Sharon Kay Penman's Blog, page 115

My favorite non-medieval king

A brief greeting from Deadline Doomland, which is no Disneyworld. I am taking time away from my grim reaping to mention that on this date, May 29th, in 1630, my favorite non-medieval king, Charles II, was born. And with a lovely sense of symmetry, on May 29th, 1660, Charles was crowned as England’s king, after fifteen years in exile. If only I had nine lives like a cat, I would have liked to write about Charles; I’ve always seen certain similarities between the Restoration king and the first Yorkist king, Edward IV. This intelligent, cynical, pleasure-loving king has sauntered through many novels over the years. He appears in the once-scandalous-now-tame Forever Amber, written some seventy years ago, and much more recently, in Priya Parmar’s excellent Exit the Actress, the story of Charles’s best known mistress, the actress Nell Gywn.

A What-if Moment in Medieval History

I am beginning to feel like the Grim Reaper, for lately all I seem to do is write death scenes. Unlike my other books, of course, which all had such happy-ever-after endings.
Anyway, on May 28, 1265, the Lord Edward outsmarted his cousin Harry de Montfort, which does not seem to have been all that difficult. Edward had been held captive since the battle of Lewes the year before, but he was treated more as a guest than a prisoner or even a hostage, and on this May afternoon, he convinced Harry that it would be fun to hold races. Harry and his knights took turns racing one another, while Edward lamented that his new stallion had gone lame. You can see where this is going, can’t you? A pity Harry couldn’t. When Edward got the signal he’d been awaiting from a nearby hill, he vaulted into the saddle of his “lame” stallion and after a mocking salute to his de Montfort cousin, spurred toward freedom. Of course Harry and the other knights pursued him, but their horses soon shortened stride, no match for Edward’s fresh stallion. Roger de Mortimer and his men then rode out to meet him, and the scene was set for the battle of Evesham in August. This is another What If moment of history. If Simon had entrusted Edward into the custody of his son Guy instead of Harry, he’d not have been able to escape. Why am I so sure? Because when some of Edward’s supporters had tried to free him from Wallingford Castle that past November, Guy had threatened to send him out to them--via a mangonel. And there would have been no Evesham if Edward had remained Simon’s hostage. English history would have taken a dramatic detour—and so would Welsh history.

Memorial Day and another Tudor outrage

Memorial Day is one for remembering those who served, so it seemed appropriate to post this today. We now understand that throughout history, soldiers have been haunted by PTSD. Sadly, until very recently in human history, not only was this not recognized, there was nothing that could be done for those suffering from it. But Homer described the symptoms in the Iliad and so did Shakespeare in his portrayal of Hotspur.
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/...
From a historical perspective, John was crowned King of England on May 27, 1199. It went better than his investiture as Duke of Normandy the preceding month, when he was joking with friends and accidentally dropped the investiture lance. Naturally when he later lost Normandy, everyone saw this an “Ah-ha” moment.
And on May 27, 1541, Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, daughter of George, Duke of Clarence, was beheaded at the Tower of London; butchered is a more apt description for it took eleven blows with the axe to kill her. Henry VIII committed some vile acts as king, but this judicial murder of the frail, ailing 68 year old countess on a trumped-up charge of treason was surely one of the vilest. She would later by beatified by the Catholic Church, the third of the four stages toward canonization.

