Cecily Duchess of York
-
I don’t know what your reaction would be to reading the following, but my Ricardian heart plummeted:- “….There have been many versions of Shakespeare’s Richard III over the years. But King Richard and His Women may be the first to focus on the title character and his relationships with the women in his life….” Firstly…
-
Recently I came across this fascinating blogpost by an archaeologist called Katharina, who was working on a Bronze Age burial site in Austria. The skeletons her team excavated have recently been DNA tested–and one of them carried the maternal haplogroup J1c2, which is part of the group to which Richard belonged. Richard’s Bronze Age foremother?…
-
If you want the bare bones of Edward’s reign(s), supposedly born today but on an impossible date, here they are, although there is no reference to his valid marriage in 1461. To me, Edward IV, for all the good he did as king, was rather a prat. Sorry, but there’s no other word for…
-
The inspiration for Richard III’s rosary….
Cecily Duchess of York, Clare Castle, Clare Priory, Edmund Mortimer, George Easton, Holy Cross, John Ashdown-Hill, Leicester, Leicester cathedral, Leicester Greyfriars, Lionel of Antwerp, Looking for Richard, Papal Nuncio, Phillipa of Ulster, railway stations, reburial, relics, Richard III, rosary, St. Francis, University of East Anglia, white roseThe following article and extract are from Nerdalicious: “ ‘In the nineteenth century the Clare Cross was found in the castle ruins. It’s actually a reliquary, containing a fragment of the True Cross, and it was probably made soon after 1450 so probably it belonged to Richard III’s mother. For that reason, when I…
-
The above illustrations show two royal widows. On the left Cecily Neville, Duchess of York, mother of both Edward IV and Richard III. On the right an imagined meeting between Edward IV and the widow he was to marry, Elizabeth Woodville. In this modern age, when we are striving to live longer and longer, it’s…
-
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…
-
The following passage is from The Darlington and Stockton Times “The rat, the cat and Lovel our dog, Rule all England under a hog.” “This seemingly innocuous verse was in fact a searing criticism of those in power at the time it was written in 1484, and was found pinned to the door of St…
-
The 10 greatest medieval royal romances? Some, maybe….
Anne Boleyn, Anne Neville, Anne of Bohemia, Blanche of Lancaster, Catherine de Roet, Catherine de Valois, Cecily Duchess of York, Charles Brandon, Edmund Duke of Somerset, Edward I, Edward II, Edward III, Eleanor of Castile, George Duke of Clarence, Henry VIII, Hugh le Despenser, Isobel Neville, John of Gaunt, Mary “Tudor”, Owain Tudor, Phillippa of Hainault, Piers Gaveston, Richard Duke of York, Richard II, Richard IIIWell, my opinion only, of course, but where are John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford/de Roët? I don’t believe his first wife, Blanche, was his greatest love. That honour went to Katherine, for love of whom he went to extraordinary lengths, enduring scandal and opprobrium, but eventually making her his third duchess. And managing to…
-
… you wait over a year for a new book from John Ashdown-Hill and two turn up almost together: Cecily Neville (left) on 30 April and those “Princes” on 15 July, with another volume on Elizabeth Wydeville to follow …
The New Murrey and Blue blog 