"A History of the English Monarchy" extract: Lord of Warriors and Ring-Giver of Men

My most recent book A History of the English Monarchy covers the English Crown from Roman rule to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, when the monarchy began to shift into a British institution. To mark almost a year since it was released, I'm posting short extracts from each of the book's seven chapters, over the  next few days.

The book begins with Conquest: The violent birth of the monarchy, a chapter which covers the longest time-span of all seven by narrating the development of monarchy in England from 30 B. C., beginning with the suicide of the goddess-queen Cleopatra and the seeming victory of Britain's republican rulers in Rome, through to the reign of England's most famous royal saint, King Edward the Confessor. This short extract discusses the importance of the family of Alfred the Great, the Wessex line of kings who helped unite England in the ninth and tenth centuries.

After Alfred, who died in October 899 , there was a succession of four kings of his line who expanded the borders of Wessex and the authority of its Crown. Alfred’s son, King Edward the Elder, was acknowledged as overlord of sizeable portions of the country by 920. Like his father, he styled himself King of the Anglo-Saxons, rather than solely of Wessex, a telling indicator of their family’s growing power. It was his son, and Alfred’s grandson, Æthelstan, who could justifiably claim to be the first King of England by conquering the last of the Viking kingdoms at York. He also forced the Welsh and Scottish royals to acknowledge him, reluctantly, as their overlord and the chroniclers gave him the rather magnificent Tolkein-sounding epithet of ‘lord of warriors and ring-giver of men’. His successor and younger brother, King Edmund the Just, was called ‘lord of the English, guardian of kinsmen, loved doer of deeds’. It was a strong line of Christian warrior-kings who, from Alfred the Great to Edmund the Just, took a small kingdom on the brink of annihilation to be conqueror and liberator of an entire nation. It was this family, and their followers, who gave birth to the kingdom of England. 

In 946, King Edmund was murdered by a crazed ex-thief, shortly after attending Mass for Saint Augustine’s Day. Edmund was succeeded by his brother Eadred, who died in 955 and bequeathed the crown to Edmund’s handsome teenage son Eadwig, nicknamed Eadwig the Fair due to his good looks. Young and lusty Eadwig had other things on his mind than the piety and conquest of his forebears. He was determined to enjoy his kingship, not endure it. Things got off to a decidedly rocky start when the young monarch skipped-out on his own coronation banquet, an event at which his absence was rather likely to be noted. Wondering where the star of the show had gone, his courtiers made the horrible (in hindsight) decision of sending the saintly Dunstan to find him. Dunstan, abbot of the great monastery at Glastonbury, found the King romping in bed with a young woman – according to some sources, with two. To say that the leading champion of monastic reform in England did not see the funny side of the King’s actions would be something of an understatement. Later stories suggested that one of the women had been the young King’s future mother-in-law and that an enraged Dunstan had dared drag the King, possibly mid-coitus, out of bed and back to the banquet. Eadwig’s intermission performance at his coronation set the tone for the rest of the reign, marked as it was by deteriorating relations between throne and Church.  

Eadwig died before his twentieth birthday and he was succeeded by his younger brother Edgar, who was made of more conventionally holy stuff. Dunstan was back in royal favour as Edgar’s new Archbishop of Canterbury. Together, the two men organised a magnificent pageant of royal power at Bath in 973. It was an innovative coronation ceremony, which helped set the tone for nearly all that followed. As Edgar was enthroned as ‘Eadgar Rex Anglo’ (‘Edgar, King of the English’), the choir sang the story of Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet anointing King Solomon in the Old Testament. Today, those words still ring out at British coronations, albeit to the splendid music of Handel. Edgar was invested with the crown, the ring, the rod, the sceptre and the sword as symbols of his political, spiritual, judicial and military duties. These too are still part of the insignia of a British monarch.

A History of the English Monarchy: From Boadicea to Elizabeth I is available on British and American Amazon. 

"Choose Goodness": Reflections on the murder of Constable Kerr

The recent murder of Catholic policeman, Ronan Kerr, has sparked revulsion across Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic. Across Ulster, protests and marches were held by the people to show their overwhelming rejection of the dissident IRA's murder of Constable Kerr, by a car bomb last Saturday. They have been known as "peace marches."