The Tudors crash the party again

Okay, I made a break for it when Lionheart was busy cursing out his doctor. I am beginning to wonder if he is dragging out his dying just to spite me. But quickly, for May 24th. On this date in 1444, Henry VI was betrothed to Marguerite d’Anjou. If she could be given a glimpse into the future to see what misery this marriage would bring her, I wonder if she would have run for the closest convent?
And on May 24, 1487, the Yorkist pretender Lambert Simnel was crowned in Dublin; his claim that he was the Earl of Warwick was supported by Margaret of York and Richard’s nephew, John de la Pole, the Earl of Lincoln, but it ended bloodily for John at the battle of Stoke Field later that year. I always thought it was strange that they claimed he was the Earl of Warwick when the real Warwick was being held captive in the Tower of London; wouldn’t they have been better off had they advanced the claim that he was one of Edward’s missing sons? Henry Tudor famously gave Lambert Simnel a job turning a spit in the royal kitchens instead of tossing him in the Tower, and I have actually heard it argued that this was proof of Henry’s “clemency.” Anyone who uses the words “clemency” and “Henry Tudor” in the same sentence is not that well acquainted with the man who dated his reign from the day before Bosworth Field so he could then charge with treason those who’d fought for Richard III. It was a shrewd political maneuver, a clever way of mocking the young pretender and the Yorkists who’d supported him. Say what you will of Tudor, he was clever.
Now back to Chalus. Over the years and books, I’ve had characters die in a number of different ways. Many died bloodily, of course. Others died of TB and pneumonia and typhoid fever and septicemia and dysentery and in childbirth. But I’ve concluded that gangrene is by far the worst way to go. Aside from those poor souls who were tortured to death, of course.

The Maid and the Monster

I am making a quick foray from Chalus to report that on May 23rd, 1430, one of the most fascinating and enigmatic figures of the MA, the Maid of Orleans, Joan of Arc, was captured by the Burgundians at the siege of Compiegne and sold to the English, with dire results.

And on May 23rd, 1533, Henry VIII found compliant English prelates to declare his marriage to Catherine of Aragon null and void. So naturally I’d label today’s entry as The Maid and the Monster; sorry, I couldn’t resist.

A knighting, an assassination attempt, a temporry treaty, and the first battle of the Wars of Roses

May 22nd was a busy day in history. Unfortunately I am also busy right now at Chalus with the Lionheart, so I can’t spare the time to do justice to these events. Richard reminded me that a dying king trumps a Facebook post. So very briefly, here is what happened on this date.
May 22, 1149, Henry Fitz Empress was knighted by his uncle, the King of Scotland, at the age of sixteen. When he kept delaying his son Hal’s knighthood, you may be sure that Hal repeatedly reminded him that he’d been knighted at only sixteen.
May 22, 1176. Saladin was almost murdered by the sect known as the Assassins. It is a very interesting story and I hope eventually to be able to post about it.
May 22, 1200 Treaty of Le Goulet signed between John and the French king, Philippe Capet. Another interesting event, but it, too, will have to wait.
May 22, 1455 First battle of St Albans. The victory went to York. The Lancastrian Earl of Northumberland and Duke of Somerset were slain and Henry VI was captured. But the Duke of York’s triumph would be short-lived. Again, a story that deserves more than I can offer today.

The reluctant crusader and a murder in the Tower

On May 21st, 1172, Henry made peace with the Church at Avranches after Becket’s murder. His enemies must have been very disappointed that he was able to slide out from under this with so little damage. He had to promise, among other things, to take the cross, which does not seem ever to have interested him very much. He was reprieved by his sons’ rebellion and did not keep this vow. He would later be ambushed with the French king by the Archbishop of Tyre, who’d come to preach a new crusade after the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin. The Archbishop got the crowd so aroused that Henry saw he and Philippe (another reluctant crusader) had no choice but to take the cross, too. This was done before thousands of eye-witnesses, but I am not convinced Henry would have followed through with it. His failing health and death at Chinon got him off that particular hook. But Philippe had to honor his own vow, made all the worse for him because he had to accompany the Lionheart to the Holy Land and while Philippe hated every moment of the experience, Richard was born for such a grand stage and took gleeful pleasure in eclipsing the French king at every opportunity.
May 21st, 1471 was the death date of the last Lancastrian king, Henry VI, who died suddenly in the Tower of London. Edward put it about that poor Henry had died of grief and melancholy upon learning of the death of his son at Tewkesbury. If you believe that, I have some swamp land in Florida that I’d love to sell to you.

Could there have been an English King Otto?

