Inquisitor 1202 – Old Mates (Plus One) by Lato

Another corker to go with the last six inquisitors. All really challenging and extremely enjoyable (always helped by the occasional win – 1199 in my case!)

A long and complex preamble told us to find six unclued answers linked to a group by various means. In 23 clues there were extra letters which described a “key character”. These could be anagrammed to give . . .  I stopped reading at this point and decided to solve some clues!

A first read through yielded few answers, and most were in the bottom right corner (as usual).

I plugged on until I had most of the diagram filled. My eye was drawn to the white squares on the diagonal from the top left to bottom right. If you included the green squares on this diagonal it read OF HENRY VIII. Now my knowledge of history is sketchy at best, but we all know he was a) responsible for the dissolution of the monasteries and the establishment of the C of E and b) he married six times –  Divorced Beheaded Died Divorced Beheaded Survived. There being no obvious link with religious matters, I concluded that the six wives were the issue here. So the six unclued answers were linked to Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr. (A search of Wikipedia yielded the names and the sequence.)

Some were anagrams according to the preamble and A?G??? for the last one must be [ARAGON]* which is ANGORA. ?O?S?R? must be [SEYMOUR]* which is MOUSERY. I was a little concerned about DO?AR, but realised that Catherine HOWARD was beheaded, so [(H)OWARD]* is DOWAR and similarly [(B)OLEYN]* is ONELY. This left Parr and Cleves to be dealt with by definition. Cleve is a hillside, so by definition we get to HILLSIDES and parr are one year old SALMON.

It was, by now, pretty clear that the three words to be written below the grid, the precursors of OF HENRY VIII, (to be highlighted) must be THE SIX WIVES.

Pretty good so far, but more to come. The extra letters seemed to indicate IN HISTORY HIM WITH FIVE EXES, though that is 24 letters. Further examination revealed that it should be HIM WIV FIVE EXES (is “wiv” textspeak?). The single letter abbreviation for 26A is M(arried). So we were to anagram [IN HISTORY HI(M) WIV FIVE EXES]* which, would you believe, yields “THE SIX WIVES OF HENRY VIII”

Amazing! Thanks to Lato for hours of fun. A pity that it would be possible to submit the crossword without solving the final splendid anagram, but think what you would have missed!

The diagram was: