Lionheart (17 page)

It is not known where exactly Richard was when the news of Hattin reached him, nor that of the fall of Jerusalem, but the papal bull came as a heaven-sent opportunity for him to dun his vassals for the money to fund the greatest military adventure of his lifetime. In a fit of adolescent enthusiasm, even his atheist brother Prince John took the Cross, despite their kinsman Count Philip of Flanders having travelled all the way to the Holy Land ten years previously and returning more than somewhat disillusioned by the situation there. Richard was on campaign somewhere in the county of Toulouse, treating his unransomable captives with his accustomed brutality until his chaplain Milo persuaded him to swell the numbers in his eventual crusading army by letting them live on condition they swore to accompany him on ‘the pilgrimage to Jerusalem’.
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Having outlived poor Louis Capet, Henry II had no intention of leaving his empire on both sides of the Channel at the mercy of Philip II Augustus while he went on crusade, but making promises had never worried him and even a vow as solemn as this could always be undone by some complaisant churchman. On 22 January 1188, while he was negotiating a truce with Philip at Gisors, Archbishop Joscius of Tyre killed three birds with one stone and pinned red cloth crosses to the cloaks of Philip’s retinue, with white ones for Henry’s courtiers and green ones for the count of Flanders’ entourage. Philip Augustus likewise did not intend to absent himself for at least two years, leaving his lands at the mercy of Henry meanwhile. True, they would be protected by the Church, but Henry was quite likely to defy it, and talk his way out afterwards. Philip was also painfully aware that the tax base available to finance his crusade was very much smaller than Henry’s.

With all their vacillation and manoeuvring, the bellicose troubadour Bertran de Born was not alone in deploring ‘the journey that the kings have forgotten to make’ [
el pasatge qu’an si mes en obli
]. Meanwhile, many knights and barons departed on their own initiative. A mixed fleet of Danish, Flemish and Frisian crusaders arrived by sea in Portugal in June 1189 en route to the Mediterranean. Widening somewhat their original oath ‘to free Jerusalem’, they assisted King Sancho I – known as Sancho o Povoador, or settler king, because he encouraged immigration from Burgundy and Flanders to settle lands taken from the Moors – to wrest the strategically important area of Alvor from the Almohads of al-Andalus. Later that summer a fleet of English, German, Breton and Flemish ships brought another contingent of independent crusaders who also joined in the struggle to capture the strategically important fortress-city of Silves from the Moors.
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The ageing Holy Roman Emperor Frederik Barbarossa was the first European ruler to answer the call of
audita tremendi
, departing at the head of an army variously estimated as comprising 3,000 or more knights and 15,000 foot soldiers, squires and hangers-on in the spring of 1189. Barbarossa was, however, destined never to reach his destination, being drowned on 10 June 1190 in the river Cadnus (now Göksu) in Anatolia. Some sources say he had a heart attack while swimming in its cold water, coloured blue by minerals, on a hot day. Others allege that he fell from his horse while fording the river and drowned under the weight of his armour, but this is a rather Hollywoodian explanation: despite what one sees in all the medieval re-enactment films, it was not normal to ride in armour, but rather to have it carried on a palfrey, ready to be donned when danger threatened. Whatever the cause of his death, after the tragedy two-thirds of his army returned home, leaving a much depleted German contingent of around 5,000 men to continue its way via the land route to the Holy Land under the leadership of his son Duke Frederik VI of Swabia. He, in turn, died at the siege of Acre early in 1191. Fatefully for Richard Plantagenet, command of the German-speaking contingent was then assumed by Duke Leopold V of Austria, of whom more later.

