The commentary below isn’t really news, but it does relate to Tudor history. Just some observations I’ve made over the past few months, with no real point, I suppose.

The way I get news for the blog, besides what readers email me, is through Google news. I’ve set up some news alerts with various Tudor names, etc. which are then emailed to me so I can read through and see which I want to post on the blog. In the process though, I’ve encountered a couple of interesting things.

The first is relating to errors which are sometimes just typos but sometimes are things that really should be caught by an editor or fact-checker. For example - Yesterday I had a hit on ‘Anne Boleyn’ through the Google alerts and the article was about the gardens at Hever Castle (which are beautiful … I really need to visit there again). Further down the article was this sentence:

In the 16th Century it was the childhood home of Henry VIII’s fourth wife, Anne Boleyn. In the 16th Century it was the childhood home of Henry VIII’s fourth wife, Anne Boleyn.

Now, I understand where there could potentially be a little bit of confusion, since Henry’s fourth wife was another Anne and she did get Hever Castle in the divorce, but most people would associate Hever with Anne Boleyn and I’m pretty sure most people would know that she was Henry’s second, not fourth, wife.

Another error that I came across the other day was in one of the articles about the DNA testing of Mary Tudor’s hair. When describing the history around the disappearance of the princes in the Tower, the article flipped Edward IV and Henry VII! The most common error (and I’ve come across this one in LOTS of places) is leaving off one of the “I”s in Henry VIII, which occasionally creates real confusion, although most of the time it is obvious that someone really means Henry VIII and not his father. I won’t claim to be free of typos and errors, since anyone who knows me or who has read this website for any length of times knows that I’ve made plenty. But I’m not a professional journalist with an editor.

The other thing that has caught my attention is the cultural use and off-hand references to the Tudors in the news, in particular Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. And I’ll add that there seems to be a lot of King Edward VI schools in Britain, because I see a lot of those too!

With Henry VIII, there tend to be a lot of religious articles that make reference to his split with Rome. And he tends to show up with food articles… can’t imagine why . There have been some articles recently on the decline of the game of darts in pubs and several have mentioned that the game was reputedly a favorite of Henry VIII. Elizabeth I has been getting a fair number of references lately since this is Women’s History Month. I guess what I find interesting about all this is that the names of these monarchs are often used in a way that basically assumes some general cultural knowledge of who these people are, and not just in Great Britain.

Enough rambling thoughts from me for tonight!