Free Republic

On this date in 1547, the Duke of Norfolk was to have been beheaded. But thanks to the previous day’s death of the corpulent 55-year-old King Henry VIII, the duke’s death warrant was never signed, and the condemned noble died in bed … seven years later. A force in the gore-soaked arena of English politics for two generations, Thomas Howard had steered two nieces into the monarch’s bed. Both girls had gone to the scaffold,* and the disgrace of the second, Catherine Howard, brought a collapse in the whole family’s fortunes. Thomas Howard’s son Henry was not as lucky as...

...It was on this date in 1540 that the Machiavellian minister of Henry VIII fell by the instrument he had wielded so ably against so many others. While Henry strove to get his end away, Thomas Cromwell made the Reformation, setting his energetic hand to the needfully violent reordering of England. In almost a decade as the king’s chief minister, he had dissolved so many monasteries, annulled so many noble prerogatives, backstabbed so many courtiers, and sent so many of every class to the scaffold that most at court had some reason to hate him. (Cranmer was the only one...

...One of the most disputed stories of extreme age belongs to a 17th century man named Thomas Parr, who claimed to be 152 years old at the time of his death... Most of what historians know about the life of Tom Parr comes from John Taylor’s pamphlet, published the year of Parr’s death, “The old, old, very old man or the age and very long life of Thomas Parr.” Parr lived most of his life as a farm laborer in the county of Shropshire, and married his first wife when he was 80 years old... Parr, at some point, started...

Current 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1990s 1980s     November 2004 The 450th anniversary of England’s "absolution" by the great Shepherd who suffered to rectify the very Protestant "reforms" now embraced by his treacherous, tenth-rate successors. Cardinal Pole MICHAEL HUTCHINGSIf you ever wondered about the significance of the feast of St Andrew, it bears testimony to that tremendous day, 30 November 1554, at Whitehall, London, when Cardinal Reginald Pole as Papal Legate, absolved England "with the whole realm and dominions thereof, from all heresy and schism."This was followed by a decree, "concerning the thanks to be daily given...