Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors

by English Historical Fiction Authors

  Simon de Montfort and Simon de Montfort

  by Katherine Ashe

  In February of the year 1230—or 1229 by the way they calculated years then, starting at Easter—a French youth appeared at the Court of Henry III of England claiming the title of Earl of Leicester, and its companion honor, Steward of England. He was jettisoned from the Court and later offered insulting pay as a mercenary.

  Yet, a few months after his ignominious visit to Westminster, with the support of his cousin Ranulf, the Earl of Chester, he did manage to persuade King Henry to pay him the earldom’s rents. Later, he would indeed be Earl of Leicester, and later still, he would make Parliament a reality, harnessing the powers of King Henry.

  The youth was Simon de Montfort, and the name already was famous by 1229. His father, for whom he was named, was a leader of the Fourth Crusade. He had refused to become entangled with the politics of Constantinople and took his forces on to Palestine, while the rest of his fellow-crusaders covered themselves with shame in the imperial upheavals. For his single-mindedness, Simon de Montfort Pere was looked upon as a hero.

  Today he’s looked upon as a ruthless opportunist.

  In the France to which Simon Pere and his Normandy knights returned, there was a new religion rising which the papacy condemned as heretical. Named for the southern French city of Albi, a center of their preaching, the Albigensians were gaining converts from conventional Catholicism by the virtuous lives they lived and the astute reasoning of their market-square preaching. Their religion entailed a forty-day fast and a celebratory meal, followed by another forty day fast. Those who survived this regimen were confirmed as Cathars: Pure Ones.

  Pope Innocent III commissioned Dominic Felix de Guzman (Saint Dominic) to found a preaching order to counter this increasingly popular diversion from standard Christianity.

  But when the papal legate Pierre de Castelnau was murdered, the Pope took military measures. A knight who went on crusade to the Holy Land received forgiveness of his debts and of his sins; now those highly desirable gifts were offered for a far less costly crusade merely to southern France.

  Thousands of northern French knights responded, converging on the south with a holy license to destroy. They entrapped six thousand Albigensians in the church at Bezier, piled wood around the building, and roasted to death every man, woman, and child within.

  Recovering from this bout of blood-lust, the crusaders realized they needed a leader. But no one much wanted the dubious honor of making the murderous roisterers into a proper fighting force. Simon de Montfort Pere eventually accepted the command and, of course, has been blamed for the Bezier horror.

  Fighting a lengthy war against the lords of southern France who harbored the Albigensians, Simon Pere was forced to hire mercenaries at his own expense. He conquered most of the strategic cities, setting up for himself a dukedom that included Foix, Toulouse, and Carcassonne.

  Then, during his absence from the city, Toulouse managed to rebel. Simon found the outer walls held against him. When he attacked, he was killed by a stone hurled from a mangonel mounted on the wall and operated by a woman.

  Toulouse still celebrates the event with an image of a lamb skewering a toppled lion with the point of a flagpole. (In a taxi in Toulouse I made a favorable remark about Simon de Montfort. The driver stopped the car, fished in the trunk, found a tire-iron and came at me. I escaped through the car’s farther door.)

  Normal medieval practice usually included providing a virtual hostage to ensure the contact-giver’s commitment to the agreement. The obvious choice available for Amaury to offer to the Crown of France was his little brother Simon, whose mother was also dead by 1221, and hence unable to object. But such hostages in Paris enjoyed considerable advantages of education in the most scholarly and devout court in Christendom.

  There is no record of young Simon’s childhood, but his excellent education, as attested by the letters of his Franciscan friends who were among the foremost scholars of the era, and the great fondness and trust repeatedly placed in him by King Louis IX of France (Saint Louis) and his mother Queen Blanche, who was regent for Louis, suggest that Simon—as I propose in my book—probably served as that hostage and was the little King of France’s childhood companion.

  Queen Blanche even saw fit to betroth this title-less, virtually landless, and penniless orphan to Johanna, the Princess of Flanders, another child-hostage at her court, but one with immense wealth and power as her dowry. (Johanna eventually wed Thomas, the Count of Provence.)

