Sharon Kay Penman's Blog, page 46

Marguerite d'Anjou

March 23, 1429 was the birthdate of Marguerite d’Anjou, the French-born queen of Henry VI. She was a courageous, stubborn, proud, ruthless woman who’d been dealt a bad hand in her marriage to Henry, whose misfortunate was that he’d been born a king’s son. Here are a few Marguerite scenes from Sunne. The first is on p. 20, at Ludlow, where seven year old Richard has his first glimpse of the Lancastrian queen.
* * *
His first impression, quite simply, was one of awe. Marguerite d’Anjou was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, as beautiful as the queens of Joan’s bedtime tales. All in gold and black, like the swallowtail butterflies he’d chased all summer in such futile fascination. Her eyes were huge and black, blacker even than the rosaries of Whitby jet so favored by his mother. Her mouth was scarlet, her skin like snow, her dark hair covered by a headdress of golden gauze, her face framed in floating folds of a glittery shimmering material that seemed to be made from sunlight; he’d ever seen anything like it, couldn’t keep his eyes from it. Or from her.
* * *


The next scene on P73 takes place at St Mary’s abbey in York, when Marguerite has just gotten the devastating news of the Yorkist victory at Towton.
* * *
Weighed down by her sodden skirts, unable to catch her breath, watching as the abbot floundered beside her in the snow, while her servant struggled to maintain his own footing and gingerly extended his hand toward her, Marguerite suddenly began to laugh, jagged bursts of strangled mirth, the sound of which nightmares are made.
“Madame, you mustn’t give way!” The abbot, less timid than her servant at laying hands upon royalty, grabbed her shoulders, shook her vigorously.
“But it is so very amusing; surely you see that? I’ve a little boy and a sweet helpless fool asleep in your lodging and no money and I’ve just been told I no longer have an army and look at us, my lord abbot, Sacre Dieu, look at us! If I do not laugh,” she gasped, “I might believe all this was truly happening, and happening to me!”
“Madame…” The abbot hesitated, and then plunged ahead courageously. “You need not flee, you know. York would not harm a woman, still less a child. Your lives would be safe with him, I do believe that. Stay here, Madame. Entreat York’s mercy, accept him as king. Even if you reach Scotland, what then? Ah, Madame, can you not let it be?”
The lantern light no longer fell on her face; he could not discern her expression. But he heard her intake of breath, a sibilant hiss of feline intensity. Her hand jerked from his. “Oui, Monseigneur,” she spat. “On my deathbed!”
* * *
Lastly, on Pages 344-345, is a scene the night before the battle of Tewkesbury between Marguerite and Edmund Beaufort, the Duke of Somerset. She has just agreed to go with his daring battle plan—on one condition, that her son is to be kept away from the fighting.
* * *
“I cannot make you a promise like that,” he said, tiredly and very gently. “You know I cannot. I’d give my life to keep him safe; we all would. But I cannot forbid him, Madame. No one can. He thinks he is of an age to command. His pride demands it. He knows that York was not yet nineteen when he did win at Towton. Worse, he knows that Gloucester is himself just eighteen now. I cannot forbid him, Madame.
“The true command of the center will rest with Wenlock, not Prince Edward. And I think he will agree to remain mounted during the battle.” For a moment, he had an image of Edward’s white, set face. “In fact, I am sure of it. But further than that, he will not go. And more than that, I cannot do.”
Marguerite nodded, and he saw that she’d not expected to prevail. “No, I suppose you cannot,” she said tonelessly. She shrugged, wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Well, then, we’d best tell the others what we plan for the morrow, my lord.”
She let him take her hands in his; they were like ice, bloodless. “You have it all, Somerset,” she whispered. “It is all in your hands…The vanguard, the battle, the fate of Lancaster.” She drew a ragged breath. “The life of my son.”
* * *

The world mourns with Belgium

Horrific news from Belgium today. I have some Facebook friends and readers who live in Belgium, and I want them to know that all our thoughts and prayers are with you. The world has become such a dangerous place that we sometimes feel overwhelmed, forgetting how many good, kind, courageous people there are, far more than those who embrace violence with such mindless, vicious abandon.

