Oh, challenges

[msmcknittington]

I really need to be asleep, but I have tomorrow afternoon to nap all I want. Also, I am totally engrossed in reading about the fall of Llywellyn the Last (which I will never be able to spell right more than once).

I'm having difficulty summoning up sympathetic feelings for the English, which is Big Trouble, because my hero and his entire family are English, and I need to make the heroine's Welsh family into the bad guys. But Longshanks is really showing his ass here, so I'm having trouble doing anything but go, "Oh, the poor oppressed Welsh!"

Did you know that in 1275, Longshanks hired pirates to kidnap Llywellyn's betrothed/wife, Eleanor de Montfort when she sailed from France to go to Llywellyn in Wales? (Freaking pirates! And I always thought that section of "Hamlet" was really far-fetched.) He did! And then he held her hostage until Llywellyn met his demands. And then, in 1283, after Llywellyn had been killed/murdered, his infant daughter Gwenllian was captured by the English, and held in a convent her entire life. She died without issue, natch. And then Longshanks basically ransacked Wales, and appropriated a lot of the most symbolic objects of Gwynedd and scattered them to the wind. Quoting the Wikipedia article on Llywellyn, "Commenting on this [the appropriation of Gwenyedd's treasures] a contemporary chronicler is said to have declared 'and then all Wales was cast to the ground.'" It wasn't just a military defeat, but a political and spiritual one.

So, basically Longshanks is coming off as a big, tall bastard to me. How can I make the Welsh the bad guys after learning all that? I kind of want to rewrite history and make the Welsh victors. I could right now be typing this in Welsh, and you wouldn't even notice because it would be the same as English to us.

But I can't end the story with my hero and heroine living under the threat of the hero being executed for being a Welsh noble and the heroine being locked away as a prisoner until she dies. That's just not the Romance Way.

Another thing I discovered: Everybody in Welsh history appears to have been named Owain, Gruffydd, or Llywellyn. Toss a Rhys and a Rhodri in there, and you've got like 95-percent of 13th-century Welsh males. I can only imagine that you'd walk into a bar, shout Owain!, and everybody would turn around.

Comments

[ciorstan.livejournal.com]

Edward Longshanks was NO PRIZE. He imprisoned Isabel MacDuff, Countess of Buchan, and her sister-in-law, Mary Bruce, in cages on the exterior walls of the castles of Berwick and Roxburgh respectively. He considered orders to confine ten-year-old Marjorie of Mar in a cage in the Tower of London, but decided that was too cruel-- only because of her age. Isabel was guilty of exercising the ancient right of the MacDuffs to crown the King of Scotland, when she crowned Robert Bruce King. And Mary's crime? She was his sister.

And that is only a small part of what he did in Scotland during the Wars of Independence...

[msmcknittington.livejournal.com]

Really. He was a big jerk, which kind of came as a surprise to me, because a lot of the history books I've read sort of gloss over the atrocities and just say, "And he conquered Wales and almost conquered Scotland! Ra-ra, England!" Of course, a lot of those books were written before the 1960s, and the tenor of history has changed a lot since then.

The way that Wales is still struggling for freedom in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series is suddenly making so much more sense. My god, I might be willing to throw myself into the cause of Welsh freedom, regardless of how many centuries it's been.

Longshanks? It's really more like Jerkface.