Tea at Trianon: The Templar Tunnel

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

Saturday, April 13, 2019

The Templar Tunnel

From Ancient Origins:

The Templar Tunnel is an underground passageway located in the city of Acre, in what is now Israel. This tunnel was built by the Knights Templar when the city was under the rule of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and served as a strategic passageway connecting the Templar palace to the port. After Acre fell to the Mamluks during the 13 ^th century, the Templar Tunnel was lost and forgotten. It was only in 1994 that the tunnel was rediscovered by a woman battling a pesky blocked sewage pipe beneath her house.

The Kingdom of Jerusalem was established in 1099 following the conquest of Jerusalem by the participants of the First Crusade. About two decades later, the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon (known simply as the Templars) was founded by the French knight Hugues de Payens. This military order had their headquarters on the Temple Mount , and its main task was to protect Christian pilgrims who were travelling to the Holy Land. (Read more.)