Is this proof the Virgin Queen was an imposter in drag?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk ^ | 8 June 2013 | Christopher Stevens

[BBell]

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.

The king, Henry VIII, was due at any hour. He was travelling from London, in great discomfort — for the 52-year-old monarch was grossly overweight and crippled by festering sores — to visit his daughter, Elizabeth.

The young princess had been sent there that summer from the capital to avoid an outbreak of plague. But she had fallen sick with a fever and, after weeks of bleeding, leeches and vomiting, her body was too weak to keep fighting. The night before the king’s arrival, his favourite daughter, the only child of his marriage to Anne Boleyn, had been dangerously ill. In the morning, Elizabeth lay dead.

Elizabeth’s governess, Lady Kat Ashley, and her guardian, Thomas Parry, had good reason to fear telling the king this awful news. It would cost them their lives. Four of Henry’s children had died in infancy and, of the survivors, one — Edward — was a sickly boy of five and the other an embittered, unmarried woman in her late 20s.

The ten-year-old Elizabeth was Tudor England’s most valuable child in many ways. She could surely be married to a French or Spanish prince to seal an international alliance — and her own children would secure the

[Eva]

I never thought about that.

[Sherman Logan]

Now she was dead, and when the king discovered it, Parry and Lady Ashley would surely be executed. Their sole duty had been to keep the princess safe: failure was treason. ... 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.

Oh, nonsense.

Royal children died all the time. Like everybody else's kids. AFAIK, there is no incident in English history where the child's guardians were executed for it.

Female traitors were not executed in this way, out of respect for modesty. They were burned alive instead.

[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
Thanks BBell. Shocking new theory about Elizabeth I unearthed in historic manuscripts To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

[Condor51]

'She described herself as a Virgin Queen, and vowed she would never take a husband, even if the Emperor of Spain offered her .. his oldest son.'

Well heck, who can blame her?

She knew that the moment they were married he'd bring his whole dang family over --- and there goes England.

[ought-six]

My mother was English.

[SunkenCiv]

I was remiss at the time this was pinged to not point out that this Bisley Boy story showed up 40+ years ago in National Geographic, in an article about the Cotswolds, probably I read it in the compilation hardcover "This England".