Very illuminating. Thank you.
The short version:
9 months before King Edward IV was born, his parents were several hundred miles apart. It is likely that he was sired by someone other than Richard, Duke of York.
This would mean that Richard III was right, the Princes in the Tower were not the legitimate heirs to the throne, and the descendants of Henry VII should not be on the throne today.
I think you could find some middle ground between a single word and a full program. Why not a couple of simple sentences to describe what your point is and why you think it would be so controversial?
Seeing as Braveheart (1995) heavily (and completely ahistorically) implied that William Wallace was the actual father of King Edward III of England, and went one to be a huge Oscar-winning hit, I don’t think anyone would blink twice if someone made another movie about some medieval king being illegitimate.
I think we can almost guarantee as a matter of statistics that substantially none of the royals in any country are descended 100% from who accepted history says they are. That completely uncontroversial to me.
But until there’s new evidence of even better quality that points to a different pedigree than the official one, it’ll stand.
And of course like any other form of alternate history, if indeed back in 1523 the royal family of Slobovostan should have branched left not right after a hidden act of bastardy, literally everything that came later would’ve been different. So there’s simply no way to say which of literally millions of different histories of royal relations and intrigues would have played out over the next 500 years to today. So any attempt to determine who the current heir under that alternate starting point would be is simply nonsense.
At some point you have to let history be history. Warts and falsehoods and all, the accepted story is the story.
The 2019 film Mr Jones was about that famine.
Apparently the most controversial thing you can say on the SDMB is the real story of British and other European Colonial Slavery in the 1800s past when it’s claimed they “ended” it. The Belgian Congo is the most famous example of this but it happened similarly in British and French African colonies at the same time. The problem is, there’s only a few books about it and no dramatizations that I can think of unless they’re going the Heart of Darkness adaptation route, and that is specifically about the Congo Free State, not British or French territories.
The Collinwood school fire (Cleveland).
I very much doubt that is particularly controversial. You are highly unlikely to get a huge amount of pushback for saying that slavery continued in areas where it was supposed to have officially ended.
That probably is not as controversial as telling the story of the African domestic slavery prior to, during and post the colonial period.
Horrific, but where’s the controversy?
Edward IV was not Richard Duke of York’s natural son. During the period in which he could have been conceived, Richard was out of the country and not with his wife, Cecily Deville. Cecily herself formally stated that her son Edward IV was not of royal blood, and indeed his siblings were all tall and fair, while he was short and dark. His baptism was low key, and all his buddies made up songs about how he was certainly born of royal blood. Suspicious.
If he was not the legal successor to the throne then all Kings and Queens of England including Edward and following, were and are illegitimate.
I can understand the argument that a lot more chicanery goes on in family lineages than would appear on paper, and we just have to go with the flow sometimes. But then you can’t take the UK rules of succession seriously. At least I can’t.
Maybe it’s not “too controversial” to dramatize. I thought it might be. There would certainly be some public resistance to it in some pockets though.
There are numerous alternate lines of succession to the British Crown, some of which make a very convincing case.
But like everything else in the game of thrones, power is power.
My favourite alternate succession is the Jacobite one, which ended in Henry IX (a cardinal in the Vatican with no issue).
The only legitimacy is actually ruling the kingdom or empire, and making it stick. Edward III reigned over England for 50 years. Richard III fought bravely but lost in battle, which made Henry Tudor the legitimate King of England.
OK now I want to see Elon Musk pick a fight with King Charles III.
I don’t believe any subject is off limits for a drama or comedy.
However, a romance movie featuring beastiality or necrophilia may raise a few eyebrows. Ironically a romance featuring beastiality and necrophilia may not be so bad. Tagline: Bob loved bacon a little too much.
Critics gave it mixed reviews.
Despite Warner Bros.’ deceptive trailers, Tarzan’s actual legend — the “Jungle Book”-like tale of a lost infant raised by an animal tribe who grows up to fall in love with Jane and return to England — is told only in brief flashbacks. Instead, the film chiefly fictionalizes a real-life horror story from the late 1880s: King Leopold II of Belgium, having claimed Congo, embarked on a genocidal project to extract wealth from the region, powered by its enslaved people. Millions died.
Kudos to screenwriters Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer for highlighting this forgotten tragedy. Unfortunately, it’s debatable what Leopold’s crimes have to do with angry apes, stampeding wildebeests, vine-swinging Tarzan and a herd of comic ostriches (in a cameo apparently intended to goose the otherwise neglected 3D effects). The shell is historical, but the contents are Hollywood pablum, a string of stock set-ups that are generally well staged but no more original than the movie’s misleading title.
There’s a fun raid on a moving train, a disturbing ape massacre by evil mercenaries, a lively final battle in a port city and, of course, a heartless villain. Christopher Waltz is Leon Rom, Leopold’s agent, who’s cool and cruel and missing only a handlebar mustache to twirl. (Rom was a real-life Belgian thug whose Wikipedia page features exactly that mustache, and the info that he didn’t die until 1924.)
I thought it was good, and I was surprised that it was about what the criminal behavior of the Belgian rulers in Africa.
meh! it was over 500 years ago, I really don’t think many people care. When it comes to ascending the throne possession definitely is nine tenths of the law. The concept of “legitimacy” is pretty flakey anyway as far as the royal family goes.
And in any event, the installation of George I in 1714 established once and for all that the kings and queens of the United Kingdom rule not due to their bloodlines, but by the grace of Parliament.
Nobility is so inbred, it’s almost assured that all of the bastards (like millions of other Britons) were directly descended from William the Conqueror.
(Talking about the Collinwood school fire). You’re right. Mostly horrific. There is a second by second write up of the disaster somewhere on the 'net. One father managed to locate his daughter jammed in the crowd at the front door. All these young children completely packed into the doorway like sardines with their arms outstretched. Try as he might, be could not pull her through. Nearly suffocated and with her feet on fire, he braced his foot against nearby children who had already died. With a mighty yank he pulled her arm off. She died, on fire, looking at her father holding her arm. That’s horrific. I drive by the site fairly often.