Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  In the French capital Philip continued to drip poison into Richard’s ear, revealing Henry’s full duplicity on the subject of Alice and John and his ultimate scheme to disinherit him (Richard). He also found Richard personally to his liking, probably not as much as he had relished the more charming Geoffrey but enough so that Roger of Howden reported: ‘Philip so honoured him that every day they ate from the same dish, and at night the bed did not separate them. Between the two of them there grew up so great an affection that King Henry was much alarmed and, afraid of what the future might hold in store, he decided to postpone his return to England until he knew what lay behind this sudden friendship. ’56 The closeness between the two men has seduced the unwary into imagining that a homosexual affair is indicated, but this is a hopelessly anachronistic reading. Two men sharing a bed would have a clear sexual meaning in the twentieth century but, taken on its own, it meant little in the twelfth century; to take the example nearest at hand, Henry II and William Marshal also did likewise, and the heterosexual credentials of Henry are unimpeachable. Even kisses were more commonly used in this epoch as signs of peace or friendship rather than of Eros.57 Other evidence of a ‘homoerotic’ Richard is also vulnerable to the anachronistic fallacy. Incautious observers have sometimes tried to turn his later coronation ceremony, from which women were excluded, as an example of ‘misogynism’ but women were regularly excluded from such bachelor parties; medieval warriors, like the Achaeans in the Iliad, liked their women to dine separately.58

  Nevertheless, the persistent canard that Richard was homosexual will not go away and is not so easy to dispose of on other grounds.59 There is the mysterious incident when a hermit rebuked him in 1195 in the following words: ‘Remember the judgement of Sodom and abstain from illicit acts, for if you do not, God will punish you in a fitting manner.’ But it is quite possible, as the great Lionheart scholar John Gillingham has argued, that ‘Sodom’ could denote general sinfulness rather than homosexuality.60 In general, twentieth-century writers on Richard have been too inclined to take the a priori method pioneered by the explorer and Arabian Nights translator Sir Richard Burton in the nineteenth century, whereby any notable historical figure not producing an heir must be assumed to be homosexual - but it should be emphasised that this is not a purely modern fault.61 Medieval chroniclers regarded homosexuality as ‘unnatural’ and were keen to pounce on anyone they suspected of being guilty of this ‘ungodly’ vice. Richard’s case seems to be that of the ‘dog that barked in the night’, in that if there had been a bark one of the chroniclers would have recorded it. Yet his failure to produce an heir does seem puzzling. Was he infertile? Was his wife barren? Was he asexual or sexually neuter? Or was he lowly-sexed or uninterested in marriage? Perhaps, as some have suggested, he was eventually bullied into marriage by Eleanor of Aquitaine? Overall, the consensus of opinion is fixing on the idea that his wife Berengaria was barren, but because she did not remarry after his death this thesis is unverifiable.62

  Besides, in the Middle Ages there were simply too many stories about Richard’s alleged extramarital exploits current for the idea of a homosexual Richard to make sense. The evidence varies in levels of credibility. When Richard’s subjects in Aquitaine were groaning under his strict rule, they alleged about him that ‘he was evil to all men, to his own men worse, and to himself worst of all; he carried off the wives, daughters and kinswomen of his freemen by force and made them his concubines; and when he had sated his lust on them he handed them over to his knights for whoring.’63 This is standard atrocity propaganda of the kind routinely produced against real or imaginary oppressors; given that Richard employed mercenaries in his wars against the Aquitaine rebels, we can well believe there were high levels of rape, but to make Richard personally responsible for them and in the forefront of promiscuous lechery strains belief. But he certainly had one acknowledged bastard, named Philip, born in the pre-1189 period who is said to have become lord of Cognac in later life. There are also rumours of another son called Fulk, allegedly born to a woman called Jeanne de St Pol, and indeed one of these illegimate sons features in Shakespeare’s King John.64 A thirteenth-century tale relates that Richard was consumed with lust for a nun of Fontevraud, and threatened to burn the abbey down if he could not have her. According to the Dominican friar Stephen of Bourbon, who told the story, the nun in question, hearing that it was her eyes that had so bedazzled Richard, cut them out and said: ‘Send the king what he so much desires.’65 Such lore would never have accumulated around a known homosexual. And the widowed Berengaria would not have exhibited such grief that she seemed, according to Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, close to total nervous and mental collapse, if she had been lamenting a sham marriage to a sodomite.66

