Clearing up a French genealogical mystery (2)

Just over six years ago, we published an article about the claimants to the French throne. They divide into three lines: BOURBONS: Charles X’s male line, comprising the entire legitimate male line of Louis XIV with one proviso, became extinct in 1883.       The exceptions are the Spanish Borbons, with their habit of…

Humpty-Dumpty and his wall were Richard III and his horse….!

Well, we’ve all heard versions of the true meaning of Humpty-Dumpty, including that it was a reference to a 17th-century cannon used in the Siege of Colchester. Oh and Humpty may also have been a drink of brandy boiled with ale. All nursery rhymes had beginnings somewhere, and also have some wild notions about their…

The headless Lord Chancellor and the legless aviator

(or “Reach for the Woolsack” or “More Mores”) Kenneth More (left) was most famous for his role as Douglas Bader in Reach for the Sky, as well as appearing in A Night to Remember and The 39 Steps, but he occasionally spoke or wrote about being descended from Sir Thomas More, without providing references. Here,…

Sometimes, it is hard …

… to know whether to take certain images at face value. Although we have often been told that snooker was actually invented in India during the late Victorian era, here is Phillip II with a cue in hand. Furthermore, the cue extension known as a “swan-neck” must surely have been named after Harold II’s wife.…

A strange way of hinting that Richard murdered his nephews….

    I found this article to be rather awkward to read, due to the layout, so have extracted the part that will concern Ricardians, i.e. the ‘ghosts’ of the boys in the Tower. It’s nothing new, but I thought you might be interested. “….Prince Edward V and Prince Richard, Duke of York, just 12…

Hastings was executed because….?

“….[executed in the Tower of London was] William Hastings, who tried to support the claims of Edward VI [sic] children to the throne in 1483….” The above is a quote from this link – which contains boo-boos, as you can see from my quote.  Well, was that why Hastings was executed? For trying to support…

The other talents of Sir Clements Markham

To historians, Ricardians in particular, Clements Markham is best known as the writer who built on the earlier research of Horace Walpole and others to rehabilitate the last Plantagenet during the Edwardian era. In this capacity, his rivalry with James Gairdner is legendary and he wrote a biography of Edward VI, however Markham was a…

Richard Plantagenet, Duke of Buckingham

When Ricardians come across the title Duke of Buckingham, they immediately link it to Henry Stafford who was the second Duke of the first creation of this Dukedom and the prime suspect in the disappearance of Edward V and Richard of York, better known as the “Princes” in the Tower. The Dukedom of Buckingham has…

Richard III, snooker and probability

One thing of which we can be certain is that Richard III never played snooker. It was not invented until 1875 in Jabalpur by a Colonel Chamberlain (1). Nevertheless, it is an excellent vehicle for demonstrating the laws of probability with particular reference to the descent of the Plantagenet Y-chromosome from Edward III. Imagine that…

Oh, woe, Lucy! What a blooper….!

Not long into the final episode of Lucy Worsley’s wonderful series about British History’s Greatest Fibs, the one about India, the British Empire’s Jewel in the Crown, she makes the astonishing statement that Britain’s first arrival in the then Calcutta was not in the Victorian era, but in 1619 by ‘buccaneers’ of the East India Company . Well…