I know my fellow needleworkers would like some more details and up close pictures, but they seem to be hard to come by! At least there are plans for the dress to go on public display. So here are some links I collected, including some pictures and interviews with the embroiderers who worked on the dress.

Royal wedding: Dress embroiderers were kept in the dark

Revealed: Kate’s ‘secret meetings’ with dress designer in Henry VIII’s favourite palace

Royal wedding: the team of women who worked in secret to create Kate Middleton’s dress and Related images

Update: The announcement has now been made about the dress going on display this summer at Buckingham Palace. You can read more at the Royal Collection website.

Queen thanks Yeomen of the Guard on 500th anniversary of Henry VII’s death

The Queen expressed her thanks to the Yeomen of the Guard as she honoured the founder of the famous royal bodyguards.

More than 70 Yeomen – resplendent in their distinctive red and gold tunics, large white ruffled collars, scarlet stockings and flat brimmed black Tudor hats – gathered in Westminster Abbey in tribute to King Henry VII.

Henry VII created the Queen’s Body Guard of the Yeomen of the Guard in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth.

To mark the 500th anniversary of his death, the Queen placed a posy at his tomb in the Abbey’s Lady Chapel.

Full article

From the BBC:

Prince Charles may have only recently bought his first home in Wales, but its royal connections go back centuries, an historian has discovered.

The original owner of Llwynywermod in Carmarthenshire was related to the second wife of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn.

Mark Baker, of Prestatyn, Denbighshire, unravelled the history of what was once one of Wales’ finest homes.
…
“I have uncovered that [the house] goes back to about the 13th or 14th Centuries when it was owned by relatives of Anne Boleyn, Henry V111′s second wife.

“And the Griffies-Williams family in the early 18th century were quite close to the royals and received a baronetcy.
…
Mr Baker said the house’s renaissance only began about 10 years ago when the previous owner John and Patricia Hegarty bought the farm and land for £352,000.

They began a restoration project before selling the estate to the Duchy of Cornwall in 2006.

Mr Baker said that now only the medieval kitchen and about 60% of the walls of the original mansion of the estate remained, but he hoped it could be restored under royal ownership.

“It really is one of the lost houses of Wales,” he said.

Full article

From The Guardian:

Downing Street has drawn up plans to end the 300-year-old exclusion of Catholics from the throne. The requirement that the succession automatically pass to a male would also be reformed, making it possible for a first born daughter of Prince William to become his heir.

Full article

Top o’ the tiara to Jean for the link

The reason I say “slightly” off-topic, instead of just plain off-topic is that Elizabeth II is a descendent of Henry VII. Okay, maybe that’s stretching it, but it was a good opportunity for me to finally put up the big genealogical tree from William the Conqueror to Elizabeth II that has been rotting on my thumbdrive forever. I meant to put this up ages ago but it got lost in the shuffle. You can see the file here (120K jpg).

I am hoping that this is the first of many of these I’ll put together in the future. I had always wanted to try my hand at making my own charts in Photoshop (instead of trying to mark them up in HTML) so people could download or print them as references. A lot of books will put the basic one (Henry VII to Elizabeth), but there are other families that might be useful, so maybe I’ll get some of those up too. I also want to redo a couple of the images I have on the site now, which were scanned from books. I am pretty sure there are a couple of errors in the one of the Descent of Henry VIII’s wives from Edward I, so I might redo (and slightly simplify) that one. I also would like I better one of the descent from Henry VII to James VI/I.

For now, back to sorting through Church and nobility titles… I’ve been doing a big update on that section and it is taking for bloody ever!