Two very diffferent queens

I hope all of you in the path of this latest winter storm and horrific temperatures will stay safe and warm. We are not getting the snow where I live—sadly, that is heading yet again for Boston—but we will be getting the frigid cold, cold even by Midwest standards. Stay strong, Boston; you, too, Mainers.
Two historical events to mention today. On February 13, 1177, Joanna, the daughter of Henry and Eleanor, sister to the Lionheart, was wed to William, King of Sicily, and then crowned in a splendid ceremony. She was eleven. She and William would have one child, a son, who died soon after birth, in 1181. There is a particularly annoying article in Wikipedia about her which accuses the source for the boy’s birth, Robert de Torigny, the abbot of Mont St Michel, of “invention or misconception,” and goes on to claim she’d not have been old enough in 1181 to bear a child. Even by Wikipedia standards, that is pitiful. Robert de Torigny was one of the most respected historians of the MA, not a man given to fabrication. Moreover, he had close ties to the Angevin royal family, which would explain his knowledge of this birth. He was not only a friend of Henry’s, Henry and Eleanor thought so highly of him that he was the godfather for Joanna’s older sister, Eleanor, the future Queen of Castile. And in 1181, Joanna would have been 16, for her birthdate was October, 1165.
The second historical event is not medieval, just sad. On this date in 1542, Catherine Howard was beheaded at the Tower of London, the second of Henry Tudor’s wives to meet this fate. Contrary to legend, she did not say she died the Queen of England but would rather have died the wife of Thomas Culpepper. No one going to the block in Tudor England made defiant speeches, not if they had family or friends they wanted to shield from Henry’s wrath.