A stranded starfish and a May hanging

I missed several very important historical events this past week, but fortunately my friend Koby jogged my memory. On May 3rd, 1152, Stephen’s queen, Matilda, died, and he never seems to have recovered from her loss. I liked Matilda and tried to give her a death scene she deserved. Saints, page 627.
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Matilda had always envisioned time as a river, flowing forward inexorably into the future, forcing people to keep up with the current as best they could. No more, though. Time had become tidal. Lying in the shuttered dark of an unfamiliar bedchamber, she could feel it receding toward the horizon, leaving her stranded upon the shore. As a little girl in Boulogne, she’d often walked along the beach, throwing back the starfish trapped by the ebbing tide. Now, forty years later, when it was her turn to be marooned by the retreating waves, there was no one to save her as she’d saved the starfish, but she did not mourn for herself. Dying was not so terrible, for all that people feared it so. She was in God’s Hands, a feather floating on the wind, waiting to see if He would call her home.
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On May 3rd, 1415, Cecily Neville was born, and she gave birth to her daughter Margaret on May 3rd, 1446—the ultimate birthday present. This happened in my own family, as my grandmother and my mother shared the same birthday, February 19th.
On May 2nd, 1194, Richard I gave Portsmouth its first charter before sailing for Normandy, never to set foot on English soil again. He seems to have been interested in making Portsmouth the base for an English navy; he showed a flair for naval warfare during his time on Crusade and he was planning to use his beloved Chateau Gaillard as a means of controlling river traffic on the Seine.
Also on May 2nd, this time in 1230, Llywelyn Fawr hanged his wife Joanna’s lover, William de Braose; he was the grandson of the woman that Joanna’s father John had starved to death. Again, who could make stuff like this up?