Speaking at Constable Kerr's (25) funeral at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Beragh, County Tyrone, His Eminence Cardinal Brady, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Armagh and the Primate of All Ireland, give the Catholic Church's unequivocal condemnation of the killing: -

"Parents and grandparents, I beg you: plead with your children and with your grandchildren not to get involved with violence. Never let them be deceived by those who say that Ireland will be united or the Union made more secure by war. They are wrong. It is an illusion. Violence has nothing, absolutely nothing, to offer except misery and destruction."

He called the dissident republicans' killing "an offence against God," and implored them, in God's name, "to choose goodness, choose peace." As a sign of how far the nation has come in the last decade, members of Constable Kerr's local Gaelic Atheltic Association (GAA) carried the coffin half the way to the cemetery, before yielding to officers from the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI.) One was once a byword for Irish republican sentiment; the other once seen as the incarnation of official Unionism in Northern Ireland. Now, they helped carry the body of the same person to Saint Patrick's Cemetry. Amongst those carrying the coffin from the GAA was local sporting legend and manager of the Tyrone GAA, Mickey Harte, who only a few months ago tragically lost his only daughter, Irish beauty queen and newlywed Michaela, when she was murdered by robbers on her honeymoon in Mauritius. Tyrone is burying two young people in a short period of time; both senselessly and needlessly murdered.

The funerals of Michaela McAreavy (seen right with her father  on the day of her wedding) and Constable Ronan Kerr were attended by all members of the community and leaders of both "sides" in scenes unimaginable only a few years ago. The current First Minister of Northern Ireland, Peter Robinson, leader of the strongly Unionist and right wing D.U.P (Democratic Unionist Party), sat near the prime minister of the Irish Republic, Taoiseach Enda Kenny, whilst the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church, Dr. Norman Hamilton, exchanged kind words with Cardinal Brady after the Requiem Mass. Former loyalist paramilitary, Jackie McDonald, attended, along with the leaders of Sinn Fein, Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams. The world has changed.

After Constable Kerr's death, his mother, two brothers and sisters made an appeal for information and to encourage Catholics who have joined the police force not to be intimidated by the dissident IRA's threats to punish them for being "collaborators" with the British. Mrs. Kerr speaks with dignity, despite the tormented grief you can see in the faces of her children. And I think I would speak for the vast majority of my countrymen when I say that prayers for Mrs. Kerr, her surviving children and, of course, for Ronan, would be very much appreciated. RTE and The Daily Telegraph's coverage of the funeral can be seen below.

"Popular" character profile: Catherine

Over at my book blog, I have started profiling in-depth the main characters of Popular, my first novel which will be released in the UK on July 7th, 2011.

The first character to be profiled is nice but dim popular girl, Catherine O'Rourke, the 16 year-old daughter of a local property developer, who is still desperate to cling onto her position in the school's elite.

You can read all the details about Catherine here.

Fit for a Queen

The blog Marie Antoinette's Gossip Guide to the 18th Century is hosting a rather fun video, celebrating the legendary wardrobe of the last Queen of France and her contemporaries.

The dress above is one of the cumbersome but magnificent gowns required by Versailles etiquette to be worn by the great ladies of the Court on formal occasions of State. Marie-Antoinette was not a fan of this particular style of dress, but she made the best of it by employing the talents of her famed dress-maker, stylist and so-called "Minister of Fashion," Madame Rose Bertin, who American Vogue credited with inventing the entire concept of haute couture in their September 2006 issue.

