Sharon Kay Penman's Blog, page 114

All that is lacking is the dancing bear

On June 8, 1191, Richard finally arrived at the siege of Acre, having taken time off to conquer the island of Cyprus. This was a fun scene to write because the Lionheart could have taught Barnum and Bailey a lesson in self-promotion; he had a real flair for making grand entrances, much to the frustration and fury of his enemies. Philippe knows what to expect, having witnessed Richard’s entry into the harbor at Messina, but Conrad of Montferrat hasn’t a clue and he is vexed to see the entire camp running toward the shoreline as word spreads that Richard’s fleet has been sighted. Lionheart, pages 291-292
* * *
Watching in bemusement as this throng surged toward the sea, Conrad said scornfully, “Will you look at those fools? You’d think they hope to witness the Second Coming of the Lord Christ! What is there to see, for God’s sake? Just some ships dropping anchor offshore.”
Philippe gave the older man a tight, mirthless smile, thinking that Conrad was about to get his first lesson in Ricardian drama. (omission)
* * *
Philippe then baffles Conrad by asking if he had troupes of traveling players back in Montferrat and he makes Conrad wonder if his wits are wandering by going on about the entrance of such a troupe into a town, seeking to attract as large an audience as possible, describing how they blow their trumpets, beat on drums, sing and banter and trot out dancing dogs. occasionally even a dancing bear. Conrad demands to know what he is talking about, but he merely smiles.
* * *
By the time they reached the beach, it looked as if every man, woman, and child in the camp had gathered at the shoreline. To the west, the sun was setting in a blaze of fiery color, the sky and sea taking on vivid shades of gold and red, drifting purple clouds haloed in shimmering lilac light. The ships entering the bay were backlit by this spectacular sunset, and Philippe wondered if Richard had timed his landing for maximum impact. The sleek war galleys were slicing through the waves like the deadly weapons they were, the royal banners of England and Outremer catching each gust of wind, the oarsmen rowing in time to the thudding drumbeats, the air vibrating with the cacophony of trumpets, pipes, and horns. And just as he’d done at Messina, Richard was standing on a raised platform in the prow of his galley, a magnet for all eyes. When the crowds erupted in wild cheering, he acknowledged their tribute by raising a lance over his head and the noise level reached painful proportions, loud enough to reach the Saracen soldiers lining the walls of the city as they, too, watched, spellbound, the arrival of the legendary Lionheart.
Conrad was staring at the spectacle in disbelief, eyes wide and mouth open. When he finally tore his gaze away from the scene playing out in the harbor, he saw that the French king was watching him with a mordant, cynical smile, one that he now understood. “All that is lacking,” Philippe said, “is the dancing bear.”
* * *
Moving on, June 8, 1376 was the death of another celebrated soldier, Edward, the Black Prince, eldest son of Edward III and father of Richard II, also a character in several of Bernard Cornwell’s novels. And on June 8, 1476, George Neville, Archbishop of York, died; not one of my favorite characters in Sunne.

The Holy City under siege and the Black Death claims a queen

On June 7, 1099, the siege of Jerusalem began; when the crusaders eventually took it, the result was a shameful massacre of the Muslims and Jews living in the city. The crusader chronicles boasted of the streets running ankle-deep in blood. When Saladin lay siege to Jerusalem, he intended to take it by storm and put the townspeople to the sword to avenge this brutal slaughter, but Balian d’Ibelin persuaded him to allow the city to surrender by threatening to destroy all of the Muslim holy sites in the city if they had nothing left to lose and by offering a ransom, much of which came from money that Henry II had contributed to Jerusalem’s protection over the years. There was not enough money to ransom all of the citizens, and some were sold into slavery, but at least the streets did not run with blood as they did in1099.
On June 7, 1329, the Scots king Robert the Bruce died and on June 7, 1394, Anne of Bohemia, beloved queen of Richard II, died of the plague; she was 28 and had been wed to Richard for 12 years. She’d been quite unpopular initially in part because she brought no dowry worth mentioning and the medieval English seemed to have looked askance at foreign queens. But she appears to have been a kind-hearted woman and by the time she’d died, she’d won over many of the people. Richard loved her deeply, and things went from bad to worse for him after he lost her stabilizing influence.