  The likelihood is that Richard, as ever, occupied a middle position on the spectrum of the Devil’s Brood. Neither as uxorious as the Young King nor as prone to womanising as his father, he nonetheless contrasted strongly with John, who really was a priapic satyr. ‘Not a woman was spared if he was seized by the desire to defile her in the heat of his lust’, was one contemporary judgement.67 John cared not if he was dealing with noblewomen or even the wives of his own friends and comrades. When young he lusted after the wife of Sir Eustace de Vesci and made it a mafia-like point of ‘honour’ that he be allowed to have her. Eustace cunningly pretended to agree to be cuckolded but substituted a whore for his wife; when the foolish John boasted next day about the wife’s prowess in bed, Eustace could not resist telling him the truth.68 Angered by this further slur on his ‘honour’, John made powerful threats against de Vesci, who promptly fled from court with his wife. He lived to be a powerful enemy, one John later regretted having crossed. Even more promiscuous than his father, John sired at least seven bastards as against his father’s known three, though for obvious reasons an exact tally in such cases is impossible. Nonetheless, even John could not match the twenty-one bastards notched up by his great-grandfather Henry I, which allows some historians to claim that he was not beyond the bounds of the normal for a medieval prince.69 We certainly know more about both his mistresses and his illegitimate offspring than we do in the case of Richard. The wife of Henry Pinel, Clementia, Suzanne, Hawise, countess of Aumale, and a fair unknown to whom he sent a chaplet of roses from his justiciar’s garden in 1212, give him a more clear-cut sexual profile than his brother’s, and in many ways we know more about John’s private life than Richard’s, including the names of six of his bastards: Geoffrey, Richard, Oliver, Richard, Osbert and Joan.70

  Although he lacked his brother’s military genius he had wider interests. He had more administrative ability, a greater sense of the art of the possible, was more cunning and devious. In time he also turned himself into an above average general. Infinitely more complex than Richard, who often seems one-dimensional in his obsession with martial prowess, John was in many ways a psychological oddity. The alternating bursts of frenetic energy and lethargy suggest a manic-depressive tendency towards ‘bipolar affective disorder’ or cyclothymia.71 Yet one should not exaggerate John’s unique qualities. Although he was well known to imitate his father by biting and gnawing his fingers in rage, or even set fire to the houses of men who had offended him, this was a general, shared Angevin characteristic. Even Richard had a reputation for violent, uncontrolled fits of temper, and there was the later, probably apocryphal story, that he had killed the brother of the duke of Austria with a chessboard after a trivial quarrel when they were both being brought up in Louis VII’s court.72 It may be that even his father towards the end sometimes lost patience with John in this regard. Such at least is the import of Gerald of Wales’s story that in Winchester Castle Henry had a chamber hung with paintings but left one space blank until one day he filled it with a design of his own imagining. ‘There was an eagle painted, and the four young ones of the eagle perched upon it, one on each wing and a third upon its back tearing at the parent with talons and beaks, and the fourth, no smaller than the others, sitting upon its neck and awaiting
the moment to peck out its parent’s eyes. When some of the king’s close friends asked him the meaning of the picture, he said. “The four young ones of the eagle are my four sons, who will not cease persecuting me even unto death. And the youngest, whom I now embrace with such tender affection, will someday afflict me more grievously and perilously than all the others.” ’73

