But here I am afraid I will have to turn my Sherlock eye upon Sherlock himself, showing that the Arthur Conan Doyle stories—though clever and entertaining—are not always what they seem.
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View full-sizeDownload Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle KStJ, DL (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was a British writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are milestones in the field of crime fiction. Doyle was a prolific writer; other than Holmes stories, his works include fantasy and science fiction stories about Professor Challenger, and humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard, as well as plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction, and historical novels. One of Doyle's early short stories, "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" (1884), helped to popularize the mystery of the Mary Celeste.
I have no intention of ruining the stories for you, I hope.
I have read them over and over since I was a boy and have enjoyed the old BBC TV adaptations even more in some ways, perhaps.
Certainly, Jeremy Brett's brilliant embodiment of Holmes shall never be bettered, and some of the episodes are equally well directed.
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View full-sizeDownload Peter Jeremy William Huggins (3 November 1933 – 12 September 1995), known professionally as Jeremy Brett, was an English actor. He played fictional detective Sherlock Holmes in four Granada TV series from 1984 to 1994 in all 41 episodes. His career spanned from stage to television and film, to Shakespeare and musical theatre. He also played the smitten Freddy Eynsford-Hill in the 1964 Warner Bros. production of My Fair Lady.
I would much rather watch them than the pathetic modernizations we have been assaulted with in the past decade, including the wretched Cumberbatch*
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View full-sizeDownload Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch CBE (born 19 July 1976) is an English actor. Known for his work on screen and stage, he has received various accolades, including a BAFTA Award, a Primetime Emmy Award and a Laurence Olivier Award, in addition to nominations for two Academy Awards and four Golden Globes. In 2014, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and in 2015, he was appointed a CBE for services to performing arts and charity. Cumberbatch studied drama at the Victoria University of Manchester and obtained a Master of Arts in classical acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He began acting in Shakespearean theatre productions before making his West End debut in Richard Eyre's revival of Hedda Gabler in 2005. Since then, he has starred in Royal National Theatre productions of After the Dance (2010) and Frankenstein (2011), winning the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor for the latter. In 2015, he played the title role in Hamlet at the Barbican Theatre. Cumberbatch's television work includes his performance as Stephen Hawking in the film Hawking (2004). He gained wide recognition for portraying Sherlock Holmes in the series Sherlock from 2010 to 2017, for which he won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor. For playing the title role in the miniseries Patrick Melrose (2018), he won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actor. In films, Cumberbatch received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actor for playing Alan Turing in The Imitation Game (2014) and a volatile rancher in The Power of the Dog (2021). He has acted in several period dramas, including Amazing Grace (2006), Atonement (2007), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), 12 Years a Slave (2013), The Current War (2017), 1917 (2019) and The Courier (2020). He has also starred in numerous blockbuster films portraying Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), Smaug and Sauron in The Hobbit film series (2012–2014), and Dr. Stephen Strange in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including in the films Doctor Strange (2016) and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022).
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View full-sizeDownload Robert John Downey Jr. (born April 4, 1965) is an American actor. His films as a leading actor have grossed over $14 billion worldwide, making him one of the highest-grossing actors of all time. Downey's career has been characterized by some early success, a period of drug-related problems and run-ins with the law, and a surge in popular and commercial success in the 2000s. In 2008, Downey was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. From 2013 to 2015, he was listed by Forbes as Hollywood's highest-paid actor. At the age of five, Downey made his acting debut in his father Robert Downey Sr.'s film Pound in 1970. He subsequently worked with the Brat Pack in the teen films Weird Science (1985) and Less than Zero (1987). Downey's portrayal of Charlie Chaplin in the 1992 biopic Chaplin received a BAFTA Award. Following a stint at the Corcoran Substance Abuse Treatment Facility on drug charges, he joined the TV series Ally McBeal in 2000, and won a Golden Globe Award for the role. Downey was fired from the show in 2001 in the wake of additional drug charges. He stayed in a court-ordered drug treatment program and has maintained his sobriety since 2003. Downey made his acting comeback in the 2003 film The Singing Detective, after Mel Gibson paid his insurance bond because completion bond companies would not insure him. He went on to star in the black comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), the thriller Zodiac (2007), and the action-comedy Tropic Thunder (2008). Downey gained global recognition for starring as Iron Man in ten films within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, beginning with Iron Man (2008), and leading up to Avengers: Endgame (2019). He has also played Sherlock Holmes in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes (2009), which earned him his second Golden Globe, and its sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011). Downey has also taken on dramatic parts in The Judge (2014) and Oppenheimer (2023), winning an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, and a BAFTA Award for his portrayal of Lewis Strauss in the latter.
And we know we are in the maw of the worm when someone casts Lucy Liu**
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View full-sizeDownload Lucy Alexis Liu /ˈluː/ (born December 2, 1968) is an American actress. She has received several accolades including a Critics' Choice Television Award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and a Seoul International Drama Award, in addition to a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award. Liu has starred as Ling Woo in the television series Ally McBeal (1998–2002), Alex Munday in two Charlie's Angels films (2000 and 2003), and Joan Watson in the crime-drama series Elementary (2012–2019). Her film work includes starring in Payback (1999), Shanghai Noon (2000), Chicago (2002), Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003), Lucky Number Slevin (2006), Watching the Detectives (2007), The Man with the Iron Fists (2012), and Set It Up (2018). She voice acted as Master Viper in the Kung Fu Panda franchise (2008–2016) and Silvermist in the Tinker Bell series (2008–2014). Her other voice credits include Maya & Miguel (2004–2007), Mulan II (2004), as well as the English and Mandarin-dubbed versions of Magic Wonderland (2014) and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013). She also voiced Callisto Mal in the Disney-animated film Strange World (2022). Most recently, she starred as Kalypso in Shazam! Fury of the Gods and directed the Disney show American Born Chinese.
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View full-sizeDownload Paris Whitney Hilton (born February 17, 1981) is an American media personality, businesswoman, and socialite. Born in New York City, and raised there and in Los Angeles, she is a great-granddaughter of Conrad Hilton, the founder of Hilton Hotels. After first attracting tabloid attention in the late 1990s, when she became a fixture in NYC's social scene, Hilton ventured into fashion modeling in 2000 and was proclaimed "New York's leading It Girl" in 2001. The reality television series The Simple Life (2003–2007), in which she co-starred with her friend Nicole Richie, and a leaked 2003 sex tape with her then-boyfriend Rick Salomon, later released as 1 Night in Paris (2004), catapulted her to global fame. Hilton's media ventures have included films, television series, advertisement campaigns, books, an album, standalone singles, podcasts, and video games. She achieved two New York Times Best Sellers with Confessions of an Heiress (2004) and Paris: The Memoir (2023), and a global top-10 hit with "Stars Are Blind" (2006); pursued film acting in House of Wax (2005) and Repo! the Genetic Opera (2008); ventured back into reality television with Paris Hilton's My New BFF (2008–2009), The World According to Paris (2011), Cooking with Paris (2021), and Paris in Love (2021–present); and was the subject of the documentary This Is Paris (2020). She has performed as a disc jockey since 2012. A polarizing and ubiquitous public figure, Hilton is said to have influenced the revival of the "famous for being famous" phenomenon throughout the 2000s. Critics indeed suggest that she exemplifies the celebutante —a household name through inherited wealth and lavish lifestyle. Forbes included her in its Celebrity 100 in 2004, 2005, and 2006, and ranked her as the most "overexposed" celebrity in 2006 and 2008. Hilton has parlayed her media fame into numerous business endeavors. Under her company, she has produced content for broadcast media, launched a variety of product lines, and opened a chain of self-branded boutiques worldwide, as well as an urban beach club in the Philippines. Her perfume line alone has brought in over US$2.5 billion in revenue, as of 2020.
