by David Boyle
What happened on Philip's wedding night is one of those infuriating historical mysteries from which we are completely excluded. Nobody witnessed it except for Philip and Ingeborg and they disagreed about the basic facts. All we know is that Philip always claimed that the marriage was not consummated and Ingeborg said it had been. His own official explanation was that he realized they were fourth cousins and too closely related, but even the Pope said this was not too close. It was hard, in those days, for the interwoven European aristocracy to marry anyone more distantly related than that.* It remains a complete mystery, but there are some clues.
Three years later, still with Ingeborg haunting his life in France — refusing either to go home or to become a nun — Philip married Agnes de Meran, the daughter of Berthold, Count of Meran, which was in the Rhineland. He had no wedding night problems and may actually have already been having an affair with her at the time of his wedding to Ingeborg. Sources close to him used to say that Agnes had bewitched Philip in Amiens and made him regard his new wife with horror. Sorcery in those days was often used as a shorthand for sexual difficulties, and it seems possible that Philip found he was impotent on his wedding night.
Philip was a fastidious man, obsessively nervous about disease and so puritanical in his own court that he fined anyone swearing twenty sous, or — if they did it again — had them thrown fully clothed into the Seine. It may be that Ingeborg's uniquecombination of saintliness and sexuality unnerved him — she was 'beautiful in face, more beautiful in soul', according to the chroniclers. We know that Philip originally found her attractive, but something happened between them that led him to believe he had been cursed in some way, and it was such a disturbing experience that he regarded her with absolute revulsion ever after. It was a tragic story for Ingeborg, who was also strong-minded enough not just to refuse to return humiliated to Denmark but to spend the next twenty years imprisoned in one castle or convent after another, demanding that she be given her rights as queen and desperately selling her last clothes and jewels so she could afford to live.
The whole business with Ingeborg defies political explanation, but it seems to have occurred to Philip in the days after his disastrous wedding night that he might anyway have made a more advantageous marriage, to Henry VI's cousin Constance of Hohenstaufen, and thereby built the alliance with the emperor. As soon as he had dispatched Ingeborg's household so cruelly, he sent emissaries to Germany to propose marriage to Constance instead, assuming that his marriage to Ingeborg could be dissolved on the grounds of non-consummation. To his rage, they returned to inform him that Constance had already secretly married Henry of Brunswick, the son and heir of Henry the Lion of Saxony. Richard seemed to have quietly achieved the diplomatic breakthrough in Germany, and sealed the new understanding between Saxony and the imperial court with a secret marriage with the emperor's cousin, heiress to the Count Palatine.
Pope Celestine may have barely stirred himself in response to Eleanor's impassioned letters pleading for his support for her son's release, but he did act to rescue Richard's wife and sister, who were still trapped in Rome. He organized an escort of cardinals and sent them to Berengaria and Joanna, who were taken safely as far as Genoa. There they took a ship to Marseilles and were met, also through the intervention of the Pope, by King Alfonso II of Aragon, who ruled the coast of Provence. He led them safely intothe charge of the very man who, Richard had been told, was waiting to arrest him in the south of France, Raymond of St Gilles, the son and heir of Raymond V of Toulouse. Raymond had also been returning from Rome and had with him a powerful force of soldiers, and he escorted Berengaria and Joanna — both then twenty-seven — as far as Poitiers.
Their journey had unforeseen consequences because of the unexpected romance that grew up on the journey between Raymond and Joanna. By the time she reached Poitiers, in true chivalric style, they were in love. A surprised Richard consented to the marriage and it took place in 1196, bringing — after the death of Raymond's father the following year — peace between Richard and his most difficult neighbour in the south. The matter of Raymond's previous wife, already abandoned in a convent, was quietly brushed aside.
In Poitiers, Berengaria settled down to organizing her own fund-raising efforts on behalf of her husband. It must have been an enormous relief to her to be home. She had been crowned queen of England in Cyprus and had spent almost no time at her new husband's side, except briefly in Acre, when he was almost delirious with fever in the final months of their stay in Palestine. Richard may then have been in the middle of his infatuation with the Cypriot princess, or he may, under the influence of al-Adil, have been experimenting with more exotic forms of love. He may just have been distant and aloof. Either way, it was already clear to Berengaria that she would have to battle for a place in her husband's heart.
The old queen of England, her mother-in law, Eleanor, was now dominating the empire. It is true that the political crisis had drawn her unwillingly into that position, but Berengaria must still have wondered quite what her new life was destined to entail. She would not have known, though she might have guessed, that not one of Richard's copious letters to his mother from captivity mentioned her at all.
*It was standing next to the lance in Vienna 800 years later that the young Adolf Hitler is supposed to have had his vision of his own destiny. The lance was removed by American troops in 1945 and only handed back to Austria by President Eisenhower.
* If you wander among the treasures of the Hofburg in Vienna today, you will find any number of pieces of True Cross left behind by the Hapsburg Empire — the heir of the Holy Roman Empire — but none of them match the description of the distinctive cross that Richard found at Beit Nuba.
