12th August, 1904: The birth of an heir

For most of the eighteenth century, the power of the Russian monarchy had been wielded by women. When his mother Catherine the Great died in 1796, the new emperor, Paul, introduced a set of succession laws which, in the future, barred women in the Romanov family from inheriting the throne - or from transmitting that claim to their children. The Empress Anna had married abroad and when she unexpectedly inherited the throne in 1730, it was felt by many that her government became the puppet of her German in-laws. Female monarchs, like Anna, could therefore apparently be weak and easily dominated by their male advisers. If they weren't weak, then the dominant misogynist logic of the time held that they would be devious and manipulative. Both the Empress Elisabeth and Catherine the Great had seized the throne by overthrowing weak male monarchs in order to achieve their goals. After a century of such behaviour, Emperor Paul, who loathed his mother and had mortified Marie-Antoinette on a state visit to Versailles by the things he said about her, was determined to make sure that a female coup didn't happen again. From 1797 on wards, the succession to the Russian throne could only proceed directly through the male line.

By 1904, Tsar Paul's great-great grandson, Nicholas II, was beginning to feel the pressure of his ancestor's decision. So far, he and his Anglo-German wife, Alexandra, had produced four children - 8 year-old Olga, 7 year-old Tatiana, 5 year-old Maria and 3 year-old Anastasia. All girls. (Below) Whilst the birth of Olga, a fat and healthy baby, had been greeted with undisguised joy in 1895, the birth of Maria in 1899 had been described by her own grandmother as a crushing disappointment and when Anastasia was born in 1901, the Tsar had gone for a long walk in the palace gardens, before putting on a brave face to greet his wife and child.

Alexandra was more than aware that people expected her to deliver. (Quite literally.) And she felt the pressure keenly. When her second daughter, Tatiana, was born in 1897, the young Empress had apparently burst into tears, asking, "What will the nation say?" There were also signs that Alexandra's delicate build could not cope with many more pregnancies. She did not have a strong heart, or back, and even during her second pregnancy, she had spent most of her time in a wheelchair or in bed. She repeatedly fainted during her pregnancy with Maria and the birth of Anastasia had been difficult. Increasingly desperate, Alexandra had turned to her religion and she formed a close friendship with another member of the Imperial Family, the Grand Duchess Militsa, a woman known for her interest in the quack fringes of Christianity. On her advice, the Empress had made visits to a dubious French mystic called Philippe Nazier-Vachot; she had also gone on pilgrimage and bathed in holy springs. At one point, not too long after Anastasia's birth, the Tsarina thought she might be pregnant again, but it was a false alarm.

In early 1904, Alexandra knew for certain she was pregnant again. She was under pressure not just from her own body, which physically could not take any more pregnancies, but also from the nation, who had been anything but responsive when yet another daughter had been born in 1901 - despite the Tsar's attempts to celebrate Anastasia's birth by granting amnesty to certain prisoners. As with Anastasia's birth three years earlier, the Imperial Family stuck to their usual annual routine and decided to spend part of the summer at Peterhof (below), a magnificent eighteenth century summer palace near Saint Petersburg, built by Peter the Great and sometimes nicknamed "the Russian Versailles." 

The weather was very hot that summer and the breeze coming off the bays near the palace helped alleviate the court's discomfort. On 12th August, the Tsar and Tsarina sat down to luncheon together, as usual. The Empress was nine months pregnant. She made it to the soup course before excusing herself and hurrying to her rooms, with her servants and doctors. After all the pain and panic that had gone into hoping for a boy, and all the pain and panic that would follow this particular little boy, Alexei Romanov's birth was actually surprisingly easy. Labour lasted less than an hour and in the early afternoon, the guns at Peterhof fired out to announce the birth of another imperial child. Protocol demanded three hundred shots for a boy and one hundred and one for a girl. By the time the one hundred and second shot was fired, the nearby imperial naval base at Kronstadt had started their own salute. The population of the country's capital, Saint Petersburg, heard the news when the enormous cannons of the Peter and Paul Fortress began thundering out across the city and the cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan led the city's churches in a bell-ringing cacophony. 

The child had been christened Alexei, after Nicholas II's favourite ancestor, the seventeenth century Tsar Alexei the Just. He inherited the Romanovs' proverbial good looks and the delicate complexion of his mother's family. Nicholas described it as a "great, never-to-be-forgotten day" in his diary and attributed his son's birth to "the mercy of God." Alexandra wept hysterically: "Oh, it cannot be true! It cannot be true! Is it really a boy?" The Empress's lady-in-waiting, Anna Vyrobouva, described him as "beautiful ... healthy, normal." He was beautiful, yes, but he was not healthy.

