An Inside View of a Tortured Heart - A Book Review of "Rivals in the Tudor Court by D.L. Bogdan

D.L. Bogdan made a wise choice when she decided to chronicle the lives of Thomas and Mary Howard, the Duke of Norfolk and his daughter as up until now there has been almost no fictional material available about those who played such an important role in the Tudor court.  Norfolk was the uncle who helped raise Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard to the precipice that was queenship, and it was this same uncle who stood by to condemn them when they came crashing down.  Poor little Mary Howard served both of her cousins and was married to Henry Fitzroy, Henry VIII's illegitimate son.  Until now most novels have stayed away from these characters.  Bogdan paints a beautifully illuminated portrait of their lives.

"Rivals in the Tudor Court" is a prequel to Bogdan's firsts novel "Secrets in the Tudor Court."  Bogdan's premier Tudor novel is a first person account of the life of Mary Howard, the daughter of the Duke of Norfolk and a chronicle of the twisted relationship Mary had with her father.  She so wanted his love so badly, but never seemed to be able to gain it, yet he wanted her under his control and by his side and she never understood why.  In the second book we find out what is behind Norfolk's strange and cruel love for his child as well as others in his life.  I cannot say enough about how well Bogdan brought out an understandable and even likable personality in such a difficult and unlikeable character as the Duke of Norfolk.  The book was magnificent in it's scope of the many years of Thomas Howard's life.  His life was filled with so many losses, so many changes, so many families.  But he is so knotted up inside because of the death of his first family that he destroys everything and everyone else around him for the rest of his life.  This book was beautifully written and took me on a sweeping emotional ride.

The young Duke of Norfolk was first wed to Anne Plantagenet, a princess of the blood, a younger daughter of the former King Edward IV and sister to the current queen Elizabeth Plantagenet.  Her brothers were the young princes who disappeared into the Tower of London and were never seen again.  From the first moment that Anne and Norfolk set eyes on each other they are in love.  He falls hard for her, and she, in her guarded but peaceful way loves him.  She deals with her grief for her lost brothers by believing that they have been taken to faery (British spelling) country.  She is not overt about it and her beliefs are not an issue within her marriage and are viewed by her husband as her form of escapism.  He halfway believes that she herself is not of this world, that there is something fey about her.  Together they have four children and over the years all four die of various diseases.  When his Princess dies too Thomas is almost mad with grief.  He hardens himself against everyone, but especially children and vows never to let them into his heart again.

He marries again quickly to the Duke of Buckingham's daughter Elizabeth.  She is young and dark and the total opposite of his "Princess" but Thomas chooses her all the same.  They have several children together and four reach adulthood before dying.  The Earl of Surrey, Norfolk's oldest son is executed for treason and his oldest daughter dies from the sweat or some other plague of the times.  This leaves him with his son Thomas and his daughter Mary.  It is Mary who is the focus of Bogdan's first book and finally we find out what is really between them from Norfolk's point of view.  The first book is fraught with Mary's confusion about her feelings for her father, her need for his approval and her simultaneous hatred of him.  We discover in this latest novel that Norfolk's feelings for his daughter are just as contradictory as her feelings for him.  When she is born Norfolk sees a flash or vision of his Princess.   He is in the middle of some sort of nervous breakdown because he is afraid he will lose his new wife and child because the labor is going badly.  He drags her from the house and attacks her with a knife and is only stopped by the vision of his former wife.   When the baby finally arrives he is at once horrified and thrilled to see that she looks just like his first wife, Anne Plantagenet.  This fact strikes fear into his heart because he has no idea how to deal with his feelings about the child.  Every time he looks at her he sees his Princess, but she is his daughter.  It is as if God has taken revenge on him in some sick way by giving him back his most beloved wife, the one thing he wants most in the world, in the form of his child who is forbidden to him.

