Reign

[cactuswatcher]

Very few facts to deal with this week. Just my opinion, but Hortense doesn't sound very Italian to me. Although the Medicis were a large extended family, Catherine had no Medici first cousins. In fact the male line of her branch of the family was already extinct by this time. Her half-brother had been murdered by a distant cousin a decade earlier. All this might explain Hortense's callousness toward her presumably distant cousin. It is a bit odd that Hortense's band of thugs so quickly switched to Mary's employ especially when they must have been aware that Mary was short of money. Ah well, I guess they preferred perpetually snowy, fake-France to sunny Italy and the employ of some other Medici.

I won't comment on the design of the cannon and gun carriage, there is only so much that a prop department can do. But even the most undiscerning viewer should have noticed that the castle which the brave little French band was attacking was not a castle, fort, keep, mud hut or any other kind of structure, but an open line of low rocky cliffs. Still, if a road had run close by, the cliffs would have been a fine place to put the cannon to help block the road. Francis was indeed correct. The worst thing possible when facing an old cannon would be to sit still in range while the cannoneers took potshots at you. The chances that the cannon could have hit anybody in this small group if they'd spread out and trotted across the field were actually very slim, the firing rate being very low and the aiming being quite iffy. Still cannons did scare people, because if you did get hit the results were obviously not going to be very good. So the caution the little band showed was realistic. A line of slow moving wagons on a road would be a far easier target. As for the arrow shot, well, Francis is supposed to be the hero, right?

Comments

[dlgood.livejournal.com]

Sounds so much better than French or northern Italian food, right? Plus that wonderful Scottish weather... Who wouldn't trade Tuscany for that?