Some of the first official visitors to see the future tsar in his cradle were his four sisters, who were allowed to tiptoe in once the baby had been washed and dressed. His full name and title was His Imperial Highness Alexei Nicholaivich, Sovereign Heir and Tsarevich, Grand Duke of Russia, Hetman of All Cossacks, Knight of the Order of Saint Andrew, Head of the Siberian Infantry, Head of the Horse Battalion Infantry and Head of the Cadet Corps. His godparents were his grandmother, the Dowager Empress Marie (Nicholas's Danish mother and one of the most popular members of the Romanov family with the public); King Edward VII of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and the Tsarina's brother, Grand Duke Ernest of Hesse. It would be six weeks before his parents began to notice dark purple bruises on his arms and legs and the awful realisation that he had haemophilia - the same disease which had killed Alexandra's uncle, Leopold, and her little brother, Frederick. 

Desperate to hide the truth about her son's illness, lest it weaken respect for the dynasty, and crippled by guilt that it had been her genetics which gave him the sickness which could kill him, Alexandra turned to the same dubious religious solutions she had used when trying to fall pregnant in the first place. When doctors couldn't do anything for her, she sought an answer from God and she believed she had found it in the form of a smelly, eccentric Siberian peasant called Grigory Rasputin. His soothing voice and prayers were the only thing that seemed to stop Alexei's terrible fits of bleeding and, having witnessed these miracles with her own eyes, Alexandra became convinced Rasputin had been touched by the hands of God. To preserve her son's life, she ignored all the evidence which proved that, once he left her presence, Rasputin was not submissive and holy, but wild, drunken and belligerent. Even when she (ludicrously) was accused of being his lover, Alexandra refused to abandon the man who could cure her son. Nicholas, who found Rasputin bizarre and slightly irritating, loved Alexandra so much that he could not bring himself to shatter the only mechanism she had to cope with their child's disease: religion, represented by Rasputin. She defended Rasputin, even when everyone around her knew that his unpopularity was damaging the monarchy. Since the public knew nothing of Alexei's illness, they could not understand why Alexandra was so attached to Rasputin and, naturally, many of them therefore assumed the worst. The repressed trauma of Alexei's illness would eventually set in motion a catalogue of disasters that would shatter the prestige of the Romanov dynasty, claim dozens of political careers, split the church, end Rasputin's life and drag Alexandra's reputation through the mud. Thirteen years later, when the Russian Empire Alexei was born to inherit vanished in revolution, many people, even Alexandra's own friends and family, blamed her dependence on Rasputin and the secret grief she had carried for years, which had led her to put her son's health, his happiness and (above all) his privacy above everything else.

September 21st, 1819: The birth of a granddaughter of France

On the twenty-first day of September 1819 in the Élysée Palace, today the official residence of the French President, the most beautiful member of the French Royal Family, Princess Caroline, Duchesse de Berry, went into labour. A southern Italian princess by birth, Caroline was the daughter of Francesco I, King of the Two Sicilies, and his Austrian queen, Maria-Clementina. At the age of seventeen, Caroline had been married to Charles-Ferdinand, Duc de Berry, the King of France's youngest nephew. A glamorous and attractive pair, the Duke and Duchess had been married for just under three years when she gave birth to their first child and there was much expectation resting on the young Duchess for the event.

Despite the fact that the Duke was the younger son of another younger son, the genetic bad luck of that generation of the French royal family and the violence of the Revolution had placed him much closer to the throne than he might have been under ordinary circumstances. His eldest uncle, Louis XVI, and his little cousin, Louis XVII, had both perished in the Revolution. With the monarchy restored, his middle uncle had chosen to rule under the name Louis XVIII, to suggest continuity with his family's pre-revolutionary rule. But the current king, clever and morbidly obese, was childless and his queen had died years earlier, leaving the king's younger brother, the handsome and ultra-conserative Charles, Comte d'Artois, as next-in-line. Charles, the Duke's father and Caroline's father-in-law, had two sons, of which the Duke was only the youngest. Yet, the Duke's elder brother, Louis-Antoine, had been married for twenty years and there were still  no sign of any children. Depending on which clique you listened to at court, it was either because Louis-Antoine was impotent or because his wife was barren after the psychological traumas she had endured during her imprisonment under the revolution. Either way, in time, the crown would eventually pass from the current king to the Duke's father and then his brother and then, finally, to him. 