My friend Kasia kindly reminded me that yesterday was the death date for Richard’s nephew, Otto of Brunswick, on May 19, 1218. He was only 41 at the time. Richard was quite close to the children of his sisters, especially Henri of Champagne and his sister Matilda’s daughter Richenza and son Otto, both of whom grew up at the English court. Richard seems to have given serious consideration to naming Otto as his heir once it seemed likely he’d not have a son by Berengaria. But Heinrich’s unexpected and untimely death in 1197 gave Richard the opportunity to so some wheeling and dealing with his Rhineland allies, and Otto ended up as the Holy Roman Emperor, although he had a strong rival in Heinrich’s youngest brother Philip of Swabia, who seems to have been so unlike his evil siblings that I could almost believe he was a foundling. Richard’s death was both a personal and political blow to Otto, who was very attached to his uncle. Without Richard’s support, he was much more vulnerable, but he was able to win the good will of Pope Innocent, benefiting from the traditional hostility of the papacy toward the Hohenstaufen House. But Philip succeeded in getting himself crowned as emperor, too, by a rival faction, and after Otto and Innocent fell out, Philip seemed likely to prevail. Only then he was tragically assassinated by a deranged Bavarian nobleman, and his supporters reluctantly recognized Otto as emperor. There would be no happy ending for Otto, though, not after the battle of Bouvines which effectively dethroned him in favor of Heinrich’s son, Frederick II.
Otto had always been unlucky—Richard had come close to arranging a marriage for him with the Scots king’s daughter and heir that would have made him King of Scotland one day, but the plans fell through. And if Heinrich had not died so suddenly, it is certainly conceivable that Otto could have ended up as Richard’s heir. That raises all sorts of interesting scenarios. What would John have done? Would Richard’s vassals have found Otto a more appealing choice than John, who was tainted by his past betrayals? Otto was about 22 when Richard died, so that would have eliminated the problem that Arthur faced—no one wanted a child king. And Otto seems to have had much in common with his favorite uncle—a love of troubadours and music, the sort of bravado in battle that medieval men admired, an inveterate hatred of the French king. He was even said to have physically resembled Richard in stature.
This is, of course, yet another one of those tantalizing What Ifs of history, raising questions impossible to answer. But one thing I can say for certain, that Otto would have been happier as King of England or even Duke of Aquitaine, (for Richard had made him Count of Poitou in 1196) than ever he was as the Holy Roman emperor. He’d been raised at Henry’s court, so French rather than German was his language of choice. He seems to have been far more at home in the Angevin domains than he was in his native land; we know he missed the fine wines of Poitou! I don’t have time here to catalogue all of the other times in which Lady Luck showed herself to be no friend to Otto. I can say only that his was a sad and lonely death.
As you can probably tell, I find Otto a sympathetic figure, and he will appear in Ransom. I do have a legitimate excuse for forgetting his death, though. This weekend Richard was shot at Chalus, and things got a bit hectic after that.
May 20th is also the anniversary in 1217 of the second Battle of Lincoln, in which the French were so decisively defeated that it was sometimes known as the Fair of Lincoln. The hero of the hour was everyone’s favorite, William Marshal. And to close the circle, the Count of Perche who was slain in that battle was Otto’s nephew, the son of Richenza, who was Otto’s sister and Richard’s favorite niece, whom he’d wed to the Count of Perche at the time of his coronation in 1189. Richenza is another favorite of mine, also a character in Ransom, and she was spared the death of her son Thomas at Lincoln by her own untimely death in 1210 at only age 39.

A crusader count and a Tudor queen

May 19, 1102 was the day that Stephen, the Count of Blois, was slain at the battle of Ramleh. Stephen appears briefly in the prologue of Saints, as he tries to explain to his five year old son and namesake that his wife, the Countess Adela, daughter of the Conqueror, is insisting he return to the Holy Land to regain the honor she thinks he lost by abandoning the siege of Antioch. I found myself sympathizing with Stephen’s plight, both for being unfairly accused of cowardice and for being wed to Adela. She prevailed, as she usually did, and her husband redeemed his “lost honor” by his death at Ramleh. Here is a touching and very personal letter that Stephen wrote to his wife before the siege of Antioch.
http://mw.mcmaster.ca/scriptorium/ste...
I seem unable to keep the Tudors from crashing the party this month, for I have to mention that on May 19th, 1536, Anne Boleyn was murdered in the Tower of London by her husband, who went riding off to court Jane Seymour as soon as the canons sounded to assure him that his unwanted wife was no longer a hindrance to his plans for a third marriage.

