Before he departed on crusade, Richard had five main matters to attend to: putting the Church on a sound footing; installing the men who would be de facto Regents in his absence; securing the Welsh marches; keeping Scotland quiet in his absence, and, above all, raising the vast sums of money needed to finance the expedition to Outremer. He began by appointing four new bishops, including his favourite William Longchamp, who was given the see at Ely, several new abbots and making a number of other changes in the senior ecclesiastical hierarchy. Once again there was an element of showmanship in all this, for Richard meant to distinguish his rule clearly from that of his father; Henry II had been infamous for his practice of keeping major livings vacant so that he could pocket the revenue.15 Richard’s most important church appointment was also shrewd politics. In nominating Henry’s natural son Geoffrey to the archbishopric of York, he was removing an important political player from the board. Geoffrey Plantagenet was rumoured to have ambitions to emulate William the Conqueror and become a bastard king. This was why he had resigned the see of Lincoln earlier, as he would have had to take Holy Orders and thus waive his political ambitions. Richard forced the issue, overcame theological objections to the appointment and even had it ratified by a papal legate. The reluctant Geoffrey was virtually carried kicking and screaming to his investiture as priest, but once ordained he ceased to be a possible pretender to the throne. Outwitted, he salved his anger by a career of defiance towards Richard and the canons of his own cathedral.16 Richard set the capstone on his ecclesiastical reforms by resolving a complex, tortuous but essentially arcane dispute between Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury and the monks of his cathedral priory, which was essentially a clash between Cistercian (Baldwin) modalities and Benedictine sensibilities.17
The problem of civilian administration was a tougher nut to crack. The two key offices in England were the justiciar and the chancellor. Theoretically the justiciar was the chief legal officer, dispensing the king’s justice, while the chancellor was a kind of primitive secretary of state, though over time the two offices tended to merge in function. Some authorities distinguish the royal household element (the chancellor) which moved around with the king on his travels, and the common administrative element (justiciar) which appeared in other parts of the Angevin empire as well as England.18 Richard began well by removing Ranulph Glanville as justiciar and putting in his place a Church-civilian ‘dyarchy’ - the aged William de Mandeville, count of Aumale and the earl of Essex, and the oligarchic Bishop Hugh du Puiset of Durham. As Chancellor he put in William Longchamp, bishop of Ely and veteran administrator of Aquitaine, who thus combined the Church and civilian roles in one office. As his official heir Richard chose the four-year-old Arthur of Britanny, thus putting John’s nose out of joint. But Richard expected that the liberality he showered on John would keep his younger brother quiet. Loaded with fiefs, titles and revenues, John also took a wife at this point - none other than the wealthy heiress Isabelle of Gloucester who had long been earmarked for him. There was some opposition to the marriage from the archbishop of Canterbury - on the grounds that John and Isabelle were second cousins without a papal licence to marry - but Richard steam-rollered the match through anyway. He wanted John safely wed, so that the idea of his marrying Alice could never be resurrected.19 John was now lord of Ireland, Mortmain and Gloucester and a number of other fiefs, including those he already held and new ones, such as Lancaster, that Richard added to his portfolio. Perhaps Richard’s most stunning gift to John was a six-county benefice: Derby, Nottingham, Somerset, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall. Short of money for the crusade, Richard nonetheless allowed John to keep the entire revenues from all six counties, which would otherwise have accrued to the royal treasury; the only insurance policy Richard took out was to retain control of key castles in the territories. But in return for this largesse John had to swear that he would stay out of England for three years.20 Richard’s dispositions were essentially a balancing act, but the acrobats soon came toppling off the wire. First Essex died, and Richard made the mistake of making Longchamp one of the justiciars as well. But if Longchamp was already too prominent and thus destroying the balance of power, Richard made the further error of listening to his mother’s pleadings and partially releasing John from his oath to stay out of England: he made it dependent on Longchamp’s say-so. Nonetheless the oath still stood: despite John’s later lies, he had never been absolutely released from it.21
