The Troubadour's Song

by David Boyle

  Richard spent about five bitter days and nights imprisoned in Trifels, under guard the entire time. The conditions of his in­carceration were not recorded: whether he was able to gaze down on the Rhine and feel the fresh mountain air on his face, or whether he was condemned to sit in his cell — perhaps even within shouting distance of the most notorious political prisoners of the Holy Roman Empire. But he was rescued at this point by the intervention of William Longchamp, still at Speyer after the others had returned to England.

  Longchamp had never lost the approval of the king, but it would clearly take more than that to recover his former status back in England, especially since the story of his near seduction by the Dover fisherman had spread around the kingdom. On i April he asked to see Henry and managed to persuade him that it would be better for both sides if Richard was not incarcerated in Trifels. The two of them then hammered out an agreement whereby Richard would be allowed to return to the court, from where he would be released as soon as the hostages had arrived and the first 70,000 marks had been paid. Relieved, Richard was released to Hagenau, and was able to discuss further with Longchamp — his great fund-raiser before the crusade — how the ransom might be found.

  Longchamp was then sent back to England with a stack of letters urging the great families of England to find the money as fast as they could. One particularly effective letter, which reveals some of Richard's desperation, publicly urged the fund-raisers to let him know exactly how much each of the English barons contributed,'so that we may know how far we are bound to return thanks to each'. There were further letters to Normandy, Aquitaine and the other parts of the Angevin empire, but both Richard and Longchamp must have been aware that England was the key. It was by far the richest corner of Richard's lands, and it also possessed a sophisticated tax system, fine-tuned by the Norman kings, and particularly by Richard's father, that was far more detailed and effective than almost anywhere else in Europe.

  By the time Longchamp had left, news of the terms of the ransom had reached Paris, to the horror of Philip, and he had sent a furious letter remonstrating to Henry. Why had the emperor taken such trouble to inform Paris so early about Richard's arrest if Philip had no interest in the matter? Yet suddenly the ransom had been agreed without any reference to him at all. Philip also offered to help Henry by asking the Archbishop of Reims to mediate between him and the German dukes who were most enraged by the death of the bishop-elect of Liege. The emperor did not accept or reject this offer, which effectively pinpointed Henry's most urgent diplomatic needs, but agreed to meet Philip at Valcouleurs on St John's Day, 24 June.

  Enormously relieved that Richard had been found and that there was at least a plan in place to bring about his release, Eleanor and the justiciars in England were now mainly concerned about what John would do. It was known at the English court that he had paid homage to Philip for Normandy and had promised to divorce his wife and marry the poor abandoned French princess Alys. Philip was now also overlord for the rulers of Artois, and therefore had access to Boulogne, which meant that for the first time he could threaten England by sea. The combination of Philip and John was very dangerous for Richard's deputies, especially as John was now back in England, having arranged for a force of Flemish mercenaries to join him, and was asserting his claim to the throne.

  Before the two abbots had sent back their messages, or before the news from Blondel — or whatever espionage the Blondel story was obscuring — John was able to claim that Richard was dead, and to insist that he had had special information along these lines from Paris. This was contradicted by Eleanor and the Great Council in England, and — to their relief — most of the leading figures of the realm had sided with them. William the Marshal and Geoffrey of York, now securely in his archbishopric, both firmly denied that Richard was dead, so John's first major move fell flat. His request for help from the king of Scotland, William the Lion — who had been generously treated by Richard in 1189 — was firmly rejected.

  Eleanor knew how important it was not to drive her youngest son into open revolt. But without consulting him, and while he was relaxing between Good Friday and Easter Day 1193 — a week after Richard's show trial — she and the justiciars set in motion a secret plan to close the Channel ports and muster a home guard along the south coast of England, ordering them to use whatever tools they had to hand for weapons. It was not the first, or the last, time that that coast was defended by agricultural tools because of a shortage of weapons.* Prayers were said daily in places of worship for the safe return of the king.

  When the abbots reached Richard on the road on 19 March, he had questioned them closely about events in England, and they were able to tell him a little of John's behaviour. Richard's response was devastating and reported back home: 'My brother John is not the man to win lands by force if there is anyone at all to oppose him.' For all his resentments and shifting loyalties, John was prob­ably the wittiest and most intelligent of the brothers, but for the rest of his life he never quite played the remark down.

  Even so, by the following month, fighting had broken out simultaneously in three parts of Richard's empire. An uprising in Poitou by the Court of Perigord and some Gascon nobles was successfully beaten back by Berengaria's brother Sancho. And in England the advance guard of John's mercenaries were arrested asthey landed; those who managed to land later were driven back into John's castles at Windsor and Wallingford by forces loyal to the justiciars. John was saved by the return from Germany of Hubert Walter, who brought with him Richard's proposal that there should be a truce for six months. The garrisons were on the brink of surrender, but the truce went ahead, although John was forced to hand over both castles to his mother — as well as Peak Castle in Derbyshire — until the truce was over.

