In The King’s Witch, Cecelia Holland achieves something all too rare in historical fiction: characters who actually behave like creatures of their time. Furthermore, with one possible exception, she avoids falling in love with her historical protagonists, preserving this thankful reader from yet another of the many glorified fantasy-biographies that glut the romantic historical fiction market. That said, the first thing to be aware of is that the novel’s title and blurb are marketing ploys. While the title character is a female practitioner of medicine, witch hunts were not a phenomenon of the twelfth century and so I am relieved to report that the story is void of any element whatsoever of witchcraft. And instead of supposedly featuring a suspense plot built around espionage, the straightforward drama in The King’s Witch revolves around the collision of idealism and reality during the so-called* Third Crusade. Holland’s vision results in a bleak morality tale that stayed with me for several days – yet not without reservations that started on page one and developed into manifold issues that frequently prevented me from enjoying the actual reading experience.
May 1191. On its way to the Holy Land the fleet of English crusaders has been blown off course and temporarily made landfall on Cyprus. After replacing the hostile governor, King Richard of England marries Berengaria of Navarre in name only, citing a vow of chastity in order to answer the call of God with a clean conscience and a pure body. The most respected warrior in Christendom, he is used to getting what he wants, and what he covets is the biggest prize of all: winning Jerusalem back from the Saracens.
His sister Johanna, widowed queen of Sicily, is sceptical of his vow and of the Crusade, which she secretly opposes. As a woman without husband or children her means of influencing policy are limited, but once in Outremer the power squabbles among the international crusaders afford opportunities she cannot resist. To help achieve her ends she involves the woman her mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, another critic of the Crusade, has always trusted.
A healer informally trained in medicine, Edythe is attached to the Crusade first as an attendant to Johanna and later as the personal physician to Richard. What neither knows is that Edythe is the only survivor of her family, Jews of Troyes (in Champagne in modern-day France) killed in an attack on their community. Since the age of thirteen, when she found refuge in Queen Eleanor ’s household, she has pretended to be Christian in accordance with Eleanor’s advice. Out of loyalty to the Plantagenets she finds herself supporting the Crusade. Yet this support confronts her with her secret past: her assignment to keep Eleanor informed of behind-the-scenes affairs involves contacting Jews who can relay messages without attracting suspicion. Before long, she begins to wonder where she truly belongs. It is a decision made all the harder when she falls in love with Rouquin, a Christian knight who is the right-hand man of King Richard and who values integrity above all else.
Warning: The discussion of historical events and people in this post contains material that constitutes spoilers for readers unfamiliar with the Third Crusade.
In reading The King’s Witch, the first and most persistent obstacle I came up against was the prose. Reviewers of other novels by Cecelia Holland sometimes describe her style as minimalistic. The King’s Witch is my introduction to the author’s work and while I agree that she employs a distinctive linguistic style the adjective that best sums up my impression is “ungainly”. The choppy flow made the first fifty pages a chore until my ear attuned itself to the syntax, the cadence of the sentence structures, and the disjointed subject shifts within paragraphs. Add in a some slangy turns of phrase; French-speakers who nickname Johanna (Fr. Jeanne or Jehanne), one of their own, “Jo”; and blunders concerning the languages used by mediaeval Jews, and the matter of language in The King’s Witch remained an irritant that time and again broke my immersion in the story.
The narrative jumps between four viewpoint characters: the principal protagonist, Edythe; Richard (I) of England, one of several Christian rulers set to lead a Crusade to recapture the Latin east from the Muslim conquerors of Jerusalem, Acre, and other sites; Richard’s meddlesome younger sister, Johanna; and Philip de Rançun, nicknamed Rouquin for his red hair, a close relation of Richard and Johanna. This narrative mode does help break complex political and military events into manageable pieces, but in a novel of only three hundred pages it also means that each of the personal storylines is thinned down. The character who arguably suffers most from this treatment is Richard, whose motives and feelings regarding some key events of his Crusade are withheld from the reader. The story perspective is entirely that of overseas people attached to the Crusade (Philip Augustus of France, portrayed as a repulsive coward; Conrad of Montferrat, ambitious and shrewd; Robert de Sablé, demonised Grand Master of the Knights Templar); even the participation of any local Franks is limited (an inept Guy de Lusignan; a dainty Humphrey de Toron; an unhappily married Queen Isabella of Jerusalem). The only Muslim with a speaking voice is the character of Safadin (al-‘Adil, Sayf-al-Dīn), brother of Saladin’s (Ṣalāḥ-al-Dīn), who appears in a cameo and is seen through the eyes of Richard and Rouquin.
