Tea at Trianon: Climbing Glastonbury Tor

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

From author Stephanie Cowell:

Tor is a local word of Celtic origin meaning rock outcropping or hill. The Glastonbury Tor is 514 feet high and when you finally approach the top you find the ruins of St. Michael’s Church. Monks have worshiped here since the fifth century and this present church survived until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539 when the last Abbot of Glastonbury, the gentle and good old Richard Whiting, was hanged, drawn and quartered along with two of his monks.

From all sides the country of Somerset rolled away so far below me. The wind rushed about the ruins; I was almost unnerved by their ferocity.

I was almost entirely alone on the Tor that day. (Read entire post.)