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View full-sizeDownload Sylvester Gardenzio Stallone (/stəˈloʊn/; born July 6, 1946) is an American actor and filmmaker. He has received numerous accolades, including a Golden Globe Award and a Critics' Choice Award, as well as nominations for three Academy Awards and two BAFTA Awards. Stallone is one of only two actors in history (alongside Harrison Ford) to have starred in a box-office No. 1 film across six consecutive decades. Struggling as an actor for a number of years upon moving to New York City in 1969, Stallone found gradual work in films such as The Lords of Flatbush (1974). He achieved his greatest critical and commercial success starting in 1976 with his iconic role as boxer Rocky Balboa in the first film of the successful Rocky franchise, which he also wrote.[4] In 1977, he became the third actor in history to be nominated for two Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor. He portrayed the PTSD-plagued soldier John Rambo in First Blood (1982), a role he would play across five Rambo films (1982–2019). From the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, Stallone would go on to become one of Hollywood's highest-paid actors acting in action films such as Cobra (1986), Tango and Cash (1989), Cliffhanger (1993), Demolition Man (1993), and The Specialist (1994). He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1984. Stallone continued his established roles in Rocky Balboa (2006) and Rambo (2008) before launching The Expendables film franchise (2010–present), in which he starred as the mercenary Barney Ross. In 2013, he starred in the successful film Escape Plan and appeared in its sequels. In 2015, he returned to Rocky again with Creed, in which a retired Rocky mentors former rival Apollo Creed's son Donnie Creed. The film brought Stallone widespread praise and his first Golden Globe Award, as well as a third Academy Award nomination, having been first nominated for the same role 40 years prior. Since 2022, he has starred in the Paramount+ crime series Tulsa King.
For several months my internet connection has been blinking out, and about ten days ago it died altogether.
But the reason I mention it is that my normal sources of easy information and entertainment have been taken from me, leaving me to return to my books and DVDs to fill the summer hours when I am not:
on my bicycle
at the volleyball court
on the golf course
In digging through my video files, I came across an old collection of Granada adaptations of Sherlock, starring Brett.
My research for this paper started when I noticed that in The Adventure of the Priory School, Holmes says twice that the Duke of Holdernesse was of a family that had been connected to the Hellfire Club.
I didn't remember that from the book, so I checked my Complete Sherlock Holmes.
Arthur Conan Doyle - The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Doubleday) (1930, Doubleday & Company).pdf
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Rereading Conan Doyle's story closely, I could see that it might benefit from some slight editing, but not of that sort.
The Duke was already being put in a bad light in the book, and more slander seemed to me to be pointless.
Then it occurred to me that making the Duke look bad WAS the point of the story, a point that the producers or writers at Granada apparently wished to put an even finer point on.
If true, this would mean that the propaganda hadn't changed in over a century, with the same families continuing to run the same projects they were running in the time of King Edward.
Well, if we check the peerage, we find the Earls of Holderness dying out in the 18th century, when a Darcy died without male issue.
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View full-sizeDownload David Hume (/hjuːm/; born David Home; 7 May NS [26 April OS] 1711 – 25 August 1776 was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, librarian, and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume followed John Locke in rejecting the existence of innate ideas, concluding that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley as an empiricist. Hume argued that inductive reasoning and belief in causality cannot be justified rationally; instead, they result from custom and mental habit. We never actually perceive that one event causes another but only experience the "constant conjunction" of events. This problem of induction means that to draw any causal inferences from past experience, it is necessary to presuppose that the future will resemble the past, a metaphysical presupposition which cannot itself be grounded in prior experience. An opponent of philosophical rationalists, Hume held that passions rather than reason govern human behaviour, famously proclaiming that "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." Hume was also a sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on emotion or sentiment rather than abstract moral principle. He maintained an early commitment to naturalistic explanations of moral phenomena and is usually accepted by historians of European philosophy to have first clearly expounded the is–ought problem, or the idea that a statement of fact alone can never give rise to a normative conclusion of what ought to be done. Hume denied that humans have an actual conception of the self, positing that we experience only a bundle of sensations, and that the self is nothing more than this bundle of perceptions connected by an association of ideas. Hume's compatibilist theory of free will takes causal determinism as fully compatible with human freedom. His philosophy of religion, including his rejection of miracles, and of the argument from design for God's existence, were especially controversial for their time. Hume left a legacy that affected utilitarianism, logical positivism, the philosophy of science, early analytic philosophy, cognitive science, theology, and many other fields and thinkers. Immanuel Kant credited Hume as the inspiration that had awakened him from his "dogmatic slumbers."
More research takes us to David Hume, who tells us the Holdernesses came over with William the Conqueror, so this Darcy was from one of the oldest lines on the Isles.
