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From The Independent:

“As the centuries wore away the top layer of paint on the canvas, curators became steadily more convinced that something else lay beneath the roses which Elizabeth is holding. It was not until the work was analysed with X-ray and infra-red technology two months ago that the snake’s shape was discovered. “What we now believe is that the serpent was completely finished before it was quickly painted over at the very final stages, just before the final varnish was applied,” said Dr Cooper.

The Queen was known to have some items of jewellery in a snake-like form, Dr Cooper added, but an image of the serpent wrapping itself so seductively around the Queen’s hand may well have caused outrage. “Maybe the serpent was too difficult and ambiguous a symbol, maybe it was too dangerous an emblem. The fact that it was painted out so quickly suggests it was too difficult a symbol for the public to cope with,” she said.

David Starkey, the historian and Tudor specialist, said serpents in the 16th century held many meanings. “There was an enormous range of symbolism in the Elizabethan period and the serpent had a dual symbolism… it was undoubtedly a symbol of wisdom. There is at least one painting that shows Elizabeth I with images of green serpents on an orange taffeta dress.”"

The painting is going to be on display at the National Portrait Gallery starting March 13th through September 26.  It will be the first time the painting will be on display since 1921.

More articles:

From Times Online

From the guardian

From the Evening Standard

Excerpt from the article:

“Examining a 1545 poem by Lancelot de Carles, who was then serving the French ambassador to Henry’s court, Bernard concludes that the poem, entitled “A letter containing the criminal charges laid against Queen Anne Boleyn of England,” offers strong evidence that Anne did, in fact, commit adultery. She was accused of “despising her marriage” and “entertaining malice against the king”, with her indictment claiming that “by base conversations and kisses, touchings, gifts, and other infamous incitations” she seduced men including the musician Mark Smeaton, chief gentleman of the privy chamber Henry Norris and her brother George, Viscount Rochford, “alluring him with her tongue in his mouth and his in hers”. All five men, and Anne, were executed.”

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Somebody please go and tell us all about it!

Excerpt from BBC:

“Henry VIII, which opens in May, is part of the theatre’s 2010 Kings and Rogues season.

Shakespeare’s masterpieces Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 will also be staged, while Lucy Bailey’s production of Macbeth will star Elliot Cowan, who recently appeared in the Donmar’s award-winning A Streetcar Named Desire.

The 2010 season will also see two new plays performed for the first time.

Bedlam, by Nell Leyshon, is a fictional account of the oldest psychiatric hospital in Western Europe and is inspired by the gin epidemic of the 18th Century.

Asked about being the first known woman to stage a play at the Globe, Ms Leyshon said: “I wanted to prove that women can do big stories. It’s been said too often that women can’t.”

Other new works will include Anne Boleyn by Howard Brenton, which dramatises the life and legacy of Henry VIII’s second wife as a “sexual predator and rogue Queen”.

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Excerpt:

“Katherine has been described as the queen who came from nowhere, yet her pedigree was similar to that of Henry’s other English queens and she was well educated. The Parrs were originally a northern Yorkist family, knighted but not ennobled, who had risen during the Wars of the Roses. Both Katherine’s parents were courtiers but marriage took Katherine first to Lincolnshire and then to Yorkshire. Her life had been dramatic even before she became Henry’s wife. Twice widowed and childless, she had learned, while married to Edward Borough, how to manage a domestic tyrant of a father-in-law, Thomas Borough, Baron of Gainsborough, and raised the two motherless children of her second husband, Lord Latimer.

In 1537 she was held hostage by an angry mob in her home, Snape Castle near Ripon, during the Pilgrimage of Grace, the northern protest against Thomas Cromwell’s religious reforms. She feared also for her absent husband. Coerced by the rebels into joining their cause, he was caught between local fury and royal censure. Latimer survived the king’s wrath but, moving south at his wife’s behest, did not fully restore his reputation. In 1543, after a long illness, he died at his London home. With her brother and sister established at court, Katherine was left a comfortably-off widow with good connections. She hoped now to please herself in the choice of a third husband. Fate, however, was to decree otherwise. “

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Finally! They found it!

Real location of Battle of Bosworth

Silver badge and lead shot pinpoint site

BBC Video

I found this fabulous article about Paul Delaroche and The Execution of Jane Grey at the Times online.

An excerpt:

Lady Jane Grey passed from a private collection into British hands and was left to the nation at the turn of the 20th century. Its fame, however, had evaporated, and by 1928 it was kept in the basement of what is now Tate Britain. When the building was flooded in that year, Delaroche’s canvas was removed from its frame, rolled up and put away. Thirty years later it was apparently forgotten. In 1959 the painting was listed as “destroyed”. It was rediscovered only by accident, when in 1973 a young researcher looking for another large-scale painting asked conservators at the Tate to unroll a collection of long-ignored canvases. Lady Jane was one of them, and turned out to be almost perfectly preserved. Transferred to the National Gallery, it was put back on display, and swiftly became one of the most popular works on show.

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Katherine of Aragon service