Tea at Trianon: An Elizabethan Garden Discovered

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

Tuesday, February 16, 2021

An Elizabethan Garden Discovered

From Smithsonian:

Archaeologists conducting excavations near Birmingham have discovered one of the best-preserved Elizabethan gardens ever found in England. As BBC News reports, no historical record of the 16th-century gardens, which stretch across nearly 1,000 feet of land on the ruins of a manor in Coleshill, exist. [T]here are no plans of it, [and] it is not mentioned in any letters or visitors’ accounts,” says Paul Stamper, an expert on English gardens and landscape history, in a statement.
Aerial photographs taken in preparation for construction of the United Kingdom’s HS2 high-speed railway revealed the first signs of the remains of Coleshill Manor. Over the past two years, researchers with Wessex Archaeology have unearthed additional traces of the Tudor estate.

“This is one of the most exciting Elizabethan gardens that’s ever been discovered in this country,” says Stamper in the statement. “The scale of preservation at this site is really exceptional and is adding considerably to our knowledge of English gardens around 1600.” The estate’s medieval owner, Sir Robert Digby, rose into the aristocracy by marrying an Irish heiress in about 1598. (Read more.)