by David Boyle
Sumer is icomen in
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And spingth the wude nu
Sing cuccu!
contemporary English verse
As soon as Eleanor arrived at the German court with the hostages and the rest of the first 100,000 silver marks, her worst fears were realized. As she had been making her journey down the Rhine, Philip and John were hatching a final plan to keep Richard in prison. Their offer was generous enough to severely tempt the emperor to change his mind about Richard's release and the alliance he had been planning with him to isolate the French. Philip and John's letter reached Henry only a few days before Eleanor arrived. It offered him -£1,000 a month for as long as he kept Richard captive, or £80,000 to keep him in prison until the autumn, which meant the end of the next military campaigning season — by which time, they believed, they would have achieved their objectives. Alternatively they offered to match the entire English ransom to keep Richard permanently incarcerated or — better still — hand him over to them.
Henry was also furious about the secret marriage between Henry of Brunswick, Richard's nephew and Henry the Lion of Saxony's eldest son, and Constance of Hohenstaufen — which made Henry of Brunswick Count Palatine by marriage — and blamed Richard for failing to prevent it. But the emperor was not completely at liberty simply to decide one way or the other whether to abandon the ransom agreement and keep him in prison. It was the assembly of German princes and bishops that had agreed to the ransom, and it was impossible for Henry to change that without bringing them into the discussion. So he postponed the date of Richard's release and summoned the imperial princes to meet him in Mainz at Candlemas on 2 February. He also showed Richard the letter from his brother and former passionate friend. History does not record Richard's reaction.
This was the news that greeted Eleanor as she arrived at the German court at Speyer in mid-January. In fact, many of the princes had already arrived there for the date the emperor had set — 'three weeks after the nativity of our Lord' — for Richard's release and his coronation as king of Provence a week later. Richard's freedom seems to have been more constrained now, and Eleanor — bitterly angry — does not seem to have been allowed to see him. So, for a third time, Richard prepared to face the German assembly of princes and bishops to plead for his liberty. Henry knew from experience what Richard's powerful eloquence was capable of, but this time also Richard had woven a diplomatic alliance of princes and prelates who were prepared to support him. By his side, facing the court, was the familiar sight of the faithful Longchamp, but also Walter of Coutances and Savaric of Bath. His mother was in the hall as well. Richard used his speech to appeal particularly to the bishops, and called on them to vindicate the sanctity of an oath made and to protect a warrior who was still returning from crusade. At the critical moment he brought out the letter he had received from the Old Man of the Mountains, theshadowy leader of the Assassins, clearing him of any complicity in the murder of Conrad of Montferrat. There was applause at the end of his speech as Richard laid his hat at the feet of the emperor. Adolf de Altena, the archbishop-elect of Cologne, rose in his seat in support. Once again, there was weeping in the court. Richard had 'the eloquence of Nestor, the prudence of Ulysses,' according to one chronicler.
It soon became clear that Richard's new northern alliance was now working together on his behalf. Adolf of Cologne and Conrad of Wittelsbach, the Archbishop of Mainz, both urged the emperor to dismiss the emissaries from Paris and to honour his ransom agreement. 'The empire, lord emperor,' they said, 'has been sufficiently defiled by the unworthy imprisonment of a most noble king. Do thou not fix an inexpiable stain upon its honour.'
They were joined by an unexpected ally. Leopold of Austria was anxious to bring Richard's imprisonment to an end, partly to salve his conscience about the original arrest and partly to get his hands on his considerable share of the ransom money. He and Richard went through a show of reconciliation after the court broke up in deadlock, followed by nearly two days of feverish negotiations between the English and the Germans — 'anxious and difficult,' according to Walter of Coutances — with the two German archbishops acting as go-betweens.
