Sharon Kay Penman's Blog, page 50

No, I did not enter the Witness Protection program or get abducted by aliens

It is such a pity that years could not be returned for a refund. So far, I’m less than enamored with 2016. My spaniel’s post-surgery recovery has been an ordeal for both of us. My chiropractor is doing his best to get me mobile (without pain) again, but it will take a while. And now my main laptop has died. No, I did not kill it, only because I had no axe in the house. The hard drive had a meltdown and nothing can be recovered from it. Thank God I have Carbonite backing up my data, but it will be a huge hassle to get everything transferred to my new laptop. I haven’t decided on the name yet; in the past, I’ve gone with names like Demon Spawn and RC (Rosemary’s Baby and Melusine, the Demon Countess of Anjou. I took a different approach with my late, unlamented laptop, calling it Dracarys, which my fellow Game of Thrones fans will appreciate, but in the year I had it, it gave me nothing but grief. So I’ve decided it was not a good choice to throw my lot in with the Targaryns, and I am going instead with the only good Lannister, Tyrion. I suppose I could align with the Starks but they have a survival rate worse than those with Plantagenet blood did under the Tudors.
Because the year has been so much fun so far, I have not been able to spend time on Facebook and have suffered occasional withdrawal pangs; I also don’t trust certain parties who are given to staging coups. (No names mentioned, Ken and Stephanie.) But my chiropractor is back from his Christmas vacation, welcomed by me and his other patients the way the Parisians greeted the troops who liberated their city from the Nazis. Holly gets her stitches out next Monday. BTW, the surgical suit did work, enabling me to ditch the catastrophic plastic cone, although it is so tight-fitting she looks like a sausage bursting out of its skin. And I hope to get the new laptop set up and ready to go in the next day or two. So with luck, I won’t be such a stranger here once all of this gets straightened out.
Lastly, here is some Game of Thrones news, both good and bad. It is not returning till April 24th this year, but they are seriously considering adding an eighth season. http://www.ew.com/article/2016/01/07/...

The Winds of Winter

I am guessing that few of us are sorry to see 2015 slink off into the night. I am sure that many of us had some bright and shining moments in those twelve months, but for the world at large, too often its history was written in blood. So it seems fitting that it ended with yet another loss, silencing the soaring voice of the gifted Natalie Cole, R.I.P.
I hope 2016 has gotten off to a good start for my Facebook friends and readers. Holly and I are still in limbo. Forget Waiting for Godot; all that matters at Penman Manor is waiting for Dr David Hadley, three days and counting. We are also waiting for the arrival tomorrow of Holly’s surgical suit. The mailman will probably be surprised to find me camping out on the porch for him, and even more surprised to get the sort of welcome usually reserved for rock stars and royalty. I refuse to let myself contemplate what will happen if the suit does not work and Holly has to keep wearing the Cone of Shame for another nine days. Has anyone else ever used this for their dogs post-surgery? If you have and found it was useless, please lie to me; I am in need of even false hopes!
I am sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, this time concerning Master George RR Martin. He has admitted that his new novel will not be done by the time the HBO series returns in April. Here is the link to the story. http://www.ew.com/article/2016/01/02/... Since I devote so many of my waking hours to fending off my own deadline dragon, I hesitate to join the critical chorus. But I could suggest to Master Martin that he do with Winds of Winter what I did with Lionheart: make two books out of it. Okay, that would make eight books in the series, but that is significant only if they are supposed to match the seven kingdoms, right? Since I have not been consulted, however, I’d say the chances of this happening are slim and none and slim has left town.
Signing off now to go hand-feed Holly her lunch…sigh.

Holly and the new year

Thanks to all of you who’ve expressed sympathy for my back pain and Holly’s health crisis. I am greatly relieved to report that she came through the surgery well and I was able to bring her home. She is not a happy camper, of course, but at least the worst is over. As for me, five days and counting until my chiropractor comes back from his Christmas holiday!
Meanwhile, I’d like to wish everyone a safe and enjoyable New Year’s Eve. Let’s hope the new year will be a better one for the world; It could hardly get much worse, could it?

