The Land Beyond the Sea

I love Sharon Kay Penman's sprawling novels which combine medieval politics with the love stories between intelligent and strong willed characters. She was meticulous in her research, but the dearth of personal history (and for women, even royal women, sparse records in general) gave her the freedom to create complex and believable personal interactions.

The Land Beyond the Sea refers to Jerusalem in the late 12th Century. The novel opens with Almaric rejecting his wife Agnes in order to succeed his brother as King of Jerusalem and barring her from contact with their two children. Almaric's reign is short and he's soon succeeded by his 13-year-old son Baldwin, known as the Leper King.

Today, leprosy is a treatable bacterial infection but 900 years ago, it was a certain death, so we know Baldwin's life will be short (he died at age 24) and Penman doesn't shy away from showing his physical decline. Intelligent and strong willed, he learns to fight left handed (his right arm experiencing the earliest nerve damage) and control horses with his legs alone and he surrounds himself with good advisors. Still, he knows that as he becomes more infirm his kingdom will dissolve into chaos. He's right, and I found the hundred or so pages after Baldwin's death to be less compelling than the story of his reign. Penman shifts focus to his stepmother Maria and her second husband Balian (the main romance in the novel) and her daughter/Baldwin's half-sister Isabella and their attempts to stabilize the kingdom. Without Baldwin there's no heart and Penman probably should have ended the book with his funeral.

The Sunne in Splendour

We were reading Romeo and Juliet, not Richard III, but Sr. Maureen Christi told us that we can't trust Shakespeare's depiction of Richard because he wrote to please his politically savvy patron, Elizabeth. Granddaughter of Richard's deposer, she'd want popular culture to enhance, not diminish, her sometimes questioned reign.  Maybe Sr. Christi had read the recently published The Sunne in Splendour when she told us Richard III probably wasn't quite the villain he'd been made out to be although I doubt it (she said she never read anything unless it had been written at least 20 years earlier, to be sure it was enduring and therefore literature). Still, I wonder, because in 1982 Richard had not yet started the rehabilitation project that tells us now he was a skilled commander with moderate scoliosis who ended up buried under a car park.

Sharon Kay Penman's book wasn't the fist to portray Richard III sympathetically, but unlike Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time, she covers Richard's life from age 8, not just his reign and the question of nephews' deaths.  We first meet Richard as a boy awed by his charismatic brother Edward (and we first meet Edward seducing Richard's pretty, red-haired nurse). Sons of the Duke of York, they're on one side of the confusing Wars of the Roses, battling the addled Henry VI and his tactical skilled wife, Margarita of Anjou. She's fighting for her son, the Yorks are fighting for a crown they believe should be theirs, and the Duke of Warwick is fighting for himself.

After an exile forced by Lancaster's victories and the deaths of his father and brother Edmund, Richard comes of age in the glare of his brother Edward's reign.  Ned takes the Sunne in Splendour as his badge after an atmospheric refraction makes it appear there are three suns at the climax of his crown-winning battle, in which Richard shows his tactical skills. He also falls in love with Warwick's daughter, a love apparently thwarted when Warwick switches sides, along with Ned's and Dickon's middle brother, George, Duke of Clarence. (If this seems confusing, it is.  I recommend keeping a genealogy chart and chronology open while reading about the Wars of the Roses). Warwick marries Anne to Henry VI's son Edward, then loses to Ned after George switches sides again. Despite attempted interventions from George and from Ned's Queen, Katherine Woodville, Richard and Anne marry.

Their marriage is happy (as with her Welsh trilogy, Penman skillfully welds romance and medieval warfare and politics), but times are not. York and Lancaster both district the Queen's relatives, and the Queen herself. Katherine Woodville comes across as a scheming, calculating, power-hungry social climber - totally unsympathetic and completely compelling. I wonder how much of this portrayal, taken from the historical record, is accurate and how much is public scorn for forceful women. Her political machinations come to the forefront towards the end of the book, after Ned has burned himself out with his excesses.  She, her brothers, and her sons by her marriage to Lord Grey scheme to take the regency of her son Edward V from Richard. She'd already pushed Ned to execute unreliable George of Clarence, so what would she do as Edward V's regent, monarch in all but name?

Richard holds onto his regency, then lets his council convince him to take the crown. This leads to two  years of perpetual tragedy for Richard while rumors swirl about the fate of his nephews (Penman gives a plausible, non-Shakespearean fate for them). Broken and perhaps suicidal, Richard's fate on Bosworth Field is almost a given. The Tudors brought peace, and eventually prosperity to England, and in the final chapters Penman hints at how Richard's reputation will be altered for nearly 500 years by politically motivated authors. Penman's first novel sprawls across over 900 pages and I wanted to read it in a single sitting.

