Lionheart

by Douglas Boyd

  Of the two contenders for the imperial throne, the infant son of Constance of Sicily was unacceptable to the German electors by virtue of his minority. Although Philip of Swabia, the late emperor’s brother, had much support in the south, he was not well thought of in the north or by the bishops of the empire. In this dilemma the hero of Christendom seemed an ideal compromise candidate to many of the northern barons and bishops of the empire, who had come to know him personally.12 Henry II must have turned in his tomb at Fontevraud when Richard failed to leap at this chance to close a vice around Philip by constructing the greatest empire since Rome, comprising England, Wales, Ireland, most of France and the German empire north and south of the Alps.

  Richard lacked the strategic vision, but looking after his friends and protégés was another matter. As he had used his influence in the Holy Land in favour of his nephew Henry of Champagne, so he now proposed Matilda’s son Otto of Brunswick as candidate. Otto had served Richard loyally after remaining in France when his father returned to Germany. He had even been named count of Poitou – a post for which his youth and haughty disregard for local customs and laws made him a disastrous appointment, despite Eleanor’s attempts at tutelage.13

  That apart, he was now a knight of proven valour, schooled in the arts of warfare by his famous uncle, and well thought of by the Church, to capitalise on which Richard borrowed 2,125 marks from a Lombard banker to grease palms that could be influential on Otto’s behalf at the papal court.14 He also outfitted his nephew in considerable splendour for his return to Saxony. Endowed with a liberal supply of money for bribes and presents to the German electors, Otto departed with Richard’s blessing en route to Liège, then on German soil. Unwelcome there, he continued with the archbishop of Cologne to that city before leading the archbishop’s knights at the assault of Aachen, which surrendered on 10 July 1198. Within twenty-four hours he was married to the infant daughter of the duke of Lorraine, whose head was too small and whose neck too weak to wear a crown at the coronation next day.15

  To Philip Augustus, the Otto–Richard alliance was a new menace. In addition, the Church had forgiven neither his invasion of a crusader’s lands nor his violent rejection of his Danish wife Ingeborg immediately after the wedding night on 14 August 1193. Contemporaries hypothesised that he had discovered she was not a virgin, or that she was deformed ‘in her parts’ or had bad breath. Unable to plead consanguinity for an annulment, Philip eventually advanced the superficially humiliating argument that she had unmanned him. It was a clever move because admitting impotence enabled him to plead non-consummation, always grounds for annulment. Whatever the truth, she remained confined in the convent of Soissons so that he could live in sin on the Île de la Cité with his German mistress Agnès de Méranie and their children.16

  With the whole world and Heaven too against him, it seemed, Philip Augustus decided that he had nothing to lose by invading Normandy at its weakest point, adjacent to Ponthieu, the county allied to his cause by poor Alais’ body. Before they were driven back by Mercadier and William the Marshal, Philip’s forces took several castles, which he refused to return. Once again, he came within minutes of capture when a bridge collapsed under the weight of too many men and horses fleeing from their pursuers close behind. The collapse dumped him in the river, and drowned twenty of the armoured knights in his entourage.17

  Richard had taken a calculated risk in leaving his main force far behind in the heat of battle. The confusion of the skirmish at the bridge is evident from these lines in the ‘life’ of William the Marshal:

  And in that place we unhorsed Mathieu de Montmorency and Alain de Ronci and Fulk de Gilerval with a single lance and kept them captive. Of the Frankish force there were captured at least 100 knights. We send you the names of the more important ones, and you shall have the names of others when we know them, for Mercadier took about thirty whom we have not seen.18

  Three knights unhorsed with one lance! The Marshal was not boasting, for it was not the first time he had achieved such a hat-trick. It is interesting also to note that the Flemings under Mercadier kept their own captives for ransom in addition to their pay. Or was Richard letting them loot and take hostages for ransom in lieu of payment from him? The record is mute.

