Sharon Kay Penman's Blog, page 141

King John's first wife

On August 29th, 1189, Eleanor and Henry’s son John wed the heiress to the rich estates of Gloucester. For a woman who might have become queen of England, she is oddly invisible. Even her name is uncertain. She is usually called Isabel, but she’s also been called Avisa and Hawisa. John and Isabel were second cousins—she was the granddaughter of Robert of Gloucester, the Empress Maude’s brother and mainstay—and because they did not seek a dispensation, the Archbishop of Canterbury placed their lands under Interdict, although the Pope later lifted it. One story has it that this was done with the proviso that John and Isabel were not to have sexual relations, but I don’t know if this is true or not. It couldn’t have helped marital relations when John agreed in 1193 to put Isabel aside and marry the unfortunate Alys, Philippe’s sister, who was Henry’s alleged mistress and Richard’s long-time betrothed. But John’s failure to seek a dispensation gave him a convenient Get out of Jail card, allowing him to seek an annulment soon after he became king. He then showed how a crafty king can have his cake and eat it, too, taking his former wife into wardship as an unmarried heiress! This allowed him to enjoy the revenues from Isabel’s lands while keeping her in limbo.
John then wed the twelve year old Isabelle d’Angouleme, who was said to be quite beautiful; chroniclers were scandalized that John often stayed in her bed till noon. So while it was usual to postpone consummating a marriage when the bride was very young, it would appear that John jumped the gun, so to speak. Fortunately for Isabelle, she did not get pregnant for six years. In that, she was luckier than Henry Tudor’s mother, who gave birth to him at age thirteen, and was never able to have another child. Isabelle, of course, proved to be very fertile, presenting John with two sons and three daughters, and then giving her second husband a baker’s dozen. Slight exaggeration there, but she produced enough children to make life difficult for Henry III. They swarmed the English royal court like locusts and much of his unpopularity could be traced to his attempts to provide for his rapacious half-brothers and sisters.
Poor Isabel of Gloucester; she gets shoved off center stage even here, eclipsed by John’s gorgeous trophy wife. She was about twenty-two at the time of her marriage to John, and she survived John by a year, dying at age fifty in October, 1217. She made two subsequent marriages, but not until she was past her childbearing years, so she was denied the opportunity to have children because John kept her in wardship for 15 years. In 1214, the Earl of Essex paid John the huge sum of 20, 000 marks to wed her; it is possible the earl was coerced into this. He and Isabel were understandably outraged when John retained control of the most valuable manor, Bristol, and they joined the rebellion against him in 1216. The earl died that year of injuries suffered in a tournament, and Isabel wed Hubert de Burgh in 1217, dying just a month after that marriage. If we know little about Richard’s Berengaria, we know nothing about Isabel, another one of medieval history’s female ghosts.
Joan Szechtman has written two intriguing novels about Richard III, transported from the field at Bosworth just before he died to 21st century America. Talk about culture shock. I enjoyed Joan’s This Time, admiring the clever way she managed to do what I could not—give Richard a happy ending. Her second novel, Loyalty Binds Me, is on my TBR list. Joan has recently done a very interesting interview about the differences between the real Richard and Shakespeare’s Richard. It is in five parts on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=...
It can also be accessed here.
http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v13...

