Falls the Shadow (83 page)
Authors: Sharon Kay Penman
Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Retail, #Kings and rulers, #Llewelyn Ap Iorwerth, #Wales - History - 1063-1284, #Biographical Fiction, #Historical Fiction, #Great Britain - History - Plantagenets; 1154-1399, #Plantagenet
Llewelyn’s smile was grim. “You’re right; a crown cannot be divided without destroying it. And that is true, as well, for a country. Wales must be kept whole, or England will swallow it all. If that means transgressing the old laws, so be it. I value Welsh sovereignty higher than Welsh tradition.”
“A nicely turned phrase, but where are we going with this conversation? I’m gratified that you can see my side of things, but it does not sound as if you’re offering anything more tangible than sympathy. So what you’re saying, then, is that we go back to the way it was ere I rebelled, except, of course, that I’ll now be kept on a much tighter leash.”
“No, I’m not saying that. If it did not work four years ago, why should it work now? Our grandfather faced this very same dilemma; he could not resolve it, either, could find no way to reconcile the claims of his two sons. Our father died because of that failure. There has to be another way. I do not want to kill you, Davydd, or to see you shut away from the sun and sky—like Owain. But neither do I want to spend my days wondering how long you’ll be loyal this time.”
Davydd was watching him warily. “And have you a solution? If so, you’ve gone Merlin one better!”
“Not a solution—not yet. A possibility. Very simply put, I need an heir. Owain could no more govern Gwynedd than he could walk on water. But you, Davydd, you could. God knows, you’re clever enough; too clever by half. No one has ever questioned your courage. All you seem to lack is scruples…and that never excluded any claimants for the English crown. Prove to me that you can be trusted, and I’ll consider naming you as my heir.”
“I thought you might dangle a carrot in front of my nose to keep me in harness. But I never expected such a gilded one. I need a moment to think on this. Why should you not wed and beget a son? You’re only thirty-nine; time is still your ally.”
This next was not easy to admit, but it had to be said, for it alone could give legitimacy to his offer. “I ought to have had sons by now,” Llewelyn said reluctantly. “In these past twenty years, I’ve taken my share of women into my bed, but not a one has ever gotten with child. It may happen yet; I’ve known men who fathered children after giving up hope. But if it does not, I would be willing to give you serious consideration.”
“But no promises?”
“None whatsoever. If it be God’s Will that I have a son, I shall. But it is not God’s Will that shall determine your future; it is mine.”
“That’s honest enough, and more than I expected, I admit. We have a pact, Llewelyn, and you, my lord Prince and brother, have a newly loyal liege man. I shall seek earnestly to mend my ways, not the first to be seduced by the golden glimmer of a crown.” But beneath the surface sarcasm, there were unmistakable undertones of excitement. Davydd was raising his cup in a mock salute. “To trust, an admirable virtue I shall be taking very much to heart. Now…what say you that we give Edward a scare by entering the hall arm in arm, the very image of brotherly devotion?”
Llewelyn burst out laughing. “Damn you, Davydd, but I did miss you.” And Davydd’s startled smile would long linger in his memory, for it was utterly free of mockery, a smile of unguarded and genuine delight.
The chapel was small, but starkly elegant, its white-washed walls and marble altar silvered by moonlight, splashed by rose tints filtering through windows of stained scarlet glass. Llewelyn paused before a stoup of holy water to bless himself, then raised his lantern and moved into the chancel, with Davydd following a few steps behind.
Kneeling before the altar, Llewelyn offered up a winged prayer for the soul of the man he’d most loved, the man who’d entrusted him with a vision, one that had never burned so brightly as it did in this twilit border church. Rising, he used his lantern to light a candle for Llewelyn Fawr.
“Who is the candle for—your grandfather?”
Llewelyn nodded. “Our grandfather. I wish you’d known him, Davydd. Llewelyn Fawr—he well deserved such praise, deserved the title, too. He was in truth the first Prince of Wales.”
Davydd was surprised by the emotion that now surfaced, one closely akin to envy. For a moment, he wondered what different roads he might have taken if he—like Llewelyn—had been following the map bequeathed by Llewelyn Fawr. And then he shrugged, said flippantly, “If you mean to abdicate, Llewelyn, I’d as soon you did it in my favor, not a dead man’s.”
Llewelyn laughed, not taking his eyes from the candle’s shimmering, luminous light. “Ambition alone is dangerous, Davydd, if not coupled with a vision.”
