While the French abandoned the Crusade altogether, leaving their allies to support Richard in nothing but name, Richard was not able to direct the fighting where it counted. With the future of Jerusalem’s royal family focused on a young woman, Isabella, who is married off from one rival faction to another, it would seem that all Saladin had to do was watch and wait. The vast dramatis personae of the novel highlights the problem facing Richard – the Saracens were more honourable than the French and Austrians on his own side, so honourable that he even knighted some of them while they sent Richard fruit chilled by snow when he was ill. Lionheart covers the Third Crusade, which was far from glorious. It’s refreshing to find him both flawed and very likeable. While Penman accedes that Richard was, or became, a bad husband and that his heart wasn’t in England but in Aquitaine and on the battlefields of the Holy Land, she presents here the Lionheart that his men and family knew, not the one that history condemns.
Sharon Kay Penman states that she had preconceived ideas about Richard – his unsuitability for kingship, his irresponsibility and arrogance, and his disregard for England – but that through her research for the other Plantagenet novels, she came to see another Richard: the Lionheart who inspired his men, thousands of miles from home, who shared their suffering and dreams, who fought bravely, with a realistic strategy, and who, after all, was never an Englishman. Lionheart is the latest, the first of two novels on Richard I (reigned 1189-1199), arguably the most fantastical of England’s kings and certainly its most charismatic. Their reading is not to be rushed, it should be dallied over, and so it’s not surprising that their writing is equally painstaking and the publication of a new novel is an event. Penman’s books are rich, long and full of flavour for the past. The works of Sharon Kay Penman are close to my heart – Here Be Dragons is one of my favourite historical novels and I hold it responsible for my fascination with the 12th century (and I’m no medievalist). Publisher: Marion Wood (US), Macmillan (UK)
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