  That betrothal, and every other connection with the Court of France, collapsed for Simon after he pledged his liege to Henry III to obtain his earldom’s rents. Gossip of the period had Blanche cursing Simon and his fleeing from France.

  What was the dispute about?

  Simon’s brother Amaury repeatedly had petitioned Henry III for the Leicester titles and had been refused—understandably. Amaury was Marshall of France. He was responsible for providing mounts and pack-animals for the French Crown’s military campaigns, and England and France were at war, though in a desultory sort of way. Simon first appears in England after Amaury’s efforts irrevocably had come to naught, and at a time when France feared an English invasion.

  Queen Blanche was noted for her network of spies. Was she hoping to place an agent in Henry’s Court? A man who could inform her of Henry’s plans, and possibly could influence the young and inept king away from military actions? Was Simon sent to be that agent, in his brother’s stead? And once he had pledged his solemn and holy oath of liege to Henry, as was required of him, did he then consider it would be an act of disloyalty to his pledged lord to serve Queen Blanche as her spy? My belief is that something along these lines was the cause of young Simon’s early rift with the French royal family.

  That rift was mended in the years to come—though probably not by his being a secret agent for France. In 1252, when the Queen Regent was dying and Louis was on crusade in Palestine, Blanche named Simon Regent of France, a position he held with such success that the English chroniclers claim the French were temptingly considering that he would be a better king than Louis. Simon did not remain in France to seize power for himself, but fled, returning to the service of King Henry and England. And Louis hurriedly returned from Palestine, where he was being offered a sultanate if only he would convert to Islam.

  Sources

  Bemont, Charles. Simon de Montfort. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930.

  Excerpta e Rotulis Finium in Turri Londdinensi Asservatis Henry III, 1216-1272. Edited by C. Roberts. Public Record Office, 1835-36.

  Labarge, Margaret Wade. Simon de Montfort. London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1962. (Page 22 indicates that author’s leaning to my theory of Simon’s childhood at the Court of France.)

  Luard, H.R. Rolls Series, Vol. III.

  Matthew Paris. English History from 1235 to 1273. Translated by the Rev. J. A. Giles. London: Henry Bohn, 1852.

  Please see K. Ashe’s Volume One, Montfort The Early Years 1229 to 1243, for a full bibliography, and discussion of these points in the Historical Context section of the book.

  An Alchemist, an Earl, and the Stupor Mundi: The Cannon and Gunpowder in 13th Century Europe, with a Nod to Tess of the D’Urbervilles

  by Katherine Ashe

  Roger Bacon is considered to have introduced the formula and use of gunpowder to Europe in an article in his encyclopedic De Secretis Operibus Artis et Naturae. He illustrates a vase-shaped bronze vessel and offers a practical compounding of what is now called black powder. How did this 13th century Oxford scholar and alchemist come to have the secret of China’s explosive substance and its use in artillery?

  The trail of evidence is sometimes circumstantial but the facts are these:

  Gunpowder and cannons were known in China by the twelfth century. The first recorded use in the West appears to have been by Islamic forc
es battling Christians on the Iberian Peninsula in the early thirteenth century. Arab trade with China at that time, with dhows sailing to Canton and junks sailing to Aden, was quite active, and most likely was the means of bringing the technology to Arabic domains. But cannons and gunpowder remained very secret weapons.

  The Holy Roman Emperor Frederic II, known as the Stupor Mundi for his breadth of education and his insouciance toward Christianity, was educated by Arab scholars, attended by Arab physicians, and remained close to Arabic intellectuals and informants all his life.

  At his siege of Milan in 1238, Frederic’s army deployed a strange weapon that reportedly lofted missiles amid smoke and a thunderous roar.

  This same Milanese siege, at which Simon de Montfort was serving while in Italy—applying to the Vatican for the lifting of his wife’s vows as a nun—was commanded by Henry D’Urberville, on loan to Frederic from England and Simon’s former commander in Wales. D’Urberville would have seen Frederic’s secret weapon in operation.

