Blog Archives - Meandering Through Time

Birth of Mary Seymour

30/8/2018

Catherine Parr, the sixth and last wife of Henry VIII died on the 7th of September in 1548. Catherine's death has been attributed to an infection following the birth of her daughter Mary who was born, just seven days earlier at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire, on this very day.

Mary's father was Thomas Seymour, whose life would come to an end on the scaffold in the March of the following year. On Seymour's death, his estate passed to the crown and Mary was left in the guardianship Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk, the widow of Charles Brandon.

Mary was alone in the world at the age of just seven months and with no inheritance to help support her she was, it would seem, a burden. Evidence for this can be found in a letter from the Duchess to William Cecil where she asks for financial help. In the January of 1550, Mary was awarded what was left of her inheritance, however, no claim was made on it and therefore it has been supposed that the poor child died before that date.

In a biography of Catherine Parr, written in the 19th century, it states that Mary lived into adulthood and married. However, a recent biography suggests that Mary died, just as the above dates suggest, in 1550. In a poem dated to 1573 is said to refer to Mary.

I whom at the cost
Of her own life
My queenly mother
Bore with the pangs of labour
Sleep under this marble
An unfit traveller.
If Death had given me to live longer
That virtue, that modesty, That obedience of my excellent Mother
That Heavenly courageous nature
Would have lived again in me.
Now, whoever
You are, fare thee well
Because I cannot speak any more, this stone
Is a memorial to my brief life

It is thought that Mary Seymour was buried somewhere on the estate of Grimsthorpe Castle in Lincolnshire where Catherine Brandon lived with her new husband Richard Bertie.

There are no portraits of poor Mary Seymour, however, I do have photographs of Grimsthrope Castle that were taken in 2011 when I last visited.

Mona Lisa

21/8/2018

On the 21st August in 1911, Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous painting was stolen from the Louvre. It took more than two years before the authorities found out what exactly happened.

Vincenzo Perugia, an Italian petty criminal who worked at the Louvre, hid in the museum's gallery until closing time and then removed the Mona Lisa from its frame, probably smuggling it out the next day. Perugia was under the impression that the Mona Lisa had been stolen by Napoleon and by returning it to Italy he doing his patriotic duty, and therefore he asked for 500,000 lire as a reward.

Fellow Italian Alfredo Geri agreed to take a look at the painting and Perugia took the painting to Geri’s gallery where he was persuaded to leave it for an expert to examine it - by the end of that day the police had arrested Perugia.

Historians believe the woman in the portrait is Madam Lisa Giocondo, the wife of Gherardini, a wealthy Florentine silk merchant. Mona Lisa is certainly beautiful and has a smile that has enchanted many over the passing centuries, many of us asking "what is the secret behind her smile?

However, I am more interested in the fact that de Vinci used the Fibonacci sequence when he worked on this painting. Now, I understand the principle of this sequence and how it appears in nature, but what I don't understand is why an artist such as Leonardo De Vinci applied it to his works as we see here in the image below.

What was the point of doing something so complicated if the majority of people didn't understand said sequence or even knew it was there?

A Massacre at Acre

19/8/2018

20th August 1191

Below is one description, taken from the Itinerarium Regis Ricardi of King Richard I's attack on the Turkish forces as he made his way to Jerusalem with his army:

"King Richard pursued the Turks with singular ferocity, fell upon them and scattered them across the ground. No one escaped when his sword made contact with them; wherever he went his brandished sword cleared a wide path on all sides. Continuing his advance with untiring sword strokes, he cut down that unspeakable race as if he were reaping the harvest with a sickle, so that the corpses of Turks he had killed covered the ground everywhere for the space of half a mile."

A great piece of medieval PR by Richard de Templo, which makes the king sound like some sort of superman. He wasn't!

When he reached Acre he ordered the deaths of over 2,700 captives outside the walls of Acre in retaliation to Saladin's summarily beheading of his Christian prisoners. He was not the only one committing atrocities like this, they were the norm during the Crusades. On the very same day the Duke of Burgundy did the same with his captives, the vast majority were soldiers of a garrison just out side Acre, but 300 of those killed were wives and children, they were all barbarically slaughtered in full view of the Saracen camp:

"roped together in groups, attacked with swords, lances clubs and stones, their bellies slit open before their bodies burnt, in case gold and jewels had been swallowed"

Death of Macbeth

15/8/2018

Macbeth or mac Bethad mac Findláich was a Scottish warrior, a clan leader from Moray in the north of Scotland, the son, as his name states, of Findlaech of Moray. It was on this day in 1057 he was killed by the son of Duncan I, the very man he had killed in battle on the 14th August in 1040 - fourteen years and one day later.

