Tea at Trianon: Eleanor of Aquitaine in Rome

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

Wednesday, November 26, 2025

Eleanor of Aquitaine in Rome

From The Catholic Herald:

King Charles and his wife, Queen Camilla, may have been the first king and queen of England to visit the Vatican since the Reformation. But they were certainly not the first English rulers to do so; they were treading in what had once been a well-worn path. One of the more remarkable visits occurred in early April of 1191. The ruler in question was not a king, however, but a queen: the glamorous – and perhaps over-glamourised – Eleanor of Aquitaine.
She remains the only known queen of England to have made the journey to Rome on her own.
When she made the journey, Eleanor was almost seventy. She had outlived two husbands and two adult sons. The first of these husbands was Louis VII, king of France; they had separated in 1153. The second husband was perhaps the greatest ruler of his generation: Henry II, king of England, duke of Normandy, and count of Anjou.
A combination of single-minded ruthlessness and formidable good luck had endowed King Henry with a complex of lands that stretched from Hadrian’s Wall to the Pyrenees. But Eleanor had not only survived two husbands. She had also borne them a total of nine children. At a time when child birth claimed the lives of so many women, this in itself was no small achievement.
Eleanor clearly had a love for children. In an episode almost entirely neglected by her many modern biographers, Eleanor was celebrated for having rescued a baby boy left to die on the roadside. She took in the child and found him a well-appointed home with an episcopal friend. There was more to Eleanor than the ambitious power broker of The Lion in Winter.
And so it was that in the spring of 1191, she travelled to Rome on behalf of one of those children, her eldest surviving son, now King Richard I. Richard had succeeded his father in July 1189 and had immediately freed Eleanor from the luxurious captivity in which she had been held since her disastrous involvement in the rebellion of 1173-4.
The background to her trip lay in the seismic events surrounding Jerusalem. In 1187, the great Kurdish war leader Saladin had crushed the army of the kingdom of Jerusalem and then quickly seized the holy city itself. When news of these disasters reached the West, Richard had been the first prince to take a crusading vow.
Within a year of his coronation, true to his word, he had set off eastwards. Before doing so, he called upon his mother to assist him in his endeavour. Queen Eleanor rose to the challenge admirably. In the ten months before her arrival in Rome, she had journeyed from Chinon to Pamplona and, in the company of the king’s bride, from Pamplona to Sicily, crossing the Pyrenees twice, traversing the Alps in the midst of winter, and sailing back and forth to Sicily – a journey of more than 2,200 miles. (Read more.)