  D’Urberville was also Simon’s immediate predecessor as governor for Gascony, England’s dukedom in southern France. Incidentally, this is that same Henry d’Urberville whose empty tomb appears in Tess of the D’Urbervilles to inspire the country girl with her great ancestry. Henry died on crusade in the Holy Land at King Louis’ battle at Mansourah.

  Before going to govern Gascony for King Henry, Simon de Montfort served as ambassador for England at King Louis IX’s court in Paris (1246-48). During the time of his stay there, the university brought charges against a young alchemist named Roger Bacon who was annoying everyone by making foul smells in his room. The university authorities applied to King Louis to have him evicted.

  Roger Bacon next turns up established at Oxford, which is then under the care of Robert Grosseteste’s protégé, Adam Marsh. Grosseteste’s and Marsh’s existing letters to Simon show an extraordinary degree of familiarity with the Earl; they undoubtedly were his closest friends. It would seem likely that Simon was the link between Bacon and Oxford, and it was probably through his initial patronage that Bacon found a home there—on a bridge where his malodorous matter could be conveniently dumped into the river.

  In his De Secretis Operibus Artis et Naturae, published in 1248, Bacon describes explosives and includes a drawing of a bronze vase-like vessel, the prototype of the European cannon.

  Commissioned to suppress the Gascon lords’ rebellion against English rule, Simon de Montfort defeated the mountain fortress of Mauleon in 1248 so swiftly that the deed was attributed to supernatural agency and brought about a fairly prompt surrender to the new governor. Might Simon have been using the cannon that Bacon describes?

  The next record of what seems to have been the use of a cannon was in 1253, when King Henry was trying to raise funds from his English barons for a war—again to subdue Gascony. The king displayed to the lords steel arrows, quarrels which had been lobbed at him amid thunderous noise from the roof of the fortress of La Reole—which previously had been supplied and used as headquarters by Montfort. The butt ends of the arrows were blackened as from a fiery explosion.

  A cannon, very similar to the one Bacon illustrated in his writings of 1248, appears in De Nobilitatibus, Sapientii, et Prudentiis Regum, by Walter de Milemete in 1326. But the use of cannon and gunpowder by the English is not widely recognized until the Battle of Crecy in 1346.

  William Wallace, the Hero?

  by Rosanne E. Lortz

  Whenever I study history, I have an innate bias in favor of the underdog. When the Britons face the invading Angles and Saxons, I root for King Arthur’s warriors at Badon Hill. When the Anglo-Saxons bear the iron yoke of the Normans, I rally with Robin Hood’s men in Sherwood Forest. And when the Scots thwart Edward I’s ambition to rule the entire island, I look to William Wallace as the hero of the hour.

  My first introduction to William Wallace was in The Scottish Chiefs, a nineteenth century novel by Jane Porter. The highly romanticized story, strewn with N. C. Wyeth’s poignant illustrations, appealed to my young teenage self. My second encounter with Wallace was in the 1995 movie Braveheart. The much grimier, but still highly romanticized story appealed to my older teenage self. Both stories made me want to cry “Freedom!” with the Scottish warrior and shed tears for his patriotic martyrdom.

  Later, when I was curious enough to sift fact from fiction, I discovered that both of these retellings were about as accurate as a perjurer’s deposition. But, even with all the embellishments discarded, I had no doubts where my loyalty lay. I was still committed to William Wallace, and taking Edward I’s side was unthinkable.

  This certainty was sorely shaken when I encountered the Flores Historiarum, a Latin chronicle written by several English hands during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. It was begun at St. Alban’s Abbey, continued at Westminster Abbey, and today there are approximately twenty manuscripts extant.

