The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  Back in the Holy Land, Richard’s crusade was going rather well. Despite difficult conditions and his own illness, he had secured Acre and was managing to discomfit Saladin, albeit by some highly unpleasant tactics. In August 1191 he massacred 2,600 Muslim prisoners on a plain outside Acre. Shortly afterwards, the Christians had marched south and taken Jaffa, Jerusalem’s port-town. There were constant lines of communication open with Saladin, and the two leaders were beginning to test one another with diplomatic offers for a peace settlement. These included, most mischievously, an offer from Richard to marry his sister Joan to Saladin’s brother, on the condition that the brother converted to Christianity.

  Amid all this, news filtered through regularly from England. Rumours of John’s plots and sharp practice did not take long to fly east. In early April 1192, at Ascalon, Richard heard that Longchamp had been deposed. This was disturbing, but Richard had already made contingency plans, sending Walter of Coutances, bishop of Lincoln, back to mediate between John and Longchamp, and to play an active role in government as justiciar.

  But at the end of May 1192 Richard received word that was far more disturbing than tales of coups among the regency powers in England. He learned that John was plotting with Philip II. The envoy who brought the news warned of ‘abominable treachery’ and the potential loss of England. Only Eleanor of Aquitaine was holding her son in check. Richard knew from personal experience the damage that could be wrought against the Plantagenet Crown when a prince of the blood allied with the Capetians. After all, he had done just that to his own father.

  From the spring of 1192, Richard realized that time was finally running against his crusade. The kingdom of Jerusalem was only part-won, but the longer he stayed attempting to complete the mission, the greater would be the chance of him returning to find the kingdom of England reduced to rubble by his brother, half-brother, and Philip II. One last campaign season was about to begin. It would have to be his last in Outremer. One last opportunity for glory, one last chance to put Saladin back in his place, and then home, to Aquitaine and Anjou, Normandy and England.

  In the middle of April 1192, the Italian nobleman Conrad of Montferrat received some wonderful news. After a long career spent at war in the Holy Land he was to become king of Jerusalem. His long-running struggle against his chief rival, Guy of Lusignan, was over. Guy was relinquishing the kingdom in exchange for the lordship of Cyprus. Conrad was to be placed at the permanent head of the Christian community in Outremer. When the Western nobles left, he would bear responsibility for pushing on with the war against Saladin. It was a great honour, for which he had long hankered.

  On the night of 28 April, Conrad, still in a celebratory mood, went to supper in Tyre at the home of Philip, bishop of Beauvais. After a convivial evening, Conrad rode home through the city, flanked by a pair of guards. As he turned down a narrow street, he saw two men sitting on either side of the road. As Conrad approached, they stood up and walked to meet him. One of them was holding a letter. Conrad was intrigued but did not dismount. Rather, he stretched down from his horse and reached out to take the letter. As he did so, the man holding the letter drew a knife and stabbed upwards, plunging the blade deep into Conrad’s body. At the same time, the other man leaped onto the back of Conrad’s horse and stabbed him in the side. Conrad slumped dead from his horse. He had been nominal king for less than a fortnight.

  Conrad was murdered by two Assassins sent by the mysterious Rashid ad-Din Sinan, the Old Man of the Mountain – the leader of a violent sect in Syria, who had allied with Saladin against the Christians. The assassination began the end of Richard’s crusade. Richard was immediately rumoured to have sponsored the attack, since he had previously supported Guy of Lusignan. And the politics of kingship in Outremer slumped once more into crisis. Events were moving against Richard, and his military position was deteriorating. A summer march on Jerusalem ended in failure and in fighting. When Saladin destroyed and poisoned all the wells in Judea strategic disagreement raged about whether an attack on Jerusalem was preferable to concentrating on southern Palestine, in order to disrupt Saladin’s links with Egypt. Stalemate beckoned, with Saladin controlling Jerusalem and the Christians the coastal ports. The war was becoming unsupportable on both sides. As Richard wrote to Saladin: ‘you and we together are ruined.’

  There would be one last hurrah. At the end of July, Richard attempted a feint around Acre, hoping to convince Saladin that he had designs on Beirut, in order to relieve military pressure being applied by Saladin in the south. Saladin did not rise to the bait. In Richard’s absence he launched a fierce attack on Jaffa. It was a brilliant success. The walls were mined and sapped with lethal skill, and on 31 July huge sections collapsed in a juddering landslide of stone and dust. The city was sacked by rampaging Saracens. It was a disaster: Jaffa was Jerusalem’s port, and an essential strategic stronghold for Christian maritime superiority.

  But on the night of 31 July, Richard appeared with a small fleet. He had sailed against the wind and in utter desperation. His little flotilla sailed to land, a beacon of knightly crimson. A red awning covered the royal boat. From it waded ashore the red-headed king, his red banner above his party. He led his men towards the town where Muslim flags flew over every quarter, and the streets rang with shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar’. As some of his crew built a beachhead from scavenged wood, Richard led a charge against the town.

