History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 7/10 · Translated from French

• Accuracy: Grounded in the real Artois inheritance dispute and the diplomatic origins of the Hundred Years War, with invented dialogue and some compressed timelines.
• Readability: Brisk and theatrical, like the earlier volumes, though the cast is now enormous.
• Plot: Robert of Artois forges his way toward an inheritance, is exposed and exiled, and takes his revenge by urging England’s king to claim the French crown.

The Lily and the Lion was long the final volume of The Accursed Kings, until Druon added a seventh in 1977. It brings the story of the Capetian curse to its most consequential point: the start of the Hundred Years War.

Its central figure is Robert of Artois, a giant of a man with enormous appetites, who has spent the series trying to recover the county of Artois from his aunt Mahaut. Here he goes too far, producing forged documents to support his claim. Exposed, he is disgraced and flees to England, where he finds a young, ambitious king, Edward III, and encourages him to press his claim to France.

Druon makes the argument that a family quarrel over a province, combined with one man’s vanity, helped set off a war lasting more than a century. It is an overstatement, but a thrilling one, and the book dramatises it well.

Robert is the best character in the whole series, and this volume gives him his fullest treatment: bullying, funny, cunning and self-destructive. Mahaut, his equally formidable adversary, matches him.

The weakness is sprawl. By this point there are dozens of characters and dynastic connections, and newcomers will be lost. The pace is slower than in the early books, and some chapters exist mainly to connect historical dots.

The 7 reflects a strong conclusion to the original sequence rather than a standalone novel. Readers who have come this far will be satisfied; those who haven’t should start with The Iron King.