by David Boyle
It was now 16 March. Richard had been back in England for three days, moving in the opposite direction to the pilgrims. He and Eleanor now crossed the Thames by the old wooden bridge and entered a city in the mood for celebration, with carpets and mats and tapestries hanging out of all the upper windows they passed, with decorations on every wall, and the sounds of cheering, the blowing of Saracen horns and carol music. Royal entries into cities were marked by carol singing, as well as dancing — withgarlands on the heads of girls, old women leading them into the dances, and the more serious-minded clergy tut-tutting on the edges in disapproval. With the music and colour, and himself as the centre of worshipful attention, this must have been one of the supreme moments of Richard's life. The phrase 'Merry England' ('Anglia plena jocis') had been coined less than half a century before, and it was this kind of occasion — with its dancing, colour and banners fluttering on the breeze — which underpinned it.
Richard and his mother processed side by side to St Paul's Cathedral, where they held a crowded and colourful service of thanksgiving, with the music echoing under the great vault of the still-uncompleted nave. London made the most of Richard's return and the privilege of marking his first formal stop. They had paid for it and they felt they deserved it. Richard never visited London again, but his fund-raising, his absence and his ransom had all converged to lay the foundations of a proud and powerful city. It must have occurred to Eleanor during the service, as she looked around the red and gold painted decorations all over the cathedral walls, that the stone slabs under her feet were all that divided the enormous congregation from the silver being amassed in the vaults, ready for the next instalment of the ransom payment.
After the service and the procession down to Westminster, they were 'hailed with joy upon the Strand,' according to the Dean of St Paul's, the historian Ralph of Diceto. Two days later, they rode north to St Albans and went on to give thanks at the shrine of St Edmund the Martyr at Bury St Edmunds, the same abbey that Longchamp had been ejected from the previous year. Having paid his tribute to the English saints, it was time for Richard to restore order in his kingdom.
Londoners had turned out in delight and could see with their own eyes that Richard was alive. When the news reached John's castles, which had been confiscated by the Great Council in February but were still holding out, most of them surrendered immediately. John's castellan at St Michael's Mount died of shock when he heard the news.
John had sent secret messages, via his envoy Adam de St Edmund, to his English castles the month before, ordering them to prepare for siege. Adam, however, had been followed and arrested in London on 9 February by the mayor's agents. But even without the message, two of John's castles still held out — Nottingham and Tickill in Yorkshire. The garrison at Tickill sent two knights to find out for certain whether Richard was really in the country, and, when they heard beyond a shadow of doubt that he was, they surrendered. But Nottingham was tougher.
Richard reached Nottingham two days after the service in St Paul's. It is one of those peculiarities of folklore that, although there is no evidence that Robin Hood actually operated during these critical four years of Richard's absence, history confirms the legend that Nottingham Castle was Richard's first excursion on his return. In fact the siege was led by two of the names associated closely with Robin Hood in the very earliest reference to the legend: Ranulf, Earl of Chester, and David, Earl of Huntingdon, the brother of the king of Scots. The king's arrival outside the besieged castle was heralded with trumpets and horns, but the defenders were not taken in by what they believed to be a trick and they fought on. As Richard stood watching the siege, two of those next to him were suddenly hit by arrows and he ordered an immediate assault. He took part in the attack himself, wearing only a light coat of chain mail and with a large shield carried in front of him. In his first military operation since Acre, part of the outer bailey of the castle was taken, along with some other buildings, which were burned down deliberately by the garrison during the following night.
The next day, he changed tactics, erecting a large gallows in full view of the castle and bringing up the siege engines. When there was still no sign of surrender, he changed tack again, offering the garrison safe conduct for two of its defenders, so there could be absolutely no ambiguity about their intentions if they fought on knowing that the king had in fact returned.
'Well, what can you see?' said Richard as they were ushered into his tent. 'Am I here?'
When they reported back to the castle, the garrison finally surrendered.* The lives of nearly all of them were spared, on the condition that they paid hefty ransoms. The exception was Hugh of Nonant's brother Robert Brito, who had refused to be a hostage on the grounds that he owed his allegiance to John. Richard ordered that he should be starved and imprisoned. He died in Dover Castle the following year.
