by Douglas Boyd
Meanwhile, Henry had been bending the spirit of the crusading oath: that those who had taken the Cross be as brothers to one another. In the summer of 1188 he commanded an army of English and Welsh mercenaries in alliance with Richard’s force of Gascons and Basques in the old game of tit-for-tat in central France. In November 1188 Philip called a conference at which he proposed a long-term peace on condition that Henry II marry Princess Alais to Richard and declare him the legal successor to the dual realm. When Henry did not agree, Richard knelt in homage before Philip Augustus for Normandy, Anjou and all the other lands on French soil held in fief by Henry.4
Henry was now 55 – a fair age for the time and, in his case, exacerbated by a broken leg that had mended crooked and damage to his vertebrae and severe haemorrhoids resulting from so many years’ hard riding in peace and war that made it extremely painful to sit on a cushion, let alone mount the hard leather saddle of a destrier. Philip rightly pressed home the advantage this gave him as recurring bouts of illness found his principal enemy so enfeebled and lacking in authority as to be unable to compel his vassals’ attendance at his Christmas court that year in Saumur. With hostilities suspended until the end of Lent, Henry attempted and failed to wheedle some concessions from Philip through Cardinal John of Agnani.
The end of Lent 1189 therefore saw hostilities resumed, but with Richard and many of Henry’s vassals having switched allegiance to Philip’s side. When that coalition approached Le Mans, where Henry was holed up with some 700 cavalry, the outlying suburbs were deliberately fired – by which side is unclear – and flames engulfed the whole town. At the last possible moment Henry left the shelter of the walls, his escape with the mounted knights being covered by the rearguard of Welsh foot soldiers. In hot pursuit, Richard neglected to don his armour and overhauled these sacrificed Welshmen at a ford, where he had the good fortune to confront William the Marshal, whose skill and speed of reaction deflected his lance at the last moment, so that it killed Richard’s mount and not the rider. As the fight moved on, William is said to have shouted, ‘Let the devil kill you, for I shall not.’
It might be supposed that the control of a powerful, heavy destrier bearing an armoured knight was partly a matter of luck, but the record of William the Marshal in countless mêlées and under battle conditions proves that it was a question of training and the level of strength, skill and split-second timing one might find today in an Olympic athlete. A vassal of William of Tancarville, William turned the knightly sport of the mêlée into a profession. At his first meeting in 1167, for which he had to borrow a horse because he was too poor to own a destrier, he won a total of nine horses and all their riders’ equipment. Teaming up with another young knight, he became a professional, capturing 103 knights with their horses and equipment in one ten-month season.5 To such a warrior, even in the heat of battle, every move was a precision action.
On 3 July 1199 Tours fell to Philip and Richard’s forces. Next day, Henry’s eldest surviving legitimate son suspected his father of bluffing with talk of illness until he saw approaching the castle of Colomiers-Villandry the frail figure of a man dying from septicaemia and who had to be supported in the saddle. Henry acceded to all Philip’s demands, agreeing to swear allegiance to him, to repay the costs of the campaign and pardon all those who had abandoned him – with one exception. Miming a kiss of peace for Richard, he hissed into his ear, ‘May God let me live to avenge myself on you.’6
He was by then so frail that he had to be borne back to Chinon Castle on a litter, cursing his sons. By the next day it was obvious that he had not long to live, and consented to confession and absolution by the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of Hereford. The final straw came when a list provided by Philip Augustus of the vassals to be pardoned for changing sides was handed to Chancellor Geoffrey the Bastard. In the great rebellion of 1173–74, while bishop-elect of Lincoln, he had proven himself so competent and faithful in his father’s cause that Henry II said, ‘My other sons are the bastards. This one alone has shown himself my true and legitimate son.’ It was now Geoffrey’s duty to read out the list of those who had betrayed him, first of which was Prince John, whom Henry had thought to be the one legitimate son who was loyal.7 His last hours on 6 July 1189 were spent with only his bastard son to console him.8
Because of the hot weather, his wishes to be buried at his favourite abbey of Grandmont in the Limousin were disregarded and the corpse was hurriedly transported before decomposition set in to the nearby abbey of Fontevraud, where Richard stayed beside the bier only for the few minutes it took to assure himself that his father really was dead before heading for the Angevin treasury at Chinon. He found it empty, every last denier having been expended on Henry’s final campaigns. Either then or at another time when the treasury was so depleted he composed a sirventès containing the crystal-clear line: there’s not a penny in Chinon.