The royal divorce that changed the course of history

On March 21st, 1152, a royal marriage ended, and the history of Christendom was forever changed. At Beaugency, France, Louis VII of France and Eleanor of Aquitaine were declared to have been related within the prohibited degree, and their marriage was therefore annulled on grounds of consanguinity. Within two months, Eleanor would horrify Louis by wedding the young Duke of Normandy, Henry Fitz Empress, and to add insult to injury, she and Henry were related to the same degree as she and Louis were. Below is a scene from When Christ and his Saints Slept, beginning on p 613, between Eleanor and her nemesis, Bernard, the Abbot of Clairvaux, who would later be canonized by the Catholic Church and who famously proclaimed that the Angevins were from the Devil and to the Devil they’d go. Henry and Eleanor’s sons seemed to have felt that gave them bragging rights. Anyway, I give you the queen and the cleric.

* * *
Abbot Bernard greeted her with frigid formality. He so resembled one of the patriarchs of old—pale and haggard, burning dark eyes and flowing long hair—that Eleanor wondered cynically if he’d deliberately cultivated the image. “I understand,” she said, “that you convinced Louis not to bring my daughters to Beaugency to bid me farewell. He told me that he would have done so—if not for you, my lord abbot.”
He was quite untroubled by the accusation. “That is true,” he said calmly. “I thought it was for the best. Such a meeting was bound to be painful.”
“Am I to believe, then, that you were acting out of Christian kindness?”
“I care for all of God’s lost lambs, Madame, even the foolish ones who keep straying into the hills where wolves prowl and dangers lurk. The Lord forgives much, provided that there is true repentance. It is always possible to come back into the fold, into grace.”
“With you as my guide? I’d rather take my chances with the wolves.”
“Take care, Madame, lest you imperil your immortal soul. You do but prove I have good reason to keep your daughters away from your baneful influence.” As wrathful as he was, the abbot still remembered to keep his voice down, for this was not a conversation for others to hear. “Your lack of gratitude should not surprise me, though, given your lamentable lack of decorum and discretion—“
“Gratitude? My apologies, my lord abbot. It seems I’ve been maligning you unfairly, for you do have a sense of humor, after all!”
“It is foolhardy to court danger, Madame, but it is lunacy to court damnation. You do indeed owe me a debt of gratitude. If not for my forbearance, you might have been cast aside for adultery rather than consanguinity.”
“It is also foolhardy, my lord abbot, to hold your foes too cheaply. Your convictions to the contrary, most women are not idiots. I could not have been accused of adultery, for you have no proof, and well you know it. And even if you’d found men willing to swear falsely that it was so, a verdict of adultery would have prohibited Louis from marrying again…as you well know, too.”
“I see no point in continuing this conversation. If you would spit upon salvation, so be it, then. I leave your sins to God. Fortunately for the king and for France, he is now free of your unholy spell, free to choose a wife devout and docile and virtuous, a wife who will give him the heir you could not.”
Eleanor’s eyes shone with a greenish glitter. “What a pity,” she said, that the Blessed Virgin Mary is not available, for she would have suited his needs admirably.”
Bernard drew in his breath with a sibilant hiss. “You are an evil woman, wanton and truly wicked, and you will indeed suffer for—“
“No—no, she is not!” Neither Eleanor nor the abbot had heard Louis’s approach, and they both spun around at the sudden sound of his voice. “You are wrong, Abbot Bernard,” he said, with a firmness Eleanor had seen him show all too rarely. “I know her far better than you, and there is no evil in her soul, only a misguided sense of…of levity.”
(omission)
There’d been times when she’d yearned for words sharp enough to draw blood, to leave ugly scars. She’d blamed Louis for much that had gone wrong in their marriage, for not being bolder or able to laugh at life’s perversities, for not being more like the swaggering, spirited, roguish men of her House, for no longer heeding her advice as he’d done in their first years together, for loving God far more than he could ever love her, and for the reluctant desire and sense of shame that he’d brought to their marriage bed.
But she’d not hated him for those failings—anger and frustration and occasional contempt, but not hatred. That had come only after Antioch, after Louis had accused her of harboring an incestuous passion for her uncle and threatened to have her bound and gagged and dragged away by force if need be. Ever a realist, she’d yielded, far too proud to fight a war she could not hope to win; she was learning that women must pick their battles with care, that strategy mattered more than strength. Eventually Louis had apologized and swore upon the True Cross that he knew her to be innocent. But by then it was too late. By then her uncle had been slain by the Turks, his impaled head rotting above the caliph’s palace in the hot Baghdad sun, and Eleanor could not look upon her husband without Raymond’s doomed and bloodied spectre coming between them.
But now that she’d regained her freedom, she found herself remembering how it had been at first for them, a fifteen year old bride and her sixteen year old bridegroom, shyly appealing, awed by her beauty and eager to please her. Before he’d begun to yearn for the peace of the cloister, before those poor souls had died in the flames of a Vitry church, before the miscarriage and daughters instead of sons, before his hair shirt and her disgrace, before the crusade and Antioch and Raymond’s needless death, before Abbot Bernard. For a poignant moment, she could see that long-lost youth reflected in the depths of translucent blue eyes. And then the memory faded and she was looking at a man decent and ineffectual and despairing, a man she could pity but not respect and never love.
* * *
Of course we now know that Eleanor was actually born in 1124, not the traditional date of 1122, so she was an even younger bride than we’d realized—only thirteen. It is interesting to speculate how different their history might have been had she given him even one of the sons she’d give Henry. We also know that it was the husband who determines the sex of the child, an ironic twist that Eleanor might have appreciated. But I suspect that she’d rather have had the glorious chaos of life with Henry, even with its bittersweet ending, than whatever Louis could have offered her. As I have her think in one of my novels, she was not made for safe harbors.

