Tea at Trianon: St. Thomas Becket's Psalter

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, January 11, 2022

St. Thomas Becket's Psalter

From a year ago but fascinating, via the BBC:

Before dawn on 14 October 1164, Thomas Becket found an open gate in the city walls and rode out of Northampton with a servant and two guides, the sound of their horses' hooves masked by high wind and driving rain. The archbishop was making a run for it after a week on trial in Northampton Castle. The initial charge had been a minor one, but King Henry II had added new and increasingly serious accusations, and a verdict of treason was looking likely.
Becket headed north, making it to Lincoln in two days, then put on the rough, dark woollen tunic of a local religious order, adopted the name Brother Christian, and turned south into the wilderness of the fens. His companions were genuine lay brothers, able to lead him through the marshes and waterways to isolated hermitages and priories, where he would be able to plan his next moves. Had he been caught, the leading Becket expert Prof Anne Duggan says, the king could have chosen any punishment he liked - castration, blinding, even death. But Becket wasn't caught. He made it, ultimately, to Kent and was rowed from there to France in the first days of November. (Read more.)