  Yet in the critical years of 1187-89, when Henry contended both with Philip Augustus and Richard, John scarcely appears in the official record, except as a pawn in Henry’s elaborate guess-the-successor game. In the summer of 1187 Henry sent a swathe of envoys to Paris to ask Richard to return to him, but persuading him was an uphill task. At first Richard showed his contempt by pretending to comply and then suddenly swooping down on the castle of Chinon and carrying off the large amount of silver coin in the treasury there, for use in a rearmament programme in Aquitaine. When Henry continued to importune him, to the point where there was virtually a messenger a day arriving at Philip’s court, Richard at last sensed he had played this particular game long enough, so went to Angers and swore yet another of the ‘eternal’ oaths of homage and fealty to his father - this was at least the sixth time he had so sworn.74 Yet if Henry thought he had solved the problem of his eldest son, events soon conspired to disabuse him. On 4 July 1187 in the Holy Land the new Muslim conqueror Saladin utterly defeated the new king of Jerusalem and occupied the Holy City. The Christian kingdom of ‘Outremer’ - the land beyond the sea - was in imminent danger of extinction. That autumn, at Tours, not long after the reconciliation at Angers, Richard took the Cross without informing his father or his new friend Philip - he was the first western ruler to do so.75 Bertran de Born saw distinct possibilities for his war of all against all project in the Third Crusade now being proclaimed throughout Europe and said of Richard: ‘He who is count and duke and will be king has stepped forward, and by that his worth is doubled.’76 But both Henry and Philip were stunned. Henry shut himself away for days and would see no one, while Philip angrily reflected that if Richard departed for the Holy Land, the entire contretemps over Alice would continue; how could his sister be brought to marry a man who was away on crusade?77 The whole Franco-Angevin vendetta was now to acquire a totally different colouring as the cause of Christianity versus the infidel absorbed universal attention in Western Europe.

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  FULLY TO MAKE SENSE of the era 1187-93 in Richard’s life, and especially the years after 1189, we have to turn aside from the running conflict between France and the Angevin empire to examine the labyrinthine complexity of Middle Eastern politics in the same epoch. The most militarily successful of all the Crusades, the first, saw Christian and Norman princelings established in what later became known as Outremer - the Christian lands beyond the sea. The great Prince Bohemond established himself in Antioch, and Godfrey of Bouillon stormed Jerusalem in 1098 and massacred thousands of Muslim defenders. To achieve security, the new princelings had to conquer all the coastal cities of Palestine, to ensure seaborne communications with Europe, and then to conquer Galilee to safeguard the frontier with the Muslim state of Syria, based on Damascus.1 From the mid-twelfth century onwards, the ‘Franks’, as the Christians were habitually termed by their Muslim enemies, also expanded into southern Palestine and established famous fortresses like Krak. The conquest of Tyre in 1124 was particularly important, as it deprived the Egyptian fleet (the Egyptians were the natural enemies of Outremer) of watering facilities north of Ascalon.2 By 1131 the Crusader kingdom comprised most of Palestine and the coast of Syria, both the inland cities of Jerusalem, Tiberias, Antioch and Edessa and the coastal cities of Latakia, Tortisa, Tripoli, Beirut, Tyre, Acre, Caesarea, Haifa, Jaffa and Ascalon. The largest cities were Jerusalem and Acre, with a population of about 25,000 each out of a total for the entire kingdom of Jerusalem of some 250,000. Two points are salient. By and large the crusader kingdoms and provinces were ruled by the younger sons of minor European aristocratic households, for the motivation to go on crusade was remarkably similar to the motives for the conquistadores four hundred years later as described by Bernal Diaz: ‘to serve God and to become rich’. Yet the crusaders could never have enjoyed the success of the First Crusade or the halcyon period of colonisation thereafter but for the weakness of the Fatimid regime and the general paralysis in the Muslim world caused by the doctrinal and ideological warfare between Sunni and Shia factions.3

