A Cairo dweller Troll on Quora

I sometimes go on Quora to give answers to various questions, usually about Richard, and occasionally I get drawn into arguments with those who are entrenched in the belief that Richard was a usurping, chid-murdering hunchback. I can easily argue against these and, as an osteopath, I can state with authority that he wasn’t a hunchback. This is par for the course, but sometimes they get the strangest ideas about him.

Recently, one such misguided individual insisted that Richard was cruel to his mother in law and to George, Duke of Bedford. It seemed a weird thing to pick on and then I found out that he had just read the new ‘biography’ of Richard by Prof Hicks. No wonder he has such strange ideas. Hicks always seems to grasp onto snippets which either don’t make sense and which are just his own opinion or else takes a tack that nobody else has thought of (e.g. that the remains found in Leicester are not Richard, that he committed incest by marrying Anne), usually because it is clearly wrong or unlikely.

I am still arguing with this particular troll and many will say it is pointless. In a way it is as he will never change his view, it is so firmly entrenched. But the reason I do it is that there are innocents viewing the answers given on Quora and I want them to have the true facts. Usually it is obvious who is the most logical and fair-minded in these discussions, so I hope to convert a few neutrals to being Ricardians by showing up these narrow-minded people as illogical and unfair.

A friend remarked that she had heard Quora pay ‘plants’ to argue with people and stir up trouble deliberatley in order to increase the traffic to their site. The same conclusion applies: neutral readers will still see that our Ricardian arguments are much better than the Cairo-dwellers‘ ones!

Does anyone else rise to the bait at times for this reason?

Heading for a new record?

This is Richard Dunne, the player who has scored the most top flight own goals (ten in twenty seasons) since the beginning of the Premier League.

“David” is already challenging that total in a shorter time frame. Here are some of his career highlights:
1) Claiming that “Perkin” confessed his imposture to a Scottish Bishop, many years before that cleric was born.
2) Claiming that Henry VII was a senior Lancastrian, when he was junior to Richard III in that respect, being descended from a younger sister of Richard’s ancestress.
3) Claiming that the “Lincoln Roll” detailed Edward IV’s sons to have died as children, when it didn’t.
4) Claiming that Edward V and his siblings were legitimate because secret marriages were automatically illegal, except that his parents also “married” in secret. This part of the Fourth Lateran Council’s findings was frequently ignored – thankyou to Esther for locating it.
5) Claiming that Henry VII was Earl of Richmond from 1471-85, when the Complete Peerage shows him to have been under attainder.
6) Claiming that Catherine de Valois spoke in Parliament about her “marriage” to Owain Tudor after her death and centuries before any woman addressed an English or British Parliament.
7) Claimed that Henry VII’s supposed descent from Owain Glyn Dwr’s servant was as valid as Richard III’s descent from Llewellyn Fawr.
8) Claimed that “Perkin” directly accused Richard III of killing Edward V, whilst the transcript shows that he did not and had many uncles.

9) Claiming that Henry VI arranged Margaret Beaufort’s 1455 marriage to Edmund “Tudor” because there was no Lancastrian heir, even though his own apparent son had been born two whole years earlier.
10) Claiming that the “Lincoln Roll” was compiled for the eponymous Earl, who died in 1487, yet it frequently mentions much later dates.

While we are at it, we hereby confirm that we did not invent “David” to make counter-productive Aunt Sally comments. Does his Tardis need a service?

 

BREAKING NEWS! TROLL CATS DEMONSTRATE TO THEIR HUMAN COUNTERPARTS HOW ITS DONE.

 

Cat trolls are credited for being  wiser than human trolls, who are well known for being  wotless, boring and prone to making gaffes…

A group of cats, known as a moggle, have been discovered by their incredulous owners, to have been routinely trolling.  Not only that but the surprised owners discovered that the felines were actually a lot better at it than their human counterparts even though some of them did not have thumbs – well none of them had thumbs actually.  Asked where they liked to troll best they said anything featuring Henry Tudor was fair game.  When they were questioned why, and who their favourite king  was, they all concurred Richard III because it was well known he liked and admired cats as although they were small in stature they had hearts like lions – unlike Henry Tudor  who was a complete waste of a good suit of armour, spending the whole of the Battle of Bosworth behind a pike wall!   Pausing only to regurgitate a fur ball, one of the group, Percy,  explained that Tudor liked nothing better than setting his favorite greyhound, Morton, onto any innocent passing cat just because he could.  However, one of the group, Bowfoot, did demur that he thought Henry, although a coward, was not bad looking as he thought the cross-eyed look very handsome.

