Tea at Trianon: Mysterious 'Painted People' of Scotland

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

Wednesday, September 13, 2023

Mysterious 'Painted People' of Scotland

The kingdom of the Picts was called Alt Clut and later Strathclyde. From Live Science:

Ancient DNA reveals that the Picts, the "painted people" of Scotland who fought off the Romans, weren't an enigmatic group that migrated from faraway lands. Instead, the Picts had local roots and were related to other Iron Age people in Britain, a new study finds. An analysis of eight skeletons from two Pictish cemeteries, published Thursday (April 27) in the journal PLOS Genetics, also suggests that the Picts did not organize their society around the female bloodline, contrary to what historians have long suggested.
The Picts, named from the Latin word "picti" for their reported use of body paint or tattoos, were a people who, in the third century A.D., resisted Roman rule and formed their own kingdom in northern Britain that lasted until around A.D. 900. There is very little written information about the Picts — much of what they wrote is in a unique and hard-to-translate script called ogham — and only a few of their settlements and cemeteries have been found. (Read more.)