by Dan Jones
The Plantagenets were now almost totally dominant throughout the Vexin. Philip held little more than Gisors – and this former Norman stronghold was now overshadowed by the new fortress at Les Andelys. It was clear that the time had come to settle with Richard. As soon as Christmas was over, on 13 January 1199, Philip and Richard met to make a long-term truce. The papal legate Peter of Capua initially arbitrated the negotiations, hoping to reconcile the two kings and expedite the launch of a new crusade under a new pope, Innocent III. But it was clear during the bad-tempered discussions that Richard bore a great fury against the Church for abandoning him during his imprisonment, and for sitting by while Philip threatened his absent lands. Richard sought from Philip a peace that would return every single possession that had been taken from him. Philip was prepared to agree, saving the return of the castle of Gisors, which he hoped to secure by a marriage alliance. Negotiations dragged on into March.
At the end of March, although it was Lent and war-making was technically forbidden, Richard went to the Limousin to lead a company of men in attacking a castle at Châlus-Chabrol. A revolt led by the count of Angoulême and the viscount of Limoges had broken out in the south. Richard went unhesitatingly to put it down.
Châlus-Chabrol was not a large castle. There were only forty men and women inside it, of whom just two men were trained knights. They were barely equipped for either battle or siege, lacking both numbers and armour. As he examined its defences, Richard would no doubt have considered that a short siege would be enough to break the defenders’ resistance.
The land around Châlus-Chabrol was scorched. Richard’s army brought all the usual terrors: men with swords and crossbows galloped through the countryside, burning what they found before laying siege to the castle proper. Engineers dug tunnels, under the cover of crossbow fire, which fizzed at the battlements of the castle, keeping defenders pinned down, unable to disrupt the sapping of the walls on which they stood. The rumble of masonry occasionally imperilled those working closest to the walls. But they kept digging, weakening the will of the besieged as surely as they undermined the strength of the stone defences.
For three days they dug and fired. For three days, the small garrison resisted. For three days, Richard camped near his men, watching over them, directing, drawing on all of his experience to bring the castle quickly to submission. In the gloom of the evening of 26 March, he left his tent to inspect the state of the defences. He was armed with a crossbow, an oblong shield and an iron helmet, but he wore no other armour. The battlements of the castle were all but deserted in the gathering dusk.
But not entirely. As Richard looked up, he saw a flicker of movement. A lone body popped up above the ramparts. It was a man later identified by Ralph de Diceto as one Peter Basilius. He was carrying a crossbow in one hand and a frying pan from the castle’s kitchens in the other, as a makeshift shield.
Brave in the face of unbeatable odds, the hapless defender loosed off a single bolt in the direction of Richard’s party.
Richard was used to being in the line of fire. From Jaffa to Gaillon, he had stood before hostile forces, trusting in his training, his reactions, and the professionalism of the men around him. He had led men from the front many times before, and dodged countless arrows and bolts. He lived for the thrill of battle, and took deep pleasure in the noble pursuit of combat. Pathetic as his enemy was here, Richard was filled with admiration for the makeshift courage he saw above him. Characteristically confident under attack, he took time to applaud the indomitable defender before ducking out of the way of his bolt. But the delay was fatal. Whether Richard’s reactions were slowing fractionally, or whether pride finally conspired against him, he failed to move in time. The bolt struck him in his left shoulder and sank to a depth of around six inches.
Richard did not cry out. He was a king and a leader. He could not afford to offer succour to the castle’s defenders, or to worry the men around him. With a wooden shaft sticking out from his shoulder, he simply returned to the royal tent.
When he arrived, it was dark. Richard would have been in considerable pain. The bolt had not severed a major blood vessel, and had missed his heart, but it was deep in his body nevertheless. Richard tried to yank the bolt from his shoulder, but as he did so the wooden shaft snapped, leaving the barbed point buried deep inside his body.
