brought so much of that grief upon himself.
Nor was Richard a bad king. Historians today give him higher marks than the Victorians did. Yes, he spent little time in England, but it was not the center of the universe, was only part of the Angevin empire. After his return from his crusade and captivity in Germany, he found himself embroiled in a bitter war with the French king, and spent the last five years of his life defending his domains from Philippe Capet. The irony is that he has been criticized in our time for the very actions—his crusading and his military campaigns—that won him acclaim in his own world. By medieval standards, he was a successful king, and historians now take that into consideration in passing judgment upon him.
He was, however, a bad husband, his infidelities notorious enough to warrant a lecture from the Bishop of Lincoln. Note that I say he was taken to task for adultery, not sodomy. I discussed the question of Richard’s sexuality at some length in the Author’s Note for Devil’s Brood and will not repeat it here since this note is already going to rival a novella in length. Very briefly, the first suggestion that Richard preferred men to women as bedmates was not made until 1948, when it took root with surprising speed; I myself helped to perpetuate it in Here Be Dragons, for I’d seen no need to do in-depth research for what was basically a walk-on role. But the actual “evidence” for this claim is very slight, indeed. I’ll address this issue again in A King’s Ransom, for that is where Richard will have his famous encounter with the hermit. The research I did for Devil’s Brood inclined me to be skeptical, and I am even more so after finishing Lionheart, for I had not realized the intensity of the hatred between Richard and Philippe. The French chroniclers accused Richard of arranging the murder of Conrad of Montferrat, of poisoning the Duke of Burgundy, of plotting to kill Philippe by sending Assassins to Paris, of being bribed by the “godless infidels” and betraying Christendom by allying himself with Saladin. So why would they not have accused him of sodomy, a mortal sin in the Middle Ages, and a charge that would have stained his honor and imperiled his soul? If they’d had such a lethal weapon at hand, we can be sure they’d have made use of it.
Berengaria has remained in history’s shadows, a sad ghost, a neglected wife. She has not received the respect she deserves because her courage was the quiet kind; she was not a royal rebel like her formidable mother-in-law. She has been called a barren queen, unfairly blamed for the breakdown of her marriage. Since I knew of her unhappy marital history, I was somewhat surprised to discover that the marriage seems to have gotten off to a promising start. Because Richard shunned her company after he recovered his freedom, I’d assumed this was true in the Holy Land, too. But Richard actually went to some trouble to have her with him when he could. It would have been easier and certainly safer to have had her stay in Acre instead of bringing her to Jaffa and, then, Latrun. We cannot be sure what caused their later estrangement, but I have some ideas; as a novelist, I have to, don’t I? I think we can safely say, though, that the greater blame was Richard’s.
What surprised me the most about Richard the man as opposed to Richard the myth? I already knew he was almost insanely reckless with his own safety, so it came as something of a shock to learn that he was a cautious battle commander, that he took such care with the lives of his men. It is a fascinating paradox, and one which goes far toward explaining why he was loved by his soldiers, who seemed willing “to wade in blood to the Pillars of Hercules if he so desired,” in the words of the chronicler Richard of Devizes.
It also surprised me to learn that his health was not robust, that he was often ill, for that makes his battlefield exploits all the more remarkable. The Richard of legend smolders like a torch, glowering, dour, and dangerous. But the Richard who comes alive in the chronicles had a sardonic sense of humor, could be playful and unpredictable; Bahā’ al-Dīn reported that he habitually employed a bantering conversational style, so it wasn’t always