There are no images of Macbeth, however, in the Prophecy of Berchan, an ancient Irish poem on the history of early Scotland, Macbeth is called "the red, tall, golden-haired one"

The real Macbeth is overshadowed by the Macbeth of Shakespeare's play which is a tale of ambition, a desire cleverly planted in Macbeth's mind by the 'weird sisters' who we know as the three witches.

As mentioned in a blog on the death of King Duncan of Scotland Shakespeare source is the Chronicles of Raphael Holinshed, to which he is known to have referred for many of his other historical dramas.

meanderingthroughtime.weebly.com/history-blog/king-duncan-i-and-macbeth

Birth of Margaret Pole

12/8/2018

On the 14th of August in 1473 the birth of Margaret Pole, the daughter of George Duke of Clarence and Isabel Neville at Castle Farleigh, an estate not too far from Bath in Somerset.

This west country castle was once the ancestral home of the Hungerfords, a family who had sided with the Lancastrians during the Wars of the Roses and were punished for that with execution and the loss of their estates. Castle Farleigh was granted to Richard, Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III, however, in 1473 it was linked with the Duke of Clarence for it was here that Isabel gave birth to Margaret.

Isabel Neville died in 1476 and Clarence was executed two years later, Margaret lived out the rest of her childhood with her paternal cousins in the royal household. Six years following the accession to the throne by Henry Tudor she was married to Richard Pole by whom she would have five children - the four sons were thorns in the sides of Henry VIII. However, Margaret was a member of the young Katherine of Aragon's household during the reign of Henry VII and under Henry VIII she was governess to Henry's daughter Mary. During the troubles between Catherine and Henry and Henry and Mary, Margaret would stay true to their cause.

By the end of 1538, Margaret was in trouble and found herself embroiled in the fall out of the arrests of her sons Geoffrey and Henry Pole on a charge of treason. She was detained at Cowdray Park, the home of the Earl of Southampton. It wasn't long before trumped up charges were brought against her, and she was sent to the Tower where she was kept for just under two years. Poor Margaret was not treated well during her incarceration, the conditions were austere and inadequate for a woman her age let alone her status, the room was cold and damp and she suffered as a result.

Margaret Pole would die at the hands of an inexperienced executioner on the 27th May in 1541 - she was sixty-eight years old.

The above image is considered to be that of Margaret Pole as she wears a tiny barrel charm on a bracelet which is taken to represents her father's death in a barrel of Malmesbury wine. This, of course, is a case of fabricating the evidence to fit the crime. Not only did this one tiny detail added weight to the vat of wine theory but it means that this portrait has been wrongly attributed.

King Duncan I and Macbeth

12/8/2018

The numerous clans of Scotland had been fighting each other for centuries and would continue to do so right up to the 18th century. One of these battles, in the middle of the 11th century, saw the death of King Duncan I at the hands of one Macbeth.

Duncan, who had a claim to the throne through his mother was king for just six years and Macbeth or mac Bethad mac Findlaich to give him his true name, was a clan leader from the north of Scotland. Like many a monarch in history, Duncan's time as king lasted as long as he could hold onto the crown before another with what they considered an equal claim ripped it from his head. In Duncan's case, his forays into the lands held by Macbeth at Moray cost him his life.

It was on this day that the aforementioned Duncan was slain in battle by Macbeth's forces at Bothnagowan or Pitgaveny near Elgin in Moray.

If you think of Macbeth then your mind automatically thinks of William Shakespeare who used Raphael Holinshed's Chronicle of Scottish History as a basis of his famous play and it is from his work that we, on the whole, view Duncan and Macbeth. Holinshed's work and Shakespeare play should be taken with a pinch of salt, they were written over five hundred years after the event. Shakespeare wrote Macbeth when James I of Scotland was on sitting on the English throne.

