Sharon Kay Penman's Blog, page 106

Deadline dragons, the Tudors, and blessings upon the NJ Supreme Court

Sorry I was off Facebook today, but I was cornered again by a certain dragon, who seems to be winning our current war. Not much of medieval importance occurred today in any event, although Margaret Tudor died on this date in 1541. Margaret was the unhappy Queen of Scotland and sister to the Tudor Bluebeard. She also has the dubious distinction of being obliterated from the family history by the script writers for The Tudors series. But she still fared better than her beautiful sister Mary, who was renamed Margaret, magically and mysteriously married off to the King of Portugal instead of the King of France and then murdered him. A pity there are no defamation lawyers for the dead.
On a happier note—what wouldn’t be happier than deadline dragons and the Tudors---I am pleased to report that there is a reason to be proud of New Jersey tonight. Jersey seems to get little respect. We are often a breeding ground for corrupt politicians, Tony Soprano is one of our more famous exports, and people joke that our state bird is the mosquito and our state tree is dead. Of course we do have Bruce Springsteen. And thanks to our Supreme Court, New Jersey now joins the enlightened ranks of states in which same-sex marriage is legal.

A bargain for my British readers

I am sure that October 17th was not a blank slate on the medieval calendar and there were some events of importance occurring on that date. Just none that interested me very much! So I am going to focus today’s Facebook post upon my favorite detective, Justin de Quincy, who has had a good year so far. In September, three of his mysteries were finally made available as e-books in the UK; the fourth, Prince of Darkness, will be brought out next spring, both as an e-book and a paperback edition. The mysteries have been selling briskly on Amazon.co.UK; yes, writers keep track of our book sales, at least when they first come out. But my British editor has alerted me that Justin is about to have a spotlight shone upon him by Amazon.
For twenty-four hours, The Queen’s Man will be promoted on Amazon.co.UK and the German and French Amazon sites as Amazon’s Kindle Daily Deal. This means that for all of today it can be downloaded for just ninety-nine pence in the UK and for a comparable price in euros. So for my British readers who’ve enjoyed the mysteries, this is an opportunity to enter Justin’s world for a minimal cost. And for those who’ve not read any of the mysteries, Justin and I hope you’ll remedy that straightaway! Justin is a modest lad, but he’d love to have soaring sales figures to use against those pushy Angevins for shoving him off center stage the way they did.

New Author's Note for Sunne in Splendour

I have a new blog up at long last.
http://sharonkaypenman.com/blog/

The complete Author’s Note for the new hardcover edition of The Sunne in Splendour

