Pandemics through history….

  For the last few years we’ve been beset by a pandemic. COVID-19 is the new blight on the block, and has set about knocking us down like ninepins in spite of antibiotics and even immunisation. But modern medicine has done a lot to standing up to the silent menace. In times gone by folks…

THE DEATH OF HENRY VII

UPDATED POST ON sparkypus.com A Medieval Potpourri https://sparkypus.com/2020/05/14/the-death-of-henry-vii/ Henry VII on his deathbed : Wriothesley’s Heraldic Collection Vol 1 Book of Funerals. c Unknown artist’s impression of Tudor being crowned in the aftermath of Bosworth.. It must have seemed surreal to him as he wandered through the dead kings apartments at Westminster that had now,…

Seeking the Real Duke of Clarence

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about Richard III’s brother, George of Clarence. You know the one–typical ‘middle child’, ‘false fleeting Clarence’, the one drowned in Malmsey who was also a drunk and quite possibly insane, hanging, as he did,  old ladies on the vaguest of suspicions. And I began considering–is George, like Richard, maligned,…