- Title: Solomon’s Crown
- Author: Natasha Siegel
- Genre: Historical Fiction/Romance
- Publisher: Dell
- Pages: 368
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If you were to stack a copy of every romance novel set in the medieval world on top of one another, the pile would reach as high as the spires of the Cologne Cathedral. That’s to say the genre is a crowded one and has been for decades. Chivalric romance, epic poetry, adventure, forbidden attraction, the arcane and historical figures that stretch toward the boundaries of heroic myth lend themselves to great – and not so great – reads. The terrain of the medieval is so frequently trodden that whenever a book finds new ground, it’s something to celebrate. And so, let’s celebrate the queer medieval romance Solomon’s Crown as it unites medieval royal rivals as lovers.
I ought to start by confessing a bias – or a series of strong preferences, if you prefer. Natasha Siegel has set Solomon’s Crown in 12th-century Europe. She cast Richard I, Duke of Aquitaine, and Philip II, King of France, as her romantic and political protagonists. The historical record is disputed, but Richard and Philip were, at a time, very close and possibly lovers. She tells her version of their love story against the backdrop of war, intrigue, betrayal and family drama as England and France struggle to make and remake the continent. This is the stuff of epic history, and excellent reads.
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Siegel opens the novel by telling readers the plot points that follow are not all historically accurate. Like The Lion in Winter before it, a play and film of which the novel is consciously reminiscent, Solomon’s Crown pulls on historical threads, dyes them new colours and then runs in circles with them. What’s left is a lovely, if unconventional, tapestry. As Siegel notes in her disclosure, the book “takes enormous liberties with its setting: adding wars that didn’t happen, removing wars that did, ignoring deaths, changing clothing and geography, and portraying medieval battles with such flagrant disrespect for reality that any military historians who read it will probably throw the book into their fireplaces before they manage finish it.” Well, all the worse for them. This isn’t a non-fiction work of medieval history. It’s a romance novel. And a good one that still manages to express quite a bit about the history it distorts.
What Solomon’s Crown eschews in historical accuracy it reclaims in the depths of its characters and its exploration of family jealousies, sexual discovery and political imperatives. These story elements are in their own way faithful to medieval history, particularly the period in which the novel is set. Henry II – the father of Richard and his rival brothers, husband of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and rival of Louis VII of France and his son Philip II – looms large in the story because he loomed large in the lives of these historical personages, just as he loomed large in the history of Europe. Through Henry in the background and foreground, Siegel manages to explore not only forbidden romance between Richard and Philip – not so much forbidden for being a gay romance, but for being a romance between members of major rival royal families – but also the mundane complexities of relationships between fathers and sons.
Early in the novel, the reader gets the sense that Richard and Philip are as destined to be together as England and France are to go to war. There are echoes of Romeo and Juliet here. Beyond those destinies is the question of how the characters might balance their love and the necessities of state. Some of the novel’s best insights come from examining subsequent tensions. As Siegel writes of Philip assessing his royal rival, “I understood every decision Henry had ever made. I had once believed myself to be a throne wearing the face of the man; Richard had proved me wrong. But here was a king who embodies that. He was a crown and nothing more.”
The romantic elements of Solomon’s Crown are sometimes subtle, but always full of substance and essential. You won’t forget the novel is a romance read. “Kisses do not a kingdom make, nor love a conquest end,” thinks Richard, to himself when trying to balance royal duties and love. “I am nothing like the stars,” Philip says to Richard. “You are,” Richard replies, “You are as lovely, and almost as distant.” But there’s far more to the novel than romance. Indeed, the romance is a counterpoint to a key element of the book – the struggle within and between nations, families and oneself and one’s expected duties.
Without The Lion in Winter, it’s unlikely Solomon’s Crown would exist – at least not as it does. James Goldman’s 1966 play and the subsequent 1968 film of the same name, which Goldman also wrote, are masterpieces – incisive studies, too, of love, families and politics. As Henry says to Philip in the film, “We are the world in small. A nation is a human thing; it does what we do, for our reasons.” Siegel has managed to capture the spirit of those lines in her novel and give them new life for a new time without losing the timeless parts that make Goldman’s writing, and hers, works of historical fiction that tell the truth about history.