Love and Ambition in the Arctic by Stef Penney

Continuing our cold theme, our guest for January is Stef Penney.

Photo credit: Ian Plillips-McLaren

 Stef Penney grew up in Edinburgh. She is a screenwriter and the author of three novels: The Tenderness of Wolves (2006), The Invisible Ones (2011), and Under a Pole Star (2016). She has also written extensively for radio, including adaptations of Moby-Dick, The Worst Journey in the World, and, mostly recently, a third instalment of Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise series.

The Tenderness of Wolves won Costa Book of the Year, Theakston’s Crime Novel of the Year, and was translated into thirty languages. It has just been re-issued in a 10th anniversary edition. http://www.stefpenney.co.uk

Here Stef is talking about her new book with Charlotte Wightwick

Charlotte Wightwick: Tell us about your new novel, Under A Pole Star.

Stef Penney: Flora Mackie first crosses the Arctic Circle at the age of twelve. As a young scientist in the 1890s, she confounds expectations to become leader of an expedition to North-West Greenland, where she encounters rival American explorers Lester Armitage and Jakob de Beyn. All three become obsessed with the north: for Flora it is her real home; for Armitage it is a theatre for his ambition; for de Beyn, a place of escape. Their paths cross many times over the next decade, changing their lives for ever. It began as a book about ambition, but I think it’s ended up as a love story.

CW: Were you inspired by any real-life explorers or incidents when developing her character? What about the other characters in the book?

SP: There were no women arctic explorers at the time (the first was in the late 1920s), but there were a few female mountaineers, and a handful of women, like Isabella Bird, who made extraordinary solo journeys. But the High Arctic was (and still is) a very hard place to get to, logistically; an expedition there involved massive expenditure, specially chartered ships, tons of equipment, and a lot of time. Unless you were fantastically wealthy, you had to be able to sell yourself as the right man for the job. So Flora has to overcome many obstacles – some through her choices, some by fate – before she becomes the leader of an expedition. She has to be quite unusual to surmount all those difficulties, but once I decided she was the daughter of a Dundee whaling captain who had spent much of her childhood in Greenland, this almost impossible thing began to work...

With the other characters, I was inspired by historical explorers, although neither is closely based on any one figure. The accounts of Frederick Cook and Robert Peary, and the controversy about who reached the North Pole first, or at all, got me thinking about what sort of people explorers are, and why they might lie. At first, I was overwhelmed by that story. They were extraordinary personalities – not just the unfathomable Cook and the incredibly dislikeable Peary, but Peary’s wife Jo (also dislikable) who joined him on a couple of expeditions as a non-active member, and Matthew Henson, his African-American servant, who went everywhere he went, but who was ignored by Peary, and the public, after their final trip. Theirs was a story you couldn’t make up – except they did.

CW: ​Love and ambition are two of the key emotional themes in the book - how do these play out in your characters and what were the key issues you wanted to explore here?

SP: I’m fascinated by the idea of ambition – particularly the point where it tips over from driving a person to achieve a goal, to driving them to lie – or worse – to reap the rewards that goal brings. The love story evolved later, but it became, perhaps, more important in the end. I don’t really think in terms of issues, so I don’t know that I intended to explore anything in particular, other than the collision of those particular characters, in that particular place.

I suppose one thing that emerges is the way Flora holds onto her self and her autonomy under the onslaughts of the time – society, cultural expectations, biology, and indeed, love. Another thing that came to concern me very much is the way that sex is portrayed in fiction. I didn’t set out to write an explicit love story, but as writing progressed, I came to feel that not to precisely describe the affair between the two main characters would be a cop-out (no pun intended!). I’m a pedant; I get annoyed by love scenes where you’re left with questions like, Sorry, did she have an orgasm? How? What were they using for contraception? (Particularly pertinent, perhaps, in historical fiction.) And if you’re writing about the difference between good, bad and indifferent sex – well, it seems to me you have to be specific.

CW: The book tackles a number of serious subjects, including for example the impacts of colonisation and what that meant for the lives of indigenous people - can you say a little about these?

SP: It’s hard to avoid such things in writing about Arctic exploration. It’s also what makes it, for me, more fascinating than the Antarctic, where explorers could continue to behave in their own cultural bubble without anyone challenging them. The parts of the book most closely modeled on history are the various trials the Inuit characters suffer at the hands of explorers. Although there was nothing in Greenland to compare with the genocide in, for example, Tasmania, (because the land was commercially unexploitable), horrific things occurred: some accidental, like the fatality of unfamiliar diseases, and some that sprang from the explorers’ sense of white supremacy. Though some explorers in the book, as in history, are more insensitive than others, no one comes out of it with completely clean hands.

CW: This isn't the first time you've written about northern, unforgiving settings ( your first book, The Tenderness of Wolves was set in Canada) - what is it do you think that draws you to write about such landscapes?

SP: I don’t seem to be able to stay away from them for long. Some people are drawn to deserts – for me, it’s the north. Perhaps because it’s close to the Scottish landscapes of my childhood. We spent all our holidays in the Highlands or on the North-West coast, and there’s something about bleak, rugged landscape that gets into your bones. And that’s even before you get to the ice and snow – it’s beautiful yet deadly; it’s ephemeral and transformative, it both conceals and reveals... Such hostile surroundings force people to reveal themselves, too. Two of the things I most enjoyed writing were my vision of Eden, which had to be a northern place; and being inside a glacier: something truly extraordinary.

