Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors (15 page)

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

R
oger 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 forces 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

W
henever I study history, I have an innate bias in favor of the underdog. When the Britons face the invading Angles and Sa
xons, 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

T
he early years of England’s King Edward II’s reign were dogged by many difficulties. First, he had to fight his bar
ons 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.

It meant that Bruce could never move too far away from his northern base which was supplied from Scotland. It also caused many Irish allies to blame the Scots for the damage that was being done to Ireland’s food supply and to withhold their support for his cause. Bruce’s Gaelic allies also failed to win Papal recognition for the newly crowned Ard-Rí, which further eroded support for the invasion.

The war dragged on until 1318 when the English King finally put together the men and resources to roll back the Scottish advance. Sir Roger Mortimer landed with a huge army at Youghal and succeeded in pinning the Scots back into Ulster where they awaited the arrival of promised reinforcements from King Robert later in the year.

The next battle would decide the fate of the invasion and of Ireland for centuries. Against all the advice of all his own commanders as well his remaining Irish allies, Bruce insisted on taking to the field at Faughart near Dundalk on October 14, 1318, days before his brother’s army, which had by then arrived in Ireland, could help him. Due to the rivalry that existed between the brothers, Edward wanted to win this last deciding battle without Robert’s help.

Seriously outnumbered, the Scots were defeated. Edward Bruce and many leading Scottish nobles were killed at the battle of Faughart. This battle was the end of Scotland’s interest in Irish affairs and the dream of a strong alliance of Celtic nations that could challenge England’s hegemony.

Sir Roger Mortimer, who is rightly credited with being the main architect of the defeat of the Bruces’ invasion of Ireland, subsequently went on to play a significant part in England’s history. (See
The Greatest Traitor,
by Ian Mortimer.)

The Great “What-Ifs?”

What if Edward had waited for his brother at Faughart? What if he had won and succeeded in establishing a strong Irish Royal dynasty allied to Scotland? How different would subsequent Irish, Scottish, and English history have been?

Gaelic Ireland

The Bruce invasion of Ireland provides the historical backdrop to my novel
Morgallion,
which takes its title from the marchland barony of the same name. It was here that the remains of an ancient lake or “crannóg” settlement was uncovered 20 years ago beside Moynagh Lough in Co Meath. This site was the subject of an extensive archaeological excavation led by John Bradley from the National University of Ireland Maynooth who traced its origins to Neolithic times and its continued development right into the Middle Ages. Moynagh’s crannóg Gaelic community was therefore on the frontier of Norman-English and Gaelic cultures after the Norman invasion and inevitably had to endure all the inherent dangers and traumas that living in such a precarious location entailed.

It is also on record that Edward Bruce’s invading army occupied the nearby caput town of Nobber for several weeks on his way to his victory over Sir Roger Mortimer at the battle of Kells in November 1315. In common with every other district in the front-line of the invading army’s advance, its people suffered dreadfully from famine, disease, and the ravages of war.

These are some of the “pegs” of historical fact on which the story of
Morgallion
hangs. While it is fiction, it portrays how the lives of ordinary people might have been impacted by events that washed over and around them. The book is an attempt to put some “flesh on the bones” of what scant historic records tell us. The research and writing of the book began twenty years ago and was finally brought to completion in April 2012.