“I’d say it is dreams that are dangerous,” Davydd objected, only half in jest. “It was a dream that led to Evesham, was it not?”
Llewelyn turned, dark eyes capturing the candle’s glow. “Yes,” he said. “But it was also a dream that led here, to the Treaty of Montgomery.” Picking up his grandfather’s taper, he sought to kindle a second candle. The wick sputtered, but then caught fire, shot upward in a clear white flame.
“In Nomine Dei Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti,” Llewelyn said softly. “May you rest in peace, Simon.”
Walter de Cantilupe, Bishop of Worcester, died on February 4, 1266. The other prelates who had supported Simon de Montfort—the Bishops of London, Lincoln, Winchester, and Chichester—were suspended by the Pope, and three of the four endured years of exile, one dying in Italy, two not returning to England until King Henry was dead.
The recalcitrant rebels, John d’Eyvill, Nicholas Segrave, and Baldwin Wake, received royal pardons. Baldwin Wake wed Hawise de Quincy, Elen and Rob de Quincy’s youngest daughter, before February 1268; their great-granddaughter, Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent, wed Edward Plantagenet, the Black Prince, and her son ascended the English throne as Richard II.
Thomas Fitz Thomas, London’s memorable Mayor, was kept in prison until April 1269, when he was finally able to gain his freedom upon payment of five hundred pounds. But his properties had been confiscated, and his sons were burdened with debt. Fitz Thomas’s health suffered during his long imprisonment; he was dead by 1276. His widow, Cecilia, later married John de Stepney, a prosperous London fishmonger. Fitz Thomas’s colleague, Thomas Puleston, was not released from prison until 1275; he died within two years.
The subsequent histories of Eleanor (Nell) de Montfort, her children, Edward Plantagenet, and Llewelyn and Davydd ap Gruffydd will be related in my next novel.
Popular veneration of Simon de Montfort continued into the early years of the fourteenth century. So strong was public sentiment in Simon’s favor, so many miracles were alleged to have occurred, that it is conceivable he might eventually have been canonized by the Roman Catholic Church had it not been for the unrelenting hostility of the English Crown. Simon’s son Amaury succeeded in winning the Pope’s support, and Simon’s body was reinterred before the High Altar in the abbey of Evesham. The abbey was demolished in the sixteenth century by Henry VIII, but in 1965—the seven hundredth anniversary of Simon’s death—a memorial was erected upon the site of his grave, dedicated by the Speaker of the House of Commons and the Archbishop of Canterbury. The stone, brought from Simon’s birthplace, Montfort l’Amaury, was engraved with the words: “Here were buried the remains of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, pioneer of representative government…”
Falls the Shadow
was originally intended to be the shared story of two men, Simon de Montfort and Llewelyn ap Gruffydd. But I soon discovered that I’d set myself an impossible task, for the scope and breadth of their lives could not be compressed into one volume. My solution was to yield
Shadow
to Simon, and to devote my next book,
The Reckoning
, to Llewelyn.
The very least that can be said of Simon de Montfort’s life is that it was eventful, often improbable, so much so that I feel I should attest to a few of the more unlikely occurrences. Simon truly did remind Henry that an addled French King had been confined for his own good, an insult Henry never forgave, for twenty years later he could recount Simon’s words almost verbatim. Some of their heated exchanges in the course of Simon’s Gascony trial come straight from the pages of medieval chroniclers; Simon did indeed dare to warn Henry that, were he not a King, it would have been “an evil hour” for him. Henry actually did accuse Simon of seducing Nell, a charge made before Henry’s entire court. Simon’s contemporaries reported that he wore a hair shirt, a gesture of piety as natural to the medieval mind as it is alien to ours. The wild thunderstorm that broke over Evesham field during the battle was not a novelist’s dramatic indulgence. So violent a storm was it that men invested it with a superstitious significance out of all proportion to an act of nature; one chronicler even compared it to the tempest that raged over Calvary as Jesus Christ was crucified. And Simon’s son Bran did arrive at the battlefield in time to see his father’s head upon a pike.
