Daily history

Good morning,




Quote of the day:

“The fastest way to a man’s heart is through his chest.”

                       Roseanne Barr



Instead of the usual bad news of the day, I will send y’all one of the greatest love stories in history. It is the biography of Robert Dudley and then the regular history lesson.



                       Robert Dudley

                                 Earl of Leicester



This is the story of unrequited love between two people that were in love for most of their lives but were kept apart by the politics of Elizabethan England. Elizabeth stated that she would never marry because she was fearful that her powers would be diluted by a husband. The present day Prince Phillip of England is the husband of Queen Elizabeth II and is titled as Prince Consort.



Most contemporary historians believed that Robert Dudley and Elizabeth, the future Queen of England, were born on the same day, it was later determined that Robert was probably one year older. Robert was the son of John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, Duke of Northumberland and protector of England during the reign of Edward VI. Robert was the fifth child of thirteen. He first met Elizabeth when he was eight years old, probably in a royal classroom. They became good friends and their friendship lasted throughout both of their lives. He was certainly a match for Elizabeth intellectually but was not interested in the classics. He was more into mathematics, astronomy and astrology in addition to being a good athlete and a superb horseman. When speaking of Elizabeth later on he said that he knew her better than anyone, even from the time she was eight years old. He said that Elizabeth had always told him that she would never marry.



Robert married Amy Robsart in 1550 with Amy being the daughter of a Norfolk squire. Even thought people though they were in love, the marriage contract indicated otherwise. Normally daughters were not heirs to their father’s estate but Amy was the exception, she was an heiress making the marriage advantageous to both. The marriage ceremony between Robert and Amy was a glittering one with all the appropriate pomp and circumstance. The festivities were attended by Elizabeth and the Boy-King, Edward VI.



After Robert’s father tried to usurp the throne and place his sister-in-law Lady Jane Grey on the throne the shit hit the fan. This rebellion was quashed and Robert, his father and five of his brothers are imprisoned in the Tower of London in the Beauchamp tower awaiting trial. Elizabeth was also imprisoned in the Tower but in the Bell tower. The two wings were joined by a walkway and Robert and Elizabeth met frequently on this walkway and their friendship turned to love even though they were closely guarded. After all was said and done, Robert’s father John, Roberts brother Guilford and Lady Jane Grey had a meeting with a big guy with a big axe out on the lawn of the Tower. All the others were released.



Robert and his brother Henry go to France to fight on the behalf of the King of France, Phillip II. Henry was killed in this war. After returning to England Robert finds out that Elizabeth was in serious financial trouble and sells some of his lands and bails Elizabeth out and she never forgot Robert’s generosity. Elizabeth ascends to the throne of England in 1558 at the age of twenty and Roberts star began to rise. He was made the Master of the Queens Horse, a very prestigious position that required him to be in the presence of the Queen almost constantly. It was his function to plan her public appearances and personal entertainment. Robert was good at this because he and Elizabeth share the same love of drama and music. There was no doubt that he was the Queens favorite which automatically made him the most despised man in England out of envy. Within the first years, Elizabeth showered Robert with titles, among these was the Earl of Leicester, properties and money and spending more time with him than anyone else. Tongues wagged as to their intimacy, all assumed they were lovers. It was also said that Elizabeth was carrying Roberts child but this story was easily dismissed, but there was no doubt that they were deeply in love. They were bonded by knowing each other as children, had suffered imprisonment together, and each trusted and respected the other totally. Like any couple they occasionally argued, but Robert always spoke and treated Elizabeth with the respect that her position deserved.



By 1560 Robert was the most hated man in England and stayed that way until his death. No one had a good word to say about him except The Queen and her family. Elizabeth was an astute judge of character and it is impossible to think that she would not have detected any insincerity in Robert over their relationship of thirty years. There is no question the Robert loved her. Had the political circumstances been more favorable there is little question they would have been married. Privately she told Robert that she would marry no one else, but she couldn’t marry him. The biggest problem with the bar to their marriage was the circumstances of his wife’s death. She was found dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs with a broken neck and naturally everyone pointed their fingers at Robert and Elizabeth. For a long time people had been saying he and Elizabeth were planning Amy’s death so he could marry Elizabeth. This shadow of doubt plagued the two for the rest of their days making the birth of any of their children suspect if they had married. Amy was probably terminally ill with breast cancer or as it was called “malady of the breast”. In fact medical opinions of today suggest that the cancer had probably reached her spine and it was weakened to the point that any kind of pressure would have broken it. However, such medical knowledge was unknown in those days and all, including Robert, believed she was murdered. Robert waited for many years hoping Elizabeth would change her mind but she didn’t. At a gala celebration in 1575 in Warwick Castle, Robert formally asked for Elizabeth’s hand and as always she refused. So in 1578 Robert married the Queens cousin, Lettice Devereux, the Countess of Essex.