His remedy was to fetter hand and foot in a dungeon Étienne de Marçay, his father’s seneschal of Poitou, who was kept there until he disgorged from the profits made in a quarter-century of tax-farming the small fortune of 30,000 Angevin pounds. Meeting William the Marshal for the first time since the encounter at the ford, Richard accused the Marshal of having tried to kill him. William replied coolly that his lance could just as easily have been aimed at the rider, not the mount. The reward for that frankness and William’s loyalty to his father was one promise that did Richard keep, marrying the Marshal to one of the richest heiresses in the Plantagenet Empire, whom he had previously promised to his supporter William of Béthune. Whichever husband was decreed for 20-year-old Countess Isabel of Striguil, it must have come as great relief to her after being held in the Tower of London by Henry as a ward of the Crown for thirteen years, both to prevent her wealth being used against him and to be the bait in a succession of promises that were never fulfilled.
With that, the Marshal was despatched to England, to liberate Queen Eleanor from her fifteen-year imprisonment under Henry. Without awaiting his arrival, that lady of 67, who had been confined as Henry’s prisoner for nearly a quarter of her life and was never, before or afterwards, known for letting grass grow under her feet, liberated herself at the first news of her husband’s death and immediately announced to all and sundry that she was still the crowned queen of England – which was true. On this authority, she took the reins of state into her capable hands, and required:
that every free man in the whole realm swear that he would bear fealty to the Lord Richard, lord of England, the son of the Lord Henry and the lady Eleanor, in life and limb and earthly honour, as his liege lord, against all men and women who might live and die, and that they would be answerable to him and help him keep the peace and justice in all things.9
Her personal tribulations of the past fifteen years prompted her prudently to require the archbishop of Canterbury to witness with her the Anglo-Norman barons’ oaths of loyalty to Richard.
In a general amnesty, those exiled by Henry were pardoned, Eleanor anticipating Magna Carta by pardoning in Richard’s name and releasing several thousand men languishing in gaol under the cruel forest laws ‘for the protection of vert and venison’, although never judged and sentenced. This was the background of anguish and injustice lurking behind the script of every Robin Hood film.10 Illustrating just how oppressive the implementation of Henry’s laws had become in his last years, all those imprisoned by his justiciars but not sentenced by any duly constituted court of law were also released, providing they could supply sureties that they would later present themselves for trial. Not everyone thought this a good thing. William of Newburgh remarked that: ‘The prisons then were heaving with multitudes of guilty men awaiting either trial or punishment, but when (Richard) came to the throne these pests, by his mercy, were released from prison, probably to transgress more confidently in the future.’11 The appointment of justiciars was very important. When the king was in England, the chief justiciar was head of the judiciary. With the king abroad, as Richard inten
ded to be for an unforeseeably long time on crusade, the chief justiciar acted as his regent.
Across the Channel in France, Richard hastened to put Philip right about the new relationship on which they were embarking. Gone was the former intimacy and talk of brotherhood; nor had he any intention of honouring Henry’s undertakings at Villandry. As to the castle of Gisors, in whose shadow they met, he refused to hand that back on the grounds that he would marry Alais after returning from the crusade, on which women were forbidden with the exception of honest washerwomen. Had his word been trustworthy, it would have been a reasonable argument.