I do plan to blog about my Richard III tour, but I am still having to devote all of my time and energy these days to fending off the Deadline Dragon, who is lurking around until I can finish the Author’s Note for A King’s Ransom.   So in the meantime, I am going to post the new Author’s Note for the hardcover edition of The Sunne in Splendour, which was published in the UK on September 12th.  Because of space constraints, my publisher, Macmillan, was forced to go with an edited version of the AN, although the AN in its entirety is included in the new e-book.     The new e-book is the one currently available for sale on Amazon.co.UK, although the date given is July, 2012; it incorporates all of the changes I made for the hardcover edition of Sunne.   And I have good news for my non-British readers.  St Martin’s Press has now made their new e-book edition of Sunne available; it includes the new AN and reflects all of the changes I made to the hardcover Sunne edition, correcting mistakes that were not caught and making some minor alterations to the dialogue.   The date listed for the Kindle edition is 2008, but the one now for sale is the new one.     
As I discussed on Facebook, Book Depository, dear to book lovers for their worldwide free shipping, is refusing to sell the hardcover edition of Sunne to non-British readers.   In the past, Amazon and Amazon.co.UK would pull a “foreign” book if a publisher complained.  In Sunne’s case, that did not happen, of course. No American publisher would lose sales if American readers bought the Sunne hardcover, for there are no plans to publish a hardcover edition on this side of the Atlantic.  So only Book Depository can explain why they have chosen to penalize would-be book buyers who live in the “wrong” country.   Sunne is still available for sale on Amazon.co,UK and Waterstones and other British book sites, although the mailing costs are not cheap.  
 Okay, end of rant.  I just find it so frustrating when artificial barriers are put up to keep people from buying books since we live in an age when book buying is in a downward spiral.  But as I promised my readers, here is the new Author’s Note for Sunne, in its entirety. 
*     *      *       *       *
AUTHOR’S NOTE   2013
I was a college student when I stumbled onto the story of Richard III, and the more I learned, the more convinced I became that he’d been the victim of a great injustice, transformed by the Tudors into a soulless monster in order to justify Henry Tudor’s dubious claim to the throne.   While I’d always realized that history is rewritten by the victors, I was taken aback by how successful this particular rewrite had been, and I began telling my friends how unfairly Richard had been maligned.  I soon discovered that they did not share my indignation about the wrongs done this long-dead medieval king.  I got a uniform reaction, a “Richard who?” before their eyes glazed over and they’d start to edge away.   
 So I decided I needed another outlet for my outrage, and it occurred to me that I ought to write a novel about Richard.  I had no idea how that casual decision would transform my life, setting me upon a twelve year journey that would eventually end in the publication of The Sunne in Splendour.   It took twelve years because the manuscript was stolen from my car during my second year of law school.  It represented nearly five years of labor–and it was the only copy.  The loss was so traumatic that I could not write again for almost six years.  And then one rainy California weekend, the log-jam suddenly broke and the words began to flow again.  I ended up moving to England to research the book, and three years later, I was lucky enough to find an  editor, Marian Wood, willing to take on a novice writer and a thousand page manuscript about that “long-dead medieval king,” and able to convince her publisher, Henry Holt and Company, that this was a good idea.   
 I am very grateful to Richard, for he launched my writing career and saved me from a lifetime practicing tax law.  I am very grateful, too, to Macmillan, my British publisher, for deciding to re-issue Sunne in a hardcover edition.   Few books ever get a rebirth like this, one that has enabled me to correct the typographical errors that infiltrated the original British hardcover edition of Sunne and to rectify my own mistakes that came to light after Sunne’s publication, the most infamous being a time-traveling little grey squirrel.  In this new edition, I have also made some changes to the dialogue.  Sunne was my first novel and was therefore a learning experience.  In subsequent novels, I came to see that in attempting to portray medieval speech, less is more. 
 It does not seem possible that thirty years could have passed since Sunne’s publication in the United Kingdom.   And because history is not static, ebbing and flowing like the tides, there have been new discoveries in those thirty years, information surfacing that was not known during those twelve years that I was researching Richard’s world.   For example, I state in Sunne that Richard and Anne wed without a papal dispensation, but there is some evidence that this is incorrect. The Earl of Warwick sought papal dispensations when he was planning to wed his daughters to George and Richard, and since he received one for George and Isabel, there is no reason to suppose he’d not have been granted one for Richard and Anne; Richard also sought and received a papal dispensation in April, 1472 because of the affinity created by Anne’s marriage to Edward of Lancaster, who was Richard’s second cousin once removed.   We still do not know the exact date of Richard and Anne’s marriage, nor do we know when their son was born, but it seems more likely it was in 1476. 
