by David Boyle
Richard had been far-sighted enough to anticipate most of the obvious crises that might arise. He knew what his brother Johnwas like, and had intended to ban him from England while he was away until his mother begged him to reconsider. Eleanor had seen each of her sons in turn lured to Paris by the king of France and turned against their family: the last thing she wanted was to have her youngest wandering aimlessly around the Continent. There were bound to be tensions between John and Longchamp, but these could be managed. It had been predictable that, as doubts grew about whether Richard would ever come home alive, the influence of John would begin to rise as barons shuffled to position themselves favourably in case he became king. It was also predictable that the pompous and demanding Longchamp would appoint his own family to as many positions as he could, and be deeply resented by many of those who found themselves subject to his power. It must also have been clear that rival parties would grow up around the two of them, a party loyal to Richard around Longchamp and a party that believed he would never return around John, and that they would loathe each other. Richard was a strategic thinker and must have expected all these trends.
Sure enough, Longchamp was a deeply unpopular figurehead. His limping gait and sexual habits made him a figure of fun among those who knew, but his money-raising tenacity — trying to recoup the hole in England's finances left by the crusade — made him anything but. He was arrogant and intolerant in his defence of Richard. 'Planting vines, Marshal?' said Longchamp to his sparring partner William the Marshal, accusing him of insinuating himself into the good opinion of John, who might — after all — succeed all too soon to the throne. 'The laity found him more than a king, the clergy found him more than a Pope,' wrote the contemporary historian William of Newburgh. 'And both an intolerable tyrant.'
Chroniclers describe him dashing around the country 'like a flash of lightning' with a thousand armed soldiers, humiliating anyone whom he perceived as undermining his power or that of the king. He was particularly brutal in his dismissal of his fellow justiciar, Hugh, Bishop of Durham. 'You have had your say at our last meeting, now I shall have mine,' said Longchamp, once the bishop had been ushered into his presence. 'As my lord the kingliveth, you shall not quit this place till you have given me hostages for the surrender of all your castles. No protest — I am not a bishop arresting another bishop. I am the Chancellor, arresting his supplanter.'
But if the rivalry between Longchamp's party and John's party was inevitable, it would have been harder to predict the effect of Richard's visit to Sicily in 1190. His spur-of-the-moment alliance with Tancred was a shock to senior barons in England. They never expected it, did not understand it — given the resulting tensions with the Holy Roman Empire — and it made them more careful about protecting their own positions. And when Richard named his nephew Arthur as heir at the same time, in order to betroth him to Tancred's daughter, the news came as a particularly unpleasant shock to John. John had been travelling around England, distributing funds generously, endowing hospitals and encouraging the idea that his brother might never return. Now there seemed no reason to stay patiently loyal, waiting for Richard to disappear; he would have to entrench his own position to fight for the succession even if Richard failed to survive. Handing over the succession to the child Arthur, at the same time as he handed over Excalibur to Tancred, seemed to John a gross act of disloyalty. The other unpredictable event was the death outside Acre of the Archbishop of Canterbury, filled with rage at the hasty marriage between eighteen-year-old Isabella and Conrad of Montferrat in November 1190. The most powerful position in the kingdom under the king himself was therefore vacant. Longchamp was inevitably going to intrigue to secure it for himself, and his opponents were inevitably going to try and stop him.
These tensions had come to a head in autumn 1191 — a year before Richard sailed home — with the news that Geoffrey had been consecrated in Tours and now wanted to come home to take up his position of Archbishop of York. Longchamp regarded him as a potential ally for his opponents and a rival for the Canterbury position, and warned him that he had promised Richard to stay abroad for three years.