Baby, it's cold outside by Julie Summers

Seventy seven years ago today Great Britain was paralysed by the most dramatic cold snap of the twentieth century. Winter 1947 was cold. Very cold indeed and there was a lot of snow for a very long time and people who lived through it will assure you it was the worst on record. But the end of January 1940 saw weather of such severity that even at the time the forecasters predicted it would be considered, in the future, the weather event of the century.

London, 28 January 1940

On 28 January 1940 there was an ice storm which Virginia Woolf described in her diary: ‘Everything glass glazed. Each blade is coated, has a rim of pure glass. Walking is like treading on stubble. The stiles and gates have a shiny, green varnish of ice.’ The cause of the weather was a warm Atlantic front meeting continental high pressure over England. The rain fell on ground already frozen and covered with drifting snow and was engulfed by the freezing air. 

Bolton under feet of snow, January 1940

Antony Woodward and Robert Penn published a book in 2007 called The Wrong Kind of Snow. As a keen weather-watcher I cannot recommend this delightful book highly enough. It charts the extremes of British weather day by day over the last 350 years. Of that fearful ice storm they wrote:

On impact, the rain turns instantly to ice: plants turn to glass rods, machines become ice sculptures, trees are split in two, wild ponies in the mountains of Wales are entombed in ice. In Kent, birds die in flight when their wings lock solid. Roads are like skating rinks, railway points cannot be change, thousands of telegraph poles collapse. The country is paralysed.

Birds on the Thames at Oxford, December 2016
I could not bring myself to show frozen birds or ponies!

What a sight it must have been and how miserable to wake up to towels frozen solid in bathrooms, no running water anywhere, ice on the inside of bedroom windows and a complete lack of any transport for essentials such as bread, milk, coal. The ice storm lasted for five days and left a deep impression on those who lived through it.

My friends in the USA or continental Europe raise their eyes to the (weather bringing) heavens when I talk about the weather. 'You British are fixated by it!' they laugh. It is true. When I lived in Germany in the 1980s we had snow on the ground in my village south of Munich from December to April and I was once caught in a full-blown ice storm in Philadelphia which made a strong impression on me but those were both weather events that occur quite regularly and in countries that are used to dealing with them.

Enjoying the British weather at an outdoor concert, Summer 2016

Watching the weather is a national pastime. I have never been able satisfactorily to explain to people living on vast continents why we talk about it incessantly. In The Wrong Kind of Snow I think you might find the answer. It is the lack of extremes and the minute variability which we cherish. Woodward and Penn point out that London gets less rain that many places in the USA, and Paris for that matter. But it gets it in drizzle form. Britain is, on the whole, damp, mild and benign. They point out that overcast skies and persistent drizzle have given Britain the best grass in the world and helped us to become one of the most advanced economies in the world from wool.

The 'perfect lawn', Trinity College Oxford

It has given us perfect turf for cricket, lawn tennis, hockey and bowls and it nurtures the English Garden to be the envy of the world. Dr Johnson once said: 'In our island every man goes to bed unable to guess whether he shall behold in the morning a bright or cloudy atmosphere.' With modern weather-forecasting we do a little better than that but I still like to think that the unpredictability of our weather brings us something worth talking about. One extreme weather event such as that of 77 years ago is a blip, something stupendous and unimaginable. Well worth remembering but as for tomorrow... I'm expecting light rain all day, winds of 11 miles per hour, north veering north westerly and a temperature of around 9 Celsius. Hm. Might even get out into my garden...

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The Queen of Tonga by Janie Hampton

Here’s a story to cheer you up on a miserable cold day at the end of January. On a June afternoon in 1953, a golden coach was pulled through the crowded streets of London in the pouring rain by eight grey horses.

The pouring rain did not dampen coronation spirits

A procession of soldiers, military bands, generals on horseback, bagpipers and foreign monarchs in horse-drawn carriages wound through central London on a five-mile route from Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace. Hundreds of thousands of people had been waiting all night and most of the day in the rain. Considering it was June, with the trees in full leaf and the days so long, the weather was cold and miserable. When it wasn’t damp, it was drizzling; and when not drizzling, it poured. But the crowds remained upbeat and excited. After the dark years of the Second World War and the austerity that followed it, at last there was a reason to celebrate. They had been waiting for this day for over a year: the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. ‘It was all organised by the Duke of Norfolk,’ said 12 year old Jane Roberts. ‘He had a face like a miserable dog.' The route was lined with policemen in capes, naval cadets, and soldiers from around the world, wearing the medals they had won in the war. As the procession made its stately way towards the palace, the roar of applause cascaded down the streets like a Mexican wave at a sports ground. The children cheered the Canadian Mounties in their red uniforms on their sleek dark horses. Scottish people cheered the bagpipers, with their swinging kilts. Older people cheered Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, stately and courageous, sitting in a glass coach with her glamorous daughter Princess Margaret. Others cheered the Life Guards in their pointed helmets with white plumes and shining brass breastplates. They all marched in unison to the thumping beat of the military bands playing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and the Victorian marching song, ‘We’re the soldiers of the Queen, m’lud’. But the strongest image that remains with everybody who was there that day is not of the beautiful young woman in the golden coach. The loudest and longest applause was for a monarch nobody had seen before, a woman of over six feet in height and 300 pounds in weight. Waving and smiling enthusiastically from her open carriage, her dark skin glistening in the rain, was the large and joyful Queen of Tonga, 
‘We heard the roar of the crowds from a mile away,’ said Enid Brown, who had come down from Birmingham with her sister Joyce. ‘We thought it must be for our new queen. The sound like the roar of a storm, it made my spine tingle. When the black carriage appeared we could see why. There was the usual pair of lovely black horses pulling. All the other carriages had their hoods up and you couldn’t really see who was inside. But this one was different alright. The top was down and there was this big lady. When we saw her, oh how we cheered! It was her joyful disdain of the pelting rain. You could see she wasn’t going to let a small thing like that ruin the day. We didn’t know who she was, but we still loved her.’