With the remaining rebel castle now safely in his hands, Richard went to Sherwood Forest, which he had never seen before. He and his mother stayed in the royal hunting lodge, now a ruin known as King John's Palace. It was this visit, according to the legends, that brought him face to face with Robin Hood. Then it was time for a marathon four-day meeting of the Great Council of England, in the great hall of Nottingham Castle.
One of the main items on the agenda was the failure of the Exchequer of Ransom to raise the outstanding money, and it was here that the extra taxes were imposed. The council also decided that the amounts the officers of the realm had paid for their positions in 1189 — right down to the level of sheriff- had not actually bought them their positions outright, but simply leased them. Now they would have to be paid for all over again. A few months later, as a result of discussions in Nottingham, England finally legalized tournaments. This was another fund-raising tool: there would be entrance fees and licence fees. Richard's illegitimate brother William Longspee, soon to be Earl of Salisbury, was appointed as their director.†
Other outstanding issues included what to do about anyonewho had openly taken John's side, notably the case of his chief propagandist, the Bishop of Coventry, Hugh of Nonant. He was restored to grace for the fee of 2,000 silver marks, but he sensibly decided to go into exile in Normandy and live in seclusion, where he died on Good Friday 1198. His sins were considered so grave that local churchmen were unwilling to hear his final confession. 'After a long illness and unbearable suffering,' wrote one chronicler, 'he closed a miserable life by a well-deserved death.'
John was ordered to appear before the Great Council within forty days, and a new Great Seal of England was ordered to replace the one that had endured such adventures in the sea off Cyprus and in the hands of Richard's jailers in Austria. The new seal carried Richard's revised emblem of three golden lions on a red background, which have been in the royal coat of arms ever since.
Richard's advisers spent the final day of the council meeting persuading him that he needed some kind of public demonstration that he was still king. He was initially unwilling, but finally agreed to a crown-wearing ceremony in Winchester while the fleet and army gathered in Portsmouth. So on Easter Day, 17 April, wearing what remained of his coronation regalia, Richard processed from St Swithun's Priory to the cathedral, led by his friend William, king of Scots, carrying a ceremonial sword, and followed by the earls, barons and knights and an enormous crowd. His mother met him in the north transept on a specially built dais that allowed her and her ladies to survey the unprecedented scene.
For nearly a month Richard waited impatiently in his new naval base at Portsmouth. This was built on land owned by Jean de Gisors, who had shifted his allegiance to Philip and had therefore forfeited it to the crown. Richard was preparing a fleet of nearly 100 ships for sail. He appointed William of St Mary Église to take charge of the new dockyard and to make Portsmouth the focal point from which to manage the defence of Normandy. He then finally set sail for Barfleur, the fleet laden with soldiers, provisions and siege engines, on 12 May. He never returned to England.
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nbsp; From Barfleur, Richard and his mother processed to Caen, followed by an ever-growing crowd, who were dancing and singing: 'God has come again in strength/It's time for the French king to go.' From there it was on to Bayeux. There were now so many people in the narrow streets that, William the Marshal said later, if you threw an apple in the air, it would have landed on someone's head. Richard hurried ahead of his army, together with his mother, to Lisieux, where he stayed in the house of the local archdeacon, John of Alencon — the messenger sent by his mother to Acre to urge him to come home — and went to bed early. But the news from Philip's siege of Verneuil preyed on his mind and he could not sleep. It was then that a figure appeared outside on foot in the evening light and asked to see Eleanor. It was John, who had slipped out of Paris earlier in the day and was in a state of'abject penitence'. Very nervously, the archdeacon woke the king.
'Why do you look like that?' asked Richard. 'You have seen my brother. Don't lie — I will not reproach him. Those who have driven him on will soon have their reward.'
So John was finally ushered into his brother's presence and fell sobbing at his feet. Richard raised him up and kissed him, just as his father had done to him after his own rebellion at the age of sixteen. 'Don't be afraid, John, you are a child,' he said. 'You have got into bad company and it is those who have led you astray who will be punished.'