  From Rome at Christmas 1197 came Cardinal Peter of Capua on a mission to bring peace to France. William the Marshal’s squire described the man as having been to a school where he had learned to prove black was white,19 but all the dialectic in the world could not have reconciled Richard with the suzerain who had betrayed him during his exile. Nor was he amused when the cardinal changed tack and argued that under canon law a bishop could not be imprisoned. His point was that Richard should immediately release the battling bishop of Beauvais, who had the misfortune to be captured by Mercadier in May 1197 and was currently held in the tower of Caen. For the mercenaries who took him prisoner, the bishop represented a source of ransom, but Richard refused to let them accept the 10,000 silver marks offered by the cardinal. The reason was not just that the prisoner was a cousin of Philip Augustus, but that he was one of the many lay and religious in the Frankish host with whom Richard had fallen out personally in the Holy Land. A war of words between them saw each blistering sirventès from Richard answered by an equally well-composed poem from the bishop.

  To Peter of Capua’s pleading that he should release this cleric who had the effrontery to confront him on crusade, Richard furiously compared the futility of the Church when he was a prisoner in Germany with its lively interest in the bishop’s predicament,20 which had nothing to do with his religious office. He had been captured in armed combat with his helm closed, so that he was unidentifiable.21 The cardinal was dismissed with a warning that, had he not been protected by his status as a papal envoy, he would have been castrated, as a warning to the pope not to meddle in affairs that had nothing to do with him. In a fit of rage reminiscent of Henry II, Richard locked himself in his bedchamber in a foul sulk.22

  On a visit to Caen, Eleanor tried to pour oil on troubled waters by asking to have the captive bishop brought before her during one of Richard’s many absences on campaign – a command that his gaolers dared not refuse. On his way to the audience, the battling bishop managed to break away from his guards, despite being fettered hand and foot, and hurled himself at the door of a church, to claim sanctuary. The door was locked, so he clung to the ring handle of the latch desperately invoking the Peace of God at the top of his voice. Eleanor’s plan came to naught when Richard refused to recognise the bishop’s right to sanctuary, after which he was transferred to stricter confinement in Chinon Castle.

  NOTES

  1. The Autobiography of Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis De Rebus a se Gestis), ed. and trans. H.E. Butler (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), p. 153.

  2. Recueil, Vol 17, p. 573–4.

  3. Roger of Howden, Chronica, Vol 3, p. 290.

  4. Ibid, Vol 4, p. 3.

  5. Biography of Hubert Walter by Kaye Norgate in Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP), Vol 28 (online version).

  6. William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum Anglicarum, Vol 2, pp. 464–5.

  7. Boyd, Eleanor, p.307; Stubbs, Roger of Howden, Vol 3, pp. 18, 42; Vol 4 pp. 5, 6, 48 (fully quoted in note 6, above); also entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2004–13).

  8. Ibid.

  9. Richard, A., Histoire, Vol 2, p. 305.

  10. Matthew Paris, Historia Anglorum, ed. F. Madden (London: Longmans, 1869), Vol 2, p. 104.

  11. Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Henrici, Vol 2, p. 146.

  12. Roger of Howden, Chronica, Vol 4, p. 37.

  13. Richard, A., Histoire, Vol 2, p. 313.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Flores Historiarum, ed. H.R. Luard, Rolls Series No 95 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1890), Vol 2, p. 117.

  16. Kelly, Eleanor of Aquitaine, pp. 313–14, 337.

  17. Roger of Howden, Chronica, Vol 4, p. 56.

  18. Powicke, The Loss of Normandy, p.
122.

  19. Meyer, Guillaume le Maréchal, Vol 3, p. 152.

  20. Ibid, p. 156.

  21. Ibid, Vol 2, pp. 52–3.

  22. J.R. Crosland, William the Marshal (London: Owen, 1962), pp. 78–81.

  21

  Death in Agony

  We owe the knowledge that many medieval diplomatic marriages of noble and royal daughters were arranged by their mothers or other noblewomen largely to academics working in women’s studies. Eleanor now turned to a traditional method of bridging rifts between royal houses and cast around for a suitable granddaughter who could be married off to Philip’s son Prince Louis. On the same wavelength, it seemed to her that her 31-year-old daughter Joanna was serving no purpose. Joanna’s dowry, clawed back from Tancred by Richard during the winter on Sicily, had all been spent to pay the expenses of the crusade, so a match would not make her new husband rich, though she had, like Henry II’s mother the Empress Matilda, kept her title as queen of Sicily.