The effect of this last device is insular, allowing the author to examine the crusader psyche in the context of its own, subjective world view. It can be a risky proposition if the author does not apply critical narrative commentary to her or his prejudicial characters. Cecelia Holland, however, manipulates her characters from the point of view of an observer more than an interpreter, and this creates both (illusory) objectivity and emotional distance. Her method is similar to that of Frans G. Bengtsson in The Long Ships (a Viking adventure yarn set around 1000 C.E., originally published in the 1940s), both adopting a terse style that eschews extraneous description and limits introspection, although Bengtsson goes a step father in striving to keep the tone and spirit of his characters’ thoughts and feelings unfiltered by obvious modern sensibilities. In both novels the reader is invited to make their own judgment about the characters and draw their own moral conclusions. While Holland’s characterisations are not always compelling enough to bridge the distance between the reader and the story caused by this narrative mode, she does leave the reader free to fill in the blanks with subjective interpretations in a way that is fruitful for the imagination and encourages active dialogue with the text.
While Elizabeth Chadwick is by far the stronger author when it comes to depicting material culture in the Middle Ages (The Falcons Of Montabard) and Sharon Penman excels at creating poignant, human drama out of complex political history, Holland establishes her own brand of period authenticity by making the religiosity of the times integral to her characterisations. She shows the ever-presence of God in the characters’ thoughts and actions. Richard, for example, measures his worthiness as a Christian by his military success in the Holy Land, which makes his story arc all the more affecting because his gradual belief in his own invincibility is rooted in an arrogance that evokes portentous shades of the fate of Moses. Piety and success are interknit in the minds of other characters too, and it is particularly interesting to see how they attempt to negotiate the letter of whatever deal they feel they have struck with God even as they honour its spirit. The relationship with God is anything but straightforward. In The King’s Witch, the sense of true communion with God is fleeting, a sudden rush of grace, never coming when looked for.
It jarred me a little, then, after the care Holland invests in the place of religion in the mediaeval mindset, that faith seems to be no one’s compass. The values and priorities of several characters seem as modern as their behaviour is mediaeval. There is an emphasis on the importance of “being oneself”, a theme that is not limited to a general message but is explicitly stated. The concept of “being true to oneself” would have been foreign to mediaeval Christians whose guiding principle was to be as faithful a Christian as possible. They had a strong incentive to try: the absolute belief in hell. Admittedly, it is a concern that mainly occupies Edythe and hers is a special case, but it pertains to Richard’s character development, too (more about both below). Strikingly, too, the spiritual layering is missing from any arguments characters bring against the Crusade: they are motivated solely by secular concerns. Nobody stops for a moment to consider the conflict between the Christian message of peace and a war supposedly authorised by God. The narrative, too, seems to skirt the question of whether any war can be holy or just. Death and battle are treated in terms of character responses to violence in general, not religious violence. In a story centred on a Crusade this seems quite a significant lack of nuance.
It is no small undertaking to de-romanticise a historical figure of such mythological stature as Richard Lionheart. Holland chooses to try to humanise him through focussing on the chinks in his armour: the illnesses he suffered in Outremer, the subject of his sexuality, and his fondness for his sister, Johanna. The author goes even further: Richard’s storyline portrays him as a tragic hero. Only part of this is due to him persisting through all betrayals and challenges and fight to the bitter end to get to Jerusalem even as almost everyone around him gives up.
Holland espouses the view, popularised since John Harvey’s The Plantagenets (1948), that Richard was homosexual rather than bisexual, sexually ambivalent, or a misunderstood heterosexual (compare, for example, speculation about the nature of the early relationship between Richard and Philip Augustus versus the common mediaeval custom that saw people of the same sex sharing a bed for practical or amicable, not sexual, reasons). She does it quite beautifully and without sensationalism, and in the process brings a rare vulnerability to this much debated side of Richard’s personality that is both poignant and convincing. The only time a lump appeared in my throat during my reading of this book was in one of Richard’s last scenes, where he faces an unexpected loss amid the ruins of his ambitions.
