Autumn dig at Chirk Castle promises to be exciting….

It seems that during the medieval period, no fewer than five holders of Chirk Castle were executed for treason. With that track record, I trust the National Trust intends to tread very carefully when it looks into the castle’s past and secrets this autumn.

Richard, Duke of Gloucester, also held Chirk for a while, so here we have yet another great castle with Ricardian connections.  It belongs to the Myddleton family now, and has done since the end of the sixteenth century, and they still live in one of the towers.

 

 

 

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The Howards, Talbots and Seymours – England’s auxilliary royal families?

This document shows the descent of the known “wives”, secret wives, mistresses, illegal wives and alleged partners of five English and British kings, taken from Ashdown-Hill’s Royal Marriage Secrets:
thosehowardsagain

As a bonus, Laura Culme-Seymour, from a naval family, including Admiral Thomas Lord Seymour; Admiral Rodney and the first three Culme-Seymour baronets, has a famous great-great-niece alive today.

A big development

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/141202/ncomms6631/full/ncomms6631.html

It seems from this that there is a Y-chromosome mismatch between Richard III (as confirmed by his mtDNA, age, scoliosis etc), and the present Duke of Beaufort.

There are various possibilities and our piece “A genealogical mystery deepens” outlined one – that Sir Hugh Swynford fathered the first “Beaufort”, making the Dukes of Somerset, Beaufort and “Tudors” his descendants.

There is one interpretational error in the (very long) article, however. Any break between Edward III and Edward IV/ Richard III would not invalidate their claim because their father’s maternal line was senior to the Lancastrians. The real Lancastrians would not be affected by our hypothesis which is, of course, one of many and can be tested in ways we have made clear.

Now we have the irony of a broken DNA link being described by a broken weblink in the Daily Mail