Sharon Kay Penman's Blog, page 4

A free book

Sorry for falling off the radar screen again, but the antibiotics only gave me a brief respite and the sinus headaches returned with a vengeance. A minor problem compared to what so many others are facing, but it does keep me off the computer. Today is a better day so I hope to be able to get online again later. Meanwhile, I wanted to alert everyone (aside from my readers in the UK or Down Under) that you can get David Blixt’s spoof spy novel, Her Majesty’s Will, for free today on Amazon. This is a delightful book, very funny, with numerous “Easter eggs” tucked away for readers who find the Elizabethan Age as interesting as I do. It is a perfect way to escape our reality for a while. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07...

Groundhog Day in May

While I really liked the film Groundhog Day, I never thought I’d be living it and I bet none of you did, either. The quarantine might even be easier for writers since we tend to live like hermits anyway; the one drawback of writing is that it is such a solitary profession. But I am hanging in there and hope you all are, too. My sinus headaches are back; I will still try to stop by when I can to check on everybody! Meanwhile, here is a Today in History post for yesterday, May 2nd.
What do a 12th century Marcher lord and a 16th century queen have in common? They were both undone by their lack of caution. William de Braose, the grandson of one of King John’s most notorious victims—his grandmother and uncle were starved to death at Windsor Castle—was hanged on this date in 1230 by the great Welsh prince, Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, after being found in compromising circumstances with Llywelyn’s wife, Joanna, in his own bedchamber. What could have been more reckless than that?
Recklessness also helped to doom that Tudor queen, for Anne Boleyn ought to have known the sort of man she’d married; had she continued to cater to his monstrous ego and bloated pride, perhaps he might not have turned on her with such terrifying suddenness, giving her time to produce the male heir that would have been her salvation. But she was too proud, too quick-tempered, and she paid a high price for that. This is a sad day for anyone who cares about justice, for on May 2, 1536, Anne was arrested at Greenwich Palace, thus setting in motion the events leading to her execution on Tower Green. I always thought one of the bravest men in the world was the Lord Mayor of London, who’d dared to say after her trial that he was convinced of her innocence. Imagine the courage that took when he’d just seen the lengths to which Henry would go to rid himself of an unwanted wife. One of the many reasons why I love the two brilliant novels about Anne’s daughter—Susan Kay’s legacy and Margaret George’s Elizabeth I—is the way both authors showed how traumatized Elizabeth was by her mother’s beheading.
Moving on, an indisputable genius died on this date in 1519, Leonardo da Vinci.
Lastly, we often talk about history trumping fiction, and nowhere is that more obvious than in Joanna’s mad affair with Will de Braose. What writer would have dared to send a woman into the bed of the man whose grandmother had been starved to death by her own father? I could not possibly make something like that up!

A great book sale

I hope you all are coping as well as we can. I wanted to let you know that Amazon is running a great ebook sale from now till May 3rd, offering 100 books at greatly reduced prices, usually $2.99. I would definitely recommend taking a look at these bargain books. For example, you can get Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. You can get the first book in the mystery series by Sue Grafton and the Canadian writer, Louise Penny. The first book in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. An excellent novel that I recently read by the Australian writer, Jane Harper, The Dry. Elton John’s autobiography. Histories. Fantasy and science fiction. Truly something for everyone.
https://www.amazon.com/b?node=2117710...

Going back in history to April 9th

I have a special story to share of a 99-year-old British veteran who has managed to raise a staggering eighteen million pounds or twenty-two million dollars for the National Health Service. The link is below.
Here is one of my Today in History posts. April 9th was a busy day in medieval history, so here is a belated post, for it was too interesting a day to ignore. It was, of course, the date in 1483 that Edward IV died, just a few weeks shy of his 41st birthday. We sometimes play the What If game here. Well, Edward’s death offers a gigantic What if. Had he not died prematurely, had he lived another fifteen years, the consequences of that would be mind-boggling. His son would have been grown at the time of his eventual death and most likely would have succeeded to the throne. It is impossible to say what would have happened then. We can only be sure of the obvious. No King Richard III. No Shakespeare play. No Sunne in Splendour. No Tudors! Would England have remained Catholic? Or would it have heeded Martin Luther’s siren song? Who knows? But it is fascinating to speculate about it.
April 9th was also the death date of Eleanor’s father, William, the 10th Duke of Aquitaine. He was only thirty-eight. And on this date in 1413, Henry V was crowned as King of England.
April 9th is often given as the death date for Richard III and Anne Neville’s son, Edward of Middleham. I’ve always been skeptical of this; it sounded like Tudor propaganda, for if Richard’s son had died on the same day as his brother, it would seem as if it was the punishment of God for his sin in claiming the throne and supposedly putting his nephews to death. The Croyland Chronicler was no friend to Richard, but this is what he wrote:
“However, in a short time after, it was fully seen how vain are the thoughts of a man who desires to establish his interests without the aid of God. For, in the following month of April, on a day not very far distant from the anniversary of king Edward, this only son of his, in whom all the hopes of the royal succession, fortified with so many oaths, were centred, was seized with an illness of but short duration, and died at Middleham Castle, in the year of our Lord, 1484, being the first of the reign of the said king Richard. On hearing the news of this, at Nottingham, where they were then residing, you might have seen his father and mother in a state almost bordering on madness, by reason of their sudden grief.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/99...