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View full-sizeDownload William the Conqueror (c. 1028 – 9 September 1087), sometimes called William the Bastard, was the first Norman king of England (as William I), reigning from 1066 until his death. A descendant of Rollo, he was Duke of Normandy (as William II) from 1035 onward. By 1060, following a long struggle to establish his throne, his hold on Normandy was secure. In 1066, following the death of Edward the Confessor, William invaded England, leading an army of Normans to victory over the Anglo-Saxon forces of Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings, and suppressed subsequent English revolts in what has become known as the Norman Conquest. The rest of his life was marked by struggles to consolidate his hold over England and his continental lands, and by difficulties with his eldest son, Robert Curthose. William was the son of the unmarried Duke Robert I of Normandy and his mistress Herleva. His illegitimate status and youth caused some difficulties for him after he succeeded his father, as did the anarchy which plagued the first years of his rule. During his childhood and adolescence, members of the Norman aristocracy battled each other, both for control of the child duke, and for their own ends. In 1047, William was able to quash a rebellion and begin to establish his authority over the duchy, a process that was not complete until about 1060. His marriage in the 1050s to Matilda of Flanders provided him with a powerful ally in the neighboring county of Flanders. By the time of his marriage, William was able to arrange the appointment of his supporters as bishops and abbots in the Norman church. His consolidation of power allowed him to expand his horizons, and he secured control of the neighboring county of Maine by 1062. In the 1050s and early 1060s, William became a contender for the throne of England held by the childless Edward the Confessor, his first cousin once removed. There were other potential claimants, including the powerful English earl Harold Godwinson, whom Edward named as king on his deathbed in January 1066. Arguing that Edward had previously promised the throne to him, and that Harold had sworn to support his claim, William built a large fleet and invaded England in September 1066. He decisively defeated and killed Harold at the Battle of Hastings on 14 October 1066. After further military efforts, William was crowned king on Christmas Day, 1066, in London. He made arrangements for the governance of England in early 1067 before returning to Normandy. Several unsuccessful rebellions followed, but William's hold was mostly secure on England by 1075, allowing him to spend the greater part of his reign in continental Europe. William's final years were marked by difficulties in his continental domains, troubles with his son, Robert, and threatened invasions of England by the Danes. In 1086, he ordered the compilation of the Domesday Book, a survey listing all of the landholdings in England along with their pre-Conquest and current holders. He died in September 1087 while leading a campaign in northern France and was buried in Caen. His reign in England was marked by the construction of castles, settling a new Norman nobility on the land, and change in the composition of the English clergy. He did not try to integrate his domains into one empire but continued to administer each part separately. His lands were divided after his death: Normandy went to Robert, and England went to his second surviving son, William Rufus.
I tried following the daughters of this Darcy, hoping to find late 19th century descendants who could be the target of Conan Doyle, but didn't have any immediate luck.
Still, I suspect that is what is going on here.
One clue given us by Conan Doyle is that this Duke was the:
“Greatest and perhaps wealthiest.”
subject of the Crown.
Another is that he had a long wispy red beard, which would have been uncommon among the top dukes.
We have seen somewhat less of that with Bohemian Grove, though some (including of course Alex Jones) have tried to convince it was a place of Satan worship and child sacrifice.
Since they live in Modern times, when all subtlety in writing (and everything else) is extinct, they have no problem inserting jibes into the works they are adapting for television.
Who but some of the peers and a couple of guys like me will ever notice?
Realizing that, I continued reading and watching, looking for more examples.
It was read by the upper and upper-middle classes, and it was at them Conan Doyle's insinuations would have been aimed.
My guess is they knew who this Baronet Brackenstall was meant to represent, though by changing the name, Conan Doyle was able to avoid a charge of libel.
He was also able to avoid it, since the insinuation was no doubt true, and could be proved true in a court of law.
I looked up the Brackenstalls in the peerage, but there are none.
It is probably a slur of one of the other Bracken- names that are in the peerage.
None of those were baronets, so he must have changed the title, too.
Conan Doyle had to change this name more than the Holderness name, since I assume his targets were still alive under that name.
In The Adventure of the Six Napoleons, the story concerns the Italian Mafia in London, and includes a Godfather-type figure, organized crime, vendettas. . . the usual.
I didn't know what to think of that twenty years ago, but now I do.
I have shown you in several previous papers that Hollywood has been selling you the mafia for many decades in films like:
It is the billionaire and trillionaire families that control all business worldwide, legal and illegal, not these Dons in loud suits with thick accents.
The Adventure of the Six Napoleons simply tells us this misdirection predates Hollywood.
The Pinkertons are made to look like heroes, which is not surprising seeing that they were the CIA of the time, and therefore Conan Doyle's US counterpart.
This is not considered one of Conan Doyle's finest, but up to now it has been dismissed as a blackwashing of the Freemasons (whom Conan Doyle's calls Freemen).
But the misdirection is even greater, since— through the comments and actions of Birdy Edwards—we are led to believe the Freemasons are opposed to the capitalists and police.
The lodges were always just a project—one of many—to control the middle and upper middle classes via infiltration and a bit of feigned trickle down of power.
We were thrown a few crumbs and fooled with some fake rites into thinking we were invested in the system.
When the only thing we were ever invested in was our own disempowerment and secret rapine.
But even that was not the main point of The Valley of Fear.
Conan Doyle wasn't assigned this topic mainly to promote the Pinkertons or to misdirect on the Freemasons, though those are potent side effects.
The main point was. . . the creation of fear.
The story itself is a little valley of fear, since it sells you the idea that these mobs at the end of the 19th century were real.
Conan Doyle is salting in the decades of newspaper reports of murders and assassinations and beatings.
He is also selling you a false idea of human nature, since he tells you again and again that these Freemen had no problem killing their neighbors in cold blood and then bragging about it in lodge.
This keeps you in line, just as it kept your 2g-grandparents in line.
Problem is, I have shown you that almost all of these murders and assassinations were faked, then as now.
Just as they now fake a weekly mass murderer or serial killer, back then they faked:
The creation of fear has been THE major project of newspapers from the beginning, but that project took a big upswing after the Civil War—with the Pinkertons being a large part of that upswing.
It took another big upswing after WWII with the creation of the CIA and has been in a steep incline ever since.
Every decade, sensible people think it must level off:
how can it continue to increase at such a rate?
But as of this minute, we see no sign of leveling.
If Ben Franklin devoted 20% of his non-advertising space to fear and chaos, and Horace Greeley devoted 40% to it,
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View full-sizeDownload Horace Greeley (February 3, 1811 – November 29, 1872) was an American newspaper editor and publisher who was the founder and editor of the New-York Tribune. Long active in politics, he served briefly as a congressman from New York and was the unsuccessful candidate of the new Liberal Republican Party in the 1872 presidential election against incumbent President Ulysses S. Grant, who won by a landslide. Greeley was born to a poor family in Amherst, New Hampshire. He was apprenticed to a printer in Vermont and went to New York City in 1831 to seek his fortune. He wrote for or edited several publications, involved himself in Whig Party politics, and took a significant part in William Henry Harrison's successful 1840 presidential campaign. The following year, Greeley founded the Tribune, which became the highest-circulating newspaper in the country through weekly editions sent by mail. Among many other issues, he urged the settlement of the American Old West, which he saw as a land of opportunity for the young and the unemployed. He popularized the slogan "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country."[a] He endlessly promoted radical reforms such as socialism, vegetarianism, agrarianism, feminism, and temperance and hired the best talent that he could find. Greeley's alliance with William H. Seward and Thurlow Weed led to his serving three months in the US House of Representatives, where he angered many by investigating Congress in his newspaper. In 1854, he helped found the Republican Party. Republican newspapers across the nation regularly reprinted his editorials. During the Civil War, he mostly supported President Abraham Lincoln but urged him to commit to the end of slavery before Lincoln was willing to do so. After Lincoln's assassination, he supported the Radical Republicans in opposition to President Andrew Johnson. He broke with the Radicals and with Republican President Ulysses Grant because of the party's corruption and Greeley's view that Reconstruction-era policies were no longer needed. Greeley was the new Liberal Republican Party's presidential nominee in 1872. He lost in a landslide despite having the additional support of the Democratic Party. He was devastated by the death of his wife five days before the election and died one month later, prior to the meeting of the Electoral College.
