The King

No, I've nothing to say here about Elvis Presley, all I care about him has been covered elsewhere on The Blob.  Here we are giving tribute to a pretender to the throne of the United Kingdom who went by the name of Anthony Tudor, and claimed to be a direct male descendant of Henry VIII. In his mind, the fact that he could trace Fat Henry's Y chromosome in an unbroken line through 11 generations to his own testicles, trumped the credentials of the present royal family. They are descended in a jiggly line from Margaret Tudor [whoop whoop no-Y-chromsome alert], Henry VIII's older sister. Apparently, Henry was romping with Anne Boleyn before he married his deceased brother's fiancée Catherine of Aragon; and fathered a son called John Hall.  John's great^9 grandson Anthony William Hall was born in 1898 in Chiswick, West London and lived for a while (1911 census) in Chetnole: a village which has some small celebrity on The Blob.

Hall/Tudor was a tiresome eccentric who wrote pamphlets and held public meetings with himself setting out his claims, suggesting that he and the present incumbent of the throne should engage in single combat for the kingdom. Living in a republic, for which much thanks, is both more civilised . . . and more boring for Hello and the tabloids. Tudor O'Dynasty also attempted to sell his own bank-notes: redeemable when he ascended rightfully to the throne. The authorities took a dim view of this because it upset people and could be construed as fraud, and Mr Hall-Tudor had many and many of his days in court.  He used the audience provided by these proceedings as an opportunity to further grandstand his claims. George V was concerned for the chap's sanity far more than he was annoyed by his presumption but no doctor could be convinced that Mr Tudor-Hall was barking so he was repeatedly fined and bound over to keep the peace without actually being incarcerated or committed. By all accounts he was kind and generous so long as you didn't appear to intrude upon his perceived rights. He was in court again on wholly unrelated business conducting his own defense when his wife attempted to divorce him in 1939 and a couple of years later when his sister attempted to evict him from their mother's home.  "His defence in the matter was that the Probate Act of 1857, although signed by Queen Victoria, had never reached Royal Assent and was therefore invalid to be used in a court of law."   Tudor Hall the King died in 1947 mourned by journalists in need of column-filling copy.

People like this who are not mad but quite definitely maddening, might have something useful to say even if it is difficult to swallow.  HEN please note.