Latest news with #WarsoftheRoses
North Wales Live
an hour ago
- General
- North Wales Live
DNA site announces 35 regal surnames that could be related to the Royal Family
Many of us are fascinated by our ancestry, keen to delve into our family history and discover potential connections to notable figures. Gone are the days of laboriously trawling through heritage records and census data, as there are now numerous online platforms that make this process straightforward and accessible, just like MyHeritage. Currently, MyHeritage is offering a 14-day free trial, providing individuals with the chance to map out their family tree, uncover new relatives, and sift through billions of historical records. They've even compiled a list of 35 surnames that could potentially reveal a connection to royalty, reports the Express According to MyHeritage, certain surnames have traditionally been linked to nobility and could strongly suggest a Royal lineage. If users possess one of these 35 surnames, they might be in for an unexpected revelation about their relatives. Curiosity about Royal lineage can be explored through surnames, and while they don't guarantee a connection to the monarchy, they serve as an intriguing starting point. To delve into their ancestry, individuals can utilise MyHeritage's platform to construct their family tree, incorporating names, dates, photos, and stories, and then sift through historical records including census data, birth, death certificates, and marriage records. Additionally, MyHeritage offers DNA testing services, as well. This provides insights into one's ethnic background and identify potential relatives. Using these tools, users can figure out if their surname is part of a royal lineage. Here's the aforementioned 35 surnames connected to the Royals, and how they made their mark on history: Windsor: The current British royal family's surname since 1917. Tudor: The Welsh dynasty that produced monarchs like Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. Stuart: A Scottish house that ruled England and Scotland in the 16th and 17th centuries. Plantagenet: A royal house that provided England with monarchs from Henry II to Richard III. Capet: The dynasty that ruled France from 987 to 1328. Bourbon: A European royal house that ruled France, Spain, and other territories. Habsburg: A prominent royal house of Europe, known for ruling the Holy Roman Empire. Hanover: The British royal house from George I to Queen Victoria. Valois: A cadet branch of the Capetian dynasty that ruled France. Lancaster: A branch of the Plantagenet dynasty, known for its role in the Wars of the Roses. York: Another Plantagenet branch, also central to the Wars of the Roses. Bruce: A Scottish royal house, with Robert the Bruce being a notable king. de Valois: A French royal house that produced several kings. de Medici: An influential Italian family that produced royalty and popes. Savoy: A royal family that once ruled parts of Italy and France. Orange-Nassau: The Dutch royal family. Oldenburg: A European royal house that includes the current Danish royal family. Glucksburg: A branch of the House of Oldenburg, associated with Danish and Norwegian royalty. Romanov: The last imperial dynasty to rule Russia. Baskerville: A noble family name with historical ties to English aristocracy. Darcy: A surname associated with medieval nobility and landowners in England and Ireland. Neville: A powerful English noble family with significant influence during the medieval period. Percy: An aristocratic English family known for their role in British history. Astley: A noble surname linked to the English peerage. Capell: A distinguished English family with historical ties to the aristocracy. Howard: A prominent aristocratic family in the UK, holding the title of Dukes of Norfolk. Seymour: The family of Jane Seymour, third wife of Henry VIII, with ties to the Dukedom of Somerset. Grey: Associated with Lady Jane Grey, England's nine-day queen. FitzAlan: A powerful medieval family, former Earls of Arundel. Courtenay: A noble family with connections to English and French royalty. Manners: The surname of the Dukes of Rutland, a high-ranking noble family. Russell: Connected to the Dukes of Bedford, an influential aristocratic lineage. Cavendish: The surname of the Dukes of Devonshire, a powerful British noble family. Talbot: A noble family holding the Earldom of Shrewsbury. Spencer: The family name of Princess Diana, tying it to the modern British royal family. For those seeking alternative resources, Ancestry is another option, providing DNA tests starting at £79, which not only connect users with relatives but also offer insights into familial origins. 23andMe is yet another choice, offering DNA tests with ancestry breakdowns and personalised health insights, with prices commencing at £89. MyHeritage boasts a commendable 4 out of 5-star rating on Trustpilot. One user praised the site, commenting: "Immediate accurate statistics of my immediate family members." Another user appreciated the ongoing updates and positive outcomes, stating: "Regular updates of discoveries, positive results. This site is not just about the money, it is about genuine results for the family history researcher." A satisfied customer shared their experience: "My family history has expanded and the format is easily understood. Changes are quick and easy. Thank you." Not all users are singing the same tune, with one commenting: "I don't fully understand it. I can't find a user guide, difficult to navigate, Help Center does not always understand my problems. My previous version was much easier for me." Yet, another budding genealogist recounted their use of the site as an 'enjoyable experience,' enthusing: "Finding related families and information relating to individuals has been a wonderful experience. MyHeritage has made it even easier to trace ancestors and verify relations."