But Holland’s interpretation of Richard also causes considerable manoeuvring that is smoothly plotted if not always logically satisfying. Shortly before his wedding, Richard takes a vow of chastity which in one sweep expresses a crusader’s honourable dedication to God’s work and shrewdly excuses him from conjugal relations. Conveniently, Berengaria (Berenguela/Bérengère), portrayed as young and childish and devout, is afraid of sexual intimacy and accepts the arrangement with relief, her heightened status more than enough to please her. Holland’s argument that Richard would neglect his obligation to try to produce an heir because he has a brother able to succeed him seems a highly irresponsible line of reasoning for a powerful man of his time (and ignores that in the spring of 1191 he named Arthur of Brittany, not John, his heir should he die without issue). And that a commander as feared and respected as Richard would marry merely to placate his mother is another contention the plot does nothing to explain; in consequence, it becomes nonsensical. Nor does Holland address the question of why he would take his bride with him into the midst of war, where either of them could be killed or captured, without any intention of trying to beget an heir as quickly as possible. When Holland’s Richard implies to Johanna that he would prefer the non-consummation of his marriage to remain permanent, and the novel shows that Berengaria is not being singled out, that Richard has no interest in bedding any woman – how, in the absence of explanatory plot points, is the reader meant to reconcile this position with the historical record? Richard sired an illegitimate son – Philip of Cognac – in his youth and, even more to the point, in 1191 – the same year he married Berengaria – made treaty stipulations concerning future heirs of his own body.
Berengaria’s childishness in The King’s Witch is a surprise. Her date of birth is unknown, but scholars have calculated that she was in her early to mid-twenties at the time of her marriage (see Berengaria: In Search Of Richard The Lionheart’s Queen by Ann Trindade, Four Courts Press, 1999, p. 20) A mediaeval woman of that age, and most particularly a queen, would reasonably be expected to have her dynastic obligations at the very forefront of her mind, but such pressure is something Holland’s version glosses over entirely. The author’s lack of interest in exploring the relationship between Berengaria and Richard – it is paid scant attention – fails to translate into a portrayal of a marriage of two people who have nothing in common or lack interest in establishing a couplehood identity, and instead becomes a fuzzy non-thing that makes for tedious, implausible fiction. The pair’s last scene in The King’s Witch marks a potential change in their relationship, but its suggestiveness is not developed into any tangible direction. The scene typifies one of several open-ended “resolutions” that combine into a non-ending where the historical characters are concerned. A sequel seems to be waiting in the wings.
The heart of the problem with the author’s characterisation of Richard may be his silence about what drives and motivates him. What is the point of making this controversial historical figure a viewpoint character if it brings no unique benefit to the narrative? Granted, the storyline’s focus on the topic of Richard’s sexuality could indicate that in it lies the key to all the reader needs to understand about his inner life; for example, that the matter of divine judgement is never far from his troubled thoughts. Unfortunately, in a crusader story the choice to treat his politics and military leadership as secondary issues to be told through the eyes of others creates a lopsidedness and reader alienation from which his portrayal never recovers. For example, when Richard is seen to order the 2700 Muslim hostages at Acre executed and participates in the massacre, the reader never learns what Richard thinks and feels about this act and its causes and consequences.
Similarly narrow is the general depiction of crusading women in The King’s Witch. Their daily life is all to do with interior decoration, love affairs, gardening, scheming, and praying, when they are not cowering in tents during battles. (Readers certainly are not given any idea that some women actually took an active part in the fighting.) Certainly mediaeval women were usually bystanders in big military clashes, but this novel's depiction of their occupations and concerns is dulled by stereotyping. None forge genuine friendships with other women nor, with the exception of Edythe whose profession it is to heal, take the initiative to alleviate the ubiquitous suffering through charitable works.
