Richard III gave Anne Neville a pet lion as a coronation gift. She used to send it out to London, where citizens would feed it stray dogs and cats. Simpler times?
This is a great article from Historic UK on the strange tale of Katherine's body.
I ranked medieval English queen consorts by the title held by their father at the time of their marriage to the monarch (whether before or after accession)
The ranks are divided into: Emperor, King, Duke, Count/Earl, and Baron.
Consorts who were daughters of an Emperor:
Consorts who were daughters of a King:
Consorts who were daughters of Duke:
Consorts who were daughters of Count/Earl:
Consorts who were daughters of Baron:
Note: Some of these royals and nobles held multiple titles, but I ranked the queen consorts according to the highest ranking title held by their father at the time of their daughter’s marriage.
This is a lush, french language film with a tour-de-force performance by Isabelle Adjani as Margaret of Valois.
The 1938 film plays up the love story between Marie Antoinette and Count Fersen, but it is notable for its sympathetic portrayal of Marie Antoinette as a young woman caught up in a political and social situation she is ill-equipped for.
Norma Shearer, who was in her mid-thirties, plays Antoinette from a young teenager to her death. Shearer, who was the widow of legendary MGM producer Irving Thalberg, chose to appear without makeup during the final scenes before the execution. This was a shocking thing to do for an actress at the time, especially one who was aging.
The film was a passion project of the late Thalberg, who advocated for it as a vehicle for his wife and Shearer was committed to completing it in his memory. She had a few more roles afterwards, before retiring from acting and stepping away from the spotlight.
No expense was spared in the costumes, which were designed by the legendary Adrian, and while the film did well at the box office, it initially lost money because of its large budget. However, it gained an audience later when it began airing on television in the 1950s.
It's completely worth a watch, for the performance by Shearer alone.
There's a really great account of the troubled production, some of its dated flourishes and the better film it might have been over on the blog Inviting History. It was originally supposed to be shot in color, with some of the gowns matching Shearer's eyes. You can see the colored image above shows the planned effect.
Here's a trailer.
Images: Norma as Antoinette, a film poster, a Colorized Norma as Antoinette and Anita Louise as Princess de Lambelle.
Other Sources: Turner Classic Movies & Wikipedia.
Let's face it. We live in the golden age of disinformation, where lies fly at the speed of light and the truth travels by mule cart. But disinformation and historical fallacies have always been a thing.
So, what did you believe until you learned it wasn't true? Was it just an innocent mistake, or something else?
Image: Possibly Catherine Howard, public domain.
There's going to be way more detailed posts floating around Tudor reddit today, but it's worth marking the anniversary of an iconic woman's death, whose complex legacy is still being adjudicated. She did not deserve her fate, and she lived one of the most fascianting and dramatic lives in history.
A popular story, often repeated and expanded upon by historical fiction writers, says that Isabella of France wrote her father in 1308 and complained that she was the most "wretched of wives" and her husband was a "stranger" to her bed.
The letter almost certainly is a fiction, a bit of fantasy by an imaginative chronicler.
The letter is not mentioned in contemporary sources and first surfaces in a chronicle called Historia Anglicana by Thomas Walsingham which was written sometime after 1477. This was fifty years after Edward II and Isabella's marriage went south and Edward II was deposed.
As Kathryn Warner writes, Walsingham was writing a generation or two later and had no access to the private letters of Philip IV. He very likely made up the story based on popular perceptions of the time or based it on the rumors and speculation of others. This was around the time the false story about the poker had taken root, and its easy to how other lurid fantasies could flourish.
Concurrently, there were also pushes to canonize Edward II, a cause his grandson Richard II would take up without success. However, dueling perceptions of Edward II appear to be a proxy for political and culture wars at the time. One faction insisted that Edward II was a deviant, failed king who died in the most humiliating and deserved fashion while the other insisted he was a holy martyr, too good to survive on the throne. Neither of these fits the facts, but then as now, propagandists didn't care.
So, it is exceedingly unlikely a twelve-year-old Queen Isabella wrote her father complaining that her adult husband was not acting as a lover. She and Edward II would have been well-aware that sixteen was considered the earliest age for safe childbirth. Eventually, she and Edward would have four healthy children, and evidence indicates they had an at times passionate sex life.
The rubble in the above image is not the original structure.
It was built in the middle of the 1200s as a prestigious Franciscan Priory, expanded in the early 1300s at the expense of Marguerite of France, Gilbert de Clare and others.
After the original institution was dissolved and mostly destroyed by Henry VIII, the old church building was used for storage before being destroyed in the great fire of London in 1666.
The rubble above was the church that was built post-fire in 1667, then destroyed in the blitz.
Christchurch was merged with the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and the historic graves are now somewhere beneath the earth, lost to history.
Read more here.
Edited to clarify some of the timeline.
I watched the film in which Marlon Brando played Napoleon as a romantic figure and I liked Jean's performance as Désirée who once engaged Napoleon and became queen of Sweden.