My ancestor may have killed Richard III

After getting feedback from good friends, I've decided not to use this public blog as a therapeutic tool but instead to use it only as a communication tool.  I will journal privately about private issues and share those thoughts and feelings with friends and family in a more intimate way.  But this blog can be used to discuss genealogy, travel, career developments, etc.  and everyone is welcome to check back for posts and make comments.  Please!

After my trip to the National Archives in Washington DC last month to research my Grandpa Cheshire's death at Pearl Harbor, I felt a little deflated not to have found anything new.  But I did get some promising leads and I plan to follow up those leads.  To be continued....

And then who should pop in the news but my Tudor ancestors' old nemesis Richard III!  The discovery of his remains in a parking lot in England reminded me of the fascinating story of how my ancestor William John Gardiner was reportedly the man who struck the fatal blow to Richard III.  

From recent news reports:

“Richard died at Bosworth on 22 August 1485, the last English king to fall in battle, and the researchers revealed how for the first time. There was an audible intake of breath as a slide came up showing the base of his skull sliced off by one terrible blow, believed to be from a halberd, a fearsome medieval battle weapon with a razor-sharp iron axe blade weighing about two kilos, mounted on a wooden pole, which was swung at Richard at very close range. The blade probably penetrated several centimetres into his brain and, said the human bones expert Jo Appleby, he would have been unconscious at once and dead almost as soon.”

The search for Richard III’s final resting place was organized by screenwriter Philippa Langley of the Richard III society.  As far as she is concerned, Richard was the true king, the last king of the north, a worthy and brave leader who became a victim of some of the most brilliant propaganda in history, in the hands of the Tudors' image-maker, Shakespeare.

My ancestor was a Welshman named William John Gardiner (1450 – 1495) who married Helen Tudor – the illegitimate first cousin of Henry VII.  Why William John (Gardynyr) Gardiner was allowed to marry into the Royal Family remains unclear, but historians have hinted that it was because of his aid to Henry VII, then Earl of Richmond, in defeating Richard III, in the Battle of Bosworth Field, near Leicester.  According to the book, THE MAKING OF THE TUDOR DYNASTY, by Roger Thomas, William killed Richard III, on August 22, 1485, allowing Henry VII to proclaim himself King of England.  William and Helen Tudor were allowed to marry a few months later.  His future wife Helen Tudor was the illegitimate daughter of Jasper Tudor, the uncle of Henry VII.

After The Church of England was formed under the reign of Henry VIII in the 1500’s, the Gardiners remained loyal to the Catholic Church.  Eventually, our Gardiner ancestors moved to Maryland in 1637.  Maryland had been founded in 1634 as a colony where Catholics could enjoy freedom from religious persecution.  Janette Gardiner (1740 - 1799) married Richard Mudd (1735 - 1794) and some of their many children immigrated to the Catholic Holy Lands of Kentucky around 1800 for land and religious freedom.  Our ancestor Nicholas Mudd’s daughter Susanna Mudd married Thomas J. Cheshire in 1834 in Nelson County, KY.