Tea at Trianon: Behind the Scenes at Mapperton House

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

Monday, November 24, 2025

Behind the Scenes at Mapperton House

Mapperton House, Dorset

From Discover Britain:

Luke Montagu took over the running of Mapperton in 2016, but it wasn’t until the Covid-19 pandemic hit that the reality kicked in for his wife Julie, who grew up in Illinois. “That’s when I realised, ‘Wow,’” she says. “This is a business but it’s a family business and it needs a lot of inner strength.” Luckily, she was excited by the prospect. “I have a real interest in the family’s history – probably because the history of the USA as we know it today pales in comparison to the thousands of years of history that Britain has.”
Mapperton, once dubbed the finest manor house in England, has belonged to the Montagu family since 1955, when Luke’s grandfather ‘Hinch’ Montagu downsized from the family’s Cambridgeshire home of Hinchingbrooke House. Begun in the 1540s, it was extended in the 17th and 18th centuries, giving what the art historian Nikolaus Pevsner described as an “enchanting” look about it – helped, naturally, by its position in a lovely Dorset valley with its 19th-century parkland and Italianate gardens laid out in the 1930s by its then-owner Ethel Labouchere. (Read more.)

Inside Mapperton House, Dorset