John's birthday

I am sorry to report that I am still desperately counting the days till my chiropractor gets back from Christmas vacation. On his next holiday, I plan to smuggle myself along.
Such sad weather-related news from almost everywhere. I hope all my Facebook friends in Texas are safe; same for my friends in Yorkshire. A tragic ending to the year for so many.
I know almost all of you are animal lovers, so please send some positive vibes my way tomorrow when my spaniel, Holly, goes in for surgery to remove bladder stones. I was blind-sided by this diagnosis and I confess I am rather nervous, probably because the last time one of my dogs had surgery, he did not survive.
Lastly, here are some medieval musings about one of the Angevins.
You will still find histories, even biographies, of King John that declare he was born on December 24, 1167. They are wrong. John was born in 1166. Had he been born in 1167, he could not have been Henry’s, for he and Eleanor were apart when she’d have needed to conceive for a December 1167 birth. Interestingly, while some of John’s biographers get this wrong, none of Eleanor’s do, all correctly placing John’s birth in 1166. How did this confusion develop? A misreading of an entry in the chronicle of Robert de Torigny, abbot of Mont St Michel, erroneously placing it in 1167. So how about John’s Christmas Eve birth? Again, there is no evidence to support this traditional date. Since he was christened John, an entirely new name not found in the family trees of either of his parents, it seems reasonable to assume he was named after the saint whose day it was, St John the Evangelist, which means that he was born on December 27, 1166.
John was Eleanor’s tenth child, her eighth with Henry; one chronicler mentioned a ninth child who was either stillborn or died young, but that has not been verified. Surviving at least ten trips to the birthing chamber is a remarkable accomplishment for any woman, especially one in the Middle Ages. Eleanor was forty-two at the time of John’s birth, and a strong case can be made that she’d just learned of Henry’s liaison with Fair Rosamund Clifford, one that was serious enough for him to have ensconced the girl at Woodstock palace. So how welcome was this fourth son, needed neither as an heir nor a spare, a son who might well have been a living reminder of an unhappy time in her life and her marriage?
No historian can truthfully answer that, of course, although some have tried. Fortunately, historical novelists have greater latitude in such matters and I can say for a certainty that my fictional Eleanor did indeed have ambivalent feelings toward her last child. Is she, then, to blame for John’s problem personality? Well, both Henry and Eleanor made their share of parental mistakes; they failed to instill any sense of brotherly solidarity in their sons, and not only did they have favorites, they compounded that sin by making it abundantly clear. But I think Henry has to shoulder most of the blame for the man that John became, for he was the primary influence during John’s formative years, Eleanor being held prisoner from the time that John was seven until he was nigh on twenty-three. The last of the Angevin eaglets was undoubtedly clever, capable, undeserving of the mocking sobriquet given by his enemies, “John Softsword.” But for whatever reasons, he seems to have been the most emotionally damaged of the Devil’s Brood, and his kingship would be a failure. He is, however, great fun to write about! .

An act of heroism that should not be forgotten

I’m still not able to spend as much time at the computer as I’d like. But there is no way I was not going to stop by to wish my friends and readers a Merry Christmas. I hope those of you in the south were spared those deadly tornadoes yesterday, a scary side-effect of this weirdly warm weather hitting half the country.
The other day I posted an uplifting story about Muslim women in Kenya risking their own lives to save Christian passengers when their bus was attacked by terrorists. Here is another story sure to warm our hearts, this one going back to WWII and a POW camp, where the Jewish prisoners were ordered to assemble outside their barracks. One man said “We are not going to do this, “and told all 2,700 prisoners to step forward. When the camp commandant angrily challenged him, he said calmly, “We are all Jews,” and did not back down even when a gun was put to his head. There were at least 200 Jewish prisoners among the men, and there is no doubt that he saved their lives. Amazingly, he never told his family about his heroic act, and his son did not discover it until after his death. But the men who witnessed it never forgot it and he is the only American soldier to be recognized as a Righteous Gentile by the state of Israel. Here is the link to this inspiring story. http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/21/europe/...

How many of us would have had courage like this?

My latest health setback is keeping me off the computer, unfortunately. But I am still thinking of my Facebook friends and worrying about the precarious state of our world. I am sure many feel as I do—overwhelmed by the relentless drumbeat of bad news, the horror stories of genuine evil (ISIS) and shameless politicians appealing to the worst of human nature and the usual tragedies that strike us all (fires, accidents, crime, etc.). More than ever, we desperately need proof that there are still good people out there. So now and then I like to post stories that show us at our best. That seems particularly appropriate in Christmas week. Below is a link to a story of amazing courage. It occurred this week in Kenya when a bus was ambushed by terrorists with ties to ISIS. These are the same killers who attacked that school back in April, singling out Christian students for execution, and leaving over 150 young people dead. This time they demanded that the passengers leave the bus and separate the Christians from the others. Instead the passengers—about a hundred of them, mainly women—chose to put their own lives at risk by defying the killers. They gave head scarves to the Christian women, hid others on the bus, and challenged the terrorists either to kill them all or to leave them alone. They not only saved the lives of the twelve Christian women on the bus, they gave hope to the rest of us. The next time we despair of mankind’s capacity for cruelty and bigotry, I hope we can remember the courage and compassion of those Muslim women facing death on a lonely road in Kenya.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/22/africa/...