Queen Salote Mafile‘o Pilolevu Tupou III  of Tonga

Word went round the crowd that she was the Queen of Tonga. 'Who’d ever heard of Tonga? Some said it was in Africa, others said it was in the Pacific Ocean,'said Enid Brown, 'Some said she had come in a canoe. Well wherever it was, it was her spirit, her style, that won us all over,'
  Queen Salote of Tonga was one of 129 heads of state who had come to London to witness the coronation of Elizabeth II. Her landau carriage, with facing seats over a dropped footwell and hinged soft folding top, was driven by two old coachmen in top hats and velvet coats. Bringing up the rear was an escort of four mounted military police. She had insisted on keeping the hood of her carriage down, so that she could see the crowds, and they could see her. The 53-year-old Queen was dressed in gold and crimson robes, topped off by a golden tiara with a tall, red feather. She laughed and waved, and the people laughed and waved back, and she became the star of the day.
   The Kingdom of Tonga is an archipelago of nearly two hundred islands between New Zealand and Hawaii, scattered over five hundred miles in the Southern Pacific Ocean, with only fifty-five thousand inhabitants. First settled in 800 BC, with the same royal family since 1600, it was named the ‘Friendly Islands’ by Captain James Cook after his first visit in 1773. In 1900 Tonga became a British Protectorate but remained a monarchy. As well as ruling, Queen Salote Mafile‘o Pilolevu Tupou III wrote songs, love poems and lakalaka – the traditional Tongan dance performed en masse with synchronised arm movements.

Queen Salote was six foot two inches tall, part of a royal dynasty far older than the British monarchy.

     John Douglas was an army officer on duty on The Mall. ‘I had a splendid view of all the procession. The loudest cheer was not for Queen Elizabeth but for the Queen of Tonga. This very large lady was in an open carriage despite the torrential rain and waving furiously at the crowds, who admired her fortitude.’ For many people it was the first time they had seen foreigners other than American GIs in the war. Cross-cultural tolerance was required in all directions. The Sheiks from the British Protectorate of Qatar thought it perfectly proper to bring their personal African slaves. Nobody had thought to tell them that slavery had been abolished in Britain a hundred and fifty years earlier.
       On his small black and white television at home, the playwright Noel Coward and his companion were watching the procession. Perched opposite the Queen of Tonga in her carriage was the diminutive Sultan of Kelantan in Malaysia, husband to three wives and father of twenty-three children. Coward’s friend asked him, ‘And who is that sitting in Queen Salote’s carriage?’ ‘Luncheon,’ he replied.

When singing The Queen of Tonga, the author of this blog drinks coffee from this coronation mug

 Jack Fishman, editor of the Sunday newspaper The Empire News, wrote a popular song about that rainy day in June, with a lilting ‘calypso’ rhythm and catchy tune. Sung by Edmundo Ros, ‘The Queen of Tonga’, soon caught on and was being whistled all over the country.
In the pacific Islands of Tonga,
They make their people stronger,
Oh it can rain or storm or squall,
But they don’t feel nothin’ at all.
Chorus: Oh! The Queen of Tonga Cross’d the ocean from far away.
Oh! The Queen of Tonga Came to Britain for Co-ro-nat-ion Day.
And when the people saw her on that torrential morn,
She captured all before her, took ev’ryone by storm.
 In every heart will always live longer,
That reign-in’ Queen of Tonga.

Marching for Women's Rights, Carol Drinkwater

Last Saturday, the 21st January 2017, I met up with a couple of friends alongside the Apollo Fountain  in the impressive Place Massena in Nice. We, along with about seventy others, were gathering to march. We were marching - each of us perhaps for slightly different reasons - against Donald Trump and Mike Pence's position on women's rights. At least, that was my principal reason for being there. Denial of climate change was another concern that fired me.
It was a beautiful day. The sun was shining. The world of the Côte d'Azur was going about its business. Yachts out on the water, bobbing in the warm afternoon.
All over the world crowds were gathering to voice their concerns. From Washington D.C the call was echoing.

Ours was a very tiny group because no permit for a demonstration had been granted due to the atrocities that had occurred on Bastille Day last year, 14th July 2016, when a lone truck driver had ploughed his vehicle through the heart of  a crowd of people out in the streets celebrating our national  holiday and murdered more than eighty people including women and children.  France remains on high alert and a country in mourning. Joining demonstrations is perhaps not the wisest act at this time. Still, I believe, that we must continue as normal. We cannot allow ourselves to be restricted by fear or groups such as Daesh win.
A few friends advised me against joining the crowd last Saturday but I was determined and I am very glad that I made the effort. How many have since asked: 'But what was the point?' 'What were you marching for?' 'No democratic rights have been threatened.'