Percy.  Although lacking teeth Percy remains a happy chap unlike Henry who also lacked teeth as well as a sense of humour..

Jockey,  originally from Norfolk, does share some similarities to human trolls in that he likes to spend his days divided equally between sleeping, eating and trolling in no particular order.

Tongue protruding in concentration Catesby the Cat demonstrates how easy it is to troll and if one sticks one’s tongue it is easier to hit the correct keys

Lovell…unique in that he can uses both paws simultaneously..unlike human trolls

Two of the cats are siblings, and being  identical,  both go under the name Stanley.  When they are not trolling,  Stanley and Stanley like nothing better than  sitting on fences

Cissie, the matriarch of the group, demonstrates she can type without looking at the keyboard.    Cissie is well known for not being able to tolerate fools easily – human trolls should give this particular cat a very wide berth..

Bowfoot opined that he thought Henry quite handsome as the cross-eyed look was very fetching indeed.

Ratcliffe..if only all trolls were as handsome,,.

 

 

Morton VIII.  This chap is a direct descendant of Henry Tudor’s favorite greyhound Morton…but that dear reader, is another story..

 

Henry the “Lancastrian”? Another own goal

You may have read here, here, here or even here about the regular own goals of a certain “Tudor”-ist troll.

Anyway, given the fact that Henry VII, whether Tudor, Beaufort or Swynford, is not descended from Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster in suo jure but from her husband’s mistress and later wife, Katherine de Roet, he wasn’t a true lineal Lancastrian. Carson has listed thirty individuals, some mentioned here, who were alive on 22 August 1485 and were descended from Blanche, therefore having better claims than Henry.

Now duRose mentions that Henry VII was descended from Blanche’s paternal aunt, therefore he was a lineal Lancastrian. This is actually true but very counter-productive. As you can see below, Blanche had no brothers but an elder sister, whose only child died in infancy. Her father, Henry of Grosmont, had no brothers but five sisters, one of whom was a prioress but the other four all had issue and descendants alive in 1485.

You can see quite clearly that Henry’s ancestress was Mary, the youngest of the quintet. Eleanor, the fourth sister, leads to Richard III et al whilst there are three lines to John Howard, Duke of Norfolk and a lot of other famous people are listed.

Here is the evidence that there are now HUNDREDS of people with a better lineal Lancastrian claim than Henry VII in 1485.

Edward IV and why I feel a song coming on

One of Cairo’s biggest trolls claimed, last week, that the Fourth Lateran Council banned secret weddings, thus Edward IV’s June 1461 marriage to the dark-haired, older, Lancastrian widow Lady Eleanor Talbot could not have been valid.

There are only two problems with this claim, from the clown who confused “June” with “youth”, had Katherine de Valois addressing Parliament after she died and Bishop Leslie of Ross meeting “Perkin Warbeck” thirty years before his own birth. The first is that those who understand canon law* disagree with the impact of the Fourth Lateran Council, at least in fact if not intent. The second is that Edward’s 1464 secret ceremony was also with an older Lancastrian widow, who probably had dark hair. If the claim was true then this “marriage” would also, of necessity, be invalid.

So Edward IV either married at least twice – there may be other cases we do not know about – or not at all. He was either a bigamist or a bachelor “until his dying day” but his children were illegitimate either way.

• Royal Marriage Secrets (Ashdown-Hill, p.20)

Here it is, in black and white …

Many of you will remember this post from before Christmas, about the “Lincoln Roll”, supposedly compiled for the Earl of Lincoln but clearly updated at least twenty-six years after his death, to cover his brother’s execution:
http://www.johnashdownhill.com/johns-blog/2015/12/21/the-henry-tudor-society-death-certificates

In it, you will note that Dr. Ashdown-Hill corrects a troll, who claimed that it showed Edward IV’s elder sons both died in childhood (“iunie“, which means something else), demonstrating that the Roll actually used the term “iuve” (short for “iuventute” or “in his youth”).

So what exactly is meant, in either the classical or late Mediaeval era, by “youth”? According to A Latin-English Dictionary (1868, ed W. Smith) , this is between the ages of twenty and forty, which seems reasonable. Richard of Shrewsbury, Edward IV’s middle son, the sometime Duke of York and (in jure uxoris) of Norfolk, was born on 24 August 1473. “Perkin Warbeck”, who may well have been Richard of Shrewsbury, died on 23 November 1499 at Tyburn, in the presence of several witnesses.

