[Originally at Antique bought online may be royal marriage bed by Roff Smith]
WHEN ENGLISH ANTIQUE dealer Ian Coulson went to pick up the bed frame he’d bought online for £2200, he expected to find a “profusely carved Victorian four-poster bed with armorial shields,” just as described in the catalog.
“At that stage I thought it was a supreme example of the Arts and Craft movement,” recalls Coulson, referring to a design aesthetic popular in Victorian England during the late 19th century. But when he arrived home and began examining his new purchase more closely, he quickly realized it was far older than Victorian.
The bed showed signs of having been repaired a good many times, something unusual in an otherwise well-kept antique barely 150 years old. Marks in the timber indicated that it had been hewn with medieval hand tools, not the mechanized saws of the industrial age. And those “armorial shields” mentioned in the catalog were in fact the English royal coat of arms.
Believing he’d stumbled onto something extraordinary, Coulson embarked on what has turned out to be a nine-year (and counting) odyssey of painstaking research. Over the years he, and several esteemed experts, have become convinced that the age-blackened antique is the long-lost bed commissioned for the marriage of King Henry VII, the first Tudor king, and Elizabeth of York.
Their union in 1486 ended the Wars of Roses, the series of bloody civil wars that pitted the House of Lancaster — a red rose on its coat of arms — against the House of York and its heraldic white rose.
If true, it would be an astonishing discovery. No royal furnishings from the early Tudor era are known to have survived the English Civil War. The anti-royalist Parliamentarians are understood to have destroyed it all.
Read the rest at https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/01/antique-bed-king-henry-elizabeth-york/ or read more awesome stuff at DowOakEvents.com
I’m a sucker for all things historic, I’ll admit it. So I love reading through anything wedding history-related. This one is definitely very cool as well. Honestly, I wish I owned something as historically awesome as this.
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