Richard & John: Kings at War (43 page)

The gleeful Philip of France passed on news of the treaty to his new-found ally Prince John. As soon as Philip returned from the Crusade he began intriguing with Richard’s disaffected younger brother, promising him Normandy in exchange for marriage with Alice. The dauntless Eleanor of Aquitaine nipped this in the bud by threatening John with confiscation of all his estates if he took ship for France.
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But John continued to tour England, telling anyone who would listen that Richard was dead. Matters seemed to swing decisively in his favour with the stunning news from Philip that Richard was a prisoner in Germany. This time nothing could stop John, and he sped to France. In Paris he did homage to Philip for the entire Angevin empire - an express act of treason. He promised to marry Alice and to hand over Gisors and the Vexin to France. He then put a toe into Normandy but was quickly rebuffed when the Norman barons, meeting at Alençon, told him bluntly they would never accept him as their lord.
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When Philip’s forces arrived, they swept through the Vexin, took Gisors and moved on Rouen, but there they were vigorously repelled by the returning hero of the crusade, the earl of Leicester. Even so, Philip felt he held all the cards in his struggle with the Angevin empire. Delighted with the turn of events, he even contemplated an invasion of England and sent John back there to foment rebellion. He asked William king of Scotland for an alliance but William, remembering the generosity of Richard in the 1189 Quitclaim of Canterbury, turned him down contemptuously. Eleanor of Aquitaine and the justiciars raised an army to defend the south-east coast, so John withdrew into the castles of Windsor and Wallingford which he had managed to capture with Flemish mercenaries. He then proclaimed himself king as the legitimate and indefeasible heir of the dead king Richard. But John’s claim that Richard was dead was refuted in spectacular fashion when a letter arrived in England from Emperor Henry VI, asking for the 100,000 mark ransom. Accordingly, Walter of Coutances summoned a great council of the realm to a meeting in Oxford on 28 February 1193.
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The justiciars of the realm debated all the possible means for securing the king’s release. Savaric, bishop of Bath, told the conclave he had already put out feelers to the emperor, his kinsman, on Richard’s behalf; the Council ordered the oath of fealty to Richard to be renewed throughout the realm; and the abbots of Boxley and Robertsbridge were chosen as delegates to go to Germany and communicate first-hand with the king. It was 28 March before the envoys discovered Richard at Oschenfurt on the Main, ten miles from Würzburg, where Leopold had him securely lodged pending the final offer from the emperor. Boxley and Robertsbridge found the Lionheart in good spirits; he was openly contemptuous when they told him of Prince John’s intrigues: ‘My brother John is not the man to conquer a country if there is anyone to offer even the feeblest resistance,’ he said dismissively.
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On 20 March the emperor met Richard again, and the king flatly refused the extortionate terms offered. Henry’s response was to charge him formally with betraying the Holy Land to Saladin, breaking his promises to the emperor (presumably by his treaty with Tancred of Sicily) and compassing the death of Conrad of Montferrat. A ‘trial’ duly took place at Speyer on the 21st. The ordeal of appearing before a panel of German princes shook Richard but he responded in a typically spirited way, rebutting the charges confidently, with such eloquence and forensic skill that even his enemies were impressed; the mood of the German princes began to shift decisively in his favour.
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Second thoughts prevailed on both sides, the indictment was dropped, and, presumably as a quid pro quo, Richard agreed to pay the ransom of 100,000 marks, on condition that Henry VI acted as peacemaker between him and Philip of France. Thereupon Leopold handed Richard over to Henry, and king and emperor continued on their way to Speyer. Here Richard was joined by Hubert Walter of Salisbury, his faithful companion and adviser in the Holy Land, a splendid mixture of soldier, administrator and diplomat, who was returning from the crusade; having got as far as Sicily he heard the news of the king’s capture, went up to Rome to lobby the Pope for support, and then hastened to Germany to be at his side. Richard sent Hubert back to England, with a letter for his mother Eleanor, in which he commended Hubert and suggested they work together for his release; Hubert’s reward for his fidelity was to be the archbishopric of Canterbury, vacant since Baldwin of Canterbury’s death in November 1190.
