Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  Finally in June a papal legate named John of Anagni, under orders from the Vatican to compose the quarrel so that the Crusade could proceed, assembled an arbitration panel of himself and four bishops, two nominated by each side (the bishops of Rheims, Bourges, Rouen and Canterbury). The arbitrators met at La Ferte-Bernard in Maine, twenty-five miles north-east of Le Mans, secure in the pledge by both kings that they would abide by the decision. Many other bishops and abbots attended the conference out of curiosity, to the point where one observer said the gathering looked more like a synod of the Gallican Church than a peace conference of warring factions. But both sides arrived with armed guards, suspecting treachery. Richard and Philip once more demanded that Henry guarantee Richard’s inheritance as heir apparent and immediately agree to his marriage with Alice. It may have been the irksome presence of John in his sick father’s retinue that made Richard add a further condition: John was to take the Cross and depart overland with Philip before he, Richard, would set out for the Mediterranean. Henry retorted that he would accept all conditions but the one relating to Alice for, he now announced, he wanted her to marry John. Richard and Philip were outraged by this latest twist in Henry’s serpentine schemings and rejected the idea angrily. But the papal legate and the panel now seemed to feel it was Richard who was being intransigent; the Old King’s political skill had still not deserted him. John of Anagni threatened to lay a papal interdict on France if Henry’s terms were not accepted; Philip, never one to take a direct threat lying down, replied haughtily that it was easy to see that the legate’s bags were full of English silver. Yet another conference broke up in acrimonious chaos.64

  Henry withdrew at once to Le Mans, but Richard and Philip attacked La Ferte-Bernard and quickly took it. A lightning campaign saw many more of Henry’s castles - Montfort, Maletable, Beaumont, Ballon - fall into their hands. Henry was now in a desperate situation, for Aquitaine was wholly with Richard, England was dragging its feet about sending troops to the continent (and they would not be available for two months anyway), and Normandy was poised to receive an invasion from Philip. At first he hoped to make a stand at Le Mans and burned all the bridges over the River Huisne, thinking this would flummox Richard. But on 10 June his son rode with his knights in full armour into the middle of the stream, sounded the bottom with their lances and found a fording place. Still reluctant to abandon the town of his birth, Henry ordered the suburbs of Le Mans burned down, to provide a fire break between Richard’s army and the defenders, but the blaze got out of control and began gutting the wooden houses around the citadel.65 On the 11th Henry realised Le Mans was bound to fall and rode away northwards with his knights, towards Normandy; at the head of the column, surrounded by bodyguards so that he could come to no harm, was his beloved John. It is said that, two miles out of Le Mans, Henry mounted a hilltop to look back on his favourite city. When he saw it in flames he had another of his rants against providence. ‘God, you have foully taken from me the city I loved best in all the world, the city where I was born and raised, the city where my father is buried, the city which holds the tomb of St Julian. I shall be revenged on you as best I can. I shall deny you my soul’, were the words attributed to him. The vanguard rode without armour, but William Marshal and his followers provided a heavily-mailed rearguard. Richard meanwhile was pursuing his father on a fast horse so as to give him no respite, so rode armourless in his tunic. One of Henry’s knights, William des Roches, charged into Richard’s knights, despite curses and imprecations from both sides. Richard exhorted his men that the point of the pursuit was to harry Henry, not to get bogged down in a mini-tournament with William Marshal and his Poitevins. But he was too late. In the melee that followed, Richard suddenly realised to his horror that the greatest knight in the realm was bearing down on him with couched lance. As William Marshal’s destrier thundered towards him, Richard cried out: ‘By God’s legs, Marshal, do not kill me! That would be wrong. I am unarmed.’ Marshal replied: ‘No, let the Devil kill you, for I won’t,’ and plunged his lance into Richard’s horse instead.66