Wales was a permanent thorn in the Angevin side. For most of his reign Henry II had been content to accept the Welsh rulers’ fealty - and in a few cases their homage also - and leave it at that; some historians have compared the situation to that of the independent princelings in India during the Raj. By and large the Welsh borders had been peaceful.22 Henry, however, had used the security situation on his northern and western frontiers as the excuse for not going crusading; with Henry it was always falsehoods and deviousness, and he was the original man who could not lie straight in bed.23 The much more straightforward (naive, said his critics) Richard wanted open dealing on all sides and tried to get a permanent solution to Wales so that the Welsh would not go on the warpath as soon as he was out of the country. This was no confected fear: as soon as he heard that Henry II was dead the powerful chieftain Rhys of Deheubarth began raiding into English territory. He justified this on the grounds that, although he had sworn homage to Henry II, this was a personal oath that did not extend to the king’s successors.24 Richard sent John, now lord of Glamorgan, to deal with Rhys while he met the other Welsh chiefs and ‘kings’ at Worcester, who agreed not to attack England while he was away on crusade.25 John’s dealings with Rhys are much murkier. He met him and worked out an agreement, then took Rhys to Oxford to meet Richard. Informed by his spies that John had concluded a secret concordat with Rhys, Richard refused to meet the Welshman. For this Richard has been much criticised, particularly as Henry II regularly received Rhys, but the probability is that Richard was not being foolish so much as pragmatic. Rhys’s status as Henry’s ‘man’ had done little to dampen down anarchy and raiding in Wales, he had made a secret pact with John, the king’s advisers counselled him that little could be looked for from Rhys, and moreover Richard calculated that the Welsh chiefs he had made over at Worcester were strong enough to contain Rhys and his turbulent sons.26 The angry Rhys, smarting at the insult to his honour when Richard turned him from the door at Oxford, continued a form of guerrilla warfare for several years in south Wales. But the other Welsh leaders kept their promise to Richard, John was watchful of his interests as lord of Glamorgan and, very importantly, William Marshal, now lord of the Welsh marches, was a force any would-be leader of a general uprising in Wales would have to reckon with.
If Richard’s dealings with Wales had produced only middling outcomes, his diplomacy with the king of the Scots produced spectacular and lasting results. In November 1189 Richard’s half-brother Geoffrey persuaded King William to come south for talks and escorted him to Canterbury. There, in the famous Quit Claim treaty of 5 December Richard returned to William the castles of Roxburgh and Berwick - surrendered after the Young King’s disastrous rebellion in 1173-74 - and formally acknowledged Scotland’s independence from England. In return he received 10,000 marks for his crusading fund. Contemporary chroniclers, and advocates of a United Kingdom ever since, condemned this as a piece of egregious folly: Gerald of Wales denounced it as ‘a piece of vile commerce and a shameful loss to the English crown’.27 Scottish nationalists have, not surprisingly, seen the treaty in a very different light and have praised Richard as a second Daniel come to judgement. It is hard not to agree with the nationalists. Whatever our view of the crusades today, at the time people of all ranks accepted that regaining the Holy Land from Islam was a sacred duty; talk of the ‘real English national interests’ in such a context becomes metaphysical or theological. And the policy was a shrewd one. When John rebelled against Richard in 1193-94, the Scots did not join in. There is a strong case to be made that Ric
hard’s policies on the Celtic fringes provided a tranquil situation that contrasted with almost all other post-1066 periods. Certainly most contemporaries thought that during his short stay in England he had performed wonders of diplomacy and statesmanship.28
Yet the criticism of later generations over the deal with Scotland was as nothing compared with the contumely attracted by Richard in his ruthless quest for money to finance the crusades. For the first time Richard appears in the eyes of history to be no longer a knight sans peur et sans reproche driven to distraction by his father’s duplicity but a ruthless militarist, the kind of fanatic who redoubles his efforts as he loses sight of his aims. For the first time it began to be whispered that here was a truly bad king: ‘bad to all, worse to his friends and worst of all to himself’, as Roger of Howden put it.29 Henry II had left the English treasury in a healthy state, despite the huge expenditure on the wars in France: contemporaries estimated the surplus at anything between 100,000 and 900,000 marks.30 Within days of his arrival in England Richard started running through this sum: first there was the 24,000 owed to Philip of France; then the huge cost of the coronation and associated ceremonies and banqueting; finally the massive and overgenerous amounts handed to John. On top of this he had to raise money for the crusade and, after the Saladin Tithe, another round of taxation would lead to serious civil unrest. A cynical student of human nature, Richard simply decided to mulct the rich, to seize and squeeze, to follow his father’s example in never guaranteeing a steady revenue through taxation but through ad hoc profiteering. Henry II had always done this, to the point where one observer wrote: ‘The King is like a robber permanently on the prowl, always probing, always searching for the weak spot where there is something for him to steal.’31
