Charlie Fenton > Recent Status Updates

‘Stow records in September 1547 how the king’s visitors arrived at St Paul’s Cathedral, where ‘alle images [were] pulled down’ and the order given for the same throughout England and ‘alle churches new whytte-lymed’ with the Ten Commandments written on the walls. They also ‘pulled up alle the tomes, grett stones, alle the altars, with the stalls and walls of the choir’ and sold them.‘

‘in 1531 there was a celebrated case of poisoning which Henry VIII considered ‘so odious’ that he decreed that poisoning should be regarded as a species of high treason, rather than a mere felony. Accordingly he ‘inflicted a more grievous and lingering death than the common law prescribed, viz that the offender should be boiled to death in hot water’.’

‘An inventory of his wardrobe, made in 1516, reveals that he had 134 doublets made from twenty-nine different fabrics and, soon after, the Venetian ambassador Sebastian Giustinian declared Henry VIII to be the best-dressed sovereign in the world. A second inventory, compiled in 1521, reveals Henry’s wardrobe to have been valued at around £10,380, the equivalent of £4 million today.’

‘Abbot persisted, arguing that ‘George was of a good nature, which the other was not’ and that, even if Villiers’s character degenerated once he was sure of the King’s favour, it would be a long time before he became as odious as Somerset. In the face of these entreaties, and the representations of those other noblemen who were thrusting Villiers forward, Queen Anne relented’

‘pictures reveal the mechanics of pregnancy dressing: the ties, extra fabric and additional stomachers used to accommodate a woman's growing child. Here, clothing acts as both sign and metaphor for the concealed state of pregnancy. The audience is alerted to the pregnancy by the alteration in attire and sees that pregnancy stretches the confines of the 'usual' or prescribed’

‘But the glory of Brookland is its font. It is one of the 38 lead fonts in England and for its remarkable pictures is perhaps the best of
all. It was here before Magna Carta was signed on Runnymede, and it seems to be a Norman artist's picture-gallery of life in Saxon England. There are 40 scenes worked round it in two tiers of arches, embracing the signs of the Zodiac and the months of the year.’

‘Overbury added as an afterthought that his parents should not take seriously Suffolk’s warning that there would be some delay before the King would assent to his release. He proclaimed confidently, ‘For that word in the letter (“sometime”) is no long time, a week or ten days’. It is almost unbearably poignant to think that, within three weeks of writing this joyous note, Overbury was dead.‘

‘Several historians, especially Ricardians, claim that there is as much likelihood that the princes survived their time in the Tower as that they died there. This simply is not true. The murder of the princes, depending on how it was done and by whom, was the work of minutes, perhaps seconds. Disposal of their bodies would have taken hours. Contrast that with years of lies, obfuscation, difficulty.‘

‘He watched Katherine as she sat across the table from him, her graceful head a little bent, gazing into the fire as she so often did, and wondered if part of the enduring love he had for her sprang from the fact that she had given him nothing but herself. She had brought him no wealth, no power, no hope of foreign thrones. Always with her, he had been the donor.’

‘Katherine knelt beside the tomb and reached out to touch one corner of the sculptured robe while she spoke to the Lady Blanche. Dearest lady—if I have wronged you too, forgive, but you know that I never meant wrong towards you, and you knew what it is to love him, as I have loved him. So forgive—and tell me how to save my child who is your namesake.’

‘Already there had been changes, the friar thought, since the Black Death in ’forty-nine had halved the population and thereby made a scarcity of labour. The old feudal system was crumbling gradually of its own weight without the explosions that were designed to hasten its destruction. Yet Wyclif’s reforms had done good, up to the point where the devil had got hold of him and forced him into blasphemy.’

‘if a husband testified under oath that he was impotent, and his wife confirmed this, then their marriage could be considered void. The drawback was that, if the husband subsequently had sexual relations with another woman, this proved that he was guilty of perjury, and he would then be obliged to take back his former wife. This meant that there was little incentive for the male to be honest’

‘She liked Lady Swynford well enough and knew her to be just, but lately she had been puzzled by the situation between this lady and her father, which before she had accepted without interest. That the two baby boys called John and Harry Beaufort were her half-brothers, she knew, and that her father loved Lady Swynford she had seen often enough with jealous eyes; but no one had ever explained these matters’

‘He took her right hand in his and spoke solemnly, “Here on consecrated ground, I, John, do plight thee, Katrine, my love and in token do give thee this ring, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” He drew from his finger the sapphire seal ring that Blanche had given him and slipped it on Katherine’s middle finger. She stared down at it and a sob tore up from her chest.’