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View full-sizeDownload Walter Lippmann (September 23, 1889 – December 14, 1974) was an American writer, reporter, and political commentator. With a career spanning 60 years, he is famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of the Cold War, coining the term "stereotype" in the modern psychological meaning, as well as critiquing media and democracy in his newspaper column and several books, most notably his 1922 Public Opinion. Lippmann also played a notable role as research director of Woodrow Wilson's post-World War I board of inquiry. His views on the role of journalism in a democracy were contrasted with the contemporaneous writings of John Dewey in what has been retrospectively named the Lippmann-Dewey debate. Lippmann won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his syndicated newspaper column "Today and Tomorrow" and one for his 1961 interview of Nikita Khrushchev. He has also been highly praised with titles ranging from "most influential" journalist of the 20th century to "Father of Modern Journalism". Michael Schudson writes that James W. Carey considered Walter Lippmann's book Public Opinion as "the founding book of modern journalism" and also "the founding book in American media studies".
the media now devotes 80% to it . . . the rest being sports.
Before we leave The Valley of Fear, it is worth pointing out that Conan Doyle doesn't seem to have understood much about the law.
His Pinkerton agent Birdy Edwards wouldn't have been able to make any of the charges stick against McGinty and the other Freemen, since he clearly entrapped them.
And his testimony against them in the other cases would have been worthless, since it would have been his word against theirs.
Without hard evidence, none of the cases would have gone anywhere.
You can't just embed an agent among criminals and then convict them based on his solo testimony.
He would have had to get them on tape. . . except that they didn't have tape back then.
And even tape is iffy in court, since the defense can always claim it isn't their clients we are hearing.
They can claim the tape was faked by the prosecution, and if the prosecution is linked to the government in some way that claim may be true.
We now know the CIA and other entities can and have faked tapes and everything else.
They have bragged about it for years—which must undercut their ability to use such artifacts in court.
In The Five Orange Pips—one of Conan Doyle's earliest and not one of his best—we find the central players are from the Ku Klux Klan.
My faithful readers will know what to think of that: the KKK was an Intelligence front from the beginning, organized to create fear through fake events.
It is disappointing, to say the least, to find Conan Doyle selling it to English readers.
There, Conan Doyle appears to be spinning the Indian mutiny in “Bhurtee”, and the exploits of General Neill.
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View full-sizeDownload James George Smith Neill (27 May 1810 – 25 September 1857) was a British military officer of the East India Company, who served during the Indian rebellion of 1857.
We see a similar thing in the long The Sign of Four, where the same mutiny is sold in the same terms in Agra.
There we are told that Englishmen and Sikhs are honorable, while Hindoos are lying scoundrels.
I don't have that much experience with Hindoos or Sikhs, but that has not been my experience with Englishmen.
The white European, and especially his Jewish overlord, has turned out to be the greatest and most successful liar and thief in history.
He did skip town with a box of securities just ahead of the police, but we are supposed to believe he sailed on a yacht to Norway just to buy time, intending to pay every creditor in full.
Now, without knowing anything of the actual case this is based on, I just ask you if that sounds believable.
Knowing what you know about bankers, does that fit the profile or the common history of bank failures?
No, clearly Conan Doyle is making up a tale of pirates and harpooners and so on as cover for this banker.
The banker didn't abscond to Norway with stolen millions, no, he was boarded by pirates and murdered for the securities in the box.
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View full-sizeDownload Alexander II (Russian: Алекса́ндр II Никола́евич, tr. Aleksándr II Nikoláyevich, IPA: [ɐlʲɪˈksandr ftɐˈroj nʲɪkɐˈlajɪvʲɪtɕ]; 29 April 1818 – 13 March 1881) was Emperor of Russia, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Finland from 2 March 1855 until his assassination in 1881. Alexander's most significant reform as emperor was the emancipation of Russia's serfs in 1861, for which he is known as Alexander the Liberator (Russian: Алекса́ндр Освободи́тель, tr. Aleksándr Osvobodítel, IPA: [ɐlʲɪˈksandr ɐsvəbɐˈdʲitʲɪlʲ]). The tsar was responsible for other reforms, including reorganizing the judicial system, setting up elected local judges, abolishing corporal punishment, promoting local self-government through the zemstvo system, imposing universal military service, ending some privileges of the nobility, and promoting university education. After an assassination attempt in 1866, Alexander adopted a somewhat more conservative stance until his death. Alexander was also notable for his foreign policy, which was mainly pacifist, supportive of the United States, and opposite of Great Britain. Alexander backed the Union during the American Civil War and sent warships to New York Harbor and San Francisco Bay ostensibly to deter attacks by the Confederate Navy[4] and sold Alaska to the United States in 1867, fearing the remote colony would fall into British hands if there were another war. He sought peace, moved away from bellicose France when Napoleon III fell in 1871, and in 1872 joined with Germany and Austria in the League of the Three Emperors that stabilized the European situation. Despite his otherwise pacifist foreign policy, he fought a brief war with the Ottoman Empire in 1877–78, leading to the independence of the Bulgarian, Montenegrin, Romanian and Serbian states, and pursued further expansion into the Far East, leading to the founding of Khabarovsk and Vladivostok; the Caucasus, approving plans leading to the Circassian genocide;[6] and Turkestan. Although disappointed by the results of the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Alexander abided by that agreement. Among his greatest domestic challenges was an uprising in Poland in 1863, to which he responded by stripping that land of its separate constitution and incorporating it directly into Russia. Alexander was proposing additional parliamentary reforms to counter the rise of nascent revolutionary and anarchistic movements when he was assassinated in 1881.
In the Holmes mystery, Professor Coram the invalid turns out to be a Russian revolutionary from the 1880s, the one who had actually thrown the bomb under the carriage.
He then fled to England, leaving his comrades to take the rap.
So, here Conan Doyle is just salting in some recent manufactured European history.
Which brings us back to the overall point of the Holmes stories, which was the creation of fear— general and specific.
Through these beguiling and now nostalgic mysteries, readers would be led to believe that murders were taking place all over London and the Isles, and that dangerous criminals were waiting to molest them everywhere they went.
You will remember that Holmes himself takes the time to tell us that the countryside is the scariest place of all, since there the criminals could act with little chance of being caught.
Sort of a
“No one can hear you scream.”
argument.
Not only that, but all these crimes were orchestrated for a greater effect by Moriarty, a genius mastermind hellbent on evil.
So of course, the public would be happy to sink all taxes necessary in maintaining:
Scotland Yard
MI5
MI6
and whatever other bogus organizations were necessary to guarantee order and civility, and combat the:
And that is why the Holmes stories have been modernized and inflated for TV and film:
the newer series aren't restricted by the requirement for taste or subtlety Conan Doyle labored under.