Although
Shadow
is my third book, I still find myself torn between two faiths. The novelist’s need for an untrammeled, free-flowing imagination is always at war with the historian’s pure passion for verity. I do try to keep fact-tampering to a minimum, but it occasionally is necessary in order to advance the story line. The Welsh Princes met at Ystrad Fflur Abbey in October of 1238; I changed the date by several weeks to accommodate the birth of Simon and Nell’s son Harry. For the sake of convenience, I referred to Henry’s “Painted Chamber,” although that term did not come into use until some years later. And I chose to call Henry’s half-brother, the Earl of Pembroke, by his family name, William de Lusignan, rather than by the name by which he is generally known to history—de Valence—that of his birthplace. As in my novel
Here Be Dragons
, I used Welsh spellings and place-names wherever possible, although I chose the slightly Anglicized “Llewelyn” over the pure Welsh of “Llywelyn,” and I used the medieval v for phonetic reasons, as in Davydd and Ednyved.
It is not easy to resurrect a time so far removed from ours. Wales, in particular, remains uncharted terrain, for medieval sources were often incomplete, ambiguous, occasionally in conflict. In dramatizing Davydd ap Llewelyn’s capture of his half-brother, Gruffydd, I have followed the chronology of the English monk Matthew Paris, rather than that of the Welsh chroniclers, for the reasons so persuasively set forth by Gwyn A. Williams in “The Succession to Gwynedd, 1238–47.”
History has not been kind to Henry. The consensus is that he was one of England’s most incompetent kings. He did leave a legacy, though, that many a more capable monarch might well envy—Westminster Abbey. And however wretched a sovereign, he was a loving father. His devotion to his deaf-mute daughter, Katherine, was atypical for his age, utterly at odds with the bias personified by Matthew Paris, who dismissed Katherine as “pretty but useless.”
This was the first of my books in which I had to deal with the ugly underside of medieval society—the anti-Semitism that was so pervasive, so poisonous a part of daily life. I sought to explain how and why people were infected, making no excuses, but attempting to root this evil in the context of the thirteenth century.
Lastly, I would like to say a few words about Simon de Montfort. A French-born English hero, lordly champion of the commons, an honorable adventurer, he continues to be as controversial and enigmatic and paradoxical a figure in our time as he was in his own. Men have been arguing about the man, his motivations, and his legacy for the past seven hundred years. To an admiring Winston Churchill, “de Montfort had lighted a fire never to be quenched in English history.” But the historian Sir F. M. Powicke, while grudgingly according Simon a certain “murky greatness,” also saw him as a “dark force.” Victorian historians in particular tended to overestimate Simon’s contribution to constitutional government, lauding him as “the father of the English parliament,” ascribing to him sentiments and aspirations no medieval man could have harbored. Simon’s admirers and his critics do find some common meeting ground, all agreeing that Simon was able, arrogant, courageous, hot-tempered, and charismatic. Opinions then begin to diverge widely. A saint he most surely was not. For myself, I saw in him glimmerings of a Shakespearean tragic hero, one doomed by his own flaws. History’s judgment upon Simon de Montfort has been fluid, fluctuating over the centuries in accordance with prevailing political winds, for each age interprets the past in the light of its own biases. But the verdict that lingers in the imagination is that of Simon’s contemporaries, the medieval villagers who flocked to his grave, the steadfast Londoners, the poor and the powerless who believed in him, who did not forget him.
S.K.P.
November 1987
The Sunne in Splendour
Here Be Dragons
The Reckoning
I would like to thank the following people, without whose support
Shadow
might still be that, a shadowy idea, a might-have-been book. First and foremost, my parents, William and Terry Penman. My American editor, Marian Wood of Henry Holt and Company. My American agent, Molly Friedrich of the Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency. My British editor, Susan Watt of Michael Joseph Ltd. My British agent, Mic Cheetham of Anthony Sheil Associates, Ltd. Valerie LaMont and Joan Stora, who were brave enough to read a manuscript piecemeal. Cris Reay, my own “fail-safe system” for verifying historical facts, no matter how obscure. Geoffrey Arnott, Britain’s best battlefield guide. Dr. Edwin McKnight, who generously acted as my “medical consultant” for Llewelyn Fawr’s cerebrovascular accident. Linda Miller, for all the artistic inspiration. Dave O’Shea, whose evocative photographs of North Wales have gotten me through more bouts of writer’s block than I care to count. And lastly, I would like to thank the staffs of the National Library of Wales, the British Library, the University College of North Wales Library, the research libraries of Evesham, Shrewsbury, and Bordeaux, the University of Pennsylvania Library, and a special expression of appreciation to the staff of the Caernarfon Archives for helping me to pinpoint the site of the battle fought near Bwlch Mawr in 1255.