He hardens himself against his daughter and keeps her at a safe distance for much of her life.  When he is called to court upon the ascension of his niece Anne Boleyn he takes Mary with him to wait on her cousin.  His hard heart enables him to stand firm during Anne's execution three years later and his hardness serves him well in the 1540s when he brings another niece, Catherine Howard to court.  He pretends to love and adore the girl, lavishing her with gifts and predictably turns his back on her when she is accused of adultery and executed.

During the intervening years Norfolk has kept his wife Elizabeth a virtual prisoner in their home and brought his mistress Bess Holland to court.  He warns her not to get pregnant as he wants no more children as they die and only serve to cause heartbreak.  Bess disobeys him and gives birth to a daughter that she names Jane.  Norfolk refuses to see her and sends her to live with a foster family.  He finally breaks down and decides to see the little girl and is disturbed at how much the baby's eyes look like those of his niece Anne Boleyn.  Poor Bess nurtures her anger and sadness and turns it into a hatred strong enough to allow her to testify against Norfolk some time later when he is arrested and accused of treason for his role in the Catherine Howard affair.  While in prison he is visited by the ghosts of those he has lost, his father, his Princess, his lost brothers in-law who disappeared so many years ago, and his executed nieces.  Bogdan makes the astute observation that Anne Boleyn's eyes are filled with accusation and amusement at his imprisonment while Catherine Howard's are filled only with astonishment at being betrayed.  Norfolk observes that Anne knew what game she was playing and the risks involved.  Catherine Howard however was young and naive and was shocked at the severity of her punishment for taking a young lover.  Catherine grew up a somewhat sheltered young lady (as far as cout politics were concerned) and Anne grew up serving at the French court, where intrigue was a part of daily life.  The child Catherine should have learned from her cousin's example. But maybe she did.  Anne died an innocent woman.  If one was to be accused of taking lovers one might as well be guilty so perhaps she then took her pleasure where she would knowing in the end that guilt was of little import. 

 Norfolk is eventually released after the death of Henry VIII and finally goes home to die.  He is attended by his estranged wife and his daughter Mary, who is deathly ill herself.  He dies calling for his Princess.  Peace at last.  This novel was a beautiful interpretation of the life of Thomas Howard, one of the most reviled and perhaps misunderstood characters in Tudor history.  He was a man who condemned two nieces to death to save his own hide, plotted against his enemies and rejoiced in their downfall.  But before all of that, perhaps Bogdan is right, perhaps he was someone else.

Book Review-Three Maids For a Crown

I just finished the most wonderful book, "Three Maids For a Crown" by Ella March Chase.  The book chronicles the lives of the Grey Sisters, Jane, Katherine and Mary.  As we all know Jane Grey was beheaded after her family tried to deny Queen Mary Tudor of her right to the throne and crown Jane in her place.  The book covers this, but since there are many books on this topic I found the portrayals of the other two sisters, Katherine (Kat) and Mary much more interesting.  The characters were so well developed that I grieved at every heart-wrenching turn in their lives right along with them.  Their tragedies of their lives are not as famous as their sister's bloody end but I think Jane may have been the lucky one.  Her end was quick and her pain short lived.  Kat and Mary had a lifetime of heartache to endure. 

Being born royalty is not all it's cracked up to be, especially if you are a threat to the current ruler.  The general rule of thumb in Tudor times was to eradicate all possible rivals to the throne like the Duke of Buckingham, the de la Pole family, the Plantagenet pretenders, Mary Queen of Scots, all of them were executed simply because they had a claim to the English throne and the Tudors were not about to lose their hold on it.  Jane Grey, being the next Tudor heir after Mary and Elisabeth was executed after the failed coup planned by her parents and the Duke of Northumberland.  Her sisters however, were spared. 

