A King's Ransom

by Sharon Kay Penman

  Constance, Duchess of Brittany, seems to have had a happy marriage with her third husband, Guy de Thouars. But her happiness was short-lived, as she died in early September 1201. It has occasionally been claimed that she died of leprosy, but that has been discredited and it is most likely that she died of the complications of childbirth; she was forty at the time of her death and the birthing chamber would have posed greater dangers for her. There is some confusion about her children with Guy. We know she gave birth to two daughters, Alix and Katherine, but I’ve seen it reported that Alix was born in 1200 and that Constance died after giving birth to twin daughters in 1201. Other histories say that Alix was born in 1201, and if so, she and Katherine would have been the twins. At least Constance was spared knowing the tragic fate of her children by Geoffrey. Arthur is believed to have been murdered at John’s command in April of 1203, and his sister, Eleanor (Aenor), was held prisoner in England for thirty-nine years, first by John and then by his son, Henry III, finally dying in August 1241. Once Arthur was believed dead, the Breton barons crowned his half sister Alix and Guy de Thouars served as regent until the French king assumed control of the little heiress, whom he would marry to his cousin when she was twelve. She died in childbirth like her mother, only twenty-two at the time. Guy wed again and his second wife gave him a son.

  Baldwin de Bethune died in 1212 and his wife, Hawisa, Countess of Aumale, paid John the vast sum of five thousand marks so she’d not have to marry again; she died two years later. A few historians have suggested she may have been John’s mistress, but I’ve never been convinced of that.

  William Marshal was a prominent figure during John’s reign, serving as regent to the latter’s underaged son, dying full of years and honors in 1219. The Earl of Chester wed another Breton heiress, Clemence de Fougères, but this marriage was childless, too; he died in 1232, having become a valuable ally of our favorite Welsh prince, Llywelyn Fawr. The Earl of Leicester was not blessed with a long life, dying in 1205. He and his wife, Loretta, had no children, and the earldom of Leicester was inherited by his sisters. The elder sister, Amicia, was wed to the French baron, Simon de Montfort, and eventually the earldom of Leicester would pass to Amicia’s grandson, another Simon de Montfort, featured in my novel Falls the Shadow. Mercadier survived Richard by just a year. He was murdered in the streets of Bordeaux in April 1200 by one of the men of a rival mercenary, who was now seneschal of Gascony.

  Geoffrey, Archbishop of York, had an even more turbulent relationship with John than he had with Richard, and he fled to France in 1207. He died in exile in December 1212. I changed the name of Richard’s loyal clerk and subsequent Bishop of Durham, Master Fulk of Poitiers, as it was really Philip and I had a surfeit of Philips. He died in April 1208. Hugh, the Bishop of Lincoln, died in November 1200; he would soon be canonized by the Catholic Church and is the patron saint of sick children, the sick, and swans.

  Philippe Capet lived long enough to overcome the stain upon his reputation caused by his abandonment of the Third Crusade and his humiliating defeats at Richard’s hands. He was much more successful against John and French historians consider him one of their great medieval kings. He seemed to be happy with Agnes of Meran, but he finally yielded to papal pressure and put her aside in 1200, making peace with the Church by effecting a sham reconciliation with Ingeborg. He continued to treat Ingeborg very badly, but Agnes spared him the awkwardness of having two crowned queens by dying in July 1201. Philippe died in 1223, at age fifty-eight, and was succeeded by his son, Louis VIII, who’d wed Eleanor’s granddaughter Blanche. Philippe’s abused queen Ingeborg outlived him by fourteen years, and was treated much more kindly by Philippe’s son and his grandson, Louis IX.

  It seems likely that in marrying Alys to the young Count of Ponthieu, Philippe hoped that the marriage would be childless and Ponthieu would then revert to the French Crown. I am happy to report that Alys gave birth to an heir, though, a daughter, Marie. Alys is one of history’s sadder figures, but in a nice turn of irony, her great-granddaughter would become Queen of England, Eleanora of Castile, who wed Edward I.

  Philip de Dreux, Bishop of Beauvais, took part in the Albigensian Crusade; naturally, he would. When he was freed from captivity in 1199, he was forced to swear that he’d not fight again against his fellow Christians. Not surprisingly, he did not honor this promise, and played a prominent role at the Battle of Bouvines, mentioned below, where he captured John’s half brother William de Longespée. He died in 1217, at age fifty-nine.