  But in Normandy Philip took personal charge of his own small invasion force with great success. The castellans in charge of the strategic castles that Henry II had so exhaustively strengthened along the Norman border were in an awkward position. Richard might never return, and his obvious successor had all but handed over Normandy to Philip. If Richard was never released, John would shortly be their overlord and too enthusiastic a defence in the name of his predecessor might prove extremely unwise. On the other hand, if Richard was freed, then their future would depend on their successful defence against the French. It was a difficult decision, and it meant that the vital frontier castle of Gisors was probably most exposed, since Gisors was nominally part of Alys's dowry and might be returned to Philip at any moment. The castellan of Gisors chose the French camp and he surrendered to Philip on 12 April. Back in England, this was considered an act of supreme treachery. Three other castellans, some of whom had been on crusade with Richard, also gave up as soon as they heard the news.

  The surrender of Gisors opened the road to the Norman capital at Rouen, and Philip advanced with twenty-three siege engines to link up with an allied Flemish army under Count Baldwin VII of Flanders. In the confusion of their arrival, Robert, Earl of Leicester — one of Richard's comrades from the defence of Jaffa — managed to slip into the city and take charge of its defence, and to great effect. When Philip had collected enough of his forces to send a message to Rouen demanding its surrender, the earl replied that the city gates were open and Philip could walk in whenever he wanted. Fearing an obvious trap, Philip refrained. He had beenprevented from mounting a full-scale invasion because of the reluctance of his barons to attack the lands of a returning crusader, and he also knew that his forces were not sufficient to take Rouen if it was defended with any kind of passion. He therefore aban­doned the attempt, burning his siege engines and emptying his wine casks into the Seine, and retreated to Paris — threatening to return with enough troops and a rod of iron.

  Despite Philip's failure at Rouen, other parts of his army had advanced all the way to Dieppe. He had gathered a fleet together at Wissant, but held back from an invasion of England until he could persuade more of his own barons to take part. If Henry could be prevailed upon to ho
ld Richard a little longer — and if Philip could scrape together a bigger fleet — then there was still time.

  The French advance had been checked and England was tem­porarily peaceful, but the situation was extremely unstable. John took the opportunity to meet his mother in London, passing on all the disastrous rumours he had heard in Paris about the fate of his brother. And it was probably at this point that Eleanor wrote her bitter appeal to the Pope. The letters were actually written not by her but by her husband's former clerk Peter of Blois, and copies were only found among his papers in the seventeenth century. Some historians dismiss them simply as exercises in rhetoric, drafted for Peter's own amusement, and that may be so. But there is some evidence that Eleanor actually composed them, perhaps with his help, because the Pope seems to have replied to the second letter. If they were really written by Eleanor, they are an extraordinary revelation of her personality — at the same time powerful and furious as it is pleading and a little querulous, as she castigated Pope Celestine for his inaction and begged him to intervene on behalf of her favourite son. 'My very bowels are torn away from me,' she wrote, angry that she had been dragged back to public life so exhaustingly.

  I have lost the staff of my old age, the light of my eyes. The kings and princes of the earth have conspired against my son, the anointed of thelord. One keeps him in chains while the other ravages his lands; one holds him by the heels while the other flays him. And while this goes on, the sword of St Peter reposes in its scabbard . . . Why do I, a wretched creature, delay? Why do I not go that I may see him whom my soul loves, bound in beggary and irons? At such a time as this, how could a mother forget the son of her womb . . . ? Yet I fluctuate in doubt for if I go away, I desert my son's kingdom which is afflicted on all sides with fierce hostility . . . Once the Church trod upon the necks of the proud with its own strength, and the laws of emperors obeyed the sacred canons. Now things have changed: no one dare murmur about the detestable crimes of the powerful, which are tolerated, and canonical rigour falls on the sins of the poor alone.

  To this devastating indictment, goading the heir of St Peter for being so pusillanimous against the emperor, there seems to have been no reply. Actually the Pope had responded to Richard's arrest by excommunicating Leopold and threatening Philip with an interdict over the whole of France if he should attack Richard's lands. He even threatened the English, rather unfairly, if they failed to raise whatever ransom was required. But his weakness in the face of imperial pressure was all too obvious. Celestine was now eighty-seven and imperial troops were in his own papal territories; his injunctions to them were ignored. There had been no condem­nation for the jailer himself.

  The second letter opens as she styles herself, unforgettably, 'Eleanor, by the wrath of God, Queen of England, Duchess of Normandy and Count of Anjou', and begs Celestine to be 'a father to a pitiable mother'. But the third appears to be a reply to an admonishment from the Pope for her tone, and is couched in terms of an apology: 'I beseech you, O Father, let your benignity bear with what is an effect of grief rather than of deliberation. I have sinned and used the words of Job. I have said that which I would that I had not said, but henceforth I put my finger on my lips and say no more.'