  The Flores Historiarum presents a much less romanticized view of William Wallace; it presents an English opinion of the Scottish hero:

  About the time of the festival of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a certain Scot, by name William Wallace, an outcast from pity, a robber, a sacrilegious man, an incendiary and a homicide, a man more cruel than the cruelty of Herod, and more insane than the fury of Nero…a man who burnt alive boys in schools and churches, in great numbers; who, when he had collected an army of Scots in the battle of Falkirk against the King of England, and had seen that he could not resist the powerful army of the king, said to the Scots, “Behold I have brought you into a ring, now carol and dance as well as you can,” and so fled himself from the battle, leaving his people to be slain by the sword.

  He, I say, this man of Belial, after his innumerable wickednesses, was at last taken prisoner by the king’s servants and brought to London, as the king ordained that he should be formally tried, and was on the eve of St. Bartholomew [23 August 1305] condemned by the nobles of the kingdom of England to a most cruel but amply deserved death. First of all, he was led through the streets of London, dragged at the tail of a horse, and dragged to a very high gallows, made on purpose for him, where he was hanged with a halter, then taken down half dead, after which his body was vivisected in a most cruel and torturous manner, and after he had expired, his body was divided into four quarters, and his head fixed on a stake and set on London Bridge. But his four quarters thus divided, were sent to the four quarters of Scotland. Behold the end of a merciless man whom his mercilessness brought to this end.

  For the William Wallace of this story, the punishment fits the crime. For the William Wallace of this story, the reader has no tears.

  The portrayal of William Wallace in the Flores Historiarum is certainly as yellow as a jaundiced eye can make it. Some could argue that it is as far removed from truth as the whitewashed hagiographies of several centuries later.

  But whether it is accurate or not, for me, this passage has always illustrated an important lesson: there are two sides to every story.

  As a historical novelist concerned about my craft, I can’t always follow my innate biases. I can’t just root for the underdog, or the man with the most glamorous legends. If two voices deserve to be heard, I must let them both speak.

  What if Edward Bruce Had Succeeded in Ireland?

  by Arthur Russell

  The early years of England’s King Edward II’s reign were dogged by many difficulties. First, he had to fight his barons who wanted to increase their own power at the expense of Royal power. Of even more significance, he had inherited a disastrous war with Robert Bruce in Scotland, arising from the claim of his father (Edward I, nicknamed “Longshanks”) to the throne of Scotland. This was effectively ended with the decisive battle of Bannockburn in 1314, which was a defeat for English arms.

  But King Edward’s Scottish troubles did not end with Bannockburn. The victorious Bruce had been invited by an alliance
of Irish chieftains to take over the vacant throne of Ard-Rí. And Bruce felt strong enough to do just that in hopes of opening a second war front against the English. He wanted to form a pan-Celtic alliance which he hoped would attract support not just from Ireland but from dissident elements in Wales. There was much talk of a “Celtic Empire of the West” which potentially would have created a strong counterbalance to the still embryonic power of London and a future British Empire.

  On May 26, 1314, a huge army of Scottish soldiers (gallowglasses) landed at Larne in Co Antrim under the leadership of Bruce’s younger brother Edward, the man chosen to assume the title of Ard-Rí (High King).

  For over three years, the Scottish invasion defeated every effort of the English colonists to resist them. Among the English who fought Edward Bruce were Justiciar Edward deBoteler and Sir Roger Mortimer, Earl of Wigmore, who was also Lord of Trim by virtue of his marriage to a scion of the deLacy family.

  Mortimer was lucky to escape from the Scots after the decisive battle of Kells in November 1315 which left the whole of Ireland—with the exception of the city of Dublin and a few castled towns—under the control of the invader.

  Edward Bruce was crowned Ard-Rí of Ireland at Knocknamellan, near Dundalk, in May 1316.

  The weather played a vital role in the progress of war. Not for the first or last time, northwestern Europe was hit by a succession of wet and windy summers which impacted the ability of the land to produce enough to feed the population. Add to this the impact of a hungry, invading army intent on starving all opposition into compliance, and you have the ideal environment for famine and famine-related pestilence to ravage Ireland during those turbulent years.