Tea at Trianon: Evelyn Waugh’s Last Masterpiece

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, September 30, 2026

Evelyn Waugh’s Last Masterpiece

From The New Criterion:

One novel that arose from the disastrous impact of the Second World War that will endure, I believe, is Evelyn Waugh’s last masterpiece, the trilogy Sword of Honour, which appeared between 1952 and 1961. He initially planned a single volume but found the story so compelling he produced three distinct novels built around the character Guy Crouchback, a figure not unlike himself in some ways.

The novels originated from what Waugh saw as a crisis of faith in Western values. He saw the enemy clearly—the war was nothing less than “the Modern Age in arms,” totalitarianism and secularism at their worst. The crisis of the times, the war and its aftermath, was also a personal one for Waugh. He believed he was witnessing the decline of the Catholic Church he had joined as a convert, a theme that dominated his writing after the war, and especially after Vatican II, which he distrusted.

The great success of Brideshead Revisited (1945), which was written towards the end of the war, had solidified Waugh’s reputation as not just the author of biting satires, but also the most significant writer of serious English prose. Yet he had written little of importance after Brideshead save for his savagely funny indictment of Hollywood and American values, The Loved One (1948), which was on par with his comic masterpieces of the 1930s as well as being a financial success. Interestingly, he offered the profits from The Loved One to the Catholic Church in England, only to have the offer declined on the grounds that the novel’s content was too scandalous to be associated with the Church. (Read more.)