He asked the archdeacon if there was anything to eat and ordered that the large salmon presented to him by the citizens of Lisieux the day before should be cooked in John's honour. 'The king is straightforward and merciful,' the archdeacon told John later, 'and kinder to you than you would be to him.'
As Richard pressed on towards Verneuil the next morning, sending his mercenaries ahead to cut Philip's supply lines, John went back to Evreux, invited the French officials to dinner and had them murdered, before announcing that he now held the town for Richard. Not surprisingly, Philip never forgave him. He immediately abandoned his siege, marched to Evreux, sacked it and destroyed its churches. It was a sign that the conflict wasbecoming particularly embittered, to the miserable impoverishment of any of the ordinary people who happened to get in the way.
There then followed four solid years of manoeuvre and counter-manoeuvre as Richard pushed Philip's forces back slowly from the land he had taken in Normandy, while Philip in turn distracted him from this by fomenting trouble in Aquitaine and the south. It was a strategic joust between two of the master strategists of the age. It saw Richard investing vast sums in a new, impregnable castle in the River Seine near Rouen known as Chateau Gaillard. He described the castle as his 'daughter'. It was an ironic boast given that he had cared so little about fathering any real children that, a year after his release, he had still not sent for Berengaria. 'He took such a pleasure in the building,' wrote William of New-burgh, 'that, if I am not mistaken, if an angel had descended from heaven and told him to abandon it, that angel would have been met with a volley of curses and the work would have gone on regardless.'
Richard's diplomatic noose around France also began to tighten; Savaric of Bath was even made Chancellor of Burgundy. It was a period that also saw the development of Richard's military tactics, with the Genoese crossbowmen and his force of 300 Saracen soldiers brought home from Outremer — shocking evidence for Richard's enemies of his admiration for Muslim culture — going into action on his behalf all over the Angevin empire.
'How is your conscience, my son?' Bishop Hugh of Lincoln asked him early in 1195.
'Very easy,' Richard is supposed to have replied.
'How can that be when you live apart from your virtuous queen and are faithless to her?'
It was a rhetorical question, but shortly afterwards Richard had his famous encounter with the hermit who urged him to abstain from the 'sin of Sodom'. Later that day he became ill with one of his periodic nervous collapses. Berengaria was still on her dower lands near Le Mans, spending her time helping the poor — the 1190s was a time of terrible famine in Europe, exacerbated by theconstant clashes between Richard and Philip — and now, finally, Richard summoned her to him and they spent Christmas together in Poitiers.
There were moments of truce. During one of them, Philip's sister Alys was finally released from her years of imprisonment for the sin of having been seduced by Richard's father. But later in 1195 the emperor was writing impassioned letters urging Richard to continue the war, and renouncing the remaining 17,000 marks of the ransom to help him to do so. Henry reminded Richard that he was now an imperial vassal and must not make peace with Philip without his consent. With this letter from Henry, the ransom payments finally stopped. The rest was never paid.
But where Richard and Philip were well matched as strategists, Richard was the pre-eminent military mind of his generation, and step by step the Angevins seized the upper hand. In July 1194 at Freteval he came close to capturing Philip, seizing his wagon train, along with his treasure and archives, and an incriminating document with the names of Angevin subjects who were prepared to swap sides. In 1198 Philip was chased to Gisors by Richard's mercenary captain Mercadier, and fell into the river as a bridge collapsed under him. Forty of his knights were drowned.