  When Count Raymond V of Toulouse died early in January 1195, his son Raymond VI decided to confirm allegiance to Philip Augustus, whose cousin he was. Since neither her father, either of her husbands nor Richard had solved the long-term problem of the breakaway county by force of arms, Eleanor’s pragmatic mind began exploring a different solution. She dangled before Raymond VI the idea of rejecting his second wife Bourguigne de Lusignan and becoming the husband of a titular queen by a marriage that would safeguard the eastern frontier of Aquitaine. With Navarre already on-side through Berengaria, it was a brilliant idea.

  Raymond was still excommunicate for the repudiation of his first wife and the Church would not look kindly on him sending away his second spouse, but there was always a complaisant churchman to sort out that kind of problem, so the marriage duly took place in Rouen during October 1196.1 Among the witnesses was Richard’s neglected wife, who otherwise lived quietly in her dower lands. Eleanor insisted that the marriage contract include a provision for Joanna’s offspring by Raymond to inherit the county of Toulouse on his death – and could afford to feel pleased that, after three generations, the county of Toulouse was reattached to Aquitaine. Joanna, of course, had no more say in the matter than when Henry despatched her as a child bride to William II in Sicily. But what was love, except a game of What If? played by poets, maidens and married women yearning for an emotionally richer life? Even that great romantic Bernat de Ventadorn, who had sworn to be true to Eleanor until death, wrote before he died, probably in 1195:

  Estat ai com om esperdutz

  per amor un long estatge

  mas era’m reconogutz

  qu’ieu avia faih folatge.

  [I was a man by love destroyed. / It ruled my mind for far too long. / But now at last I’ve understood / that I have lived my life all wrong.]

  Another loveless arranged marriage of that year ensured Richard the gratitude of his bastard half-brother William Longsword, who was awarded the daughter of the count of Salisbury.2 A hint of satisfaction can be read on the eroded features of Longsword’s effigy in Salisbury Cathedral, despite the year in question being recorded as one of famine and disease so rampant in England that corpses of the rural poor were dumped en masse into communal graves because there was no time to bury them individually.

  In July 1198 large stones fell from the sky in and around Paris, presumably from an asteroid that had fragmented in the upper atmosphere. At the same time, terrible thunderstorms ravaged crops in England, with hailstones so large that they killed many birds. In November a bright comet was sighted on fifteen consecutive nights. Like all unusual meteorological phenomena, these events were considered evil omens, although it is hard to imagine what could have been more feared in France than the bloodshed and the famine that came from the ceaseless laying waste of vast tracts of land as first Philip’s and then Richard’s forces advanced and retreated. At long last, during a meeting on 13 January 1199 conducted between Richard, shouting his terms from a boat in the middle of the Seine a few miles up-river from Les Andelys, and Philip on horseback on the bank, a five-year truce was agreed, motivated on both sides not so much by the approach of Lent as financial exhaustion. Despite twice capturing the Capetian treasury, Richard had spent every penny of the scutage levies in England in three consecutive years starting in 1194 on paying his mercenaries and building and strengthening fortresses. This compared with only seven scutages in the thirty-five years of Henry II’s reign. Neither he nor Philip Augustus then knew that before the expiration of the five years, one of them would be dead and Normandy would be lost to the English Crown forever.

  In Kipling’s phrase, the captains and the kings departed. So did the mercenaries; on the way home to Flanders, Mercadier and his men awarded themselves a bonus by plundering the great fair held outside the walls of Abbeville and robbing all the merchants assembled there. But Richard’s empty purse could not be filled so easily. He was always bemoaning the lot of a sovereign whose vassals did not hear his summons when his purse was empty. In a sirventès addressed to the count of Auvergne, who was once again exploring the possibilities of reaffirming allegiance to Philip Augustus, Richard included these reproachful lines:

  Vos me laïstes aidier per treive de guierdon

  e car saviès qu’a Chinon non a argent ni denier.

  [You no longer support me since my pay ceased to flow. / My treasury’s empty, as you very well know.]

