Alison Weir - The Captive Queen

 

Amazon description: It is the year 1152 and a beautiful woman of thirty, attended by only a small armed escort, is riding like the wind southwards through what is now France, leaving behind her crown, her two young daughters and a shattered marriage to Louis of France, who had been more like a monk than a king, and certainly not much of a lover. This woman is Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, and her sole purpose now is to return to her vast duchy and marry the man she loves, Henry Plantagenet, a man destined for greatness as King of England. Theirs is a union founded on lust which will create a great empire stretching from the wilds of Scotland to the Pyrenees. It will also create the devil’s brood of Plantagenets – including Richard Cœur de Lion and King John – and the most notoriously vicious marriage in history. The Captive Queen is a novel on the grand scale, an epic subject for Alison Weir. It tells of the making of nations, and of passionate conflicts: between Henry II and Thomas Becket, his closest friend who is murdered in Canterbury Cathedral on his orders; between Eleanor and Henry’s formidable mother Matilda; between father and sons, as Henry’s children take up arms against him; and finally between Henry and Eleanor herself.

I normally enjoy Weir’s books and devour them. This time I keep stuttering and stopping to readjust my set- there’s something not quite right about this novel. The author is a best seller in both fiction and non-fiction but frankly I enjoyed her biography a lot more. This is a little too short to do justice to the times and the extra-ordinary life that Eleanor lived; and a lot too heavy on the bodice ripper. If you’re looking for a fictional Eleanor and Henry, try Sharon Penman’s trilogy (When Christ and His Saints Slept, Time and Chance & The Devil’s Brood). For the non-fiction, Weir’s own work does nicely. Disappointing really – Innocent Traitor was so much better.