The siege of Acre

I hope that my friends and readers who live in New Orleans and the Gulf area will be spared the worst of Hurricane Isaac. Same for my friends and readers in Florida.
August 28, 1189 saw the beginning of the siege of Acre by Guy de Lusignan, the highly unpopular King of Jerusalem. Jerusalem had fallen to the great Saracen commander, Salah al-Din, known to posterity as Saladin, after Guy had led the army of Jerusalem to a devastating defeat at Hattin. Guy had been captured, but while Saladin personally executed Raynald de Chatillon and had all of the captured Templars and Hospitallers put to death, he did not harm Guy, saying, “Kings do not kill other kings.” He gave Guy his freedom eventually, upon his promise not to raise arms against the Saracens. Guy promptly found a Christian cleric to absolve him of that promise on the grounds it was given under duress. Saladin would surely have known he’d do that; Guy was nothing if not predictable. My own belief is that Saladin shrewdly set Guy free because he was such a loose cannon. When Guy arrived at Tyre, the only city now not under Saracen control, he was turned away from Tyre by Conrad de Montferrat, who’d rallied the citizens in its successful defense. In desperation, Guy took his small force south and lay siege to the city of Acre, which had been captured by Saladin after his victory at Hattin. This quixotic assault was to have unexpected consequences. To the surprise of all, probably even Guy, his siege started to attract men and soon became a symbol of resistance to Saladin. Saladin made numerous attempts to break the siege, but a stand-off developed, which was not broken until 1191 with the arrival of the two kings leading the Third Crusade, Richard of England and Philippe of France. To find out what happened next, I recommend reading Lionheart!

The Young King

On August 27, 1172, Henry II’s eldest son, known to his contemporaries and history as the Young King and to my readers as Hal, was crowned again, as his wife, Marguerite, the daughter of the French king Louis VII, had not been crowned with him the first time, much to her father’s vexation. The second ceremony was performed at Winchester, presided over by the Archbishop of Rouen and Hal’s cousin, Roger Fitz Robert, the Bishop of Worcester, a favorite of mine, as he was one of the few brave enough not to wilt in the full force of Henry’s Angevin temper tantrums. Hal’s life, which had begun in such bright promise, ended sadly, with his death at age twenty-eight in the midst of another rebellion against his father. His young widow, Marguerite, would later be wed to the King of Hungary; she died in 1197 on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and was buried at Acre, far from home and Hal’s grave in Rouen.
Henry and Eleanor have such larger-than-life personalities that they don’t need defenders. Their son Richard doesn’t really need them, either; after all, he has Robin Hood on his side. But their other sons have not done as well in the court of public opinion and could probably use a champion or two. John has my friend Owen on his side. Geoffrey has Malcolm and me to speak up for him. And Hal is lucky enough to have my Polish friend Kasia to make sure he is not forgotten. Kasia maintains a very interesting website that is Hal-centric. Here is the link; anyone interested in the Angevins ought to stop by. http://henrytheyoungking.com/index.php

The Black Prince and a blind king

August 26th 1346 is the date of one of the most significant battles in the Middle Ages, the battle of Crecy, in which Edward III defeated a much larger French army. This was due to the triumph of superior weaponry—longbows---and tactics. Historians cannot agree on the numbers involved, but it is generally accepted that the English suffered only one-tenth as many casualties as the French. Edward’s eldest son and heir, the sixteen year old youth known as Edward of Woodstock and later as the Black Prince, distinguished himself on the field, and would go on to have an impressive military career. But he would be the only Prince of Wales not to assume the throne, dying before his father did, and thus setting the stage for a child king, (Richard II) which medieval usually dreaded and with good reason.
I don’t know a great deal about Crecy, to be honest, as I’ve never written about Edward III’s reign, but I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that one of the combatants was blind. The King of Bohemia and titular King of Poland, known to history as John the Blind, had lost his sight to the inflammation of the eye called ophthalmia ten years before the battle at Crecy. Others who’d lost partial sight to this disease include Hannibal of elephants and Alps fame and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female physician in the US. According to the medieval chronicler Froissart, John’s knights tied all their reins together so they’d not be separated from John in the midst of the battle. I cannot begin to imagine what it would be like to fight in a battle when you could not see what was occurring around you. Here is a link to a website that gives a very detailed account of the battle of Crecy, although I can’t vouch for its accuracy; I certainly don’t believe that the French had 80,000 men on the field! It is an interesting read, though. http://www.britishbattles.com/100-yea... Bernard Cornwell, who does battles better than any writer on the planet, has written about the battle of Crecy. The book was published in the UK as Harlequin, but in the US as The Archer’s Tale.