The principal character in the book, Edythe, is a sympathetic heroine whose most prominent story attributes – her Jewishness and her medicine – are paradoxically the least successful parts of a characterisation that seems defined by a rather modern approach to her conundrum. Before I elaborate this point I must say that the very premise for Edythe’s storyline (told in retrospect) requires a certain amount of generosity from the reader: a penniless thirteen-year old Franco-Jewish orphan without powerful connections is welcomed into the imprisoned Eleanor of Aquitaine’s service on the strength of the respect the Queen bore for the girl’s father; is then made one of her favourite personal attendants instead of, say, a serving maid; and during her years at court passes for a lapsed Saxon nun without anyone ever poking the slightest hole in her fictitious backstory.
As the novel opens, Edythe has reluctantly accepted a mission from Eleanor to look after Richard and Johanna’s welfare and write progress reports to Eleanor, these to be sent secretly via Jewish networks. Having learnt to pose as a Christian, Edythe feels uncomfortable about seeking out Jewish contacts, and initially experiences no compulsion to be among them for her own sake. In fact, religion and faith seem to carry no personal significance for Edythe. Her internal tug of war between Christianity and Judaism does not play out as a conflict between faiths and heritage but rather as a choice between coverup and honesty. Although she goes through the motion of worshipping in Christian churches she feels no connection with God and exhibits no curiosity about or attraction to the Jewish faith. One could probably make a case for such religious apathy being an unconscious rejection, the effect of a sense of schizophrenia. But the manner in which the narrative ignores religious considerations makes Edythe’s concerns about hiding and wearing a mask seem thoroughly modern because she appears to treat her sense of non-belonging as purely a matter of ethnicity. There is a also curious lack of tension between Edythe’s awareness of being a Jew who is merely pretending to be a Christian no matter how hard she tries to live like one and her pain at the gruesome deaths of her parents and siblings, murdered by Christians. For example, it never occurs to her to contemplate whether Saracen victories might be seen as some form of vengeance against a people who have killed and oppressed hers.
The Jewish component in The King’s Witch, so thin it sometimes feels nominal, appears shaky in its details. For example, the author has King Richard calling the language of the Jews in Troyes (in Champagne, a province of modern-day France) “Zephardic” without any corrective commentary. Perhaps the word intended is “Zarphatic”, a decidedly modern term (Yiddish: A Survey And A Grammar, 1979, p.33) for the written form of the French spoken by the Jews of northern France. Edythe is supposedly speaking with a trace of a non-French accent due to her background even though the linguistic differences between the Christians and Jews of Troyes were minimal: the vernacular of both groups was the Champenois dialect of Old French. And if, as the story asserts, Edythe’s father instructed her in medicine, why did he not give her the means to study his medical treatise? In other words, why has she been taught to speak Hebrew if not for the express purpose of being able to read a language (or characters) that was reserved for liturgy and the written word? As for her ability to converse with Cypriot and Holy Land Jews, whose mother tongue would have been Greek (Yavanic/Yevanic) or Arabic, well, she is lucky to only run into those learned or international enough to have studied Hebrew or French. (Side note: The Devil's Door by Sharan Newman is a romantic mystery partially set among the Jewish community of twelfth-century Troyes.)
Turning to Edythe’s role as the personal physician of King Richard, the concept has promising potential, not least the “physician, heal thyself”-element and the freedom it allows Edythe to roam beyond customary women’s confines and interact with people of every class. Again, scepticism needs to be overcome in order to accept Edythe’s career credentials. Has anyone tutored her in medicine after she lost her father, a doctor, when she was thirteen? Otherwise, as a provider mainly of “potions and philtres” to court ladies, how has this empiric maintained and advanced her healing skills to the point where she gains royal preference over experienced, university-educated doctors? To obtain the herbs she needs, why does she rely only on markets and apothecaries, never considering that she might grow some herself? (Meanwhile, Berengaria plants an entire (anachronistic) flower garden.) And why, as a medical practitioner, does she never once express curiosity about Muslim medicine, famed throughout the mediaeval world? Her profession seems a character dress, successful as a plot device but empty of deeper meaning. For example, her treatment of bodily ills is all about the importance of balanced humours and the proper application of herbs; it never expands into a wider theme about the connection between body and soul. When a sick character broods about sin and sinning it is outside any mediaeval spiritual context such as theories that illness is an earthly purge of sins that speeds the path to heaven or, alternatively, a symptom of a wicked soul. Perhaps that disconnect explains why the narrative does not assign Edythe any qualms about medical ethics in a battle scene where her disguise as a squire makes her refrain from tending the injured.