Reading in the time of Coronavirus and a royal death

I am very happy to be back; the antibiotic has finally kicked in and I am no longer under siege by three or more severe sinus headaches a day. I hope you all are coping, staying safe, and not going stir crazy in quarantine. I know we are all avid readers here, so what are you reading while you’re sequestered? I am about half-way through Geraldine Brooks’s brilliant novel about a 17th century English village that courageously chose to self-quarantine to stop the spread of the Bubonic Plague, The Year of Wonders. I cannot recommend it highly enough, but there are times when their reality blurs with our own and I need lighter reading. So then I switch over to Bill Bryson’s The Road to Little Dribbling or Franklin and Washington, a joint biography of my two favorite Founding Fathers.
Now, in an attempt at “normalcy,” here is one of my Today in History posts. If I were to compile a list of my favorite characters, Edward IV would definitely be on that list. I was charmed by his sense of humor and his refusal to take himself that seriously, which made for some lively scenes with Elizabeth Woodville, who took herself very, very seriously indeed. So here is Edward on his deathbed, in a scene from Sunne.
The Yorkist king, Edward IV, died on April 9th, 1483, just weeks from his forty-first birthday. We do not know the exact cause of death, though pneumonia has been suggested, and it has also been suggested that his health had deteriorated because of his self-indulgent lifestyle; Philippe de Commines claimed it was apoplexy. I saw no reason to doubt Mancini’s report that he’d caught a chill while boating on the river and it grew progressively worse. He lingered for ten days before dying, and his death would have dramatic repercussions. Had he not died so prematurely, the history of England would have been drastically different, for had he lived until his eldest son and heir came of age, I do not think there would have been a Tudor dynasty, which would have been catastrophic for screen writers and historical novelists, and not so good for a playwright named Shakespeare, either. I have always seen Edward as one of those men who were at their best when things were at their worst and vice versa. Historians have differed in their assessment of his reign, but I can say for a certainty that he was great fun to write about. He was buried at Windsor in the Chapel of St George; sadly, his tomb of black marble was never completed, for his dynasty would not long survive him. Here is Edward’s death scene in Sunne, page 662-663
* * *
“You’d best prepare yourself, my lady. It’ll not be long.”
She knew he meant to be kind, but she had to fight the urge to spit at him, to scream that he was wrong, that she didn’t want to hear it. She touched her fingers again to her father’s face, and as she did, his eyes opened. They were glazed a brilliant blue with fever, were sunken back in his head. But they were lucid, looked at her with full awareness for the first time in hours.
“Bess….”
“Yes, Papa, yes! I’m right here.”
“Sorry….so sorry….”
“For what, Papa? You’ve nothing to be sorry about, nothing at all.” She could see him straining to speak, and knew she should urge him to be still, but she could not; these last moments of coherent communication were too precious to lose.
“Sweet Bess….so loved.” He made an uncertain movement; she knew he was searching for her hand and quickly laced her fingers through his.
“Don’t worry, Papa. Please don’t worry.”
“Do you know….what be the worst….worst sins?”
She bent closer, not sure if she’d heard him correctly. “No, Papa. What be the worst sins?”
The corner of his mouth twitched, in what she knew to be the last smile she’d ever see him give.
“The worst be,” he whispered, “those about be found out.”
Bess didn’t understand. “Rest now, Papa. It will be all right for us, truly it will. Rest now.”
* * *

Ghost Town

I hope you all are hanging in there, fending off the virus, cabin fever, loneliness, and anxiety. I will start posting more frequently again once my sinus infection eases up. I am still getting three or more very debilitating headaches a day. The sinus specialist’s practice is closed and no one has returned my calls. However, my primary care doctor is one of the many heroes in the medical community and he called in a prescription for antibiotics. Based on the last time we tried this, it takes about a week to get relief, but hope is on the horizon. Today I want to share some amazing photographs of a ghost town—one of the largest, busiest cities in the world, my beloved London. https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-...