  Meanwhile Henry made good his escape but, having got as far as Alençon, he seemed to give up the ghost, switched direction and went south to Chinon in Anjou. Richard and Philip took the opportunity to overrun Maine and Touraine. When Tours, the hub of the Angevin empire, fell on 3 July, the sick old man, probably suffering from dysenteric fever, had no choice but to bow his head. Next day, in such pain that he could hardly sit on his horse, he attended the last conference of his life, at Ballon, south-west of Tours. Sitting bolt upright on his charger while peals of thunder rolled around him in appropriate symbolism, Henry tasted the cup of bitterness to the dregs. He agreed to place himself wholly at the will of the king of France, to do him homage and swear fealty; he was to recognise Richard as his heir and pay Philip an indemnity of 20,000 marks; Alice would marry Richard on his return from the crusade and meanwhile three castles in Anjou would be handed over as surety; all Henry’s subjects, in England and the continent were to transfer their allegiance to Richard and Philip; the crusade would commence at Lent 1190.67 To seal the bargain Henry was forced to give Richard the kiss of peace. As he shammed the gesture, in a false embrace that somehow summed up his life, the Old King whispered balefully to his son: ‘May God let me live until I can have my revenge on you.’ Richard, full of contempt for his father, turned the empty threat into an after-dinner anecdote to enliven his followers, and soon the story was known throughout Christendom.68

  Henry dragged himself back to Chinon, the physical pain of the fever compounded by the humiliation he had just been forced to undergo. That evening he sat alone by a window, brooding on the forced surrender and repeating the words: ‘Shame on a conquered king.’ But if he thought he had supped from a cup thrice full and overflowing, there was one further agony to endure. On 5 July definite word reached him that his beloved John had gone over to the enemy. John the realist had decided he had no choice but to submit and pay homage to Philip. When he heard of this final betrayal, Henry lost the will to live.69 He died on 6 July, almost certainly unshriven. His rage against God was such that he was no longer interested in the flummery of the last rites and Extreme Unction. A messenger from William Marshal sped to Richard with news of the king’s death. Richard arrived at the convent of Fontevrault next day as night was falling and entered the Church alone. He stood silently by his father’s bier, looked down once at his father’s face and fell to his knees to say a prayer. Then he stalked out.70 There is no reason at all to believe Gerald of Wales’s fanciful story that when Richard entered the Church the corpse began to bleed from the nostrils; this is simply an imaginative gloss on the old superstition that a murdered man will bleed in the presence of his killer and was barefacedly lifted from Chrétien de Troyes’s Arthurian romances.71 Richard had behaved nobly in the presence of his dead father, and he behaved even more royally once outside the chapel. He called William Marshal to him and reminded him pointedly that just the other day Marshal nearly killed him. ‘If I had wanted to kill you, I could easily have done so,’ Marshal replied, truthfully enough. Richard smiled grimly: ‘Marshal, you are pardoned, I bear you no malice,’ he said.72 He could afford to be magnanimous for all his dreams had come true. The duke of Aquitaine was now lord of Normandy and Anjou and king of England.

  1. The Angevin Empire at the death of Henry II

  6

  RICHARD MOVED AT ONCE to consolidate his hold on the Angevin empire. First he dealt with the south. The key fortress of Châteauroux was given to his faithful knight Andrew de Chavigny, one of his most trusted followers. Another of his close aides, Baldwin of Bethune, then had to be compensated, for Henry II had promised him Châteauroux and a marriage to Denise of Deols to seal the bargain. Richard had to be at his most solomonic to avoid alienating Baldwin, who fortunately had not set his heart on the heiress and was content to receive other rich lands and and a rich bride as compensation. Richard made it a point of policy to promise something and then deliver it
, in contrast to his father’s way, which had been to make rash promises and then stall or wriggle out of them. He then met Philip of France to work out a deal on Tours, for the cathedral and the abbey there recognised France, not the Angevins, as its overlord. Evincing a gift for compromise that had eluded his father, Richard came to an agreement with Philip and then proceeded north to Normandy.1 On 20 July 1189 at Rouen he was formally recognised as duke, confirmed John as count of Mortain and arranged some judicious dynastic marriages. He restored the disgraced Robert, earl of Leicester, to his lands and confirmed him as the bulwark of his defences against Philip in the duchy. Two days later he met Philip again at Gisors but the first of many bad omens that attended Richard after his father’s death occurred: a wooden bridge collapsed under him and pitched him into a ditch.2 The superstitious said this meant the Angevins were destined not to retain the Vexin, but Philip proved unusually conciliatory at the meeting and dropped his immediate demand for the territory when Richard told him he was now prepared to marry Alice. In return for a payment of 4,000 marks over and above the 20,000 the dying Henry had promised to pay at his final humiliating conference with Philip, the French king returned most of his recent conquests at the expense of the Angevins.

