Tea at Trianon: Where the Holy Grail Came to Britain

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 31, 2023

Where the Holy Grail Came to Britain

From Country Life:

The ancient town of Glastonbury is synonymous without spirituality, mysticism and legend — and it's an unmissable stop-off on our list of places in the 21st century Grand Tour of Britain.

Glastonbury Tor had been a sacred site before the arrival of Christianity. There was a holy well, fed by a spring that never ran dry; in Christian times, this came to be called the Chalice Well.

Legend has it that Joseph of Arimathea — the man who took Christ’s body and placed it into the tomb following the Crucifixion — came to Britain, and specifically to the Isle of Avalon, back then an island surrounded by rivers and marsh. He brought two cups that contained drops of Christ’s blood and the chalice used by Him at the Last Supper. The chalice, or Holy Grail, disappeared, and the search for it became a prime object of the Arthurian knights (Arthur is supposed to have been buried at Glastonbury).
What didn’t go missing, at least until the 17th century, was an ancient thorn tree, said to have sprouted from the staff that Joseph stuck into the ground. (It’s said that Puritans who attempted to cut it down found that their axes turned against themselves.) And according to legend, it was Joseph who founded the original wattle-and-daub church on this site, the church around which a glorious abbey would later grow.

If Jospeh really did found the church it would be the earliest in Britain, and unique in that it had been established by a contemporary of Christ — but there are no records, and another account credits it to missionaries who arrived from Rome in the second century.

Either way, its foundation came very early in the history of Christianity in Britain. By the time of the Dissolution, it could vie in scale with Canterbury — only Westminster Abbey was richer. (Read more.)

From Great British Life:

Glastonbury is purportedly the ‘Isle of Avalon’ where Arthur was taken to have wounds tended after his final battle. He was the ‘Once and Future King’, of course, a hero who never truly died but would return in the hour of this nation’s greatest need.

Glastonbury certainly has the presence for Avalon, with Glastonbury Tor adding further evocation and mystery to the one enacted at the abbey.The Glastonbury connection to Arthur, the Grail et al, came suddenly in the late 12th century: There is no evidence that place and person were linked any earlier. It may just have been canny PR on the abbey’s part to attract more visitors. If you want to find some of the real Arthur I’d suggest a clamber at South Cadbury. (Read more.)