Lionheart

Sharon Kay Penman originally intended to write a trilogy, but she couldn't let go of Richard I.  He was a supporting character in Devil's Brood, completely overshadowed by reckless Henry, scheming Geoffrey, and callow, spoiled John.  Richard was the dashing hero, more valuable but much less interesting.  Penman found something compelling in his character, though, and while Lionheart sprawls across three years and dozens of battles, it doesn't quite live up to her usual standards.  The problem, I think, is Richard.  He's not as compelling as his parents or brothers (or the Welsh heroes of her first trilogy), and the martial focus doesn't leave room for Penman's strength, finding humanity in politically astute schemers.  Richard comes across as more complex than in her prior books, but other than a few scenes with his Saracen opponents, he's working alone.  Lionheart is worth reading, but it didn't transport me the way her best books have.

Devil's Brood

I love The Lion in Winter - brilliant dialog, double and triple crosses, and all performed by an amazing cast.  It's a manipulated snapshot, though, a single event which didn't actually happen but which distills the complicated relationships between Henry FitzEmpress, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and their squabbling sons.  Sharon Kay Penman takes a more historically accurate approach as the third book in her Plantagenet series sprawls through the final 17 years of Henry's reign.

Penman writes long, complicated novels with frequent shifts in location and point of view, and in Devil's Brood does so deftly.  It helps, of course, that one of her protagonists is the brilliant, proud, and stubborn Eleanor who saw herself as Duchess of Aquitaine above all other roles.  It was this pride which led Eleanor to back their sons in a revolt against her husband, a decision which led her to spend years as Henry's prisoner.  While she's a captive, her sons continue to rebel and repent, constantly shifting alliances among themselves, their father, and Phillipe of France (who, apparently, did not look like a young Timothy Dalton, more's the pity).

Interestingly, Penman leaves Richard as a supporting character, whom she portrays as a dashing soldier with little internal life.  Instead, she focuses on Henry the Young King and Geoffrey, who are less well known.  Henry comes across as a bit like Tom Bertram - a rich, handsome, rabble-rousing frat boy given more power than he can handle.  He's a lousy general and has little promise as a ruler, but he's already been named king so his father has little choice but to forgive him for his rebellions.  Ultimately he's a tragic figure who, like so many of his era, dies from dysentery, an uncrowned king.  Penman's characterization of Geoffrey owes a bit to Goldman's play.  He's a forgotten son, a scheming spare given Brittany through his marriage to Constance, the true heir.  Geoffrey is also the most intelligent and tactically-minded son, and his marriage to the equally clever Constance echoes his parents' marriage.

It's Eleanor, though, who ties the threads together.  She's a prisoner, but a high-status one who receives news and occasional visits from her rebellious children.  Eleanor also has, for the first time in her life, time to reflect.  She doesn't regret placing Aquitaine ahead of her marriage, but she accepts the truth and misses being both Henry's lover and advisor.  Their relationship is unsurprisingly strained, but never totally broken, with affection buried under the frustration, most obviously when Henry has the unenviable task of telling Eleanor of their grandson's death, and those of the Young King and of Geoffrey.  Jailer and prisoner, they're still grieving parents who have not completely forgotten their passionate relationship, and her release on his death is bittersweet because she's lost the one person who was truly her match.

Time and Chance

Trilogies should probably be read in sequence - particularly trilogies where each installment is over 500 pages.  That's a lot easier if all three books have already been published when you discover them than if you pick them up as they come out.  Time And Chance periodically refers to events in While Christ and His Saints Slept, and after 5 years, my memory of some of the details is somewhat hazy.  If I'd read them back-to-back, that wouldn't have been a problem, but since Devil's Brood didn't come out until 2008, I would have just shifted the problem to the third book. 

I read Sharon Kay Penman's Welsh trilogy alongside Alison Weir's biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and those books started my interest in medieval England.  Eleanor was a supporting character in Here Be Dragons (her granddaughter, John's illegitimate daughter Joan, married Llewellyn  of Wales), and she's the center of one of the plot threads in Time and Chance.  Her marriage to Henry II provides one of the plot threads in this sprawling novel, the compelling and sometimes explosive relationship between two intelligent and strong willed leaders which is eventually destroyed not by Henry's affairs but the fact that he falls in love with one of his mistresses.  Losing Eleanor's affection also means that he loses her shrewd political advice (the one time he goes against her counsel is when he nominates Thomas Becket to be Archbishop of Canterbury), and eventually leaves Henry alone in the political crisis of his own making.

Penman's usual style is to make a minor (or, in this case, fictional) member of the court a major character through whose eyes we see the plot.  In this trilogy, she gave Henry I an extra son (with 20 known illegitimate children, who's going to notice another one) named Ranulf.  Raunulf's mother was Welsh and in While Christ and His Saints Slept, he married his cousin and serves and a bridge between the two countries, as well as being the voice of reason to his nephew, Henry II.  Penman masterfully twines the two plot threads, but Ranulf's story frequently refers back to the prior novel and at times, I felt that I needed to check While Christ and His Saints Slept to fully understand Time and Chance.  Still, I enjoyed the novel and it's evocative descriptions of medieval court life - I just recommend reading the trilogy as more of a unit than three separate entities.