  It has been suggested that Richard in 1189 was abnormally sensitive to the idea that he had betrayed his father, and was concerned with promoting the ethos of honour, making a distinction between principled opposition to a king who had gone off the rails - such as his to his father - and merely calculating, expedient treachery and turncoatery. 3 He dealt severely with those territorial magnates who had not supported him from the beginning but joined in on his side once they saw that Richard and Philip were bound to win the struggle against Henry. Such men found themselves disgraced and their lands confiscated. Some observers accused him of humbug - making a pharisaical distinction between types of betrayal - and were particularly incensed that John, whose treachery to his father had been last-minute, expedient, egregious and instrumental in killing Henry off - got clean away with it. But Richard cleverly blunted criticism by declaring a general amnesty for political prisoners, again advertising the fact that many men had languished in prison purely for opposing Henry but that his own methods would be different, emphasising justice rather than despotism. The most illustrious prisoner thus released - but again one vulnerable to the charge that Richard was making impossible distinctions among and between those who had opposed Henry - was his beloved mother Eleanor of Aquitaine.4 Eleanor had been once again closely confined at the end of 1188, after some years of comparative freedom, once the great crisis between Henry and Richard loomed. Almost the first thing Richard did on Henry’s death was to send the newly co-opted William Marshal to England with orders to release her. Not surprisingly, Marshal found that her jailers had accurately interpreted the shape of things to come and already set her at liberty. To liberate his mother was a natural filial action, but the wider amnesty provisions raised some eyebrows. Sceptics claimed that Richard was merely showing that he was ‘soft on crime’ but at first his apparent commitment to justice and mercy won him wide popularity.5

  Richard sped from his meeting with Philip to Barfleur, to take ship for England. Again the superstitious shook their heads dolefully, for it was reported that William Marshal, Richard’s harbinger in England, had fallen off the gangplank while boarding his ship for England, though cynics said it was because he was walking on air after Richard gave him the lordship of Striguil in the Welsh marches and the beautiful heiress Isabel Clare to boot.6 Certainly Richard was remarkably magnanimous to a man who less than a month before had borne down on him with a couched lance. Apart from the Welsh territories, William had also received the vast holdings of Leinster in Ireland, and the combination of Wales and Ireland made him vastly rich. It seems that in his treatment of William Marshal, Richard was doing a number of things simultaneously: displaying his magnanimity to a recent foe, ostentatiously displaying his gifts of patronage, showing kingly wisdom and shrewdness in making over the most important knight in the empire, and contrasting his own generosity, reliability and decisiveness with the dithering, prevaricating and manipulative Henry. What Henry had merely promised Marshal Richard gave, as he took pleasure in pointing out: ‘By God’s legs, he (Henry) did not! He only promised to do it. But I give her (Isabel) to you now.’7 Marshal, once in England, set about his task with gusto. He raced to Winchester, where he found Eleanor of Aquitaine, at 67, ‘more the great lady than ever’. He told Queen Eleanor that Richard had given her plenipotentiary powers until he arrived in England and that she should act the part of Regent. Eleanor rode directly to Westminster, where she tried to make straight the ways for her adored son, receiving oaths of fealty to him from the great barons, and spreading the gospel of royal mercy to political and social prisoners, among whom she included all felons who had fallen foul of Henry’s draconian forest laws against poaching.8

