Eleanor Of Aquitaine (52 page)

At this defeat, involving the loss of many of his serviceable barons and much booty, Philip returned to Paris with a deep foreboding. The disaster of being expelled from the Vexin was so signal that, after taking counsel of his magnates, he resolved, in spite of his offenses against the church, to solicit the good offices of Rome.

The church, appalled by the new outbreaks, had already set about its own measures to bring order to Christendom. Philip's appeal to Rome of course opened the painful necessity of arbitrating the long-standing case of Ingeborg, whose agents were still clamoring for justice in the
curia
. Innocent, prevented from intervention in person, sent his legate. Cardinal Peter of Capua arrived in France about Christmas time in 1197 and, after a brief sojourn in the capital of the Capets, procured a parley of the kings at a place on the Seine between Gaillard and Vernon.

The Plantagenets, after their recent triumphs, were supercilious about a truce. Since the cardinal arrived at the rendezvous from Paris, they professed to suspect the legate of being bought with Frankish gold. Peter was, says the biographer of Guillaume le Maréchal, "one who had been to school and learned to turn matters inside out."
²⁰
However, Coeur-de-Lion, when sounded on his demands, declared that he wanted nothing that was not his own; only that his enemy should get out of the lands he held by hereditary right. He even said that, if Philip would retire to his own frontiers and stay there, he would make no claims for the recent damage to his Norman castles. The cardinal professed to find these terms stiff for the Franks. He took the view that Philip could hardly be expected to relinquish the ground it had cost him so much to gain. He explained to the King of the English the meaning of compromise. At this the famous Angevin choler rose in Coeur-de-Lion.

"What!" he burst forth, "you ask me to leave my castles and my lands in his possession? Not while I breathe."

At this point Peter tried to divert Coeur-de-Lion's thoughts to the jeopardy to which Jerusalem was exposed by the royal quarrel. This was a mistake in judgment. The vials of Richard's wrath were broken by the mention of the Holy Land.

"If the King of the Franks had left my lands in peace," he cried, "if I had not been forced to come home on his account, all Palestine would have been delivered from the infidel. But he betrayed me. By his counsel I was held in captivity, so that he could have a chance meanwhile to despoil me of my heritage. But God willing, he will not prosper in his scheming." The chronicler reports that Richard "panted with anger like a wounded boar."

At length, however, through the mediation of magnates desperate for peace, a ground was found for negotiation. For the sake of a new crusade, Richard at length agreed to a truce for five years, during which Philip might hold "in gage" the moot castles which were at the time in his possession; but the
chatellanies
(the surrounding tributary lands) should be held of Richard. This left the final situation as complex as ever; but Coeur-de-Lion's counselors helped him to see that in five years' time the castles, without their lands, would become as worthless as girdled trees that could be lopped off at will. Hence at length he agreed.

All might have proceeded without catastrophe from this point if the unlucky cardinal had not brought forward a demand for the release of Philip's cousin, the Bishop of Beauvais, whom Mercadier had dragged to Gaillard with other Frankish prisoners in the recent campaigns. This prelate, derisively known among the Normans as the "chanter of Beauvais" and described as more apt for fighting than for prayer, had been one of the most dogged of Richard's enemies in Palestine, and he was worth a precious ransom from the Franks.

"It is against the canons," said the legate, "to hold in captivity one consecrated by the church."

"What! I hold a clerk in chains? Never!" cried Coeur-de-Lion.

"Sire, do not evade," returned the cardinal. "The Bishop of Beauvais is entitled to the protection of Rome."

This challenge produced a remarkable example of Plantagenet eloquence lit up by fury.

"By my head," shouted Richard, "a consecrated man indeed! Better call him desecrated. It was not in the guise of a bishop that I took him, but as a knight with his armor all laced on. If this is what you came here for, Sir Advocate, you have missed your calling. I swear if you were not the bearer of a message, Rome would not save you from a drubbing to take back as souvenir. Does the Pope suppose I am a fool? I know very well that Rome only mocked me when, though I was in the service of God, I was made captive. I besought the Pope's aid and he could not take the trouble to help me. And now he asks me to give up a brigand, a firebrand, who has done nothing but ravage my lands by night and day. Leave this place, Sir Traitor, liar, swindler, suborner, and take care not to be found on my path again."

