Tea at Trianon: The Lost City of Powhatan

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

Friday, July 11, 2014

The Lost City of Powhatan

From Smithsonian:

Smith was an invited guest at the Algonquian settlement, Werowocomoco. He was escorted by Powhatan's son into the chief's longhouse, built of saplings, reeds and bark and set apart from the village. He promised to help subjugate Powhatan's enemies to the west, and Powhatan formally declared the pale-faced foreigner a weroance, or Algonquian chief.

The survival of Jamestown—established 400 years ago next month—hinged on this encounter at Werowocomoco. The English had unknowingly built their small rude settlement just a dozen miles from the center of Powhatan's confederacy. In the midst of their first long winter, with insufficient food supplies, the foreigners were depending on exchanging copper ware, glass beads and iron hatchets for Algonquian corn. But the peace did not hold, and within a year Powhatan relocated his capital farther west. Werowocomoco was abandoned, and the location of the dramatic confrontations between Smith and Powhatan that ensured the English foothold in North America was lost to history. (Read more.)