  Richard had John with him at Barfleur, but insisted that his brother disembark at Dover while he made a triumphal landfall at Portsmouth. Probably Richard wanted nothing to distract from his own pomp and glory; that the entire progress through England was being stage-managed became clear when he brought with him, like a Roman victor, an eminent captive in chains, none other than the widely unpopular Stephen of Tours, loathed and despised as Henry’s most sycophantic servitor when he was seneschal of Anjou.9 Richard posed as a Nerva, the merciful emperor succeeding after the tyranny of Domitian, the bringer of hope and light, the symbol of a new age. In the euphoria of the moment the people of England allowed themselves to believe the hype.10 From Portsmouth he proceeded to Winchester, where John joined him. The royal procession continued via Salisbury and Marlborough to Windsor, where Geoffrey Plantagenet, the half-brother, joined him. Richard started as he meant to go on by dismissing the old justiciar Ranulf Glanville and making him pay a heavy fine to be reinstated in the royal favour. He then informed Geoffrey that he would be made archbishop of York but would have to pay 3,000 marks for the privilege. Then he completed the final lap of the journey to London. His coronation in Westminster Abbey on Sunday 3 September continued the purposive pageantry. After making a procession from St Paul’s Cathedral to Westminster Palace through beflagged and garlanded streets, where crowds cheered at the sight of Eleanor of Aquitaine in her robes of miniver, linen and sable, Richard entered the abbey. The archbishop of Canterbury anointed him on chest, head and hands before crowning him; Richard, anticipating Napoleon, picked up the Crown himself and handed it to the archbishop. Once again the superstitious shuddered at a bad omen, when a bat flitted around the throne in broad daylight.11

  The supposed portent was ignored in the carousing and feasting that followed as a thousand or so earls, barons, knights and clergy gorged themselves on beef, venison and wine. Allegedly ‘the wine flowed along the pavement and walls of the palaces’12 but then it always does in medieval chronicles on such occasions. While the feasting went on, something happened outside the palace that would have grave repercussions throughout England. Some of London’s wealthier Jews, eager to establish themselves with the new king, arrived bearing gifts. Somehow the Christian crowds at the gate got it into their heads that this was a blasphemous insult to the newly crowned king; this was, after all, an era in which Jews were doubly execrated - for being the killers of Christ and for usury, defined in canon law as the lending of money at interest, even the most microscopic amounts. Moreover, Jews were loathed for their conspicuous consumption, their sumptuary splendour and the ostentatious wealth that a few of the more incautious Israelites liked to display. Additionally, they were widely believed to murder Christian children for ritual purposes, and the well-known legend of ‘Little St William of Norwich’ was based on this canard. There were also many great aristocratic families, abbeys and religious houses in debt to Jewish moneylenders, people who would shed no tears if their debts were fortuitously wiped out by the death of their creditors.

  Not surprisingly, in such a climate a riot d
eveloped, swords were drawn and soon Christians were slaughtering Jews. The rampaging crowd spread fire and sword into the city of London itself, killing, maiming, wounding, looting and gutting houses. To his credit, Richard dealt harshly with the rioters once order was restored; his motive was not philo-Semitism so much as aristocratic outrage that the vulgar mob had so defiled his coronation day. He hanged three of the ringleaders and ostentatiously conducted back into the bosom of his co-religionists a terrified Jew who had ‘converted’ the day before to escape death. He then sent orders to every shire in England that Jews were not to be harmed and, as an afterthought, extended the prescription to his domains in Normandy and Poitou.13 Cynics said he cared nothing for Jews, but saw them as a rich source of funds and did not want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. But it was difficult to convince the Crusade-happy mob that Jews should be left alone. If Saracens were to be slaughtered by European armies for occupying the holy places in Jerusalem, how much more deserving of death were the people who had actually crucified the Saviour? This was the kind of fanatical feeling that lay behind the anti-Semitic riots that followed in East Anglia and the Wash (Stamford, Norwich, King’s Lynn, Lincoln). Worst of all atrocities was the pogrom at York in March 1190 when Richard had already left the country. Here a mob, urged on by a twelfth-century Rasputin, began by slaughtering all Jews they could lay hands on and then pursued the pitiful remnants (about 150 souls) to the castle. When the Jews realised they could not hold out long in the citadel, they enacted a macabre rerun of Masada in AD 73: first they killed their wives and children, then committed suicide. A handful, not relishing such a death, foolishly believed promises that they would be unharmed if they surrendered, emerged from the castle, and were massacred on the spot.14