Professional help was required. A surgeon was summoned. Great care was taken to keep the king’s injury a secret. By firelight the surgeon tried to take out the wicked shard of metal from the royal shoulder. He dug deep into flesh, widening the wound, searching for the embedded barb. Eventually the bolt was removed, and the wound bandaged up.
But a darkened medieval battlefield was no place to perform surgery. Soon the wound festered and during the days that followed, gangrene set in.
The infection began to spread throughout Richard’s upper body. It was clear what lay ahead. Medieval soldiers did not recover from infected wounds so close to their heart. And Richard was a soldier to the last.
He remained in his tent, where his condition was kept secret. One of the few people to be told about the severity of the king’s sickness was Eleanor of Aquitaine. As Châlus-Chabrol fell to Richard’s besieging army, a messenger was dispatched to Fontevraud to tell the ageing duchess that her favourite son was gravely ill. She rode hard to his side, and was at the camp when, on 6 April 1199, ten days after he had been injured, Richard the Lionheart forgave the brave defender with the frying pan and crossbow and died. His heart was taken to Rouen, to be interred next to his brother Henry the Young King’s. His body was taken back to Fontevraud, along with the crown and the splendid costume that Richard had been so impatient about wearing at his coronation. He was buried at his father’s feet: the exact spot where his journey as a king had begun.
Lackland Supreme
The darkness of a spring night was settling in on Saturday 10 April 1199. Hubert Walter, archbishop of Canterbury, was in Rouen, preparing himself for bed. The next day was Palm Sunday, the celebration of Jesus’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem. It would have been a contemplative night for Walter. He was England’s primate, a hero of the Holy Land, and a man who had come close to the city of Jerusalem himself.
It was late when a visitor was announced. William Marshal had arrived from his lodgings. He wanted urgently to see Walter. It was a visit that the archbishop had been dreading for days.
The two men were party to secret information. They, along with a tiny handful of trusted Plantagenet servants, knew that King Richard had been badly injured at Châlus-Chabrol. They had been waiting for news of his condition, hoping against the worst, but preparing for it too. Walter knew that for Marshal to visit in person at such an hour could not bode well. Marshal’s biography records the words they exchanged that evening.
‘Come now,’ said Walter as Marshal approached. ‘Give me your news!’ But his face must have betrayed extreme misgiving.
‘I can tell you it’s not good, my dear lord,’ said Marshal.
King Richard was dead. It was disastrous news for both men. As news leaked across the Continent of the shock death of the 41-year-old king, the political map of Europe would begin rapidly to change. So much of the Plantagenet resurgence of the late 1190s was owed directly to Richard’s personality, his leadership and his mastery over Philip II of France. Richard had dragged the Plantagenet cause from disarray into triumph. His burning mission, to fight until Philip was put out of every quarter of Plantagenet France, was the cornerstone of his kingship, and the thread that bound all those who followed him. The truce between the houses of Plantagenet and Capet was as much a personal settlement between the two kings as a political settlement between two great powers. With Richard gone, all this was thrown into jeopardy.
Or, as Archbishop Walter put it that night, as he sat with William Marshal to chew over the consequences of the dramatic news: ‘All prowess is extinguished.’
The two men talked together as the night grew late. Richard’s death ma
de no sense. Had he been punished for greed? For lust? Was God angry? It was impossible to know. Walter and Marshal could only now consider the options for the future.
Richard had died without legitimate children, having been virtually estranged from his wife Berengaria for several years at the time of his death. He had made no clear provision for the succession during his lifetime. No son had been born to be crowned junior king. No daughter lived to be married to a suitable heir. Everything ran by Richard’s command. Unlike his father, Richard had inherited the Plantagenet lands en masse. It looked more now like one large imperial patrimony than it had in the 1180s, when Aquitaine, Anjou and the Anglo-Norman realm might have been split up between different claimants.
It had long been realized – since 1190 and Richard’s crusading days – that if this Plantagenet empire was going to be inherited by one man, then there were two possible candidates: his brother John and Arthur of Brittany, his twelve-year-old nephew, who was learning to govern his duchy under the guidance of his mother, Constance. Early in his kingship, Richard had favoured Arthur as heir, but on his death-bed he had named John as his successor.
