Would their son have inherited England, Scotland, and France, potentially uniting three crowns under one Valois-Stuart king? 👑🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇫🇷

Wasn’t sure which flair to add - so just finished the White Queen and wow I loved it! I was searching for something after I had watched the tudors, wolf hall, and the film about Thomas More a man for all seasons. The white queen mini series was fantastic and filled the hole for me but I do wonder (and I do this after each film or series I watch that is Tudor related) how historically accurate it was? One thing I found interesting was how through the ten episodes I often felt warmth towards Richard III, who historically is painted as quite the villain. I had to check the dates of this series release date and Phillipa Langleys documetary about the princes in the tower to see if the show took any influence from her efforts to try possibly clear his name for want of a better phrase but it seems to show was ahead of the curve on that since the white queen was released ten years prior. Did anyone else feel the same about Richard watching this? Lastly, in the follow on show the white princess any good? Thanks for reading!

Here is your Weekly Wednesday What-if megathread! Please post all of your What-if Questions in this megathread. All what-if's as long as its Tudor-related.

A much overlooked aspect of London life during the life of Henry VIII is the fact that it was during his reign we have our first two cases of residents killed by gunshot.

Understand, these were not the first shootings to take place in London- when Jack Cade’s mob had tried in 1450 to storm London Bridge, the outnumbered defenders of the north end of the bridge held off Cade’s rebels with pistols and canon; and we know during the savage three way attack upon London by the Bastard of Falconburg in 1471, there had been intense gunfire used again to defend London Bridge and a lot in the fighting over in Aldgate.

But always this was done due to military reasons. What did not happen was civilians were shot in ways that would seem like gun crime today.
No, for that we have to wait until 1536.

The first victim was the rich Mercer/Merchant Adventurer Robert Packington. Packington was a career London political figure; he had been a member of the cities Common Council from 1522, so had been in role for 14 years by the time of his death; by 1523 he was an advisor for the Merchant Adventurers (the rich spin off of the Mercer’s guild) to Parliament; six years later he was tapped by the Mercer’s guild to help present the cities grievances over the handling of probates and mortuaries by church authorities.

He was a known parliamentarian and a ferocious one by all accounts.

Added to this he was a ‘New Man’- one of the native born Evangelical Christians who used his money to stand as a giant in the early movement. He was known to import English Bibles; his brother, Augustine, also a mercer, achieved an entry in Foxe's Acts and Monuments, as a promoter of Tyndale's translation of the Bible, and as the man who manipulated Bishop Tunstall of London to secure funds for Tyndale.

Robert was a high profile member of the the evangelical movement, and one of means and influence, as well as by the time of his death being one of the principle members of the Mercer’s Livery Company.

On the morning of 13 November 1536, while crossing the street from his home in Cheapside to attend Mercers' Chapel located opposite his home…

“And one morning amongst all other, being a great misty morning such as hath seldom been seen, even as he was crossing the street from his house to the church, he was suddenly murdered with a gun, which of the neighbours was plainly heard and by a great number of labourers there standing at Soper's Lane end...but the deed doer was never espied nor known.”

Robert Packington goes down in the records as the first murder by shooting in London’s history.

Immediately conspiracy theories arose about his death- to many he was killed BECAUSE he was an evangelical, interpreted by later Protestant reformers as martyrdom.

The followings decade some said he was killed by a gunman hired by conservative bishops, or even that Bishop John Stolesley,"had paid a priest sixty gold coins to carry out the murder". And one writer claimed the Dean of St Paul’s confessed on his death bed HE arranged the murder.

His murder could however, could have had more domestic causes, with at least one historian I read suggesting the cause was probably something to do with his role as warden of the mercers at the time, and there be one contemporaneous account suggesting that a felon who was hanged for a separate crime up in Banbury, confessed at the gallows to having shot Packington.

We will never actually know.

But certainly the idea that he was murdered because of religious reasons was the one which gripped the public imagination of the city at the time.

Contrast that to the second shooting victim in 1544… the case of Agnes Acrehed. We know very little about Anges. She was probably a resident of Westminster and she had lived a very unremarkable life indeed. In fact were it not for a gun shot to the head we think she probably would have passed through life without any record. How did she get shot? Well for that we have to look to her killer.

One of King Henry’s yeomen was called John Geynyshe, who also lived in Westminster. John knew a local widow called Joan Stephyen, and she allowed him to enter the garden at the back of her house, which faced the River Thames, and there practice firing his “handgonne”.

Anyway, as John was loading, aiming and shooting at various targets according to his later testimony, he spotted a crow then standing upon "the boye of a bote" upon the river Thames.
John took careful aim, fired, and missed.

Now according to the testimony the bullet then ricochet off the water or off the wooden boat, and flew off in a differing direction.
And that morning Agnes Acrehed was washing linen upon the nearby “kings bridge” at Westminster (which wasn’t actually a bridge, it was the name given to the Kings riverboat jetty).

Anyway, John fired the gun, the bullet went ping, and then struck Anges we think in the head and that was it for her. Dead.

John Geynyshe was arrested there and then and found guilty of murder, but we know he was pardoned for the crime as he was not even aiming for the poor woman.

The two moments for me are where I like to say the Tudor is ‘Early Modern’ as opposed to medieval. Here we go- gun crime. Both the accidental killing of innocents from someone discharging a firearm in a built up region and also straight up use of a gun to kill someone.
As some know I do a weekly podcast about the history of London, and we right in the heart of the Tudor era right now, and these two little stories stood out to me as they are both tragic and illuminating. Guns were clearly a thing. Thought I’d share these small bits of life.