He may have well been in love with her because she was a reported stone fox but the real reason he married her was that she was pregnant and a family of the stature of the house of Essex demanded that he make an honest woman of her. Robert tried to keep the news of his marriage from the Queen but she found out anyway. In 1580 Lettice gave birth to a son also named Robert. The child was a sickly one and died at the age of four which devastated Robert. The death of this child almost assured the end to Robert’s lineage. He had a child by an affair with Lady Dudley Sheffield but illegitimate children could not be an heir. Lady Sheffield claimed that she and Robert were married in a secret ceremony but there was no evidence of it and Robert always denied it.



In 1588 Robert was put in charge of the land forces during the assault by the Spanish Armada but Robert was not a well man, probably suffering from stomach cancer, his days were numbered. He was on his way to Buxton to bathe in the supposed healing waters there but he never made it. He died at his house in Oxfordshire on September 4th, 1588. Upon hearing the news, Elizabeth locked her self in her bedroom and stayed for days. She kept the last letter from Robert in her safe until the end of her days. The letter follows:



Robert Dudley's last letter to Queen Elizabeth I

“I most humbly beseech your Majesty to pardon your poor old servant to be thus bold in sending to know how my gracious lady doth, and what ease of her late pain she finds, being the chiefest thing in the world I do pray for, for her to have good health and long life. For my own poor case, I continue still your medicine and find that [it] amends much better than any other thing that hath been given me. Thus hoping to find perfect cure at the bath, with the continuance of my wonted prayer for your Majesty's most happy preservation, I humbly kiss your foot. From your old lodging at Rycote, this Thursday morning, ready to take on my Journey, by Your Majesty's most faithful and obedient servant,

R. Leicester

Even as I had writ thus much, I received Your Majesty's token by Young Tracy.”

Evidently Elizabeth had sent Robert a gift.

It is a rumor that in Elizabeth’s last few days she could not speak and had the archbishop at her side holding her hand. Since she had no heir, everyone was waiting for her to name one. The archbishop went through a series of names and she would respond by squeezing his hand. It was determined that Elizabeth wanted James VI of Scotland to succeed her. When the archbishop mentioned the deceased Robert Dudley, Elizabeth squeezed his hand for a long time and a tear fell from her eye. But that is just a rumor. It has been reported that Elizabeth had another lover in the Earl of Essex. This is probably true by I prefer to remember her childhood friend and her adult lover as her most favorite, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester.

This date in history January 27




1863    On this date President Abraham Lincoln issues General War Order #1. He orders all US forces on land and sea to make an advance against the Confederate forces on February 22. Abe was fed up with the stalling tactics of General George B. McClellan and he was eager to get this conflict ended. Abe was neither military trained nor experienced so he rounded up some books on military tactics and read up on it. After this he decided that a simultaneous attack on all fronts would reveal the Confederate weaknesses and there they could concentrate their efforts. The philosophy was good but there were a host of reason why it would not work but he ordered the action anyway. The arrogant General McClellan called the order “amateurish” and ignored it and stayed encamped after February 22. However, US General Ulysses S. Grant in the Tennessee-Mississippi theatre did indeed begin a push against the Rebs and captured Fort Donelson and other forts on the Mississippi River. This action eventually led to Grant being able to isolate and capture Vicksburg, Mississippi. While all of this was going on Abe found out that his Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, had been unapologetically taking bribes and using his position for personal gain. Abe fired Simon and installed Edwin Stanton into that position where he remained for the remainder of the war. A little later Abe fires McClellan and puts US General Ambrose Burnside in his place. Ambrose lasted two months then Abe fired him and installed US General Joseph Hooker in his place. Even though Hooker was known to get into the sauce on a regular basis and allowed prostitutes to follow his troops (this is where the word “hooker” for a prostitute came from) he was not afraid to move his army and attack. This is what Abe wanted to see. It didn’t work however. Hooker was no match for CSA General Robert E. Lee and Abe had to fire him too.



1967    In 1960 US President John F. Kennedy has issued and order for the United States to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade and eventually NASA was born. NASA began a series of programs aimed at putting a man on the moon. The programs began with fits and starts and some failures but eventually progress was being made by leaps and bounds. Maybe too fast because on this date the spacecraft Apollo 1 was on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral with the crew aboard going through drills and exercises to be done once launched and a fire broke out and killed astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chafee. Examination revealed that it was an electrical short that had caused the fire but the real fault was the buildup of combustibles in the spacecraft. NASA engineers had ignored the possibility of a fire and plunged ahead recklessly. In spite of this tragedy, NASA was able to put a man on the moon with Apollo 8, Neil Armstrong commanding, in 1969. In all there were 17 Apollo missions and 6 visits to the moon.