Some medieval musings

I had a bad back “episode” which kept me off the computer for a while. But I am not feeling like a human pretzel at the moment so I thought I could risk making a quick Facebook visit. Here are the happenings for December 17th in medieval history.
Baldwin, Count of Hainaut and Count of Flanders died on that date in 1195. He was the father of Philippe Capet’s unfortunate wife, Isabelle, who died in childbirth at age twenty. He’d wed the sister of Philip d’Alsace, the Count of Flanders, who appears as a character in Devil’s Brood and Lionheart and will pop up again in my current novel. When Philip died at the siege of Acre without a legitimate heir to succeed him, Flanders passed to Baldwin, his brother-in-law. Philip had been wed to the niece of Eleanor, daughter of her sister Petronilla, and he’d claimed her inheritance of Vermandois after contending she’d been unfaithful; some historians and some of his contemporaries were skeptical of that, but it did not help his wife or the poor soul whom Philip alleged to have been her lover; he met a very unpleasant end.
To show how impossibly entangled the lives of these people were, Baldwin’s son, also a Baldwin, succeeded him as Count of Flanders and wed the daughter of Marie of Champagne, the younger sister of Henri in Lionheart, and he was said to have loved her “with a fervent love.” Both he and his Marie died young, though, victims of that shameful farce known as the Fourth Crusade, which never reached the Holy Land, choosing instead to sack the Christian city of Constantinople. Baldwin was then named as the first Latin Emperor of what we today call the Byzantine Empire, and died as a prisoner in Bulgaria, most likely put to death. Marie, not knowing of this, had sailed to join him at Acre, where she then took ill and died.
With such cheerful offerings, you all must wish I’d stayed off-line for a while longer!

December 14th in medieval history

I was incommunicado yesterday, of course, it being a football day. But there were a few interesting medieval events happening on this date in history, as follows:
On December 14, 1553, my favorite French king, Henri of Navarre, was born. If only I’d had nine lives like a cat, I’d have loved to write about him…sigh.
On December 14, 1287, one of the worst floods in history occurred. It was known as the St Lucia’s flood because it happened the day after St Lucy’s Day. A dike broke during a savage storm and it is estimated that 50,000 people were drowned in the Netherlands and northern Germany. Hundreds also died in England. The flood changed the history of the Netherlands by creating direct sea access for the village of Amsterdam, which allowed it to become a major port city.
On December 14, 1476 (maybe) Vlad the Impaler died. Prince of Wallachia, he earned a reputation in his lifetime for great cruelty, as his name indicates. But his real notoriety came in the 19th century when the novelist Bram Stoker chose Vlad’s family name—Dracul—for his infamous vampire, Dracula. I am sure Stoker never dreamed that vampires would become sex symbols in our time!
And on December 14th, 1542, King James V of Scotland died. He was the son of Margaret Tudor and the father of the little girl who would become known to history as Mary, Queen of Scots.

A controversial archbishop and loyal son, a young king, and a celebrated actor

Some histories claim that December 12, 1212 was the date of death of Henry II’’s illegitimate son, Geoffrey, the reluctant Archbishop of York; this has a symmetrical appeal: 12/12/12. But other histories say otherwise; all we can be sure of is that he died in December, and in exile, for he had even more problems with his half-brother John than he’d had with the Lionheart. Geoffrey had inherited his share of the combustible Angevin temper; moreover, he’d been devoted to his father and I don’t think he ever forgive Richard or John for making Henry’s last days so wretched. He had many admirable qualities, but he was ill-suited for the Church, as he himself recognized; Henry, of course, never thought to consult his sons when he was determining their futures for them. Geoffrey’s years as archbishop were turbulent ones; he even excommunicated a convent of nuns at one point! But I still find his loyalty to Henry very touching.
A friend posted a photo of Michael and Kirk Douglas on one of my Facebook pages the other day, on the occasion of the senior Douglas’s 99th birthday—yes, 99th! This reminded me of an earlier post of mine and I am recycling it here, for that gives me another opportunity to recommend a fascinating book and film that many consider a classic. So here it is.
* * *
December 9th, 1165, was the date of death for the Scots King known as Malcolm the Maiden, who was only twenty-four at the time. He suffered from ill health and it has been suggested he may have died of Paget’s Disease. He was unmarried and was succeeded by his brother William the Lion, whom we discussed earlier this week.
Moving on to the non-medieval, the renowned English poet, John Milton, was born on December 9th, 1608. And the actor and writer Kirk Douglas was born on this day in 1916. I had to mention this because of an act of kindness by Mr. Douglas this summer. I had mentioned in one of my blogs that I’d loved his book about the making of the classic film, Spartacus, and the ending of the Blacklist. To my astonishment, I received a handwritten note from him, telling me he was pleased that I’d enjoyed it. I have no idea how this was brought to his attention, but he made my day, week, and month! For those who have not read “I am Spartacus,” you are in for a wonderful reading experience, as entertaining as it is informative, as amusing as it is insightful. And if anyone has not yet seen this brilliant film, I urge you to remedy that before the year is out. It has more than stood the test of time and should not be missed.

