#Thomas Bedford

[white-cat-of-doom]

A high-five and another quick change between two Toms.

Domenico Ramelli as Pouncival and Thomas Bedford as Tumblebrutus, Cast 12 of the Oasis of the Seas.

[blueberry-bubbles130]

We are back for another historical hypothetical folks!

And this time it is:

Think of it as a Midsomer Murders/Clue style thing.

I don’t have an answer for who the victim is. You can choose anyone you want, for the victim.

[une-sanz-pluis]

Despite their superficial similarities (especially in martial terms) the brothers all had differing characters, priorities and abilities, determined to some extent by their order of birth as well as their upbringing. It was important for Henry to direct his brothers in ways that made the best use of their skills, but without eclipsing his own achievements. Ambitious younger brothers could otherwise pose the same problem as ambitious sons, all the more so as long as Henry remained unmarried and childless. It says something for Henry's management skills that he was able to keep all his brothers in a harmonious and productive balance with himself at the apex. Henry gave them all substantial roles in his affairs, which allowed them to exercise power and to distinguish themselves in a fashion that earned them great praise from contemporaries. These subsidiary yet crucial roles were both a reflection of their abilities and a means of keeping them occupied. All three were evidently prepared to acknowledge Henry as their superior (although Clarence may not have been entirely happy to do so). An important additional factor is the admiration and affection in which Henry was certainly held by both Bedford and Gloucester. Moreover, the brothers' status and their achievements on Henry's behalf meant that, although subordinate to him, they were pre-eminent over all the other men at his court. All three brothers provided an invaluable extension of Henry's kingship, and, crucially, this was in conspicuous contrast to the squabbling male members of the French royal family at the same time, of which the English royals took full advantage. The extent to which the balance between the brothers was maintained by Henry's presence is revealed after his death, when previously unobservable personal and political rivalries between Bedford and Gloucester came to the fore. It seems that while both brothers were willing to be Henry's auxiliary neither was prepared to afford the same concession to the other in the absence of his dominating presence.

Katherine J. Lewis, Kingship and Masculinity in Late Medieval England (Routledge, 2013)

[heartofstanding]

Top 5 memeable Lancasterling moments

Philippa defending Copenhagen from the Hansa while her husband apparently prayed in an abbey.

That time Hal sent John the bitchiest letter, making John the patron saint of "everyday I get emails".

Humphrey forever losing his wives. 😭

Hal's #1 problem solving hack being "guess I'll die" 😭😭

Hal getting shot in the face with an arrow and living.

Honourable mentions: John's nose and the bowl-cuts (John and Hal's and Humphrey's "IDK I'm bald???" cut) which are not really "moments" but are memed to hell and back.

I misread this in the notification as the most memorable Lancasterling moments so also have them:

Hal standing over a fallen Humphrey at Agincourt to defend him.

That time all four brothers wore matching outfits as grown adults.

John and Humphrey's slapfight over the conquest of France in 1433, iirc.

Blanche, Philippa and honorary girl Humphrey getting their heads shaved, presumably due to lice.

Mary dressing baby Hal and Thomas in matching outfits, if her accounts can be believed.

[joanofnavarre]

The children of Henry IV & Mary de Bohun and whom they were named after.

[mychameleondays]

Elvis Costello And The Attractions: Punch The Clock

F-Beat ZL25464/XXLP 19/ZL 70026

Released: August 5, 1983

[camyfilms]

ROBIN HOOD 1973

Rob? Tsk tsk tsk. That's a naughty word. We never rob. We just sort of borrow a bit from those who can afford it.

[cultfaction]

Cult Faction Podcast Ep. 87: C.H.U.D.

C.H.U.D, directed by Douglas Cheek, goes under the spotlight this week alongside our usual rants and hissy fits about film, tv and popular culture! https://cultfaction.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Episode-87.mp3

[heartofstanding]

I would gladly sit through your 35 minute presentation on Hal and then do my own.

(also I swear to god John's one biographer would talk about how messy he was in France and then call him boring and I'm like HOW DID YOU COME TO THAT CONCLUSIONS. HOW.)

Everything you said about Thomas is making me rotate him in my mind at about 5000% more speed than usual. He's so interesting and so under-explored, I really need to write something about him.

#this is why in the modern AU Henry thinks Thomas is living the perfect life and everyone else is just like 'Sir that is a mental illness'

g o d. I need to be reading this modern au already. I think Henry's favouritism is really damaging to both Hal and Thomas - Thomas doesn't really "get" to have a identity outside of his father's mirror/his father's favourite.