The cardinal hardly waited for the collection of his paraphernalia He took to his mount and rode without stopping to Paris. When he related his amazed impressions of the King of the English in the Capetian city, the magnates exchanged knowing smiles. "King Richard," they said, "is no leveret. He is not easily cowed. He intends to avenge his losses." Perhaps elders among them recalled great Henry's outbursts at the legates who presumed to bring him to terms with Becket.

On no condition could Peter of Capua be induced to return to personal negotiations with the Plantagenet king. In February Philip and Richard met again under the auspices of the Archbishop of Reims, who look over the unfinished business of Innocent's legate. Philip with his company came to the trysting place on the Seine between the Rock and Vernon, and kept his saddle, according to the custom of parley in the open. But Richard arrived with his delegation from Gaillard in a barge and did not land. He had resolved that there should be no setting for any acts of homage nor for the kiss of peace. With the clean stream of the Seine flowing between them, the kings came to terms for a final negotiation. In that last interview Coeur-de-Lion dealt as master toward his overlord, but he assented to certain tentative agreements to be confirmed at later interviews.

The King of the English demanded that the King of the Franks restore all the land he had taken; that he give up the presentation of the archbishopric of Tours, through which he had been able to meddle in the affairs of Touraine; that he end his opposition to the election of Otto as Emperor of the Romans and give him his support. Gisors, where once the vast elm had marked the place of parley betwen the Capetian kings and the Norman dukes, remained the fatal crux of the situation. For three successive years the call to arms and the ravaging of fruitful fields had added famine and disease to the miseries of northern Europe. Prelates, desperate for peace, and hoping at least for a postponement of crisis, resorted to the traditional scheme for deferring conclusions on that moot landmark. They invoked the old compromise, a marriage of the rival houses, but with Gisors this time as dowry for a Plantagenet bride. A previous scheme to marry Eleanor of Brittany to the son of Philip had been dropped after the exclusion of Arthur as Richard's heir; and now a new alliance was discussed. It was proposed that Richard affiance one of his nieces, a daughter of his sister, Queen Eleanor of Castile, to the scion of the Capets.

*

There's not a penny in Chinon
(Savies qu a Chinon non a argent ni denier
)

Sirventés
addressed by Coeur de Lion to the Count of Auvergne in 1199

When the terms of Louviers had been defined but not ratified, Richard turned his back on the Seine and the Rock and the French frontiers to make a
chevauchée
long delayed by his entanglements with Philip Augustus to more distant quarters of his realm. He was in fine fettle, for he had given to Christendom a fresh exhibition of valor and success. With his own arm he had vindicated his ancestral rights and reestablished the prestige he had lost in captivity. His most pressing anxiety at the time was over the failure of his treasury. He had drained the coffers of England and Normandy in his mighty building projects, in the support of mercenaries, and in "gifts" to restore powerful but wavering march barons to his allegiance.

Attending to various incidental matters en route, he made his way to the treasure castle of Chinon and there spent some days in early March of 1199. Here, or at Fontevrault, he certainly held conferences with Queen Eleanor in her bailiwick; for he learned a great deal about the unrest in Maine, Anjou, Brittany, and Touraine, where many barons kept in agitation by the house of Brittany and incited by Philip were spotted with treason and only awaited a favorable moment for revolt. Below the Loire those perennial firebrands, Aymar of Limoges and Adémar of Angoulême, had covertly thrown off their allegiance to the house of Poitou and appealed to the protection of the King of the Franks. In Chinon Richard verified the fact that the Angevin treasury had little to yield for his financial necessities.

While Coeur de-Lion was giving ear to these depressing matters and attending meantime to the wearisome details of feudal business that had accumulated, affixing his seal each day to a multitude of tiresome charters, he had, it seemed, a providential stroke of luck. Some unknown courier brought him news of a treasure-trove that had recently been unearthed in the Limousin.
²⁷
A poor husbandman laboring in a field in one of the lesser
chatellanies
of Count Aymar of Limoges, had accidentally turned up from the ground a massy golden treasure. The precious object seemed to represent a king seated at a table in company with his family. Its origin and significance were unknown, but it had probably been buried in the soil of the Limousin from times of Roman antiquity.

