Sunday Short Takes

Here are several things that stacked up during my very busy week!

* Turkey presents Ottoman Sultan’s letter to Elizabeth I to UK

* Cash boost to restore Tudor dynasty church on Anglesey (This is the church that I’ve blogged about before here and here.)

* Restoration work at Stirling castle on Youtube – and here’s a link to the YouTube channel for Historic Scotland. The project is restoring parts of the castle to their appearance in the 1540s.

* A new website from the UK National Archives: legislation.gov.uk launched last week.

* Giant maze to open in Trafalgar Square – the hedge maze will be in the Square from August 2 to 6.

* And finally – the fourth and final season of The Tudors will be out on DVD in October in the US (I haven’t heard a UK release date yet, but I’ll update when I find out). Here’s a pre-order link through my Amazon affiliate account for anyone so inclined. 🙂

Picture of the Week #79

Carving in the Beauchamp Tower of the Tower of London. Photo May 2003.

This carving was done by John Dudley (the son of John Dudley Duke of Northumberland) while he and his brothers were held in the Beauchamp Tower following the short reign of Lady Jane Grey and the Wyatt Rebellion in the reign of Mary I.

The carving reads: “You that these beasts do well behold and see, may dem with ease wherefore here made they be, with borders eke within [there may be found] 4 brothers names who list to search the ground.”

Sunday short takes

This is the first time in a few weeks I’ve had a few stories stack up so I could do a “short takes”!

* First up, from Foose, a review from the Spectator of G.W. Bernard’s book “Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions” (which I posted about back in February)

* More excavations at the site of The Theatre in Shoreditch (previously mentioned here and here) are going on this summer, and you can follow along at the Museum of London’s “Working Life of the Museum” blog (here’s a , , , 1

Mary Rose artifact may to travel in to space

This is one of those collisions of the two major aspects of my life – space and Tudor history – that I didn’t quite expect. Pretty cool!

News release from the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard website:

During their visit to Portsmouth, the Atlantis Space Shuttle crew were presented with a piece of the Mary Rose, the flagship of King Henry VIII, with a view to sending it up to space on a future mission.

The presentation took place at a gala dinner Sunday 27th June, on board HMS Warrior 1860, another ship that accompanies the Mary Rose at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.

And I thought this was an interesting tidbit:

This won

Exhibition of Tudor maps at the Mary Rose museum

From The Portsmouth Historic Dockyard website:

Could a 500 year old map have contained clues to where the wreck of the Mary Rose lay and could this be the first time Portsmouth maps have returned to the city in over 400 years? All these fascinating questions will be raised in a brand new temporary exhibition of international cartographic importance, in the Mary Rose Museum at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard from 2nd July to 17th October 2010.

Mapping Portsmouth’s Tudor Past brings together, for the first time, several important maps from The British Library, UK Hydrographic Office and the Admiralty Library. All but one of these maps are hand-drawn and are works of art in their own right. Together they give us a unique and fascinating insight into Tudor Portsmouth and the view of their world 500 years ago.

The Mary Rose Trust are delighted that the British Library are loaning 5 unique items for this exhibition including the centrepiece of the display, which will be two stunning large-scale maps of Tudor Portsmouth, one dating from 1545 (the year the Mary Rose sank defending the country from French invasion), which is the earliest scale map of an English town and one of the earliest in Europe, and the other dating from 1552, which was probably made for the visit of Edward VI to Portsmouth on the 9th August 1552.

The exhibition also includes two important maps of the Solent from the collection of William Cecil, Elizabeth I

The Tudors’ revels now are ended

As most of you know, tonight is the series finale of Showtime’s The Tudors.

Spoiler alert!

(Henry VIII dies.)

It’s been an interesting four years for Tudor-philes with this series. I know my website traffic, email, blog questions, etc. have increased from people who have been watching the series and want to dig in to the real history behind what they were seeing – and that’s always a plus in my book. (The people wanting to learn history that is, not necessarily the increase in my email volume!) All in all, I’ve enjoyed it, even if I was occasionally frustrated with some of the “creativity” they used with the history (the sisters of Henry VIII being my biggest pet peeve).

Now I’m looking forward to the Starz mini-series of The Pillars of the Earth, Showtime’s The Borgias, and going in to some fantasy territory – A Game of Thrones on HBO. Starz also has a series called Camelot in development that sounds like fun. So there is definitely a lot of stuff that will fill the gap the end of The Tudors will leave in my entertainment schedule!

Picture of the Week #76

Watch bell recovered from the Mary Rose. Photo June 2000.

The info card reads:

This cast bronze watch bell, found beneath the aftercastle in June 1982, was one of the last objects to be raised from the Mary Rose. The inscription, in Flemish, reads: IC BEN GHEGOTEN INT YAER MCCCCCX – It was cast in the year 1510 (the year before the ship was launched). Close by, the remains of a wooden bell hanger were recovered. The clapper would have been made of iron but it did not survive.

The bell was probably made by Peter van den Ghein I of Mechlin who cast bells for Iona Cathedral and Peterhouse, Cambridge.

Effort to get statue of Henry VII in Pembroke

Update: Here’s a link to an article from the BBC on the statue effort

From The Western Telegraph:

A former Pembroke Castle guide is campaigning to instate a statue of one of the building’s most famous residents in the town.

Henry VII, the first Tudor King was born in the castle and lived there until he was 11- years- old.

Local resident Mel Phillips is now looking at ways of putting up a statue to commemorate the link. She has won the backing of the manager of the castle and is now exploring ways to fund the project and asking the town