Marshal, who saw himself as a feudal statesman of indissoluble loyalty to the Plantagenets, argued in favour of the older man. Walter disagreed. Speaking against Arthur’s candidacy, Marshal told Walter that Arthur lacked good advice. He called him ‘unapproachable and overbearing’. ‘If we call him to our side, he will do us harm and damage,’ said Marshal. ‘He does not like those in our realm. My advice is that he should never be king. Instead, consider the claim of John: he seems to be the nearest in line to claim the land of his father as well as that of his brother.’
This was hardly an incontestable claim. The thirteenth century was dawning, but twelfth-century fogginess over the exact rules of royal inheritance still endured. Did the son of a king’s older brother (in Arthur’s case, this was Henry II’s third son Geoffrey) trump the claim of a king’s younger brother? Lawyers and writers disagreed. Customs varied across Europe and quite frequently the issue was still decided according to the personal suitability of the individuals concerned. Certainly Hubert Walter could not give an irrefutable defence of Arthur’s claim in the dead of that April night. But he gave Marshal one dire warning, based not on the law of succession, but on his assessment of John himself.
‘This much I can tell you,’ he said. ‘You will never come to regret anything you did as much as what you’re doing now.’
John did not inspire confidence. This was perhaps his defining characteristic. Neither princes nor bureaucrats were fully inclined to believe him or to believe in him, and frequently this was with good reason. John’s career to 1199 was pockmarked by ugly instances of treachery, frivolity and disaster, since his earliest, unwitting involvement in the dynastic politics of the Plantagenet family as ‘John Lackland’, his father’s coddled favourite, until his covetous behaviour during his brother’s long captivity. John’s behaviour during the latter years of Richard’s reign had been broadly good, but it did not take much to recall how appallingly he had acted while Richard was out of the country. John had rebelled against Richard’s appointed ministers, interfered with ecclesiastical appointments, connived at the destruction of the justiciar William Longchamp, encouraged an invasion from Scotland, spread the rumour that his brother was dead, entreated Philip II to help him to secure the English throne for himself, done homage to Philip for his brother’s continental lands, granted away to Philip almost the whole duchy of Normandy, attempted to bribe the German emperor to keep his brother in prison, and almost single-handedly created the feeble state in which Richard had found the Plantagenet lands and borders on his eventual release from captivity.
And these were only the political facts. The personal perception was worse. Although John had been quiet and dutiful in his service to Richard following their reconciliation in 1195, he was still thought by many to be untrustworthy. Contemporary writers also commented on John’s unpleasant demeanour, which seemed dark in opposition to the brilliant glow of chivalry that emanated from his brother. Like Richard and Henry II, John was already known for his tough financial demands and fierce temper. Like Henry he was thought to be cruel, and he tended to make vicious threats against those who thwarted him. Unlike Henry and Richard, however, he was also weak, indecisive and unchivalrous. Several writers noted that John and his acolytes sniggered when they heard of others’ distress. He was deemed untrustworthy, suspicious, and advised by evil men. Very early in his career, he was thought by William of Newburgh to be ‘nature’s enemy’.
Amid all this hostility, in 1199 John could not be at all sure of a smooth accession. He was certain, however, that Philip II would support Arthur’s rival claim. John’s first action therefore was to seize the royal treasure at the castle of Chinon. He was right to do so, for as he rode on to visit his brother’s tomb at Fontevraud and pay his respects to his widow, the winds of opinion in the Plantagenet heartlands were billowing behind Arthur. On Easter Sunday, the barons of Anjou, Maine and Touraine – the beating heart of the empire created by Henry II – declared for the Breton, at a stroke cutting off Normandy from Poitou and the rest of Aquitaine. At Le Mans, his father’s dearest city, John was turned away by the garrison and nearly trapped by Philip and Arthur’s armies.
