Tea at Trianon: The True Story of How Benjamin Guinness’s Will Changed the Course of History

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, October 2, 2025

The True Story of How Benjamin Guinness’s Will Changed the Course of History

From Town and Country:

Benjamin Lee Guinness was the most successful businessman in Ireland, generous and wide-ranging in his philanthropy, civic-minded and now politically active. “The Governor,” as his children called him, now became Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness, Bart, MP, his seat Ashford Castle.
However thrilled Sir Benjamin was for himself and for Arthur, who as the eldest son would inherit the baronetcy as well as so much on the material side, he didn’t enjoy it for long. It was late in life to be kicking off a political career, and the novelty and stimulation of the House of Commons and the pleasures of London palled in fairly short order. When fatigue and ill-health prevailed Sir Benjamin longed for the dear familiar rhythms of life at home at St Anne’s.
[His youngest son,] Edward Cecil brought him down to the Queen’s Hotel in Sydenham, Kent in May 1868, and wrote from there to his elder brother Arthur that their father was “very weak and languid, his stomach is very much out of order, he thinks caused by want of exercise which his cold prevented him taking.” He was “heartily sick of London, and of being a member [of Parliament].” Edward Cecil accompanied his father back to Mayfair the next day and reported to Arthur that he was “exceedingly weak today and very sickish,” adding that, despite this weakness, “the Devil can’t induce him to see a doctor’. He had lost all appetite and was eating barely anything. (Read more.)