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Confidently expecting he would soon be released, Richard sent to England for hostages and ships to take him across the Channel. But Henry distrusted Richard as a slippery eel and was taken aback by the facility with which he had won the German princes round at his ‘trial’. His first response was to send the king under armed guard to the castle of Trifels in the mountains west of Speyer, where it was intended that his imprisonment be harsher than the initial confinement at Durnstein. Fortunately for Richard he spent no more than a couple of days in this spartan fortress, for William Longchamp, no great success as justiciar in England, now proved his mettle by appearing at the imperial court and persuading Henry VI to ease the terms of the king’s captivity.
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Consequently Richard was moved back to the itinerant German court, now at Hagenau. Longchamp achieved a further breakthrough by getting the emperor to agree to release Richard once an initial payment of 70,000 marks was made. Longchamp then returned to England with letters from both Henry and Richard, urging the justiciars to raise the money as soon as possible. Hubert Walter and Longchamp both proved able advocates once back in England, although the scale of their task should not be underestimated.
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100,000 marks or £66,000 - maybe £2 billion in today’s money - was an enormous sum for any medieval state to raise, as may be seen from some everyday comparisons. At the time a sheep cost one penny, a pig sixpence, the normal rent for a cottage was sixpence a year, and soldiers were paid twopence a day; the ransom was three times the annual expenditure of the English government. Moreover, this extra sum had to be found in a society that had already been mulcted by the Saladin Tithe and drained by other taxes to pay for the Third Crusade.
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It was fortunate for Richard that England was the financial jewel in the Angevin empire. Not only was the taxation system itself superior in efficiency to those in Normandy, Britanny and Aquitaine, but the English economy itself was robust, swimming in silver coins that had flooded in from abroad to pay for English wool and the products of water mills and the lead and tin mines in the West Country. The justiciars, at Eleanor of Aquitaine’s urging, issued a decree levying a 25 per cent tax rate on income and moveable property and began by requisitioning gold and silver plate from churches as well as the annual wool crop of the Cistercian monks. But soon it was decided that the justiciars should be excluded from the actual process of collecting the ransom. Instead the business was given over to four trustees who would lodge the collected silver in the vaults of St Paul’s Cathedral pending its shipment to Germany: Hubert Walter, Richard Fitzneal, bishop of London, William, earl of Arundel and Hamelin, earl of Warenne were the quartet appointed - on the basis that they were the only members of the English elite not involved in the ousting of Longchamp in 1191.
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The systematic means of uplifting money centred initially on the 25 per cent tax on revenue and portable property, but this produced disappointing returns, raising only £7,000 instead of the expected £12-25,000 (as a result of corruption?).
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Other means of raising money in England were via the scutage on the knight’s fee, and through special ad hoc taxes, some of them fines on localities that had seemed sympathetic to the rebellious Prince John; there were also retrospective taxes in 1194 and 1195 to celebrate Richard’s eventual release.
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Churches and abbeys were gradually forced to disgorge all their wealth; carucage (a tax of two shillings per hide per landowner) was levied; there was a new additional toll imposed on anyone with property worth more than ten shillings; and individual contributions were invited (demanded?) from all the great lords, who responded variously, with William king of Scotland in pride of place with a donation of 2,000 marks.
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The worst burden of new taxation fell on the Jews who were visited with a special new tax of 5,000 marks. It has been well said that the raising of the ransom money was eloquent testimony to the soundness of English finances and administration, not to mention general economic prosperity. Similar letters were sent to the other parts of the Angevin empire, and we can catch glimpses of the response in, for example, the amount of £16,000 paid over to Germany from Normandy in the financial year 1194-95.