Richard’s ‘daylight robbery’ project was made easier by the concentration of England’s wealth into the hands of a few, all known to the king and his officials, all of them bound to him by feudal ties and politico-legal clientelism. There was no hiding place, no medieval equivalent of tax evasion. Ambitious nobles were willing to pay a lot for lucrative offices, titles, places and other privileges. Custom and tradition also made it easy for an unscrupulous king to make rich pickings from death or bequest. When the bishop of Ely died intestate, Richard helped himself to his ‘portable property’: not just 3,000 marks in coin but also gold and silver plate, horses, livestock, granaries, carpets, tapestries and other fine cloths.32 The office of sheriff was particularly sought after, and in a ‘sale of the century’ Richard sold them off to the highest bidder. In order to gain control of local castles and become sheriff of Hampshire, Godfrey de Luci, bishop of Winchester paid out more than 4,000 marks. Hugh du Puiset, bishop of Durham, paid out 2,000 marks for the sheriffdom of Northumberland and another 1,000 for his recognition of the honour of being made justiciar.33 But the royal scamming did not end just with the disposal of sheriffdoms, for a ruthless monarch would dismiss the incumbent sheriffs, fine them for malfeasance, nonfeasance or misfeasance (this could amount to 1,000 marks per sacking) and then make another appointment for another 2-3,000 marks. Given that levels of civil discontent were not high in Henry II’s England, it was implausible that Richard really needed to dismiss twenty-two of the twenty-seven sheriffs in office when the Old King died. But every hiring or firing transaction brought in more money. However, it by no means follows that the new appointees were all rich sycophants: to his credit Richard required both money and ability before he would appoint a man to be sheriff.34
Another quick means of raising money, much copied by modern states in modern combats, was to allow people to buy themselves out of military service in the Holy Land. Many people had taken the crusading vow in a moment of euphoria, uplift and hysteria and then realised next morning the potentially horrific implications of what they had done. For such people Richard offered a simple way out: pay for military exemption. It hardly needs to be said that such exemptions were not bought cheaply. It might seem that in a religious age buying oneself out would have been considered blasphemous or heretical, but the Pope himself provided a loophole by sanctioning this system of ‘compounding’ for those deemed essential to national security or stability at home while the monarch was leading armies abroad, or even for those deemed to be providing ‘essential’ administrative duties.35 As with all such ‘essential war work’, the opportunities for shirking for those with a deep purse were almost infinite. Richard is often considered an obtuse warmonger, unalive to the nuances of administration and unversed in political subtlety, but there was much method in his apparent money-madness in 1189-90. At one stroke he could raise money and unseat all his father’s old followers, as Roger of Howden pointed out: ‘The king removed from office Ranulf Glanville, the justiciar of England, and almost all their sheriffs and officers; the closer they had been to his father, the more he oppressed them. Anyone who did not have as much as he demanded was immediately sent to jail where there was weeping and gnashing of teeth; then he appointed other sheriffs in their place. Everything was for sale - offices, lordships, earldoms, sheriffdoms, castles, towns, lands, the lot.’36 One of his followers gently put it to Richard that he was overdoing the financial side of things. He replied dismissively: ‘I would sell London itself if I could find a buyer.’37
Most modern criticisms of Richard as king of England focus on two things that were apparent in 1189: Richard cared little for England and he used it as a gigantic cash-cow. The first proposition is surely incontestable: he came to England on 13 August 1189 and left it four months later, on 12 December, then revisited it for two months in 1194 - six months in all during a ten-year reign. His preference for Aquitaine was overwhelming, and although he spoke Latin as well as his native French, he never spoke English. The criticism of using England like a bank is valid with hindsight, but Richard genuinely believed in the crusade and, if it was to be effective, he had no choice but to raise vast sums of money; it was either that or see his armies annihilated by better fed, armed and equipped Saracens. It is perfectly permissible for modern critics to say that, sub specie aeternitatis, the Frankish nations of the West should never have gone on crusade but, given the beliefs and ideologies of the time, it is an anachronistic judgement. It is significant that, of all contemporary chroniclers, only William of Newburgh raised the point that a king of England’s proper place was to be in England, permanently, but in the light of the sensibilities of the time this would have been considered an eccentric point of view. It was only in the seventeenth century that the perception gained ground that an absentee king was the worst possible species. Hence the paradox that the one King Richard who was a paladin of chivalry and a military genius should ultimately have suffered in comparison with the two other King Richards, who died in abject defeat and disgrace.
