Tea at Trianon: The Sword in the Stone: A Medieval Latin Account

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

Thursday, July 30, 2026

The Sword in the Stone: A Medieval Latin Account

From Medievalists:

At the Abbey of Saint Denis-en-France, the Benedictine monk and chronicler Guillaume de Nangis (d. 1300) wrote a Latin World Chronicle from Creation to AD 1300. The text contains an account of the reign of King Arthur of Britain that includes the celebrated Sword in the Stone Episode. This iconic scene was not traditionally part of the ‘historical’ account of King Arthur’s biography.

The pseudo-historical Brut chronicle story of King Arthur, which originates with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae [History of the Kings of Britain] (c. 1136), has Arthur, aged fifteen, succeed to the throne of Britain without contest. Geoffrey’s Historia implies that Arthur was widely known to have been King Uther Pendragon’s son and heir apparent. The prose redaction of the Estoire de Merlin [Story of Merlin] (c. 1210), an Old French romance attributed to Robert de Boron (fl. 1191–1212), contains the earliest known attestation of the Sword in the Stone Episode, and it is built around an alternative history of Arthur’s childhood. According to it, Merlin compels King Uther Pendragon and Queen Ygraine to give up their son (Arthur) as a newborn. The enchanter sees to it that the child is baptized ‘Arthur’ and adopted by the worthy knight Sir Antor and his wife. The couple raise Arthur as their own alongside their biological son Kay. (Read more.)