The producers and directors know that you, the 21st century viewer, have been hardened by a lifetime of fake murders and rapes, forced upon you by:
literature
TV
film
and the news.
You can't be kept in line by Conan Doyle's old stories, which are now so tame they could be lumped in with Winnie-the-Pooh and Mother Goose.
They know you are reading Conan Doyle or watching Jeremy Brett to flee the modern world, and that you are more interested in the carriages and cravats, the tobacco in the coal scuttle, or the great cloaks and the gaiters than you are in the murders or mysteries themselves.
That is why they have to take that stuff away from you, replacing it with heightened levels of gore and gristle.
They have to find newer and more potent ways to mess with your mind.
I do beg you to notice the big hole in A Study in Scarlet:
Brigham Young is sold to us as authoritarian, with a secret military to guarantee agreement with all his pronouncements.
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View full-sizeDownload Brigham Young (/ˈbrɪɡəm/; June 1, 1801 – August 29, 1877) was an American religious leader and politician. He was the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), from 1847 until his death in 1877. During his time as church president, Young led his followers, the Mormon pioneers, west from Nauvoo, Illinois, to the Salt Lake Valley. He founded Salt Lake City and served as the first governor of the Utah Territory. Young also worked to establish the learning institutions that would later become the University of Utah and Brigham Young University. A polygamist, Young had at least 56 wives and 57 children. He formalized the prohibition of black men attaining priesthood and led the church in the Utah War against the United States.
But somehow two of the four original elders, Stangerson and Drebber, later left in the schism.
This despite being depicted as weak by Conan Doyle.
How is that possible?
Young wouldn't let Ferrier leave, but he would allow this major rebellion to succeed?
Shouldn't he have ordered Stangerson and Drebber killed, to prevent further dissolution of all he had worked for?
The story has no continuity, as usual.
Finally, I got back online and looked up Conan Doyle's bio again, to compare it to what we have learned here.
His mother was a Foley, which may link us to my recent paper on Scott Foley.
Doyle was schooled by the Jesuits, both in England and Austria, and we know from Disraeli that the Jesuits were a Jewish front.
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View full-sizeDownload Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, KG, PC, DL, JP, FRS (21 December 1804 – 19 April 1881) was a British statesman, Conservative politician and writer who twice served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He played a central role in the creation of the modern Conservative Party, defining its policies and its broad outreach. Disraeli is remembered for his influential voice in world affairs, his political battles with the Liberal Party leader William Ewart Gladstone, and his one-nation conservatism or "Tory democracy". He made the Conservatives the party most identified with the British Empire and military action to expand it, both of which were popular among British voters. He is the only British Prime Minister to have been born Jewish. Disraeli was born in Bloomsbury, then a part of Middlesex. His father left Judaism after a dispute at his synagogue; Benjamin became an Anglican at the age of 12. After several unsuccessful attempts, Disraeli entered the House of Commons in 1837. In 1846, Prime Minister Robert Peel split the party over his proposal to repeal the Corn Laws, which involved ending the tariff on imported grain. Disraeli clashed with Peel in the House of Commons, becoming a major figure in the party. When Lord Derby, the party leader, thrice formed governments in the 1850s and 1860s, Disraeli served as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons. Upon Derby's retirement in 1868, Disraeli became prime minister briefly before losing that year's general election. He returned to the Opposition before leading the party to a majority in the 1874 general election. He maintained a close friendship with Queen Victoria who, in 1876, elevated him to the peerage, as Earl of Beaconsfield. Disraeli's second term was dominated by the Eastern Question—the slow decay of the Ottoman Empire and the desire of other European powers, such as Russia, to gain at its expense. Disraeli arranged for the British to purchase a major interest in the Suez Canal Company in Egypt. In 1878, faced with Russian victories against the Ottomans, he worked at the Congress of Berlin to obtain peace in the Balkans at terms favorable to Britain and unfavorable to Russia, its longstanding enemy. This diplomatic victory established Disraeli as one of Europe's leading statesmen. World events thereafter moved against the Conservatives. Controversial wars in Afghanistan and South Africa undermined his public support. He angered farmers by refusing to reinstitute the Corn Laws in response to poor harvests and cheap imported grain. With Gladstone conducting a massive speaking campaign, the Liberals defeated Disraeli's Conservatives at the 1880 general election. In his final months, Disraeli led the Conservatives in Opposition. Disraeli wrote novels throughout his career, beginning in 1826, and published his last completed novel, Endymion, shortly before he died at the age of 76.
He was already published at age 20, both in fiction and in a medical journal, which is pretty astonishing seeing he wasn't out of medical school yet.
which may link us to Stephen Hawking, who came from a prominent line of Hawkins in the peerage, related to the same families we are about to see.
Doyle's father was Charles Altamont Doyle, scrubbed immediately at thepeerage.com, but listed there as a peer.
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View full-sizeDownload Charles Altamont Doyle (25 March 1832 – 10 October 1893) was an illustrator, watercolorist and civil servant. A member of an artistic family, he is remembered today primarily for being the father of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.
Note the name Altamont, since we saw above Holmes playing an Altamont in The Last Bow.
Since Wikipedia admits Doyle's uncles were very wealthy, Charles Doyle was probably the brother of the 2nd Baronet, Sir Francis Hastings Doyle;
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View full-sizeDownload Sir Francis Hastings Charles Doyle, 2nd Baronet (21 August 1810 – 8 June 1888) was a British poet.
which would make Arthur Conan Doyle cousin of the 4th Baronet Arthur Havelock Doyle.
And of course, the d'Arcys link him to the Darcys.
Not only does that remind us of Pride and Prejudice, where Darcy is one of the main characters; more importantly it links us to the Holdernesses we were looking at above, in the Adventure of the Priory School.
Yes, Conan Doyle was a Darcy, so he was also a Holderness.
Which means he was jostling with cousins or turning the knife in a lesser line.
The Granada writers may have also been of those lines, continuing the old feud.
At any rate, through the d'Arcys/Darcys, we can link Conan Doyle to Darcy, 4th Earl Holderness, who was the son of Frederica Schomberg.
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View full-sizeDownload Frederica Susanna Mildmay, Countess FitzWalter, 3rd Countess of Mértola (née Schomberg, previously Frederica Darcy, Countess of Holderness; 1687 – 7 August 1751) was a British peeress.
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View full-sizeDownload Frederick Herman de Schomberg, 1st Duke of Schomberg KG PC (6 December 1615 – 1 July 1690) was a German-born military officer and nobleman who served as Master-General of the Ordnance from 1689 to 1690. Having fought in the French, Portuguese and English armies, he was killed in action fighting on the Williamite side at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.
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View full-sizeDownload Raugravine Caroline Elisabeth (19 November 1659, Heidelberg – 7 July 1696, London) was a German noblewoman and daughter of Charles I Louis, Elector Palatine.
and the granddaughter of. . . the King of Bohemia, Karl I Ludwig.