The scene was set for a national scandal. On 13 September 1191Geoffrey landed at Dover, where it so happened that the castle was in the hands of Longchamp's brother-in-law Matthew of Clare, who was married to his formidable sister Richeut. When Longchamp heard of Geoffrey's arrival, he ordered his immediate arrest, and it was Richeut who dispatched two knights and fifteen armed men to St Martin's Priory, where Geoffrey had sought sanctuary. After a brief siege of four days, they found him at the altar — just as Thomas Becket had been found at the altar at Canterbury by four knights a generation before — and, deliberately manipulating this symbolism, Geoffrey grasped the processional cross and refused to leave. The knights removed their cloaks to reveal chain mail underneath, genuflected in front of the altar, struck their breasts three times and seized him. They dragged Geoffrey, still clutching his cross, all the way to Dover Castle, his head bumping on the priory steps.
He was hauled before Matthew, the castle's constable, who — aware of the symbolism just as everyone else was — entirely lost his nerve. He burst into tears and fell on his knees before Geoffrey, begging forgiveness, much to the rage of his wife. Geoffrey refused to eat, having his own food sent up from the town. It was an uncomfortable few days for the constable as well.
Confusingly, Henry II had two sons called Geoffrey. But the illegitimate Geoffrey was already a national hero, partly because of his role fighting the Scots in his youth, and partly because he was the only one of Henry's sons to stay loyally by his father until the very end. There was outrage at the thought of his being bumped on the steps, in this worrying echo of the murder of Becket. It was also precisely the kind of event Longchamp's opponents had been waiting for. Sure enough, eight days after Geoffrey's arrest, the Bishop of London pleaded with Longchamp to let him go, offering his own diocese as surety, and the new Archbishop of York made his way triumphantly to London, where he was received by the bishop on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral.
The leader of John's party was the calculating propagandist Hugh of Nonant, who was in his spare time — as one historian puts it — also Bishop of Coventry. He had suffered a particularly bruisingencounter with Longchamp over whether it was fitting for a bishop to hold sheriffdoms.* Now he calculated that Richard was never coming home and was devoting his considerable talents to putting John's case against Longchamp effectively. Hugh and John then seized the initiative, bringing together all the senior justices at Marlborough — including William the Marshal, who had risen fast after he spared Richard's life a few days before he became king — and urged the bishops and barons on the Great Council of England to meet them in Reading. Together, they issued Longchamp with an ultimatum: to meet them at Loddon Bridge over the Thames, outside the town.
On the morning arranged for the meeting — Monday 7 October — Longchamp set out from Staines with the Earl of Norfolk and the Bishop of London. After four miles, the news reached him that John was there, accompanied by a band of Welsh soldiers, and he nervously turned round again, sending a message ahead that he had been taken ill. Back in Staines, he discovered that John's soldiers were accompanying a baggage train that had been sent on ahead to London. Longchamp misunderstood this, concluding that his greatest fear was being realized and the king's brother was trying to seize the city, and he set off there himself as fast as he could.
When the news that Longchamp was not on his way to meet them after all reached the other barons on the road, they stopped. 'What shall we do now?' asked Reginald, Bishop of Bath. 'Shall we go back to Reading?'
'Certainly not,' said Hugh of Nonant, according to the chroniclers. 'Let's go to London and buy some winter clothes.'†
Where the two roads converged outside London, Longchamp's escort ran into John's baggage train and there was a brief melee during which one of Longchamp's knights wounded John's chief official, who died later in the month. But
Longchamp's company had the worst of the fighting and fled down the road towards London, sending messages ahead to his supporters to summon London's leading citizens to Guildhall. When he reached there himself at the end of the day, he urged them to shut the city's gates. Arguments broke out immediately about whether that was a wise thing to do in the face of the man who might soon be king. Members of John's party in the assembly found themselves on the winning side of the argument and accused Longchamp of treason, but by then the argument had spilled out into the streets around Ludgate. It was dark, and people came out with lamps to find out what was happening, as the gatekeepers argued with John's messengers. Again, the cautious merchants of London decided the risk of offending him was too great and the great gates swung open. Longchamp and his staff fled to the Tower.
