I'd like to welcome author J.P. Reedman to The Writing Desk:
My Latest Book
My most recent release, The Good Queen, is about Matilda of Scotland, queen of Henry I of England. I chose her as a subject as she is a queen who seems rather overlooked in a sea of other Matildas, most notably her mother-in-law, Matilda of Flanders, William the Conqueror’s wife, and her daughter who was Empress Maude, a leading figure in the Anarchy and mother of Henry II. Matilda of Scotland was important is several ways—her maternal side was Anglo-Saxon royalty (in fact, her uncle Edgar had a good claim on the English throne), and her father was the Scottish king Malcolm Canmore, slayer of MacBeth.
So, through her marriage to Henry, she brought the blood of two other royal British houses to their children. Every English (and later British) monarch can trace their ancestry to Matilda. At first, she faced some discrimination in the Norman court, where she and Henry were sometimes mocked as ‘Godric and Godgifu’, implying that they were Saxon peasants, but before long Matilda overcame this bigotry and gained a reputation as ‘The Good Queen.’
She interceded early on with her husband to improve the lot of the Anglo-Saxon people and she was also hands-on with the poor and sick, emulating her mother who was eventually canonised as St Margaret. She even washed the feet of lepers, which horrified her younger brother, David, who was living at the English court. He was so terrified when she asked him to join in that he fled the room to the laughter of his friends! Matilda also was a great builder of churches and bridges…and also gave London its first public loos!
I felt Matilda was a good subject for a novel because she had some unusual qualities. Despite being pious, she had huge fights with her aunt Cristina at Romsey Abbey. Cristina was trying to force Matilda and her sister Mary to become nuns, against their own wishes and those of their parents. Matilda would rip off the wimple and trample on it to show her displeasure. Things grew so tense that her father, King Malcolm, had the two girls moved to Wilton Abbey in Wiltshire. Matilda seemed much happier there but now she occasionally wore a nun’s wimple of her own volition—as a good way to get rid of unwanted suitors. However, this ploy rather backfired, because when she wished to marry Henry a tribunal had to be held to determine if she had taken any vows or was free to wed.
An Unexpected Discovery During my Research
I was very surprised to find out that after giving birth to her two children (and possibly a third that died young), Matilda had told the King that ‘two was enough’ and now that she had presented him with an heir, she wished that they should live as ‘brother and sister’ instead of man and wife. This seemed to be well-known at court and she did not seem to have been condemned for her choice, nor did Henry seek put her aside because of it, often leaving Matilda ‘in charge’ of the realm when he was away on campaign in Normandy.
Henry of course was a well-known womaniser with over twenty illegitimate children, so he was not short of female company. The royal couple’s lack of many children did come back to haunt Henry later, though—their only son, William, drowned in the wreck of the White Ship, paving the way for the dynastic feud known as the Anarchy. Matilda never knew about her son’s untimely death, having died several years before the tragedy occurred.
The Hardest Scenes to Write
I don’t find beginnings hard in the first draft, but they often are the scenes that have to be rewritten extensively as the characters often develop in unexpected ways later on that do not match with the characters as drawn in the earliest chapters. I’d say, though, that in these biographical fiction novels about medieval women, sometimes the middle is difficult because quite often that section of the women’s lives is poorly recorded, which means guesswork and trying to ‘fill in the blanks’ in plausible ways. Matilda’s whereabouts, for example, were unknown for a while.
She had returned to Scotland from Wilton after her father had a spectacular fall-out with William Rufus, but mere months later her father and brother were slain at Alnwick Castle, her mother died shortly after hearing the news, and an uncle usurped the throne, leaving Matilda and her siblings in a very precarious position. They fled to England as exiles but no one knows where she then stayed. Many think she returned to Wilton, but the abbey records only record William Rufus saying he would offer nothing but bare minimum for her keep if she chose to stay there. It is possible she was at court with some of her brothers and her uncle as guardian—although William Rufus’s court was deemed a rather unsavoury one.
As for my books’ endings, initially when I began to write my ‘Medieval Babes’ series, I had thought to write every single one of them as ‘birth to death.’ But then I decided that would be just too miserable! So, unless there is something very unusual about their demise, I now finish the many of the books with something memorable from the protagonist’s life instead of a death bed scene.
What Is Next on the Agenda?
For the Medieval Babes series, my next might well be Isabella of Angouleme, wife of King John, though it won’t be about her years with John but afterwards, when she returned to France, married her own daughter’s betrothed who was the son of the man she’d once been betrothed, and caused general havoc! My next novel will be one for my newer Wars of the Roses series, The Falcon and the Sun, which is going to centre on various members of the York family, particularly the lesser-known ones.
It will be about Edmund of Rutland, brother of Edward IV and Richard III, who was killed at the battle of Wakefield. Also, for something completely different, I will also be working on a high fantasy novel, The Deadborn King, a complete rewrite of an epic I first wrote in the 1980’s. It’s been in my head since around 1980 and just won’t let me go!
J.P. Reedman
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