Author: Boadicea

On This Day – 19th April 2005

Christ's Representative?

On the 19th of April 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected as the 256th Pope,  head of the world’s 1.1 billion Roman Catholics. Although there have been eight German Popes, only three have been from the territory of present day Germany. The last German Pope was Pope Victor II (1055 – 1057).  Ratzinger was the oldest Pope to have been elected since Clement XII in 1730. He took the name Benedict, meaning ‘Blessing’.

For more than 20 years Ratzinger was head of the congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican – the Vatican’s guardian of orthodoxy, that was once called the Inquisition.  It has been suggested that his denunciation of all deviations from traditional church teachings as ‘trickery and error’ may have been the decisive factor in his winning the Papacy.

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Murder and Queensland University

Patrick Mayne

Patrick Mayne was born in Cookstown, County Tyrone, in about 1824. Patrick left his native Ireland and arrived in Australia in 1841. By 1846 he was in Moreton Bay, Queensland, working as a butcher at the boiling down works, Kangaroo Point. Moreton Bay is about 45 km north of Brisbane, and in 1841 was still a penal colony and a pretty rough place.

In 1848 a group of men, including Mayne and a sawyer called Robert Cox, were drinking in a hotel called the Bush Inn. Cox had just been paid £350 for a load of cedar and everyone knew that he had that money.  Patrick and a few of his friends returned to the inn after mid-night to find Cox and were told that he was drunk and had left.
The next morning, a man rowing up the river at 7 a.m. saw the legs and loins of a man floating in the water. It took another hour to find the upper part of the body in long grass. Eventually the head was found, propped up so it would look at whoever found it – and then, horror upon horrors, the entrails were found draped over the well behind the hotel. It probably was Brisbane’s most bizarre murder. The cook from the hotel was arrested for the theft of the money and the murder, tried, convicted and hung.

On This Day – 7th April 1739

Turpin Pushing Woman into a Fire

On the 7th of April 1739, Dick Turpin, highwayman, was hanged at York.  Some articles on the internet give the date as the 10th or even the 19th of April. However, the account of his trial shows that he was tried on the 22nd of March 1739 and executed on Saturday the 7th of April. No messing around with ‘Appeals’ in those days…

Richard Turpin was baptised on the 21st of September 1705 in Hempstead,  Essex. He was the son of John Turpin, a small farmer and some-time inn-keeper.  Dick was apprenticed to a butcher in Whitechapel, which then was still a village on the outskirts of London. He completed his apprenticeship, married and opened a butcher’s shop in Buckhurst Hill.  Wiki says that Dick married an Elizabeth Millington, but the Newgate Calendar, published about 1760, gave the lady’s surname as Palmer. I rather think that Wiki is correct.

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On This Day – 3rd April 1042

Coronation Edward the Confessor

On the 3rd of April 1042 Edward the Confessor was crowned in Winchester.

Edward was born in about 1003. He was the oldest son of Ethelred II (The Unready) and his second wife, Emma sister of Richard II of Normandy.  Ethelred’s name means ‘well advised’, while the epithet ‘Unready’ meant exactly the opposite –  ‘ill advised’.

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Juana Queen of Castile, Aragon, Sicily and Naples

Juana

Sometimes, something or someone catches my attention and I would want to know more, much more. Don’t ask me why this particular lady caught my attention, but she did. She wasn’t English, although she visited England once. She was the third child and second daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, the Catholic Monarchs of Spain and the sister of Catherine of Aragon. She died in 1555 in a windowless room in the castle of Tordesillas. Her name was Juana.

Google Juana and you will find that she is known as Juana la Loca, the insane queen of Castile. I would refute that, and assert that she was the victim of powerful and ambitious men: her husband, Philip the Handsome, her father Ferdinand, and her son, Charles V Holy Roman Emperor.

Juana was born in 1479 in Toledo. Little is known of Juana’s childhood, she was too far removed from the throne to be given much importance. One chronicler said she was the only one of the family who lacked physical charm, whilst another said that she was the beauty of the family. They all noted her precocity and were unanimous in their praise of her intelligence. She outshone her siblings being especially gifted in languages and music. Isabella and Ferdinand delighted to show her talents to visitors, but it was obvious that she did not like such attention. She was, it is claimed, aloof, subject to moods, melancholia and drawn to solitude. Unlike the rest of her family who were prolific writers, none of Juana’s letters, if she wrote any, have survived.  However, most of her recorded comments show a sharp-wit tinged with scepticism and an independence of mind. Continue reading “Juana Queen of Castile, Aragon, Sicily and Naples”

On This Day – 24th March 1603

On the 24th of March 1603 Elizabeth I died at Richmond Palace. It was the eve of the annunciation of the Virgin Mary,  an appropriate day for the Virgin Queen to die, and, according, to the Julian Calendar in use at the time, it was the last day of the year 1602.

In the late winter of 1602/3 Elizabeth was feeling unwell. She had caught a chill after walking out in the cold winter air, and complained of a sore throat as well as aches and pains. “I am not well” she declared, but refused the administrations of her doctors.  She also refused to rest in bed and stood for hours on end, occasionally just sitting in a chair. Her condition became worse and her ladies-in-waiting spread cushions across the floor. She lay on the floor for nearly four days – mostly in complete silence and eventually grew so weak that when her servants insisted on making her more comfortable in her bed she was unable to argue.  Contemporaries thought that she would have recovered had she fought against her illness, but she was did not want to. She was old, she was tired, and she was lonely.  As her condition deteriorated, Archbishop Whitgift (her favorite of all her Archbishops of Canterbury) was called to her side, and the Queen clung tight to his hand. When he spoke to her of getting better, she made no response, but when he spoke to her of the joys of Heaven, she squeezed his hand contentedly.  By this time she was beyond speech and could only communicate with gestures. She finally fell into a deep sleep from which she did not wake. Continue reading “On This Day – 24th March 1603”