humour
-
They are sharp and good for purposes both fair and foul, and might even be handy for some back-stabbing (should one be of that disposition!) What am I talking about? The Stanley Knife. Jokes abound on certain medieval groups about these multi purpose knives being something that should have been invented by the two side-shifting,…
-
I don’t know how to tell you this but Dan Jones has made further appearances on our television screens this spring. Thankfully, both C5 three-part series have featured him as a sidekick to Suzannah Lipscomb, so his prejudices against various monarchs have had little exercise. The first of these was about Elizabeth I, featured Lily Cole…
-
Lance Corporal Jones – Dad’s Army – referring to his trusty bayonet. When someone on a Ricardian group mentioned that John Ashdown-Hill was receiving a right bashing on the BBC History Magazine page, I and a few other intrepid Ricardian souls..you know who you are..trundled over there to take up the cudgel on said author’s behalf.…
-
Here are nine “celebrity” couples who married in secret, fairly recently, but Edward IV surely couldn’t have done, according to some “historians”. Once, perhaps, but definitely not twice, no matter what a Bishop, the Three Estates and Parliament, all of whom knew him well at the time, concluded. After all, nobody else ever has. {now…
-
You may have read here, here, here or even here about the regular own goals of a certain “Tudor”-ist troll. Anyway, given the fact that Henry VII, whether Tudor, Beaufort or Swynford, is not descended from Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster in suo jure but from her husband’s mistress and later wife, Katherine de Roet, he…
-
Before anything else, let me identify the above illustrations. Top left is, um, supposedly a 15th century back armour. Whoever wore it, male or female, was rather peculiar anatomically. 2nd top left is a Boccaccio Amazon Queen. 3rd top left is an illustration from the British Library, and top right is Queen Isabella with her…
-
When I saw this headline about Royal Dukedoms, I’m afraid I’m so steeped in all things Richard that I leapt to the conclusion that it would be about one of the boys in the Tower. Then up popped the present Duke of York! I thought, that’s traditionalist propaganda gone mad – are they going to…
-
In life, Henry VII was renowned for fighting his battles from a deckchair, behind a pike wall with a telescope. Even some of his statues are behaving similarly now. The best example is, or was, in Exeter. It commemorated the two sieges of the city in 1497 when the two Cornish Rebellions were kept out…
-
One of Cairo’s biggest trolls claimed, last week, that the Fourth Lateran Council banned secret weddings, thus Edward IV’s June 1461 marriage to the dark-haired, older, Lancastrian widow Lady Eleanor Talbot could not have been valid. There are only two problems with this claim, from the clown who confused “June” with “youth”, had Katherine de…
-
HENRY VIII: THE EVEN HANDED PERSECUTOR
Anne Askew, Anne Boleyn, beheadings, burnings, Catherine Howard, chopping and changing, clergymen, Courtenays, Edmund de la Pole, Edward of Buckingham, George Boleyn, hangings, Henry Lord Montagu, Henry Pole the Younger, Henry VIII, Howards, Jane Parker Viscountess Rochford, Margaret of Salisbury, Mark Smeaton, monks, Nun of Kent, religious persecution, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas MoreSome folks out there have recently been trying to justify the long list of people executed by Henry VIII because ‘at least they had a trial’ or ‘because it was over religion, and there were always beheadings, pressings, burnings over religion.’ Well, surprisingly, I must agree with them on one thing. Henry sure could be…
The New Murrey and Blue blog 