On Monday of this week, his first day in office, President Trump along with seven other MEN gathered together in the Oval Office. Those seven men watched on as Trump signed an executive order to reinstate the Global gag rule, which severely restricts funding for organisations that support or offer advice on pregnancy terminations no matter the circumstances.
This post is not about whether abortion is right or wrong. Each of us has our own conscience and opinions on this subject. But from my point of view, this signature on his first day, overlooked by his male colleagues, is an insult to all women. And I was even more certain that my Saturday afternoon walking in the sunshine with friends and strangers was not a waste of time.

I have penned several books in a very successful series published by Scholastic entitled My Story. Each is a diary written at a chosen point in history that recounts 'live' events through the eyes of an adolescent. Boys and girls are the witnesses, but in my case, I have chosen to tell each of these diary stories through the experience of a young girl. Two of the books - Twentieth Century Girl and Suffragette - published now as two stories of Edwardian England and titled Cadogan Square - are stories set at different stages of the women's suffrage movement: 1900 and 1909.

Women have been marching for their rights for over one hundred and fifty years. Women have endured imprisonment and force-feeding while standing up for what we believe is our place in this world.  We have marched for the right to vote, to qualify as medical or legal advisors, to gain degrees, to handle our own finances, to have the right to apply for a mortgage, to earn an equal wage alongside our male colleagues, to choose to take on the role of motherhood or not ...

I marched last Saturday because I cannot stand by silently and see any of what we have achieved be eroded. I live in a democracy, and thank heavens for that. Not all of us do. Our democracy gives me the right to raise my voice, to sound the alarm. To voice my opinion and to let all politicians know that we are paying attention. It is another form of a vote.  To remain silent, in my opinion, is a complicity.

www.caroldrinkwater.com

Highgate Cemetery by Miranda Miller

    At the very end of 2016, when the year itself seemed exhausted by its own historical weight, I visited Highgate cemetery with Britta, a friend who grew up in East Berlin. On a frosty sunny morning it was a beautiful hillside park as well as place to contemplate. Those great Victorian cemeteries were inspired by Pere La Chaise in Paris.The first part to open, in 1839, was the West Cemetery, which is on your right as you walk down Swain’s Lane from Highgate. You have to make an appointment to go there but it’s well worth visiting with its Egyptian Avenue, Lebanon Circle, Terrace Catacombs and remarkable plants and wild life. Volunteers cut back the vegetation so that it is romantic but still passable and they also study the foxes, hedgehogs butterflies and other rare insects.

    Further down Swain's Lane on the right you come to the East cemetery, which costs £4 to enter and still attracts people from all over the world. Since 1975 both cemeteries have been run by a charity, the Friends of Highgate Cemetery. John Betjeman described it as a ‘Victorian Valhalla’ .These grand Victorian necropoli were built with high walls and locked gates to keep out the Resurrection Men but they were always intended to be parks as well. Once it was beautifully manicured but now it is its wildness that makes it charming and romantic. Douglas Adams, George Eliot, several of Charles Dickens’ children and his wife Catherine, Paul Foot, Eric Hobsbawn, Anna Mahler, Sidney Nolan, Peter Porter, Ralph Richardson Alan Sillitoe, Herbert Spencer Leslie Stephen and Max Wall are all buried here. Many of the less famous graves are very touching; there is an area dedicated to London firemen and some of the epitaphs on the graves of forgotten people read like short stories. For instance: “Emma Wallace Gray Died in October 1854 in the 19th year of her age...From the effects of fire, her dress having accidentally ignited ten days previously. In bloom of youth, when others fondly cling to life, I prayed, mid agonies of death.”

    Karl Marx (1818-1883) upstages all his subterranean neighbours. The morning we were there a constant flow of international visitors surrounded his monument. He had been expelled from both Cologne and Paris because of his political activities before settling in London in 1849. "From this time on he was one of the leaders of the socialist party in Europe, and in 1865 he became its acknowledged chief" ( to quote from his obituary).  He was laid to rest in the same grave as his wife Jenny, who had died less than a year and a half before him. Eleven people attended his funeral, including his friend Engels. Other members of his family were later buried in the same grave, including his daughter Eleanor, known as Tussy. She was a courageous supporter of the early Trades Unions who poisoned herself in 1898 after discovering that her partner, Edward Aveling, had secretly married a young actress.

   As the years passed so many people came to visit Marx’s grave that it was moved to a more accessible spot, on the main path. The present grandiose marble monument was unveiled 73 years after his death, in 1956, in a ceremony attended by about 200 people, “ to honour the memory of a man whose spirit - if that is the right word - now dominates approximately half the world.” (as reported in The Guardian the following day). One of his most famous quotations is carved on it: ”The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways - the point however is to change it.” Laurence Bradshaw, the sculptor, said he aimed to express the "dynamic force of his intellect" and wanted the sculptured likeness to be at eye-level rather than "towering over the people."

    Everybody who lived through the mid -20th century has their own Marx. At 15 I was a Young Communist for a few months and attended earnest discussion groups about his writings in West Kensington. A few years later I was taught history by academics who saw the world in terms of a Marxist interpretation. For some he was a demon, for others an omniscient prophet. Britta, my companion the day I visited the cemetery, is nostalgic for the GDR she lived in until she was in her late thirties. After the wall came down in 1989 there was a long public debate in Germany about what to do with the monuments and place names of Communism. There’s a striking scene in the 2003 film 'Good Bye, Lenin!' where the huge Lenin statue is lifted up by helicopter and flies off over the city, pointing as it goes. Finally, Marx was accepted as a philosopher and the grand boulevard round the corner from her flat is still called Karl - Marx - Allee. She tells me sadly that her grandchildren are taught at school that he was worse than Hitler.