The following day, the bells of St Paul's rang out as the leading citizens of the city, together with the barons and bishops of the Great Council, met in the cathedral chapterhouse to decide what to do. Geoffrey read out a letter from Richard giving him permission to land in England, and this was conveniently translated into French by Hugh of Nonant, for the benefit of those who did not understand Latin. The discussion continued at the so-called folkmoot, the gathering of London citizens around the wooden cross outside the cathedral, where the crimes of Longchamp were recited again. After that, the decision seemed clear. The Great Council would depose Longchamp as chief justiciar and replace him with Walter of Coutances. John was given the meaningless title 'Governor of the Whole Realm', which, in effect, recognized him as Richard's heir, and in return he confirmed that Londoners should have their own municipal government and their own mayor. The ancient office of Lord Mayor of London officially dates from this moment.
It was a uniquely dangerous moment for Longchamp, who — for all his considerable faults — believed he was loyally defending the throne of England against John's machinations. He knew it was too late to lay in provisions for a siege, and there really was no alternative but to come to some kind of terms. Hugh of Nonant made sure he was one of the four bishops who came to the Tower to inform his great rival of the Great Council's decision, and particularly enjoyed the moment because Longchamp fainted at the news and had to be revived with a bucket of cold water.
He came round for a final show of defiance, but the die was cast. Early on Thursday morning, Longchamp emerged to find an enormous, noisy and hostile crowd waiting for him on a field to the east of the Tower, near what is now St Katharine's Dock. 'He was as pale as one who treads upon a snake in his bare feet,' wrote one chronicler. Alone against the crowd and his enemies on the Great Council, he bravely warned the barons that John was determined to steal the crown from his brother. 'Let all of you know,' he told those assembled, 'that I do not lay aside any of the offices that the king entrusted to me. You, being many, have overcome me because you are stronger than I.'
The short, broken figure of Longchamp was escorted to Dover Castle, which he was allowed to keep. He was not completely alone. The elderly conservative barons of England and the earls of Warenne and Arundel had stayed loyal to him as the man appointed by the king, but there were few of them, and the completeness of his fall from power hung heavy on him. He still had further to go.
What happened next was never explained — except by Hugh of Nonant, and it may not be sensible to take his word for it entirely. Maybe Longchamp believed his life was in danger. More likely he believed he would be prevented from leaving the country. Either way, by the time he reached Dover on 17 October, he had decided not only to escape abroad, but to do so in disguise. This proved a serious mistake, because, most unwisely, the Chancellor — this was Longchamp's remaining office of state — decided he would be most inconspicuous dressed as a woman. Even more unwisely, he chose an attractive green gown that was too long for him.
Limping characteristically, he made his way dressed in this fromthe castle down to the beach to find some means of conveying himself across the English Channel. There he attracted the attention of a bare-chested fisherman who had just landed his catch. After a brief and disturbing flirtatious discussion, the fisherman put one arm round Longchamp's neck while the other felt down towards the groin. There was a sudden intake of breath, and — most unexpectedly — the fisherman let out a raucous, leering guffaw, pulling the gown up over Longchamp's head and shouting to the rest of his crew to come and see what he had caught. At this point, a couple of Longchamp's servants, who had been keeping an eye on him, intervened to rescue the Chancellor of England from further molestation.
The second incident was fatal. A woman passer-by admired his dress, fingered the cloth on his arm and asked how much it had cost. There was no reply — Longchamp spoke no English — and the woman became suspicious. She called over her friends and pulled back the green hood to reveal a small, frightened man. The mob descended and Longchamp — now beyond the reach of his servants — was dragged off to a cellar in Dover. A week later, when the news reached London, the new 'Governor of the Whole Realm' ordered his release, and Longchamp finally took a boat to Flanders. Far away in Palestine, Richard was repairing Jaffa and planning his first advance on Jerusalem, little suspecting the fate of his most loyal supporter.