Henry realized that he had been outmanoeuvred, but he was determined to extract whatever further concessions he could from the situation. He therefore made one final demand: that Richard should resign his kingdom and all the possessions of the Angevin empire to Henry, and receive them back as a vassal of the Holy Roman Empire. Perhaps this offer was actually intended to break the negotiations, giving Henry an excuse to accept the money from Philip and John; perhaps it was a genuine attempt to lock Richard into the alliance that he had always intended. Either way, it was completely unacceptable. How could the ancient crown of England, let alone the rest of the hard-won empire, be handed over to the Germans? It was unthinkable.
Except, Eleanor wondered, it was a potential way out of theimpasse. She had all but broken England with the effort of raising such an unimaginable sum, a hefty proportion of which was still theoretically at least in her possession, under the guard of her soldiers, even if it was at the imperial court. If it was necessary to make this meaningless and illegal gesture to the emperor just to release her son from his clutches, then perhaps it was worth the indignity. Her message to Richard, via his advisers, at the end of the day on 3 February was a strong recommendation to accept. And with enormous reluctance, he did so. When the court reconvened, Richard knelt at the emperor's feet and turned England from an independent kingdom into an outpost of the empire and promised payments to the emperor as his vassal of -£5,000 a year.
The details of Richard's homage to the emperor were suppressed in England, though his coronation regalia was still sent from England to Germany later in the year in big chests, returned at last to Trifels. Those who had witnessed it were silent about it, and it was only written about by historians after Richard's death, with the additional information that Henry had released Richard from his promise on his deathbed. It was barely mentioned again in English history, but it rankled. Two centuries later, when the Emperor Sigismund was visiting Henry V of England, the Duke of Gloucester took a boat out to meet the visitor's ship on the tide as it arrived in Dover and, with a drawn sword, demanded that the emperor should not set foot in England until he had given up his claim to the overlordship. The whole embarrassing incident has been excised from history by the English ever since, but the German chroniclers remembered it — and so did the emperor.
At 9 a.m. on 4 February the remainder of the first 100,000 silver marks were finally handed over, and the two German archbishops conducted Richard formally into the custody of his mother. Mother and son were reunited for the first time since Sicily and, with enormous relief, his ordeal was over. Eleanor had told the Pope that worrying about the imprisonment of her favourite son had meant she had been 'worn to a skeleton, a mere thing of skinand bones'. She had described him as 'the staff of my old age, the light of my eyes'. Now at last he was free.
But the worry was not quite at an end. Eleanor deeply distrusted the emperor and she had made preparations so that, once Richard was finally released, they could leave almost immediately. Perhaps Henry had withdrawn the promise to crown him king of Provence; perhaps Richard preferred not to stay for the extra week. Either way, when a well-wisher advised Richard to go immediately, the coronation was forgotten in the haste to leave Mainz. Before he left, he wrote to his nephew Henry of Champagne and the other rulers in Outremer, promising that — if he could achieve peace at home — he would return to Acre at the agreed time. The Mainz court and the collective princes of the Holy Roman Empire also dispatched a letter to Philip and John, as agreed during the negotiations, that they expected everything taken from Richard while he was in captivity to be returned to him, and threatening that they would do everything they could to enforce this demand.
Once he heard the news that Richard had been released, Philip realized that this was his
last chance and mobilized his armies. That same month, John surrendered the whole of Normandy east of the Seine to him, except for Rouen and some key castles. It was now time for Philip to take possession, and in the weeks ahead the towns of Evreux, Neubourg and Vandreuil also surrendered to him. Soon he was in control of both banks of the Seine all the way to Rouen. Time was clearly running out for the defenders.
Meanwhile, Eleanor and Richard set off with the English soldiers on boats back up the Rhine, and sure enough, as soon as they had left, the emperor changed his mind and sent out armed parties to find Richard, arrest him again and bring him back. He also sent urgent letters to Philip, informing him of this and urging him to send out naval patrols to try and intercept him in the English Channel. But it was too late. By then Richard and his mother were well on their way north to Cologne, where they spent three days as guests of the new archbishop, who — as provost of Cologne — had been one of the members of the court who had spoken up for Richard during his original trial in 1193. Richardand Eleanor were his guests at mass in the cathedral on 12 February, when Archbishop Adolf joined the choristers and sang the mass for 1 August: 'Now I know that God has sent his angel and taken me from the hand of Herod.'