  The crusader states benefited from two great advantages. In the first place were the famous crusader castles that so bewitched T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia).4 Including walled cities, there were more than fifty of these. Although their military role has been overplayed - they could not stop invaders, for example, and their purely strategic importance was largely over by 1140 - they were important both administratively and economically. Administratively they formed the heartland of Outremer and were often the focus for settlement and colonisation projects, while economically they provided the force that allowed castellans to extract a surplus from the working population locally. It is difficult to separate civic and military or public and private aspects of the castles, but in purely military terms it can be said they usually performed a negative rather than positive function: they allowed Christians to counter-attack Muslim forces sortieing on raids from their own strongholds and they afforded a base providing water, supplies and - in case of defeat - protection; it was always wise to encounter an enemy near a friendly fortress.5 Finally, the best of the castles had a symbolic importance in that they betokened the indestructibility of Outremer. The great showpiece castle, supposedly impregnable, was Krak des Chevaliers (Hisn al-Akrad) in Syria.6 Here successive obstacles of fosse, outer and inner walls and three great towers acting as redoubts, formed an overlapping system of defence. The inner defences were much higher than the outer yet were close to them so that an enemy could be simultaneously engaged from both positions, while round towers, closely spaced at intervals from both lines of the wall, provided security from the flank. So formidable was Krak des Chevaliers that Saladin himself took one look at it and decided not even to try to besiege it.7 The other ‘secret weapon’ of the kingdom of Jerusalem was the two knightly orders that protected it: the Templars and the Hospitallers. The Hospitallers had developed from the hospices attached to a Benedictine monastery in Jerusalem in 1071, while the Templars were founded around 1119 to defend pilgrims travelling to the Holy Sepulchre. Having received papal recognition, the two orders added military roles to their functions, so that by the time of the Third Crusade they were the local backbone of the Christian armies in Outremer.8

  The two obvious weaknesses of the Latin states were factionalism between the lords of the various castle-cities (especially Jersusalem, Antioch, Tripoli and Krak) and the fact that they ruled largely Muslim populations whose loyalty was suspect, especially in wartime.9 These disadvantages were played up by the rising star in the politics of the Middle East, Al-Malik al-Nasir Salah ed-Din Yusuf, known in the West as Saladin. Yusuf was the son of Najm-ad-Din, a Kurdish nobleman from northern Armenia, near Georgia. Najm-ad-Din migrated early in his career to Baghdad, the seat of the Abbasid caliphate, and was made constable of Takreet Castle on the River Tigris. Tradition said that Saladin was born on the very day in 1137 that Najm and his brother Shirkuh were disgraced and forced to relocate north in Mosul.10 After many adventures, Saladin had his early formation in Damascus, where his father was in the service of Zangi, formerly ruler of Mosul but now the lord of Syria. When Zangi died, the new prince of Damascus was his son Nur al-Din, the major influence on Saladin’s life, a man who had inherited Zangi’s anti-Frank zealotry.11 An ambitious Sunni, Nur al-Din set his sights on the detested Shiite caliphate of the Fatimids in Egypt and determined to destroy it; as commander of his armies he appointed Shirkuh, with his 26-year-old nephew Saladin as his aide. Nur al-Din’s decision to launch his troops against Egypt was a courageous one, for it meant crossing territory dominated by the crusader states, but his gamble paid off. Although Shirkuh had to fight no less
than three major campaigns in six years, and could not finish off the enemy even by the great victories at Kawm-al-Rish in 1164 and Al-Babain in 1167, finally, in 1169, he was triumphant and Nur al-Din’s banner fluttered above the mosques in Cairo. The Egyptian campaign was the making of Saladin: a promising staff officer at the beginning of the war but a leader of men and Shirkuh’s heir apparent by the end, he had also whetted his appetite for anti-Crusader warfare. The Franks, knowing the threat that would come from a united Egypt and Syria, intervened on the side of the Egyptian Fatimids but lost the third and final round of the struggle against Shirkuh.12