JUST realised I had not inflicted this terrible, no-good, very bad question on you so here you go:

Rank the Lancasterlings in terms of your interest. 😈

How dare you come into my house on this beautiful day and ask me to Henry IV my children

Hal, naturally. I want to lock him in a lab and study him. All I think about is how completely normal he is. Hyperfixated so hard that when I was 17 I made my class sit through a 35 minute presentation on why he is the Most Interesting.

Philippa. Extra tormenting because we basically have the cliff notes of her life with no elaboration. It's a bit of a double edged sword because if we knew more about her there would probably be an insufferable amount of girlbossification, but Katherine Hepburn would probably have played her in a biopic so really we would be winning (also she actually did what a lot of girlboss history claims their favourite historical figures did, so you know).

Humphrey. He is the Real Housewife of Medieval England, and I love mess. Only has room in his brain for books so he lets his junk do all of the decision making. Somehow ended up the most tragic of the doomed siblings because all of his brothers are dead. He is so dumb and it's fascinating.

John. I love him, but the payoff of being the competent brother TM is that even though he's not boring, everyone talks about him in a boring way. He gets slot into dull but effective, like he's the accountant of the family I'm come from multiple generations of accountants I'm allowed to make that joke so all of the interesting details about him get sort of hidden away. Like, tell me more about the mess he was dealing with in the north, and the time he and Thomas got arrested for brawls, and his illegitimate kids; not the alchemy obsession that seems to be pulled out of thin air.

Blanche. The unfortunate byproduct of her dying so young with not much evidence surviving about her is that there will never be much to know. But I want to know. I want her letters and her diary and what she thought of her situation and whether she was angry at all about being married off so young she probably didn't even know what it meant.

Thomas. The problem with Thomas is there's a lot there, but no one ever mentions it. There's probably loads of juice to him, except it gets warped into "He's Henry's favourite and then just creates problems until he dies" and that's just not a narrative that lends itself to further study. I didn't start getting interested in Thomas until I read fic from his point of view that really delved into how much it would mess with your head to be the favourite child in this family. Like obviously being the only son your dad actually likes (allegedly), being the one he takes with him into exile, the only one allowed to get married, the only one trusted to go to France-- but not the one who is going to be king-- would completely mess with your head. I can totally believe him signing up for the assassination plot, and feeling like he needed to prove himself in an Agincourt-like battle to the detriment of reason, because the guy basically got his entire identity turned into being Henry IV's perfect son. He's sporty-- so is his father. He's a lady killer-- so is his father. He's good in battle-- so is his father. Even after Henry's death he doesn't get to form his own identity, and the identity he has steadily gets chipped away. The psychological rammifications of that could be fascinating, but historians either only praise him out of the belief that he's a nuisance to Hal, or basically ignore him entirely.

[danielarlngton]

A Huguenot, on St. Bartholomew's Day, Refusing to Shield Himself from Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic Badge (1851–52) is the full, exhibited title of a painting by John Everett Millais, and was produced at the height of his Pre-Raphaelite period. It was accompanied, at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1852, with a long quote reading: "When the clock of the Palais de Justice shall sound upon the great bell, at daybreak, then each good Catholic must bind a strip of white linen round his arm, and place a fair white cross in his cap. —The order of the Duke of Guise."

It depicts a pair of young lovers and is given a dramatic twist because the woman, who is Catholic, is attempting to get her beloved, who is Protestant, to wear the white armband declaring allegiance to Catholicism. The young man firmly pulls off the armband at the same time that he gently embraces his lover, and stares into her pleading eyes. The incident refers to the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre on August 24, 1572, when around 3,000 French Protestants (Huguenots) were murdered in Paris, with around 20,000 massacred across the rest of France. A small number of Protestants escaped from the city through subterfuge by wearing white armbands. Millais had initially planned simply to depict lovers in a less dire predicament, but supposedly had been persuaded by his Pre-Raphaelite colleague William Holman Hunt that the subject was too trite. After seeing Giacomo Meyerbeer's opera Les Huguenots of 1836 at Covent Garden, which tells the story of the massacre, Millais adapted the painting to refer to the event. In the opera, Valentine attempts unsuccessfully to get her lover Raoul to wear the armband. The choice of a pro-Protestant subject was also significant because the Pre-Raphaelites had previously been attacked for their alleged sympathies to the Oxford Movement and to Catholicism. Millais painted the majority of the background near Ewell in Surrey in the late summer and autumn of 1851, while he and Hunt were living at Worcester Park Farm. It was from a brick wall adjoining an orchard. Some of the flowers depicted in the scene may have been chosen because of the contemporary interest in the so-called language of flowers. The blue Canterbury Bells at the left, for example, can stand for faith and constancy. Returning to London after the weather turned too cold to work out-of-doors in November, he painted in the figures: the face of the man was from that of Millais's family friend Arthur Lemprière, and the woman was posed for by Anne Ryan. The painting was exhibited with Ophelia and his portrait of Mrs. Coventry Patmore (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1852, and helped to change attitudes towards the Pre-Raphaelites. Tom Taylor wrote an extremely positive review in Punch. It was produced as a reproductive print by the dealer D. White and engraved in mezzotint by Thomas Oldham Barlow in 1856. This became Millais's first major popular success in this medium, and the artist went on to produce a number of other paintings on similar subjects to serve a growing middle class market for engravings. These include The Order of Release, 1746 (Tate, London), The Proscribed Royalist, 1651 (Lord Lloyd-Webber Collection), and The Black Brunswicker (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight). All were successfully engraved. There are smaller watercolor versions of the picture in The Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford, the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, and a reduced oil replica in the Lord Lloyd-Webber Collection, all by Millais.

