http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11036348

“As recently as Thursday morning, East Carolina University history professor Larry Tise searched for the reason that a portrait of Queen Elizabeth I crossed the ocean to be purchased by a North Carolina woman living in New York City in 1958.

It’s a final detail eluding Tise and a team of ECU researchers who spent the last six months staring into and through her painted visage, he announced Thursday to a group of 30 people.

The painting was placed in the researchers’ care by the staff and governing board of the Elizabethan Gardens, in whose gate house it hung for 50 years under speculation. Prior queries produced conflicting opinions about whether it was authentic or unimportant.

Local conservators, art historians, photographers and scientists established a number of other facts this year.

On a visit to Sir Henry Lee in 1592, a 59-year-old Queen Elizabeth sat for a portrait with Lee’s artist in residence, Marcus Gheeraerts. The piece in question is a copy made of the much larger work created that day, in which she is pictured standing over her kingdom.

Tise said it is not a traced copy of her bejeweled head and torso, but one that was painted freehand — a much more difficult skill. Pigmentation tests showed that one person may have painted the majority of it and another filled in the face, he said.

The purchaser, Ruth Coltrane Cannon, was aiding in the restoration of New Bern’s Tryon Palace and was buying any antiques that looked the part. But she also was a gardening enthusiast who had led campaigns to have gardens cultivated next to historical homes.”

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“Work has begun to unearth remnants of buildings which became infamous for the murder of the second husband of Mary Queen of Scots, Lord Darnley.

The remains of the buildings have been buried beneath Old College for more than 200 years.

The dig is being carried out prior to a £1m landscaping project which is being funded by a private donor.

The house where Darnley had been lodging was associated with the Collegiate Church of St Mary, commonly known as the Kirk O’ Fields.

It was destroyed by an explosion on 9 February 1567 and although Darnley and his valet escaped, both men were later apparently strangled in the garden.

Mary’s third husband, the Earl of Bothwell, was thought to be culpable but was acquitted of the murders two months later.”

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The Tudor dynasty’s Anglesey family church is to receive a grant for vital restoration work from the Welsh Assembly Government.

Parts of St Gredifael’s Church in Penmynydd date back to the 12th century, but the years have taken their toll on its roof, windows and doors, so the £78,000 from the Assembly’s historic buildings fund will be very welcome.

“We’ve been enthusiastic in trying to save the building,” said the Rev Philip Hughes. “We estimate we will need about £250,000 in all, so this will go a long way towards helping us start with the most urgent work.”

Inside St Gredifael’s is the tomb of Gronw Tudur, the great-uncle of Henry VII.

“There were five brothers at nearby Penmynydd [estate],” explained local historian, Tom Clifton.

“One was Gronw, whose effigy is on the oldest tomb at the church, and another was Meredudd.

“He had a son, Owain Tudur, who joined Henry V’s army and became a member of the court circle.”

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This is SO COOL!!!!

“Curators at Bosworth Battlefield in Leicestershire have launched an international search for the descendants of the men who fought at the bloody battle for the English throne on August 22 1485.

Timed to coincide with the battle’s 525th anniversary and an extensive re-enactment at the heritage site, the call is designed to add some detail to the list of names already held at the Bosworth Battlefield Visitor Centre and enhance the growing knowledge of the Battle, which was the final chapter in the bloody episode in English history known as the Wars of the Roses.

Contemporary accounts of the clash, which effectively swept away the Plantagenet dynasty and ushered in the Tudors, suggest there were between 12,000 and 16,000 men fighting for King Richard, opposed by 5,000 fighting for Henry Tudor and between 5,000 and 7,000 in the army of the Stanleys.

The names of many men in these armies are held at the Visitor Centre but, as Curator Richard Knox concedes, there is much more to be done to flesh out their stories.” Read more

Battle of Bosworth Renactment on August 21 and 22nd! 10am-5:30pm.  Check out here: www.bosworthbattlefield.com for more details!

His Last Letter! By Jeane Westin.  I’m going to head to Barnes and Noble to see if I can get a copy! Also, the new Philipa Gregory, The Red Queen, also just came out! And then Alison Weir has The Captive queen out, but that’s not Tudor related.

Sorry I’ve been MIA.  I have been insanely busy with work and I’m going on vacation so life has been hard to update.  I just came across this, though I’m a bit behind.

“Bosses at Kenilworth Castle decided to reproduce the food-fest – originally served at the castle by Sir Robert Dudley in 1575 – as part of their summer celebrations.

The meal took 700 man-hours to research and create in authentic detail and was presented on a massive banquet table dressed with towering sugar sculptures.

Desserts on offer to luck members of the public included gold gilded jelly, custard tarts, jams and candies — the no so lucky ones got dried sturgeon stomach and pigs bladder skins which were also on the menu.