Perth Now
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Sophie Turner found it 'weird' having Kit Harington play her lover
Sophie Turner found it "weird" to play Kit Harington's lover in a movie. The pair - who first starred together as half-siblings Sansa Stark and Jon Snow in eight seasons of Game of Thrones between 2019 and 2019 - have showcased a very different relationship in upcoming gothic horror film The Dreadful, and the 29-year-old actress admitted it was bizarre having to get up close and personal with her good friend. Speaking in a video interview with Vogue, she said: "I did a movie last year which I'm really excited about with my old but very good friend Kit Harington, who played my brother on Game of Thrones. "We're doing a gothic horror… but we play lovers." Sophie then grimaced as she apologised to viewers. She said: "Sorry, guys. It's really weird for all of us." Game of Thrones featured incestuous relationships and Sophie had previously teased "things could happen" between Sansa and Jon, particularly after his true parentage was revealed, but she admitted she would find it awkward. Speaking in 2016, she told Access Hollywood: "Things could happen, things couldn't happen. They are cousins and it is Game of Thrones. "I could not do that with Kit. There's no way I could do those kind of scenes with Kit— I'd laugh way too much." Despite finding it "weird" playing lovers in The Dreadful, which is set in the 15th century during the War of the Roses, Sophie previously admitted she pushed producers to cast Kit, 38, opposite her. She told the Sunday Times newspaper: "They were trying to find someone for that role, and I was like, 'You can't not have Kit.' "It's set around the time of the Wars of the Roses, so we'll probably be floating about in robes on clifftops again." Sophie - who has Willa, four, and three-year-old Delphine with ex-husband Joe Jonas - previously joked she "got [her] sex education" from Game of Thrones. During an appearance on the Dish podcast, she quipped: "I definitely got my sex education from that show. More than enough." Sophie also likened her castmates to family members. She explained: "I never had proper formal training, so I got to learn from the amazing actors around me, which I felt like I won a competition. But it was great. We all were a family. "My character, I got to live with. So it felt like we kind of merged into one person by the end of it. But it was amazing." Sophie admits that the show "informed [her] entire life in terms of like business decisions, just etiquette on set, how to act". She added: "Everything I learned from Game of Thrones — and a bit from my parents."
NZ Herald
18-07-2025
- General
- NZ Herald
New book questions Richard III's role in princes' disappearance, claims survival
The elder prince, Edward, was heir to the throne at the time of his disappearance and would have ruled as King Edward V of England. Langley decided to delve into the mystery after coming to believe that the conventional narrative in which Richard had the young princes killed smacked of 'history being written by the victors'. She was finally spurred into action after reading an article about Richard's reburial at Leicester Cathedral in 2015 which questioned whether the nation should honour a 'child killer'. 'I think I'd always realised that the story sort of developed during the reign of the Tudors,' she said, adding that it was then 'repeated and repeated over time' until it became 'truth and fact'. The last English king to die in battle, Richard ruled from 1483 until his brutal death at the Battle of Bosworth near Leicester in 1485, aged 32. Bosworth was the last major conflict in the Wars of the Roses and changed the course of English history because the Tudor dynasty of Henry VII captured the crown from Richard's Plantagenets. Langley attributes the accepted story that Richard had the boys murdered to King Henry VII, a 'very, very intelligent individual, but suspicious and highly paranoid'. 'He had a massive spy network working for him. And he was able to completely control the narrative,' she said, adding that Richard ended up 'covered in Tudor mud'. Taking a cold case review approach to the historical 'whodunnit', Langley says she assembled a group of investigative specialists, including police and lawyers, to advise her. 'They said: 'Look, if you haven't got any confirmed, identified bodies, then it has to be a missing persons investigation and you have to follow that methodology'. 'They said: 'You have to actively look for evidence'. That's when it really started to get interesting.' An undated handout picture released on February 4, 2013 from the University of Leicester shows the skeleton of king Richard III found at the Grey Friars Church excavation site in Leicester. Photo / AFP Langley put out an appeal for volunteers to scour archives, only to be inundated with offers of help from people ranging from ordinary citizens to medieval historians. The result was the decade-long Missing Princes Project which she says unearthed a significant amount of information pointing to the survival of both young princes. Langley now believes that it is up to Richard's detractors to disprove the survival thesis, which she outlines in the new book The Princes in the Tower: Solving History's Greatest Cold Case. 'The onus is now on them to find the evidence that the boys died. 'They cannot say Richard III murdered the princes in the tower any more because we found numerous proofs of life everywhere,' she said. Key to Langley's conviction that both boys survived are documents discovered supporting a rebellion by 'Edward IV's son'. During the rebellion in 1487, Lambert Simnel, a pretender to the throne who came forward after Richard's death, was crowned in Dublin. According to fresh references found by the project, the boy was 'called' or said to be 'a son of King Edward', which she believes points to Simnel being the elder prince, son of Edward IV. The reaction to Langley's research has been mixed. Michael Dobson, director and a professor of Shakespeare studies at the University of Birmingham's Shakespeare Institute, expressed scepticism. 'Given the ways of dynastic monarchy, I think Richard would have been taking a very big risk in leaving those princes alive,' he said. 'The chances of their having accidentally gone missing while incarcerated on his orders in the Tower of London seem pretty remote.' -Agence France-Presse