   At the moment, with socialism in crisis, you don’t hear much about Marx in England. Above the gigantic hairy bronze head hovers a large (if invisible) question mark. What does Marx mean to us now? He would not necessarily have recognised his own ideas in the uses that were made of them after he died. In 1882 he wrote in a letter of the form of 'Marxism' which arose in France: “If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.” 

   Last year there was a three-part Open University /BBC co-production for BBC Four called Genius of the Modern World. Bettany Hughes explored the life and works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. “We might not realise it, but we all live with a 19th-century male philosopher in our lives. Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud are towering thinkers, men with the wit and the will to question the status quo.” Nobel laurate Paul Krugman wrote recently that when thinking about automation and the future of labor, he worries that "it has echoes of old-fashioned Marxism – which shouldn't be a reason to ignore facts, but too often is."

   At his best Marx was such a powerful writer that it seems likely that people will always be influenced by him. He wrote that “ Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” Another quotation that has great resonance for me at this time of crisis in our democracy is: “The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.”

Richard the Lionheart - what we think we know by Elizabeth Chadwick

Statue of Richard Coeur de Lion outside
the Houses of Parliament, Westminster|
Carlo Marochetti  1856. Modern audiences
are frequently critical of the work and
consider it does not deserve its position.

I belong to several historical forums where Richard the Lionheart often crops up as a subject of discussion. A question such as 'What do we know about Richard the Lionheart?' will elicit a slew of responses, frequently negative, and when asked for sources or elaboration the response is usually without provenance beyond 'I read it somewhere.' Further clarification is not usually forthcoming or turns out to be from text books or teaching of a certain era.  There is also a strong tendency to view Richard through the filter of modern mindset and not engage with him on the terms by which he lived his life in the late 12th century.

Generally the same comments keep repeating in a never ending circle, so I thought I'd set out to explore them in more detail.

1. He hated/ didn't care about England: (and I have had this said to me at Dover Castle by a costumed interpreter responsible for 'informing' the general public).

Why?

 a) Because he didn't even speak English.

My findings:  He probably had at least a smattering of words.  He was born in England, at Oxford, in September 1157 and although his family was peripatetic, he spent several years of his childhood in England.  His wet nurse was an English woman from St Albans called Hodierna and he remembered her with fondness and gave her lands on which to live in her retirement.  Her name, however, suggests she was Norman, so although he had an English-born wet nurse, she may well have spoken to him in French. The fact remains though, that with English servants around the nursery court, he would have picked up a certain amount of the language.

However he would not have used it in his dealings as an adult, but then neither would any of the nobility with whom he associated where  the language of the court was either Anglo-Norman or Latin.

Sometimes you will hear it said that his first language was Occitan - the language of the south of France and parts of Aquitaine, but the main language of the Dukes of Aquitaine was Poitevan French which was closer to the French of the north.  Richard's famous song Ja Nus On Pri is not written in Occitan but in French.

Other English kings surrounding the time of his rule did not speak English as a matter of course either. Henry I may have done so to a greater degree, having an English wife and the court poked fun at him for his Englishness, but his own father William the Conqueror had never learned the language and there is no indication that King Stephen, Empress Matilda or Henry II, Richard's father were fluent. Again, Henry II would likely have had a smattering.  King John the same and Henry III. But Richard is no different to any of his close ancestors and inheritors so it's rather odd to single him out.

Face of Richard the Lionheart.  A Victorian plaster cast
tomb effigy in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

b) Because he was never there and only spent 6 months of his reign in England.  

True.  But... and there's always a but.

He was born in England and spent several years of his childhood in the country.  When he became king he was preparing to go on crusade - something set in motion before the death of his father.  Henry II himself had pledged to go on crusade. In early 1185 he had been begged face to face by Heraclius, Patriarch of Jerusalem to leave his empire and take up the throne of Jerusalem.  Henry II's grandfather Fulke of Anjou had been King of Jerusalem and Henry and his sons were close kin to the current, dying king Baldwin IV.  So Richard's involvement with Jerusalem was political as well as religious and an ongoing family thing.

The 'Angevin Empire' spanned an area from the borders of Scotland as far as the Pyrenees and that meant any ruler had to delegate and spread himself thinly.  Henry II himself spent more time across the Channel than he did in England.  Before the death of his brother Henry the Young King, Richard's inheritance portion had been designated as Aquitaine and in his teen years he was groomed for this role and indeed spent a considerable amount of time in the region. However, once he was king, he was mostly dealing with problems further north on the French border, caused by Philip of France's expansionism following his own brother John's earlier inept and treacherous mischief making. While Richard had been in prison John had been trying to negotiate keep him there and had also made a treaty with Philip of France whereby he surrendered the whole of Normandy east of the Seine except for the city of Rouen, and that included surrendering all the major fortresses. Richard spent the rest of his life following his return from imprisonment trying to put that right.

England itself was ruled by Richard by delegation.  Even despite often being long distances away or behind bars so to speak, Richard still had a vision for England.  He left - as he deemed - suitable custodians during his absence.  When some of those custodians proved to be problematic, he changed them under advice.  Even when imprisoned in Germany, he was able to hold court and govern by messenger.  By and large England remained stable under the management of a capable civil service headed by the Richard-appointed wonder-man of his day Hubert Walter Archbishop of Canterbury who overhauled what was already a highly efficient civil service into something even more cutting edge.