[white-cat-of-doom]

Lance Barker, Coricopat and dance captain (and returning performer) in Cast 13 shares his whirlwind last couple of weeks.

Twin things with Ashlyn Fenn as Tantomile.

With the Gumbie Cat, Emma Brynn Cooper.

Out of costume with Cast 12 alumni Adam Hearn covering Mistoffelees, Noelani Neal as Cassandra, and Thomas Bedford as Tumblebrutus.

The entire Cast 13 and the progressive expansion to include the creative team and crew.

[blueberry-bubbles130]

Here’s a more grounded historical hypothetical before we get into the truly ridiculous ones:

As always there will be rounds to this poll so I will try to cover more historical figures from around this era. I just tend to start around the War of the Roses/The Tudors because they’re my favourite time periods.

[une-sanz-pluis]

The thing that strikes me as extraordinary about Henry V and his brothers is how there's no real comparative case to make about English kings who were universally supported by their brothers. Edward II alienated his brothers and stepmother by favouring his favourites at their expense. Edward III's only brother, John of Eltham, died young and Edward was rumoured to have murdered him. Of the "three sons of York", George Duke of Clarence attempted to usurp his brother and was later executed for treason by Edward IV while Richard III usurped his brother's sons and had them declared bastards. The Devil's Brood was, well, the Devil's Brood.

Yet whatever could be said for the rivalry between Henry V and Thomas, Duke of Clarence in their father's reign, or the fractious relationship between John, Duke of Bedford and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester in their nephew's reign, they worked as a team. They were all loyal to Henry V and he rewarded their loyalty. There is no sign of faction or discontent between them.

[heartofstanding]

May I ask for your top 5 lancasterling cringefail moments?

Humphrey's entire political career. I started thinking about various Humphrey incidents and honestly the whole list could just be his antics so I just grouped them together. The best thing he did for his political career was dying and being presented as a martyr.

The Battle of Bauge. I'm always crying about this but it's very cringefail of Thomas to ignore everyone going "um don't start a battle dude, bad choice" and going "I'm going to do it anyway" and then fucking snuffing it and becoming the exemplar of "don't fucking do that" 😭😭😭

John staging re-enactments of John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy's assassination... for Burgundy's own son. All in the name of keeping the Anglo-Burgundian alliance going but just lol. LOL.

The Siege of Aberystwyth. Hal's big fancy symbolic treaty - gets his buddy Richard Courtenay to come all the way from Oxford to Aberystwyth with relics that everyone swears on for a non-violent transfer, buggers off with all the glory and then Owain Glyndwr just fucking re-takes it.

The March to Calais. No one actually thinks of this is cringefail because it resulted in the victory at Agincourt but it is very cringefail to set off on a march you think it is going to take a week, probably not intending to face battle, end up going through some Heart of Darkness shit, run out of food, suspect the French to be regrouping for another attack so you can't even relax after your great victory and have to hot-foot it out of the country.

Honourable mentions:Thomas missing the Battle of Agincourt because he either had dysentery or was set home in disgrace for disagreeing with Hal, Humphrey's marriage to Jacqueline of Hainault with the intention of becoming Count of Hainault, Holland and Zeeland, Hal turning up in London with a massive crowd of people and gaining absolutely nothing but a "I guess I won't kill you but everyone else can keep slandering you" from his father, John marrying Jacquetta of Luxembourg to shore up his alliance with Philip the Good and pissing him off instead, Humphrey announcing his intentions to do a very big, very, very expensive campaign in France and being shouted down, Humphrey claiming all the credit for relieving the siege of Calais when it was already relieved, Thomas arriving in France to lead a campaign in support of the Armagnacs against the Burgundians on his father's behalf only to find out upon the arrival the Armagnacs have made peace and want him to bugger off home without getting paid...

[eddyoffrance]

Just found this miniature of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester from Capgrave's book and he really resembles his brother John a lot.