Jean Flori says Henry II was a paedophile: is he justified?

[syntinen_laulu]

A few days ago I took his Richard the Lionheart: King and Knight  out of my university library. I confess so far I have only been able to skim it, but my attention was caught by his unqualified characterisation of Henry as a “paedophile” on the basis of his alleged relationship with Alys of France.

Flori says:

Comments

[empressith]

That.

[silverwhistle]

No. This is simply bad (possibly deliberately bad?) translation. There is nothing to indicate she was a child.

Also, mediæval people did not approve of sex with sexually immature children: see Choniates's disapproval of Andronikos's consummation of his marriage with Alice's half-sister Agnes. Even if a marriage was contracted early, consummation was generally delayed until physical maturity - the dangers were too obvious.

[syntinen_laulu]

Flori might - just might - have had a case if he had argued that in the normal course of events the marriage of Alys and Richard would have been celebrated (though, as you say, not necessarily consummated) as soon as she turned 12, and alleged that the only reason Henry could have had for not doing that was that he was already doing her, or at least had made up his mind to. But he doesn't make that argument; instead he just doctors the witten sources.

This allegation on its own wouldn't make me think Flori was a pervert: just a sensationalist. But the sheer creepiness of the Stephen footnote and the suggestion about the 8-to-11-year-old Isabella marrying for love, make me really think there's something unhealthy about him. And certainly a bad historian; I wouldn't trust any statement he made as far as I could fold it into a paper plane and throw it.

[gilda_elise]

There seems to be a lot of this going around. As cepblionhearth notes, some "historians" are applying modern day morals to the Middle Ages. The same thing was done by Michael Hicks to Richard III, accusing Richard of incest because of his marriage to Anne Nevill (and possibly pedophilia.) Oddly enough, he didn't make the same charge against Richard's brother, George, even though he married Anne's sister.

[criccieth]

yes, well - Hicks. Need any more be said? I mean yes, if I remember the age gap between Richard and Anne was slightly less than that between George and Isabelle, but you're still only talking four years or thereabouts, and she wasn't a child by the mores of the day

[silverwhistle]

As far as the OP goes - yes it does sound like present-judging-the-past.

No - it's just entirely gratuitous sensationalism. The primary sources say nothing about her age at the time of this alleged seduction The language used does not indicate that she was not an adult. This is either Flori or his translator deciding to spice things up.

[syntinen_laulu]

I think it has to be Flori. He does quite clearly call Henry a paedophile and contrasts him with Richard, who he reckons was a bisexual lecher but at least "not a paedophile like his father". There's no way the translator could have introduced that theme if it wasn't in Flori's text.

[curtana]

There is a really bad OCRed version of De instructione principum Book III here. If someone with more time than me wants to plow through Latin full of typos (well, OCR-os) - I guess, based on a hasty look, that it's the passage on p. 91 of that edition, as that's definitely something to do with the King of France's sister and the various attempts to marry her to one or another of Henry's sons, but there could also be some other passage elsewhere...

[silverwhistle]

It's possible to view it as the proper PDF.
All it does is refer to her as "that virgin, the daughter of his lord". There is no indication that she was not an adult.

I must admit to being sceptical about the whole story. Henry was many things, but not stupid: to have bonked Alys would have prevented her marriage to any of his sons on grounds of affinity. However, the story gave Richard a great excuse to dump her in favour of pursuing his southern alliance with Navarre.

[silverwhistle]

Just how creepy is it to invent the idea of an eleven-year-old girl “marrying for love”?

Especially when she was betrothed at 8!

I think Flori has some very weird hang-ups!

[silverwhistle]

In the thirteenth century, the Minstrel of Rheims was familiar with the main lines of the story

And who in their right mind takes anything the Minstrel of Reims says seriously? He invented the Blondel legend and makes a total balls-up of the Third Crusade.