  Berengaria’s younger brother Fernando died at the age of thirty in 1207 when he was killed in a tournament. Her youngest sister, Blanca, had a brief but happy marriage to Thibault, the Count of Champagne, brother of Henri of Champagne; she was a great comfort to Berengaria during the latter’s widowhood. Berengaria’s brother Sancho’s story is another sad one. His health deteriorated and he grew so heavy that he could no longer mount a horse and became a recluse. His marriage to Raimond of Toulouse’s daughter Constance failed, and although he had four illegitimate sons, he died without an heir in 1234, Navarre’s crown passing to his nephew, his sister Blanca’s son.

  Leopold of Austria’s eldest son, Friedrich, assumed the papal penance imposed upon his father and took the cross. Like so many crusaders, he was stricken by a fatal illness, dying in April 1198 at the age of twenty-two. His brother Leopold inherited the duchy. He would have a long and very successful reign, earning himself the epithet “Leopold the Glorious” before his death in 1230. Friedrich, the son of Heinrich von Hohenstaufen and Constance de Hauteville, would become Holy Roman Emperor and even King of Jerusalem; he was one of the most intriguing, colorful, and controversial figures of the Middle Ages, called Stupor Mundi, the Wonder of the World.

  As I explained in Lionheart, I chose to retain Richenza’s German name although she’d changed it to Matilda during her family’s exile in England. Her husband Jaufre, Count of Perche, died suddenly in April of 1202, leaving her a widow at age thirty. Jaufre entrusted her with the minority of their son, Thomas. She wed again between April of 1203 and April of 1204 to Enguerrand de Courcy, the French king’s cousin, and Kathleen Thompson, in her excellent history Power and Border Lordship in Medieval France, argues convincingly that what slight evidence there is indicates this second marriage was not of Richenza’s choosing. She died in January 1210, only thirty-eight, and her son, Thomas, was slain at the Battle of Lincoln in 1217.

  Richenza’s brother Otto was crowned King of Germany in 1198, but he continued to be challenged by Heinrich’s brother, Philip of Swabia. Richard’s death was a great blow to him, and his hold on power became more precarious after John’s loss of Normandy, the tide shifting in Philip’s favor. But then Philip was tragically murdered in 1208 by a deranged vassal with a personal grudge, and the German barons turned again to Otto, as did Pope Innocent III. He was crowned as the Holy Roman Emperor in October 1209. He soon fell out with the Pope, though, who threw his support to Friedrich von Hohenstaufen, who was then seventeen. Since Philippe Capet was backing Friedrich, John resumed aid to Otto. The result was the Battle of Bouvines in 1214, which ended in a defeat for Otto and John, although the English king had not taken part in the battle. Otto was forced to abdicate the imperial throne in 1215 and died in May 1218, at age forty-one. His elder brother Henrik died in 1227 and his younger brother Wilhelm married the daughter of the King of Denmark, but he died young in 1213.

  Anna is my own name for the Damsel of Cyprus. As I explained in Lionheart, the best source for the history of Isaac Comnenus and his daughter remains the article by W. H. Rudt de Collenberg, “L’Empereur Isaac de Chypre et sa fille, 1155–1207.” He speculated that her name may have been Beatrice, for a Beatrice received a generous bequest in Joanna’s will. But that Beatrice seems to have been one of Joanna’s two ladies-in-waiting who took the veil at Fontevrault after her death. The Damsel of Cyprus had an interesting marital history. Her marriage to the Count of Toulouse did not last long, and was over by the time Raimond
went to the Holy Land in October 1202. In 1203, “Anna” wed Thierry, the illegitimate son of Philip d’Alsace, the Count of Flanders. They sailed with the army during the debacle that was the Fourth Crusade, and upon their arrival in Cyprus, Anna’s new husband claimed the island in her name. The then–King of Cyprus, Amaury de Lusignan, was having none of that and declared them persona non grata. They then went to Anna’s homeland, Armenia. In 1207, Thierry turned up in Constantinople, now ruled by his cousin, but we do not know if Anna accompanied him or remained in Armenia. After that mention in 1207, Thierry and Anna disappear from history; I am sentimental enough to hope that the remainder of her life was a happy one.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I HAVE ALWAYS LOOKED upon an Author’s Note as a necessary evil, for I find them very difficult to do. I do think they are essential, though, serving several purposes. They enable me to clear my conscience if I have had to take any liberties with historical fact and they lift the curtain to offer a behind-the-scenes look at the making of a novel. They are also important to my readers, who have often told me they enjoy them almost as much as the books themselves. I can understand that, for I feel cheated when I read a historical novel and then discover that the author has not included an Author’s Note. So I have no intention of abandoning them; I even included one for my contribution to George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois’s anthology, Dangerous Women, surely the first short story to have its own Author’s Note! Yet I will always approach them warily, my view of the Author’s Note being perfectly expressed by Dorothy Parker, who said that she hated writing but loved having written.

