August 5th, from a Welsh king to a Hollywood star

On August 5, 1063, Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, was betrayed and slain by his own men while struggling to repulse an invasion by Harold Godwinson, later King of England. Gruffydd is the only man to rule over all of Wales, from 1057 until his death, allthough he was called King of the Britons, not King of Wales. His wife was Ealdgyth of Mercia, who would later wed Harold. Was she willing to wed the man responsible for her husband’s death? We know virtually nothing about this woman, aside from the fact she was said to be beautiful, so we can only conjecture about her marriage to Harold. She would be widowed again three years later when Harold was slain at Hastings, but she then disappears from history, her fate unknown.
August 5, 1100 was the coronation of Henry I, just days after his brother William Rufus’s death in the New Forest.
August 5, 1301 is the birthdate of Edmund of Woodstock, Earl of Kent, son of Edward I and thus half-brother to Edward II. He would be executed in 1330 for engaging in a plot to free Edward II from captivity. Since Edward had been declared dead in 1327, historians have not been kind to Edmund, seeing him as gullible at best, a fool at worst. His is a complicated story and I hope I can persuade Kathryn Warner to stop by and explain it since I am urgently needed back in Narbonne to finish a scene with Joanna and Berengaria and it is bad manners to keep queens waiting.
On August 5, 1305, William Wallace was captured near Glasgow, betrayed by a Scottish knight loyal to Edward I. He would be executed in a truly barbarous fashion (being drawn and quartered, one of Edward I’s more dubious contributions to the English judicial system). What he said at his trial could also serve as an epitaph for the last Welsh prince, Davydd ap Llywelyn, who was drawn and quartered for treason 22 years earlier: “I could not be a traitor to Edward for I was never his subject.”
Lastly, two non-medieval events worth mentioning. On August 5, 1620, the Mayflower and Speedwell sailed from Southampton for the New World. They had to turn back when the Speedwell sprang a leak. The Mayflower would subsequently sail alone on September 6th, anchoring off the tip of Cape Cod in November after two harrowing months at sea. I have always marveled at the courage it took to sail in bygone times. When I was writing Lionheart, I watched some truly terrifying videos on YouTube of ships being tossed around like toothpicks by angry seas, and these were large ships equipped with modern technology! Imagine how it would have been to be caught in a storm in a medieval ship like Richard’s galley, the Sea-Cleaver. I would so have been a stay-at-home had I been born back then.
And it came as a minor shock to me to realize that it has been 50 years since the death of the American film icon Marilyn Monroe on August 5, 1962.