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View full-sizeDownload Charles Louis, Elector Palatine (German: Karl I. Ludwig; 22 December 1617 – 28 August 1680), was the second son of Frederick V of the Palatinate, the "Winter King" of Bohemia, and of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia and sister of Charles I of England. After living the first half of his life in exile during the German Thirty Years' War and the English Civil War, in 1649 Charles Louis reclaimed his father's title of Elector Palatine, along with most of his former territories.
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View full-sizeDownload Elizabeth Stuart (19 August 1596 – 13 February 1662) was Electress of the Palatinate and briefly Queen of Bohemia as the wife of Frederick V of the Palatinate. The couple's selection for the crown by the nobles of Bohemia was part of the political and religious turmoil setting off the Thirty Years' War. Since her husband's reign in Bohemia lasted over one winter, she is called "the Winter Queen" (German: Die Winterkönigin, Czech: Zimní královna). Princess Elizabeth was the only surviving daughter of James VI and I, King of Scotland, England, and Ireland, and his queen, Anne of Denmark; she was the elder sister of Charles I. Born in Scotland, she was named in honour of her father's predecessor and cousin in England, Elizabeth I. During Elizabeth Stuart's childhood, unbeknownst to her, part of the failed Gunpowder Plot was a scheme to replace her father with her on the throne, and forcibly raise her as a Catholic. Her father later arranged for her marriage to the Protestant Frederick V, a senior prince of the Holy Roman Empire. They were married in the Chapel Royal in the Palace of Whitehall, and then left for his lands in Germany. Their marriage proved successful, but after they left Bohemia, they spent years in exile in The Hague, while the Thirty Years' War continued. In her widowhood, she eventually returned to England, at the end of her own life, during the Stuart Restoration of her nephew, and is buried in Westminster Abbey. With the demise of Elizabeth's great-niece, Anne, Queen of Great Britain, the last Stuart monarch in 1714, Elizabeth's grandson by her daughter Sophia of Hanover succeeded to the British throne as George I, initiating the rule of the House of Hanover.
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View full-sizeDownload Charles I (19 November 1600 – 30 January 1649) was King of England, Scotland, and Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution in 1649. Charles was born into the House of Stuart as the second son of King James VI of Scotland, but after his father inherited the English throne in 1603, he moved to England, where he spent much of the rest of his life. He became heir apparent to the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1612 upon the death of his elder brother, Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales. An unsuccessful and unpopular attempt to marry him to Infanta Maria Anna of Spain culminated in an eight-month visit to Spain in 1623 that demonstrated the futility of the marriage negotiation. Two years later, shortly after his accession, he married Henrietta Maria of France. After his succession in 1625, Charles quarreled with the English Parliament, which sought to curb his royal prerogative. He believed in the divine right of kings and was determined to govern according to his own conscience. Many of his subjects opposed his policies, in particular the levying of taxes without parliamentary consent, and perceived his actions as those of a tyrannical absolute monarch. His religious policies, coupled with his marriage to a Roman Catholic, generated antipathy and mistrust from Reformed religious groups such as the English Puritans and Scottish Covenanters, who thought his views too Catholic. He supported high church Anglican ecclesiastics and failed to aid continental Protestant forces successfully during the Thirty Years' War. His attempts to force the Church of Scotland to adopt high Anglican practices led to the Bishops' Wars, strengthened the position of the English and Scottish parliaments, and helped precipitate his own downfall. From 1642, Charles fought the armies of the English and Scottish parliaments in the English Civil War. After his defeat in 1645 at the hands of the Parliamentarian New Model Army, he fled north from his base at Oxford. Charles surrendered to a Scottish force and after lengthy negotiations between the English and Scottish parliaments he was handed over to the Long Parliament in London. Charles refused to accept his captors' demands for a constitutional monarchy, and temporarily escaped captivity in November 1647. Re-imprisoned on the Isle of Wight, he forged an alliance with Scotland, but by the end of 1648, the New Model Army had consolidated its control over England. Charles was tried, convicted, and executed for high treason in January 1649. The monarchy was abolished, and the Commonwealth of England was established as a republic. The monarchy would be restored to Charles's son Charles II in 1660.
Holmes fans will know that Conan Doyle's first short mystery published in Strand was A Scandal in Bohemia.
I have a first edition copy of that bound Strand edition on my shelves.
In it, the King of Bohemia makes an appearance at 221B Baker Street, to beg Holmes to retrieve a photo of him from Irene Adler.
So, Conan Doyle was related to his character there as well.
Through the Darcys, Conan Doyle was closely related to the Kings of:
Bohemia
England
Russia
Denmark
Sweden
Prussia
and just about every other country of Europe.
This would also link Conan Doyle to Mark Twain, and just about every other famous person.
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View full-sizeDownload Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910) known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature." His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884),[4] with the latter often called the "Great American Novel." Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner. Twain was raised in Hannibal, Missouri, which later provided the setting for both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He served an apprenticeship with a printer early in his career, and then worked as a typesetter, contributing articles to his older brother Orion Clemens' newspaper. Twain then became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River, which provided him the material for Life on the Mississippi (1883). Soon after, Twain headed west to join Orion in Nevada. He referred humorously to his lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. He first achieved success as a writer with the humorous story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," which was published in 1865; it was based on a story that he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, where he had spent some time while he was working as a miner. The short story brought him international attention. He wrote both fiction and non-fiction. As his fame grew, he became a much sought-after speaker. His wit and satire, both in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and Twain was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty. Although Twain initially spoke out in favor of American interests in the Hawaiian Islands, he later reversed his position, going on to become vice president of the American Anti-Imperialist League from 1901 until his death in 1910, coming out strongly against the Philippine-American War and colonialism. Twain earned a great deal of money from his writing and lectures, but invested in ventures that lost most of it, such as the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter that failed because of its complexity and imprecision. He filed for bankruptcy in the wake of these financial setbacks, but in time overcame his financial troubles with the help of Standard Oil executive Henry Huttleston Rogers. Twain eventually paid all his creditors in full, even though his declaration of bankruptcy meant he was not required to do so. He was born shortly after an appearance of Halley's Comet, and predicted that his death would accompany it as well, dying a day after the comet was at its closest to Earth.