Only in Rouen, where the rules of ducal inheritance were more clearly in favour of a brother over a nephew, did John meet with something like a welcome. On 25 April he was invested as duke of Normandy with a crown of golden roses placed on his head. This, at least, was a triumph – for to lose Normandy after all that had passed in the last five years would have been a sorry failure indeed.
For security in the rest of Richard’s dominions, John relied on trusted agents to rally support behind him. The redoubtable Eleanor, now seventy-five years old, led the movement to secure her son as heir in Aquitaine. She had despaired of John’s behaviour in the early 1190s but was ultimately loyal to her children. The wife of two kings, she would do all in her power to see to it that she was the mother of three. Now she commanded an army under the famous mercenary captain Mercadier, harrying forces loyal to Arthur of Brittany and helping to secure John’s succession in the face of stern opposition. In England, meanwhile, Marshal turned his belief in John’s legitimacy into action. He sent envoys to convince the English barons to take an oath of fealty: it should be obvious to those who had interests on both sides of the Channel that John, already invested as duke of Normandy, was a better choice to safeguard their positions. So with the support of Hubert Walter and Geoffrey Fitz Peter, the justiciar, John was accepted as king. But as Marshal, so ardent a supporter in that first night’s conversation, later recalled: ‘Neither the Gascons nor the men of Limousin, the men of Poitou or Anjou, or the Bretons agreed to it at all, for they had no love for his overlordship.’
John Softsword
The old king of France met the new king of England on the border between their lands. There were only two years between them in age, but they were separated by a world of experience. It was mid-January 1200. John, aged thirty-two, had been a king for eight months, Philip II, although only thirty-four, for just short of twenty years. Christmas had passed, and a truce that had been arranged to discourage warfare during the season of Nativity had held. Now came the first meeting between the two kings since John’s accession. They talked for a long time about the truce they were making. During their conversation, they embraced warmly. It must have felt to John as though he was being pulled into the warm fold of kingship.
In contrast, Philip must have known that here, at last, was a Plantagenet rival whom he could hope to dominate. His experience with John ran deep. They had gone to war beside and against one another already – but never on equal terms. During their long history together, John had always been the child, the younger brother, the supplicant, Philip the king and the judge.
It is not too fanciful to assume that Philip despised John. The English king’s behaviour during Richard’s imprisonment
had been nothing short of craven. The deals he had been ready to make to feel the weight of a crown on his head had suggested that John hankered for power, but had a stunted idea of what power truly meant. This was a man who would blink first in a negotiation, and who would allow his prerogatives to be chipped away without a serious fight.
John had been crowned king by Hubert Walter at Westminster Abbey on Ascension Day, 25 May 1199. To accompany him the king had brought a few friends over from the Continent. There was little time afforded for a magnificent ceremony, as had been the case in the past. The new king had been showered with gifts and reverence, but the whole thing smacked of a necessary formality, rather than a pageant to be revelled in. John could not, nor wished to, stay very long in his new kingdom. The anointing and the great ceremony were mere precursors to the defence of Normandy, Anjou and the soft points of his new dominions’ borders.
Within a fortnight of his coronation, John had embarked again for the Continent. The situation in Normandy was already urgent and he needed allies. Philip backed Arthur of Brittany as a rival claimant to John, and Anjou, Maine and Touraine were all under attack from the combined French-Breton forces. The middle swathe of the Plantagenet territories, which joined the duchy of Normandy with that of Aquitaine, risked being overrun.
Having disembarked at Dieppe, John had renewed the alliances Richard had so carefully cultivated with the counts of Flanders and Boulogne. In autumn 1199, he marched against Philip in Anjou. Here, John managed to achieve a great coup. William des Roches – the most powerful baron in the county, who was leading the rebellion there on behalf of Arthur’s claim – suddenly switched sides. Messages of support for the new English king had filtered through from both the Emperor Otto IV and from Pope Innocent III, and it seemed to des Roches that the tide was going out on Philip.
