Just in case there are folks here who haven’t been over the The Raucous Royals blog lately, I wanted to post something here about Carlyn’s great analysis of this season’s episodes of “The Tudors”.
Here’s a link to the write-up for Episode 3 and the entries for previous episodes can be found at the bottom of that post.
The Independent ran an interesting article about the jousting fall in 1536 that will be in an upcoming documentary:
The jousting accident that turned Henry VIII into a tyrant
Medical study uncovers turning point in king’s life. Michael McCarthy reports
Henry VIII became the tyrannical monster remembered by history because of a personality change following a serious jousting accident, according to a new historical documentary.
After the accident
From The Telegraph:
The year 1536 changed Henry VIII from a handsome, popular and athletic king to a corpulent tyrant who thought little of dispatching his many wives, a historian has claimed.
A new look at the life of one of England’s most famous monarchs argues that a series of calamitous events within the space of 12 months had an irreversible effect on his life.
Suzannah Lipscomb, a research curator at Hampton Court Palace and Oxford scholar, said the apparent betrayal by his wife, a dangerous fall from a horse and a religious rebellion all played their part in transforming Henry.
She said: “He did move from being the much f
King Henry VIII’s astrolabe at the British Museum. May 1998.
From the British Museum website:
This small astrolabe, signed by Bastien Le Seney from Normandy, clockmaker to Henry VIII, is inscribed with the King’s motto and arms but surprisingly the quartering is mixed up and lions in the top left quarter face in the wrong direction.
Dimensions
Diameter: 85.5 millimetres
Thickness: 4.5 millimetres
Length: 124 millimetres (Overall length including suspension loop.)Curator’s comments
For the reversed quartering (namely England appearing in the first and fourth quarters rather than the second and third) cf. Philip Lankaster, ‘A note on some partizans with the Tudor royal arms in the Royal Armouries’, in: Royal Armouries Yearbook, 7, 2002, pp. 40-45 (Copy on file).The quality of the markings and the execution of the intrument as well as the lions in the first quarter facing sinister raise serious doubts about its authenticity as an instrument made for Henry himself.
This popped up all at once through various news sources, so I’ll just pick one:
From Broadcasting & Cable:
Jonathan Rhys-Meyers reign as King Henry VIII will end in 2010. Showtime has picked up a fourth and final season of drama The Tudors.
The series will return to the network for its final bow in Spring 2010, with production slated to begin this June in Dublin, Ireland.
Head on over to the Lady Jane Grey Reference Site blog and submit them! The deadline is April 15.
[Please submit the questions at the link above, not at this site]
From The New York Times:
Just a King for His Time: Executions, Wives, Divorces and Bad Diets
THE Henry VIII whom Dickens called
The UK National Archives has an on-line exhibition for the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession to the throne: Henry VIII – Power, Passion, Parchment. The exhibition features some documents that you can zoom in on and examine up close.
And here is an article from the Telegraph on the exhibition – Salacious claims of Anne Boleyn’s incest in Henry VIII documents placed online
AP photo
This is pretty cool… I can have both a history and tech geek-out!
From The Telegraph:
Scientists have managed to “virtually restore” the faded hues of his 28ft long tapestry using coloured light beams.
The Manchester University researchers looked at the back of the heavy wool and silk tapestry, which has been less affected by sunlight, to gauge what the original colours might have been.
They then measured the colour of every yarn on the front and used computer software to calculate how much of the original pigments of woad (blue), weld (yellow) and madder (red) had been lost.
High-definition projectors have now been used to beam two million pixels of different coloured light on to the tapestry.
Also check out the BBC story, with videos
The book for Henry VIII: Man and Monarch at the British Library will be released next week in the UK.
Here are the Amazon.co.uk order links (paperback and hardcover):
And the US order link (I think they will just be sending it from the UK, since it doesn’t look like there is specifically a US edition at this time):
The Queens Garden, one of the many lovely gardens at Sudeley Castle. May 1998.
The Banqueting Hall ruins can be seen to the right.
Hampton Court Palace‘s 500th anniversary events will start this Friday, and there is a lot going on!
Here are some highlights:
The Henry VIII talks at Hampton Court Palace
And of course, I have to link to the shopping. Here’s the web store for the Historic Royal Palaces – I love the “Divorced, Beheaded, Survived” charm bracelet. There is also a neat one with each of the wives’ badges.
This just goes to show you how many things may still be hiding in archives, libraries, attics, etc.
From The Guardian:
A drawing of Henry VIII’s famous victory over the French at the “Siege of Boulogne” in 1544 is to go on public display for the first time in more than 400 years after lying undiscovered and mislabelled in the British Library archives.
The image, drawn by a “war artist” commissioned to record the Tudor king’s military achievements, dates to 1545 and is one of four “views” documenting Henry’s second invasion of France.
For centuries art historians have pondered why there was never a final picture showing the surrender of the city. Just three drawings survived, one showing Henry landing in Calais, another of him on the way to Boulogne, and a third of the siege in progress.
“Everybody just assumed that the end of the siege had not been done,” Peter Barber, head of map collections at the British Library, told the Observer. But due to a cataloguing error the existence of a fourth drawing had gone unnoticed. It only came to light when Barber began re-cataloguing the manuscripts of Sir Robert Cotton, which had been left to the nation by his grandson, Sir John Cotton, in 1702 and passed to the British Museum on its founding in 1753.
The drawing will be on display at the British Library’s “Henry VIII: Man and Monarch” exhibition
Showtime has created a fun, tongue-in-cheek blog for “The Tudors” – Pop Tudors – History, recapped. No spoilers.
I particularly like the flowchart for 16th century marital dispute resolution. 🙂
Newly-discovered portrait by Matt Groening the Elder
[Yes, I know it’s lame to use something that I did a long time ago, but I didn’t have a chance to Photoshop something new for April Fools’ Day!]
Then head on over to the Lady Jane Grey Reference Site blog and submit them! The deadline is April 15.
And best wishes to Ms. de Lisle on that lower back trouble!
[Update – Please submit the questions at the link above, not at this site]
These are mostly updates to previous topics, so I’m just going to lump them all together:
* Henry, Mind of a Tyrant by David Starkey will be running on Channel 4 in the UK on Mondays in April. You can listen to a stream of the soundtrack by Philip Sheppard on the composer’s website
* A new painting of the Mary Rose that was reconstructed with new information of examination of the wreck and artifacts.
* Rediscovering Henry VIII – An article by David Starkey from the Times Online about the upcoming British Library exhibition Henry VIII: Man and Monarch that he is the guest curator of.
* Two articles about information that may have been lost during the restoration of the Cobbe portrait (that may or may not be of Shakespeare): Forsooth, restorers botched up bald bard William Shakespeare from The Guardian and Restorers ‘wiped away’ precious details from rare William Shakespeare portraits from The Telegraph
News from the Old Royal Navy College at Greenwich:
A weekend of Tudor-themed festivities will take place in Greenwich to help mark the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII
Carved sign in Richmond. May 2000.
Since yesterday was the anniversary of the death of Elizabeth I, I chose this image from part of the remaining section of Richmond Palace, where she died in 1603.
Actually, the stamps themselves are the same, but the cover is different.
First up are some larger images of the two sets from the Royal Mail (click on each thumbnail to see a bigger version):
And here is the press release from Royal Mail (PDF).
And here is another first day cover, this time from Bletchley Park (which some of you might know from the WW2 code-breaking efforts), highlighting Tudor spymasters and code breakers. The first day covers are available from the Bletchley Park post office. Proceeds will go to the Bletchley Park preservation fund. You can get more info from the press release here (PDF).
