Tea at Trianon: Is Camelot a Myth?

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, April 26, 2020

Is Camelot a Myth?

From Ancient Origins:

According to the Historia Regum Britanniae , Arthur was the son of Uther Pendragon, who succeeded his brother, Aurelius Ambrosius, as king of Britain. Incidentally, prior to Aurelius’ story, Geoffrey provides an account of the legendary wizard Merlin. After Uther’s death, Arthur became the new king of Britain.

Geoffrey narrates the deeds of King Arthur, which included the subjugation of the Saxons, the conquest of Norway, Dacia, Aquitaine, and Gaul, and a successful war against the Romans. Arthur’s story comes to an end after he is mortally wounded during a battle with Mordred, whom Geoffrey claims was the king’s nephew. After the battle, Arthur was brought “to the isle of Avalon to be cured of his wounds”. It was there that Arthur “gave up the crown of Britain to his kinsman Constantine, the son of Cador, Duke of Cornwall, in the five hundred and forty-second year of our Lord’s incarnation”. (Read more.)

From Smithsonian:

The first English prose version of the Arthurian legend was penned by Sir Thomas Malory, a knight of uncertain identity who is thought to have turned to a life of crime during England’s Wars of the Roses. Parts of Malory’s tale, which he finished while in prison, were based on a group of 13th-century French romances known as the Vulgate Cycle.

Now, as Steven Morris reports for the Guardian, scholars in the U.K. have announced the discovery of seven manuscript fragments that appear to belong to this Old French sequence—though the texts differ in small but significant ways from known versions of the cycle. (Read more.)