SIR THOMAS MORE , A MAN FOR ALL REASONS: SAINT OR SINNER?

‘Not exactly the horse’s mouth’ In Josephine Tey’s spellbinding novel ‘The Daughter of Time’, Detective Inspector Alan Grant has a reputation for being able to spot a villain on sight. Whilst in hospital with a broken leg, Grant is idly flipping through some old postcard portraits to while away the time. He turns over a…

1484 – TITULUS REGIUS: FACT OR FICTION?

  Introduction ‘ ‘This is indeed a mystery’ I remarked.’ What do you think it means?’‘I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suite theories, instead of theories to suite facts.’   In Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story A Scandal…

Richard has a new champion….!

 At last, another serious writer who champions Richard.  Jason Goetz has produced a very even-handed account of how Richard’s dastardly reputation has come down through the ages…and he takes Richard’s side against the ten-times-more-dastardly Tudors. Goetz has written a series called Essays on the Classics! (The Great Books Revival), in which one of the people…

New Year, old Ricardian books….

Did someone acquire a nice little New Year treat? At noon on 4th January, in Leyburn, North Yorkshire, the books in the above illustration were up for auction. https://www.the-saleroom.com/…/lot-02e2b5da-0bc6-4ca7-a3ff-… Here’s the description of Lot Number 58:- “RICHARD III Buck (George) The History of the Life and Reigne of Richard the Third, 1647, London, W. Wilson, 4to,…

This is not Anne Boleyn

(re-blogged from Lissa Bryan’s guest post on The History Geeks, in response to this article) This “new portrait of Anne Boleyn” has been making the rounds in social media, and now is being publicized in several news articles. It is not Anne Boleyn. The sketch that is circulating is a third-hand copy of a painting…

THE MALIGNED RICARDIANS

Part 1 – Sir William Cornwallis the younger “ His virtues I have sought to revive, his vices to excuse” (The Encomium of Richard III, Sir William Cornwallis) It is conceivable that historians do not take the early revisionist histories of king Richard III seriously owing to an assumption that the authors were not themselves…