There is a painting of a dark-haired bearded Duncan depicted as one, among ninety-three other paintings, of Scotland's heroic kings, it has him wearing a red cloak over his armoured shoulders (the image below is probably based on this work)

The original painting is by a Dutch artist and dates to the reign of Charles II and forms part of the aforedmentioned set commissioned to decorate the Great Gallery at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. The inscription on the painting reads - Duncanvs I. The inscriptions on each of the paintings are taken from the work of a 16th-century Scottish historian and together they are an attempt to represent the 'symbolic power' of Scottish kingship.

Duncan's portrait has the following inscription -

'Son of Beatrix, daughter of Malcolm II a good and modest Prince. He was slain by Macbeth, traitorously, in the 6th Year of his Reign’ Duncan I is number eighty-four in the series.

Duncan I's body is stated to be buried on the island of Iona.

Birth of Henry V

9/8/2018

The date of Henry V's birth is said to be either the 9th or the 16th of August in 1386/7 at Monmouth Castle. The baby, so the story goes was placed in this cradle. Sadly tests prove that the cradle dates to a much later century, the cradle posts however are dated to the 15th century. It is linked to the village of Newland in Gloucestershire just a few miles from where Henry was cared for as a baby.

He was born the second son of Henry IV, he had, by the age of seventeen taken part in the Battle of Shrewsbury and topped that with five years fighting against Welsh and the legendary Owen Glendower, the last Welsh leader to be known as the Prince of Wales. Henry also put down a rebellion led by Richard of Conisburgh grandfather to Richard III, Henry Scrope and Thomas Grey and their attempt to put Edmund Mortimer on the English throne. This later became known as the Southampton Plot. We also remember King Henry V for his involvement with France where between 1415 and 1420 he was successful in taking the port of Harfleur, the town of Rouen, and managed to force the French to sign the Treaty of Troyes.

Following his success in France, Henry was recognised as the heir to the French throne which was sealed by his marriage to Charles VI's daughter Catherine of Valois. The couple returned home to England, six months later Catherine was crowned queen and two months later, Henry returned to France. The young queen gave birth to her son Henry, later Henry VI, in the December of 1421, but the of hero of Agincourt lay dying from dysentery at the Chateau de Vincennes, in France, where he died on the 31st of August, leaving his lands and titles in the tiny hands of his nine-month-old son.

Battle of Maserfield and the Death of Oswald of Northumbria

5/8/2018

A number of years ago I finished researching a maternal family line that came to an end in Cornwall in the last years of the 13th century. Despite being Cornish I was surprised to find that this families bloodline can be traced all the way up country to Oswestry in Shropshire. Whilst adding a few updates to this family's story, I found out this amazing fact - the town of Oswestry was founded, so legend tells us, as the result of the death on this day in 641/2 of King Oswald of Northumbria.

Oswald was a 7th-century king, the son of Aethelfrith King of Bernicia - a territory that made up half of what is now Northumbria. Oswald was killed at the aforementioned Battle of Maserfield following a power struggle with the Mercians under the leadership of Penda, the King of Mercia. This battle was thought to have taken place at Maes-y-llan which is just to the north of Oswestry.

Following the battle Oswald's body was dismembered, his head and limbs were placed on stakes. However, one of his arms, so the legends has it, was taken by his pet raven but eventually dropped. The arm landed in a tree, or a tree grew where it landed and in time this site would become known as Oswald's Tree or Oswestry. Oswald's remains would continue to be moved from one place to another, the last time being some two hundred and fifty years later. Oswald would later become St Oswald.

The story of Oswald's relics began the year after his death when Oswiu, Oswald's brother, who had returned to Northumbria from Scotland in 633, retrieved his body parts and placed them at three different locations namely Bamburgh, who received an arm, Lindisfarne who received his head and at Bardney in Lincolnshire who received his torso. However, another account has it that it was Osthryth, Oswald's niece, who moved Oswald's bones (that of his torso) to Bardney Abbey sometime before 697 where they would rest until 909 when they made their final journey to St Peter's Abbey, later St Oswald's Priory in Gloucester.

Oswald's head was eventually interred in Durham Cathedral - his other three heads made their way to different places in Europe! Poor Oswald's other arm is said to have eventually made its way to Peterborough Cathedral.

So the cult of St Oswald was established.

Bardney Abbey was one of the first abbeys built along the River Witham on land granted by Oswald, it was endowed by Osthryth and her husband Aethelred. After her murder, Osthryth would later be buried there herself.

This tall tale reminds me of the scene in The Wizard of Oz when the witches flying monkeys pull the Scarecrow apart to which the Tinman says "Well, that's him all over!"