Bottom line:  Richard was forced to be an absentee landlord, but that didn't mean he was a neglectful or disinterested one.

c) Because he bankrupted England. He used England as a cash cow and didn't care about it.

This is one that when you ask for sources, there are never any forthcoming.  It sort of gets pushed under the rug...

Money had to be raised for the crusade that had been agreed in his father's day and for which plans were afoot when Richard came to the throne. He did this by using the money in his father's treasury. Taxing the people who had already been forced to cough up a tax known as the Saladin tithe in his father's reign was a non starter, so he turned to the relatively small pool of the rich, both secular and clergy and sought means of wresting money from them. When the Bishop of Ely died intestate, Richard was able to seize  the Bishop's movable wealth which included 3000 marks in cash, gold, silver, precious gems, cloth, horses and grain.  At the start of his reign ambitious men were willing to pay large sums of money in order to gain positions of authority and Richard put these up for sale. However, not willy nilly. The men appointed for their cash, were also men of experience and reliability, and Richard was very careful in his selection, personally appointing all the sheriffs.

England was indeed a wealthy country and yes, he used it as a cash cow, but a good farmer looks after his livestock and doesn't neglect something as important as his cash cow in case it runs dry and Richard even during his absence was diligent.

He is sometimes accused of costing England a massive amount of money because of the ransom that had to be raised to free him from prison in Germany. But what else could he do? He had not expected to be taken prisoner but a series of unfortunate events including a shipwreck and then having to travel without a guide through difficult territory led to his capture and incarceration  by his enemy Leopold of Austria while probably trying to reach the lands of his brother-in-law Henry the Lion of Brunswick.  Leopold then handed him over to Emperor Heinrich of Germany.

The ransom demanded for Richard's release totalled 150,000 marks, a phenomenal sum. 100,000 was to be paid for Richard 's release and another 50,000 for which the German emperor would hold hostages until the sum was paid.

Richard's mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine and the justiciars and nobility of England and the other territories did their utmost to gather in the ransom. a 25% tax on income was raised, and on the value of moveable goods.  The entire wool clip of the Cistercian monasteries was taken and gold and silver from the Church.  England had a particularly strong civil service and this enabled the ransom to be gathered efficiently.  Indeed, Richard found English civil servants very useful throughout all of his dominions and utilised their expertise.

Returning to the business of the 'cash cow'  John Gillingham observes that a problem with this statement is that 'England is the only part of the Angevin Empire for which we can compile a series of figures for the king's annual revenue.'  We have the pipe rolls which detail England's balance sheets in essence from 1156 right through the reigns of Henry, Richard and John.  In contrast we don't have that full information for anywhere else although a few documents exist - for example the Norman exchequer rolls of 1180, 1195 and 1198. These three rolls show that by 1198, the Norman exchequer was bringing in £25,000 - compared with £6,750  in 1180 under Henry II. At that same time in 1180, England was bringing in £14,300.  Professor John Gillingham suggests that Normandy in the reign of Richard may have become even more of a cash cow than England, as its population was smaller. In 1198 in terms of payments to Richard, both Rouen and Caen had to find more than London.

On average English revenue brought in around £22,000 a year.  The preparation for the crusade upped the ante to £31,089. While Richard was away the revenue dropped to £11,000.  Once returned and excluding the ransom demand, the revenue climbed again to between £22,000 and £25,000, the latter sum toward the end of Richard's reign to fund his war in Normandy (cause by John's mischief making while Richard was on crusade).  John's revenue once he came to the throne fluctuated between £22,000 and £25,000 at the start of his reign, but in 1210 and 1212 came in  at £50,000 and in 1211 a staggering £83,291  as he went on the warpath to try and recover Normandy.  Once the non routine exchequer audit sums are added in, the amount rises to £145,000.

Bottom line.  There may have been a momentary cash flow shortage but the cow kept on producting and it was John, not Richard who milked it so much that it led him into a field named Runnymede and a document that came to be known as Magna Carta.

d) Because he said he would sell London if he could find a buyer.

This is often taken as evidence of disparagement. Fancy saying that about your country.  He mustn't have thought much of it.

 Richard was reknown for his dry sense of humour - even remarked upon by an Arab historian. Today we might say we'd sell our soul for a Gucci handbag (or whatever floats one's personal boat) but it doesn't mean one is going to pop along to the nearest black mass and do a deal with the devil!  Leeway has to be given for humour, rather than taking everything literally.

2. He was gay.

Why?

a) Because he shared a bed with King Philip of France.

King Arthur and his knights are nakedly asleep together when they
are attacked.  Guiron le Courtois mid 14thc British Library

Chronicler Roger of Howden tells us about the friendship between Richard and Philip of France in the summer of 1187.  Howden says that Philip honoured Richard so highly that every day they ate at the same table and shared the same dishes, and at night the bed did not separate them.  The King of France loved him as his own soul and their love was so great that the lord king of England was stupefied.

One has to enter the medieval mindset to understand this one.  Men shared beds all the time.  It was indeed a sign of honour and trust and there is plentiful pictorial evidence of this in medieval society. Henry II would only have been 'stupefied' because it was a demonstration that Richard had turned his back on him and was looking to Philip of France as liege lord and ally.  Henry II himself shared beds with other men - William Marshal for example on one occasion. It was an accepted norm, used to demonstrate trust and prestige.  The talk of loving as much as his own soul, is again a typical medieval literary conceit and implies nothing beyond loyalty.  It's a non starter in a cultural context of homosexuality.  Cross it off the list.

