genealogy
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I have just made the mistake of watching The Private Lives of the Tudors, which is based on the book of the same name by Tracy Borman. It’s bad enough that Henry Tudor is first referred to as the Earl of Richmond, but then Dr Susan Doran INSISTS upon referring to him as the DUKE of…
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“Open the Box” (or urn)?
“Princes”, books, Crick, Edward V, Elizabeth Roberts, game shows, Garden Tower, Glenn Moran, Henry Pole the Younger, John Ashdown-Hill, Leicester dig, Michael Miles, mtDNA evidence, radio carbon dating, Richard III, Richard of Shrewsbury, Sir Alec Jeffreys, Take Your Pick, The Private Life of Edward IV, Watson, Westminster AbbeyNow that John Ashdown-Hill’s new book (bottom left) on the Tower of London and the “Princes” has been published, we are in a position to know Edward V’s mtDNA, which he would share with his brothers and maternal cousins such as Jane or Henry Pole the Younger. Progress has been made since Moran’s appendix to…
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Does someone not understand science?
“Beauforts”, Anglo-Saxons, Cecily Duchess of York, DNA evidence, dynastic succession, Edmund Mortimer, Edmund of Langley, Edward III, Ethelred II, evidence, executions, forked beard, Henry V, House of Wessex, Joan “Beaufort”, John Ashdown-Hill, Lancastrians, Lionel of Antwerp, mortimer claim, Nevilles, Penrith church, Raby, Ralph Earl of Westmorland, Richard Earl of Cambridge, Richard III, Sir Thomas Grey, Southampton plot, Strathclyde, William Scrope, Y-chromosome, YorkistsThis blog suggests that the failure of Richard’s Y-chromosome to match that of the Dukes of Beaufort doesn’t make him a male line descendant of Edward III through the “illegitimacy” of Richard, Earl of Cambridge. The issue it fails to address is this: The inconsistent chromosome has several other, more likely explanations – that Richard…
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Reading Abbey is reopening, but without the remains of Henry I having been found. He’s there somewhere, having definitely been buried there after his “surfeit of lampreys”. Well, they found Richard in Leicester, so there’s still hope of locating Henry.
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Today marks the anniversary of the death in 1402 of Edmund of Langley, 1st Duke of York, an undervalued and almost forgotten prince. Edmund deserves his place in history. Without him the House of York itself would never have existed, and its later members, who everyone finds so interesting, would never have been born.…
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This story is not new, but has come to the fore again in recent days. I do not know how accurate it all is, but here is a genealogical tree and a link to explain more.
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For everyone who enjoyed Only Fools and Horses, and then The Green Green Grass, the gentleman in the above photograph will be familiar as “Boycie”. But what might not be so well known about the actor, John Challis, is that for the last twenty years he and his wife, Carol, have owned and lived in…
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As we mentioned here, Ashdown-Hill’s biography of Richard’s mother was published in April. Whilst his latest, to which we shall return later, was released today, we shall concentrate on Cecily here. This is the book that summarises Cecily’s life by delineating her full and half-siblings, demonstrating that portraits (right) previously assumed to be of her and…
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Now then, I think the Tower of London ought to have a quiet word with Westminster Abbey, because if the boys’ remains have never been found – what’s in That Urn? And by the time they supposedly disappeared, Richard was King, not merely Duke of Gloucester. “…One of the Tower’s greatest mysteries is the lost…
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This is Stratford Johns, who featured heavily in Z-Cars and Softly, Softly. In spring 1976, with his co-star Frank Windsor, their characters appeared in Second Verdict, investigating six mysteries, of which the “Princes” were the second. It should be possible to locate a recording of this programme.