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A sad ghost

Thankfully not as much happened on August 25th; yesterday’s Note left me exhausted! On August 25, 1192, Hugh, the Duke of Burgundy, died at Acre after a brief illness; naturally the Bishop of Beauvais accused Richard of poisoning the duke. Richard was then very ill himself with malaria, lying close to death at Jaffa; one chronicler reported that he finally started to recover after learning of Hugh’s death. Here is my scene from Lionheart:
* * *
“I had a message tonight from Isabella. She says that Hugh of Burgundy died at Acre five years ago.”
Richard started at him. “I think,” he said, “that I’ve just gotten my sign.” Henri did not know what that meant, but it did not matter; his uncle was smiling, the first real smile he’d seen on Richard’s face since he’d been stricken with the quartan fever.
* * *
I hope Richard is too busy in the afterlife to browse the Internet, for I shudder to think of his reaction if he read Wikipedia’s description of Hugh as “a most trusted ally of Richard Lionheart.”
On August 25, 1227, Genghis Khan died; anyone ever see the film in which he was played by John Wayne? Not Hollywood’s finest hour, or Wayne’s, either.
On August 25, 1227, Louis IX died at Tunis, possibly of typhoid, on his second crusade. He was the only French king to be canonized and was the son of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s granddaughter, Blanche of Castile. Not a king I like very much, but an important one.
And on this date in 1482, Marguerite d’Anjou died at age 52. Edward IV had allowed her to return to France in 1475, but her father, Rene of Anjou, showed no interest in her plight and she had to scrape by with a pension from Louis XI, who first forced her to renounce any claims to Anjou. She was living at Chateau Dampierre near Saumur when she died. She was buried in Angers Cathedral, but her tomb was one of so many destroyed during the French Revolution. Her death seems to have attracted little notice on either side of the Channel. Louis demanded that her dogs be sent to him; Louis liked dogs. I think of her as a sad ghost in the years after Tewkesbury, mourning her son and what might have been.
This last death is not medieval, but on August 25, 1688, the famous—or infamous—pirate Henry Morgan died in Jamaica. I had to mention Henry as he was Welsh; he was also one of the very few pirates who managed to get himself knighted.

Geoffrey le Bel

Since today is the birthday of Geoffrey of Anjou (see my post below about August 24th) I am celebrting by sharing Elizabeth Chadwick's excellent article about him. BTW, Elizabeth has one of the best websites for anyone interested in the MA. Here is the link.

http://livingthehistoryelizabethchadw...

Why August 24th is as unlucky as Friday the 13th

I’m going to include a few non-medieval events today.
On August 24th, 410 AD, the Visigoths sacked Rome, but oddly enough, they apparently were rather humane about it—no bloodbath. And on August 24th, 455 AD, it happened again, or almost did; this time it was the Vandals who were about to sack the city. But after their king met with Pope Leo, the Vandals turned around and left Rome in their dust I saw a movie about this as a child and I remember being fascinated, wanting so much to know what the pope could have said to convince the Vandal king to spare the city. It was disillusioning years later to learn that this mystery was so easily solved—the mother of all bribes.
For years, it was thought that Mt Vesuvius erupted on August 24th, 79 AD, destroying Pompeii and two other towns, but some historians now think it occurred in October. I don’t know which date is correct, but here is an eye-witness account of the tragedy. http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/po...
August 24th, 1113 was the birthday of Count Geoffrey of Anjou, famous for being the father of Henry II and for being the source of the dynasty name Plantagenet; he liked to put a sprig of broom ( planta genista in Latin) in his cap, or so the story goes. Historians and many novelists use the term Plantangenet for convenience, but it was not actually used by the kings themselves until the 15th century; Richard, Duke of York, father of the Yorkist kings Edward IV and Richard III, is believed to have been the first to do so.
August 24th was an important day for King John. He wed the very young Isabelle d’Angouleme on this day in 1200, and in 1215, Pope Innocent III cooperatively declared the Magna Carta null and void on the grounds that John had signed it under duress.
August 24, 1217 is the date of a famous sea battle off Sandwich; the notorious pirate Eustace the Monk was captured and beheaded. One of John’s illegitimate sons, Richard Fitz Roy, a character in my novel Here Be Dragons, was a hero of this battle.
On August 24th, 1349, six thousand Jews were massacred in the German city of Mainz, blamed by the townspeople for the bubonic plague. Many people don’t know that in Germany and France there were horrific pogroms after the plague struck, as the panicked population looked for scapegoats.
On August 24th, 1572, the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre was on-going, one of the bloodier chapters in French history, which I’ve discussed on several occasions this month.
And on August 24th, 1814, the White House was set on fire by the British. We don’t hold a grudge, though!
Looking over this list of events, August 24th seems as unlucky to me as a Friday the 13th. Probably a good day to stay in bed; at least that is going to be my excuse.