  The attack was fearsome and unexpected. Against absurd odds, Richard’s men cleared Jaffa of the Muslim invaders, scattering them with crossbow fire and driving them back inland. A few days later, when the Muslim attackers returned to the devastated city, they were once again repulsed, this time by a hedgehog formation of knights firing crossbows. Once again Richard won a victory which had seemed impossible, cementing his legend in the East in the process.

  But this was the final military engagement of the Third Crusade. The war was becoming unsupportable on both sides. Richard wrote to Saladin warning that if fighting continued much longer ‘you and we together are ruined’. The two sides had nothing more to throw at one another but diplomacy. A three-year truce was finally agreed on Wednesday 2 September 1192. Saladin kept Jerusalem, but agreed to allow a limited number of Christian pilgrims access to the Holy Sepulchre. The Christians kept everything they held between Tyre and Jaffa. The True Cross remained in Saladin’s hands.

  Richard never met Saladin, and he never made his pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He sent a message to the sultan that he would return to conquer again, a challenge that Saladin manfully accepted, writing back that he could think of no king to whom he would sooner lose his empire. But Saladin had less than a year to live, and the two men were never to stage their rematch.

  In October 1192 Richard set sail for Europe. He must have left with great trepidation about what awaited. For all he knew, he might have already been usurped by his brother. Richard left behind the 26-year-old Henry, count of Champagne, to whom both he and Philip II were uncles, as king of Jerusalem. But this was a king with only part of a kingdom. Richard’s crusade had been, by the harshest measure, a failure. But it had succeeded in one aspect: it had created the legend of the Lionheart. Unfortunately, this did not inspire universal admiration.

  At the Emperor’s Pleasure

  In the late spring of 1193, Richard I composed a song. It was a ballad of melancholy and abandonment, of frustration and homesickness. The haunting melody accompanied lyrics written in Occitan. It is known, after its first line, as ‘Ja nus hons pris’. It is a song that would survive more than eight centuries.

  The lyrics of the two most famous verses are:

  Ja nus hons pris ne dira sa raison

  adroitement, se dolantement non;

  Mes par confort puet il fere chancon.

  Moult ai amis, mes povre sont li don;

  honte en avront, se por ma reancon

  sui ces deus yvers pris.

  Ce sevent bien mi homme et mi baron,

  Englois, Normant, Poitevin et Gascon,


  que je n’avoie si povre compaignon,

  cui je laissasse por avoir en prixon.

  Je nei di pas por nule retracon,

  mes encor suit ge pris.

  No man imprisoned tells his story

  rightfully, as if he were not sorrowful;

  but for comfort he can write a song.

  I have many friends, but poor are their gifts;

  shame on them, if for my ransom

  I must be two winters imprisoned.

  It is well known by my men and my barons,

  English, Norman, Poitevin and Gascon,

  that I do not have the poorest companion

  whom I would leave to remain in prison.

  I don’t say this for their reproach,

  but still, I am imprisoned.

  Richard probably wrote this lonely song in the imperial palace of Hagenau – a great fortified hunting lodge on the Moder river. The magnificent building had been built up by Frederick Barbarossa, and was now held by his successor as Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VI. It was filled with precious jewels and the great treasure of the empire. No item that rested there in 1193 was so valuable as Richard the Lionheart.

  Despite his heroics Richard had returned from crusade to find his name had been blackened across Europe. His efforts in the East might have been admirable to those who remained with him until the end, but for many of the allies who had returned before him, Richard was ripe for a fall. He had rejected the French king’s sister in humiliating circumstances. He had deposed the ruler of Cyprus, who was related to several other important European nobles. He had refused the spoils of war to men like Leopold of Austria, having had the ducal flag torn down during the sack of Acre. It was widely rumoured that he had sponsored the murder of Conrad of Montferrat, who was killed in Tyre by assassins in April 1192. Almost every major prince in western Europe had incubated some reason to hate him, and as he returned from Outremer the previous autumn, it had become clear to him that there were few safe territories in which the king of England could now travel.

  Richard’s journey back from the Holy Land had therefore followed a very different course to his outward travels. He had made first for Corfu, where he learned that his enemies were gathering against him. They had cut off virtually every sea route and landing point between northern Italy and the southern tip of Iberia. Almost every path back to Plantagenet lands meant heading through hostile territory.

  With the November seas turning rough, Richard and a handful of trusted lieutenants hired galleys and headed north. In the rough autumn seas they were shipwrecked off the coast of Istria, in the Adriatic. A long land route home through central Europe and on via the territories of his brother-in-law Henry the Lion, in north-east Germany, beckoned. Almost every step of the way would take them through hostile territory. The small party disguised themselves as pilgrims and set out on foot. But the most famous crusader king in Europe could not travel unrecognized. Three days into the journey, fifty miles away from Vienna, they were spotted and denounced. Richard was arrested and delivered as a prisoner to Leopold, duke of Austria. In February 1193 Leopold sold him to Emperor Henry VI.