Richard's arrival in Holy Land

June 6th is seared into history, of course, as the date of D-Day. Saving Private Ryan justifiably received many accolades, but I also like a much older film, The Longest Day.
Going much further back in time, on June 6th, 1191, Richard Coeur de Lion reached the crusader city of Tyre. Here is a description of the city from Lionheart, page 280.
* * *
The men fell silent as Tyre came into view, impressed by its formidable defenses and moved by their first glimpse of a city where the Lord Christ had once walked. Tyre was virtually an island, connected to the mainland by a short and narrow causeway. A protective breakwater or mole extended out into the sea, a heavy chain stretching from a high tower on its eastern edge to a second tower on land, barring entry to the harbor. Richard was surprised to find his eyes misting as he gazed upon the ancient stone walls of this legendary biblical city. It had been more than three years since he’d taken the cross upon hearing of Jerusalem’s fall, years in which his holy quest had often seemed like a tantalizing dream, glimmering on the horizon just out of reach. At long last, it was about to take tangible form.
* * *
Unfortunately, he soon learned that in the Middle East, nothing was simple and not all of his enemies were Saracens. Tyre was held by Conrad de Montferrat, who was just as strong-willed as Richard himself, and the English king received his first hard lesson in the cut-throat politics of the Kingdom of Jerusalem when he found he and his men were denied entry to Tyre, on Conrad’s orders. This did not get their relationship off to the best of starts. Lionheart, page 281.
* * *
Raising a hand to silence the indignant protests of his men, Richard gave Alan Trenchmer a terse command to anchor the fleet in the lee of the breakwater. Glancing back at Tyre, deceptively tranquil in the golden dusk, he shook his head in disgust. “What does it say,” he said caustically, “when our enemy, an infidel Saracen, is a man of greater honor than our Christian ally?”
* * *
Interestingly, and rather ironically, Richard got along much better with his Saracen foes than he did with Conrad and the French. Saladin’s chronicler, Baha al-Din, reported that Richard formed friendships with some of Saladin’s emirs, and he even knighted a few of them, including the son of Saladin’s brother, al-Malik al-Adil. He would later pay a high price for this mutual respect, though, when he found himself in a German court, charged with betraying Christendom to the infidels.

Loyalty in a police dog and a king's brother

I will only be able to make hit and run visits for June, thanks to that deadline bearing down on me like a runaway train. So my Facebook entries are going to be brief although we know that brevity does not come naturally to me.
Edward I was luckier than he deserved, IMHO. One of the ways in which he was lucky was that he was blessed with a brother both competent and very loyal, not always the case for brothers of kings; George of Clarence, anyone? Edmund, Earl of Lancaster and Leicester, died on June 5, 1296, at age 51. I found him quite sympathetic, as anyone reading Shadow can probably tell.
And be forewarned. This story will have some reaching for a box of tissues. It shows a K-9 shepherd grieving for his slain master. http://www.today.com/pets/police-dog-...

Catherine Violet Hubbard

“Sunday morning, two days after the shooting, two days that felt like two eternities, I sat with my husband, Matt, on our living room couch in Newtown, Connecticut, staring at the blank document on my laptop, wondering where to start, how to start. How to find the words to write my little girl’s obituary.”
This is the opening paragraph of a story no one who reads it will ever forget, written by the mother of one of the twenty children murdered at Newtown, CT. Their daughter Catherine loved animals and when her mother struggled to write her obituary, she added a line that donations could be made in lieu of flowers to a local animal rescue. She and her husband would later be stunned to learn that the shelter received over $175,000 in donations from all around the world, and the rescue—which had been made up of volunteers—decided to create the Catherine Violet Hubbard Animal Sanctuary.
http://www.guideposts.org/inspiration...
https://www.facebook.com/CatherineVio...