*This was in itself a delicate business. A century later, the Archbishop of Cologne challenged his fellow Archbishop of Mainz to a duel over who had the right to sit next to the emperor.
* Elections were surprisingly common in medieval Europe, but not absolutely sacrosanct. 'I order you to hold free elections,' Henry II wrote to the monks of Winchester in 1173, 'but nevertheless, I forbid you to elect anyone except Richard my clerk.'
*The most recent occasion involved the Home Guard in the autumn of 1940, when most of the rifles in the British Army had been left behind on the beaches of Dunkirk.
*The most ingenious twelfth-century dish was probably a pie with living birds: when the pastry was broken open the birds would fly out — first the small ones and then the larger hunting birds not far behind, which would chase them up to the ceiling of the hall.
*This had been finished in 1174 and survived until the Nazi Kristallnacht in 1938.
† William Brewer was the man who founded the beautiful Mottisfont Abbey in Hampshire, still a haven of green peace and quiet.
* Philip had married his first wife, Isabella of Hainault, in 1180, when she was only ten. The wedding was not consummated for some years and was disrupted when one knight pushed the crowd at Saint-Denis, upsetting lamp oil all over the wedding guests. Philip tried to divorce her four years later, but she wandered barefoot in public around Senlis until he agreed to take her back.
* Theoretically, anyone related in the fourth degree — with the same great-great-grandparents — could not get married, and 'affinity' included godparents. The Church was even pressing for seven degrees. But in practice this was normally ignored, simply because of the difficulty of finding anyone of sufficient rank, and because of the potential that diplomatic marriages had to bring peace.
9. A King's Ransom
'As the earth grows dark when the sun goes down, so the face of the kingdom was changed by the absence of the king. All the barons were disturbed, castles strengthened, towns fortified and ditches dug.'
Richard of Devizes, Chronicon de Rebus Gestis Ricardi Primi
'And do you know what will befall the king if he is not cured of his wounds, and does not hold his land? Ladies will lose their husbands, hapless maidens will be orphans, many knights will die; and the lan
ds will be laid waste. All these ills will result because of you.'
Chretien de Troyes, Percival
Blondel and Richard's more literate crusaders would have been familiar with the new story of romance and spirituality that had emerged from the court of Champagne in the years before Richard's coronation. Chretien de Troyes was among the first of the trouvères of northern France, and his extraordinary tales of the quest for the Holy Grail — built around the court of King Arthur — were rapidly spreading across Western Europe. Chretien had probably borrowed the stories from a Welsh writer called Bleheris, in a book given him by his patron, Philip, Count of Flanders, who had died outside Acre just before it fell. But he gave them life -the Knights of the Round Table and the intricate mystery of their parallel search.
At the heart of the Grail romance was the haunting and mysterious figure of the Fisher King, the wounded monarch whose affliction — whether it is an actual wound or just Philip Augustus-style impotence — meant that his land had become sterile and wasted. The forests had died, the crops were parched and the rivers had run dry. To heal the land, Percival, Lancelot and Galahad have first to heal the king, and that requires them to seek out the Grail. Their purity and character are tested along the way, and — just as in the old tradition of the Courts of Love — the constant testing of their dedication adds to the quest.
The nature of the Grail is different in different accounts. Sometimes it appears to be the cup that held the blood of Christ or the chalice used at the Last Supper. Sometimes it is the Celtic cauldron of rebirth and sometimes even a precious stone from the crown of Lucifer when he was flung out of heaven. The legends are probably based on much more ancient tales — probably Celtic (Percival is usually described as Welsh) — but the Grail quest has all the hallmarks of the twelfth century: dedication and purity for a great quest, the mystery and excitement of hidden or forgotten knowledge, and a luminous sense of romance that could just as well be sexual as it is spiritual. That is the atmosphere that Blondel and Richard grew up with, and — as you would expect from the age of chivalry — the answer to the quest is often something very simple, such as a polite question.
'In the night, God had restored the streams to their proper channels in the country,' wrote Wauchier de Denain in his Conte del Grail, 'and all the woods, it seems, had turned green as soon as he had asked why the lance bled.' Chretien's Percival was abandoned in mid-sentence, and the French poet Wauchier was attempting to finish the story during the events described in this book.
Richard's subjects in England had, at this time, been enjoying unprecedented wealth — the first windmills were appearing across the countryside and the burgeoning wool trade was drawing in silver money from all over Europe. But they also knew all about the waste land. Those who were old enough could remember the civil war between Stephen and Matilda in the 1140s had seen the country descend into banditry, terror and disorder and left villages, as one chronicler put it, 'standing lonely and almost empty'. Now the prospect of the waste land returning to England seemed all too imminent. Their king was wounded, in the sense that he wasimprisoned by a powerful emperor in a distant land. And, as a result of that wound and Richard's absence, England was perched on the edge of a similar descent into disastrous civil war. Even if that was avoided, its wealth seemed certain to be sucked away to pay for his unprecedented ransom.
