Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Great Britain Read Online Free PDF Page B

remained open ever since. The small churchyard contains two remarkable graves. The first is that of the former poet laureate Sir John Betjeman (1906–1984) who loved Trebetherick. The second is that of Fleur Lombard (1974–1996) the first female fire-fighter to die on peacetime active service while tackling a fire which arose from an arson attack in Bristol. She was posthumously awarded the Queen’s Gallantry Medal.

KINGS, QUEENS AND PRINCES
    These islands have had more than their share of colourful rulers. Kings, queens and princes have followed one another over the centuries in a rich tapestry of inheritance, invasion, war and murder – within which truth has often been interwoven with myth. Regal or roguish, here are some of the more celebrated and notorious royals.
Murderer Assassinated by Shakespeare
The Princes in the Tower
    S ince William the Conqueror there have been 41 monarchs of Great Britain, including the present Queen Elizabeth II. They include one dual monarchy (William and Mary, who reigned from 1689 until William’s death in 1702), and two kings who were never crowned: Edward V, one of the murdered ‘Princes in the Tower’; and Edward VIII who abdicated in December 1936 after reigning for less than a year. However, some of the coronations which did take place were, to say the least, eventful.
    The Princes in the Tower were almost certainly murdered, probably on the orders of their uncle Richard III. Other candidates have been largely eliminated because Richard III had the unparalleled misfortune of having his character assassinated by William Shakespeare in one of his most memorable plays,
Richard
III. However the princes did not disappear completely. During the reign of Henry VII, who defeated Richard III at the battle of Bosworth in 1485, young men occasionally appeared claiming to be one of the princes or a close relative and thus, by some people’s reckoning, the rightful king of England. In 1491 one of these appeared in Cork and announced that he was Richard, Duke of York, the younger brother of Edward V. He was recognized by some European monarchs who were enemies of Henry VII and landed in Cornwall in 1497. His rebellion swiftly petered out and Henry spared his life when the impostor confessed that he was really Perkin Warbeck, born in Tournai, France. He was sent to the Tower but escaped. Henry, by now thoroughly fed up with him, had him hanged at Tyburn. A more comical pretender was Lambert Simnel, son of an Oxford tradesman, who in 1487 claimed to be Richard III’s nephew and was actually crowned as Edward VI in Dublin. Manipulated by others who hoped to gain by making him king, he gathered an invading army which was defeated near Newark. Henry VII, realising that he was a dupe, pardoned him and gave him a job in the royal kitchens where he lived out an uneventful life.
Chariots of Ire
The revolting Boadicea
    B oudicca was the wife of Prasutagus, ruler of the Iceni tribe of the area now known as East Anglia who had ruled as a nominally independent ally of Rome. He left his kingdom jointly to his daughters and the Roman Emperor but when he died his will was ignored and oppressive taxes were imposed on the Iceni. When Boudicca protested the Roman governor Paulinus had Boudicca flogged and her daughters were raped by Roman slaves. In AD 60, while Paulinus was leading a campaign in Anglesey, Boudicca led the Iceni in rebellion. They destroyed the Roman city of Camulodunum (Colchester) and routed a Roman legion which was sent to suppress the uprising. Londinium (London) and Verulamium (St Albans) swiftly followed, razed to the ground, with many thousands of Romano-British subjects perishing in the mayhem. Paulinus gathered his forces and overcame those of Boudicca in a battle which was known as the Battle of Watling Street and was probably fought somewhere near Wroxeter in Shropshire. The crisis caused panic in Rome and prompted Nero to consider withdrawing all Roman forces from Britain but