slowlyeden:Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, Kate Barlass, from Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdal
slowlyeden:Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, Kate Barlass, from Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale’s Golden Book of Famous Women, 1920, viaCatherine Douglas is a figure who has gone down in Scottish historical folklore. She was lady-in-waiting to Joan Beaufort, the queen of James I of Scotland. On February 20th 1437, a group of men led by Sir Robert Graham arrived at Blackfriars in Perth, where the king was staying, in order to kill him. The king’s chamberlain, aware of the assassination plot, had removed the bolt from the door of the room in which James and the queen were staying. James fled into a sewer tunnel (clothed only in his nightshirt, cap and furry slippers), while the queen and her ladies replaced the floorboards to hide his location. Catherine placed her arm through the staples of the door to bar the assassins. They forced the door, breaking Catherine’s arm, and discovered and killed the king. (James had been unable to escape from the sewer because, three days before, he had had the exit blocked up with stone, because his tennis balls kept running into the hole while he was playing.) From then on, Catherine became ‘Kate Barlass’.(Kate’s legend may also be the origin of the phrase ‘Katy, bar the door!’, perhaps influenced by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1881 poem about the event, which includes the line ‘Catherine, keep the door!’) -- source link
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