The White Queen

Anyone who hasn't been impressed by The White Queen might enjoy The White Queen Rubbish and Tosh page on facebook. It's very funny.

Sounds as if your daughter was very much on trend (or ahead of it) as the power of women is a very big theme at the moment - even as early as Aethelfled apparently according to the luscious MW!!

Same here. Also the BBC4 series 'She Wolves' was about one of them the other week; I only caught the tail end of the programme..I think it was about Margaret [?]. A series I'd like to watch in it's entirety at some point. As I've mentioned before, my daughter did some research on the power of mediaeval women when she was at uni which sparked an interest which neither of us found the time to follow up. Also [going back to Michael Woods latest series [any excuse ]], celibacy seemed as powerful a tool as using sexuality/procreation to manipulate.

I thought so too!

I thought the two (or was it three?) programmes that PG did when The White Queen was running, were excellent at explaining the situation.
She presented them really clearly,and I enjoyed them more than TWQ.

The "factual" books about the real women of the Cousins' War are brilliant for background and have helped me to understand not just the Phillipa Gregory novels (Red Queen, White Queen, Lady of the Rivers) , but Henry V (film of the Globe production) and Henry VI parts 1, 2 and 3 which (again Globe production ) are currently on tour. We saw them on 3 consecutive evenings quite recently and I am just about getting there. There has been so much about the Cousins' War, the Plantagenets etc this summer. Gregory is a serious historian even if the TV adaptations of the novels had been juiced up a bit!

It wasn't so much the 5 extras at Bosworth JessM it was the snow in August!! And how Margaret Beaufort came to be waltzing about on the battlefield is beyond me. And don't get me started on the way nobody aged at all - and this in the days when you were middle aged at 30! The scriptwriter said the inaccuracies didn't matter because she was making it more interesting, but if you don't think history is interesting enough why not just write something new?

I need to watch it all again with sub-titles on. Can you get sub-titles on the DVD? Or read the book.

I cared about them all jess!

Suggest you read The White Princess instead tegan if you are interested in the "pretenders", although i note that the DVD of the WQ is out (or at least being advertised). But the series has now fizzled to its end, and did any of us care what happened to a single one of those characters? Even a smidgin? (apart from the princes I suppose, a few episodes back)
Clever old PG to write 3 books and get us sympathising right left and centre with lots of the people involved. But when you throw them all into the mix without a point of view everyone is someone else's enemy.
The battle of Bosworth with about 5 extras was the last straw.

Thanks, jingle. I'm going to have to read it tomorrow. DH has got Queen at full blast on BBC 4 and my sis-in-law is on facebook bleating on about her block paving in the front garden being soooooo high maintenance!!!

Glad I've got grass and gravel.

Fascinating stuff. I think I'm going to have to get the dvd of The White Queen when it comes out and watch it again [including the bits I've missed]. A friend on another forum did tell me that he thought the series was historically accurate, and he's studied that period of time quite a lot, so I wish I'd stuck with the series now.

The links to the different pictures of them are worth clicking on.

this is an interesting piece about the princes in the tower

To get a convincing result, you'd have to dig up one of the bona fide royals and compare DNA. So that is probably why she is against it. Of course now they think they have R2's DNA they could perhaps show if the bones were related to him. But nearly all the kings and princes seem to have spread their seed around rather freely, so you would need Elizabeth W's DNA to be 100% sure they were her sons.

I think they should investigate. It's a fascinating story.

I wish they would research the remains more too. J0's link suggests there's concern it may cause a president but surely each case would be taken on it's merits. If the remains prove not to be royal they should be buried elsewhere.

I've often wondered about Lambert Simnel, did Henry let him live because he knew he wasn't important, or because he was really one of the princes and Henry couldn't bring himself to kill him in cold blood? Had no worries about killing the poor Warwick boy of course. I wish they would do some research into the bones, but apparently the Queen isn't in favour of it.

Yes you're right merlot. Don't know why I said that.

The baby boy was Edward V, one of the Princes in the Tower, thevothercwas his younger brother Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, not yet born in this series. The two brothers were the only sons of Edward IV of England and Elizabeth Woodville alive at the time of their father's death.

again!

JessM. The Rivers chaps were Elizabeth's brothers. Her first two sons, Thomas and Richard Grey did not have Rivers titles.

Prince in tower number 1 tegan? Would have been another king edward if crowned?
She had 2 previous sons by her first husband. These were the Rivers chaps who figure in the series. Huge resentment against their advancement seems to have been a key cause of resentment in politics of the time, but this has not been emphasised so far.
The young Edward was given into the care of uncle Rivers (in Ludlow I think) where he stayed until his father died. This left his uncle Richard of York out in the cold somewhat at this point. Much drama.

So what happened to the baby boy that Elizabeth gave birth to last week, who was actually the King's son?

It's fascinating. I always preferred the Plantagenets to the Tudors at school.

I wish they would investigate further into the deaths of the Princes in the Tower. I'm sure I saw a programme on telly years ago that suggested Margaret Beaufort might have been responsible but I'm not sure.