Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  Nothing could halt the frenzied pace of the building work on the fair castle of the rock (bellum castrum de Rupe). On 8 May 1197 there was a fall of red rain, which the superstitious interpreted as a shower of blood. Richard brushed aside the ill omen and said the work would go ahead even if an angel descended from heaven and ordered him to stop.64 Château-Gaillard became something close to monomania with him, and its cost was astronomical - £12,000 in two years as against £7,000 spent on all other castles for the whole of Richard’s reign. Even Henry II had not spent more than £7,000 on his showpiece, Dover Castle, which took twelve years to complete (1179-91). It is likely that Château-Gaillard was the most expensive castle built in all Europe until that date; it was certainly the most famous fortress in the Middle Ages.65 Richard’s obsession with his Camelot had some rational basis, for the castle was designed both as the ultimate in defence, blocking the direct route to Rouen, and as a command post from which he would launch an offensive to regain the Vexin, when the time was ripe.66 In tandem with Château-Gaillard, which provided the funnel through which troops from Rouen could be poured into the marchlands of eastern Normandy, Richard developed his inchoate ideas on sea power, tested on the Mediterranean and against Saladin’s fleets on the Seine, building a fleet of ‘galleys’ (probably versions of the Viking longship) with shallow hulls, designed for speed and riverine warfare.67 Under the protective shelter of Château-Gaillard Richard built a port in the new town of Les Andelys for his pilot version of the flyboat. There was thus an elaborate network of sea power extending from Portsmouth to Rouen and up the Seine. To set the capstone on his great achievement, Richard built a palace in the town, which became by far his favourite residence.68 For the rest of his life he was absent from the urban complex Les Andelys-Château-Gaillard only when campaigning.

  The one snag with Château-Gaillard was that the territory of Les Andelys was technically the manor of Richard’s old gadfly the archbishop of Rouen. The problems with this fiery cleric, which had only just been damped down, flared up once more as the archbishop strenuously objected to Richard’s despotic and ‘illegal’ action in so contemptuously riding roughshod over his (Rouen’s) prerogatives. To the archbishop it seemed the last straw that the king of England, who had devastated so much of his church property during the late war, should now filch the jewel in his episcopal crown - for the toll-house at Andeli, collecting dues from ships plying up and down the Seine, was one of his principal sources of income. Richard made the archbishop many tempting financial offers, but the stubborn divine turned them all down.69 Angered and frustrated, Richard simply moved in and started the building work anyway. The archbishop thereupon laid Normandy under an interdict and set out for Rome to lay his case before the Pope.70 Not wishing to share Leopold of Austria’s fate at the hands of the papacy, Richard sent his own rival embassy, principally the troika of Philip of Poitou (bishop elect of Durham), the bishop of Lisieux, and his old warhorse, the faithful William Longchamp. Richard’s mission began badly when Longchamp suddenly died at Poitiers, having barely begun the long journey.71 In Rome the ambassadors fared better, since Pope Celestine and his cardinals were sympathetic to Richard; as many of them said, the entire war and castle-building programme was only taking place because Philip had defied a previous papal bull and seized the Vexin while Richard was on crusade. Celestine additionally thought that the archbishop of Rouen was being greedy and had been offered a fair price for Les Andelys, and moreover was guilty of the sin of pride, leaving the bodies of the dead in Normandy unburied simply because of a wrangle over filthy lucre. In April 1197 he raised the interdict and sent the fire-eating bishop back to Normandy with instructions that he was to agree a settlement with the Lionheart. The litigious archbishop did not do badly out of the settlement, netting a net annual revenue of £1,405 (a vast fortune in those days) from the agreement signed with Richard.72