Once they had gone far enough up the river and into the territories of his new network of allies in northern Europe, Richard could afford to pay his respects to some of the princes responsible for setting him free. The whole purpose of the alliance had been only partly about his freedom and only partly about trade; the main purpose was to isolate the French while Richard secured his inheritance. To that end, the promised pensions to the various princes and prelates now had to be delivered. Henry, Duke of Brabant, was given the rent from the manor of Brampton in Huntingdon. The Archbishop of Cologne got the rent from the manor of Soham in Cambridgeshire. By 16 February Richard was in Louvain; by 25 February he was in Brussels. He and his mother were entertained by the Duke of Brabant to a sumptuous banquet in his castle in Antwerp, where Eleanor sat in pride of place on Richard's right.
Antwerp was also the main port in the vicinity, and here he met the English fleet sent to collect him from Rye, including his favourite galley, Trench-le-Mer, under the command of Stephen de Turnham, the admiral who had conducted Berengaria and Joanna from Acre to Rome. From there, they sailed immediately down the coast of what is now Belgium to the coastal port of Zwin, these days a silted-up nature reserve but then the vital seaway to the port of Bruges. It is not clear why Richard and Eleanor did not make their way back to England as quickly as they could. Perhaps the weather was too bad. But it is possible that they were only too aware of the threat from Philip's naval patrols — as requested by the emperor — now that the French controlled the ports of Dieppe and Treport. It would have been too ironic for Richard to fall once more into the hands of a malevolent king. But the potential of naval strategy was now exercising his mind, and he may also have wanted to survey the strategic possibilities of the nearby islands. Whatever the reason, Richard spent the nextfive days sleeping on board the ship and making brief forays along the coast.*
On 12 March, more than five weeks after his release, he finally weighed anchor and slipped across the North Sea in the night. Their small convoy landed at Sandwich in Kent early the next morning. It was a bright and beautiful spring day.
The arrival of the king and his mother after all this time came as a complete surprise, not just in Sandwich, but everywhere else. There was nobody to greet them as they stepped off the ship, and no arrangements for conducting them to their capital. Instead Richard went on foot to Canterbury to pay his respects at the tomb of Thomas Becket. From Canterbury, he set out on horseback -with Eleanor presumably in a litter — along the Pilgrim's Way to London, the old Roman road of Watling Street, and as they did so, the news began to spread. The first signs of spring in England welcomed the king home, and the ploughmen whispered as they passed that the beautiful sunshine was a good omen for the rest of Richard's reign. The blossom was out in the Forest of Blean, north of Canterbury, and from there Richard and Eleanor made an increasingly noisy procession through Ospringe, Sittingbourne, Newington and Rochester, where Hubert Walter had arrived to greet them, together with an enormous crowd of excited people.
At Rochester, they stayed briefly at the castle and Richard consulted with his new chief justiciar. Then it was back on to Watling Street to Strood — past the new hospital for pilgrims — to Dartford, where they crossed the River Darent at the ford. On top of Shooters Hill, they were able to get their first glimpse of London in the distance. An hour or so later, they were making their way down the Old Kent Road, past the gardens and vineyards and the new inns that were growing up south of the Thames for the burgeoning pilgrim trade. Chaucer's famous Tabard Inn, where Watling Street met the Roman Stane Street, was not yet built, butthere were others like it, clustering around the ponds for watering horses and cattle coming from the southern markets and into London. As they reached the south bank of the river, Richard caught his first glimpse of the new London Bridge,* now stretching part of the way across the river. It was a very different city from the one he had left four years before.