Harry Parr of Bompas & Parr, who prepared the banquet, said: “Creating this banquet was a mighty technical and logistical challenge,”

“We used modern architectural technology to help us, designing and fabricating the sugar moulds using the same techniques that architects use to design buildings.

“The dishes, however, were all down to good old fashioned cooking, and as well as taking inspiration from the garden we used authentic, Elizabethan recipes from tasty tansies to flowery flummeries.”

From http://newslite.tv/2010/06/29/historic-300dish-dessert-banqu.html

From Portsmouth Historic Dockyard:

“During their visit to Portsmouth, the Atlantis Space Shuttle crew were presented with a piece of the Mary Rose, the flagship of King Henry VIII, with a view to sending it up to space on a future mission.

The presentation took place at a gala dinner Sunday 27th June, on board HMS Warrior 1860, another ship that accompanies the Mary Rose at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. John Lippiett, Chief Executive of the Mary Rose Trust, who made the presentation to the astronauts, commented:

“It is really tremendous to have the opportunity to present this little piece of the Mary Rose to the visiting Shuttle crew to take back to Houston, in the hope that it will be taken into space on a future mission.

This parrel, in effect a wooden ball-bearing measuring some 3×3”, was part of the mechanism used to hoist the yards carrying the sails up the mast. It was therefore fundamental to the propulsion of this our first true warship.

The Mary Rose was as revolutionary in technological advances 500 years ago as the Space Shuttle was in the early 1980s. Both have helped pioneer exploration and advance the sciences. It is most appropriate to mark their place in history in this manner.”

The last Atlantis mission from which they have just returned, saw the crew take a 4-inch long wood sample of Sir Isaac Newton’s apple tree. The piece from the original tree that supposedly inspired Newton’s theory of gravity, along with a picture of Newton, was taken into orbit by British-born astronaut Piers Sellers. The wood is part of the collection of the Royal Society archives in London, and will be returned there at the end of their tour. On a previous spaceflight, he took a commemorative medallion that the group presented to the physicist Stephen Hawking.

This won’t be the first time the Mary Rose has had links to space – Michael Foale CBE, the first Briton to perform a space walk and record holder for cumulative-time-in-space for a UK citizen, was a volunteer diver on the excavation of the Mary Rose in 1981.

The Mary Rose sank in 1545 in the Battle of the Solent. She was raised in 1982 with her artefact collection of 19,000 objects presenting a unique time capsule and one of the world’s most precious heritage icons.

The Mary Rose 500 Appeal are currently fundraising to secure the building of the new Mary Rose Museum to open in 2012, which will reunite the hull with her artefacts and ensure completion of the conservation in 2016 providing visitors with new and unique views of the vessel – visit www.maryrose500.org“

Also, from the Press office of BBC magazine,

“The July issue of BBC History Magazine, on sale now, includes a feature entitled ‘Buccaneers of state’, which reveals how English pirates could be useful troublemakers for Elizabeth I and her successor James I. The article was written by Claire Jowitt, a professor of Renaissance English literature at Nottingham Trent University. Claire will also be discussing England’s Tudor pirates on BBC History Magazine’s new podcast – coming soon to www.bbchistorymagazine.com“

Could a 500 year old map have contained clues to where the wreck of the Mary Rose lay and could this be the first time Portsmouth maps have returned to the city in over 400 years? All these fascinating questions will be raised in a brand new temporary exhibition of international cartographic importance, in the Mary Rose Museum at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard from 2nd July to 17th October 2010.

Mapping Portsmouth’s Tudor Past brings together, for the first time, several important maps from The British Library, UK Hydrographic Office and the Admiralty Library. All but one of these maps are hand-drawn and are works of art in their own right. Together they give us a unique and fascinating insight into Tudor Portsmouth and the view of their world 500 years ago.

The Mary Rose Trust are delighted that the British Library are loaning 5 unique items for this exhibition including the centrepiece of the display, which will be two stunning large-scale maps of Tudor Portsmouth, one dating from 1545 (the year the Mary Rose sank defending the country from French invasion), which is the earliest scale map of an English town and one of the earliest in Europe, and the other dating from 1552, which was probably made for the visit of Edward VI to Portsmouth on the 9th August 1552.

The exhibition also includes two important maps of the Solent from the collection of William Cecil, Elizabeth I‘s Secretary of State. These maps were made to review the defences of Portsmouth Harbour, and highlight both fortifications and potential invasion beaches. The Brouscon tidal atlas of 1540, displayed with a tidal calculator recovered from the Mary Rose, will clearly demonstrate a sophisticated Tudor understanding of the tidal currents and timings around the British Isles.