A royal birth, a royal death, and a well-deserved execution

March 20, 1469 was the date of birth of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville’s daughter Cecily. Here is what I wrote about Cecily for the new AN for the 30th anniversary edition of Sunne; it had to be edited out of the hardcover AN for Sunne because of space concerns, but the new e-book edition of Sunne in the UK and the US has the new AN in its entirety.
* * *
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.
* * *

On March 20th, 1413, the first Lancastrian king, Henry IV, died. His health had deteriorated in the last years of his life and at one time, he apparently suffered from a disfiguring skin condition. Some claimed he’d been inflicted with leprosy as divine punishment for the execution of a prelate, the Archbishop of York, who’d taken part in a rebellion against Henry. But according to his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, his bones were examined in the 19th century and they concluded that he showed no signs of leprosy. I confess I wondered if 19th century science was advanced enough to draw such a conclusion, but I simply don’t know enough about Henry’s life to have a horse in that race. It had been predicted that he would die in Jerusalem, which must have discouraged him from taking part in any crusades, but he collapsed and died in the Jerusalem Chamber of the abbot of Westminster…..or so it is said. He is a major character in Brian Wainwright’s excellent novel Within the Fetterlock

Lastly, on March 20, 1549, Thomas Seymour was beheaded. Among his crimes was the suspicion that he’d seduced the young princess, Elizabeth. She was kept under close watch by hostile observers, and when they flung the news of his death at her, she responded with remarkable coolness, saying that “Today died a man of much wit, but little wisdom.” Of course by then she’d already learned one of life’s most painful lessons, that there was no one she dared trust.

The Leper King

Wednesday was the date of death in 1185 of one of history’s most tragic figures, the courageous young man known as the Leper King, Baldwin IV of Jerusalem. He was not yet twenty-four, and died knowing that his kingdom was not likely to long survive him, for it was being torn apart by inner turmoil and threatened by the most dangerous of its Saracen foes, the man whom history would know as Saladin. Baldwin was stricken with this cruel disease while still a child, but he was still crowned at age thirteen upon his father’s unexpected death, for at that time, his leprosy was suspected but not yet definitively diagnosed. Here is a brief scene from Outremer, after Baldwin, now fourteen, has discovered the truth that they’d kept from him and has confronted William of Tyre, his tutor, who would become Archbishop of Tyre and the author of one of the great histories of the MA.
* * *
“Why?” Little more than a whisper. “Why me?”
William had been asked that before, of course, in the years since he’d become an arch-deacon. A cry that must surely have echoed down through the centuries, every time a parent buried a child, a wife bled to death in the birthing chamber, a husband was struck down on the field of battle, a man or woman was faced with a wasting disease, an unbearable loss. He’d told them what he’d been taught, the words he’d offered to Maria when her daughter died, that it was not for mortal man to understand the ways of the Almighty. He had quoted from Scriptures--Now we seek through a glass, darkly, but then face to face—often having to explain the meaning to the illiterate, that whilst on earth, their knowledge was imperfect, upon that glorious day when they were admitted into the Kingdom of God, all would become clear. He found now that he could not say that to Baldwin, and so he gave the boy an answer of wrenching honesty.
“I…I do not know, Baldwin.”
Baldwin regarded him searchingly. “I know what men say of lepers. That they are morally unclean. That leprosy is the disease of the damned, punishment for their sins.” His voice wavered, but then he broke William’s heart by mustering up a small smile. “IF this is indeed leprosy, I have not had a chance to commit any sins great enough to deserve this, William.”
* * *