  Richard’s diplomacy was successful on several other fronts in 1196-97, once again refuting the absurd canard that he was nothing but a tunnel-vision soldier. By brilliant manipulation, in a very short span of time he deprived Philip of France of both his major allies. It had always been his hope that matters in the south of his empire could be stabilised so that he could concentrate all his resources on the struggle in the Seine valley, but now events in Spain forced his hand. Following the death of his ally Alfonso II of Aragon in April 1196, the new rulers in northern Spain became involved in fratricidal conflict of their own, leaving them unwilling or unable to intervene in the affairs of Gascony, Aquitaine and Provence. King Sancho of Navarre was engaged in war with Castile, and Richard could no longer rely on him.73 Faced with these new currents, and licking his wounds over the setbacks in Normandy in the summer of 1196, Richard decided to think the unthinkable and aim for a total diplomatic revolution. In short, he set out to conciliate the count of Toulouse, whose forefathers had waged a forty-year war against the Angevin empire. In a generous package designed to win over the new count Raymond VI (Raymond V died in 1195), Richard renounced all claims to Toulouse, gave back all disputed territory to the count, and offered his sister Joan in marriage, with the county of Agen as dowry.74 Raymond VI jumped at the terms for, quite apart from the benefits to himself, Toulouse could now enjoy uninterrupted trade through Bordeaux and have unimpeded access to the Garonne river. In Rouen in October 1196 Richard presided over the marriage of his sister (given her full honorific title of queen of Sicily) to the young count of Toulouse.75 The elaborate wedding was a particular slap in the face for Philip of France, since Philip had defied papal and public opinion that summer by taking a wife, even though the fiasco involving his Danish spouse Ingeborg had not been resolved. Agnes, his new wife, was the daughter of Berthold IV, count of Meran in the Rhineland, a Hohenstaufen supporter and ally of the duke of Swabia. The papacy never recognised Philip’s third marriage, and Anglo-Angevin chroniclers delighted in referring to Agnes as ‘the adulteress’.76

  Having secured the south of his empire, Richard next proceeded to turn Philip’s flank by another and, some think, even more important diplomatic about-turn. Just as economic imperatives made sense of an Aquitaine-Toulouse accord in the Garonne basin, so did the prerequisites of the important English wool and corn trades point towards a Flanders alliance. The densely populated manufacturing centres of Bruges, Ypres, Ghent and Lille were the classic secondary producers of the Middle Ages, with England as their complementary primary producer, but hitherto politics had cut across the natural lines of comparative advantage, with trade embargoes, tariffs and sanctions the order of the day.77 Once again it was the opportune death of a representative of the old order that opened the door to diplomatic revolution - with the succession of Baldwin IX - and once again one can observe the synchronicity that Baldwin VIII of Flanders died in 1195, the same time as Raymond V of Toulouse. Richard’s envoys prodded away at an old Belgian wound - the loss of Arras, St Omer and Douai to Philip Augustus in 1192. Richard secretly promised not just an end to all trade embargoes and the payment of full arrears on his truncated pension (consequent on the loss of Artois to Philip) but also an ex gratia emolument of 5,000 marks. In the summer of 1197 Baldwin IX came to Normandy to sign a formal treaty. One of the significant straws in the wind was that three of the Norman lords of the Vexin marches, who had previously been most wobbly and ambivalent about the Angevin cause, now stood surety for Richard’s end of the treaty. Both the pact and the action of the Norman lords were a serious blow to Philip and to France.78

