Berengaria of Navarre in history and in DeMille’s 1935 film “The Crusaders”

Hollywood diva Loretta Young as the English queen Berengaria of Navarre in the 1935 film The Crusaders. Berengaria is the only English queen who never set foot on English soil. It is held, however, that she may after all have visited England, but only after the death of her husband, Richard the Lionheart. Like many medieval queens, Berengaria is poorly represented in the chronicles, and little is known of her life: for instance, whether their eight-year marriage to Richard was ever in the end consummated, given that they met a bare handful of times, probably no more than ten. Having married during the crusade, the Lionheart went on fighting after the wedding. In Cecil B. DeMille's film this aspect is played up in a bedroom scene: the headstrong Berengaria refuses her husband her bed and even prepares to swing a sword at him, when suddenly the horns sound, summoning the king to battle, and the newlyweds part. The thirty-odd years that remained to her Berengaria lived as a widow, almost without rights and in constant want.