Lament for a Welsh prince

December 11th is always a sad day for me, as it was on this date in 1282 that Llywelyn ap Gruffydd was slain at Cilmeri, and with him died any hopes for Welsh independence. There were so many deaths in my books, deaths that changed history, usually for the worst. But few deaths were as difficult for me to write as the death of the man the Welsh would call Ein Llyw Olaf—Our Last Leader. More than twenty years ago, I was driving along a Welsh road as darkness came on, thinking what a challenge it would be to write of Llywelyn’s tragic end. Suddenly it was as if I heard a voice, so clear and vivid that it was almost as if the words had been spoken aloud. A man ought to die with his own language echoing in his ears. When the time came to write that scene, I remembered.
From The Reckoning, page 534.
* * *
“Is it true?” he asked. “Are you the Welsh prince?”
Llywelyn labored to draw enough air into his lungs. “I am Llywelyn, son of Gruffydd, son of Llywelyn Fawr, Prince of Wales and Lord of Eryri,” he said, softly but distinctly, “and I have urgent need of a priest.”
The young Englishman seemed momentarily nonplussed. “I’d fetch one,” he said hesitantly, “if it were up to me.” Kneeling in the snow, he unhooked his flask, supported Llywelyn’s head while he drank. “There will be a doctor at the castle,” he said, and then, surprisingly, “I’m Martin.”
“Thank you, Martin,” Llywelyn whispered, and drank again. He was almost amused by their solicitude, their determination to keep him from dying. He could envision no worse fate than to be handed over, alive and helpless, to Edward. But he did not fear it, for he knew it would not come to pass. He’d be dead ere they reached Buellt Castle, mayhap much sooner. He measured his life now not in hours or even moments, but in breaths, and he would answer for his sins to Almighty God, not the English king.
Another of the soldiers was coming back. “Here, Martin, put this about him.”
Martin took the blanket. “He’s in a bad way, Fulk,” he murmured, as if Llywelyn ought not to hear. Fulk picked up the lantern, and swore under his breath at the sight of the blood-soaked snow.
“Christ,” he said, and then, to Llywelyn, almost fiercely, “You hold on, hear? We’re going to get you to a doctor, for the king wants you alive!”
Llywelyn gazed up at him, marveling. “Indeed,” he said, “God forbid that I should disoblige the English king by dying.” It was only when he saw that Fulk and Martin were uncomprehending that he realized he’d lapsed into Welsh. But he made no effort to summon back his store of Norman-French. A man ought to die with his own language echoing in his ears.
The English soldiers were discussing his wound in troubled tones. But their voices seemed to be coming now from a distance, growing fainter and fainter until they no longer reached Llywelyn. He heard only the slowing sound of his heartbeat, and he opened his eyes, looked up at the darkening sky.
* * *
When they realized Llywelyn was dead, the English soldiers cut off his head so they would have proof of his death to show King Edward. After they rode away, Llywelyn’s squire Trevor crept out of hiding.
Page 536.
* * *
They’d left a blanket behind, blood-drenched by the decapitating. Trever reached for it, began to drape it over Llywelyn’s body, taking great care. By the time it was done to his satisfaction, he’d gotten blood all over himself, too, but he did not mind, for it was his lord’s blood. Sitting down in the snow beside the body, he said, “I’ll not leave you, my lord. I’ll not leave you.”
And that was how Goronwy found them, long after the battle of Llanganten had been fought and lost.
* * *
Llywelyn’s brother Davydd claimed the crown, vowing to continue the fight against the English. But the Welsh knew it was over. A poetic people, they expressed their grief in anguished elegies, none more impassioned and heart-rending than the one written by Llywelyn’s court bard, Gruffydd ab yr Ynad Goch.
See you not that the stars have fallen?
Have you no belief in God, foolish men?
See you not that the world is ending?
Even after so many centuries, the pain of that lament transfixes us, allowing us to share their sorrow, their uncomprehending rage, and their understanding that Wales had suffered a mortal blow when their prince had been struck by that English spear. Ah, God, that the sea should cover the land! What is left us that we should linger? That haunting cri de coeur was Llywelyn ap Gruffyd’s true epitaph.