  If 1197 was a year of spectacular military triumphs for Richard, it also saw the revival of his military fortunes. In April that year he raided Ponthieu and singed Alice’s husband’s beard by sacking the port of St Valery. The gutting and looting of the town was notable for one incident, showing the harsh side of Richard. When he found an English ship in the harbour, caught redhanded trading with the king’s enemy (the count of Ponthieu), he hanged every last member of the crew as an example.79 The next month he captured the castle of Milli, in an ac
tion where William Marshal distinguished himself. When Richard gently rebuked his most famous knight for recklessness, doing a job that younger men should be doing, Marshal reminded the king of his own bullheadedness, for his captains had had to restrain him from leading the charge during the siege.80 Yet if Richard’s right-hand man, the greatest knight in England, sans peur et sans reproche, was winning golden opinions, the Lucifer on his left surpassed him, for Mercadier, dauntless leader of the routiers, hauled in an even greater prize than Milli by capturing Philip, the bishop of Beauvais.81 The bishop, another fiery cleric, who had been a reliable thorn in Richard’s side for years and was largely responsible for the black legend that he had hired the Assassins to murder Conrad of Montferrat, was now in his power and, as William Marshal saw, ‘was one of the men Richard hated most in all the world’.82 Richard threw the bishop into a dungeon and refused to release him. To protests from the Church Richard replied that he was holding Beauvais not in his capacity as a bishop but as a military prisoner, since he had imprudently sprung to arms when hearing of the siege of Milli and had been taken by Mercadier in full armour, helmeted and caparisoned. Richard knew that it was Beauvais’s lobbying that had led to a temporary worsening of his conditions while the emperor’s prisoner in Germany, and determined to exact a grim vengeance, but the pleas of the invaluable Hubert Walter made him soften his stance.83 Convinced that fortune was with him - he even vaingloriously told William Marshal that the capture of Beauvais proved that God was on his side and against Philip - Richard spurred on, took the castle of Dangu, just four miles from Gisors, and even sent outriders to threaten the outskirts of Paris itself.84

  After the alliance with Baldwin of Flanders was concluded, Richard was able to indulge his dream of a two-pronged offensive against Philip. While Baldwin invaded Artois in late July 1197, Richard swept through Berry, capturing ten castles.85 Philip took his time about responding, evincing the perennial obsession with the Vexin by recapturing Dangu, and only then advancing to the relief of Arras.86 Baldwin tried the oldest trick in the world - the feigned retreat - and the angry and intemperate Philip fell for it. Having stretched Philip’s supply lines thin, Baldwin got his troops round behind him, broke down the bridges and cut his communications and food supplies. He then opened the sluices and flooded the country so that the French were trapped, unable either to advance or retreat, and still less to receive supplies. Surrounded and starving, the French at first tried to live off the land, but their depredations merely aroused the peasantry against them as armed guerrillas to add to their woes. Philip was at last forced into an abject surrender; he offered to give Baldwin whatever he asked if he would only break with Richard. Baldwin rejected the offer brusquely and instead summoned Philip to a peace conference to be held in September.87 Although Richard was riding high and certainly felt no inclination to make a permanent peace with Gisors and the Vexin still unconquered, he and Baldwin met Philip at a venue between Gaillon and Les Andelys in the week of 9-16 September and agreed a truce of 16 months, to run until New Year 1199.88 Baldwin departed on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury, while Richard cemented the alliance by getting John to agree that, in the event of Richard’s death, he would make no peace with France without Baldwin’s consent and in the event of Baldwin’s death would not do so until he had consulted Baldwin’s brother and heir presumptive. John’s letters patent to this effect were issued under his titles of lord of Ireland and count of Mortain.89 The significance of the covenants made by John with Baldwin and his brother, witnessed as they were by the most important civil, military and ecclesiastical dignitaries in the Angevin empire, was that for the first time Richard implicitly recognised John as his heir. Arthur of Britanny’s wardship with the king of France, so ‘cleverly’ devised by Constance and her husband, now looked like the gravest of errors.90