The day that changed history

May 18th was a day of historical happenings. The Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer Omar Khayyam, was born on May 18th, 1048. He is best known in the West for the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translated in the 19th century by Edward Fitz Gerald. Even those who’d not recognize his name would recognize this verse:
The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."

On May 18, 1096, there was a bloody massacre of the Jews of Worms, Germany; whenever crusades were launched in the MA, men afire with crusading fervor turned their zealotry and wrath upon the “infidels” closer to home than the Saracens. The Bishop of Worms had tried to shelter the city’s Jews from the mob, but they broke into his palace and murdered at least 800 of the Jews they found there when they refused to accept baptism. Sadly, this would happen again after the Second and the Third Crusades were preached, and while I am not one of St Bernard of Clairvaux’s greatest fans, I do admire his response to these pogroms in 1146. When the Archbishops of Cologne and Mainz appealed for his aid in ending the violence against the Jews in their cities, he set out at once for Germany, and stopped the attacks that had been led by a fanatical French monk named Radulphe.

Still on the subject of crusades, Richard Coeur de Lion had failed to recapture Jerusalem, which caused many—including Richard himself—to view the Third Crusade as a failure. But he had been able to give Acre one hundred more years of life as a Christian bastion. That came to an end, though, on May 18, 1291, when the city fell to the Sultan of Egypt, al-Malik al-Ashraf Khalil. Michael Jecks has a new novel coming out next month about the fall of Acre, a prequel to his Templar mystery series called Templar’s Acre, which offers a dramatic and compelling account of this siege.

But for me, May 18th will always be most significant for the wedding that took place in the cathedral of St Pierre in the city of Poitiers in 1152, a marriage that truly changed history, when the young Duke of Normandy, Henry Fitz Empress, took Eleanor, the former Queen of France and Duchess of Aquitaine, as his wife. Here is a brief scene from their wedding night in Saints, page 646, as they enjoy a late-night supper in bed and Eleanor regales Henry with tales of her infamous grandfather, the duke known as the first troubadour.
* * *
Henry brushed back her hair. “Tell me more,” he urged, and she shivered with pleasure as he kissed the hollow of her throat.
“Well…Grandpapa Will painted an image of Dangereuse on his shield, saying he wanted to bear her in battle, just as she’d so often borne him in bed. He liked to joke that one day he’d establish his own nunnery—and fill it with ladies of easy virtue. And when he was rebuked for not praying as often as he ought, he composed a poem, ‘O Lord, let me live long enough to get my hands under her cloak.’”
Henry gave a sputter of laughter. “Between the two of us, we’ve got a family tree rooted in Hell! Once Abbot Bernard learns of our marriage, he’ll have nary a doubt that our children will have horns and cloven hooves.”
“The first one with a tail, we’ll name after the good abbot.” Eleanor reached for a dish of strawberries in sugared syrup, popping one neatly into his mouth. He fed her the next one, and when she licked the sugar from his fingers, as daintily as a cat, his body was suddenly suffused in heat. Dipping his finger in the syrup, he coated one of her nipples. She looked startled but intrigued, and when he lowered his mouth to her breast, she exhaled her breath in a drawn-out sigh. “Abbot Bernard preaches that sin is all around us,” she said throatily, “but I doubt that even he ever thought to warn against strawberries.”
“He’d likely have an apoplectic seizure if he only knew what can be done with honey,” Henry predicted and Eleanor began to laugh.
“I think,” she said, “that you and I are going to have a very interesting marriage.”
Henry thought so, too. “I want you, Eleanor.”
Her eyes reflected the candle flame, but brighter and hotter, making promises that would have provided Abbot Bernard with a full year of new sermons. “My lord duke,” she said, “tonight all of Aquitaine is yours for the taking.”
* * *