Western Telegraph
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Western Telegraph
Tudor festival to take place in Tenby where Henry VII sheltered
Tenby's National Trust Tudor Merchant's House is well known for giving an historic insight into the 15th century lives of the merchant and his family. And just a few yards away underground is the tunnel through which the young Henry Tudor, the future Henry VII, escaped from Tenby during the Wars of the Roses. After being besieged at Pembroke Castle, he took refuge in the house of Tenby's mayor, Thomas White, near St Mary's Church, before making his way to Tenby harbour through the tunnel, which begins underneath the building which now houses Boots the Chemist in High Street. Pembrokeshire early music group, La Volta, wil be performing during the weekend. (Image: La Volta) Tenby Tudor Weekend 2025 includes talks, a guided walk, a short play, early music and a quiz, as well as an opportunity try some Tudor crafts and cooking. For more information, see call Anne on 01834 842730 or email tenbytownclerk@ . The weekend takes place on Saturday June 21 and 22 and programme highlights include a Tudor painting demonstration by Terry John at the Tudor Merchant's House; a guided walk of Tudor Tenby; a Tudor crafts and cooking workshop for all, a play about Jasper Tudor; a Tudor Spice Trail talk and concerts of early music by La Volta.
Yahoo
06-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Real Reason Trump Has Created This Autopen Scandal
When Richard III seized the English throne towards the end of the Wars of the Roses, he pressured Parliament to legitimize his usurpation of the crown from his nephews. Parliament responded by passing a law that accused the late Edward IV, Richard's brother, and his wife Elizabeth Woodville of all manner of misdeeds. The law, Titulus Regius, was an incendiary one. It claimed that Edward's reign had seen the laws of God and his Church, of nature, and of England left 'broken, subverted and disregarded, contrary to all reason and justice.' It denounced his marriage as invalid, in part because Elizabeth had allegedly bewitched him through 'sorcery and witchcraft.' And it conveniently declared that their children, who stood ahead of Richard in the line of succession (and had gone missing under his care), were bastards and automatically ineligible for the throne. The United States is a republic, not a monarchy. But that has not stopped President Donald Trump from taking a similar approach to declaring his predecessor's administration invalid. This week, he issued a memorandum to direct Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate whether Biden's White House advisors had used an autopen device to fabricate Biden's signature on official documents. Though the memo did not go so far as to accuse Biden officials of using sorcery to bewitch him, it argued that they took advantage of his allegedly compromised mental state to wield presidential powers. 'This conspiracy marks one of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history,' it said. 'The American public was purposefully shielded from discovering who wielded the executive power, all while Biden's signature was deployed across thousands of documents to effect radical policy shifts.' Trump had already signaled that his focus was on Biden's pardons of various people whom he sees as political enemies. 'The 'Pardons' that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,' he wrote in a post on his personal social-media website in March. 'In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!' Conservative media outlets have written extensively about the previous administration's use of an autopen in recent months, insinuating that it was a sign of Biden's incapacity. There is no evidence that it was used to sign things against the former president's will. Focusing on it is a throwback of sorts to the Obama years, when he began to use the device while traveling overseas. He first used the autopen to sign an extension of the PATRIOT Act in 2011 during a weeklong tour of Europe. In 2013, he used it to sign the bill that prevented the U.S. government from going over the so-called 'fiscal cliff' while vacationing in Hawaii. Less notable uses also followed, such as signing routine annual proclamations. Obama's autopen use initially raised some constitutional questions since Article I requires the president to 'sign' legislation before it can become law. Conservatives occasionally brought it up as part of their broader efforts to paint Obama's tenure as illegitimate in various ways. But a 2005 opinion by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel found no issue with a president directing his signature to be attached to a document as opposed to signing it by his own hand. It grounded its reasoning in ancient principles of English and early American legal tradition. 'Under the 'principle of signatures,' the common law recognized that one could sign a document not only with one's own hand, but also by the hand of another who was properly authorized to affix one's signature to the document on one's behalf or who did so in one's presence,' the office explained. 