Jane and Katherine had been married in a double wedding to Gilbert Dudley, a son of the Duke of Northumberland and Henry Herbert, the son of another nobleman.  Kat is thrilled to be married and is totally in love with her husband, as much as any twelve year-old girl can be.  Her sister is not so happy about being married to Guilford Dudley so the girl's wedding day is bittersweet, one sister delighted to become a wife, the other beaten into submission.  Katherine's happiness does not last long however, when the plot to grab the crown fails Katherine's marriage is annulled.  She is devastated.  She is forced to serve as lady in waiting to Queen Mary, the cousin who had her older sister executed and daily sees her former husband.  All of his devotion and professions of love for Kat stopped the minute her sister lost the crown.  She grieves for him as any adolescent will do for a lost love.  Her shame and sadness color the next several years of her life.

Mary Grey, the youngest of the three was born a hunchback, her spine curved and her shoulders uneven.  This on top of the fact that she was born a girl made her utterly useless in the eyes of her parents.  But this child, who spent her days staying out of sight so that no one would remark on her ugliness, she grew adept at eavesdropping.  During her life she overhears plots of poison, treason, regicide, and the personal agonies of many at court.  She hides in the shadows, seeing and hearing everything, but saying nothing.  When the poor girl finally finds love during the reign of her cousin Elisabeth it is short lived.  She and her husband Thomas Keyes are imprisoned because they did not get the queen's permission to marry.  Her sister Kat and her second husband are similarly imprisoned and separated with their two sons.  Her second husband, who was the nephew to the former queen Jane Seymour, makes Kat's claim to the English throne even stronger.  She also already had two sons, something Elisabeth would never have.  With these two boys as heir England would not have fallen under Stuart rule.  Elisabeth could stand for no one to be happy in love if she was not to be, especially those who could claim her crown.  In spite of all of the wonderful things that Elisabeth I did, she did some very ugly and cruel things as well.  It was a trait she held in common with both of her parents.  All three had the capability to do great good, or great harm, as we all do.  But in a world where your every whim is a command the power for great good or great harm is all too real.  Elisabeth locked her cousins away leaving them no chance for a happy life.  I wish that her mother Anne Boleyn, who I believe learned from her mistakes at the end, could have been there to give her daughter some sound advice about the way you should treat your family and those others around you.  If she had lived, maybe the Grey sisters could have lived too.

Mistress of the Art of Death

I just finished reading a great book, the first in a series called "Mistress of the Art of Death" by Ariana Franklin.  The book centers around Adelia Aguilar, a female doctor from Salerno (the medical hub of the world at the time) who is called to England by Henry II to investigate a series of child murders.  As female doctors were unusual during this time and risked being labeled as witches Adelia must pretend to be an assistant to Mansur, an Arab who is really her servant and bodyguard.  As Arabs are also unusual in medieval England attention is invariably drawn to the two of them, so their "secret" mission soon becomes a very public one.

The murders have taken place in Cambridge and are horribly sadistic and frightening.  The first child to disappear was named Peter and when his body was found it was immediately claimed by the local convent of St. Radegund's.  The Prioress declared the child a saint and claimed that touching his bones could bring about healing and miracles.  The convent soon becomes a pilgrimage site and begins to grow wealthy from the pennies paid by those seeking to be healed. 

Meanwhile the town's Jews have been blamed for the murder as the first child's body was thrown onto the lawn of a rich moneylender after it was dead and was seen being secreted into the cellar by the family so that it could be gotten rid of under the cover of darkness.  It was common for Jews to be blamed for almost anything at the time, plague, bad harvest, why not child murder?  They were the eternal scapegoats of Christendom.  After it became known that the body of "Little Saint Peter" was in the house of a prominent Jew riots begin and the family is killed.  The rest of the Jewish population of the city is locked up in the town Castle for protection.  By the time Adelia and Mansur arrive they have been locked in for over a year.  The bodies of the other three children show up the morning after Adelia and company arrive in Cambridge.