August 23rd in history--just barely

Here is today's Facebook Note, rather late in the day, but better late than never, I hope.

I’d like to thank you all for your good wishes. I am doing well and on the mend, though I probably won’t be around much for the next few days. So this might be a good time for someone to stage a palace coup; not that I am mentioning any names, of course. Thanks, too, for posting so many comments about Richard yesterday. He’ll never escape from Shakespeare’s shadow, but at least he has not been forgotten.
Another historical figure who deserves to be remembered is William Wallace, who was put to death in the most brutal manner possible—drawn and quartered—on August 23, 1305, after being charged with treason by Edward I.
And on August 23, 1358, Isabella of France, queen of Edward II, lover of Roger Mortimer, and mother of Edward III, died at Hertford Castle; she was 63 and had been in poor health for a while. She asked to be buried in her wedding mantle and with the heart of her husband, Edward II. Our Edwardian expert, Kathryn Warner, is one of those who have cast doubts upon whether Edward really died at Berkeley Castle as reported. I do find it strange that Edward’s half-brother, the Earl of Kent, tried to free him three years after his death had been announced, paying for that abortive rescue mission with his own life. So he must have believed that Edward was still alive. But I just don’t know enough about that era of British history to draw conclusions of my own.
And the infamous St Bartholomew’s Day massacre began in Paris on the night of August 23rd, 1572; thousands of French Huguenots were slain before the madness stopped. I’d written about this tragedy recently, so I won’t repeat myself, except to say that my favorite French king, Henri of Navarre, the future Henri VI, escaped being murdered because of his new bride, Marguerite de Valois, sister of the ruling French king. C.W. Gortner dramatizes this event in his novel, The Confessions of Catherine de Medici, who was Marguerite’s mother. And here is a first-hand account of the killing that set off the massacre; be warned, though, for it makes grim reading. http://historymedren.about.com/gi/dyn...

Richard, by the Grace of God....

I have a minor surgery this morning, so I have to post this now, and it won’t be as lengthy (or long-winded?) as my usual ones. But I am sure some of you can take up the slack! Two significant battles were fought on this date. On August 22, 1138, King David of Scotland suffered a defeat at Cowton Moor in Yorkshire. David was the uncle of the Empress Maude and he was attempting to advance her claim while grabbing some prime Yorkshire real estate for Scotland. He was defeated by William le Gros, the Count of Aumale. The count’s daughter Hawisa was a character in Devil’s Brood and Lionheart, wed first to Henry’s friend, the Earl of Essex, and then reluctantly to one of Richard’s vassals, William Forz. I like that sharp-tongued lady and hope to give her some screen time in A King’s Ransom, too.
And of course today is the anniversary of the Battle of Bosworth on August 22, 1485. I’ve been told by some readers that when they reread Sunne, they always stop before the battle. It was not fun for me to write, either; it took me three weeks to get Richard out of his tent and onto the field. (The reluctance was mine, not his.) I think Richard’s most memorable epitaph is the one he was given by the city of York, by the people who knew him best. They very courageously inscribed in the city records: “It was showed by John Sponer that King Richard, late mercifully reigning upon us, was through great treason piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness of this City.”