Hugh of Nonant enthusiastically passed on the details of Longchamp's humiliation to anyone who was prepared to listen. But astonishingly Longchamp did not stay humiliated. His feisty determination returned almost as soon as he had set foot in Normandy. He was, after all, a papal legate. His first task as he saw it, therefore, was to inform the Pope of at least some of the details of his dismissal. It took about twenty days for a messenger to make the journey from Normandy to Rome, down through Champagne and across the Alps. And on 2 December the normally mild-mannered Celestine dispatched a furious letter of complaint to the Great Council of England, which was sent to Longchamp in Normandy to deliver in person. Celestine was outraged at the treatment of his legate. 'AH applauded him when prosperous; all murmur against him when fallen,' he said. The letter was sent along with two cardinals, Jordan and Octavian, who met Longchamp in Paris and renewed his position as papal legate — while the agents of Richard's mother kept him under observation to make sure he never strayed too close to the palace of Philip Augustus.
The presence of the two cardinals worried Eleanor of Aquitaine. She was suspicious of them, and she particularly wanted to prevent them from crossing the Channel and upsetting the delicate and unpredictable balance of power in England under Walter of Coutances. There was little she could do to prevent this, but there was something. The cardinals should strictly have asked for letters of safe conduct across Normandy in order to get to England, and this they failed to do. So when they arrived in the capital of Normandy on their way north, asking to see her, the drawbridge of Rouen was raised against them. Acting under strict instructions from Eleanor, William Fitzhugh — Rouen's seneschal and the senior officer there — explained to the cardinals that their failure to ask for safe conduct was a breach of Richard's rights as a crusader to have protection against foreign agents. The cardinals protested that they had something better than letters of safe conduct from Richard: they had one from the Pope himself. An angry exchange took place outside the gates, and the furious cardinals withdrew, smugly claiming, 'It is meet for the servants of the Lord to suffer contumely from his adversaries.' Unable to involve Eleanor, they stayed away from England.
As a papal legate, Longchamp then issued a flurry of excommunications against the people most responsible for his dismissal — though he stopped short of excommunicating the king's brother — with a special execration for Hugh of Nonant, demanding that he should be strictly avoided by everyone.* In return, the newgovernment in England laid an interdict — a mass excommunication — on Longchamp's own diocese in Ely, which meant they could siphon off the revenues from there into the treasury. It was a fearsome ecclesiastical sanction, which meant that no services could be performed, no masses said, no funerals or burials carried out. It meant that bodies were left unburied on
village greens across affected dioceses. The two cardinals, now back in Paris, then excommunicated William Fitzhugh for their treatment outside the Rouen drawbridge, together with the entire garrison, and laid an interdict on the whole of Normandy. Archbishop Geoffrey also excommunicated his own suffragan bishop of Durham, the man Richard had originally placed in charge of the north of England. Longchamp had himself already been excommunicated by the bishops who met at Reading, urged on by Hugh of Nonant, which gave Eleanor an excellent excuse for not seeing him. It was against ecclesiastical law to eat or drink with people who had been excommunicated and she was able to avoid being drawn into the power struggle by refusing to meet an excommunicate.
So far, the emergency arrangements set out by Richard and his mother seemed to have worked. Longchamp had overreached himself, but his place had been taken peacefully by Walter of Coutances. The new chiefjusticiar was having to deal with increasingly angry letters from Rome, but that was to be expected. What happened next had not been planned for at all — and it was the reason for Eleanor's desperate letter to Richard that arrived in Palestine on 15 April 1192. It was this letter, and those that followed, that must have been uppermost in his mind as his ship slipped its moorings in Acre and sailed north under the Mediterranean stars. On 20 January 1192 — just as Richard had been entering Ascalon — Philip Augustus met William Fitzhugh with a copy of the agreement he had made with Richard in Messina, complete with royal seals, and demanded that he hand over his sister Alys, together with the disputed Norman territories of Gisors, Aumale and Eu. Suspecting correctly that the document before him was a forgery, Fitzhugh refused.
