Catherine of Aragon, the youngest daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, came to England to marry Arthur, the eldest son and heir to the throne of Henry VII, in 1501. Arthur died the following year and his younger brother took the throne, asking Catherine to marry him in 1509.
The Spanish princess-turned Queen Consort of England was by all accounts a devoted wife, but the marriage bore no sons. Henry came to believe, or said he believed, that it was punishment from God for marrying his brother’s wife. By this time the King had fallen hard for the daughter of Thomas Boleyn, 1st Earl of Wiltshire, Anne. Henry was in a pickle. His wife wouldn’t agree to a divorce, and Anne Boleyn was not about to give it up as a mere mistress. She was going to be the King’s wife, or nothing.
The problem was, the Pope refused to grant the divorce. Henry launched the Reformation so that he could divorce his wife and marry this young girl from Kent, getting his divorce the following year and going on to become Supreme Head of the Church of England.
Catherine of Aragon died alone in a convent some three years later, the only Class Act in this whole, sorry story.
Catherine had been popular with the people, but this second wife was not. To many, she was ”the King’s whore”. Many believed Boleyn to be a witch who had cast a spell on the King. The marriage produced a daughter, Elizabeth, but again no sons.
On the day that Catherine of Aragon was buried at Peterborough Abbey, Anne miscarried a male child. The Savoyard ambassador Eustace Chapuys commented “She has miscarried of her saviour”. There would be no divorce this time. The King of England concocted a plot based on a rumor, and Anne was convicted of incest, adultery and treason. Anne Boleyn was executed by decapitation in 1536. She would not be the last.
Henry married Jane Seymour, 11 days later. Though she bore him a son, she died two weeks after the birth. Years later, Henry would request on his deathbed that he be buried next to her.
Anne of Cleaves would be wife #4, an arranged marriage with a German Princess intended to secure an alliance with the other major Protestant power on the continent, especially after England’s break with Rome over that first divorce. Henry was put off by her appearance however, apparently believing himself to be quite the prize. The marriage went unconsummated. They were amicably divorced after 6 months.
Catherine Howard was 19 and Henry 49 when she became wife #5. He was hugely fat by this time, with festering ulcers on his leg that never healed. Henry’s suits of armor reveal a waistline grown from 32″ to 54″. The man weighed 400lbs on his passing, five years later. Catherine was young and flirtatious, preferring the company of young courtiers to that of the fat old guy she was married to. She would be tried and convicted of adultery two years later. As with her predecessor, execution was by the headsman’s axe. Catherine Howard lost her head on, February 13, 1542.
Katherine Parr was the 6th and last wife of Henry VIII. Henry died in January 1547, Parr going on to marry Thomas Seymour, 1st Baron of Sudeley, six months later. Katherine died in September 1548, as the result of complications of childbirth.
Ironically, Henry himself may have been the problem, when it came to the inability to produce a male heir. Researchers revealed in 2011 that Henry’s blood group may have been “Kell positive”, a rare condition which would have initiated an auto-immune response in the mother’s body, targeting the body of the baby inside of her. It’s unlikely that first pregnancies would have been effected, but the mother’s antibodies would have attacked second and subsequent Kell-positive babies as foreign objects.
The science to prove or disprove the theory didn’t exist in the Tudor era, but it may not matter. Anyone attempting to bring that particularly bit of news to Henry VIII, very likely would have paid for it, with his head.
Spitballs lessened the natural friction with a pitcher’s fingers, reducing backspin and causing the ball to drop. Sandpapered, cut or scarred balls tended to “break” to the side of the scuff mark.
Submarine pitches are not to be confused with the windmill underhand pitches we see in softball. Submarine pitchers throw side-arm to under-handed, their upper bodies so low that some of them scuff their knuckles on the ground, the ball rising as it approaches the strike zone.
29-year-old Ray Chapman had said this was his last year playing ball. He wanted to spend more time in the family business he had just married into. The man was right. Raymond Johnson Chapman died 12 hours later, the only player in the history of Major League Baseball, to die from injuries sustained during a game.
In a world where classified government information is kept on personal email servers, there are still some secrets so pinky-swear-double-probation-secret that the truth may Never be known. Among them Facebook “Community Standards” algorithms, the formula for Coca Cola, and the secret fishing hole where Lena Blackburne’s Baseball Rubbing Mud comes from.
If you were to keyword search “United States Army”, “Silver Star” and “World War II”, you’ll find among a long list of recipients the name of “Ball, Harvey A. HQ, 45th Infantry Division, G.O. No. 281”.
Midway between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox and well before the first crocus of spring has peered out across the frozen tundra, there is a moment of insanity which helps those of us living in northern climes get through to that brief, blessed moment of warmth when the mosquitoes once again have their way with us.
Groundhogs hibernate for the winter, an ability held in great envy by some people I know. During that time, their heart rate drops from 80 beats per minute to 5, and they live off their stored body fat. Another ability some of us would appreciate, very much.
To prove the value of his ‘third eye’ theory, to his own satisfaction if to no one else, Hughes drilled a hole in his own skull in 1965, using a Black & Decker electric drill. He must have thought it proved the point, because he expanded on his theory with “Trepanation: A Cure for Psychosis”, followed by an autobiography, “The Book with the Hole”, published in 1972.
At age 27, Amanda Feilding brought an electric dentist’s drill to her London apartment, and drilled a hole in her skull. After four unsuccessful years trying to find a surgeon to do it for her, “I thought, ‘Well, I’m a sculptor, I may as well do it myself'”.
At the time, the Iron County DA also considered charges against ABC News reporter Chris Cuomo, for aiding in the crime.
Early radio experiments by Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi left both inventors believing they had picked up, in Marconi’s words, “queer sounds and indications, which might come from somewhere outside the earth.”
The British author H. G. Wells wrote the War of the Worlds in 1897, telling the story of an alien earth invasion by Martians fleeing the desiccation of their own planet. The story was adapted to a 
Over time, the solution to the meat question became a matter of doubling down on what we’re already doing, as factory farms and confinement operations took the place of free ranges, and massive use of antibiotics replaced the idea of balanced biological systems.
Anthonomus grandis, the Boll Weevil, is a small beetle, about the size of the nail on your little finger. Indigenous to Mexico, the beetle crossed the Rio Grande near Brownsville, sometime around 1892. The insect spread rapidly, producing eight to ten generations in a single growing season and preying mainly on the young cotton boll.
Designed in Italy at a cost of $1,800, the monument depicts a female figure in a flowing gown, arms stretched high over her head, and holding in her hands a trophy.
In 1928, Al Capone purchased a Cadillac 341A Town Sedan with 3,000 pounds of armor and inch-thick bulletproof windows. It was green and black, matching the Chicago police cars of the era, and equipped with a siren and flashing lights hidden behind the grill.
The internet can be a wonderful thing, if you don’t mind taking your water from a fire hose. The reader of history quickly finds that some tales are true as written, some are not, and some stories are so good you want them to be true.
Historical Easter Eggs - Today in History 
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