Henry's worst mistake

There were a few historical happenings on June 3rd, ( the fall of Antioch, for one) but I am going to have to beg off from dealing with them, for real life has come to a screeching halt as I remain trapped in the deadline doldrums. I can’t resist mentioning, though, that June 3rd, 1162 was a day that would soon give Henry II considerable grief, for it was on this date that his great good friend, Thomas Becket, was consecrated as Archbishop of Canterbury, just one day after he’d been ordained as a priest. Henry was convinced theirs would be the perfect partnership. He was wrong.

A first marriage for duty, a second one for love

June 2nd, 1420 was the wedding day of King Henry V of England and Catherine Valois of France. She soon satisfied a queen’s primary duty and gave him a son and heir, (the unfortunate Henry VI) but within two years, she’d be a young widow after his death from dysentery, which was often lethal in the MA; John and Edward I were among its royal victims, as was Henry’s son Hal. Catherine had a much more interesting widowhood than Berengaria of Navarre, who never wed again, which can be interpreted in a number of ways. But Catherine’s eye was taken by a handsome young Welshman, Owen Tudor; a secret marriage followed, and the result would be a blessing for future historical novelists and Hollywood screenwriters—the Tudor dynasty. Whether they were such a blessing for England is very much open to debate. They did save their best for last, though, Gloriana.

A count's death, a city's fall, and a queen's coronation

On June 1st, 1191, Philip, the Count of Flanders, an occasional character in my Angevin series, died at the siege of Acre, very soon after his arrival. He gave the Angevins a fair amount of grief during his long career and I am sure he was no favorite of Eleanor’s either, for he accused her niece Isabel, her sister Petronilla’s eldest daughter, of adultery, putting the alleged lover to death in a rather gruesome fashion and using the accusation as an excuse to seize his wife’s inheritance, the rich county of Vermandois. If I seem skeptical about the charge, many of his contemporaries were, too. He did, however, do Richard a very good turn and Philippe Capet a very bad one in Sicily, backing Richard up when he declared that he could not wed Philippe’s sister Alys because she was reputed to have been his father Henry’s mistress. Here is a brief scene from Lionheart between Richard and Philip, page 186.
* * *
While Richard had little interest in discussing his father’s carnal conquests, he did want to know why Philip had taken such a risk. “You’re going to pay a price for your honesty, as you well know. Not many men would have dared to defy Philippe like that, for he’s one to nurse a grudge to the end of his earthly days. Yet that does not seem to trouble you.”
“And you want to know why.” Philip leaned back against the altar and was silent for a moment. “Ah, hellfire, Cousin, I’d think the answer would be obvious. I am nigh on fifty and there are mornings when I feel every one of those fifty years, thanks to aging and the joint evil. I can no longer ride from dawn till dusk without aching bones, find the pleasures of the flesh are losing their allure, and I’ve had to face the fact that I’ll not be siring a son to follow after me. At this point in my life, I do not much care about disappointing Philippe Capet. What matters is not disappointing the Almighty. This is the second time I’ve taken the cross. The first time I had less worthy motives, for I had it in mind to meddle in Outremer’s politics, hoping to see the Leper King’s sisters wed to men of my choosing. As you know, that did not happen. Now I’ve been given another chance and I mean to make the most of it. Most likely I’ll die in the Holy Land, but to die fighting for Jerusalem is not such a bad fate, is it?”
Richard had never expected to feel such a sense of solidarity with Philip, for they’d been rivals for as long as he could remember. Now he found himself looking at his cousin through new eyes. “No, it is not such a bad fate at all,” he agreed, although he did not share the older man’s fatalism. He was confident that he would safely return from Outremer, for surely it was not God’s Will that he die in a failed quest.
* * *
And of course the Count of Flanders did die in the Holy Land, although not as he probably anticipated and surely wanted—storming the barricades, sword in hand. He died, instead, of one of the many illnesses that swept the siege camp, disease actually killing more crusaders than the Saracens did.

And on June 1st, 1204, both Henry and Richard were surely spinning in their graves like tops, doubtlessly making the nuns of Fontevrault wonder if their abbey church had been struck by an earthquake, for on this date, the capital city of Normandy, Rouen, fell to the French king.

