Tea at Trianon: Westminster Abbey

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

Friday, February 4, 2022

Westminster Abbey

I was there last week and the people who work there are gracious and helpful. From Country Life:

A smidgeon over 955 years ago, on Christmas Day 1066, William, Duke of Normandy was crowned King of the English in the abbey church of St Peter at Westminster. The ceremony set divine seal on his victory at the Battle of Hastings less than three months earlier, but it was an ominous affair. William was presented to his people for acclamation and when the nervous guards outside the church heard shouts in an unfamiliar language they imagined treachery and began firing houses. According to the chronicler Orderic Vitalis (d. 1142), in the pandemonium that ensued, William, perhaps for the only time in his life, completely lost his nerve and sat trembling uncontrollably on the throne.

The church in which William was crowned was the predecessor to the Westminster Abbey we know today (Fig 1). In 1066, the Benedictine monastery here already claimed a long history — impossible now to substantiate — stretching back to the piety of Sæberht, King of the East Saxons, in the early 7th century. It was only very recently, however, an important institution.

According to an anonymous life of Edward ‘the Confessor’ — the king from whom William the Conqueror claimed succession — composed in the 1060s, the monastery at Westminster had previously been ‘insignificant in buildings and numbers’. Edward, however, was drawn to patronise it by his devotion and because it ‘lay hard by the famous and rich town [of London] and also was a delightful spot, surrounded with fertile lands and green fields and near the main channel of the river, which bought abundant merchandise… from the whole world’. (Read more.)