  And with Henry VI he stayed. As he sat trapped in the emperor’s court, Richard was treated with caution but not cruelty. The rules of aristocratic decency allowed for house arrest, rather than throwing ruling kings into dungeons. Richard was a crusader, and his imprisonment was technically forbidden by the pope – a point that Plantagenet diplomats made in furious terms at Rome. Starving him to death in a damp cell would have drawn down anathema and opprobrium. But Richard was imprisoned nonetheless, as surely as his mother had been by his father; and as surely as his great-uncle Robert Curthose had been under his grandfather, Henry I. It would have played constantly on his mind that Eleanor had been a prisoner for fifteen years, and Curthose had died a prisoner, after three decades’ incarceration. How long would Richard be imprisoned? No one in Europe could say.

  Back in England, the man for whom Richard’s imprisonment meant most was his brother John. The count wanted nothing more than to see his brother Richard kept for ever in an imperial or a French prison. It gave him a free run at the Crown of England. And John, as ambitious and ruthless as any Plantagenet before him, needed no prompting to try and seize a throne.

  In January 1193 John did homage to Philip II in Paris for the bulk of the Plantagenet dominions, and agreed to marry his brother’s spurned bride, Alice. Then he went back to England and attempted to raise rebellion.

  Fortunately for Richard and for England, there were more sensible heads in a country used to coping with an absent king. Eleanor of Aquitaine and Walter of Coutances manned the coastal defences, newly threatened by sea from Flanders, that Philip had rushed so enthusiastically back from crusade to claim. William the Lion, king of Scotland, mindful both of an absent crusader’s plight and Richard’s generosity to him in 1189, refused to rise. Hubert Walter, Richard’s companion on crusade, who was elected archbishop of Canterbury after Richard sent a request from captivity in March, presided over a great council at which it was generally recognized that the king was alive, but in grave need of assistance.

  As his allies in England performed heroics, Richard too attacked the politics of imprisonment with kingly aplomb. In March he was put on trial by the emperor. He spoke to the assembled magnates and courtiers with such magnificence, dignity, eloquence and grace that he moved many to tears, and won many friends among the local nobility. William the Breton wrote that Richard ‘spoke so eloquently and regally, in so lionhearted a manner, it was as though he were seated on an ancestral throne at Lincoln or Caen’. When Philip II tried to have him transferred to the French court, Richard consulted the rebellious nobles of the Rhineland, who bordered the Holy Roman Empire and the French kingdom, reconciled them to the empire and kept himself at the imperial court by the cunning of his diplomacy. Although reports reached him that Philip’s forces were overrunning Normandy, taking the great castle at Gisors and besieging the ducal capital of Rouen, he did not panic, but sent reassurances to his supporters in England, maintaining the vital impression that release was not far away.

  But release was an expensive ambition, and one that would strain the Plantagenet empire to the limit. Already recently hard-pressed by the demands made to fund the crusade, Richard’s dominions were now subject to a brutal 25 per cent tax on income and movables. The great nobles were to contribute personally to the king’s ransom. Monasteries and churches around England learned to beware the tramp of royal servants as they approached to demand wool crops and valuable plate. As the chronicler Ralph de Diceto recorded:

  the greater churches came up with treasures hoarded from the distant past, and the parishes with their silver chalices … Archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, earls and barons [contributed] a quarter of their annual income; the Cistercian monks and Premonstratensian canons their whole year’s wool crop, and clerics living on tithes one-tenth of their income.

  The pockets of the Church and the greater subjects alike were ruthlessly tapped, under the watchful eye of Eleanor and the royal justiciars. It was testimony to the value placed on the legitimate kingship of a proven warrior that Richard’s kingdom rallied to fund his extortionate ransom, while all but ignoring his brother John’s increasingly unbecoming attempts to snatch illicit power for himself.

  But even with such a mighty effort, it took more than six months to raise Richard’s ransom. Throughout the autumn, he languished at the emperor’s pleasure, while the legends of the captive Lionheart spread throughout Europe. Years later, tall tales would circulate of Richard’s favourite minstrel, Blondel, walking the Continent in search of his master, finally recognizing his prison cell from afar when he heard the refrain of a song the two of them had composed together. This story was the product of a later age. But Richard does seem to have kept his spirits high in captivity, appearing bright and cheerful to his visiting diplomats, even as his treacherous brother strove to seize his kingdom.

  On 4
February 1194 Richard was released. He paid 100,000 marks for his freedom, gave hostages as guarentee for 50,000 more, and was persuaded by his mother to submit to a piece of ungentlemanly brinkmanship from Henry VI, who, late in negotiations demanded Richard release the English Crown to the emperor and then have it granted back as a vassal of the empire. It was a wild price to pay: a true king’s ransom. But it meant freedom at last, after a year and six weeks in captivity. His empire was fraying at the edges, but it had waited for him. According to the chronicler Roger of Howden, Philip II wrote urgently to John to tell him the news. ‘Look to yourself,’ wrote the king, ‘the devil is loose.’

  Richard landed in Sandwich on 20 March having been away for nearly four years. Three days later, wrote Ralph de Diceto, ‘to the great acclaim of both clergy and people, he was received in procession through the decorated city [of London] into the church of St Paul’s’. It was a joyful homecoming. But Richard could not afford to linger over grand welcomes. He had plenty of work to do.