With the expectation that the Duke would one day sit on the French throne as King Charles XI, with Caroline as his queen, there was added pressure for her to produce a son. On September 21st 1819, however, she was unable to oblige. Instead, she gave birth to a daughter who was promptly christened Louise-Marie-Thérèse (above). "Louise" was given in honour of her godfather and great-uncle, the King, and "Marie-Thérèse", in honour of her aunt and godmother, Madame Royale.

As dramatised in Elena Maria Vidal's novel, Madame Royale, Princess Louise-Marie's life was not to be as happy or tranquil as royalists would have hoped. At the age of only five months, she lost her father when he was stabbed to death by a republican assassin as he left the opera one evening with his wife who was, already, two months pregnant as her husband bled to death in front of her. The Duke's death led to a backlash of anti-republican legislation and sentiment in France, with royalism in France losing its liberal base and becoming more and more dominated by conservatives of the far Right. When the old King died in 1824 and Louise-Marie's grandfather inherited the throne as King Charles X, he was determined to preside over a government with a policy of zero tolerance for compromise. Along with colonial expansion in Algeria and government support for the Industrial Revolution, Charles's government also curtailed the freedom of the press, limited the suffrage and promoted the Catholic religion so overzealously to the extent that one wit once quipped that it was a government for priests, by priests. Intent on atoning for the sins of his youth, Charles X apparently could not understand that the whole nation was not content for the government to insist they atone along with him. In 1830, the King was badly advised by those around him and betrayed by members of his own family, when he was swept off the throne in favour of his liberal cousin, Louis-Philippe. 

Louise-Marie, aged eleven, followed her poor grandfather into exile. She then lost her mother when Caroline bravely returned to France, determined to launch a counter-revolution and restore the crown to its rightful incumbent - her son, Henri. Caroline's attempt failed and she was placed under house arrest by Louis-Philippe's government. Locked up and isolated from friends or family, Princess Caroline fell in love with a handsome Italian nobleman, Count Lucchesi-Palli, whom she secretly married and had children with, much to the exiled Royal Family's fury.

Refusing to allow Henri or Louise-Marie to live with a mother they deemed so demonstrably unsuitable, the French Royal Family placed the children in alternative care. The real mother figure in the young Louise-Marie's life was not, therefore, the glamorous and unstable Caroline, but instead Caroline's former sister-in-law, Marie-Thérèse. The only surviving child of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, Aunt Marie-Thérèse had all of her late mother's love for family life and children, and her father's solid and dependable attitudes. From then, until the day she married at the age of twenty-five, Marie-Thérèse was the centre of Louise-Marie's world and she adored her aunt and guardian.

Married in Vienna to Ferdinando-Carlo, Prince of Lucca, Louise-Marie was destined to spend her whole life dodging the revolutions which intermittently rocked Europe and which had first begun in her homeland, thirty years before her birth. In 1848, three years after her marriage, her husband was briefly imprisoned when a wave of continent-wide unrest spread to north Italy. After his release, the Prince and Princess sought refuge with their young family in the United Kingdom, where Louise-Marie had spent much of her adolescence.

A year later, Ferdinando-Carlo and Louise-Marie returned to Parma, with their three young children - Margherita, Roberto and Alicia. Another son, Enrico, followed two years later. Then, tragically, a mere five years after they returned in triumph, Louise-Marie was to experience the same agony her mother had endured, when her beloved husband was stabbed to death by an unknown assailant. He died a day after the attack and Louise-Marie was forced to assume the burden of leading the government in the name of her 6 year-old son, Roberto, who had now succeeded as Duke of Parma.

In 1859, Louise-Marie's time as regent ended, when war and revolution once more entered Parma and she and her children were forced into exile again. They settled in Venice, where, exhausted at the age of forty-four, Louise-Marie, Dowager Duchess of Parma, passed away. Her body was taken to the Kostanjevica Monastery in Slovenia, where she was buried next to the other members of her family who had died in exile in the pretty local Church of the Annunciation of Our Lady. There, the body of the woman who was born at a time that had seemed like the high point of monarchism's triumph in Europe, but whose life had been constantly disrupted and devastated by its traumas, rests to this day.

June 23rd, 1703: The birth of the Polish Queen of France

On this day in 1703, one of the most powerful aristocrats in the Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Stanislas Leszczynski, marked the birth of his second daughter, Maria (above). Christened in honour of the Virgin Mary, baby Maria's full name was Maria Carolina Sophia Felicity Leszczynska. Both the baby and her mother, Katarzyna, were in fine health and a year later they both acquired a royal title, when Stanislas was able to pursue his claim to the Polish throne, thanks to his Swedish allies.