Lastly, on June 1st, 1533, Anne Boleyn was crowned as Queen of England. It was probably a very triumphant day for her, but we know how that turned out.

A tale of three medieval mothers

On May 31, 1246, Isabelle d’Angouleme, former Queen of England, “John’s Jezebel,” as the historian Nicholas Vincent colorfully calls her, died at the abbey of Fontevrault. After John’s death, she left England and wed Hugh de Lusignan, son of the man to whom she’d once been betrothed, before John had swooped down on her like a hawk on a pigeon. Her second husband was betrothed to Isabella’s own young daughter at the time, and Isabelle and Hugh apparently held the little girl as a hostage until the Pope angrily intervened and insisted upon her return to England. I think my portrayal of Isabelle in Here Be Dragons was too kind, but in my defense, there had not been much written about her when I was researching and writing Dragons more than 25 years ago. She had a very turbulent second marriage and embroiled herself in dangerous political intrigues, motivated to some degree by hostility toward the French queen-regent, John’s niece, Blanche of Castile. The chroniclers are almost unanimously hostile to her, so it is difficult to sift truth from rumor; but she does not seem to have been a happy woman, very beautiful, but sharp-tongued and prideful and manipulative, at least during her marriage to Hugh de Lusignan. John apparently kept her on a shorter leash.
May 31, 1443, was the birthdate of one of my least favorite medieval women, Margaret Beaufort, mother of you-who-who. For a fun read, I recommend Brian Wainwright’s hilarious spoof of the Wars of the Roses, the Adventures of Alienore Audley; Alienore’s account of the birth of Henry Tudor is not to be forgotten. Brian is a man of many talents, for he is also the author of a serious historical novel set during the reign of the first Lancastrian king, Within the Fetterlock. I recommend this one, too.
Lastly, on May 31st, 1495, Cecily Neville died, having outlived eleven of her thirteen children, a sad epitaph for any mother. Only five of those thirteen survived to adulthood, six if you count 17 year old Edmund of Rutland. By the time of Cecily’s death at age 80, only her daughters Elizabeth and Margaret still lived. Anne Easter Smith’s Queen by Right tells Cecily’s story.
Say what you will of Margaret Beaufort, she was devoted to the interests of her only child; she’d been wed at twelve and impregnated almost at once, with the result that she could bear no other children after Henry. I will resist the temptation to say snarkily that one Henry Tudor was more than enough. Actually, I sympathize with Margaret, the child-bride, and find it admirable that she later argued against child marriages for her granddaughters. She serves as a stark example of the reason why-- although the medieval nobility often wed their daughters at very young ages-- such marriages were rarely consummated until the girl reached puberty, which occurred later in the MA than in modern times.
Cecily Neville was also a devoted mother. She’d have to be, to have forgiven George of Clarence’s follies. Isabelle seems to have been the odd woman out in this maternal grouping. Or maybe she just didn’t care much for John’s children, for once she sailed for France, she never looked back. Henry III rather sadly seems to have yearned for her love and approval and rashly heaped favors and titles upon his numerous half-siblings from her marriage to de Lusignan. The English looked upon them as a foreign plague of greedy locusts and naturally blamed Henry for their bad behavior. As a general rule, medieval kings fared better if they were only children.

More on the Maid and the Monster

On May 30, 1431, Joan of Arc was burnt at the stake. This is surely the most dreadful of all deaths and even the worst of us do not deserve such a fate. Joan was far from that, one of the most enigmatic and intriguing figures of the MA, and so we ought to spare a sympathetic thought for her today, France’s patron saint and possibly one of the greatest challenges for any historical novelist.
Also on May 30th, 1536, Henry VIII took his third wife, Jane Seymour, after mourning his second wife, Anne Boleyn, for all of ten days. In my more cynical moments, I think that Jane was the luckiest of Henry’s wives, dying before the bloom was off the rose, so to speak, and before she could fall from this fickle monarch’s favor.