A medieval narcissist

I am happy and relieved to report that I was able to finish the page proofs for my British publisher, Macmillan, and I should soon be able to share with you their book cover for The Land Beyond the Sea. Plans are going ahead, too, to renovate and update my website; one of the changes will be sending out newsletters much more frequently. Now on to Today in Medieval History.
On October 2st, in 1449, George of Clarence was born. What can we say about Brother George? I don’t know that he was the worst king’s brother in English history. I think that was John, for he not only attempted to steal Richard’s crown, he did his best to make sure that Richard ended up in a French dungeon, where death would have been a mercy. But George certainly made an unholy pest of himself and gave so much grief to his family and others in his 28 years that it may have been a blessing if he’d been one of those babies who did not survive the perils of a medieval childhood.
I cannot say George was fun to write about, as some “villains” are. For example, I love writing about John. But George took himself very seriously, a character flaw in and of itself, and was always on the lookout for grievances to claim and then to nurture. I think he was a narcissist, for he certainly displayed many of the traits of one. He was boastful, lacked any empathy for others, always wanted to be the center of attention, was jealous and easily angered and took pleasure in petty cruelties. Even today, this form of mental illness is not easily treated; in the Middle Ages, of course, it could not even be properly diagnosed. Eventually, George paid a terrible price for his bad behavior, but in the interim, he inflicted some severe wounds upon his mother, his siblings, his wife, and any others unlucky to incur his wrath. See Chapter 9 of Book Three, page 746 of The Sunne in Splendour to meet a particularly tragic victim of his paranoia and vengefulness. (If you don’t remember Ankarette Twynyho, say so here and I will post about her tomorrow.)
On to other historical happenings on this date. On October 21, 1204, Robert Beaumont, the fourth Earl of Leicester died. He was one of the heroes of the Third Crusade, a character in Lionheart and Ransom, who was very loyal to Richard and seems to have been well regarded by all but the French king. His marriage was childless, though, and upon his death, his earldom passed to his sisters, opening the door for a young French adventurer named Simon de Montfort to stake a claim to it twenty-some years later. My new book, The Land Beyond the Sea, even has a de Montfort connection; one of them traveled to the Holy Land and wed Balian d’Ibelin’s eldest daughter.

And October 21, 1221 was the day that Alix de Thouars, the Duchess of Brittany, died in childbirth. The daughter of Constance of Brittany and her third husband, Guy de Thouars, Alix was only twenty or twenty-one at the time of her death, there being some confusion about her birth date. The birthing chamber was as dangerous for medieval women as the battlefield was for their men. I’ve written a number of childbirth scenes over the years and readers have occasionally asked me which one I found the most challenging. That is easy to answer—the harrowing chapter dramatizing the ordeal of Ellen de Montfort, wife to Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, as she struggled to give birth to their child. The Reckoning, Chapter 32.