Stanislas I's reign in Poland, however, was short and troublesome. He was king for less than six years before being deposed and the royal family were forced to seek asylum in Lorraine, in modern-day Germany. They also endured personal tragedy when Maria's elder sister, Anna, died at the age of eighteen after contracting pneumonia.

The ex-king, queen Katarzyna and princess Maria lived a relatively quiet life in exile until Maria's name was unexpectedly put on the list of ninety-nine eligible princesses to marry the young King Louis XV of France. Louis's chief minister, Cardinal Fleury, lobbied hard for the King to pick Maria as his bride, since she had royal ancestry and a Catholic faith (both pre-requisites for a future queen of France), but, more pragmatically, her father's lack of political power meant that a marriage to Maria Leczszynska would not pull France into any dangerous or costly foreign alliances, as the marriage of Louis XIV to Maria-Teresa of Spain had done in the previous century. The marriage between the exiled Polish princess and the handsome young monarch took place at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg on the Feast of the Assumption in 1725.

The marriage itself was an unremarkable one, although it began happily enough. Marie (as she was known in France) endured her husband's numerous affairs with relative complacency. With unusual grace and tact, she managed to establish a friendly relationship with her husband's most notorious mistress, the marquise de Pompadour, a famously beautiful but unpopular woman, who was the only one of Louis XV's lovers to treat the Queen with anything like respect and courtesy. 

A devout Roman Catholic, Marie was noted for her charities and for her large family. Between 1727, two years after the marriage, and ten years later, the Queen gave birth to eleven children - including the future duchess of Parma and the father of three kings, Louis XVI, Louis XVIII and Charles X. 

Novelist Elena Maria Vidal writes on her blog of Marie's time as queen: -

"She was the last Queen of France before Marie-Antoinette. According to Jean Chalon, the author of Chère Marie-Antoinette, Queen Marie tightened up the rigorous court etiquette that Marie-Antoinette later relaxed because it was so suffocating. The daughter of a dethroned monarch and wife of a blatantly unfaithful husband probably needed the highly ritualized pomp to boost her morale and her rank more than did the "daughter of the Caesars." Yes, Marie Lesczynska's father was the dethroned king of Poland and her early life was complicated by upheaval and exile. Yet for this very reason, she was chosen to be the bride of the teenage Louis XV, because she had no political entanglements at all... Queen Marie quietly devoted herself to her faith and her family. Courtiers mocked her Polish ways and called her La Polonaise even as later they would call Marie-Antoinette L'Autrichienne. All of Marie's children were as religious as she was; her youngest daughter Madame Louise became a Carmelite nun and a Blessed of the Church. Some of her grandchildren were quite pious as well, especially Louis XVI, Madame Clothilde, and Madame Elisabeth. Clothilde was declared a Venerable and Louis XVI and Madame Elisabeth can be regarded as martyrs in that they would not surrender their religious principles. When she died in 1768, Louis XV sincerely mourned the mother of his children, and we hope he regretted causing her such pain with his infidelities."

Happy 85th Birthday, Your Majesty

Today, Her Majesty The Queen turned eighty-five and she marked the anniversary of her birth by attending the Maundy Thursday service at Westminster Abbey to mark the Thursday of Holy Week, when the Church traditionally remembers the Last Supper and Christ's arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane.

It's hard to believe The Queen is eighty-five, given the rigours of her daily schedule and the number of political engagements she undertakes every year. The BBC news report of the Queen's visit to the Abbey for the service, including the Monarch's annual bestowal of charity on the elderly, can be accessed by clicking HERE, where you can also see a video of Her Majesty, the bishops and the congregation interacting inside the Abbey.

For this blog's discussion of the history of the Christian festival of Maundy Thursday, including its ancient association with the British monarchy, please click HERE.

"Perhaps one of the most interesting Maundy Thursday customs originates here in the United Kingdom, when the monarch bestows alms or "Maundy Money" on a group of pensioners - one for each year of the Sovereign's life. A special church service is held in a cathedral in either England or Wales, where the Queen hands out specially-minted coins to a group of pensioners, who have been invited to the service by local authorities...

