Twelve weeks after coming on the market, the Surrey house used to portray the home of actress Maggie Smith's character, Lady Violet Crawley, found a buyer and recently closed along with several adjacent properties for nearly $9 million. Known as Dower House on the TV series, it was built around 1686.
In a social media post reporting that the King would cooperate with the police investigation into his brother Andrew's ties with the late serial sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, CBS News mistakenly referred to the monarch as King Charles II a distant ancestor of King Charles III who died more than 300 years ago in 1685. The mistake, which was slapped with a community note on X, quickly went viral, with social media users dunking on the suggestion that a 17th-century monarch had been reached for comment.
It's nearly 200 years since the birth of a British aristocrat who became the first Muslim member of the House of Lords. But few have heard of Lord Henry Stanley, who "defied convention and his family's wishes" when he converted to Islam in 1859, according to historian Jamie Gilham. Little remains of Stanley's letters and diaries "which is really frustrating but adds to the idea that he was a private man," he said.
So, on Sunday 25th January, members of the reenactment society will converge on The Mall from all across the country, some arriving already dressed in buff coats and broad-brimmed hats, others changing into period clothing on arrival. There are pikes to be shouldered, muskets checked, and a few tentative practice swings as old drill is recalled, before the ranks are set and order restored.