Was the treasure miraculously designed to replenish the empty chests of Chinon?'
¹
At any rate, Aymar deserved to suffer its loss for his treachery. Richard at once demanded possession of the trove from his vassal. With Richard and Mercadier on his borders, Aymar chose the better part of valor and offered half of the treasure to his overlord. Richard's reply was to appear, in spite of Lent, with a force of
routiers
before the little castle of Chalus where the treasure was believed to be hidden.

The castle was no first-class fortress, but it stood on a defensible rise of ground. It was unmanned save for two or three armed knights, probably stationed there to drive off robbers; and it was otherwise peopled by about two score laborers and householders belonging to the fief.
²⁸
Such a paltry outfit offered no difficulties to Coeur-de-Lion. Having refused the garrison's belated offers of capitulation, Richard surrounded the place and set sappers at the foundations of the protecting walls. Driven to bay, the motley garrison strove with such weapons as they could contrive to defend their lord's castle from the
routiers
. From their battlements they rolled down stones on their besiegers and from the vents in the barbicans exhausted their supply of arrows. In the meantime they sent to Count Aymar for relief, and he in turn appealed to Paris.

The siege was brief.
²⁹
On the 25th of March after supper, Richard returned in the early twilight from his lodgings to the precincts of the castle. In company with Mercadier, he went about the circuit of the fortifications to examine the work of the sappers. With a shield, but carelessly, he protected himself from the random arrows that fell here and there about him. Suddenly in the dusk a shaft from a strong bow sang in the air and struck him in the shoulder. The heavy missile entered his flesh below his nape and near his spine. It proved to be one from his own armory which some sharpshooter had retrieved from a cleft where it had lodged in one of the barbicans. It went so deep that its head could not be withdrawn.

Without uttering a sound in evidence of surprise or pain, Coeur-de-Lion mounted his horse and rode to his hospice under cover of the falling night, so only his intimates knew what had occurred. His lodgings were at once cleared of all save four of his familiars, for fear of spreading alarm among the
routiers
. Then the king was laid upon his couch. In vain his companions tried to draw out the head of the arrow by main force. The remnant of the shaft gave way, but the barb remained embedded. Mercadier then summoned a "surgeon" from amongst his following, and he, by the glimmer of a lantern, gashed the flesh, to lay bare the missile. In a ghastly operation the leaden barb was dug from the king's shoulder. His companions dressed his wounds with unguents and poultices; but fatal mischief had been done and the assistants soon saw that their medicaments would be vain.

Richard, with lively presentiment, sent for Queen Eleanor whom he had left in Lenten retreat at Fontevrault some days previously. She at once dispatched the ss Matilda northward to break the news to Berengaria and to summon John, both of whom were in Maine, but not together. With the Abbé of Turpenay
³¹
for comfort and escort, she set out on her journey of more than one hundred miles. She must have traveled day and night, possibly part of the way by river, for she reached her son's hospice as if borne by the wind.

Coeur-de-Lion was already beyond the reach of his physicians and her own agonized ministrations. Only the offices of his chaplain, Milo, who had accompanied him on crusade
³³
and attended other illnesses, any longer availed. But the king had time to pour into his mother's ears his last testament. Their covenant to recognize John as the heir was reiterated and some personal gifts to Otto were designated, together with such small sums as Richard could commend to charity for the repose of his soul. In his last hours he manifested the magnanimity and compunction that had at other times impressed the chroniclers. It is said indeed that he condemned the surrendered garrison of Châlus to be hanged, but this order is perhaps to be attributed to Mercadier or others of his following. Hoveden relates that when all Coeur-de-Lion's testamentary affairs had been arranged, he ordered his slayer to be brought to his presence. This felon proved to be an obscure youth of the Limousin whose name is variously recorded.
³⁴
Haled in chains into the chamber where the king lay, he was placed at the foot of the royal couch, where he stood terrified but with a desperate bravado. From his story it appeared that on the fatal day he had manned the barbican from dawn to dusk, launching from the shelter of a huge frying pan employed as shield whatever enemy missiles he could pluck from clefts in the walls. The shot that fatally wounded the king with his own arrow gave the youth, in spite of his chains, the character of avenger for the impious Lenten assault on Châlus, and this realization perhaps moved Richard to his last act of chivalry.