The custom itself dates back to the time of King Edward I, who ruled England from 1272 until his death in 1307. He was also the conqueror of Wales, hence the custom of using Welsh cathedrals for the Maundy services as well. From then, until the deposition of King James II in 1688, the main part of the tradition was for the monarch to humble his- or herself by washing the feet of the twelve local paupers who had been gathered for the service, along with bestowing generous amounts of charity upon them. The washing of the feet was done to imitate Christ's act of loving humility, when He washed the feet of His own apostles at the Last Supper. Bearing in mind how filthy the feet of a pauper in the Middle Ages would have been, the royal Maundy traditions indicate just how passionate a hold Christianity had over the hearts and minds of people in that era....

In its original form, the practise was last carried out in England on Maundy Thursday 1688 ... Queen Mary II, who instituted the current tradition of the money being handed out to the elderly, rather than the poor, which continues to this day."

March 18th, 1496: The Birth of Mary Tudor, Queen of France

For almost all her adult life, Henry VIII's youngest sister, Mary, was referred to as "the French Queen" by her brother's government, despite the fact that she had technically only held that title for three months, during her brief marriage to the aged King Louis XII, which ended with his death on New Year's Day 1515, when his teenage English bride was not yet nineteen. Almost immediately following her first husband's death, Mary did what the Tudor family apparently did best and caused an international scandal. She seduced her brother's best friend, the Duke of Suffolk, a handsome playboy more likely to think with his crotch than his brain and returned to England with the marriage already (vigorously) consummated. When her brother discovered what his sister and best friend had done, he went into convulsions of fury - firstly at the thought that Charles had dared go to bed with the king's sister and secondly because Mary had (perhaps deliberately) removed herself from being a matrimonial pawn in her brother's games of diplomacy. Mary felt lucky to have escaped one potentially hideous marriage to an old man in such a short space of time and she was determined not to give her brother the opportunity to put her in that situation again. Charles, duke of Suffolk was good-looking, entertaining and suitably reckless to agree to her plan. After living down their disgrace, they returned to Court, thanks to the intercession of Cardinal Wolsey and Queen Katherine. They remained staples of court high society until Mary refused to yield precedence to Anne Boleyn and Anne refused to back down on the issue either. Through their daughter, Frances, Charles and Mary eventually became the grandparents of Lady Jane Grey. 

 

However, despite its romantic (or scandalous) beginnings, the marriage of Charles Brandon and Mary Tudor was not an especially happy one and having gotten over the novelty of being married to a princess, Charles went back to his bed-hopping ways with characteristic abandon. The couple's first son died as a baby and his brother, Henry, born a year later and created Earl of Lincoln by his royal uncle, died at the age of eleven. Their eldest daughter, Frances, Jane Grey's mother, inherited her father's duchy of Suffolk and married Henry Grey, Marquess of Dorset; after his death, like her mother, she made a scandalous second marriage to a man who was her social inferior. Her younger sister, Eleanor, married the Earl of Cumberland and later acted as chief mourner at the funeral of Katherine of Aragon in 1536.

Mary's controversial choice for a second husband, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk (?1484 - 1545) was played in all four seasons of The Tudors by British actor, Henry Cavill (above.)

Yet for someone whose life was to become famous for scandal, the first Mary Tudor's life began fairly quietly. Like all of her siblings, bar the last, her birth was a relatively easy one for her mother, the thirty year-old Queen of England, Elizabeth of York. There is some debate over where the birth itself took place and Westminster has been put forward by some of Mary or Elizabeth's biographers, but it seems likely the real location was Richmond Palace, the sumptuous and magnificent royal residence recently completed by the baby's father, King Henry VII, as a tribute to his hard-won rule over England, Wales and Ireland. At the time of her birth, Mary joined three siblings at the pretty riverside manor of Eltham, where the royal nursery was kept. Her eldest brother, Arthur, the heir-presumptive, was already nine years-old and his education was more and more being placed into male hands chosen by his father the King, rather than those selected by his mother the Queen or his grandmother, the Countess of Derby. Mary's more regular childhood companions were her less-pretty but equally wilful big sister, Margaret, who later married the King of Scotland, and her four year-old brother, Henry, Duke of York. An elder sister, Elizabeth, had very sadly died whilst the Queen was pregnant with Mary, in what may have been a case of severe allergies, unrecognisable and certainly untreatable in the fifteenth century.

Even at the age of thirty, the pale and blonde Queen Elizabeth was generally considered a beautiful woman, which was expected since her mother, the late Queen Elizabeth Woodville, was described as the most beautiful woman in the British Isles. Mary too was thought to be a very attractive woman and if she did not quite have the once-in-a-generation beauty possessed by her maternal grandmother, there is no denying that, even accounting for flattery, Henry VIII's younger sister was physically lovely. 