At Sées the archbishops of Canterbury and Rouen absolved Richard from the mortal sin of bearing arms against his father while both were bound by their crusader oaths. In the presence of Prince John, he was invested as plenary duke of Normandy on 20 July and the symbolic ducal sword duly belted around his waist. He then bought John’s loyalty – or so he thought – by confirming his possessions in France and England, particularly the Norman county of Mortain. While the king of England had no right to appoint bishops, their half-brother Geoffrey the Bastard was politically neutered by Richard ordering the canons of York to elect him archbishop of that diocese, an office that debarred Geoffrey from any eligibility to wear the crown.12 On 10 August some of the canons obediently elected Geoffrey archbishop. The result was another of the Church v. monarch spats: the dean of York, Hubert Walter, and the bishop of Durham protested that they and many of the canons had not been present to vote aye or nay and therefore contested the appointment by writing to the pope. For once, Queen Eleanor sided with the Church hierarchy, as did Ranulf de Glanville, although in her case, the motivation may simply have been a dislike for all Henry II’s bastards.13
As so often, there was a way out of this maze: Richard now arranged the promotion of Hubert Walter to the see of Salisbury and rewarded Hugh of Le Puiset for withdrawing his objection to the rigged election by settling on his son the post of treasurer of York. No sooner were they out of that maze than Archbishop Geoffrey did a Becket and refused to accept the other recent appointments, for which Richard deprived him of all his lands, both secular and religious, on both sides of the Channel.14 To frustrate permanently Geoffrey’s temporal ambitions, for which he would need to delay consecration, as he had done at Lincoln, Richard first despatched a posse of his household knights to suggest forcibly that it would be a good idea to accede to the king’s wishes. When that did not work, he sent a deputation of bishops and other clergy to Geoffrey’s manor at Southwell, with orders to consecrate him willy-nilly. The deed was duly done by Geoffrey’s own suffragan, Bishop John of Whithorn.15
In Normandy too, Richard had problems with the Church, in the person of Cardinal John of Agnani, who had been Henry’s go-between with Philip Augustus, and who now wished to attend the coming coronation in England. That might seem harmless enough, but in the current expansion of papal power, it could later have been seen as creating a right for papal legates to attend future coronations or even, as in the Holy Roman Empire, to play a part in the selection of English monarchs. So, the worthy cardinal was firmly told that he was persona non grata in England.
After putting his continental possessions in order, on 13 August Richard stepped ashore in Portsmouth and looked out on the country where he had been born, but spent only two brief visits, at Easter 1176 and Christmas 1184. Within forty-eight hours of the landing, he was supervising the weighing of the state treasure, estimated to have a total value of £90,000.16 From this he took 20,000 marks, or just under £14,000, to pay Philip Augustus’ costs in the recent war, settling the debt Henry had agreed to in their final meeting. To this, he added another 4,000 marks to be quit of any claim from Philip.17 He then rode to Westminster to be reunited with the mother he had betrayed when playing the part of Henry’s puppet after the rebellion.
On 29 August he had Prince John married to Isabel of Gloucester, also known as Hawise, riding roughshod over the objections of the archbishop of Canterbury on the grounds of their consanguinity, the bride being a great-granddaughter of Henry I, who was also John’s great-grandfather. The couple’s estates were, however, immediately placed under interdict, pending a dispensation from Rome. To gain the support of the Church on another tack, Richard rescinded Henry’s ordinance that every monastery keep a string of horses ready to service his unpredictable and gruelling progresses throughout the realm. To gain that of the nobility, who resented the way that Henry I and Henry II had diluted their power by creating novi homines or new nobility and elevating their favourites through arranged marriages to heiresses of title, Richard declared all such marriages void.
The Welsh took advantage of the change of English monarch to invade the marches. It was Eleanor who had to curb her son’s impetuous instinct to ride out and drive them back across the border forthwith, riding instead with him to Westminster for the coronation on 3 September. In the absence of any consort – the unfortunate Princess Alais was still languishing in Winchester – Eleanor played the grand role of dowager queen surrounded by her own retinue of ladies- and maids-in-waiting. Led into the cathedral by William the Marshal bearing the gold sceptre beneath a silk canopy borne by four barons in the presence of nineteen archbishops and bishops, thirteen abbots, eleven earls and seventeen barons, Richard walked between bishop Reynald of Bath and Hugh of Le Puiset, the bishop of Durham who had disputed Geoffrey the Bastard’s appointment.