When history changed at Beaugency

I hope you all are coping. I may not be able to post here as often as I’d like, but please don’t worry; my absence has nothing to do with the coronavirus. I’ve been dealing with an acute sinus infection and when it did not respond to antibiotics, I was supposed to see a sinus surgeon; of course, that appointment was cancelled and so for the foreseeable future, I will be having good days and bad days and on the bad days, I’ll be elsewhere. I’ll be thinking of you all, though, whether I am here or not, hoping for the best for people all over the world.
I was going to post about the battle of Towton, Edward IV’s bloody coronation, but I couldn’t bring myself to write about so much suffering and death. So, instead, I will play catch-up. Here is a post from last year about one of our favorite queens, the incomparable Eleanor of Aquitaine.
One of history’s most consequential divorces occurred on this date. On March 21, 1152, Louis Capet and Eleanor of Aquitaine’s marriage was annulled at Beaugency on the grounds of consanguinity. Think how history would have changed if Louis had elected to stay the course and kept Eleanor as his queen. If Eleanor had never given birth to a son, France could have had a Queen Marie, as the Salic Law was not in force then. There would have been no Philippe Capet, no St Louis, no Philippe the Fair—shedding no tears here, folks. But there would have been no Plantagenets as we know them! Yes, Henry II would still have become king—most likely. But without Eleanor’s Aquitaine, maybe not? And without Eleanor as his queen, no Devil’s Brood. Take her DNA out of the mix, and the Plantagenet dynasty would have been an entirely different breed of cat. If the Chaos Theory is applied (the argument that a butterfly’s flapping wings could give rise to a hurricane), history as we know it would have been utterly altered. For better or worse? Who knows? But my history would definitely have been changed for the worse without Richard III to write about. I’d have still been a lawyer—shudder. So I am happy to celebrate the Beaugency annulment, thanking my lucky stars that Louis set Eleanor free to hook up with Henry just two months later. As Eleanor says to her sons in The Lion in Winter, “Such, my darlings, is the role that sex plays in history.”

Fate is inexorable

I have a Today in History post that I confess is a rerun, but it is several years old so I am hoping none of you remember it. And also a link to an interesting article about receiving packages in the mail; I was not taking any precautions when getting boxes from Amazon, but I think I will be a bit more careful from now on.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...

On March 26th, 1199, Richard Coeur de Lion’s fabled luck finally ran out. He rashly ventured out to inspect the siege of Chalus Castle without armor, and was struck by a crossbow bolt. He’d been watching a man up on the battlements who was using a large frying pan as a shield and that amused him greatly; he was laughing and cheering the man on when he was hit. He gave no indication of it (it was dusk at the time) and returned to his own quarters, where he attempted and failed to remove the bolt. A doctor summoned by his mercenary captain Mercadier had no better luck and apparently made the injury much worse in his ineffective attempts to extract it. Richard had enough experience with battle wounds to realize that he was doomed and sent for his mother as his condition worsened; she arrived in time to be with him when he died. By all accounts, it was a very painful death, but he endured it with his usual stoicism. Here is a passage from the chronicle of Ralph de Coggeshall; the translation comes courtesy of my fellow historical novelist and friend, Sharan Newman.
“Therefore the king was wounded, as usual through his well-known reckless behavior. He gave no heartfelt sigh, no mournful cry, nor did he show any sign of pain by expression or gesture to those present, nor show his sadness or fear so that his enemies might not report how severe the wound was. Afterwards, he endured the pain to the end as if it were a trifle, so that there were many who were ignorant of the calamity that had occurred.”
Here is a more cheerful document, a letter written by Richard himself to his good friend, the Bishop of Durham, who’d been with him in the Holy Land and during his German captivity. Richard describes how he won a victory over the French king in September of 1198. Richard had captured the castle of Courcelles and Philippe marched from Mantes to relieve it, not knowing that it had already fallen. When Richard’s scouts reported the movement of the French army, he assumed they were massing to attack his own troops. But when he saw that they were heading north toward Courcelles, he determined to attack them even though he only had a small band of knights with him.
In his letter to the bishop, which was widely circulated, Richard describes how the French fled before his men, a retreat turning into a rout, with so many knights crowding the bridge over the River Epte that “the bridge broke down beneath them, and the King of France, as we have heard say, had to drink of the water, and several knights, about twenty in number, were drowned. Three also, with a single lance, we unhorsed, Matthew de Montmorency, Alan de Rusci, and Fulk de Gilveral, and have them as our prisoners. There were also valiantly captured as many as one hundred knights of his….and Mercadier has taken as many as thirty. Men-at-arms, also, both horse and foot, were taken; also two hundred chargers were captured, of which one hundred forty were covered with iron armor. This have we defeated the King of France at Gisors. But it is not we who have done the same, but rather God, and our right, by our means, and in so doing, we have put our life in peril, and our kingdom, contrary to the advice of all our people. These things we signify unto you, that you may share in our joy as to the same. Witness ourselves at Anjou.”
The “we” he employs is the royal we, so when he says “we unhorsed” those French lords, he is referring to his own derring-do. Ironically, Matthew de Montmorency was one of the men who’d fought beside Richard in the Holy Land; readers may remember him from Lionheart. Even down through eight centuries, Richard’s glee at the humiliation of the French king, who “drank of the water” of the river, comes through loud and clear. Buried in the last sentence of the letter is the admission that he’d launched this attack against the advice of his men, counting upon surprise and the ferocity of the attack to carry the day; William Marshal colorfully described him that day as a “ravening lion, starved for food.”
William Marshal also gives us the name of the man who rescued Philippe from drowning, saying “When they pulled the king out of the water—he had been extremely frightened for his life—he declined to stay in Gisors, even though it had a very strong castle, for he feared his enemies so much that he feared he would be besieged inside the town.” The Marshal did not have much respect for Philippe, as you can tell.
As you may remember from Ransom, Richard inflicted some very humiliating defeats upon the French king in the years 1194-1199, and the English chroniclers reveled in them. Richard had also drawn a diplomatic noose around Philippe by 1198, having lured away Philippe’s major allies and vassals, so that the French king’s position was looking more and more precarious in the spring of 1199. But as Uthred, Bernard Cornwell’s wonderful, conflicted hero in his magnificent Saxon series, often says, “Fate is inexorable,” and a crossbowman at Chalus would do what the French king could not, bring down a lion.

