Tea at Trianon: Veni, Vidi, Vici

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, August 6, 2024

Veni, Vidi, Vici

The lost woods of Ireland. From The Abbey of Misrule:

There are a lot of hedgerows around these parts, and a lot of trees too, which is always welcome. Ireland is the least-forested country in the whole of Europe, and its farmers work hard annually to uphold that status, as they hack down endless miles of hedgerows and young woodland, and then burn the results in huge slash piles in the fields. It’s a very un-PC thing to say, but since I’m technically an Irish citizen now I can say it: when you come across a patch of well-tended old woodland in Ireland these days, you can be pretty sure the British were responsible for it being there.

Before you get your tricolours out, let me quickly concede that the British were also responsible for a lot of that deforestation in the first place. Empires need a lot of timber, especially maritime ones. Ships don’t just build themselves. But the ruling, largely Protestant, aristocracy of Ireland, having built themselves ‘big houses’ all over the country, then set about trying to make the landscapes around them as English as possible. Often that meant planting forests of oak, ash and elm across great acres of bog or farmland. If you see a beech tree in Ireland, you can be almost sure that the English planted it. Beeches are native to southern England, but invasive here. Irish nationalists may wish to labour the parallel in the comments section.

Anyway, whatever you think of the matter, the fact remains that if those big houses left nothing else behind (other than some very picturesque ruins), they did bequeath the nation some lovely, and much-needed, woodland, and this week’s well sits on the edge of some of it. Once, these now-public woods were the gardens of Woodlawn House, which was burned in 1922 by the IRA. No trace of the house remains, but the beech trees are still going strong.

Back to the well. Tobar na nOlc translates, apparently, as ‘well of the wretched.’ This sounds positively haunted to me, but the sources suggest that the wretched in question were the visitors with stomach and throat ailments who arrived here seeking cures. There is no saint associated with this well, and there is no sign of veneration, which calls into question whether it was ever really ‘holy’ at all. It is hard to say from this far out, but it is certainly not a sacred place now. (Read more.)