So the Roll, whichever de la Pole it was actually compiled for, which I think we can deduce, is wholly consistent with “Perkin” being who he claimed to be.

Juventus FC, most of whose players are aged between 20 and 40

“Perkin Warbeck” who, if he was Richard of Shrewsbury, died at 26.

Let’s all sneer at fiction writers….

It’s time to get up on my hind legs and have a loud bleat about something that is beginning to get my goat. That ‘something’ seems to have become the new ‘must do’. What is it? The sneering and display of often pathetic pseudo-intellectual superiority that is constantly directed at Ricardian fiction. Snide remarks and exclusivity abound, and it was one such recent remark that has my goat venting its spleen.

Novelists are now sneered at as the new low life, and the sneering is done by folk who haven’t the wit or perseverance to write a book themselves. How easy it is take pot shots, employing a special school-playground spitefulness with which to punish presumptuous authors who lift Richard from history and write stories around him. Fiction about anything else can do as it damned well pleases. Time and again Ricardian authors are criticised and mocked, especially by people who also regard themselves as Ricardians. Why? Well, writing about Richard makes a novelist an immediate target. There isn’t an Eleventh Commandment in the Bible, but we all know it exists. Thou shalt not mess with Richard. No one should write imagined scenes with him because such scenes DID NOT HAPPEN. Well, that’s the point. It’s fiction!  And he was not St Richard of Middleham. (Before fingers start jabbing and anonymous keyboards start rattling, I am not suggesting he was a fallen angel either!)

Some authors—a precious few—appear to be sacrosanct. How so? After all, their work is fiction too. With fictional characters to help the ‘real’ characters along, and conversations that are clearly reported by flies on walls. Ah, but that’s different. These authors write literary classics, or so someone has decided. And maybe these books are classics, but to praise only them implies that all other authors write tripe. Sorry, but fiction is fiction is fiction. The fact that it has been written in a haze of basking glory makes no difference. Lengthy homage or rattling yarn, it remains fiction, no matter what the genre within that sphere. And there are an awful lot of really good authors to entertain us all with their work. I am privileged to know a number of them, both new acquaintances and those made over the many years of my career. They are all dedicated, and all write from the heart. They do not deserve to have war declared on them by these invisible Hitlers.

Unfortunately, many so-called Ricardians have developed a mob mentality. Just witness some of the poisonous reviews at Amazon, and monstrous posts at Facebook. Trolls abound. When they are aiming at books, they spit vitriol about titles they have mostly not even read, and organise themselves into lynch mobs, following the book and the author, and being sure to make comments about comments, and so on. How dumb. Talk about the herd instinct. Baaaaaa! Fiction writers all do one thing, they tell stories. That is the whole point of it. But apparently they do it so well, the sheep out there in the wide world believe every word . . . or at least, are convinced other sheep will. No sheep shall be allowed to think and decide for itself is the Twelfth Commandment.

Ricardian trolls aren’t solely concerned with authors, they like to attack individuals of all sorts, for the hell of it, it seems. These trolls are particularly despicable…as well as faceless, nameless and conscienceless! Cowards by any other name, with wide yellow streaks down their spineless backs..

There’s a parallel universe out there, people! Why can’t these miserable excuses for human beings get a life of their own? And why do they do this at all? Because the author has created something of which they, the trolls and rabid, self-appointed posses, disapprove. The meaning of the word ‘fiction’ seems to have escaped them. They have become too thick-skinned and know-all to make the distinction between what is fact and what is imagined. It doesn’t even matter when an author makes it plain that the book’s plot is fictional. There is a mass abandonment of medications, it seems. Oh, and they think their opinions are more vital than anyone else’s. Never forget that. I wonder if some of them think they have a hotline to Richard? ‘Fraid so, folks. And they don’t even realise he’s never taken their calls.

Historians don’t escape either. They too are accused of . . . wait for it, writing fiction! Well, there’s a surprise. Even historians with a hitherto unblemished Ricardian record are now being sniped at for ‘invention’. But historians have a right to express an opinion, it’s what they do. They weigh up the evidence and decide what they think. Short of going back to Richard’s time and filming everything, thinking is all they can do. Their Holy Grail is to unearth actual proof of something. A long-lost document, a sculpture, a death mask, anything. How often does that happen? Once in a blue moon. And yes, OK, there are some historians who are in Cuckooland, but I’m not here to name names, only to generalise.