‘When Kathleen [Kennedy] met Peter Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, the 8th Earl Fitzwilliam, in 1946, sparks flew. The earl was a bon viveur with a passion for racing horses and seducing women, a bit of a scoundrel really. He came with his own baggage - a wife Olive “Obby” Plunket and a daughter. His estate Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire was even grander than Chatsworth.‘

‘Although Bess passed away over four hundred years ago, many elements of her have survived. Her building projects were second to none especially Chatsworth and
Hardwick Hall, which inspired the rhyme "Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall" because of it's unusual proportions of glass to wall. She was an avid needle worker and the Marian hanging which she made with Mary Queen of Scots can be viewed at Oxburgh Hall’

‘For some years prior to her husband’s death she had been having an affair with Sir Arthur Mainwaring, a carver to Prince Henry, who had fathered three of her children. Dr Turner, it seems, had been aware of the situation, and had accepted it. At any rate, in his will he was amiable enough to leave Mainwaring a bequest of £10, implying that this should be spent on a wedding ring for Mrs Turner’

‘a story about the Jones family, who all appeared to be suffering from arsenic poisoning, under the headline: ‘Poisoning by Arsenical Wall Paper - not Green?’ The wallpapers in the family home were tested, and of seven kinds of paper, six were found to contain arsenic. In fact, the green wallpaper contained considerably less arsenic, prompting new concerns that all colours of wallpaper might be toxic.’

‘Mrs Anne Turner, who was also found guilty of being an accessory, told the Sheriff of London as she awaited execution, ‘O, the court, the court! God bless the King and send him better servants about him, for there is no religion in the most of them, but malice, pride, whoredom, swearing and rejoicing in the fall of others. It is so wicked a place as I wonder the earth did not open and swallow it up.’’

‘In about 1745 the gallery was converted into a library to accommodate the books inherited from Sir Richard Ellys, a distinguished theologian and antiquity who, with an eye for the rare, curious, old and beautiful, assembled an outstanding collection of works. The 12,000 volumes housed at Blickling, which form one of the most remarkable country-house libraries in England’

‘In 1834, the Massachusetts State Board of Health, Lunacy and Charity noted in its annual report that a dress a made from arsenic-green tarlatan might shed twenty to thirty grains of poisonous pigment in just one hour of dancing.‘

(Audiobook version, not on here - and not easy to add on iPhone!)

‘Even before Scheele's green became common in Britain, however, questions were being raised in Germany about the side effects of arsenical pigments in domestic decoration, since the poisonous properties of arsenic were well known. In 1813, German chemist Leopold Gmelin (1788-1853) reported in a Berlin newspaper that the use of arsenical pigments
in wallpaper was dangerous, and recommended a ban.‘

Most of the book is nothing new, but the last chapter is interesting. I do agree to some extent that really the capture(s), convictions etc. weren’t down to police work or anyone really but Bundy himself. In some part of his mind, he wanted to be caught. As a law student, he would have known they couldn’t check his car without a warrant - and speeding, really? Theatrics in the courtroom etc.

‘The year of 1369 was one of disaster for England. John Wyclif’s wandering Lollard preachers were not slow to point out that the corruption and wickedness of the clergy—and the court—had attracted God’s wrathful eye. The four dread horsemen of the Apocalypse were let loose across the land to scourge it again with famine, war, pestilence and death.‘

“When King Edward dies, God give him grace, our glorious Prince of Wales will reign, and after him come his two sons, little Edward—a sickly lad though and given to fits—but now we also have the tiny Richard. If aught should happen to all of them”—he raised his hand and murmured—“Christus prohibeat!—there’s the Duke Lionel and his get, present and future, for I hear he’s to marry again”

‘female workers and children spent long days sifting through piles of mining waste, which included arsenic. Most of these workers were slowly poisoned, although few realized why. The poison not only contaminated the run-off from mines, but also leached into the soil and water, damaging crops and poisoning local inhabitants.‘

‘Despite failing eyesight in her later years, Emma carried on entertaining at an
impressive rate, recording in 1895, for example, that the number of guests that year
for breakfast amounted to 416, with 482 for luncheon, 2,109 for afternoon tea and
615 for dinner annually.’

‘a particularly gruesome episode, ostensibly organised to rebury the coffin in a more secure situation but which saw drunken louts perpetrate ‘the greatest indecencies, by pulling off her hair (of a beautiful yellow) and knocking her teeth out; then with a spade cut off her head'. Katherine's body was later placed in the Chandos vault and then moved for the last time to the interior of St Mary's Church’

Sudeley was now largely in ruins, a shadow of its former self. Carpenters and masons from Winchcombe and beyond had been employed by soldiers and the agents of Parliament to fell the grandest parkland trees for sale as timber and to remove the castle roofs and dismantle major sections of its walls. Sudeley's architectural showpiece, the exquisite east range of the inner courtyard, drew particularly savage attention