The three wise men sharing a bed. I hesitate to call it a
menage a trois!

b) Because he was accused of committing sodomy by the clergy and did penance for it.

Roger of Howden reported in 1195 that a hermit came to King Richard and rebuked him for his sins, telling him to remember the destruction of Sodom and abstain from ilicit acts.  Richard dismissed the warnings, but later, struck down by illness, did penance and took to staying in church until the service was over and distributing alms to the poor.  He was also to avoid illicit intercourse and keep his attentions solely on his wife who remained childless.

Again, it's a case of that pesky modern mindset.  Everyone today assumes that 'Sodom' is purely connected to homosexual behaviour and that tells us that most modern people don't read their Old Testament. Biblical references to Sodom are more about the terrible punishment meted out to sinners rather than being explicit about the sort of sin.  It was all about the fall of cities, not homosexuality and anyone hearing such sermons in the Middle Ages would not automatically think that Richard was homosexual because he had been accused of the sins of Sodom.  Rather it would be the notion of general debauchery, which accords with him having an illegitimate son called Philip of Cognac, and of being accused to meddling with the wives and daughters of his vassals in Aquitaine.  Roger of  Howden accuses him of  carrying off his vassals' 'wives, daughters and kinswomen by force and making them his concubines; when he had sated his own lust on them, he handed them down for his own men to enjoy.'  One chronicler accuses Richard of consorting with whores on his deathbed.

c) Because he and his wife Berengaria of Navarre didn't have any children

No one knows the reason for this - although if he was warned to keep to her bed, perhaps a political marriage was not one of personal attraction. It is no proof either way.

3. He was a war monger.

Why?

Because he was always fighting and went on crusade where he slaughtered 3,000 Muslim hostages.  He lived for war.

There is no denying that Richard excelled in the arena of war and that it was his particular skill.

 The slaughter of hostages is always terrible and reprehensible on the human scale, and that particular massacre at the siege of Acre has gone down as a red stain against Richard's reputation in history. Whatever the military circumstances, and even acknowledging medieval mindset, it is hard not to judge here.  The most neutral that can be said was that Richard needed to move on, Saladin was pretending to negotiate for the hostages while procrastinating, and Richard took a commander's decision to remove the obstacle from the field rather than let Saladin get the better of him.  It appears to have been an act of cold, political and military neutrality rather than done in hate. Today it would certainly be a war crime. In his own period the slaughter was greeted by the Christian chroniclers with either approval or a shrugged neutrality. Saladin got the blame for being intractable and the chroniclers said it was his fault for not doing a deal.  The Muslims reacted to the slaughter of their people with anger and swore revenge and to do similar in retaliation. Pretty much medieval warfare business as usual.  Which is not to exonerate, but to put in context.

Being a good warrior was an excellent defining trait for a medieval king.  A medieval monarch was  expected to be able to fight and to command successfully and this was Richard's particular skill.   A perceived lack of such skills might lead to one being called 'Softsword' as in the case of King John. As an aside,  Richard was given the Sobriquet 'Lionheart' when he was just 19 years old.

4. He was a traitor to his father

Why?

Henry II: A contemporary portrait
by Gerald of Wales

Because he was influenced by his mother and her jealousy (over Rosamund de Clifford)  and dissatisfaction and went to war against his father because of that, basically stabbing him in the back.

Henry II was a micro-manager who had his hands firmly gripping the reins of power, so firmly that he found it very difficult to delegate.  To ensure the succession was secure he had his eldest surviving son, also named Henry, anointed and crowned when he was 15 years old. Richard, the next son was to have his mother's lands of Aquitaine and Geoffrey the third son was to have Brittany.  John, happening along 9 years after Richard was born, was a problem when it came to finding him land unless he married a wealthy heiress or had estates carved out of his brothers' inheritances.  His father's first effort to do this and give John castles (belonging to Henry the Young King)  as part of a marriage negotiation with the father of little Alice de Maurienne, resulted in the first rebellion of Henry's sons against him - that and going over Eleanor's head by having the Count of Toulouse swear for Aquitaine to him, not to Eleanor and Richard. Since Henry did not have sovereignty over Aquitaine, this was an act of gross provocation to Eleanor its Duchess, and Richard her successor. There is no evidence whatsoever that Eleanor was in a jealous fluff over Henry's mistress Rosamund (who doesn't get mentioned in the chronicles until after Eleanor's imprisonment). An astute, political queen, Eleanor would not have been concerned over one of her husband's many affairs, and this one with a teenage girl from the Welsh Marches).

Later, during a second rebellion by Henry the Young King over his father's refusal to give him any sort of power, and more squabbles over castle tenures, the Young King died from dysentry in the field. Redistributing the inheritance, Henry II then tried to remove Aquitaine from  Richard and give it to his youngest son John.  Aquitaine, which Richard had been ruling and controlling for 10 years and in which Henry's only concern was as the husband of its Duchess. For Richard to hand it over to the teenage John (with Henry manipulating the puppet strings) was a step too far.  He was bound to rebel - and climb into bed with Philip of France - see point 2!

So there you have it. As always people will make up their own minds - hopefully taking into account medieval mindset,  but I hope I have given at least some food for thought in the above post.  All history is a form of archaeology and the more one digs, the more layers one discovers and the more one can evaluate the story. How much you know, will always influence your understanding.

