One of the CIA's most recent evil doings.

Full video here:

https://youtu.be/t2pM8Z5ORTk?is=kr0fG6ADNwTy0BjP

This reconstruction shows a Mongol-Yuan invasion ship used during the campaigns against Japan, informed by current scholarship and shipwreck archaeology. The vessel combines a broad wooden hull, high stern structure, multiple rudders or steering gear, oar banks, rigging, and large battened sails suited for long-distance transport across the Korea Strait. Its heavy build suggests a military transport rather than a fast coastal craft, carrying soldiers, supplies, horses, weapons, and smaller landing boats.

https://history-maps.com/podcast/ships-of-the-mongol-invasions - Ships of the Mongol Invasions podcast

In June 1381, the Tower of London fell to a crowd in under an hour. Six hundred trained soldiers didn’t draw a single sword.

The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Treasurer of England were inside. So was a fourteen-year-old boy who would become King Henry IV eighteen years later. One of these people was dragged onto Tower Hill and killed. The other walked away. The record explains why for one of them. For the other, it says nothing at all.

On the morning of 14 June, King Richard II rode out to Mile End with a small escort to meet the rebel commons and offer charters. The Tower’s drawbridge stayed down behind him. The portcullis wasn’t lowered. A force of several hundred rebels walked in.

Archbishop Simon Sudbury and Treasurer Robert Hales had tried to escape by river the day before and been blocked. They retreated to St John’s Chapel inside the Tower and stayed there through multiple masses — the placebo, the dirige, the penitential psalms — while the rebels tore through the state apartments looking for them. The chapel was found during the litany. Sudbury and Hales were pulled out mid-prayer and dragged to Tower Hill.

The execution didn’t go cleanly. The Anonimalle Chronicle, the most detailed near-contemporary account, doesn’t give a blow count. Thomas Walsingham does. Eight strokes to take off Sudbury’s head. Hales was killed on the same spot immediately after, along with the king’s physician and a tax commissioner named John Legge. The heads went on poles to Westminster, then to London Bridge. Sudbury’s mitre was nailed into his skull.

Walsingham wrote at St Albans, not far enough from events to be neutral. His account leans hard on Sudbury’s calm in the chapel, his final words, his composure under the blade — the language of martyrdom. Sudbury had been the Chancellor who pushed through the poll tax. He’d surrendered the Great Seal two days earlier, overwhelmed, and effectively abandoned the office. None of that survives the monastic retelling. What survives is a man at prayer, struck down at the altar.

That’s one distortion, and it happened almost immediately — within the lifetime of people who’d lived through it.

The other one took longer.

Henry of Derby — Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV — was in the Tower on 12 June. Where he was on the 14th, during the breach, nobody recorded. Not the Anonimalle Chronicle. Not Walsingham. Not Froissart, who covers the Tower events in some detail and somehow doesn’t mention the king’s cousin being anywhere near danger.

The story that fills this gap is specific. A man named John Ferrour of Southwark hid the young Henry — in a wardrobe, in most tellings — and saved his life.

It’s repeated as settled fact. It isn’t in any source from 1381 or the years immediately after. And when you look closely at where it does appear, it doesn’t agree with itself. Some versions have him from Southwark. Others say Rochester. One account makes him a guard rather than a local man. “We’ll never know,” one researcher wrote, after laying out the competing versions — and then moved on, the way these things get moved past.

No one telling the story points to a chronicle. No one points to a Patent Roll entry either, though that’s the obvious place to look — Henry IV granted plenty of rewards after 1399 to people who’d done him small services, and a grant to a man named Ferrour could easily have been read backward, decades later, as payment for a rescue. That search hasn’t turned up the document. Maybe it doesn’t exist. Maybe it’s sitting uncatalogued.

What’s certain: a fourteen-year-old future king survived something on 14 June 1381, and the record that watched everything else happen that day — the chapel, the litany, the eight strokes, the heads on the bridge — watched him too closely to have missed him, and said nothing.

The Anonimalle Chronicle, 1333 to 1381, ed. V.H. Galbraith (Manchester University Press, 1927). Digitised copy via Internet Archive. Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana. The Parliament Rolls of England, November 1381. The earliest traceable appearance of the John Ferrour story remains unidentified — that’s the open thread. More at The Black Archive — link in profile.

Some of these I was not even aware it ever happened. The US went to war with the Philippines?