Tea at Trianon: The Death of Arthur

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

Sunday, June 23, 2024

The Death of Arthur

From Pendragonry:

Where should we begin looking for such a stone for Arthur? The early 12th-century writer Geoffrey of Monmouth placed ‘Cambula’ in Cornwall, where the ‘famous (inclytus) Arthur’ was ‘wounded to death’ and from where he was carried ‘for the healing of his wounds to the island of Avallon.’ Nobody knows where this Avallon was. It seems to have been a kind of Celtic limbo, perhaps associated with apples (afalau in Welsh) – though that etymology is contentious.

Yet in the late 12th century the monks of Glastonbury Abbey apparently knew where to find the body, and because of Ralegh Radford’s excavations in the 1950s it’s been long surmised we know at least roughly where they looked.

In a much later interpolation in The Antiquities of Glastonbury (‘De antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesiæ”) – originally written in the 12th century by the usually sceptical William of Malmesbury – we read that

Arthur, the illustrious King of the Britons [was] buried in the Monks Cemetery, between two pyramidal stones, along with his spouse.

As William died half a century before the excavation of Arthur’s grave in or around 1191 we can dismiss this post hoc assertion. Sometime after the middle of the next century a Glastonbury monk, Adam of Domerham, recorded that

the famous king Arthur … had lain … near the Old Church between two pyramids, once magnificently carved.

Giraldus Cambrensis, better known as Gerald of Wales, had already written this account around the turn of the 13th century, soon after the discovery:

Now the body of King Arthur … was found in our own days at Glastonbury, deep down in the earth and encoffined in a hollow oak between two stone pyramids
… In the grave was a cross of lead, placed under a stone … I have felt the letters engraved thereon.

Three principal questions arise: Where was the ‘old church’, vetusta ecclesia? What exactly were these two ‘pyramids’? And what do we know about the lead cross Gerald of Wales handled? (Read more.)