The threat of civil war had temporarily receded, now that John's ambitions seemed to have been checked, but it had been replaced by the threat of invasion. Eleanor, the consummate politician, was in charge for the time being. But she was elderly and there was also a subtle but unmistakable jockeying for position, even among the justiciars, who must have realized that — should Richard's return be delayed too long — they would have to make the leap of allegiance at some point to his brother, or risk losing everything because they had stood aloof from the winning side. The Bishop of Durham, Hugh de Puiset — the co-justiciar who had been stripped of his power so humiliatingly by Longchamp in 1190 -had been ordered to raise the siege of John's remaining castle at Tickhill just as he was about to take it. It was whispered that even Walter of Coutances and William the Marshal had been careful not to prosecute their military operations against John too forcefully.
England's noble families all now knew the talk about the king's brother — his greed and unreliability, and how he had lost his head and fled to France, handing over much of Normandy to Philip. They knew how John's mercenaries had behaved, turning the territory between his castle at Windsor and Kingston into a small waste land of their own. But Richard had no legitimate children and John was the de facto heir, and the prospect of living under his rule was looming and disturbing.
Then there was the question of money. Those close to the English government knew about Richard's diplomatic success in Germany, how he had detached Baldwin, Count of Flanders, from the French side, and the new network of alliances with the princes and prelates of northern Germany — promising valuable trade concessions across the Baltic in the future. But they also knew that these agreements were based on large sums of money, over and above the ruinous ransom, that had been promised by Richard inthe future. As well as that expenditure, the justiciars had embarked on urgent fortifications to protect the most vulnerable parts of the coast from the expected invasion by Philip and the French. Large sums had been spent strengthening the castles at Dover and along the coast from Pevensey to Chichester, Winchester, Porchester, Southampton and Corfe, as well as Bristol and Gloucester, to guard against an incursion from John's sympathizers in Wales.
Richard had asked to meet Walter of Coutances face to face, and the chief justiciar made the uncomfortable journey across the Channel and down the Rhine to see him. While he was on his way, Richard replaced him with his trusted Hubert Walter, now also Archbishop of Canterbury. Walter of Coutances had taken over the reins of the country with great skill at a moment of unique danger for England, and — by doing so — had twice missed the opportunity he craved of becoming Archbishop of Canterbury himself Hubert Walter was criticized for his pride and ostentation, and for his lack of holiness, but as an administrator he was absolutely inspired. He set about overhauling England's comparatively sophisticated systems of government. They were going to face their sternest test yet.
The country he took over was united behind Richard in a way it had been for no previous monarch since the Norman invasion. The great divisions of language remained in place — the French and Latin of the ruling classes and the emerging English of those they ruled — but this seems to have been the generation when England finally became English, rather than an uneasy coexistence of Saxons and Normans. They must have been aware of how rarely Richard had even crossed the Channel. They could hardly have overlooked the impact on their pockets of the Saladin Tithe to pay for his crusade. But they remained enormously proud of their king, still as far as they were concerned the hero of Christendom. That may be one reason why this enormous ransom was eventually paid.
Also, England was not a waste land yet. It was a country that had benefited from the stability of Richard's father and his efforts to codify and systematize the legal system. Its increasing wealthwas admired, though its peculiarities remained a source of disapproval on the Continent. The English vice, then as now, was alcohol. Writing in Paris a little later, Jacques de Vitry — later Cardinal-Bishop of Acre — outlined the drawbacks of all Europe's nations. The French were proud and effeminate, he said; the Germans were angry and obscene; the Lombards greedy and cowardly — and the English were drunkards and had tails.*
But if they drank more than their neighbours, they could at least afford it. The trade in wool was already making England wealthy, feeding the burgeoning cloth industry in Flanders. The trade in wheat was packing the ports of East Anglia, the mines of the West Country were extracting tin and lead, and the silver coins in payment were flooding into England from all over the known world. A new generation of water mills, many of them investments by the Templars, was app
earing all over the countryside, symbols of twelfth-century enterprise. Staffordshire was already producing ceramic plates and cups. The merchant guilds of London were emerging and London was growing into its new status as an immensely rich, self-governing financial centre, and had embarked, under Peter Colechurch, on one of the most extraordinary engineering achievements of the century: the nineteen stone arches spanning 906 feet of the new London Bridge.
But for all that wealth, the ransom was an immense amount of money. It was far from clear, even with Hubert Walter's administrative skills, whether this country of forests, abbeys and small farms would be able to afford to pay for their king and bring him home.
So, by the summer of 1193, it was clear that the bill for Richard's ransom was going to cost his empire 150,000 silver marks, most of which would come from England. This was not just because of England's wealth, but because England's tax system was far superior to the one in Normandy, Aquitaine or Brittany, and was the onlyadministrative system capable of raising anything approaching that sum.