A Fine and Terrible Mystery

There is a book I want to read but it hasn’t been written.  It’s a book which solves an important mystery, or at least provides the likely solution to the mystery embodied in the known life, deeds and works of a man who lived in the 15^th century.

Call him Thomas.  He was born in 1416, approximately, near the year of Henry V’s great victory at Agincourt, in Stretton-under-Fosse in Warwickshire.  A minor noble, he was knighted sometime before 1441 (commonly at the age of 21) and in that year served as an Elector in Northamptonshire.   When he was 27 he and one Eustace Barnaby were accused of stealing  £40 from one Hugh Smyth.  (At that time £40 purchased £29,440 worth of goods at 2015 prices, but corresponded to £230,600 in the relative value of labor.)  It wouldn’t have been a minor theft yet it wasn’t prosecuted.

Thomas married Elizabeth Walsh in the same year and together they had a son, Robert and possibly 1-2 other children later.  In 1443 he was elected to Parliament as one of two “Knights of the Shire” for Warwickshire and was appointed to the Royal Commission for the distribution of funds to impoverished Warwickshire towns.  That trust could suggest the earlier accusation was frivolous and without merit.  In 1449, at the age of 33, he was elected Member of Parliament for the Duke of Buckingham’s safe seat of Great Bedwyn.

In 1451, when Thomas was about 35 years old, his life changed.  He was accused, along with 26 others, of trying to murder the Duke of Buckingham, one of the most powerful Lancastrian magnates in the land.  Thomas probably owed allegiance to the Earl of Warwick, a powerful Yorkist supporter.  The accusation was never proved.  Later in the same year he was accused of extortion twice then of breaking into the home of Hugh Smyth of Monkskirby, stealing £40 and raping Smyth’s wife and attacking her in Coventry 8 weeks later.  (Rape at that time could mean abduction or consensual sex with a married woman.)  His arrest was ordered but nothing was done.  In the following months Thomas was accused of over 100 serious crimes, mostly violent robberies.

He was finally brought to trial in August of that year in Nuneaton, the heartland of Buckingham’s power and imprisoned in infamous Marshalsea Prison in Southwark in spite of pleas to be tried by a new jury from Warwickshire.  Over the next several years he escaped was imprisoned again, escaped, was imprisoned until he was released on £200 bail (worth £147,000 of goods at 2015 prices) gathered by Warwickshire magnates.

From 1460 until 1470 he was imprisoned at Newgate for further alleged crimes, including joining with the Earl of Warwick in a plot to assassinate the Yorkist King, Edward IV.  He was explicitly excluded from two of Edward IV’s general pardons afterwards but was finally released during the short period when the Earl of Warwick returned Henry VI to the throne.  He died in 1471, about the age of 55.

While Thomas was in Newgate he had access to the library of the Greyfriars Monastery adjacent to the prison, one of the finest libraries in western Europe at the time.  And he wrote a book, arguably the greatest achievement of prose literature in the 15^th century, “Le Morte d’Arthur.”

Here is just one quote from Sir Thomas Malory’s book,  (there are many others that would have served just as well),

“Wherefore, as me seemeth, all gentlemen that beareth old arms ought of right to honour Sir Tristam for the goodly terms that gentlemen have and use, and shall do unto the day of doom, that thereby in a manner all men of worship may dissever a gentleman from a yeoman, and a yeoman from a villain.  For he that gentle is will draw him to gentle thatches (virtues) and to follow the noble customs of gentlemen.”

There are several obvious mysteries.  First, what happened in 1451 that caused a young knight with family, income and good prospects to turn into an apparently notorious outlaw?  If he was such an outlaw, why did the magnates of Warwickshire pay such a great sum for his bail?  Finally, most importantly, why is it that someone who was accused of such crimes wrote a book so intimately concerned with the issue of knightly morality?  Was he a redeemed sinner, a hypocrite, a Robin Hood, a rare honest man caught in an age in which everything, including the justice system was freely and cruelly manipulated by partisan politics (as the Paston letters indicate)?

I expect reasonable cases can be made for most, if not all, of the above.  As of late the study of Sir Thomas Malory’s life has become a bit of back water in spite of his importance to English letters.

Ian Mortimer has written a unique, thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening historical work:  “1415:  Henry V’s Year of Glory.”  The book chronicles everything that occurred on every day in 1415 in the world as far as Henry could have known it.  What makes the book so extraordinary is how a nuanced, complex and deep characterization of Henry Vth emerges from meticulous examination of that detail.