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View full-sizeDownload Edgar Allan Poe (né Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, author, editor, and literary critic who is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism and Gothic fiction in the United States, and of American literature. Poe was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story, and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction. He is the first well-known American writer to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career. Poe was born in Boston, the second child of actors David and Elizabeth "Eliza" Poe. His father abandoned the family in 1810, and when his mother died the following year, Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allan of Richmond, Virginia. They never formally adopted him, but he was with them well into young adulthood. He attended the University of Virginia but left after a year due to lack of money. He quarreled with John Allan over the funds for his education, and his gambling debts. In 1827, having enlisted in the United States Army under an assumed name, he published his first collection, Tamerlane and Other Poems, credited only to "a Bostonian". Poe and Allan reached a temporary rapprochement after the death of Allan's wife in 1829. Poe later failed as an officer cadet at West Point, declared a firm wish to be a poet and writer, and parted ways with Allan. Poe switched his focus to prose, and spent the next several years working for literary journals and periodicals, becoming known for his own style of literary criticism. His work forced him to move between several cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. In 1836, he married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, but she died of tuberculosis in 1847. In January 1845, he published his poem "The Raven" to instant success. He planned for years to produce his own journal The Penn, later renamed The Stylus. But before it began publishing, Poe died in Baltimore in 1849, aged 40, under mysterious circumstances. The cause of his death remains unknown, and has been variously attributed to many causes including disease, alcoholism, substance abuse, and suicide. Poe and his works influenced literature around the world, as well as specialized fields such as cosmology and cryptography. He and his work appear throughout popular culture in literature, music, films, and television. A number of his homes are dedicated museums. The Mystery Writers of America present an annual Edgar Award for distinguished work in the mystery genre.
but he took the detective story much further and gave it patina that is hard to deny.
His choice of:
names
locations
characterizations
and ambiance is masterly, and he often peppers his stories with enough close observation, esoteric fact, and charming logic to make them compelling.
They weren't popular for no reason and haven't remained popular only due to constant promotion (as we could say of most others).
I will tack on a few comments about my recent experience at the public library.
As I told you above, my internet connection has been out, so to get online I had to go to the library.
Much strangeness was afoot there, though you may not be surprised to hear it.
The first weird thing is that I wasn't able to access Barnes and Noble to order more of my own books.
They either failed to load with Chrome, or I got “another user” message with Firefox.
Someone was resetting or closing the page at the same time I was trying to access it.
So, I went to a librarian and pointed this out.
She thought maybe I was being blocked by the library and said she might be able to whitelist me.
But when she looked at the firewall message, it turned out that wasn't the case.
The library wasn't blocking me, since when that happens a message stating that pops up.
That wasn't the message we were seeing.
So, instead of trying to access the pages from the public computers, she tried to access them from her own computer behind the front desk.
From that computer there was no problem.
She said that was strange, since the filters were supposed to be stronger on her computer than the public ones.
I didn't question that statement, but of course it makes no sense.
In short, she wasn't able to help me.
So, although I have one of the largest personal websites in the world (created, managed and maintained by one single person), the content of that website cannot be viewed at the public library in my hometown.
Although that is kind of sad, I don't worry much about it, since I don't know what good that is doing them.
Do they really think the top revolutionaries in the world are doing their work from the public libraries?
Looking around at my fellow library surfers, I didn't get the impression they were the cream of the insurgency.
They looked like a bunch of deadheads to me. . . but maybe that was just their cover. I said above that I didn't suspect interference on my internet connection, but it is now three weeks later, and I do.
I needed a new computer, since I haven't been able to update my OSX or browser, making my internet experience difficult.
It looks like the problem was with the line from my house to the pole, but I guess we will never know.
A local ISP was scheduled to come out and install a whole new line and box.
And even there I found interference.
This new ISP couldn't get through to me on my groundline, telling me they were getting a busy signal.
So, I had to use someone else's phone.
I now believe Century Link and/or Comcast have been interfering with my internet connection on purpose.
They are also interfering with my phone line, since I have been told callers are getting a FAX signal, although I don't have a FAX.
Update:
more confirmation of that and more weird stories to tell.
This local ISP, Kit Carson Electric, took more than a week to get someone out here to check the property, then another week to call me and set up a down payment, then more than another week passed after that.
They told me they didn't have a staker, or only had one for the entire county.
I questioned the logic of that, asking why they didn't hire more than one.
Getting the full run-around, I asked for an estimate of when it would get done.
I was told it might be more than another week and a half, and to be patient.
I declined and requested my down payment to be refunded.
In other words, I fired them before they even got started.
During the same weeks, I called Century Link again to disconnect the service, so I would quit being billed for it.
The guy at first offered me a free month to stay, plus waiving of various fees and late charges, and promised to get boots on the ground to fix it immediately.
He said he was going to switch me over to tech Tom.
Grudgingly, I said OK.
But then “Tom” came on the line.
One problem:
Tom wasn't a real person.
He was a robot voice, saying:
“I am Tom, your tech support.”
The line then went dead.
So, Century Link is no longer even a possibility.
I am now in talks with TaosNet, which is sending someone out here in the next week. . . hopefully.
Make a note of that for any future book orders or donations.
*Just to remind you, Cumberbatch is in the peerage, from a line of British Consuls in Turkey.
He is also:
a Bowes (linking him to the Queen)
a Blakiston (Baronet)
a Harvey
and a Congdon.
He is 3rd cousin of King Richard III, whom he portrayed in The Hollow Crown.
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View full-sizeDownload Richard III (2 October 1452 – 22 August 1485) was king of England from 26 June 1483 until his death in 1485. He was the last king of the Plantagenet dynasty and its cadet branch the House of York. His defeat and death at the Battle of Bosworth Field, the last decisive battle of the Wars of the Roses, marked the end of the Middle Ages in England. Richard was created Duke of Gloucester in 1461 after the accession of his brother Edward IV. In 1472, he married Anne Neville, daughter of Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick and widow of Edward of Westminster, son of Henry VI. He governed northern England during Edward's reign and played a role in the invasion of Scotland in 1482. When Edward IV died in April 1483, Richard was named Lord Protector of the realm for Edward's eldest son and successor, the 12-year-old Edward V. Before arrangements were complete for Edward V's coronation, scheduled for 22 June 1483, the marriage of his parents was declared bigamous and therefore invalid. Now officially illegitimate, Edward and his siblings were barred from inheriting the throne. On 25 June, an assembly of lords and commoners endorsed a declaration to this effect, and proclaimed Richard as the rightful king. He was crowned on 6 July 1483. Edward and his younger brother Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, called the "Princes in the Tower", disappeared from the Tower of London around August 1483. Accusations were circulating that they had been murdered on King Richard's orders, even before the Tudor dynasty became the established rulers two years later. There were two major rebellions against Richard during his reign. In October 1483, an unsuccessful revolt was led by staunch allies of Edward IV and Richard's former ally, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. Then, in August 1485, Henry Tudor and his uncle, Jasper Tudor, landed in Wales with a contingent of French troops, and marched through Pembrokeshire, recruiting soldiers. Henry's forces defeated Richard's army near the Leicestershire town of Market Bosworth. Richard was slain, making him the last English king to die in battle. Henry Tudor then ascended the throne as Henry VII. Richard's corpse was taken to the nearby town of Leicester and buried without ceremony. His original tomb monument is believed to have been removed during the English Reformation, and his remains were wrongly thought to have been thrown into the River Soar. In 2012, an archaeological excavation was commissioned by Philippa Langley with the assistance of the Richard III Society on the site previously occupied by Grey Friars Priory. The University of Leicester identified the human skeleton found at the site as that of Richard III as a result of radiocarbon dating, comparison with contemporary reports of his appearance, identification of trauma sustained at Bosworth and comparison of his mitochondrial DNA with that of two matrilineal descendants of his sister Anne. He was reburied in Leicester Cathedral in 2015.