1926    Scottish inventor John Baird demonstrates in London the first transmission and reception of a TV signal. It was a program about a red-haired housewife with a Cuban bandleader for a husband and their interplay with their landlord and his wife, just joking. Anyway, in 1932 the Radio Corporation of America demonstrates television using a cathode ray tube called an iconoscope created by a Russian inventor named Vladimir Zworykin. This invention made the picture much cleared than before. In 1936 the British Broadcasting Company began sporadic television broadcasts in high definition and in 1939 they began regular broadcasts. The first color set reached the public in 1954. In 1969 the head of the United States Federal Communication Commission, Newton Minnow, called television “a vast wasteland”. But things are much better today with shows like: The Simpsons, Wife Swap and American Idol. Hello Newton, where are you?



1975    On this date a Senate investigative committee headed by Idaho Senator Frank Church opens hearings on the actions of the FBI and the CIA. The committee comes to find out that the FBI had been conducting illegal surveillance on hundreds of thousands of Americans for years. The also found out that the CIA had been fostering or participating in the murder of elected officials worldwide. It was only two years before that the CIA had engineered the murder of the democratically elected president of Chile Salvador Allende and the military takeover of the government by a Chilean General that was sympathetic to the US, at least as long as the money kept rolling in. The real reason for the murder of Allende was he had threatened to nationalize the copper mines held by the American company Kennecott Copper and ITT also. He also had open trade with North Korea and Cuba among others, all United States enemies. Not only that, they had ignored a presidential directive to destroy their vast supply of poisons. It is ugly out there, ya’ll.



1978    On this date a man named Richard Chase is captured near Sacramento, California for the murder of Evelyn Mirith and Daniel Madden. He had sexually mutilated Evelyn with a knife before stabbing her to death and had shot Daniel in the head. The strange part of this is that Richard removed some of their organs, filled them with blood and took them to the house. The people that knew him were not surprised because a few years before Richard were found out in the middle of a pasture covered with the blood of the cow he had just killed. When the police searched Richard’s house they found blood in containers throughout the house. It appeared that Richard had been drinking blood for some time. He went to trial for murder and even though he was obviously insane, the jury found him guilty of murder and sentenced him to life without parole. On the day after Christmas in 1980, Richard was found dead of a suicide in his San Quentin prison cell....... and stay gone.



1951    On this date United States detonated the first nuclear device, fueled by fissionable material made at the Hanford, Washington facility, on the recently acquired Nevada test site. The blast was so large that the flash was seen in San Francisco. The previous tests had been done at the test site at Los Alamos, New Mexico including the very first nuclear explosion in history in July of 1945. The device was known as “Little Boy”. The only other nuclear devise in existence at that time was also an American invention known as “Fat Man”. This bomb was dropped on Nagasaki without testing because the scientists were sure it would work and they were very, very right.



Born today:

1807    American author Henry Wordsworth Longfellow. He said “It take less time to do something right than it does to explain why you did something wrong.” Obviously Hank was a married man.



1847    English actress Ellen Terry. She said “No matter the skill of the actress can overcome the loss of youth.” Time marches on, Ellen....Damn it!



1886    US Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. He said “The layman’s constitutional view is that anything he likes is constitutional and anything he doesn’t like is unconstitutional.” Yeah, so what is wrong with that, Hugo?



1897   US singer Marian Anderson. She said “So long as you hold somebody down, a part of you must be down there with them, meaning that you cannot soar as far as you otherwise might.” That sounds like my third ex-wife.



1902    US writer John Steinbeck. He said “Writers are somewhere between clowns and trained seals.” Steinbeck gave some of the best literature ever written and he received many awards for it. He gave us The Grapes of Wrath and Travels with Charlie among many others. He is no longer with us and it is our loss.



1912    English writer Lawrence Durrell. He said “All culture corrupts, but French culture corrupts absolutely.” My sentiments exactly Larry.



1913    US writer Irwin Shaw. When speaking of American football he said “If they armed the players, there would not be a stadium big enough to hold all the crowds.” I like the idea of men armed with ice picks against hungry lions.



1930    US actress and wife of Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward. She said “Sexiness wears this and beauty fades, but to be married to a man that makes you laugh every day, now that is a real treat.” Joanne went to high school right here in good old Greenpatch for a while.



1932    English-borne actress Elizabeth Taylor. I have been in love with Liz ever since I saw her in National Velvet. She said “The problem with people with no vices is there is a good chance they will have many irritating virtues”. There is little doubt that Liz has a plethora of vices. She is a skank, no doubt about it.



Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow