When Christ and His Saints Slept (143 page)

BOOK: When Christ and His Saints Slept

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If I seem to be slighting Henry and Eleanor in this author’s note, that is because they speak very well for themselves. I enjoyed writing about Eleanor’s twilight years in
Dragons
, and like many of my readers, I visualize the aged Eleanor as the
Lion in Winter
’s Katharine Hepburn. It was more challenging to write about the young Eleanor, colliding with Henry in Paris like two runaway comets, changing the history of Christendom with their passion and their ambition. Readers often ask me to “cast” my books for the screen. I’ve always thought that Timothy Dalton was born to play Llewelyn, either the grandsire or the grandson, but after that, I usually draw a blank. I have to admit, though, that I think Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson would make a splendid Henry and Eleanor.

I would like to end this note by focusing one last time upon Maude and Stephen. The legend that Maude and Stephen were lovers and Henry their son has been thoroughly discredited by historians. As the British scholar Marjorie Chibnall points out in her recent biography of Maude,
The Empress Matilda
, this myth did not surface until the thirteenth century and may be traced to confusion over Stephen’s adoption of Henry as his heir once peace was finally made between them. What of Maude’s relationship with Brien Fitz Count? One of her biographers suggests that they may have been lovers, a suggestion Ms. Chibnall firmly rejects. That they were devoted to each other, none can deny, and it is hard not to conclude that Brien’s devotion was personal rather than political, for he ruined himself on Maude’s behalf, resolutely refused to accept any rewards for his steadfast and dangerous loyalty, and took holy vows upon her departure from England. I doubt, though, that they ever became lovers in the physical sense. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, in his insightful and well-researched article “The Devolution of the Honour of Wallingford, 1066–1148,” describes Brien as Maude’s “courtly lover,” and I suspect that is as close to the truth as we are likely to get.

I broke with conventional wisdom in this book, for it has been an accepted belief that Maude had no children before Henry. But in her biography, Ms. Chibnall reports that a German chronicler claimed that Maude bore a child to her first husband, a child who died soon afterward. According to Ms. Chibnall, this chronicler, Hermann of Tournai, was a near contemporary of Maude’s but not always a reliable source. She does not dismiss his story out of hand, though, for the same reason that I tend to believe it. I do not think Maude’s father would have risked naming her as his heir unless he knew she could conceive a child. The emperor had an illegitimate daughter; moreover, the woman was almost always blamed for a childless marriage in the Middle Ages. Why would Henry have staked his dynastic hopes upon a woman who might be barren? To me that is a persuasive argument for the veracity of Hermann of Tournai’s account.

Stephen is my third weak king. But unlike the pathetic Henry VI or the petty Henry III, Stephen had some very attractive qualities. He was courageous, generous, optimistic, and good-natured. Unfortunately for England, he was also impractical, impulsive, an appallingly bad judge of character, blind to consequences, insecure, and easily influenced. After reading my manuscript, a friend said “Poor Stephen. He lost so much when he gained a crown.” I think she is right. But the English people lost far more.

It might be said that both Stephen and Maude were victims of their age, for the twelfth century was not friendly terrain for a too-forgiving king or a sovereign queen. History has not been kind to either of them. In Maude’s case, I think the judgment might be overly harsh, for if you study her past, you find three Maudes. There was the young woman who made a successful marriage to a manic depressive and so endeared herself to her German subjects that they were loath to see her return to England. There was the aging matriarch who passed her last years in Normandy, on excellent terms with the Church and her royal son, respected for the sage counsel she gave Henry. In between, there was the harpy, the termagant so reviled by the English chroniclers, whose mistakes were exaggerated and magnified by the hostile male monks writing her history.

Maude could be infuriating and exasperating, but she had great courage, and she never lost a certain prickly integrity. As for Stephen, I think the truest verdict was one passed by a contemporary chronicler: “He was a mild man, gentle and good, and did no justice.”

S.K.P.
July 1994

Also by Sharon Kay Penman

The Sunne in Splendour

Here Be Dragons

Falls the Shadow

The Reckoning

Acknowledgments

I
WAS
very fortunate; while researching and writing
Saints
, I never lacked for support and encouragement. A number of people have been helpful, but I would like to single out the following ones for special thanks. My parents, for always being there for me. Valerie Ptak LaMont, for her writer’s insight and honesty. Scott Ian Barry, for letting me draw upon his expertise as an animal behaviorist in the attack scene with Loth, Ranulf’s Norwegian dyrehund. Jill and John Davies, for a special afternoon in Lincoln, tracking the Fossedyke to find where Robert Fitz Roy was likely to have crossed with his army. The best editors and agents that any writer could hope to have: Marian Wood and John Jusino of Henry Holt and Company, Susan Watt of Michael Joseph Ltd., Molly Friedrich of the Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency, and Mic Cheetham. As well, the staffs of the University of Pennsylvania, the British Library, and the research libraries of Shrewsbury, Oxford, Winchester, and Lincoln.

Henry Holt and Company, Inc.
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New York, New York 10011

Henry Holt
^®is a registered
trademark of Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

Copyright © 1995 by Sharon Kay Penman
All rights reserved.
Published in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Ltd.,
195 Allstate Parkway, Markham, Ontario L3R 4T8.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Penman, Sharon Kay.
When Christ and his saints slept / by Sharon Kay Penman.

—1st ed.

p. cm.
I. Title.