MrsE

And "Timeless" and the short lived PanAm.

She's not in The Queen, she plays EIIR in The Crown. Try and find some of her other television work; she's a natural comedian, but was heartbreaking in Tyrannosaur.

Not only did the curse skip Henry it actually skipped his firstborn, who was not Arthur, but Roland de Velville, who was his son by a Breton woman, and who enjoyed a long and prosperous career in Henry's service. I've seen discussions about the vicissitudes of the Tudor dynasty framed in all seriousness in terms of the curse, viz, it must have existed because Henry VIII only left one male heir who died young (ignoring the fact that Richard III's son also died very young), and neither Mary or Elizabeth had children. Seriously, this seems now to be part of historical discourse. The wretched Gregory woman has a great deal to answer for.

And Margaret Beaufort supported her on the issue of her third marriage, providing rooms for her at one of her houses.

The book contrived to be simultaneously lurid and dull. Nothing. Happens. I mean really, endless iterations of "the boy", of "I don't know", of Henry being by turns an idiot, a boor, delusional, terrified mean spirited, and spiteful. Gregory loathes the Tudors but had the problem that evidence points to Elizabeth being at the very least content with her husband, so Gregory throws in a truly bizarre few pages of her falling in love with him (complete with toe curlingly bad sex scene); but then she has to fall out of love with him again and sigh resignedly in her superior Yorkly way. She ends the book before the death of Arthur, an event that unequivocally demonstrates the couple's concern and support for one another, because how would she spin that? So this show had a problem; the book would make terrible television and Henry would be completely unsympathetic. They chose instead to go with a romance, but there's no drama in that.

No, they weren't betrothed as children. She was betrothed to the Dauphin who then backed out of the arrangement. Edward IV tried to lure Henry back from Brittany with the promise of marriage to one of his daughters, but Henry wasn't having any of it. Sensible chap. I'm not sure how much Elizabeth grew up around CPR; he spent a lot of his time in the north. Certainly though Elizabeth saw at first hand what her mother went through at his hands; I don't believe for a moment that she entertained any romantic feelings for him but she might well have been afraid of him. Certainly she knew that her brothers disappeared on his watch, suffered the bastardisation of herself and her siblings, and knew he'd murdered her uncle and half brother.

He wouldn't be the white prince though, as the reference is to the white rose of York. Arthur's badge (other than his personal one) would be the Tudor rose, combining the white rose with the red rose of Lancaster.

Indeed; the crown was Henry's by right of conquest; if he'd lost at Bosworth he'd have been dead. The idea that Richard Cubed had a greater claim to the throne even though he'd been defeated is just silly Yorkist worship. Go up against a king and lose and that's it, you're deaded - although Henry didn't kill him immediately which was, in hindsight, an error of judgement on the part of the man who is regularly accused of slaughtering every York in sight. Did none of them think it odd that Richard, Richard and Thrice Richard didn't fetch up until after his mother had pegged it? You know, the woman with absolutely the most credibility when it came to identifying him?

Or the gesture might be completely his own.

My sons' paternity is beyond dispute; they both grew up with their father. Neither laugh like him. His son by a previous marriage doesn't laugh like him either. I don't know anyone who laughs like their parent(s). They don't laugh as they did when they were children either. If he laughed like Edward IV the likelihood is that he learnt to do it.

I have seen it argued that he was living with the merchant in Tournai because he had to in order to be safe and until he was old enough to take the throne for himself. Bollocks. He'd have been as safe as houses in Burgundy. Henry himself lived in exile for 14 years and managed to evade attempts to drag him back to England and he didn't have the power of Burgundy looking after him.

She remarried three (I think) times and did remain at court as a favourite of the queen and stayed until HVII's death. They seem to have been very close friends prompting one observer to speculate as to the nature of the relationship, but no one else seems to have thought anything untoward was going on. They could of course have married but didn't. She had no children that survived, and if she did have a child with Richard The Three it died in infancy. When she was brought to court after Warbeck's capture she was in mourning and that might have been for a child. IN her will she refers to each of her husbands with the exception of RRR. She died in 1537, aged 67.