Also traveling with the female doctor and Mansur is a man called Simon of Naples, he too is a Jew and a brilliant doctor.  The three set up house in the abandoned home of a Jewish pawn broker and are immediately swamped with patients.  They go about their investigation quietly, Simon talking with the Jews in the castle about who may have owed money to the dead money lender and would therefore have benefited from his death.  (The written tallies conveniently burned up in a fire on the night of the first murder.)  Adelia, who is a medieval medical examiner, examines the bones of all four dead children and determines that they died savagely, the marks of a sharp instrument having left deep grooves on their pelvic bones.  She also discovers that all four children were buried or kept in chalk, which is common throughout the region. 

After much investigation with the help of Ulf, the grandson of the housekeeper assigned to Adelia by the local Prior, Simon and Adelia determine that the monster's lair is somewhere in the region of Wandlebury Ring, a local chalk hill where sheep graze but people avoid.  Superstition surrounds the place and it is believed that old, evil spirits inhabit it.  Wandlebury is close to the town, but far enough away that screams would not be heard.  It is isolated, made of chalk, rife with tall grass and deep pits.  A perfect killing ground.

One of Adelia's suspects is Sir Rowley Picot, a crusader and tax collector for the king.  After several coincidental encounters Rowley tells Adelia that he has been following the killer all the way from the Holy Land, and that a trail of dead children has been left in his wake.  The killer was a crusader, a warrior for God who really worked for the devil.  Rowley and Adelia join forces, but they are both shaken by the murder of Simon of Naples and realize that the killer is now after them as well.

But who is the killer?  Who is luring the children to their deaths?  An Arab candy called a jujube is found tangled in the hair of one of the dead children.  The children are being led away by the promise of sweets, and by someone they trust.  Cambridge is not a large city at this time so most people know each other and they find it hard to believe such a person as a child killer could live in their midst.  The last three killings also took place almost a year after the first.  Seven years before that a herd of sheep was slaughtered in the same manner as the children, increasing the town's fear of Wandlebury ring.  The clues begin to add up and Adelia, Simon, and Mansur begin to construct the profile of a killer.

He is male
He is full of rage
He went on crusade
He is seemingly harmless and charming to children

I won't spoil the end of the book, but I will say that the killer was not working alone and that he  meets a fitting end.  His accomplice is walled up in a room, a fate that is at once horrifying and satisfying after what was done to the children of Cambridge.  I could hardly put the book down, it was a wonderful read.  I highly recommend it and the other four books in the series.  Sadly, the writer has passed away so there will be no more books forthcoming which is truly a shame.

Small Moments Make up a Life

Yesterday I found this and I thought it was beautiful.



Absolutely, totally beautiful.  A beautiful tribute to "The Tudors" but more than that an amazing compilation of "small hours" from Henry's life.  I wonder if that's really the sort of thing that went through his head towards the end of his life when he was ill and knew he was going to die.  Did he dream of the wives and friends he had lost?  When he closed his eyes did he see Katherine in all of her quiet dignity?  Did he see the beautiful young princess he had married or the old woman she became?  I'd like to think that he remembered the best of her, when she was young and sweet, and he was in love with her.  Did he see Anne, standing regally on the scaffold?  Did he see Catherine Howard smiling and dancing?  Was he haunted by the quiet martyrdom of Thomas More, the pleading of Cromwell or the tears of Wolsey?  God I hope so.

I think what gets me so much about this video is that when you watch it you see how odd Henry's life really was.  He had so many different "lives" and "families."  Who does that?  Generally, when you look at the course of a person's life, even a king's life, they have one person who was their mate for life, maybe two or three, but not six.  If you take the time to think about it, how strange must it have been for him to go from being married for twenty years and being sure of your wife and who your child is to a new wife and a new daughter, and then another wife and another child?  I was talking to someone a few years ago and at some point they said to me that something they had done "was with another wife and another family."  I remember thinking at the time how odd it was, you have one life that you are used to and one set of children, and then, 20 years later, you have another?  Something about seeing Henry's whole life strung together like that made me so very sad.  You can really see how he made some people truly happy, and how he was so viciously cruel to those same people in the end.  It has always broken my heart how he turned on his closest friends and most loyal servants, More, Wolsey, and Cromwell.  I don't know that I would have liked these men in life, but their sadness when he turned on them is painful.