  It seemed like a temporary answer to Richard’s prayers when he heard that a hoard of Roman gold had been unearthed on the land of Viscount Aymar of Limoges shortly before Easter 1199.3 The most valuable piece – a ceremonial shield or breastplate – was said to depict a king or chieftain seated at table surrounded by courtiers or members of his family. When he demanded that this treasure trove be handed over to him, Aymar offered to go halves – a reply that incensed Richard, coming as it did from a vavasour who should have been eager to ingratiate himself, in Richard’s opinion at least. The gold had been taken for safekeeping to the castle of Châlus. Although a castle might be manned by 1,000 soldiers or more during periods of hostilities, at other times a handful of men sufficed so long as the drawbridge was up and the portcullis down. Châlus was held by two sergeants-at-arms. Being lowborn, their names were never certainly recorded, but they were probably Pierre Brun and Pierre Basile. With them inside the walls were a total of thirty-eight men, women and children.4

  An alternative explanation of the siege is that Richard had his sights on capturing the largest gold mine in France, which was situated not far from Châlus. Whichever is true, he defied the Lenten truce by sending Mercadier to besiege the nearby castles of Nontron and Piégut, and thus ensure that his retreat from Châlus, if it became necessary because Viscount Aymar arrived with a superior force, would be unhindered. He himself then headed for Châlus with a force of about 100 mercenaries. At their approach on 25 March, the defenders were desperate because he had announced in advance that he would give no quarter.

  It says much for the construction of the castle that the paltry force of defenders held out through three days of determined assault. What happened after its fall is a good example of the level of violence and bloodshed in the routine siege of a relatively unimportant castle. On the evening of 26 March, Richard was checking the progress of the sappers undermining the outer wall. With the tunnel entrance shielded by wattle fences to protect them from the defenders’ missiles, they had dug a huge cavern in the hillside. The roof was propped up with tree trunks copiously packed with pig carcases smeared with pitch and other combustible material which, when fired, would consume the props and bring down the wall above, making a breach through which the attackers could swarm.

  Richard was wearing a helmet but no body armour. Instead, he was carrying a buckler to fend off stray missiles fired from the arrow slits high up in the walls of the keep. Their own supplies of arrows long since exhausted, the men of the garrison were reduced to scrambling about at risk to life and limb in the outer bailey, collecting missiles fired by the a
ttackers that had not broken or been deformed on impact. Pierre Basile had spent the day doing this and dodging the incoming fire under the shelter of a huge frying pan from the castle kitchen, which he used as a shield. He was now on watch at the arrow slit, which is still visible in the wall of the circular keep, and waiting for a target of opportunity before daylight failed.

  There are two versions of what happened next. In the first, Richard let his shield drop at the very second a reused arrow from his own armoury flew through the air to pierce his shoulder. The more credible version is that the missile that struck him was a reused crossbow quarrel. The accuracy of a crossbow was greater than that of a bow and the quarrel travelled faster than an arrow, so that a peasant might deliberately kill a king, which is why the weapon had been outlawed by the Lateran Council of 1139 as being unchivalrous. Ironically, Richard was one of the kings who had defied the ban; his troops had used this weapon both in Cyprus against Isaac Comnenus’ forces and against the Saracens in the Holy Land. He was also credited by William le Breton with having introduced the weapon into France when hiring mercenary Genoese crossbowmen.5

  Caught literally off-guard, Richard was hit by the quarrel at the junction of the neck and left shoulder.6 Giving no sign to the mercenaries around him of the pain he was suffering, he mounted his horse and rode back to the house commandeered for his use. While it would have been difficult to conceal an arrow nearly 3ft long sticking out of his shoulder, a far shorter quarrel could have been hidden in the poor light in order not to affect the mercenaries’ morale. Richard had been wounded many times, and this was not the first crossbow bolt to pierce his skin. Back in his quarters, he was laid on a couch, where Mercadier’s medic attempted to pull out the missile in the flickering light of resinous torches. The wooden shaft broke off, as it was designed to do, and revealed the mark of the Angevin armoury at Chinon, leaving the pointed metal head still deep in the wound. Fortified with alcohol, the only analgesic available, Richard had to grit his teeth and bear the medic’s clumsy efforts to cut deeper and deeper into the shoulder muscles, hampered by a layer of fat: his patient had been putting on weight for some time.7