Richard's strategy to secure his southern dominions was enormously helped by the unexpected love between his sister Joanna and Raymond of St Gilles — also a well-known womanizer with a reputation for cruelty — who had now succeeded his father as Count Raymond VI of Toulouse. Richard and Berengaria were in Rouen Cathedral in October 1196 for the wedding. There was also an unexpected bonus when Mercadier captured Richard's great enemy Philip, Bishop of Beauvais, Conrad of Montferrat's friend, the versifier who had execrated him in Palestine, and probably the man who hated him most in the world. It was God's way, said Richard, of saying who was right and who was wrong.* Whenthe Pope sent his legate Cardinal Peter of Capua to ask Richard for his release, Richard lost his temper. His diatribe was remembered years later by William the Marshal:
By my head, he is deconsecrated, for this is a false Christian. It was not as a bishop that he was captured but as a knight fighting and fully armed, a laced helmet on his head. Sir hypocrite, what a fool you are! If you had not been an envoy I would send you back with something to show the Pope which he would not forget. Never did the Pope raise a finger to help me when I was in prison and wanted his help to be free. And now he asks me to set free a robber and an incendiary who has never done me anything but harm. Get out of here, sir traitor, liar, trickster, corrupt dealer in churches, and never let me see you again!
Peter of Capua fled to Philip's court in Paris, telling him that he was afraid he would have been castrated if he had stayed a moment longer. Richard went to bed and refused to see anyone. His mother later arranged diplomatically for the bishop to escape from Chateau Gaillard and be given asylum in Aquitaine. He was to play an active role on the French side, mace in hand, during the Battle of Bouvines in 1214. But the pressure from Rome was mounting for some kind of agreement that might facilitate another crusade, and Peter of Capua finally managed to negotiate a truce, so that Richard and Philip could meet. They finally did so in January 1199, Richard on a ship on the Seine and Philip remaining on horseback on the bank. It was a stiff and suspicious conference and the former passionate friends never met again.
Although the emperor had cancelled the rest of the ransom, the story of the money did not end there. It was Henry's plan to use his vast windfall of silver to carry out a successful invasion of Sicily, which he claimed in the name of his wife, Constance. This was a critical part of his vision of an enlarged Holy Roman Empire that would dominate the Mediterranean just as it dominated central Europe. He could now afford to pay and equip an enormous army to do what he failed so ignominiously to do in 1190-91.
Only a fortnight after Richard's release, Henry had another stroke of luck. The king of Sicily, Richard's unexpected ally Tancred of Lecce, died suddenly. His heir was his four-year-old son, who was crowned by the ageing Pope Celestine as William III in a desperate at
tempt to prevent the emperor from encircling the papal lands in the middle of the Italian peninsula. This was the moment to act, and three months later Henry was marching across the Alps.
The kingdom of Sicily extended over much of what is now southern Italy and by October Henry was ready to cross to the island, taking Palermo on 20 November. The emperor made a generous agreement, offering the child king the principality of Taranto, and invited William and his mother and sisters to watch his own coronation in Palermo on Christmas Day 1194. The following day, near Ancona, Constance gave birth to their son, Frederick, the man destined to crown himself king ofjerusalem and who would later be known as Stupor Mundi — the Wonder of the World. Three days later, Henry's advisers discovered a conspiracy against him in Palermo — or said they had discovered one — and all the leading figures of Sicily, including William and his family, were blindfolded, sent to Germany and imprisoned. William's mother and sisters were eventually released and lived in exile in France. Nobody knows what happened to William, though it is said that he returned much later to Sicily under the name Tancredi Palamara but was arrested in Palermo and executed in 1232.
Henry had the tombs of Tancred and his predecessors opened to remove their jewels and regalia. As many as 150 packhorses were loaded up with treasure and taken to Trifels, where Richard had been briefly imprisoned. They included the Sicilian coronation robes that were used in later centuries by the emperors themselves, and are still on public display in Vienna. As for Excalibur, which Richard had presented to Tancred, Henry seems to have overlooked it in the treasury in Palermo and it has never been seen again.
Vast quantities of silver from the ransom that fuelled the emperor and his army now ended up in Sicily, so much that it allowed Henry to launch a new silver coinage there. In fact, all over Europe the English silver began to circulate — either in its original form or melted down into new coins — making its way along the trade routes to Venice and the East, and often back to England again. When the leaders of the Fourth Crusade handed over their money to pay for the enterprise in Venice a few years later, they did so in sterling silver from England. Hoards of Richard's ransom still appear sometimes on the Continent.