I know that the twenty priceless works of art shown in this article https://www.artnews.com/list/art-news/artists/national-gallery-london-what-arworks-to-see-1234722763/ about the 200th anniversary of the National Gallery are wonders to behold, but I look at them from the viewpoint of whether or not I’d want them on my wall. The answer is no. Well, except for two, the main one…

If you go to this link https://huddersfieldhub.co.uk/university-of-huddersfield-to-launch-public-lectures-with-talk-on-the-national-health-innovation-campus/ you’ll see that on 12 December 2024 at the Daphne Steele Building of Huddersfield University, Professor Tim Thornton, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, is to give a “….talk about his research into King Richard III and ‘the princes in the Tower ’, one of the most famous and notorious missing person…

What I’m suggesting in this post must surely have been put forward before, but I don’t recall ever seeing it, so here goes with my hypothesis. Nothing is really known about the mother of Richard III’s illegitimate son, John of Gloucester, a.k.a. John of Pontefract, see here https://richardiii.net/richard-iii-his-world/his-family/illegitimate-children/john-of-gloucester/. Nor can his year of birth be…

In the Wiki article on Lady Catherine Gordon, I found the following remarkable statement: “In February 1503, Lady Catherine was a mourner at the funeral of Queen Elizabeth, arriving in a “chair”, a carriage, with Lady Fitzwalter and Lady Mountjoy. The train of her dress was carried by the Queen’s mother-in-law, Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby. Lady…

This post is about an e-tour of the kitchen at Old Gainsborough Hall, in which meals were once cooked for Richard III and Henry VIII. Please note that I have put those monarchs in their correct order. How dare they name Fat Henry before Richard III! Apart from that awful error, this is very interesting.…

Today, I have dipped into Memorials of the Wars of the Roses by W.E. Hampton. This is a wonderful read for anyone interested in the period and full of interesting snippets. Although Hampton is, at times, rather judgemental and certainly not afraid of calling a spade a flipping shovel. For example, I am the last…

The mystery of who/what is in That Urn* in Westminster Abbey has been rattling around for centuries, and now it’s in the news again. Westminster Abbey is what is known as a Royal Peculiar, and therefore under the jurisdiction of the monarch. See here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_peculiar. While the late Queen wouldn’t allow the urn to be…

Coming upon an assessment of Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, the “Kingmaker”, is a fairly rare experience. He’s always there, of course, for how can he not be when it comes to the Wars of the Roses? But having an article to himself is not something he enjoys very often. Well, that’s how it…

“….A prosthetic nose worn by Lord Laurence Olivier has been put on sale by his widow Dame Joan Plowright for £771,  along with other items from the late actor….The Shakespearean actor, who was nominated for 11 competitive Oscars – taking home one for 1948’s Hamlet – wore the nose during his 1955 Academy Award-nominated Richard III performance….”…

Richard III has been damned by history and Tudor apologists as a deformed monster with a hunched back, withered arm and the mind of a psychopath. So entrenched was this that Richard’s ability to fight fiercely like the warrior he was didn’t seem to occur to those who revelled in maligning him. If he was…