Tag: questions of paternity

Isabella of France

This is the second of Kathryn Warner’s books about Edward II, focussing on the life of his wife, who came across from France as the daughter, sister and aunt of the last five Capetian kings at the outset of the Hundred Years’ War, her niece being passed over as a Salic Law led to a… Continue reading Isabella of France

Was 29th March a day of retribution for a certain 14th-century lord….?

  For the past two/three years I have been grappling (off and on, so to speak) with some defiant dates. No doubt I’ve bewailed this particular problem before because my interest in the lord concerned is quite considerable. Not least because he may have had great significance for the House of York. So here goes… Continue reading Was 29th March a day of retribution for a certain 14th-century lord….?

Is Dan Jones beginning to understand …

… what is really likely to have happened in the fifteenth century (as Harriss, Ashdown-Hill and Fields strongly suspect)? At this rate, he will soon learn the fact of the pre-contract and how canon law works.

Salvador Dali to be exhumed in paternity case….

So, a Spanish judge has ordered that Salvador Dali’s remains be exhumed in order to settle a paternity case. But here in the UK, a marble pot with a lid cannot be opened to examine the bones inside. Many of which are reputedly animal bones, not human. Oh, well, I suppose there’s some logic in… Continue reading Salvador Dali to be exhumed in paternity case….

Another DNA case

The father of James Duke of Monmouth is usually assumed to be the future Charles II, who freely acknowledged his resonsibility. There exists a scientific proof, as published on p.36 of Beauclerk-Powell and Dewar’s Royal Bastards, through Y-chromosome tests comparing Monmouth’s male line descendants the Dukes of Buccleuch with the Dukes of Grafton, St. Albans… Continue reading Another DNA case

A genealogical mystery deepens (originally published in the December 2013 Bulletin)

The suggestion in John Ashdown-Hill’s Royal Marriage Secrets (pp.69-74) that Edmund “Tudor” may have been fathered by Edmund Beaufort, of Somerset, and not by Owen Tudor, Catherine de Valois’ servant and apparent illegal husband, is most intriguing. It is clear that Edmund was a “transitional child” between one of her relationships much commented on at… Continue reading A genealogical mystery deepens (originally published in the December 2013 Bulletin)