Thirty-two reasons to visit Ireland

What better time to post this than St Patrick's Day? Some of these sites were already discovered by the Game of Thrones guys, with a number of scenes filmed here. http://www.cnn.com/…/ireland-most-bea...

Downton Abbey cast

Happy St Patrick’s Day, everyone. And for Downton Abbey fans, here is fun link that shows us what the cast members look like in real life. Wait till you see Phyllis Logan, the actress who played Mrs. Hughes!
http://www.zimbio.com/What+the+%27Dow...

Return of the Prodigal Son

I am two days late on this, but on On March 14th, 1471, Edward of York, his brother Richard, and their small band of exiles landed on the Yorkshire coast near the fishing village of Ravenspur. They had sailed from Flushing on the 11th in heavy seas, losing the ship that carried their horses but evading the English fleet under command of the Earl of Warwick’s kinsman, the Bastard of Fauconberg. They’d planned to land in Norfolk, where they had Yorkist support, but when Edward prudently sent a scouting party ashore first, they learned that the Duke of Norfolk was under arrest and the Lancastrian Duke of Oxford was on the alert for them. They put out to sea again, then their ships were scattered in a storm. Richard and the three hundred men under his command came ashore near Ravenspur, and must have had a nerve-wracking night until in the morning they were able to find Edward and Will Hastings and the five hundred men on their ship and then unite with Edward’s brother-in-law Anthony Woodville and his two hundred men. Not a large army to attempt what many thought to be impossible—recover a lost throne. But Edward was one of those men at their best when things were at their worst, and paradoxically, at his worst when all was going well. He was blessed, too, with a brother he could trust implicitly, a luxury few kings enjoyed. And so they set forth bravely on their all or nothing gamble. .

The Ides of March Redux

I came across this old March 15th post and decided to repeat it, partly because Stephane’s quip made me laugh and partly because I feel confident that very few will remember something I posted four years ago. We’re all in favor of recycling, right? Stephanie has very generously offered to show me how to set up an Author Page, so I hope that will be up soon, at which time those who’ve friended me on my personal Facebook page will have to migrate over to the new page. I’m not happy about this, but Facebook doesn’t care. Anyway, here is that old post.
Several of my Facebook friends teased me because I’d called yesterday a “slow history day,” or as Stephanie put it, “Et tu, Sharon?” I explained that I was not dissing Julius Caesar, but simply being true to my laser-like focus on the MA. But I did forget an important medieval death that occurred on March 15, 1190, all the more unforgivable since it was mentioned prominently in Lionheart, and I’d like to thank my friend Kasia for reminding me that Isabelle of Hainaut, the first wife of the French king, Philippe Capet, died a month shy of her 20th birthday, after giving birth to two stillborn twin sons. She sounds like a fascinating young woman, for she’d managed to outwit Philippe at the tender age of 14 when he attempted to end their marriage on the bogus grounds that she’d failed to give him a son. She took to the streets of Senlis clad in a penitent’s shift, going from church to church to pray that her lord husband be saved from his evil advisers, and got so much sympathy from the public that Philippe was forced to relent and take her back. And the clever girl then deflected Philippe’s anger at having his royal will thwarted when he offered to wed her to any highborn lord in his realm. “Sire,” she said, sweetly and demurely, “it does not please God for a mortal man to lie in the bed in which you have lain.”

HBO trailer for new Game of Thrones season

Here is a link to the HBO trailer for the new Game of Thrones season. They continue to be as mysterious as possible. April 24th seems like a long time away. http://www.ew.com/article/2016/03/08/...