Where both contemporary and modern critics are on surer (and unexceptionable) ground is their focus on Richard’s absurdly myopic treatment of his brother John.38 After granting him six whole counties, on top of the lordships he already held, Richard both shrank his own revenue base - for Nottingham, Derby, Somerset, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall contributed nothing to the exchequer until 1194 - and created a kind of kingdom within a kingdom, with John in possession of about a third of the kingdom of England. Richard of Devizes thought this was the wrong way to deal with John: his ambition was so evident that Richard should have moved in the opposite direction and taken him down a peg or two.39 Defenders of Richard point out that he had little choice in his treatment of his brother, that harsher treatment would have made him certain to rebel. In terms of money John had all he could desire, but not in terms of power or prospects. If Richard had been generous in the power stakes, he might have given him Aquitaine or Normandy. As it was, John could legitimately complain that he had less power now that Richard was king than Richard or the Young King had had while Henry was alive. Some scholars even argue that, to head off John’s ambitions, he should have given him more power. Perhaps the solution was to compel John to come on crusade? But Richard feared
that the scheming John might do to him with Philip Augustus what he (Richard) had done with Philip to his father; the obvious way to deal with this was to make sure John and Philip never met. And it is true that a combination of Eleanor of Aquitaine and the ministers Richard appointed to serve in his absence should have been able to see off John quite easily.40 But no one has satisfactorily explained why Richard rescinded his earlier demand that John stay out of England while the crusade was in progress. That was the truly cardinal error.
Having, at least to his own satisfaction, settled the affairs of England, Richard made the eight-hour crossing from Dover to Calais on 12 December 1189, proceeded to Normandy and spent Christmas at Lyons-la-Forêt. 41 On 30 December he held another conference with King Philip at Nonancourt. A non-aggression pact was agreed, whereby an attack on the lands of one would be regarded as an attack on the lands of the other; since Richard and Philip were the only conceivable such aggressors in western Europe, the accord effectively guaranteed peace while the two monarchs were on crusade. More controversially, Richard renewed his pledge to marry Alice when he was already engaged in serious negotiations for the hand of Berengaria of Navarre - a duplicitous move which predictably aroused the selective fury of Bertran de Born.42 Richard kept the Alice card in play throughout 1188-89, first to get Philip on his side against his father, and then to make sure the crusade proceeded, though he managed to avoid direct perjury on the issue. For his lies and half-truths on this matter he has been much pilloried, but if he blatantly stated that he would never marry Alice, war with Philip was the likely result. It needs to be reiterated that with Alice Richard was in a trap not of his own making. It by no means follows that he was homosexual, overly squeamish or absurdly fastidious in not marrying his father’s mistress. The true cause of all this trouble was Henry. Like Louis XV of France and many another ruler, he had allowed his lusts to triumph over considerations of hard politics, and now his son was having to pick up the pieces. But the issue of Alice was a running sore between Philip and Richard, and made a poisonous and inauspicious start to the Third Crusade.43
Richard & John: Kings at War Page 18