Sources:
Richard I by John Gillingham - Yale English Monarchs Series  Yale University Press

Richard Coeur de Lion in History and Myth edited by Janet L. Nelson - King's College London Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies

The Angevin Empire second edition by John Gillingham published by Arnold

The History of William Marshal - Holden, Gregory and Crouch published by the Anglo Norman Text Society

Online - British Library online catalogue of illuminated manuscripts http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/welcome.htm

The Annals of Roger de Hovedon 

 https://archive.org/stream/annalsofrogerde02hove#page/64/mode/2up

Elizabeth Chadwick is a bestselling historical novelist.  Her most recent novels are a trilogy about Eleanor of Aquitaine and she is currently writing about the great William Marshal's missing years in the Holy Land. 

A woman, a dog, and a walnut tree.. by Leslie Wilson

This advertisement appeared in 1903, and I hope that to all my readers it will seem as shocking as to myself. What is equally shocking is that in fact it contains the essence of the abuser's mind-set; the attempt to clear his (less often) her conscience (it won't stop the abuse recurring), and that Pat's equivalent is alive and well and maybe living just down the road from any of us, or even next door.
But here, it's a joke. It's even considered a good way to sell butter.

 What has often struck me, in reading the fiction of the quite recent past, is the extent to which domestic violence is normalised or trivialised. 'Your tantrums may do very well at home,' says the Earl of Worth to Judith Taverner in Georgette Heyer's 'Regency Buck,' 'but they arouse in me nothing more than a desire to beat you soundly. And that, Miss Taverner, if ever I do marry you, is precisely what I shall do.' And how can we believe that he won't? Since he starts his acquaintance with the heroine by forcing a kiss on her, it's quite clear that he hasn't much sense of her boundaries.
Of course, domestic violence wasn't frowned on in the Regency period, but Heyer wrote the novel in 1935, when one would like to think it was regarded with more loathing. But maybe not. And it's odd how the examples I'm thinking of all come in 'feel-good' novels, that one would read for amusement, possibly while eating chocolates.
Take 'Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day,' Winifred Watson's charming mille-feuille of a novel. Here Miss La Fosse's Michael appears on the scene and begins by shaking his adored soundly. Oh, yes, Miss Pettigrew persuades herself that Michael 'would never really hurt Miss La Fosse,' and that 'Miss La Fosse had done to the young man something meriting anger, for which she had no excuse..The punishment then was only just.' Miss Pettigrew then goes on to justify the assault by comparing it to smacking children. Clearly in those days attitudes to smacking children were very different, but: an adult woman is not a child. 'Do I look like a wife-beater?' Michael later demands of Miss Pettigrew, who, already infatuated, gasps: 'Certainly not.' And of course, she's right. Wife-beaters don't have it tattooed round their foreheads. It'd make it easier for the rest of us if they did.

Martin van Maele: Histoire comique de Francion

Just to drive the point home, Michael later says of his love: 'obviously she needs a little physical correction, but I'm the only right man to do it.' It makes me think of Max Frisch's fire-raisers, stacking up paraffin and kindling round the house while the householder refuses to believe there's anything dangerous going on.
Later, he wins her love by punching another lover down, which is what not a few Georgette Heyer heroines do, too. A violent man is good husband material, is the nasty message.
Then there's the attitude to rape. 'A nice rape,' is what Albert Campion once suggests would be therapeutic for a woman. At least his wife protests, but almost casually; one wonders if it's really rape he's talking about, but I do think of Freud's belief that 'penis normalis' was the cure for all ills.
In 'The Pursuit of Love,' when Fanny bids Linda farewell on her journey to the South of France, Linda says: 'I do feel so terrified - think of sleeping in the train, all alone.'
'Perhaps you won't be alone,' I said. 'Foreigners are greatly given, I believe, to rape.'
To which Linda replies: 'Yes, that would be nice.'
And thus rape, like Worth's desire to beat Judith, is presented to us as something exotic, something a woman really wants, and really enjoys.
This is not to say that all authors of the past trivialise abuse.In 'The Making of a Marchioness', Frances Hodgson Burnett has one of her characters say of Mrs Osborne: 'That little woman.. lives every day through twenty-four hours of hell. One can see it in her eyes even when she professes to smile at the brute for decency's sake. The awfulness of a woman's forced smile at the devil she is tied to, loathing him..'
And then, of course, there's Morel's beating of his wife in 'Sons and Lovers,' where Lawrence eloquently describes the mother's psychological processes. Or are they hers? In the end, the story is about the effect on Paul of his father's violence. Paul is later described as incapable of violence towards his own women, and yet he himself does a nice job of emotional abuse on his first love, Miriam. And oddly, Lawrence seems to feel that Morel and his wife had a vital, nourishing relationship in spite of the violence, and blames Mrs Morel for it. As the abuser always does.
It's estimated that one in four women will experience violence in a relationship in her life. That's not the same as saying that one in four men is violent, but it's a terrifying statistic. The police receive about two calls a minute about domestic violence. Most of these will never lead to prosecution, still less successful prosecution, because the crime is committed far away from witnesses, and even if there's injury, it's only one person's word against another's.
It's now thought that abusers are not men who themselves have been abused, but who have seen their mothers abused in childhood, have had it role-modelled for them, in fact (though some people will decide that abuse ends with them). But there is a direct line between the people who in 1903 thought two black eyes was a good way to sell butter, and the man who assaults his wife 114 years later. Like the anti-Semitism which also lurks in 'Miss Pettigrew', we need to be aware of these things, though. They are past a joke.