After Mary's birth, there was a short lull in her mother's pregnancies. It was not until the middle of 1498, nearly two years after Mary, that Elizabeth was able to announce that she was with child again. As usual, her over-bearing mother-in-law oversaw all the arrangements and Elizabeth awaited the outcome of her sixth pregnancy as she had done the previous five. Few women in English history could claim to have been better-connected than Elizabeth of York, something which had been vital in convincing her husband to select her as his bride when he seized the throne in 1485. She was the daughter, sister, niece, wife, mother  and grandmother of kings, but in the final estimation, for most of her early life, these dazzling familial connections brought her nothing but misery.

Mary Tudor was destined to be the last of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York's brood to live past infancy. The death of little Elizabeth, a few months before Mary's birth, proved to be an indicator of things to come, rather than a tragic one-off. The next baby, born at Greenwich on February 21, 1499 was christened Edmund, Duke of Somerset, but he died shortly after his first birthday. His baby brother, Edward, named in honour of Elizabeth's late father, died not long after his christening and Mary's little sister, Katherine, led to their mother's death in childbirth of her thirty-seventh birthday in 1503. Princess Katherine joined her in the grave two weeks later, leaving Mary motherless at the age of six.

British actress Glynis Johns, perhaps best known for her work in Mary Poppins, is seen here in the role of Mary Tudor in the 1953 biopic The Sword and the Rose.

Happy birthday, Lynsey!

My sister's birthday!

September 22nd, 1515: The Birth of Anne of Cleves

"On this day in history, the 22nd September 1515, Anna von Jülich-Kleve-Berg, or Anne of Cleves, was born near Düsseldorf. She was the second daughter of John III, Duke of Jülich, Cleves and Berg, an important German ruler, and Maria of Jülich-Berg. Elizabeth Norton writes of Anne’s grand lineage – not only was she descended from Edward I, she was also, on her father’s side, closely related to Louis XII of France and the Duke of Burgundy."

Claire at The Anne Boleyn Files commemorates the anniversary of the birth of Anne of Cleves, Queen of England, the fourth wife of King Henry VIII. To date, Anne holds the record of having held that title for the shortest period of time amongst the confederacy of consorts, having been Queen from January until July of 1540. In second place is another unlucky German princess, Caroline of Brunswick, the consort of George IV, who held the title from January 1820 until her death in August 1821. Anne's predecessor, Jane Seymour, her successor Catherine Howard, Richard II's child-bride Isabelle de Valois and Richard III's wife, Anne Neville, were other women who did not long enjoy their throne.

The Princess Royal at 60

Lord Belmont in Northern Ireland carries news on the official birthday portrait of Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal (above), who turned 60 today.

The Daily Mail gives an account of Princess Anne's dress.

I very briefly had the opportunity to be presented to Her Royal Highness at the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland's Garden Party at Hillsborough Castle in 2009 and I have to say from that very, very brief meeting she seemed down-to-earth and charming, with a very wry sense of humour.

Happy Birthday, Jenny

Yesterday, my beautiful sister Jenny turned 18 and since we're goyam, today we can say "You are a woman."

Jen, it's hard to pick out which memory to write about here and since there's no way I can do our beloved (accurate) impersonations of all the Kardashians one after another, I thought I'd just make a list of 18 of our finest moments: -

1. The time when I was swinging you round by the arms on the beach, got bored and let go (I don't remember this - but Ashleigh assures me it happened.)

2. The time you decided to sing "We are Golden" by Mika into my camera phone in the thickest Malone accent imaginable.

3. The time we baked a White Chocolate Vanilla Cheesecake for Mother's Day

4. The time you and Shane spent 7 hours trying to sew the hole that had been made in our trampoline's safety net - and it was literally the worst sewing in the world. Its mistakes could have been seen from space and I didn't have the heart to tell either of you until several days later.

5. "Hey you guys."

6. That hideous bus trip to Stranraer, when I got such bad cabin fever I head-butted you - for my own amusement.

7. "The Lost Prince"

8. Making Mel tea and toast in our kitchen last night

9. When you were off school for almost two months and we spent literally hours at a time on the sofa watching the "Desperate Housewives" box-set

10. Our secret Haagen-Dazs sib munch-fests watching the geekiest movies of all-time

11. That computer game we got years ago set in Ancient Egypt. You couldn't pronounce the character's name, so you re-named her "Toot-a-loop." Many times at 2 a.m. we'd enter the study to see you frantically clicking the mouse, screaming, "Run, Tootaloop! Run!!"