The personal style of Marie-Antoinette and her confidantes is something often misrepresented. Like earlier queens, such as Anne Boleyn and Henrietta-Maria, Marie-Antoinette was genuinely interested in fashion for fashion's sake - she enjoyed the touch and sight of gorgeous fabrics and daring, fashion-forward gowns. Unlike other sovereigns, such as Elizabeth I or Louis XIV, the Queen did not enjoy dressing for the sake of grandeur or political display. Her decision, in the 1780s, to patronise the movement for simpler, elegant lawn dresses was one of her more controversial, but is also indicates that the Queen preferred style to splendour and innovation to tradition when it came to fashion.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given her own obsession with fashion and her appreciation of the power of aesthetics, Marie-Antoinette's set was known for being a fairly fashionable one. Her brother-in-law, the Comte d'Artois, was generally considered to be the best-dressed man in France, while several of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting were praised for their sense of style - the imperious but entertaining Princesse d'Hénin, a friend of the Comte d'Artois', had a preference for sophisticated and generally fairly conservative cuts in clothing; the pretty Thérèse-Lucy de Dillon, married to the Governor of Tobago and chatelaine of a beautiful townhouse on the rue du Bac, generally followed where the Queen led, but her love of the latest fashion and complimentary, highly-feminine styles were commented upon with approval by many of the courtiers at Versailles.

Amongst the Queen's extended circle, perhaps the most adventurous dresser was Victoire, the Princesse de Guéménée, wife of one of the highest-ranking aristocrats in the kingdom and related by blood to another of the nation's "first families." Victoire was noted for the general fabulousness of her lifestyle, her extravagant parties, her sophisticated manners, her luxurious homes, her gambling addiction, her financial recklessness, her love for her pet dogs and her dazzlingly decadent dress-sense. Madame de Guéménée dressed in the most lavish and ostentatious style, which so many of us associate in our heads with the last days of the ancien régime in France. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Madame and her husband were the only French aristocrats in the entire century who actually faced bankruptcy - a financial scandal which rocked the nobility and titillated the gossips of Paris and Versailles for months to come. The Queen, who was not particularly close to Madame but enjoyed her parties, arranged for a loan to be given to the couple to spare them the humiliation of debtors' prison, but the Guéménées were still forced to quit the capital for awhile, in order to live-down the disgrace of their bankruptcy.

Perhaps the keenest of the Versailles fashionistas, after the Queen herself, was her friend and Superintendent of her Household, the Princesse de Lamballe. A pretty society widow, the Princesse was not only one of the highest-ranking women in France as a Princess of the Blood, but also one of its wealthiest, thanks to the enormous fortune she had inherited when her young but immoral husband died at the age of twenty from advanced syphilis, leaving her everything but an infection. Mercifully, Madame de Lamballe had avoided contracting venereal disease, since her husband had quit his wife's bed for that of a dancer, Mademoiselle Chassaign, shortly after the wedding. That the Lamballe marriage had been abusive had long been whispered in the corridors of Versailles and with the inheritance received from her husband, it was cruelly (but accurately) reported that the prince had given his wife far greater pleasure in death than he ever had in life. Deeply religious, morally upstanding, highly sentimental, emotional and lady-like, Madame de Lamballe showed no wish to re-marry and instead used her vast fortune to give generously to her favourite charities and to maintain an extravagant yet elegant life as one of the French aristocracy's premier socialites. She kept two large homes - her town-house of the Hôtel de Toulouse (where the recent film Marie-Antoinette starring Kirsten Dunst was partially filmed; Madame's home was used to film the scenes of Marie-Antoinette's youth in Vienna) and her beautiful country house of the Château de Rambouillet (above left.)

"Eat, Sleep and Pray": An Author remembers the road to publication

American novelist, Elena Maria Vidal, author of Trianon, Madame Royale and The Night's Dark Shade, writes about the long and difficult road between starting a novel, finishing it and getting it published. It is a long and drawn-out process, which I myself am familiar with - as I am with the rejections!

"It was a turbulent time in my life, as I was undergoing a major career change. I had no computer, no internet, and little money. Nevertheless, I was imbued with the desire to tell the story of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette as it had never before been told, shedding a new light upon the gravely misunderstood King and Queen. I wrote ten hours a day, stopping only to eat, sleep and pray. Before I even completed the final manuscript, I began sending out query letters and sample chapters to every publisher I could think of. Rejection after rejection came. I knew in my heart that somehow Trianon would be published although at the time it seemed futile."

Every novel has a different road to publication and it's true to say that for every one which reaches the reading public, there are a hundred which do not. Thankfully, Trianon was one of the ones which made it! And deservedly so.

For this blog's review of Elena Maria's first novel, Trianon, click here. A review of its excellent sequel will be posted in the next couple of weeks.

For an interview with Elena Maria, click here.