I hope, after Henry became the evil man that he was when he died that every time he slept he dreamt of someone he had wronged.  I hope his last memories caused him to feel regret.  I love that the last thing he dreams of in this video is three of his wives begging him for mercy, for that must be a truly horrible thing to remember, especially little Catherine Howard screaming his name while running towards the chapel in a desperate bid to gain his forgiveness.  Since her ghost is said to repeat this scene almost daily it obviously left an emotional impression somewhere in time, either in the minds of those who recorded the scene or on the veil between this world and the next.  Somehow though, I think those he rid himself of got the last laugh, as they watched his spirit moving in a decidedly downward direction!

In Memoriam...Katherine Howard

Today in 1542 Henry VIII executed a second wife, his infallible "Rose Without a Thorn" Catherine Howard.  My heart goes out to this child who walked out to her death on Tower Green on a cold February morning.  She had been abandoned by her husband, what little family she had, and her lover Thomas Culpepper had been executed.  She was truly alone, and left the world with a reputation as a harlot. 

Lady Jane Grey was executed in the same spot several years later, on February 12 1554, completing a trio of queens executed on the lawn of the royal palace turned prison.  Jane left this world under Henry's fanatical daughter Mary, and died with the reputation of a sainted martyr.  She too, however, was alone.  Her husband had been executed and her parents had gone back to the country, leaving her to die.  Her father, fool that he was, more or less brought down the axe on her head by trying to raise a second rebellion in her name after she was imprisoned and Mary had been declared queen.

Two girls, near to each other in age, who died a day and 12 years apart in the same spot, and yet they were so different, but found themselves in similar situations.  Catherine had a reputation as an empty-headed wanton and Jane was a pious scholar.  Both were trapped in marriages that they probably did not want, at least in the sense of loving their husband.  I think (and this is just my opinion) that Catherine loved Henry in some sense, but not with the passion and exhilaration that a young girl feels when they first fall in love.  That first blush of infatuation and the crazed things that teenagers will do for it most likely was not for Henry, but for Culpepper, Catherine's alleged lover.  Jane was forced into marriage by her ambitious parents and married Guilford Dudley, the son of Edward VI's chief counselor.

But this article is not about Jane, it's not that I do not feel sorry for her or do not admire her faith and strength to the very end, but Jane was all that she should be as a young woman of her time.  She was learned, obedient, and a faithful protestant. She  had lived for a time with Katherine Parr, Henry VIII's last wife and had been educated for several years with her royal cousins, Edward and Elisabeth. She was an exemplary young woman and her death was a tragedy.

Catherine Howard, however, was not all that she should be.  She was raised by her grandmother, the dowager Duchess of Norfolk, and was quite experienced in the love of men for her young age.  Some say she was sexually abused, which perhaps she was, but girls married and became mothers at such a young age in Tudor England that perhaps she considered herself of an age to experiment sexually.  At any rate, she was young and pretty and most likely wanted attention from men as her own father had left her to be raised by the Duchess upon the death of her mother.  Today we talk about the importance of a father figure in a young girl's life, and we know that without that guiding influence many young girls seek attention in all manner of unhealthy ways.