In my opinion, anyone who has the talent, dedication and love of a subject to sit down and write a book about it, deserves to be praised. They should not have the ignorant school bullies ganging up to harass and insult them. So, sucks to those bullies. And hooray for everyone who writes a book about Richard, fiction or non-fiction.

And hooray to anyone who stands up to trolls of all descriptions! May they triumph, and the scumbags go down the pan, to be lost in the sewers from whence they slithered.

Rant over.

The case of the time-travelling Bishop

Following our recent post https://murreyandblue.wordpress.com/2015/03/04/what-perkin-actually-said/, the eternal troll duRose has assured us that Francis Bacon and John (The Colourblind Cartographer) Speede didn’t actually invent “Perkin”‘s specific accusation against Richard III.

No, we are assured that much of Bacon’s manuscript came from John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, who actually lived from 1527-96, whilst “Perkin” was executed in late 1499. Leslie only quotes part of the speech to James IV, which Leslie obviously never heard unless he was a time traveller or confirmed it at a seance. So we still don’t have an authentic, contemporaneous accusation against anyone at all.

One troll in particular

How “hard of understanding” are the denialists?

We ask this because David Durose is displaying even more symptoms of the Cairo Syndrome. He repeats many of his claims in the teeth of the evidence and makes more, unsupported, claims.  The “Lincoln Roll” cannot have pertained to the younger John de la Pole, Earl thereof, if it mentions Henry VII’s younger children, unless he was a fortune-teller: “You will have seven children and four of them will survive infancy”? It is far more likely to pertain to Edmund or Richard, Lincoln’s younger brothers, one of whom was Earl of Suffolk and the other claimed that title whilst both were alive throughout Henry’s marriage.
The document was compiled in stages, of course, but the mis-translated suggestion that the “princes” were dead comes from the second stage, clearly in a different hand, probably relating to Lord Richard in c.1520. It really won’t do to claim that this document “proves” any death by 1487, any more than it did two weeks ago. Replying that “Oh yes it does” won’t do either because we are nearly three months from the pantomime season. “Denialist” is a euphemism and many words with the same meaning start with an “L”.

Our prescription is an apology and a withdrawal, on his part, accompanied by this advice: When you are in a hole, stop digging.

Meanwhile, we hear that someone else is trying to walk from Fotheringhay to Middleham. It may take her just a little longer than five minutes.

The Internet Trolls’ Anthem

Internet trolls are a very busy breed, and surely need something to sing as they work. So here’s a little anthem for them. To be sung to the tune of “You don’t get me, I’m part of the union”, by the Strawbs.

Now I’m an internet troll…
Amazed at what I control
I say what I think, that other folk stink
Yes, I’m an internet troll

When I log on each time
To pour out my bile and slime
With virulent glee (sure that I’ll stay free)
I think I do no crime

I have no life of my own
As I sit in my smelly home
All I can think is that I’m in the pink
I’m not a poisonous gnome

Oh, you don’t get me, I’m an internet troll
You don’t get me, I’m an internet troll
You don’t get me, I’m an internet troll
Til the day I’m named
Til the day I’m shamed

We trolls intend to defeat
The folk of the world’s elite
But we don’t care if, should we feel like it
We get others too – that’s neat!

We plot with our troll brethren
Laying plans to cause more pain
We think it’s our mission to treat with derision
To abuse and accuse to our gain

Before the internet came
Our lives were just plain lame
We were nothing but gas, and it came from the a-s
But the net gave us secret fame

We all have a naff handle
Too yellow to risk a scandal
Coming down on our heads, harming us instead
Oh, the truth isn’t worth the candle

Oh, you don’t get me, I’m an internet troll
You don’t get me, I’m an internet troll
You don’t get me, I’m an internet troll
Til the day I’m named
Til the day I’m shamed

Should a law come to get us all
We’d be frightened and appalled
We’d scuttle afar, like the vermin we are
Snivelling we were never trolls!

If our friends should know who we are
And our neighbours come to stare
We’d shuffle around, try to go to ground
But trolls deserve no care

In prison we should be,
Or a good old pillory
Being showered with muck, but who’d give a f-ck!
Just desserts it would surely be.

Oh, you don’t get me, I’m an internet troll
You don’t get me, I’m an internet troll
You don’t get me, I’m an internet troll
Til the day I’m named
Til the day I’m shamed

Oh, you don’t get me, I’m an internet troll
You don’t get me, I’m an internet troll
You don’t get me, I’m an internet troll
Til the day I’m named
Til the day I’m shamed . . . .