  I’ll begin with Richard’s dangerous and dramatic adventures upon his departure from the Holy Land; it is remarkable how reality so often transcended fiction whenever the Angevins were involved. I’ve seen it suggested that Richard’s crusade was his Iliad and his homeward journey his Odyssey. I am inclined to see Lionheart as the story of Richard the legend and A King’s Ransom as the story of Richard the man. I realize that Ransom’s early chapters may read as if they were written by a Hollywood scriptwriter, but what I describe really happened—the two shipwrecks, the encounter with pirates, Richard’s temporary reprieves in Görz and Udine.

  The site of his first shipwreck—La Croma—is today known as Lokrum Island (and the shore where Richard and his men landed has become a famous nudist beach). The Republic of Ragusa is now Dubrovnik, Croatia. Sadly, the cathedral that Richard’s money helped to rebuild was destroyed in an earthquake in 1667, but his memory lived on in local folklore, and, during World War I, a Serbian diplomat seeking British aid reminded that government of the warm welcome their king had received in Ragusa more than seven hundred years before.

  As with virtually every episode of Richard’s life, there are conflicting stories about his capture outside Vienna. The most reliable English source is the Cistercian monk Ralph of Coggeshall, for he is believed to have gotten his information from Richard’s chaplain, Anselm, and his is the most detailed account. Roger de Hoveden reported that Richard was sleeping when Duke Leopold’s men arrived, which makes sense in light of his illness. Years later, the German chroniclers put about a more colorful story—that he’d attempted to escape detection by pretending to be a servant, roasting a chicken on a spit in the hearth, and he was given away because he’d forgotten to remove a valuable ring. But this rather unlikely tale appears in none of the accounts by Austrian chroniclers, as the German historian Dr. Ulrike Kessler points out in her biography of Richard. I was skeptical, too, even before I realized the “chicken on a spit” story was refuted by the Church calendar itself, for Richard was captured on December 21, during Advent, when Christians were forbidden to eat meat of any kind.

  The letter that the Holy Roman Emperor, Heinrich, wrote to the French king gives us a glimpse of Heinrich’s nasty nature, while providing invaluable details about Richard’s capture. The English chroniclers said that Richard was accompanied by only one knight, Sir Guillain de l’Etang, and a young translator. But since Heinrich claimed that Richard had two knights with him, I was able to bring Morgan along for the ride. Arne is a name of my choosing, as the boy’s real name was not reported. We know only that he spoke German, that he was courageous, and very loyal to Richard, for he had to be tortured by Duke Leopold’s men before he finally revealed that the English king was in Ertpurch, today called Erdburg.

  According to William Marshal’s Histoire, Richard hated Philip de Dreux, the Bishop of Beauvais, more than any other man, blaming Beauvais for his harsh treatment at Trifels, where he was—in his own words—“loaded down with chains so heavy that a horse would have struggled to move.” In light of that graphic description, my fictional Richard may have been luckier than the real Richard, for I did let Markward spare him the leg shackles.

  I’m on the record as stating that Richard I is the historical figure whom I found the most surprising, and new readers have occasionally asked me to elaborate upon this statement. I had not expected to learn that he’d been seriously ill so often, that his marriage appeared to get off to a promising start, that he was as careful with the lives of his soldiers as he was reckless with his own life. But I was utterly astonished to discover that he’d formed friendships with some of Saladin’s emirs and Mamluks, even knighting a few of them, and that his political skills were almost as impressive as his military skills. What he accomplished at Heinrich’s Imperial Diet in Speyer is remarkable, a bravura performance that even his enemies were forced to acknowledge.