I'm not sure that Catherine was empty-headed either.  Though we will never know one way or the other, I think she was a typical teen, and she still possessed the idea of "it won't happen to me."  Teenagers today think that pregnancy won't happen to them, that car accidents will not happen to them, that alcohol poisoning will not happen to them.  They think this because they are so young, and death is such a foreign idea to them.  The mind of an adolescent is till growing and changing, so rational thought is not always something they have the ability to produce.  Catherine simply thought she would not be caught when she had an affair with Culpepper.  She was probably in love, and felt that she would do anything to be with him.  Who among us cannot remember sitting by the telephone, praying that it will ring and that special boy or girl will be on the line?  The euphoria that came with that phone call beat out all other feelings did it not?  I'm sure it was the same for the doomed young queen, contact with Thomas thrilled her, and she threw caution to the wind.  Poor child, she thought her crazy, tyrannical husband would forgive her anything, that he adored her that much.  She was wrong.  She should have taken the example of her cousin Anne to heart.  A wife that caused trouble for this king, especially in any way that unmanned him had only one fate.  Death.  The video below shows Anne Boleyn's spirit watching over Catherine, and I like that idea.  If Anne was with her, then she was not alone.

Tudor Vampires?

I know with the release of the Twilight series came plethora of vampire books, but I am not sure what I think of Anne Boleyn as a vampire and Elisabeth as a slayer. I think that maybe just takes it a little bit over the top for me. But, who am I to criticize published authors right? I read their books and they made money off of it so hey, I guess they are one step ahead of me. The book advertised at the top of the blog entry "The Secret History of Elizabeth Tudor, Vampire Slayer" is, in my opinion actually pretty good for what it is. It is well written, with subtle hints at Anne Boleyn (Elisabeth's mother for those of you who don't know) and a very well developed main character. Weston's Elisabeth has believable feelings and desires, and she does a good job of portraying the farce of queenship. Always having to smile, always having to appear entertained by every idiot ambassador who comes through the door when really she wants to die from boredom. The plot of the book is well thought out and based in the mythology of King Arthur.

Arthur's son, Mordred made a pact with a group of vampires that came to England during his father's reign. He agreed to let them rule England with him as their king if they would help him fight off the Saxon horde. Mordred is in love with Morgaine, the daughter of a knight who died in Arthur's service, but she becomes a vampire slayer, and therefore, cannot be with Mordred. Morgaine dies fighting him and hundreds of years later she visits Anne Boleyn in the chapel at Saint Peter ad Vincula to tell her that the child she is carrying is not a prince, but a girl who will inherit of all of Morgaine's slaying powers. Anne eventually ends up being buried in Saint Peter's and her daughter is taken there on the night off her coronation where she is visited by Anne and gains her slayer powers. She then goes on to be both attracted and repelled by Mordred. She knows she must defeat him, that is her destiny, and so on. I won't reveal the ending, but the book is worth reading. I liked that Elisabeth got to have a small moment with Anne, the mother she most likely could not remember. Since she wore a ring all of her days as queen that secretly carried her mother's portrait in it I'm sure she longed to know her. She could never say it in public, for that would be acknowledging that she was the daughter of a convicted traitor, but Anne was her mother, and no matter what she would have loved her. I have always wondered what Elisabeth was told about Anne. Henry tried so hard to eradicate anything that would remind him of her, but he could not dispose of the daughter who grew to look more and more like her with each passing year. In fact, as the most famous portrait of Anne has now been determined to have been painted within living memory of the dead queen, and commissioned by someone who knew her, Elisabeth may have looked more like her mother than anyone ever knew. Check this out:











Honestly, though I don't want to imply that I wanted Henry to think ill of his daughter, I hope it galled him until the day he died. She was every bit her mother's child in temperament and intelligence and she had her black eyes, though she had Henry's red hair. A living reminder of the woman he had loved so fiercely, and so cruelly destroyed.