It seems to me that the life of Sir Thomas Malory, so important to understanding one of the seminal works of English literature and the English literary imagination might yield to a similar approach, particularly a close  examination of 1451 and the actions of the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke of York, the Earl of Warwick and Queen Margaret as well as those more immediate to Malory himself. It's easily worthy of Sherlock Holmes, don't you think?

Episode 2 is here.

St. Crispin's Day

Then call we this the field of Agincourt,

Fought on the day of Crispin Crispianus.

Last night Lynn and I watched “Henry V” in honor of both Shakespeare and that most famous of English kings.  We had a difficult choice as we have 6 versions (Laurence Olivier, David Gwillim, Robert Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, Jamie Parker, Tom Hiddleston) from which to choose.  I love them all; we’re fans.  We settled on Branagh as it was the one we’d seen least recently.
 

Branagh made the film when he was young but after years of experience with the RSC and in particular performance in the histories.  All that work and apparent passion paid off in originality and accessibility.  He had the courage and foresight to find the political drama in minor scenes often dismissed to comedy and find the honest feeling and humanity in the “low characters” who previously were so often turned into clowns.

My favorite scene in his version is in Act IV, Scene 7, when Henry and Fluellen (Ian Holm) embrace after the battle, weeping, obviously amazed they’re still alive.

 

FLUELLEN:  Your grandfather of famous memory, an't please your majesty, and your great-uncle Edward the Plack Prince of Wales, as I have read in the chronicles, fought a most prave pattle here in France.
KING HENRY V:  They did, Fluellen.
FLUELLEN:  Your majesty says very true: if your majesties is remembered of it, the Welshmen did good service in a garden where leeks did grow, wearing leeks in their Monmouth caps; which, your majesty know, to this hour is an honourable badge of the service; and I do believe your majesty takes no scorn to wear the leek upon Saint Tavy's day.
KING HENRY V:   I wear it for a memorable honour; For I am Welsh, you know, good countryman.

My favorite production, nevertheless remains, the Trevor Nunn production for the RSC, directed by Terry Hands with Alan Howard as Henry.  I’d seen the play a few times before and didn’t like it much, particularly compared to Henry IV, part 1.  It had always seemed, stagey, declamatory and lacking in drama.

 

Then I saw Alan Howard’s Henry.  I suspect he found his emotional center in the king’s fearful sense of personal guilt for his father’s usurpation expressed in Henry’s prayer before the battle.  Here was a very human Henry living on edge striving to balance devastating emotions and ferocious will.  Every time the French herald came to him the audience could see his terror and his heroism. Here was a Henry who could have lost the battle of Agincourt but didn’t because he won the battle to balance himself.  It seemed to me then, and still does, that Howard and Hands had seen more deeply into the heart of the play than any before and found a drama about the nature of courage.
 

I freely admit that there is much of that Henry in my characterization of "that black name, Edward, Black Prince of Wales" at Crecy.
 

I want to mention two books about the historical Henry that I highly recommend.  The first is Juliet Barker’s Agincourt who comes closer than anyone else I’ve read to a reasoned derivation of Henry’s character from his history.  Her insights about Shrewsbury, the horrible facial wound he suffered there and the consequences are particularly original.  The second is Ian Mortimer’s 1415: Henry V's Year of Glory  Mortimer’s book is a day by day chronicle of that year and everything that was transpiring in Europe, and how Henry was affected by and took advantage of those events.  Both books changed how I view the late medieval world and may dramatically change your perception as well.

As a Black Prince on Bloody Fields

One of my novels, “As a Black Prince on Bloody Fields,” is seeing the light of day.  I’ll let the words on the back cover speak for it.

"An uncertain sixteen year-old in black armor steels himself to lead the vanguard of his father’s army on a muddy battlefield.  It is a stormy day in August, 1346.  He is Edward Plantagenet, called “the Black Prince.”  The place is “The Valley of the Clerks,” near the town of Crecy, France. 

This is the story of his youth and adulthood as he tells it, from a childhood among lions in the Tower of London to his love for a woman whose life is as wild and exceptional as his own.  She is Joan, called “the Fair Maid of Kent,” renowned for her beauty.

At 26, after years of vast social and economic change and the desolation of the Black Death, Edward returns to France in another desperate gambit to save his father’s kingdom and discover who he truly is.  Before Henry V and Agincourt there was Edward and Crecy and Poitiers.  And Joan.”

If you’re reading this, hopefully you’re wondering whether you would be interested in reading the novel.  Maybe you’re wondering why I wrote it.