  For the intellectuals of northern Europe in particular, Germany seemed determined to take control of both the temporal and the spiritual affairs of the whole of Europe. John of Salisbury, who was exiled along with Becket a generation before and had dominated the intellectual life of Western Europe after the death of Abelard, had urged England and France to work together to resist Frederick Barbarossa's plans for European domination, and his growing influence over the papacy,, 'Who made the Germans judges over the people of Christ?' he asked, contrasting the world of freedom and justice in Western Europe with the tyranny of Germany. For the barons of Eleanor's generation, the emperor's imprisonment of the king of England was a further twist in the tale of growing German hubris.

  1. Three generations of English kings: (clockwise from top left) Henry II, Richard I, Henry III and John (from a thirteenth-century manuscript).

  2. A French troubadour or possibly a jongleur (from a thirteenth-century manuscript). Historians of music do not know for certain what instruments the troubadours used, or indeed if they used any at all. Jongleurs were paid to spread the troubadours' songs as widely as they could.

  3. Lancelot and Guinevere kiss for the first time, watched by Galahad (from a manuscript of Arthurian legends, c. 1315). The twelfth century was a romantic age of sexual and emotional awakening.

  4. Minstrels below the table, with some romantic hand-holding on the table above (from a fourteenth-century French Book of Hours).

  5. A crusader knight (from the twelfth-century Westminster Psalter).

  6. (Left) The coronation of Richard I (a miniature from Flores Historiarum by Matthew Paris, 1250-52).

  7. The king and his entourage set off on crusade (from a 1250 history of Jerusalem).

  8. (Above) Richard's neglected queen, Berengaria of Navarre, in effigy on her tomb at L'Epau Abbey.

  9. (Left) Philip Augustus, Richard's former passionate friend, carved on Rouen Cathedral.

  10. Philip shocks the English by leaving Palestine before the end of the crusade (from Grandes Chroniques de France, c. 1335-40).

  11. Richard I the Lionheart at the Battle of Arsuf, 14 September 1191: this was the only pitched battle Richard ever fought in his life (nineteenth-century oil painting by Feron Eloi Firmin).

  12. The engraver Gustave Dore's view of Richard's dramatic assault from the sea at Jaffa (from J.-F. Michaud's Bibliothèque des Croisades, 1877).

  13. Richard's arrest in a kitchen outside Vienna, as the German chroniclers recorded it.

  14. Arrested in disguise by two soldiers, Richard kneels before the clean­shaven emperor (from Liber ad honorem augusti by Petrus de Ebolo, 1195-6, a contemporary German chronicle now in Switzerland).

  15. The scene of Blondel's song: Diirnstein and its castle as it was in 1650.

  16. Ornate gloves played a key role in Richard's arrest. These gloves were looted by Emperor Henry VI from the Sicilian treasury and incorporated into the imperial coronation robes.

  17. The Pedlar by Charles Alston Collins, 1850. This Victorian painting shows Berengaria's horror as she discovers Richard's belt on sale in a market in Rome.

  18. Behind the Holy Family is Vienna as it was in the fifteenth century; the walls were built with the money from Richard's ransom (detail from the Schottenmeister altar, after 1469).

  19. Two scenes from Richard's life: languishing in prison and then attacking Philip in Gisors (from a thirteenth-century document).

  20. Richard's emotional speech at Speyer in March 1193 (from a nineteenth-century print by Werthmann).

  21. Richard's legendary encounter with the lion (from a sixteenth-century woodcut).

  22. One of Blondel's songs (from a thirteenth-century song collection in Paris).

  23. A thirteenth-century map of Watling Street, Richard and Eleanor's route home, showing Dover, Canterbury, Rochester and London.

  24. (Above) Coins changing hands.

  25. Old London Bridge, late eighteenth century, as the bridge would have appeared for much of the medieval period. It was half built when Richard reached the city in 1194.

  26. Salisbury Cathedral, the English version of the new Gothic style.

  27. Richard's half-brother William Longspee, the first to be buried in Salisbury Cathedral.

  28. Richard's effigy on his tomb, now empty, at Fontevrault. The effigy is not necessarily a likeness, but it may be a guide to his appearance. The clothes provide some idea of contemporary fashion.

  29. Blondel's song as a classic children's story, this time from Agnes Grozier Herbertson's 1911 book Heroic Legends, showing the troubadour as he creeps under the tower at Diirnstein. The story of Richard's imprisonment is still a familiar element of other legends, like that of Robin Hood, thanks largely to Sir Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe.

  30.
Robin Hood and His Merry Men Entertaining Richard the Lionheart in Sherwood Forest by Daniel Maclise. The meeting shown in this Victorian oil painting is entirely mythical, but Nottingham and Sherwood Forest were in fact Richard's first objective on his return to England.

  Eleanor's rage was shared across all Richard's dominions, but she had added reason to be angry. Richard was her favourite, and the entire crisis in government — which threatened everything she had worked towards — was on her shoulders at the age of nearly seventy; she may have doubted her ability to stand the strain. But most of all, she had a personal horror of imprisonment. She had been incarcerated in Old Sarum by her husband for sixteen miser­able years, at the end of which she had effortlessly taken over the reins of power in the empire. Her first act in 1189 had been to release all the prisoners in England, because, she said, she knew what it was like. Eleanor hated prisons, and something of this horror is reflected in the letters.