But I digress, the topic of this blog entry is Tudor vampire books. The second of this strange new literary genre that I read was "Boleyn, Tudor Vampire" by Cinsearea S. This book has Anne Boleyn hanged instead of beheaded so that she can reawaken in her grave as a vampire. She then digs up her brother George, who is more like a zombie than anything else and he becomes her undead servant. Next she raises Mark Smeaton, who decides that does not like bumbling about the country as a zombie who is falling to pieces, so she reburies him and he returns as a ghost. Anne and her crew spend the next year or so terrorizing Henry, Charles Brandon, and anyone else they run across. Thomas Wyatt is their willing accomplice and he himself becomes part vampire. I have to admit, I loved the idea of Anne, Mark, and George doing things to purposely annoy and torment Henry after what he did to them, it satisfied my need for revenge in terms of wanting fairness for everyone, and really, revenge is just plain fun at times, isn't it? The book is pretty gory and I would not recommend reading it while eating. Don't expect a great story, but if you want a sort of ok zombie-vampire read, it will suffice. It's not great literature, but then, what do we expect of Boleyn vampires and zombies?

The Pied Piper, Fact or Fiction

I found a book in the library the other day (a young adult book) called "What happened in Hamelin."  Since I love historical fiction I decided to give it a whirl.  It is of course, based on the story of the Pied Piper.  I remember feeling a shiver, or a thrill at something creepy and not quite right about that story when I was little, and to be honest, I have never really thought much about it.  Since I wanted to read this book, I decided to research the history behind the story.  This how it played out.

There is a replica of a stained glass window from the 1300s in a church in Hamelin, (the original was destroyed) that shows a large group of children following a man in multi-colored clothing playing a flute.  The inscription below, which is from the 1300s reads:

In the year of 1284, on John's and Paul's day
was the 26th of June.
By a piper, dressed in all kind of colors,
130 children born in Hamelin were seduced
and lost at the calvarie near the koppen.

So, the meaning of Calvarie or Calvary is really unknown.  It is speculated that it was a place of execution.  But, as Calvary (the hill where Christ was crucified) was also called Golgotha, or the place of the skull, and koppen means head, it could have been a skull or head shaped hill.  What really happened to the children of Hamelin remains a mystery.  There are many stories and theories, for instance some scholars propose that the phrase "children of Hamelin" is figurative and does not mean children in the literal sense, but means people who were born in Hamelin.  These same scholars think that possibly a person trying to recruit peasants to colonize the eastern block, and present day Romania came through the town and talked many of the people into leaving.  As people at the time generally did not leave their home village, this was a strange and traumatic event for those left behind.

Another theory is that a disease, not unlike the black plague swept through the village, killing many of the children and elderly, who would have been the weakest.  In the middle ages, (so I read)  death was often portrayed wearing multi-colored clothing, so this theory would make sense as far as the figure in the picture in the stained glass window.  Although to be honest, I was hard pressed to find such an image of death when I searched.

A third theory poses the idea that this story is about the children's crusade, which actually happened in 1212.  This odd and frightening event started with a boy named Stephen of Cloyes claimed that Christ had personally given him a letter for the king and that he was to lead a crusade of children to the Holy Land to recover the Holy Sepulchure.  The boy must have been very charismatic because thousands of children followed him.  This happened in France and also in Germany, but was led there by a boy named Nicholas.  These children eventually made it to port cities and were sold into slavery if they did not die on the way.  Over 30,000 children went on these "crusades" and never returned home.  It is a frightening example of the instability and zeal of adolescents and the strength of mob mentality.  You can read more about the Children's Crusade here: http://www.middle-ages.org.uk/the-childrens-crusade.htm

It is always possible that these children were led away by some strange deviant who killed them, but such a large number is unlikely.  Of course, one must remember Michael Jackson and Neverland Ranch, a children's paradise created by a very strange and charismatic man...so it is entirely possible.  Never the less, The Pied Piper remains a fairy tale mystery.  In 1284 something very bad happened in the town of Hamelin, but unless some new primary source is found, we will most likely never know exactly what that thing was.

Sources:

http://www.wisegeek.com/is-the-pied-piper-of-hamelin-based-on-an-actual-event.htm

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2060/was-the-pied-piper-of-hamelin-a-child-molester

http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/3805/the_lost_children_of_hamelin.html

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/410409/the_legend_of_the_pied_piper_all_fiction.html?cat=37