We also know more about the life of Edward’s daughter Cecily, for since Sunne’s publication, it has been established that she wed Ralph Scrope in late 1484.  He was the son of Thomas, Lord Scrope, but we know little about this brief marriage. Henry Tudor had it annulled upon becoming king so that he could marry her to his uncle, John, Viscount Welles.  He was in his forties and Cecily only eighteen, but what little evidence there is suggests the marriage was a happy one.  They had two daughters, both of whom died before the viscount’s death in 1499.  Cecily had often been in attendance to her sister the queen, but in 1502, she made what had to be a love match with a man of much lesser status, a mere esquire, William Kyme.  Tudor was furious, banishing her from court and confiscating her estates.  But she had an unlikely champion in Tudor’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, who’d apparently become fond of Cecily, and she interceded with her son on Cecily’s behalf.  After the death of her beloved sister, Elizabeth, in 1503, Cecily and her husband retired from the court and settled on the Isle of Wight.  She and William had a son, Richard, born in 1505 and a daughter, Margaret, born in 1507.  Since Cecily died on August 24, 1507, she may have died from the complications of childbirth.  This marriage, too, appears to have been a happy one.  I would like to think so, for this daughter of York, said by Sir Thomas More to have been “not so fortunate as fair,” had suffered more than her share of sorrow in her thirty-eight years. 
            And in my Afterward, I said that Francis Lovell was not seen alive after the battle of Stoke Field and probably drowned trying to cross the River Trent.   Well, now we know he actually reached safety in Scotland, for he was granted a safe-conduct by the Scots king in June, 1488. Sadly, he then disappears from history’s notice, leaving us to determine for ourselves whether he died soon afterward or perhaps chose to fly under the Tudor radar for the remainder of his days.  
 While these are undeniably interesting discoveries, none of them would be classified as dramatic or a game changer.  We still have not solved the central mystery of Richard’s reign–the fate of his nephews.  That argument goes on, unabated, with many still claiming they died at Richard’s command, others sure they were put to death by Tudor, still others confident that the younger boy survived, surfacing as Perkin Warbeck, and some agreeing with me that the Duke of Buckingham was the most likely culprit.   So my views on that have not changed in the intervening thirty years.  
 There has been, however, a truly amazing development in the fascinating, improbable story of the last Plantagenet king.   In September of 2012, DNA results confirmed that Richard’s lost grave had been found, in a Leicester car park of all places.  I confess I’d been dubious when the expedition was first announced, never imaging they’d find their royal needle in that Leicester haystack.  But once they described their find, I had no doubts whatsoever that this was indeed Richard.  The skull had been smashed in and his bones bore the evidence of a violent, bloody death that tallied with descriptions of Richard’s last moments at Bosworth.  Even more convincing to me was that this man had suffered from scoliosis, which would explain the disparity between Richard’s shoulders, noted during his lifetime; in Sunne, I had him injured in a childhood fall.    I have scoliosis myself and my heart went out to Richard, living in an age without chiropractors.  I’d always known he did not have the deformities claimed by the Tudor historians, for he’d earned himself a reputation as a superb soldier at an early age, and at Bosworth, he fought like a man possessed, coming within yards of reaching Henry Tudor before being overwhelmed by sheer numbers. I still like to think that memories of Richard’s last, desperate charge gave Tudor nightmares for the rest of his life.
What else did we learn from the discovery of Richard’s remains?   While we always knew he’d died violently, we now know he suffered no less than ten wounds after being surrounded and unhorsed.  We know he was five feet, eight inches tall.  And, most amazing of all, we now know what he looked like, thanks to the reconstruction of his face.  There are no contemporary portraits and the best-known one in London’s National Portrait Gallery was tampered with to make him appear as sinister as the stories then circulating about him.  For those who have not seen Richard’s reconstruction, it is accessible on the Internet, and will be included in some of the many books sure to be written about this remarkable archaeological find.  What struck me was how young he looks.  It is almost like watching a film about England before World War I; the characters always seem so vulnerable, living their lives with such heartrending innocence, not knowing what horrors lay ahead for them.   Eden before the Fall.  Or Eden while Edward IV still reigned and Richard was the loyal younger brother, Lord of the North, never imagining what fate held in store for him and his doomed House.   
S.K.P.
March 1, 2013
*     *     *     *      *
 The members of my Richard III tour agreed that the highlight of the trip was our visit to Leicester, where we visited the car park and met with Philippa Langley and Mathew Morris.  Philippa was the driving force behind this quixotic, remarkable project and Mathew is one of the archaeologists involved in the dig.  Philippa’s fascinating story of the hunt for Richard’s long-lost grave will be available for sale on October 22nd.   Here is the link.   http://www.amazon.com/Kings-Grave-Search-Richard-ebook/dp/B00CQY9FDG/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381806318&sr=1-1&keywords=philippa+langley    I will discuss our Leicester experiences when I am able to blog about the tour; it was a memorable evening in so many respects.   The odds were so against Philippa, but she persevered when most people would have given up in despair.  If Richard III does have a guardian angel, she lives in Edinburgh!
October 15, 2013
   

