Tea at Trianon: Under the Faerie Hill

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, July 9, 2024

Under the Faerie Hill

From The Abbey of Misrule:

Tobar Gráinne, the well we were seeking, was supposed to lie on the top of some hills. One of the hills contained a collection of neolithic tombs, said to be around 4,500 years old. There was also, as the sign indicates, a mass rock. Mass rocks are common in Ireland, and are often marked like this. Back in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Irish Parliament, under the control of the Protestant Ascendancy which had been importing landowners from England and Scotland to settle, and ultimately convert, Catholic areas of the country, instituted a series of laws known collectively as the Penal Laws, which in many places made it difficult or impossible to celebrate the Catholic Mass.

Edmund Burke, the original conservative philosopher, described the Penal Laws as ‘a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.’ Those who were oppressed by them though, did not always take their degradation lying down. Refusing to relinquish their faith, priests would hold secret masses in remote parts of the countryside, or in houses or barns. A ‘mass rock’ is simply a flat stone, usually in a remote place, which was used as an altar for one of these surreptitious masses. (Read more.)