Gunpowder Plot
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As you can see, Kit Harrington will soon portray Robert Catesby in a BBC drama about the Gunpowder Plot. Catesby, shot while resisting arrest, was one of the lucky ones. Then again, our folk memory of the seventeenth century is not entirely accurate. Here it is.
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William Catesby, a Northamptonshire lawyer, was one of only three people executed in the aftermath of Bosworth, the others being a West Country father and son. From this and other circumstantial evidence, we are inexorably drawn to the conclusion that this happened because he was the only surviving layman who knew the details of Edward…
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We have had a few views recently, asking “why was arthur pole executed?”. Well, we don’t think he was. There were several Arthur Poles: 1) The first (Sir Arthur, 1502-35) was probably the youngest son of the Countess of Salisbury but there are no suggestions that he died from other than natural causes. 2) The…
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Robert Cecil—Was He Shakespeare’s Real Richard? It is quite astounding that many traditionalists still trot out the old ‘Shakespeare was right’ trope when referring to Richard III, even though more statements in his famous depiction have been proved to be wrong than ‘right’ in regards to this maligned king. Shakespeare was, of course, a dramatist,…
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The first of these was Welsh, a potential descendant of the princes of Powys who died in c. 1479 (1). He married Edith St. John, half-sister of the younger Margaret Beaufort and they had one son (Richard) and possibly a daughter (Eleanor), although the latter could have been his daughter by Bona Danvers. Richard was…
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