When I was fourteen and first starting to write a lot I wanted to write the kind of books I liked to read.  They were the books of adolescence, the books you live inside, the books for which you grieve when they end, sometimes to the point of tears.  And I devoured them.  I remember reading The Lord of the Rings over two rainy summer days mostly outside.  The snow-tipped mountains visible from our backyard never looked so green.

Later, in graduate school, I wondered if that was sentimentality.

Now, much later, I perceive that response as proportional and proper for anyone at that time and place in life.  The books were creating whom I aspired to be, who I was and who I am now.  They merit tears.  I never would have been able to love and live in War and Peace that first time through if it hadn’t been for reading J. R. R. Tolkien four years before.

What were the books?  I’ve already mentioned Tolkien, (who 41 years after his death amazed me with his translation of Beowulf beautifully assembled by his son Christopher.)  There was T. H. White who may been one of the first since Chaucer and Thomas Mallory to portray the medieval world as intimate, which it was.  There was Mary Renault, whose novels of ancient Greece, particularly the Theseus and Alexander novels, imagined and portrayed sexuality and gender with the breadth and nuance that had escaped even the more literal members of the lost generation.  Then there was Dumas, Hemingway, Faulkner and, surprisingly late at 18, Shakespeare, the greatest love of my literary life.

Quite simply I’ve tried to write a book I would have wanted to read then and would read now.

I have no illusions about belonging in that great company mentioned above but their influence is evident and might be a clue as to whether you’d want read my book.

It concerns the Hundred Years War, the same hundred years of devastation that inspired George R. R. Martin’s “Fire and Ice” fantasy books and the HBO “Game of Thrones” series.  That period of European history has its vast share of dramatic and fictional treatments, from Shakespeare to Bernard Cornwell.  But, to my knowledge there are few, if any, that attempt to imagine the personal experience of the Black Prince, which must have been amazing.

That's why I wrote it.  If you're interested in a review, you can find one on the Kirkus Reviews website:  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/thomas-w-jensen/as-a-black-prince-on-bloody-fields/

The wicked cool cover was designed by Carolina Fiandri, CirceCorp Design.  You can purchase the paperback and the Kindle eBook directly from Amazon now.

What I'm Reading, What I've Just Seen: "The Fears of Henry IV," "Agora"

My deep interest in history comes, I believe, as a result of wanting to understand how we came to be what we are. My particular fondness for the late medieval (13th and 14th centuries) stems from the general parallels between that age and our own. It was a time of significant cultural, scientific and industrial change. Institutions were either failing or reinventing themselves. The consequence was the Renaissance, obviously.

The last few years have yielded especially fine books on the subject. Juliet Barker’s Agincourt and Ian Mortimer’s 1415: Henry V’s Year if Glory are by far the most compelling and engaging books I’ve read on the subject. Barker’s empathetic rendering of Henry and Mortimer’s much more critical one, pull you inside life at that time better than anything else I’ve read, history or fiction. Barker’s book is worth it for the description of the battle of Shrewsbury and the subsequent treatment of then Prince Henry’s facial wound alone, but is much, much more. Mortimer provides a day by day narrative of Henry’s life and major events in Europe for all of 1415 and, as a result, gave me an utterly new perspective on that age. If you want to understand that time, I doubt you could do better.

And, while we were in England, I came across Mortimer’s biography of Henry IV, The Fears of Henry IV: the Life of England’s Self-Made King. It’s a much more traditional narrative, but is engaging and reveals a life much richer and deeper than one might imagine from Shakespeare or Holinshed, my first touch stones for his character. And now, Lynn has just given me Korda’s new biography of T.E. Lawrence which looks like particularly good fun. I have that peculiar sense of fantastical wealth that comes from having good books to read.

I’m also very fond of historical film although I’m a difficult audience. Example: I’m deeply fond of Ridley Scott’s “The Kingdom of Heaven” but can hardly bear his “Robin Hood.” I expect something truly exceptional about once a decade.

So it was with great joy that I recently found “Agora,” Alejandro Amenabar’s film about the life of the great female philosopher and mathematician Hypatia who lived in Alexandria in the fourth and early fifth century A.D. It’s the most ambitious film I’ve seen in recent memory; it’s portrayal of time and place are exceptional and beautifully detailed. And, Rachel Weisz’s nuanced characterization of a beautiful woman who’s great passion was understanding planetary motion while surrounded by acolytes all suffering from various kinds of unrequited love, is beautiful.

It belongs in the company of truly great historical films, such as Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" or Ridley Scott's "The Duelists."