Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn really did sleep here….!

If you fancy staying in a Tudor castle, then Thornbury Castle in Gloucestershire is the place for you. It’s a beautiful castle that is now presented very much in the Tudor style. “….It was built in 1510 by Edward Stafford, the Duke of Buckingham, who had been given permission by the young King Henry VIII…

The Epping hunting lodge of Queen Elizabeth I….

If, like me, you’re puzzled by this unusual, rather stark old building (which doesn’t look real or even English!) then this article explains: “….Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge is a Grade II* listed building that has been saved as a museum. This old timber-framed and plastered building is a unique example of a Tudor ‘grand stand’.…

Buckden Bishop’s Palace

A few years back I wrote about Buckden Towers in Cambridgeshire, the old palace of the Bishops of Lincoln. Finally, with the pandemic receding, I was able to visit the site in its small village (once a thriving place in coaching times and earlier but much diminished with the advent of the railways.) Here Richard…

Finding Richard (from across the Atlantic Ocean)

I had never been much interested in medieval history. I thought of them as backwards and a little too obsessed w the afterlife. However, the “what ifs” of history always intrigued me. What if the Nazis won WWII? What if the north had been defeated in the American Civil War? And so forth. I’d always…

The de la Pole history of a Hull pub….

It seems that a Hull pub stands on a historically important site because many centuries ago, the building on the corner of Lowgate and Alfred Gelder Street in the city centre replaced a certain Suffolk Palace, which once belonged to King Henry VIII. However, of much more interest to us than the Tudor monarch is…

THE CARTOON KINGS: THE HENRYS

Wandering around Google Images, as you do, I can across these less than flattering but pretty darn funny vintage cartoons of Henry VII and his offspring Horrible Henry VIII. I’ve seen other cartoons of Henry VII in a miserly pose but whoever drew THIS one must have been well aware of a contemporary description of…

Born back Ceaselessly into the Past: the History of the Fitzgeralds

When most people think of the beautiful Scott and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, they tend to think of the Jazz Age. That is the epithet coined by Scott to explain the wild ride of the 1920s – the drinking, the music, the partying, the real estate and stock market boom. And let’s not forget literary genius.…

Elisabeth Brooke, Marchioness of Northampton.

Elisabeth Brooke had a very eventful life! My attention was drawn to her as she was a descendant of Constance of York and Thomas Despenser through their daughter Isabelle’s first marriage to Richard Beauchamp – the Richard Beauchamp who became Earl of Worcester as opposed to her second husband, also Richard Beauchamp, the Earl of…

SIR THOMAS BURGH c.1430-1496 AND GAINSBOROUGH OLD HALL

Reblogged from A Medieval Potpourri @sparkypus.com Gainsborough Old Hall.  Photo thanks to Graham Oxford Photography Street. Sir Thomas Burgh was the builder  of Gainsborough Hall, as seen today,  after inheriting the original building in 1455 on the death of his mother Elizabeth Percy,  when he was 24 years old.  The building and enhancement, which took…

Breaking the code – Charles V

The Emperor Charles V was the grandson of Maximilian I (Richard III’s friend and step-nephew-in-law), a nephew of Catherine of Aragon (and thus by marriage to Henry VIII) and father-in-law of Mary I. In February 1547, he feared death at the hands of a Italian mercenary (Pierre Strozzi) and wrote a fiendishly coded letter to…