non-romance, romance, #13: The Lion in Winter (1968, dir. Anthony Harvey)

'tis the damn season

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A small moment of affection before the war begins. Or the affection is a part of the war? The Lion in Winter (1968)

The historical marriage at the center of The Lion in Winter is not considered romantic at large, even when the Plantagenets’ history is ripe for romanticization. Most depictions of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine focus on the embitterment associated with their coupling. The Angevin king did have affairs and his consort did support a revolt against her husband in 1173. This revolt led Henry to imprison her for the last sixteen years of his life. Still, Eleanor was frequently brought out for state business, including the management of the unruly Plantagenet sons’ loyalties (a few of whom helped her with the revolt).

Henry may be cast as a lover, but it is usually with Rosamond, the mistress in the affair that is seen as the irrevocable breaking point in the marriage, like in quite a few operas about this moment. He also might shown as petulant and impulsive, like in Becket, the 1964 film based on a 1959 play by Jean Anouilh, dealing with his friendship with and then murder of Thomas Becket. Eleanor can be the discontented shrew of a wife, but she can also be the benevolent and beloved Regent if the depiction is particularly focused on and favorable to Richard I, her favorite son. This is true in many Robin Hood stories, where John, Henry’s favorite son, plays the villain.

I’m not particularly concerned with the historical Plantagenets here, other than the sense that these personalities are from a vague history. It is important that these things happened a long time ago and it is important that they happened in the medieval period. Because they are medieval, and high medieval at that, the history’s story is linked irrevocably to how this period told stories and what values they put into those stories.

Eleanor of Aquitaine brought the concept of courtly love from courts in Aquitaine first to France and then to England, helping create the genre of chivalric romances. Where would we be today without this etymological ancestor of “romance?” There’s a lot of insistence that genre fiction romance is separate from these medieval romances, but there is overlap here. These chivalric stories’ setting lends itself to time slippage, where things happen suddenly and death for a character is, at best, a temporary problem because they could always show up in another romance. Sir Gawain cheats death by accepting the invitation to the game with the Green Knight and romance characters cheat death by having their stories end at Happily Ever After.¹ In The Lion in the Winter, Henry and Eleanor are always playing a game and, I would argue, get a happily ever after.

The contemporaneous history of this squabbling family is colored by legend and literature and a clerical distaste for perceived immorality. Given the constantly shifting allegiances between Henry, Richard and John, it can be unclear what stories are propaganda, written to inflate the current monarch or what is reactionary commentary. No matter the historical truth, the minutiae of these people, like the loaded glances, the biting insults, or the words of affection, are lost to us, just given the distance from where we sit, looking back. I realized and lamented my desire for this first-hand knowledge of the subtleties of history when I read Possession by A.S. Byatt earlier this year, which involves characters taking primary documents and piecing together a relationship and a time jump that shows the reader, but not the characters, where they got it right and where they got it wrong.

The Lion in the Winter fills the gaps of history to the brim with dialogue, quick pivots in loyalties, and an ache for something lost. The Christmas court of 1183 at Chinon flatly did not happen, but time moves in mysterious ways in a medieval set romance. And despite the cheating, the plotting, and the cruelty, it is a romance.