More Legendary Ten Seconds songs …

… with Jules Jones as lead vocalist: A new album highlighting the singing of Jules Jones on some of her favourite songs of the Legendary Ten Seconds.Recorded in Torbay, Kingsteignton, Teignmouth and Madron.Released on Richard the Third Records, Songs mastered by Phil Swann in Kingsteignton.Jules Jones lead and harmony singingIan Churchward guitars, keyboards, mandolin, mandola, ukulele…

Another interesting hypothesis

On Thursday, we published a presentation by “Useful Charts”, showing how the English throne may have descended had Henry VIII’s will been followed after 1603 as it had beforehand. Of course, the family in question may have fared differently anyway if Lady Katherine Grey, her Seymour husband, and son and Arbella Stuart, the latter’s wife,…

Royal History’s Biggest Fibs

Lucy Worsley, having covered the Wars of the Roses, the “Glorious Revolution” and Britain in India, has returned with a further series. This time, the episodes earlier this year having been about the Reformation, the Armada and Queen Anne, she covers the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, reversing the contemporaneous “spin” on the French Revolution, the…

The real life of the last Stuart

Television history is rarely focused upon Anne (left), except as the final act of the Stuart drama like this or her unfortunate reproductive history in this series. Discussion is, therefore, reduced to the cliches of her fragile family, her weight and her fondness for brandy. She is also omitted from most dramatisations of the time, such…

A new interpretation of 1580s events

We all know that Mary Stuart was beheaded at Fotheringhay on 8 February 1587 and that the Spanish Armada sailed to facilitate a Catholic invasion of England in the following year, leaving Lisbon on 28 May and fighting naval battles in late July, at Plymouth and Portland. The traditional view is that Mary Stuart’s execution…

Lucy does the Glorious Revolution

Did anyone watch the second episode of Lucy Worsley’s fib-busting series last night? I didn’t quite make it to the end because I was so tired, but saw enough to understand that she did to James VII/II exactly what she did with Richard III. By that I mean she concentrated on the deeds/misdeeds of the…

TREASON 1 – The Merciless Parliament 1388

 Introduction Treason is a terrible crime. It denotes a betrayal so wicked as to be unforgivable. In medieval England a traitor was executed with the maximum of corporeal pain and all his goods and chattels were forfeited to the crown, thus disinheriting his heirs and successors forever. Henry de Bracton a thirteenth century English jurist,…

Stephen Lark’s book on the Battle of Sedgemoor….

The Battle of Sedgemoor 1685 by Stephen Lark (Bretwalda Battles Book 19) [Kindle Edition] ASIN: B00TEAO11G Driving the M5 today, across the Somerset Levels, it is hard to imagine what the landscape used to be like, before rhynes and ditches drained much of the water. The rhynes were there in the 17th century, but they…