I expect they knew that Henry VII would be kept safe by the Yorks in much the same way the Henry VI was. Ahem.

Good God. So the idea is that they carried him alive from the battlefield; that he stayed alive all the way to Leicester; that he remained alive for the two days his body was displayed; that he remained alive while he was put in a coffin and buried in Greyfriars church? Why? Given that the discovery of his remains at the site of a church was all over the news not so long ago, why would they do that? Oh, forget it, I give up trying to make sense of this. Gregory's book was bad enough but they've outdone even her with the murder of Jasper, Elizabeth rallying the troops, Elizabeth torching Shene and now this.

CPR buried alive? What?

I remember being a bit irritated by one aspect of the 1900 house; they were furnished with a range but only basic instructions about how to use it and, crucially, no experience of using it. Of course the birthday cake was a failure. They had no experience of their own and no family and friends to call on; ditto the hair washing. It made things seem more difficult than they would have been for people actually living then. Anyone enjoying this might like to seek out "Back In Time For Dinner" and "Further Back In Time For Dinner" with GIles Coren, in which a family "live" through about decades of changing social and food habits.

I still collect dripping; it's lovely on toast.

This was always going to be seriously flawed. If they stuck to Gregory's version Henry would be totally unsympathetic, Elizabeth a pallid nonentity and no one would either care or believe that she at any point entertained any tender feelings for him unless she was an even greater idiot than she at first appears and that's going some. In trying, at least to an extent, to make Henry more appealing, they removed any sting from the tail and had instead to resort to making Margaret Beaufort into a pantomime villain (boo, hiss) who murders grown men; then there's "the boy" (He's behind you!) and the the farrago of supposition, wish fulfilment and risible pro York bias that his story represents. The truth is that bugger all happens in the book, and what does is the product of Gregory's Tudor loathing imagination. She offered them very meagre fabric with which to work, so they threw out the polycotton and replaced it with Lurex.

You're right of course; and I suppose they'll stop before HVII has an actual nervous breakdown and murders his mother with an axe before being locked in the Tower in an iron mask while Lizzie takes over and rules with the dignity, grace and sheer star quality with which every last York was endowed. It didn't happen? So?

The Swynford children were all legitimised by an act of Parliament of Richard II; the insertion by Henry IV to a later exemplification of the act of a clause barring the line from the succession was by Letter Patent and was not, without the ratification of Parliament, of sufficient authority to set aside the original act which contained no such prohibition. That aside, Edward IV took the throne by conquest and if this person is his son then his claim is, by your standards, also invalid. Add to that the fact that, unless Richard III was lying about the illegitimacy of EIV's children, then Warbeck, if actually Richard of Shrewsbury, is not the rightful heir at all, because if he was illegitimate in 1483 he's illegitimate now. If not illegitimate then Richard III was in fact a usurper and Henry VII was doing nothing untoward in deposing him.

William was certainly no looker.

Ah, that makes sense. And now she's gone. I wouldn't want to be in Gaston's shoes when Fabien Marchal finds out who killed his lover.

No, I've seen it; he's asleep by the fire, she caresses his face, he upends her onto the floor and she says "Is this how you seduce all the women?" He says "something that I can't make out" and she responds with "You're still here - I like that". What was the "something" he said to her?

I agree. I couldn't make out what he said to her when she asked if this was how he seduced all the women; she replied "You're still here - I like that", but what was she replying to?

It wasn't her birthright though; the only previous attempt at having a queen regnant on the throne had ended in utter disaster. Rule Henry out and she still wouldn't have been queen in her own right, a male York (Lincoln was named RIII's heir I think) would have been king. So if both Richard and Henry had died at Bosworth Lincoln would have been on the throne, not Elizabeth.