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!
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