  I was not surprised, though, to find no evidence to support the popular belief that Richard preferred men to women as bed partners, for by the time I began researching Devil’s Brood I already knew that this claim was founded upon an erroneous understanding of medieval custom and culture. For a supposition that was first raised only in 1948 by J. H. Harvey in The Plantagenets, it gained traction due in some measure perhaps to the success of the wonderful film The Lion in Winter, one of my favorites. I made my own small contribution to the new legend by not researching what was essentially a walk-on role for Richard in Here Be Dragons, and in recent years I’ve been punished for that by having to explain often to puzzled readers why the Richard in Here Be Dragons is not the same man in Devil’s Brood and Lionheart.

  I first addressed the question of Richard’s sexuality in the Devil’s Brood Author’s Note. J. H. Harvey decided that Richard was gay because he’d misread a passage in Roger de Hoveden’s Annals (fully quoted in Devil’s Brood), which described a visit Richard paid to the French king’s court in 1187, writing that Philippe held Richard in such high esteem that they ate from the same table and from the same dish and at night shared the same chamber. In our age, we would naturally assume they had a sexual relationship. But in the Middle Ages, it was quite common for people to share beds, even with strangers in inns. More to the point, such ostentatious intimacy was a way to demonstrate royal favor, a means of flaunting political alliances and mending political fences. Edward IV, one of the most heterosexual of English kings, shared a bedchamber with the rebel Earl of Somerset to dramatize their reconciliation. And Roger de Hoveden’s matterof-fact tone clearly shows that he understood Richard and Philippe were deliberately sending Henry a message, which Henry understood all too well, for he at once postponed his plans to return to England, fearing that they were plotting against him.

  Richard’s famous encounter with the hermit is also cited by those who’ve accepted J. H. Harvey’s premise. Again, if we place a modern interpretation upon the hermit’s warning, we conclude that Richard was being accused of sodomy. Yet this reading disregards the fact that the “destruction of Sodom” had a wider meaning in the Middle Ages, often used to refer to the apocalyptic nature of the punishment, not the nature of the offense. Even the term “sins of Sodom” referred to a broad spectrum of sins, not just sodomy, some not even sexual. The French chronicler Guillaume Le Breton declared that Richard had brought about his death at Châlus because he’d offended against the “laws of nature.” But he was r
eferring to Richard’s war against his own father. Dr. Gillingham has an interesting discussion of all this in his biography of Richard. Not all historians agree with this reading of the “destruction of Sodom,” of course. So were there any suggestions made during Richard’s lifetime to indicate he was homosexual or bisexual? The answer is no.

  Both of the chroniclers who accompanied Richard on crusade believed that he’d desired Berengaria long before he’d married her, Ambroise even describing her as his “beloved.” I thought that was sweet, but unlikely, for medieval marriages were matters of state, and I don’t think Richard had a romantic bone in his entire body. Their comments do show, though, that they believed his sexual tastes were “conventional,” as Dr. Gillingham put it. Legend had it that Richard demanded women to be brought to him on his deathbed, thus hastening his death; Guillaume Le Breton reported that Richard had preferred the “joys of Venus” to “salubrious counsel”—the advice of his doctors. Like so many of Richard’s legends, this seems improbable, for gangrene is fast-acting and he’d have known very soon that he was doomed. Eleanor was one hundred forty miles away at Fontevrault, and for her to have reached him in time he must have sent for her within a day or so of his wounding. So I very much doubt that a man in such severe pain would have been carousing with camp whores. Yet the French chronicler’s comment does tell us that he, too, assumed Richard’s sexuality was “conventional.”

  Even more tellingly, the Bishop of Lincoln took Richard to task for adultery, not sodomy, and St Hugh was famed for his blunt speaking and strong sense of morality. The bishop’s lecture actually occurred in 1198, but I was unable to dramatize it in the chapter for that year and I had to move it back to Chapter 26 in 1195. So Richard’s repentance and reconciliation with Berengaria after his sudden illness in 1195 did not last long, and he was soon straying from his marriage bed again.