Before the high altar, he prostrated himself and swore the triple oath to keep the Peace of God, to enforce the laws of the realm and to exercise justice and mercy in his judgements. Physically, he was everything that a king should be: tall, bluff, well-built, with a clear gaze from those bright blue eyes. The assembled nobles agreed to accept him as king – they had no choice, but the formality had to be observed. Richard was then disrobed down to his drawers and shirt. The dean of London, Ralph of Diceto, handed to the archbishop of Canterbury the sanctified oil to anoint Richard on hands, chest, shoulders and arms. This done, the chrism – doubly sanctified oil – was used to anoint his head as a token of the sacrament of kingship. Richard was clad in a tunic and long dalmatic robe. He was then girded with the sword of state, two earls affixed golden spurs to his feet and he was crowned by the archbishop and two earls before being invested with the ring, the sceptre and the rod of state. At that point he was at last formally the king of England and, seated on the throne, he listened to the consecrational Mass.
NOTES
1. The title of a bull was simply formed from its first words, in this case translated as ‘having heard the terrible news’.
2. Richard, A., Histoire, Vol 2, p. 243.
3. A. de Sousa Pereira, ‘Silves no itinerário da terceira cruzada: um testemunho teutónico’, Revista militar, 62 (2010), pp. 77–88 at www.revistamilitar.pt/artigopdf.php?art_id=538.
4. Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Henrici II et Ricardi I Benedicti Abbati, known Commonly under the Name of Benedict of Peterborough, ed. W. Stubbs (London: Longmans/HMSO, 1867), Vol 2, p. 50.
5. A. Hyland, The Medieval Warhorse (Consohocken, PA: Combined Books, 1994), p. 88.
6. Gerald of Wales, De Principis Instructione Liber in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. G.F. Warner (London: Eyre, 1894), p. 296.
7. La Vie de Guillaume le Maréchal, ed. P. Mayer (Paris, 1901), p. 327.
8. The events of 1188 and 1189 are covered in greater detail in Boyd, Eleanor, pp. 227–35.
9. Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Henrici, Vol 2, p. 75.
10. Roger of Howden, Chronica, Vol 3, pp. 4, 6.
11. William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum Anglicarum, Vol 1, p. 293.
12. Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Henrici, Vol 2, p. 100.
13. Stubbs, Gervase of Canterbury, Vol 1, p. 457.
14. Roger of Howden, Chronica, Vol 3, p. 17.
15. Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Henrici, Vol 2, p. 88.
16. Pipe Roll 1 Richard I, p. 5.
17. Roger of Howden, Chronica, Vol 3, p. 8.
<
br /> 10
The Enemy Within
Walking out of Westminster Abbey to the celebratory banquet in Westminster Hall, this was a king with no knowledge of, or interest in, the country or the people over whom he ruled, and whose native language he could not speak. The language of the court, the nobility and the growing merchant class was, of course, Anglo-French – a bastard tongue whose speakers sometimes felt they had to apologise to those freshly arrived from France for ‘not speaking proper French’.
One should never speculate what went on in the mind of a historical personage, but in Richard’s case there is no need to. His actions make it plain that the island realm was to him nothing more than a source of wealth to finance his achievement of the great enterprise in which his father had failed, and thus ensure that the name of King Richard I of England would not forever be overshadowed by that of Henry II. Having taken the Cross in November 1187, his overriding priority was to depart on crusade to the Holy Land as soon as the necessary funds could be raised and there make his reputation as the king who recaptured Jerusalem from the Saracen. Among many other factors in his reasoning was a personal tie to Guy de Lusignan, the king of Jerusalem who had so signally failed to out-general Saladin at Hattin. He came from a Poitevin family – troublesome vassals, but vassals nonetheless and therefore arguably under Richard’s feudal protection as count of Poitou.