Tea at Trianon: A 17th-century Cotswold Cottage

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

Thursday, June 9, 2022

A 17th-century Cotswold Cottage

From House and Garden:

In May 2016, James Mackie was in the thick of the spring auctions in New York. At the time, he headed up the Impressionist and Modern Art department at Sotheby’s in London, and in a rare, idle moment before the sales kicked off, found himself googling houses for sale in the Cotswold village of Little Faringdon, where he had spent happy weekends at a friend’s house. ‘This place popped up in a village nearby,’ recalls James, referring to the 17th-century mellow-stone cottage that he now shares with his partner, gardener and writer Arthur Parkinson. ‘I came back from New York on the Friday, saw it on Saturday, put an offer in on Monday and, after a bidding war, had it by Friday.’
Back in 2016, James was living in a small flat in Chelsea, so the idea was that this would be a weekend bolthole. ‘I’d been in London for 20 years, but as I became older, I felt the pull of the country,’ says James, who grew up in Devon and spent holidays at his grandmother’s farm in Derbyshire. The cottage interiors were tired, but James fell for its beamed ceilings, the pretty relief mouldings on either side of the sitting room fireplace and the 17th-century stone staircase that curves up around it.
It is a long, thin house, growing out from the original one-up, one-down cottage, as former outbuildings were absorbed into its footprint. Above the linear sitting room, kitchen and dining room are two bedrooms – the main one has an en-suite bathroom – reached by staircases at either end of the house. (Read more.)