Meanwhile, Henry had been bending the spirit of the crusading oath: that those who had taken the Cross be as brothers to one another. In the summer of 1188 he commanded an army of English and Welsh mercenaries in alliance with Richard’s force of Gascons and Basques in the old game of tit-for-tat in central France. In November 1188 Philip called a conference at which he proposed a long-term peace on condition that Henry II marry Princess Alais to Richard and declare him the legal successor to the dual realm. When Henry did not agree, Richard knelt in homage before Philip Augustus for Normandy, Anjou and all the other lands on French soil held in fief by Henry.
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Henry was now 55 – a fair age for the time and, in his case, exacerbated by a broken leg that had mended crooked and damage to his vertebrae and severe haemorrhoids resulting from so many years’ hard riding in peace and war that made it extremely painful to sit on a cushion, let alone mount the hard leather saddle of a
destrier
. Philip rightly pressed home the advantage this gave him as recurring bouts of illness found his principal enemy so enfeebled and lacking in authority as to be unable to compel his vassals’ attendance at his Christmas court that year in Saumur. With hostilities suspended until the end of Lent, Henry attempted and failed to wheedle some concessions from Philip through Cardinal John of Agnani.

The end of Lent 1189 therefore saw hostilities resumed, but with Richard and many of Henry’s vassals having switched allegiance to Philip’s side. When that coalition approached Le Mans, where Henry was holed up with some 700 cavalry, the outlying suburbs were deliberately fired – by which side is unclear – and flames engulfed the whole town. At the last possible moment Henry left the shelter of the walls, his escape with the mounted knights being covered by the rearguard of Welsh foot soldiers. In hot pursuit, Richard neglected to don his armour and overhauled these sacrificed Welshmen at a ford, where he had the good fortune to confront William the Marshal, whose skill and speed of reaction deflected his lance at the last moment, so that it killed Richard’s mount and not the rider. As the fight moved on, William is said to have shouted, ‘Let the devil kill you, for I shall not.’

It might be supposed that the control of a powerful, heavy
destrier
bearing an armoured knight was partly a matter of luck, but the record of William the Marshal in countless
mêlée
s and under battle conditions proves that it was a question of training and the level of strength, skill and split-second timing one might find today in an Olympic athlete. A vassal of William of Tancarville, William turned the knightly sport of the
mêlée
into a profession. At his first meeting in 1167, for which he had to borrow a horse because he was too poor to own a
destrier
, he won a total of nine horses and all their riders’ equipment. Teaming up with another young knight, he became a professional, capturing 103 knights with their horses and equipment in one ten-month season.
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To such a warrior, even in the heat of battle, every move was a precision action.

On 3 July 1199 Tours fell to Philip and Richard’s forces. Next day, Henry’s eldest surviving legitimate son suspected his father of bluffing with talk of illness until he saw approaching the castle of Colomiers-Villandry the frail figure of a man dying from septicaemia and who had to be supported in the saddle. Henry acceded to all Philip’s demands, agreeing to swear allegiance to him, to repay the costs of the campaign and pardon all those who had abandoned him – with one exception. Miming a kiss of peace for Richard, he hissed into his ear, ‘May God let me live to avenge myself on you.’
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He was by then so frail that he had to be borne back to Chinon Castle on a litter, cursing his sons. By the next day it was obvious that he had not long to live, and consented to confession and absolution by the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of Hereford. The final straw came when a list provided by Philip Augustus of the vassals to be pardoned for changing sides was handed to Chancellor Geoffrey the Bastard. In the great rebellion of 1173–74, while bishop-elect of Lincoln, he had proven himself so competent and faithful in his father’s cause that Henry II said, ‘My other sons are the bastards. This one alone has shown himself my true and legitimate son.’ It was now Geoffrey’s duty to read out the list of those who had betrayed him, first of which was Prince John, whom Henry had thought to be the one legitimate son who was loyal.
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His last hours on 6 July 1189 were spent with only his bastard son to console him.
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Because of the hot weather, his wishes to be buried at his favourite abbey of Grandmont in the Limousin were disregarded and the corpse was hurriedly transported before decomposition set in to the nearby abbey of Fontevraud, where Richard stayed beside the bier only for the few minutes it took to assure himself that his father really was dead before heading for the Angevin treasury at Chinon. He found it empty, every last
denier
having been expended on Henry’s final campaigns. Either then or at another time when the treasury was so depleted he composed a
sirventès
containing the crystal-clear line: there’s not a penny in Chinon.