A French king and a duke of Brittany

August 21, 1165 was a day of great happiness for the French king, Louis VII, for after four daughters, his third wife gave birth to his longed-for son. So joyful was Louis that Philippe was known as Dieu-donne, God-given. Philippe must be considered one of the great French kings, for he vastly expanded the territory of the French Crown during his long reign of 43 years. I have been able to find little to admire about the man himself, though. While not a soldier of Richard’s caliber, he was effective at sieges, and he was undeniably intelligent, if not as well educated as the Angevins. He was also utterly unsentimental, pragmatic, and stubborn. Henry II had saved his throne for him on several occasions early in his reign, but he did all he could to turn Henry’s sons against him and, with Richard’s help, hounded Henry to his miserable death at Chinon. He was more anti-Semitic than his contemporary monarchs, said to have believed in the Blood Libel, expelling the Jews from Paris at the start of his reign, and burning eighty Jews to death in Bray in 1192 after the Countess of Champagne (his half-sister Marie) had hanged a Christian who’d murdered a Jew. His reputation was then in tatters because of his abandonment of the crusade, and cynical medieval rulers often found that persecuting Jews was one way to regain public favor. He showed no honor whatsoever after Richard was captured and turned over to the Holy Roman Emperor, scheming and conniving and doing his utmost to make sure the crusader king never saw the light of day again. He wanted to repudiate his first wife ostensibly because she had failed to give him an heir—she was fourteen at the time! He treated his second wife, the Danish princess Ingeborg, with deliberate brutality after disavowing her the day after their marriage, at times even denying her the right to attend Mass. He deserves recognition for his accomplishments, leaving the French monarchy much stronger than he’d found it, but I think he’d have been a difficult man to love.
Philippe’s birth was not a source of joy to Henry, who naturally wanted Louis to remain without a male heir. In Time and Chance, Henry has just had to retreat after a failed campaign in Wales when he gets the news that Louis has finally sired a son. Fortunately for Henry, a sweet young thing named Rosamund Clifford happens to be there to offer him comfort. When they meet in the gardens at Chester Castle, she says shyly, “I was worried about you, my lord. That letter seemed to trouble you so….”
“This letter I was just ripping to shreds?” Henry at once regretted the sarcasm; why take out his temper on the lass? “You might as well be the first to know. All of Paris is re-joicing; it’s a wonder we cannot hear the church bells pealing across the Channel. The Al-mighty has finally taken pity upon the French king. On the fourth Sunday of August, his queen gave him a son.” Of course Henry could not have guessed that this little boy would eventually destroy the Angevin empire.
Moving ahead twenty-one years and we have the death of my own favorite of the Devil’s Brood, Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, Henry and Eleanor’s “forgotten” son. He died after being trampled in a French tournament, just a month shy of his twenty-eighth birthday in 1186. Geoffrey has been as ignored by historians as he was by his own parents, for he was the only one of their sons not to become a king, and his successful career in Brittany was not brought to light until the publication of Dr Judith Everard’s excellent Brittany and the Angevins. I owe her such a huge debt, for it was her research that enabled me to do justice to Geoffrey in Devil’s Brood. It is too sad to quote from Geoffrey’s death scene in my novel, so I’d rather close with a brief passage from his wedding night. He’d been betrothed to Constance, the heiress to Brittany, since childhood, and she was a reluctant bride, for she blamed Henry for deposing her father. But Geoffrey wins her over, much to her surprise, and their marriage gets off to a promising start.
* * *
She awoke the next morning just before dawn, with a dull headache, a dry mouth, and total recall of the extraordinary events of her wedding night. Propping herself up on her elbow, she studied the man beside her. He looked younger in his sleep, less guarded, and she realized that the flighty Enora was right, after all; her new husband was easy on the eye. Best of all, he was quick-witted and clever and ambitious. We will make effective partners. We will be good for Brittany and good for each other, and who would ever have imagined it?
* * *
And they were—good for Brittany and for each other. Sadly, they had so little time together—just five years. I have no doubt that English, Breton, and French history would have been changed if Geoffrey had not chosen to ride in that tourney on that hot August afternoon.