Tea at Trianon: The Lost Tomb of Robert Bruce

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

Sunday, May 26, 2019

The Lost Tomb of Robert Bruce

From The Scotsman:

A three-dimensional reconstruction of the “lost tomb” of Robert the Bruce is to go on permanent display at Dunfermline Abbey, the last resting place of the medieval Scots monarch. Bruce’s tomb was destroyed during the Reformation, although fragments of the structure were later discovered alongside Bruce’s remains in 1817, before being excavated the following year. While the skeletal remains were reinterred beneath the Abbey, with the grave sealed with a thick layer of molten bitumen so as to ward off the advances of graverobbers, what remained of the tomb itself was preserved at sites across Scotland, with fragments held by the National Museums Scotland, Abbotsford House, Dunfermline Museum, and the Hunterian in Glasgow. (Read more.)