12. Those videos we made of how everyone in the family looks when they wake up first thing in the morning and then got told off by Mum for "bullying"

13. You seeing the "Eclipse" trailer for "Twilight" for the first time and crying with excitement at hearing Edward Cullen's voice again.... you are a trooper.

14. That AMAZING photograph of us on the rollercoaster in Canada - with Lynsey in the front of the cart squealing with happiness and you and I pulling EXACTLY the same pose of horror mixed with tears mixed with nausea behind her.

15. The photograph of us on the log ride in Canada, which Mum made us go on about four times to get a nice one of the family - she gave up after the fourth go when we still looked like we were about to projectile vomit and die.

16. Our mutual love of napping, interrupted only for you to take one of your 28 daily phone-calls to or from Oscar.

17. The secret trip to Ballymena under the aliases "Constantine Moncreiffe" and "Anastasia Beaverhausen."

18. "Eh.... don't you forget, it was me and Gareth that made up bleh-bleh. You're just a thief. A comedy thief!"


Happy birthday, Jen!


All my love,

Your brother x

The Age of Anne Boleyn

“But to come to her death... She was convicted and condemned [and] she was not twenty-nine years of age.”
- Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria (1538 - 1612)

“She would have been around thirty-five when she died, middle-aged by Tudor standards. Life had not been kind to her, and stress had aged her prematurely.”
- Alison Weir, The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1991)

A mistress of King Louis XV of France always insisted that there was only one rule in polite society that could never be broken - and that was that you should never ask a pretty woman her age. So, it seems a tad impolite that for years historians have been trampling over such niceties, by debating back and forth about the age of Henry VIII's second wife, Queen Anne Boleyn. But then, as with so much about Anne Boleyn, it may not be appropriate, but it's certainly important.

The issue of Anne Boleyn's age is one which is particularly important to me, because a research paper on the subject was one of those I submitted when applying to Oxford. In the course of recently researching my own biography of Anne Boleyn, which I believe may take me the next five or six years to complete, I returned to that paper and began to research in-depth the issue of Anne's birth. It is my conclusion that the current chronology of Anne's childhood that we have been given by most historians is utterly wrong and highly misleading. Anne Boleyn was, I believe, born six years later than most modern historians suggest - not in 1501, but in the summer or autumn of 1507.

Since parish records were not kept in England until later in the 16th century, we only have exact birthdays for Henry VIII's two foreign-born wives - Katherine of Aragon, who was born in Spain on December 16th 1485, and Anna of Cleves, who was born in Germany on September 22nd 1515. For his English wives, historians have had to use comments about the ladies' generic age and appearance, ambassadorial reports, family wills and even funerary details to try and guess the birth date of Jane Seymour (?1507 - 1509), Catherine Howard (?1521 - 1525) and Katharine Parr (?1512 or 1514.)

Of course, had Anne Boleyn lived out a normal life-span, the issue of when exactly she was born would have become less and less important with the passing years. For example, had she lived to the same age as her Irish grandmother, Lady Margaret, and died at the age of 83, Anne would have lived well into the reign of her daughter Queen Elizabeth and would have died sometime around the time of the Spanish Armada. By that point, Anne would have been the Queen Mother and her influence in politics, perhaps still considerable, would have been so long-lasting that the issues concerning her early rise to power in the 1520s would not have mattered so much. Furthermore, had she been properly buried her date of birth would perhaps have been recorded on the tomb.

But Anne Boleyn did not live into her eighties and she was buried in an unmarked grave. Yet, it matters very much to what we know about her, her marriage and the English Reformation that we accurately date her birth. Was she a young woman of eighteen when the King first began to pursue her or an accomplished, mature lady of twenty-five? Was she twenty-eight at the time she was executed or was she thirty-five? Because if she was 28, as one of her stepdaughter's ladies-in-waiting claimed, then the reasons behind her execution become infinitely more sinister - at 28, Anne Boleyn was still undeniably in her childbearing years. Yes, she would have been at the tail-end of them by Tudor standards, but she would have had at least four or five more years before she was considered infertile, and so the idea that it was just her "failure" to produce a son which led to her death in 1536 suddenly becomes a good deal less convincing and the idea that it was her husband who orchestrated her monstrously unfair death becomes infinitely more likely. However, if she was 35, then she was already practically middle-aged by Tudor standards and it becomes far more likely that the entire reason for her destruction was politics pure and simple, with Anne - and to some extent, perhaps, maybe even her husband - being victims of a savagely brilliant process of character assassination, lies, manufactured hysteria and a ruthless palace coup organised by the King's chief adviser, Thomas Cromwell.