'Furthermore, a document signed in one's name by the hand of another in either of these manners was equally effective as a document signed with one's own hand.' It is worth noting that the original autopen controversy stemmed largely around the president's use of it to sign legislation, where the Constitution explicitly requires a signature. For practical reasons, presidents do not commit all or even most of their orders, instructions, or official actions to paper. A president's direct order to someone serving in the military, for example, carries the same legal weight whether delivered over the telephone, via videoconference, or in person. Since Trump's particular issue with the autopen centers around pardons, it's worth noting that the historical precedents for that power are much looser than for any other official act a president might undertake. The modern practice is for would-be recipients to apply to the Justice Department's Office of the Pardon Attorney, who reviews cases and makes recommendations to the president. If approved, the office gives pardon recipients a formal document bearing the president's seal and signature. That is a modern convenience rather than an actual legal requirement, however. Trump himself has ignored or bypassed the pardon attorney and issued almost all of his pardons at his personal whim. Past presidents have also wielded the pardon power by proclamation instead of individualized certificates. They have issued mass pardons to ex-Confederate officials, to formerly polygamous Mormons, Vietnam War draft evaders, and so on without difficulty. My favorite examples of the pardon power's ad hoc usage come from the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln developed a reputation during his time in office as a bit of a soft touch when it came to clemency. He was also strikingly informal about it. In one encounter, Lincoln once wrote out a pardon for a young boy accused of desertion on a nearby scrap of bandage. When General Joseph Hooker once sent a list of death warrants for 55 convicted deserters to the White House during the war, historian Ron Soodalter recounted, Lincoln simply wrote 'pardoned' on the envelope and mailed it back. Lincoln's current successor is familiar with this freewheeling approach to governance, albeit to achieve far different ends. Trump has often gone to great lengths to conceal or destroy government records, whether by tearing them up after he is done with them or absconding with them to his Florida golf resort. He notoriously does not use email or a computer and prefers to conduct business over the phone instead of putting anything into writing. This approach conveniently avoids creating a paper trail that could be used against him later. Trump has also argued before that a president's intent matters more than the precise physical or ministerial act that he performs when running the executive branch. He asserted in a 2022 interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, for example, that he could declassify documents telepathically. 'There doesn't have to be a process, as I understand it,' Trump said. 'You're the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it's declassified, even by thinking about it.' Naturally, part of Trump's argument is that Biden's intent was dubious because of his 'cognitive decline' while president. 'This was especially true of actions taken during the second half of his Presidency, when his cognitive decline had apparently become even more clear to those working most closely with him,' his memorandum stated. The 'investigation' appears designed to create a pretextual justification to nullify a wide range of official actions undertaken by the Biden administration. The White House's documents take pains to mention Biden's executive orders and judicial appointments as part of this alleged scheme. 'If his advisors secretly used the mechanical signature pen to conceal this incapacity, while taking radical executive actions all in his name,' the memorandum claimed, 'that would constitute an unconstitutional wielding of the power of the Presidency, a circumstance that would have implications for the legality and validity of numerous executive actions undertaken in Biden's name.' If someone forged Biden's signature on an official document that carried legal weight, that would indeed be a scandal and could be a criminal offense. But Trump's theory has a few flaws in it. For one thing, there is no evidence that any Biden officials took any actions without his approval or consent. Biden himself has also denied that it happened. 'I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations,' he said in a statement on Friday. 'Any suggestion that I didn't is ridiculous and false.' Trump's idea that a president could invalidate all of his predecessor's acts by claiming that predecessor was mentally incompetent at the time is also untenable, both practically or legally. There is no 'undo' button in the Constitution. A Democratic president could also do the same thing to the Trump administration's executive actions and judicial appointments upon taking office in 2029, perhaps even extending it to his first term. After all, Trump's own mental fitness is far from uncontested: He publicly defended himself from such claims in 2018 by boasting that he was a 'very stable genius.' For those reasons, Trump's own attempt to delegitimize his predecessor's administration would be unlikely to achieve any substantial legal goals. A Supreme Court where one-third of the justices were appointed by Trump is unlikely to agree that a mentally incompetent president's judicial appointees can be removed from the bench by executive fiat. As with Richard III's Titulus Regius, the memorandum's real effect may be as propaganda—grist for the content mills of right-wing media. That this is all arriving ahead of a summer simmering with bad economic headwinds is significant. Even so, it will be hard to distract from the damage wrought by Trump's own administration over the next four years.