'Faster than the winds flew, [came] the report of the king's long-expected but almost despaired of return,' wrote the chronicler William of Newburgh. By the time Richard and Eleanor's increasingly unwieldy procession had reached the church of St Mary Overie (now Southwark Cathedral) on the south side of the river and was preparing to cross the old wooden bridge next to Peter Cole-church's half-built stone structure, news of their arrival had reached London. People were on the streets and the city had been cleaned and decorated for the occasion, with rushes lining the route.
Winchester was still the capital of England when Richard was young, but now it was clear that London overshadowed it thanks to its sheer scale and wealth. It was an increasingly independent city that governed itself, with Henry FitzAilwin — one of the trustees of Richard's ransom money — as its powerful mayor. It had flexed its political muscles to depose Longchamp as chief justiciar, siding with the rebels, and would do the same in 1216 by inviting the Dauphin Louis over to take the throne, just as it played a role in deposing Charles I during the English Civil War four and a half centuries ahead. The city was already repeating the radical slogan of William FitzOsbert, 'Londoners will have no king but their mayor.' Even in four years, and though it still had a populationof only 40,000, London had grown immeasurably in wealth as its trading and financial tentacles had stretched out towards the Baltic, Palestine and beyond.
The Germans in Richard's entourage were immediately struck by the city and told the king, had the emperor known, things would have turned out very differently. 'For really, if he could have known of these English riches, he would not easily have believed that England could be exhausted of its wealth,' they told the king. 'Nor would he have thought of sending thee away without an intolerable amount of ransom.'
What Richard's companions would have seen as they wandered around London in the days to come was its enormous energy: the splendour of the great houses outside the city walls in the suburbs of Holborn, the clatter of mills in the meadows in Finsbury and Moorgate, the chaos of the hue and cry as citizens dropped everything to chase thieves down the narrow streets, the menace of the gangs of apprentices or wealthy youths moving around the streets in defiance of the 9 p.m. curfew tolled from the church of St Martin le Grand. They would have smelt the tanneries and breweries and trodden in the piles of stinking horse dung washed eventually down into the river, along with an unpleasant concoction of fish heads, rotting meat and sewage.
There were also the horses parading at Smithfield on Fridays, the football games on the fields outside the city, and, since this was now Lent, the jousting games on fields outside the walls every Sunday. The visitors would have missed the events of Shrove Tuesday, when boys brought their fighting cocks to school. But they must have sat by the River Walbrook, which divided the city between rich and poor, and where the inhabitants of the city ska
ted in the frozen winters, and tested out some of London's civilized innovations — the public cookshop by the river and the public lavatory at Queenhithe dock.
They were probably as divided about what they saw as contemporary commentators were. On the one hand, there were the attractive wooden two-storey houses, the upper floors stretching over the street and their bustling workshops at street level. Thenthere was the evidence of thought behind the intricate rules -about the mesh of fishermen's nets, or the just price' that merchants should charge for food and luxuries — designed to protect people's livelihoods from unfair or unsustainable competition. On the other hand, there were the savage dogs that hung around St Paul's Cathedral at night, the rogue salesmen forced to eat their own rotten food in public and the pigs wandering the streets at will.* Becket's friend and biographer William FitzStephen loved everything about the city except 'the immoderate drinking of foolish persons and the frequent fires'. Meanwhile his West Country colleague the chronicler Richard of Devizes saw only the jesters, smooth-skinned lads, moors, flatterers, pretty boys, effeminates, pederasts, singing and dancing girls, quacks, belly-dancers, sorceresses, extortioners, night-wanderers, magicians, mimes, beggars, buffoons . . . Therefore, if you do not want to dwell with evil-doers, do not live in London.'
It was a city of different nationalities — French diplomats, Italian bankers, Baltic traders — all crowded together in the eating houses, gambling with dice in the taverns or cheering the theatre shows at Skinner's Well and Clerkenwell, just outside the city walls, and, more than anything else, buying and selling — fish in what is now Old Fish Street, loaves in Bread Street, chickens in Poultry, corn in Cornhill, while ships and barges crowded the wharves from the mouth of the River Fleet at what is now Blackfriars down to Longchamp's Tower of London.