Linda Buckley-Archer
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| The Men's Time Trials in Teddington |
For three days Olympic cycling has taken over Bushy Park and
the surrounding roads. Miles of
barriers and bunting and Olympic flagpoles. It’s been a festival atmosphere where we live, in
Teddington, and the roar of the crowds drifted over the park this afternoon as
‘Wiggo’, Bradley Wiggins, fresh from his Tour de France triumph, won gold. He flashed by me on Chestnut Avenue (conceived
by Sir Christopher Wren) en route to Hampton Court Palace and victory. The herds of deer that normally roam
the park have been keeping a very low profile. It was so good to see Henry VIII’s old residence as a
backdrop for the crowning of a British sporting hero.
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| Waiting for Wiggins: Chestnut Avenue in Bushy Park with the roof of Hampton Court Palace in the distance |
And what did you all think of the 2012 Opening Ceremony and
its historical agenda? I loved the
whole daring concept of the evening: the crowd-pleasing James Bond and Mr Bean
sketches, of course, but also the
idiosyncratic attempt to introduce the history of Britain into the
spectacle. It was probably mad to
try, but they pulled it off, and, oh, those chimneys and the smelting of the
Olympic rings! It was the dramatic
equivalent of rendering the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in a
haiku. Thanks, I suspect, to
screenwriter and Carnegie medal-winning children’s writer Frank Cottrell Boyce,
who did the storyboard, not only British history but also children’s literature (and children) were celebrated in the spectacle.
It certainly raised a cheer from me.
Versailles and the Affair of the Poisons: Part II
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| The Palace of Versailles |
In June I wrote
a post about a 17th-century
French scandal involving poisoning and focused on one individual, the Marquise
de Brinvilliers, who was burned for her crime. As it turned out, the Brinvilliers case was only the tip of
the iceberg. Once La Reynie, Chief
of the Paris Police, started to dig about, and discovered the sheer scale of
the problem, he determined to stamp it out. It was not uncommon, it seemed, for people across the social classes, including the nobles at Versailles, to procure poison
from individuals masquerading as harmless ‘fortune-tellers’. The Chambre Ardente, a special tribunal, was set up in 1679. It was to meet in secret to investigate
the affair. One notorious purveyor
of love potions and poisons to high-ranking individuals at court was Madame
Voisin. The woman was arrested,
interrogated and tortured. She
talked...and talked. Every day the
names of more and more noble courtiers were dragged into the affair: the Duchesse d’Angouleme, the Princesse
de Tingry and even the maid and sister-in-law of Madame de Montespan, the
King’s mistress. The whole
of France talked of nothing else. “Men’s lives,” said the horrified La Reynie,
“ are up for sale as a matter of everyday bargaining; murder is everywhere – in
Paris, in the suburbs and in the provinces.” That persons
close to the King were implicated was especially worrying – partly on account
of the scandal, but more importantly on account of Louis’s safety.
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| La Reynie |
Despite La Reynie’s zeal, it was when witnesses started
testifying that the King’s mistress herself, Madame de Montespan, had had
regular dealings with Madame Voisin (an accusation which Voisin never
confirmed) that things started to fall apart. As far as the King was concerned it was unthinkable that she
should be tried and imprisoned. The
tribunal consequently collapsed.
In order to avoid Madame de Montespan’s involvement, all evidence
implicating her was to be suppressed by means of the lettre de cachet (detention without trial). Nancy Mitford (in The Sun King) notes the final tally of punishments meted out by the
Chambre Ardente:
[...]36 burnt to death
after torture; 4 sent to the galleys; 36
banished or fined (mostly gentlefolk) and 30 acquitted. The fortunate 81 who remained and who
benefited by lettres de cachet [insofar as they weren’t executed], were chained
up in dungeons all over France for the rest of their lies, in solitary
confinement. If they spoke to
their gaolers they were whipped – Mme de Montespan’s name must not be bandied
about the French prisons. Thirty-seven
years later some these people were still alive.
I first read about l’Affaire
des Poisons while doing some preliminary research at Versailles. I remember looking out on the exquisite
grounds and thinking how horribly deceptive appearances can be. But then, that’s why we invented
novelists and historians...
Happy Holidays!