In the novel's afterword, Cecelia Holland defends the verisimilitude of Edythe becoming Richard’s personal medical attendant by making reference to the female doctor Louis IX brought along on his Crusade in the following century. (Her name was Hersende/Hersent and she was married to the royal apothecary.) It is certainly true that female practioners did exist in a range of mediaeval medical fields (their marginalisation means that few names have survived). However, as Piers D. Mitchell notes about King Louis’s (and Queen Marguerite’s) doctor: “An educated female physician was unusual in the thirteenth century, and it was especially extraordinary for her to be so well respected that she should become personal physician to one of the major kings in Europe. Her position and the title magistre Hersende, physica suggest she may have had a university education” (Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds and the Medieval Surgeon, 2004, p. 19.) In view of the problems I have noted above, Edythe’s appointment seems to be stretching credibility to the utmost. In the end, it was something I was willing to live with in the name of artistic expression, if only because I liked the character’s unassuming, sensitive, and self-reliant nature and wanted her to find happiness.
An unusual combination of uncosmetic realism regarding mediaeval gender politics and a relationship development defined by popular romance tropes makes Edythe and Rouquin’s love story a narrow but conspicuous thread of red in a decidedly grey-toned narrative. The subplot grows more prominent in the second half of the story where it complements and completes the character storylines without overwhelming the general story. Edythe’s pilgrimage to find her place in the world takes precedence, and romantic love is a stage in that process, not its goal. With Rouquin, for the most part, what you see is what you get: an unvarnished mediaeval male in his attitude to women, a knightly retainer of integrity but no patience for courtliness who increasingly balks at the imbalance of loyalty in his relationship with the Plantagenets. He does carry a secret which, if he is meant to be a reliable narrator, is a fanciful fictional twist that mines up-to-date genealogy research but switches years. (Clue for those wanting spoilers: Andrew W. Lewis’s essay in Eleanor Of Aquitaine: Lord And Lady edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John C. Parsons, p. 161 in my 2008 edition; alternatively, Holland’s previous novel, The Secret Eleanor, which I assume deals with the background to the secret.) Nevertheless, there seems very little point to including the secret since it carries no plot consequences and since Rouquin’s storyline neglects the opportunity to incorporate it in any sort of “what if” scenario.
One of the things I found most striking about The King’s Witch is its atmosphere of pessimism and resignation. From the beginning the story takes a cynical view of the Crusading army and the plot has an unabating undertone of frustration, anxiety, and loneliness. While the actual and metaphorical Jerusalem fuels several characters’ imaginations and/or ambitions, the crusader goals are individualistic instead of communal and so the Promised Land increasingly begins to resemble a mirage, and the confident enterprise sinks into a struggle darkened by relentless death and deprivation. Even the landscape of Holland’s Latin East is desolate: charred and rotten cities surrounded by sand and blood. (The desertlike barrenness is effective dramatically but gives a misleading impression of the actual terrain, which from Ascalon to Acre and east into the mountain valleys of Judea was prime agricultural land.)
