Tea at Trianon: Two Englands: Albion and Logres

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

Saturday, August 19, 2023

Two Englands: Albion and Logres

From Charles Coulombe:

If Ireland is the spiritual home of many of the Catholics and Orangemen scattered around the Anglosphere, the next Kingdom, England, is surely still the centre of everything and one else. Open the popular imagination, and what comes tumbling out? A cavalcade of King Arthur, Robin Hood, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Mummer’s Plays, Morris Dances, Jack in the Green, Foxhunting, Harvest Festivals, Lessons and Carols, Boar’s Head feasts dance in the head. As Orson Welles put it,

…I think there has always been an England, an older England, which was sweeter, purer, where the hay smelled better and the weather was always springtime and the daffodils blew in the gentle, warm breezes. You feel a nostalgia for it in Chaucer, and you feel it all through Shakespeare.

There are certainly two Englands – the one that Orson Welles described, and that Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis dubbed Logres, and the other, which they called Britain, and William Blake Albion. The former is the one that haunts the imagination, and is filled with Knights and Cavaliers, Saints and shrines. The other is the land of Henry VIII and Cromwell, of Puritanism and “dark satanic mills.” We sought the first. (Read more.)