Battle of Hastings and a new book about Elizabethan England

October 14, 1066 was the date of one of the Middle Age’s most significant battles, as William the Conqueror’s triumph at Hastings over the Saxon king, Harold, dramatically changed the history of several countries, among them England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and France. And on October 14, 1322, Robert the Bruce inflicted a humiliating defeat upon Edward II at the battle of Byland Moor, forcing the English king to recognize the independence of Scotland.
Now onto England’s golden age, the reign of Elizabeth. Grace Tiffany, a Shakespeare scholar, university professor, and author, has a new novel out, Paint, set in Elizabethan England. I have not had a chance to read it yet, but I read an earlier novel by Grace, My Father Had a Daughter, about Judith Shakespeare, and I enjoyed it enormously, so I have high expectations for Paint. Grace also has a very entertaining blog, http://www.shakespearefiction.blogspo... And for readers who’d like to find out more about her books, here are links to Paint and My Father had a Daughter.
http://acmrs.org/publications/catalog...
http://www.amazon.com/My-Father-Had-D...

From the murder of an emperor to the birth of a Lancastrian priince

October 13th was an incredibly busy day from a historical standpoint. So fasten your seat belts for this one.
On October 13, 54 AD, the Roman emperor Claudius was poisoned. I am sure that thousands are like me, having gleaned most of what we know about Claudius from the brilliant television series, I, Claudius, based upon the equally brilliant novel by Robert Graves. The wonderful actor Derek Jacobi played Claudius as a very sympathetic character who was extraordinarily unlucky in his choice of wives, including the notorious Messalina and Agrippina, who is believed to have murdered him to gain the crown for her son, Nero. The series is available on DVD for those who’ve never seen this classic.
On October 13, 1162, Leonora, the second daughter of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, was born. She would become Queen of Castile, winning the affection of her husband and his subjects. She is one of the two children who outlived their mother, the other being John. She seems to have had a happy marriage, but there was much tragedy in her life due to the deaths of so many of her children. The abbot of Mont St Michel was her godfather. Like all of Henry and Eleanor’s children, she was said to be very attractive, and a later Spanish chronicle described her as having dark hair.
On October 13, 1278, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd wed Ellen de Montfort at Worcester Cathedral. They’d actually been wed by proxy but Edward I then had the bride kidnapped by a pirate in his pay and held her prisoner for 3 years as he sought to extract as many concessions as possible from Llywelyn. Edward paid for the wedding and then blackmailed Llywelyn into making even more concessions on the eve of the wedding. Knowing his sense of humor, I do not think it was coincidence that he scheduled it on October 13th, which was the feast day of St Edward. Llywelyn and Ellen’s marriage appears to have been a happy one, but I doubt that they enjoyed the wedding itself.
On October 13, 1307, the grasping, unscrupulous French King, Philippe IV, ordered the arrest of the Templars. You will occasionally see October 13, 1244 give as the birthdate of the last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, but there is no evidence for that as we are not even sure of the date of his birth year.
On October 13, 1399, Henry IV was crowned at Westminster as the first Lancastrian king, having deposed and probably murdered his cousin Richard II, his usurpation laying the seeds for the Wars of the Roses. Brian Wainwright has written an excellent novel about Henry’s reign, Within the Fetterlock.
On October 13, 1453, the only child of Marguerite d’Anjou and the hapless Henry VI was born, Edward of Lancaster, who would die at seventeen at the battle of Tewkesbury.
It is sometimes claimed that October 13, 1537 was the birthday of the Nine Days Queen, Jane Grey, but that is open to dispute, with some historians believing that she was born earlier than that, possibly even in 1536. Susan Higginbotham has written a novel about Jane, Her Highness, the Traitor. I’ve always had great sympathy for Jane, the ultimate political pawn.