In the end, this buildup of drama fizzles because the internal devastation of the characters simply does not live up to the external debacle. At the time of the Crusades, Christian nations considered the Holy Land to be a region that had been theirs since the time of the Apostles, a territory rightfully belonging to the Church (via the Eastern Roman Empire), now lost to the enemies of Christ. Therefore, to the early crusading nations in particular (before canon law institutionalised the concept of crusading in the thirteenth century) this was not all about a free-for-all, wealth-building invasion for ambitious power seekers. The call to relieve Jerusalem and rescue the Holy Sepulchre from infidels was no mere propaganda exercise by religious fanatics. Yet in The King’s Witch, the fact that the Crusade falls apart has no spiritual ramifications for the characters. To them – in line with modern reasoning – the blame for failure rests with insufficient funding, undisciplined troops, incompetent leaders, and factional quarrels that cause internal division and defection. Disillusioned (in some cases even relieved), they pack up and leave. But to the mediaeval mind such problems were actually only symptoms of something much worse. To them, defeat was a judgment from God: their sinfulness had made them unworthy of ushering in the era of Christ’s reign on earth. That was cause for more than disillusionment: it meant fear and despair and, in a sense, hell on earth. Yet of all the many characters in The King’s Witch, Richard alone is burdened by such attitudes. As he mourns his shattered dreams, however, it is his personal failings that haunt him; the problem that the biggest enterprise of Christendom lies in ruins is a side issue. Furthermore, with its emphasis on funds withheld and the desertion of allied troops the plot arguably absolves him of the blame he places on himself. What the novel is left with is a feckless climax and a straggly ending narrowly saved by the romantic subplot. (A last-minute attempt at thriller-type suspense involving Edythe is embarrassingly ill-advised and best forgotten.)
If there is an overarching theme in The King’s Witch it is perhaps that history does not stand still. It does not stop with victory or defeat. It streams past and through everything, making every achievement and failure, every victory and defeat, a fleeting, transitional, shifting thing. Anything humans can do is very limited. In the big scheme of things, an individual is small and helplessness. The characters grapple with the futility of trying to direct great affairs, and with the powerlessness of the powerful who lose their people’s loyalty. The only control anyone has is over who one personally is, which necessitates being truthful to oneself and to others - even love becomes a shackle if the giver and the receiver keep secrets from each other. The powerfulness of this theme may be the book's greatest strength.
Finally I must note that although The King’s Witch can be read as a standalone novel it seems to form part of a larger story. Continuous reference (often through letters which whizz in and out of Outremer with remarkable speed) to preceding events and off-page characters indicate plot links to Holland’s previous novel, The Secret Eleanor, and the foreshadowing regarding some of the historical characters points to future publications. (The plot of The King’s Witch concludes in September 1192.) To my chagrin I was not aware of such a series until after I had begun reading. Only after unpacking the book and examining the cover did I notice a small banner I had overlooked when ordering the novel: below the title is printed “Heirs Of Eleanor Of Aquitaine”. I do wish the blurb had mentioned a series, because I am not a fan of them and have no inclination to pick up The Secret Eleanor. The mythology surrounding the fragmentary direct references involving Eleanor of Aquitaine in archival sources is so thick that speculation has alchemised into fact (recent research would probably necessitate revision of some of the conclusions in the linked article, but the premise remains valid), and The King's Witch gives me no reason to believe The Secret Eleanor dispenses with legend (on the contrary). Instead, how about bringing some fresh faces into the mediaeval scene? Historical fiction these days appears to be all about marquee names, but I cannot see why Ermengarde of Narbonne, a once famous contemporary of Eleanor, should not qualify.
Many readers of historical fiction profess deep admiration for Cecelia Holland’s work. The King’s Witch is not a novel that persuades me to join their ranks, but I am going to try another to find out if her earlier work leaves me less conflicted. I perceive, for example, a fluency of voice and style in the first chapter of Great Maria that feels like balm after the tortured choppiness of The King’s Witch. Meanwhile, it is unfortunately difficult to avoid treating The King’s Witch like an appetiser to Sharon Penman’s forthcoming Lionheart. Although there is no guarantee that Penman’s perspective will bring anything fresh or that her story will carry greater resonance, the size and scope of her novels and the ideas and theories her narratives so dynamically propound promise intellectual and emotional stimulation with which Holland’s lean and dry offering with its bleak characters cannot compete. Ironically, I enjoyed The King’s Witch considerably more after closing its pages than while reading it: the narrative themes inspired reflection, but too many half-baked elements resulted in a dissatisfying story in which I struggled to discern the hand of a master of the genre.
*As the author notes in her afterword, what we today call the Crusades (a term not in common usage in the twelfth century) was not a coherent movement or clearly ordered sequence of single, officially organised expeditions. Any serious attempt at numbering them depends on which activities and events one defines as a Crusade and which geographic locations and even the spiritual goals/loyalties/responses one includes in that definition.
This is my sixth entry in the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge, hosted by Historical Tapestry.