His remedy was to fetter hand and foot in a dungeon Étienne de Marçay, his father’s seneschal of Poitou, who was kept there until he disgorged from the profits made in a quarter-century of tax-farming the small fortune of 30,000 Angevin pounds. Meeting William the Marshal for the first time since the encounter at the ford, Richard accused the Marshal of having tried to kill him. William replied coolly that his lance could just as easily have been aimed at the rider, not the mount. The reward for that frankness and William’s loyalty to his father was one promise that did Richard keep, marrying the Marshal to one of the richest heiresses in the Plantagenet Empire, whom he had previously promised to his supporter William of Béthune. Whichever husband was decreed for 20-year-old Countess Isabel of Striguil, it must have come as great relief to her after being held in the Tower of London by Henry as a ward of the Crown for thirteen years, both to prevent her wealth being used against him and to be the bait in a succession of promises that were never fulfilled.

With that, the Marshal was despatched to England, to liberate Queen Eleanor from her fifteen-year imprisonment under Henry. Without awaiting his arrival, that lady of 67, who had been confined as Henry’s prisoner for nearly a quarter of her life and was never, before or afterwards, known for letting grass grow under her feet, liberated herself at the first news of her husband’s death and immediately announced to all and sundry that she was still the crowned queen of England – which was true. On this authority, she took the reins of state into her capable hands, and required:

that every free man in the whole realm swear that he would bear fealty to the Lord Richard, lord of England, the son of the Lord Henry and the lady Eleanor, in life and limb and earthly honour, as his liege lord, against all men and women who might live and die, and that they would be answerable to him and help him keep the peace and justice in all things.
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Her personal tribulations of the past fifteen years prompted her prudently to require the archbishop of Canterbury to witness with her the Anglo-Norman barons’ oaths of loyalty to Richard.

In a general amnesty, those exiled by Henry were pardoned, Eleanor anticipating Magna Carta by pardoning in Richard’s name and releasing several thousand men languishing in gaol under the cruel forest laws ‘for the protection of vert and venison’, although never judged and sentenced. This was the background of anguish and injustice lurking behind the script of every Robin Hood film.
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Illustrating just how oppressive the implementation of Henry’s laws had become in his last years, all those imprisoned by his justiciars but not sentenced by any duly constituted court of law were also released, providing they could supply sureties that they would later present themselves for trial. Not everyone thought this a good thing. William of Newburgh remarked that: ‘The prisons then were heaving with multitudes of guilty men awaiting either trial or punishment, but when (Richard) came to the throne these pests, by his mercy, were released from prison, probably to transgress more confidently in the future.’
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The appointment of justiciars was very important. When the king was in England, the chief justiciar was head of the judiciary. With the king abroad, as Richard intended to be for an unforeseeably long time on crusade, the chief justiciar acted as his regent.

Across the Channel in France, Richard hastened to put Philip right about the new relationship on which they were embarking. Gone was the former intimacy and talk of brotherhood; nor had he any intention of honouring Henry’s undertakings at Villandry. As to the castle of Gisors, in whose shadow they met, he refused to hand that back on the grounds that he would marry Alais after returning from the crusade, on which women were forbidden with the exception of honest washerwomen. Had his word been trustworthy, it would have been a reasonable argument.

At Sées the archbishops of Canterbury and Rouen absolved Richard from the mortal sin of bearing arms against his father while both were bound by their crusader oaths. In the presence of Prince John, he was invested as plenary duke of Normandy on 20 July and the symbolic ducal sword duly belted around his waist. He then bought John’s loyalty – or so he thought – by confirming his possessions in France and England, particularly the Norman county of Mortain. While the king of England had no right to appoint bishops, their half-brother Geoffrey the Bastard was politically neutered by Richard ordering the canons of York to elect him archbishop of that diocese, an office that debarred Geoffrey from any eligibility to wear the crown.
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On 10 August some of the canons obediently elected Geoffrey archbishop. The result was another of the Church
v
. monarch spats: the dean of York, Hubert Walter, and the bishop of Durham protested that they and many of the canons had not been present to vote aye or nay and therefore contested the appointment by writing to the pope. For once, Queen Eleanor sided with the Church hierarchy, as did Ranulf de Glanville, although in her case, the motivation may simply have been a dislike for all Henry II’s bastards.
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