"The bones of Elizabeth I, Good Queen Bess, lie mingled with those of her sister, Bloody Mary, in a single tomb at Westminster Abbey. But are they really royal remains — or evidence of the greatest conspiracy in English history? If that is not the skeleton of Elizabeth Tudor, the past four centuries of British history have been founded on a lie. And according to a controversial new book, the lie began on an autumn morning 470 years ago, when panic swept through a little group of courtiers in a manor house in the Cotswold village of Bisley in Gloucestershire."
To cut to the chase, The not so warm and fuzzy Henry VIII was coming to visit his daughter Elizabeth- who in fact was dead. The problem was her governess and guardian would most certainly face the King's wrath for "letting" his heir pass away. Here's an example:
"They would be bound and dragged through the mud for a mile to the scaffold. There they would be hanged, cut down and disembowelled. Their entrails would be hauled from their bodies and held in front of their faces as they died, and then their limbs would be hacked off and displayed on spikes, to be picked bare by the birds."No walk in the park to be sure and compounding their problems, there were no comparable young female matches in the village to Elizabeth, but - you guessed it. There was a boy from a local family called Neville. He was a gawky, angular youth a year or so younger than Elizabeth, who had been the princess’s companion and fellow pupil for the past few weeks. And with no time to look further afield for a stand-in, Parry and Lady Ashley took the desperate measure of forcing the boy to don his dead friend’s clothes. The deception worked and the two started in earnest to train the boy to be a princess.
My only comment , where's the problem here with Princess training? The village kid probably always wanted to be a princess like most of us. Unlike most of us though, we didn't all go on to be queens!
I've teased you enough with the story, go here for more.