  Diplomatic matters now returned to the fore with an election of a new German emperor, after Henry VI died of a fever in Messina on 28 September 1197, aged only 32. The devout said that God had once again punished a malefactor who had abducted the crusader king, just as he had previously punished Leopold of Austria, though on his deathbed Henry promised to repay Richard all the money he had extracted for the ransom. Indeed Pope Celestine expressly forbade Henry’s burial until all this money was repaid.91 Henry’s son, the future Frederick II, was only three years old and so out of the running, but a fierce contest developed between the Hohenstaufen and their Welf enemies that once again threatened to tear the empire apart; since the rivals were backed by Richard and Philip, respectively, the German election campaign of 1197-98 turned out to be Franco-Angevin warfare by other means. Richard’s allies were all the friends who had backed him in the dark days of early 1194: principally the archbishop of Cologne and the princes of the Lower Rhineland.92 Though invited to come to Germany to take part in the election, Richard declined - the psychology here is surely obvious - and instead sent his old comrade from the grim 1192-93 kidnapping, Baldwin of Bethune (now count of Aumale), plus Philip of Poitou, the bishop of Durham and other old faithfuls. Richard’s inclination was to support his nephew Henry of Brunswick, though he was inconveniently absent on crusade. This happy chance averted a potential conflict with the archbishop of Cologne, who was unhappy at the thought of Henry the Lion’s heir as emperor. When an assembly of princes chose Henry VI’s younger brother Philip of Swabia as the Hohenstaufen candidate, the archbishop, with Richard’s blessing, opted for Henry of Brunswick’s younger brother Otto, whom the Rhineland princes thought would be a cipher. Richard was happy with Otto, whose education and cultural formation had been in Aquitaine, and he became known as the ‘English’ candidate.93 In June he was elected king at Cologne and crowned at Aachen the following month, with Baldwin of Flanders and his brother as Richard’s representatives. Philip of Swabia bitterly refused to accept the outcome, and signed a treaty with Philip Augustus, identifying Richard, Otto, count Baldwin and the archbishop of Cologne as his mortal enemies.94 The treacherous Prince John must have been tempted to join his erstwhile ally, for Richard’s enthusiasm for Otto threatened his own position; there was talk that Richard intended to name Otto as his heir in England.95

  Yet the dissentient stance of both Philips virtually received its coup de grâce when the new Pope Innocent III (elected on 8 January and consecrated on 2 February 1198), having maintained an official posture of neutrality, openly welcomed the new emperor’s election in the most effusive terms. In fact he and Richard had been working together to get Otto elected.96 Once again Richard had decisively outpointed Philip Augustus in the diplomatic stakes. The new pontiff proved energetic and interventionist, determined to mediate in the long-running dispute between Angevin and Capetian kingdoms but reserving his judgement until he had visited both countries; in expressing such a wish the Vicar of Christ showed himself an innovator, for by tradition the pope never left the environs of the Vatican.97 In April Richard sent the bishop of Lisieux to Rome to get Innocent’s backing for his attempt to get the entire ransom repaid from the heirs of Henry VI and Leopold of Austria. Innocent replied sympathetically, promising to do all in his power to bring pressure on Leopold’s son and the duke of Swabia. For all that, at the same time he lifted the interdict on Henry VI and allowed his body to be buried. When the duke of Swabia was so bitterly disappointed at failing to become the new German emperor, Innocent let him off the hook by failing to press him for the return of the money.98 This was a blow to Richard, but Innocent made good his complaisance in this regard by two hard-hitting decisions that clearly favoured the English king. In the first place, he took an even tougher line than his predecessor Celestine on Philip Augustus’s marriage to Agnes, condemning it out of hand on two counts: he, the pontiff, stood forth as the protector of ‘persecuted women’ like the discarded Ingeborg; and Philip had been contumacious in not awaiting the Church’s permission before entering a third union. When Philip predictably failed to respond to the Pope’s demand that he restore Ingeborg, Innocent
placed an interdict on France; it was, however, only partially obeyed by the French clergy, as Philip viciously persecuted any priests who obeyed the pontiff ’s orders rather than his own.99 The second papal move favouring Richard also concerned wives, this time Berengaria. As long as the king of Navarre was Richard’s ally, it hardly mattered that he had not in fact handed over the castles of St-Jean-Pied-de-Port and Roquebrune, promised to the English king as Berengaria’s dowry. But now that the new king of Navarre, Sancho VII, had other concerns and was no longer any use to Richard, it was imperative that Richard gain possession of the strongholds. Innocent wrote to the new king in the strongest terms, requiring him to make good his father’s pledge on the dowry.100 It was clear from this development that Berengaria’s reconciliation with her husband had been only partial, and that her childlessness was now perceived as a major problem. Berengaria had failed to produce an heir, and had a brother who was now insouciant about Richard’s diplomatic concerns. The cynic might say that, in a loveless marriage, the queen had outlived her usefulness. 101