Why I am no longer a fan of Book Depository

I got a shock yesterday. Several of my American readers had told me they’d been unable to buy the new British hardcover edition of Sunne, that they kept getting an “out of stock” message. When I checked, the same thing happened to me, so I e-mailed my editor at Macmillan. She was away but she got back to me as soon as she returned, and I was utterly taken aback by her response. She said that Book Depository will not sell British books to American readers! Now we all know that with e-books, geography is destiny, but real books? My editor said that Macmillan does not have the legal right to sell their books in America and if Book Depository was selling in defiance of borders in the past, they should not have been doing that.

Like many of you, I’ve bought British books from Book Depository without any problem, but now they seem to be enforcing this insane policy. And Sunne is not the only victim. Americans cannot buy the new Bernard Cornwell, the Pagan Lord, either. They show only the American edition for pre-order; when I searched for the UK edition, which came out in September, even including the ISBN number, I was told there was no such book! And to add insult to injury, Book Depository is hiding behind weasel words like “out of stock,” instead of being honest and saying they won’t sell the books to us. I assume they will not sell American books to British readers, either.

So this is bad news for my non-British readers who’d hoped to buy the new Sunne. To compound the lunacy of this, Sunne is not taking sales away from my American publisher. There has not been a hardcover edition in the US since 1982! Amazon.co.Uk is still selling Sunne to American readers, but I suppose that could change at any moment; and of course, the mailing costs are quite high for these transatlantic sales. So once again the ants are crushed when the elephants fight, and guess who are the ants? Us, of course, the book-buying public.

A medieval wedding and a modern birthday

I am sure there were some important medieval happenings on this date in medieval history; the marriage of the Black Prince to the Fair Maid of Kent comes to mind. But for me, October 10th matters most as the entrance upon the world stage of my friend Paula Mildenhall. Happy Birthday, Paula!

The Lionheart leaves the Holy Land

On October 9, 1192, Richard I sailed from Acre for home, or so he thought. It was probably just as well that he did not know what lay in store for him—savage storms at sea, two shipwrecks, an encounter with pirates, a wild dash across the heart of the Hohenstaufen empire, capture in an Austrian village, and imprisonment that violated both the laws of war and the laws of the Church. But having the high moral ground was not much help when dealing with a sociopath. All this, of course, will be dramatized in A King’s Ransom. So here is the ending paragraph of Lionheart, a crusader chronicle reporting that he did indeed pray fir Outremer’s survival until he could return to fulfill his holy vow.
* * *
They’d chosen to depart at dusk so they could sail by the stars. Earlier that day, it had been overcast, but brisk winds had scattered the clouds. As the buss raised anchor and headed out of the harbor, most of the men on deck were looking toward the horizon, where the sky was streaking with the dying rays of the setting sun. But Richard kept his eyes upon Acre, slowly disappearing into the distance. “Outremer,” he said softly, “I commend you to God. May He grant me the time I need to come back to your aid.” He stayed where he was, not moving until darkness swallowed up the shore and all he could see was the endless, rolling sea and the glittering stars, brilliant and cold and eternal.
* * *

Of Deadlne Dragons and a rescued chimpanzee

I have finished the copy-edited ms for Putnam’s, now need to go over it for my British publisher. Then the fun really begins—the Author’s Note, which is always the most challenging task for me, often harder than the book itself. But the solitary confinement ought to be over and I hope to be able to drop by now and then. It is likely to be a while, though, before I can start blogging about the Richard III tour. Meanwhile, here is a bittersweet story about a chimpanzee who spent sixteen years in a cage and who has now been set free in a sanctuary in Cameroon. What is so amazing is that he did not know how to communicate with other chimpanzees because of his long isolation, and that often triggers aggression. But they seem to understand that he is “different” and the dominant male has taken Bazou under his wing. So there is a happy ending, albeit sixteen years late.
http://www.care2.com/causes/after-16-...