This much about Anne Boleyn's life is certain - we know that she was sent abroad for her education in 1513, that she returned to London as a débutante in 1522, Henry VIII asked her to marry him in 1527, she was crowned queen and became a mother in 1533 and she was executed in 1536. If one follows the 1501 argument, then she was 12 when she went abroad, 21 when she came back, 26 when she was engaged, 32 when she was crowned and 35 when she died; the alternative scenario has her leaving England at 6 and returning at 15, betrothed at 19, crowned at 25 and dead at 28.

Happy Birthday, Aisleagh

"Are you frightfully cross?"
"No. Just a little hungry."

Aisleagh M. and I did not have the greatest starts to a friendship. We first met each other within a few weeks of starting at Down High, when I was a podgy scarf-wearing 1st year with a "posh" accent and Aisleagh sported enormous glasses and a cow's lick. Things took a turn for the worse when, one day outside Music class, her best friend Grace's contact lense flipped inwards, Grace crumpled to the ground in pain and her eye turned beetroot red. "Good," I said, as I swept past her agony-wracked body. Aisleagh heard and wasn't pleased. (I can't remember why Grace and I had turned on each other - I think it was something to with Home Ec.) Finally, on a History trip to France, Aisleagh poisoned me by tipping a mountain of salt into my glass at supper one evening. I didn't notice, drank it and accidentally smashed the stem of the glass in my fury when I set it down.

The turning point came in 4th year, when we were both in Miss Gorman's GCSE English Lit class. For some reason, we ended-up sitting beside each other for the first half of the year and fell into conversation about how much we hated some other people in our year. And from that spite, a beautiful friendship was born.

Together, it must be said, that Aisleagh and I didn't always bring out the best in one other. One sweltering summer day, along with our friends Grace and Thomas, we went to Saul for a picnic, near Saint Patrick's Mount. OK - on it. However, since it was so close to Marching Season not a lot of places were open because of the holiday, so supplies were limited. OK - again, that's a lie: we'd eaten everything by the time we got there.

After a few hours, the heat grew unbearable, as did our thirst, so we bullied Grace and Thomas into going and buying some water, handing them my drinks cooling bag to help. An hour later, they returned, with sweat pouring off Thomas and Grace practically crawling along behind him: "Here," they said wearily, proffering the cool bag.

I opened it, to see that they had purchased carbonated water - the only kind available at the only shop available, the Raholp Post Office. I showed the contents to Aisleagh, who was sunbathing next to me, near to the Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes. From behind her sunglasses, Aisleagh peered into the bag before almost imperceptibly shaking her head.

"Ehm.... we would like still water," I said, handing the bag back.
"What?" said Thomas.
"Yes, we are going to require still, chilled, water, please."
Thomas, collapsing to the ground with heat exhaustion, just kept staring at me in horror: "Are you serious?"
"Yes, I am serious. I am also thirsty."
Grace, meanwhile, was just staring at Aisleagh, with a piteous expression in her eyes - begging not to be sent back on the trail. I had never seen Grace so broken and tired before. Regarding her best friend's misery and physical near-collapse, Aisleagh made her decision and propped herself up on her elbows: "I'm allergic to fizzy water."
Grace's mouth fell open and Thomas's was pursed into a seriously unimpressed line: "What?" asked Grace.
"Yep. I need still."
"But..."
"Allergic!"

However, Aisleagh and I failed to consider the logistics of tactics that day - because her evening was being spent with Grace, mine with Thomas. So as I was walking home with Thomas, it's fair to say that my behaviour earlier in the day did not exactly receive glowing reviews and it's equally fair to say that Aisleagh was the victim of a savage physical attack once Grace recovered her energy levels.

Anyway, today is Aisleagh's b'diddy and huge licky love to her on this most glorious of days. Through bullying, poisoning, hair pulling, biting, shopping excursions to Dublin, diets, spiders, Bones, the Lone Ranger, The X Factor marathon, painting with all the colours of the wind, paws up for Lady Gaga, drama practicals in school, the time the curtain rose on us for the school play and we were hugging each other in front of the entire audience and that terrible time were we went to a house party that was so unutterably boring that we tried to escape by climbing out the bathroom window, only to be caught by the host (your boyfriend at the time) - it's all been a delightful cycle of dysfunction.

Happy Birthday, Lovey Loverson. Lots and lots and lots of love xxx