The duke's two loves

At the end of this post, I am adding a link to an article about free TV shows and films and even audio books to keep cabin fever at bay during the quarantine. And here is a Today in History post.

Yesterday, March 24, 1603 was the date of death for the woman I always call (with a smile) “the only good Tudor,” Elizabeth I. She was sixty-nine and her death does not seem to have been a peaceful one. She is fortunate in that she has had two brilliant novels about her, which is more than many historical figures can say. Legacy by Susan Kay, covers Elizabeth’s entire life, and Margaret George deals with her last years in Elizabeth I, which I can’t resist thinking of as The Lioness in Winter. I highly recommend both novels.

March 25th in 1306 saw the coronation of Robert the Bruce as King of Scotland.
March 25th was also the birthdate of Blanche of Lancaster; 1345 is traditionally given as the year of her birth, but I’ve also seen it as 1346. She was a great heiress, and in 1359, she wed her third cousin, John of Gaunt. They had seven children, so she was usually pregnant during her nine year marriage, which is believed to have been a happy one. Only three of her children survived, but one would become the first Lancastrian king, Henry IV. She died in 1368, of what may have been the bubonic plague, at only twenty-one or twenty-two, and her husband grieved greatly for her. I tend to envision her as soft-spoken and fair, a lovely ghost who would haunt her husband’s memory with a rustle of silken skirts and a swirl of silvery blonde hair, an ethereal creature of moonlight, ivory, and lace, forever young. She inspired the major character in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, and was sympathetically portrayed in Anya Seton’s classic novel, Katherine. Katherine is, of course, Katherine Swynford, one-half of one of the more famous love affairs of the Middle Ages; she was governess to Blanche and John’s children and, after Blanche’s death, his mistress, and eventually his third wife, a marriage that scandalized his world and delighted all of us who are secret romantics at heart. Yet he requested to be buried next to Blanche.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entert...

Video of Eden

I wanted to share this brief video of one of the most beautiful countries in the world, Italy, still ground zero for the coronavirus, for after a two-day drop, its death toll is soaring again. The death toll there is almost 10%. Closer to home, my state of NJ is now second only to New York in the number of cases, the “top” five being New York, New Jersey, Washington, California, and Michigan. But the most frightening statistic I read came from the World Health Organization. It took 67 days to go from the first reported case to 100,000 cases; it took only 11 days to reach 200,000, and just 4 days to hit 300,000. We are currently at over 400,000 cases worldwide, more than 50,000 of them in the US.
Sorry, it was not my intention to depress us all with such sobering figures; I promise not to keep coming here to share my fears for us all. I’ll try to confine myself to medieval death tolls, as when I posted that photo of the Horns of Hattin earlier today! And for a respite from reality, here is the link to Italia, which is dedicated to the doctors and nurses and first responders of Italy; the music is lovely, too. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=634...