Cumberbatch's mother is scrubbed at Wikipedia and thepeerage.com, but she is a Ventham, linking us to the Brisbanes and through them to the. . . Stewarts.
These are the Stewarts, Baronets of Blackhall, but they link us to the Stuarts, Kings of England and dukes in many lines.
Through his mother, Cumberbatch is also related to the Waters, as in Roger Waters of Pink Floyd.
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View full-sizeDownload George Roger Waters (born 6 September 1943) is an English musician and singer-songwriter. In 1965, he co-founded the rock band Pink Floyd as the bassist. Following the departure of the songwriter, Syd Barrett, in 1968, Waters became Pink Floyd's lyricist, co-lead vocalist and conceptual leader until his departure in 1985. Pink Floyd achieved international success with the concept albums The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977), The Wall (1979), and The Final Cut (1983). By the early 1980s, they had become one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful groups in popular music. Amid creative differences, Waters left in 1985 and began a legal dispute over the use of the band's name and material. They settled out of court in 1987. Waters's solo work includes the studio albums The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking (1984), Radio K.A.O.S. (1987), Amused to Death (1992), and Is This the Life We Really Want? (2017). In 2005, he released Ça Ira, an opera translated from Étienne and Nadine Roda-Gils' libretto about the French Revolution. In 1990, Waters staged one of the largest rock concerts in history, The Wall – Live in Berlin, with an attendance of 450,000. As a member of Pink Floyd, he was inducted into the US Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005. Later that year, he reunited with Pink Floyd for the Live 8 global awareness event, the group's only appearance with Waters since 1981. He has toured extensively as a solo act since 1999. He performed The Dark Side of the Moon for his world tour of 2006–2008, and The Wall Live, his tour of 2010–2013, was the highest-grossing tour by a solo artist at the time. Waters incorporates political themes in his work and is a prominent pro-Palestinian activist with regards to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. He has called for the removal of the Israeli West Bank Barrier and supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel. He has described Israel's treatment of Palestinians as apartheid. Some of his comments, such as his likening of Israel to Nazi Germany, and elements of his live shows, have been accused of being anti-Semitic. He has dismissed the accusations as a conflation of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism.
Also, to the:
Halyburton's
Livingston's
Morgan's
Nicolson's
Elphinstone's
Mackenzie's
Forbes'
and Frasers'.
**Liu, who has all the charm of a plate of burned toast, is perhaps the only woman in the world who makes Yoko Ono seem relatively appealing.
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View full-sizeDownload Yoko Ono (Japanese: 小野 洋子, romanized: Ono Yōko, usually spelled in katakana オノ・ヨーコ; born February 18, 1933) is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking. Ono grew up in Tokyo and moved to New York City in 1952 to join her family. She became involved with New York City's downtown artists scene in the early 1960s, which included the Fluxus group, and became well known in 1969 when she married English musician John Lennon of the Beatles, with whom she would subsequently record as a duo in the Plastic Ono Band. The couple used their honeymoon as a stage for public protests against the Vietnam War. She and Lennon remained married until he was murdered in front of the couple's apartment building, the Dakota, on December 8, 1980. Together they had one son, Sean, who later also became a musician. Ono began a career in popular music in 1969, forming the Plastic Ono Band with Lennon and producing a number of avant-garde music albums in the 1970s. She achieved commercial and critical success in 1980 with the chart-topping album Double Fantasy, a collaboration with Lennon that was released three weeks before his murder, winning the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. To date, she has had twelve number one singles on the US Dance charts, and in 2016 was named the 11th most successful dance club artist of all time by Billboard magazine. Many musicians have paid tribute to Ono as an artist in her own right and as a muse and icon, including Elvis Costello, the B-52's, Sonic Youth and Meredith Monk. As Lennon's widow, Ono works to preserve his legacy. She funded the Strawberry Fields memorial in Manhattan's Central Park, the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland,[8] and the John Lennon Museum in Saitama, Japan (which closed in 2010). She has made significant philanthropic contributions to the arts, peace, disaster relief in Japan and the Philippines, and other such causes. In 2002, she inaugurated a biennial $50,000 LennonOno Grant for Peace. In 2012, she received the Dr. Rainer Hildebrandt Human Rights Award and co-founded the group Artists Against Fracking.
So how did she get into Hollywood and why is she promoted like this?
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View full-sizeDownload Jonathan Lee Miller (born 15 November 1972) is a British actor. He achieved early success for his portrayal of Simon "Sick Boy" Williamson in the dark comedy-drama film Trainspotting (1996) and as Dade Murphy in Hackers (1995) before earning further critical recognition for his performances in Afterglow (1997), Mansfield Park (1999), Mindhunters (2004),The Flying Scotsman (2006), Endgame (2009), and T2 Trainspotting (2017). For The Flying Scotsman he received a London Film Critics' Circle nomination for Actor of the Year.[2] He was also part of the principal cast in the films Melinda and Melinda (2004), Dark Shadows (2012), and Byzantium (2013). He has appeared in several theatrical productions, most notably After Miss Julie and Frankenstein, the latter of which earned him an Olivier Award for Best Actor. Miller starred as the title character in the ABC comedy drama Eli Stone, for which he received a Satellite Award nomination for Best Actor. This was followed by another starring role in the BBC costume drama Emma and a supporting role as Jordan Chase in the fifth season of the Showtime drama Dexter. From 2012 to 2019 he starred as a modern-day version of Sherlock Holmes in the CBS crime drama Elementary, which earned him his second Satellite Award nomination for Best Actor.[4] In 2022, he played British prime minister John Major in the fifth season of the Netflix historical drama The Crown.
His grandfather Bernard Lee played M in the old Bond films, so these are probably the Lees/Leighs of the peerage.
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View full-sizeDownload John Bernard Lee (10 January 1908 – 16 January 1981) was an English actor, best known for his role as M in the first eleven Eon-produced James Bond films. Lee's film career spanned the years 1934 to 1979, though he had appeared on stage from the age of six. He was trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Lee appeared in over one hundred films, as well as on stage and in television dramatizations. He was known for his roles as authority figures, often playing military characters or policemen in films such as The Third Man, The Blue Lamp, The Battle of the River Plate, and Whistle Down the Wind. He died of stomach cancer in 1981, aged 73.
Many of them are Levys, and Miller may be one as well.
Also notice that Liu=Li=Lee=Levy, so Jonny and Lucy are cousins, explaining why they are appearing here together.