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Despite the momentary threat of the dungeons of Speyer, the real enemy Richard had to worry about was not Emperor Henry but Philip of France. Richard moved quickly to neutralise Philip’s influence in England by taking his brother John off the chessboard. The justiciars soon went over to the offensive and confined the rebellious John to the castles of Windsor and Tickhill. John and his party were in desperate straits by April 1193, when Hubert Walter suddenly returned from Germany and saved them by the unexpected offer of a truce - unexpected because Richard and the loyalists had the rebels on the ropes. But Richard reasoned that the enormous ransom he had to raise could not be gathered in while the realm was rent by virtual civil war. He proposed a six months’ truce, and John leapt at the offer. The justiciars were secretly glad of the outcome, for it was still possible that Richard’s enemies would find ways to detain him forever in Germany, in which case John would become king; what would their own position then be worth? The terms of the truce laid down that John could retain the castles of Nottingham and Tickhill, but had to surrender those at Windsor, Wallingford and the Peak in Derbyshire.
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Meanwhile Richard checkmated Philip on another front, when his mother and loyal forces in Aquitaine defeated a rebellion there by Ademar of Angoulême aided and abetted by Philip.
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Finally, he brokered an agreement between his putative allies in Germany (the duke of Saxony, the duke of Louvain, the archbishops of Cologne and Maintz, and other nobles, all still angry about the murder of Albert of Louvain) and the emperor. He knew that Henry VI was due to meet Philip at Vaucouleurs on 25 June and feared that the emperor, still anxious about the possible implosion of his kingdom, might ally himself with the French king against his own recalcitrant barons; the price of such an alliance would almost certainly be that Philip would demand the surrender of Richard into his custody, which would mean lifetime imprisonment. When Richard managed to bring about a reconciliation between Henry and the dissidents, the emperor in gratitude abandoned the proposed meeting with Philip.
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Normandy was the one failure Richard had to confront by mid-1193 but, under arrest as he was, there was little he could do about it. The reason Philip had been able to take Gisors and the Vexin with such ease was precisely because the lords who held the land on the borders between Normandy and France could not be certain that Richard would return as king; their position vis-à-vis Philip was therefore much like that of the English justiciars when dealing with John. It was fortunate indeed that the defence of Rouen had been in the hands of an authentic hero of the war with Saladin - Robert earl of Leicester. Philip’s humiliation outside Rouen was so striking that he destroyed his own siege engines in a classic example of displaced rage.
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He turned from campaigning to diplomatic pressure, and on 15 August married Ingeborg, daughter of Cnut VI of Denmark, who himself had a tenuous claim to the English throne that went back to the days before 1066 when King Svein Estrithson was a pretender to that crown. But Philip with Ingeborg proved to be a pre-echo of Henry VIII of England and Anne of Cleves in the sixteenth century. After one night with her, Philip declared he was sick of the sight of his wife. He repudiated her and demanded that the Danish envoys who had accompanied her to France take her back with them. When they refused, Philip got some tame and sycophantic bishops to dissolve the marriage on spurious grounds, though the Pope refused to endorse their actions; need one add that among the ecclesiastical toadies was Richard’s old enemy the bishop of Beauvais? Philip had contracted the Danish marriage in the first place simply and solely to gain access to the large Danish fleet, which he hoped to use for an invasion of England. But the imbroglio with Ingeborg turned him into the laughing-stock of Europe. By winter 1193 he was desperately scratching around for a German marriage, proposing himself as husband to the daughter of the Count Palatine of the Rhine, himself Emperor Henry VI’s uncle.
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After two months at the imperial court at Worms, where he divided his time between composing songs and supervising from afar the election of Hubert Walter as archbishop of Canterbury, Richard faced a moment of truth there when a grand conference was held on 25 June to decide his fate. Among those present, as well as the emperor, were the dukes of Louvain and Limburg and Hubert Walter, newly consecrated in Canterbury, who had sped to Germany immediately after his coronation.
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By 29 June the final terms of Richard’s ransom were hammered out. It was agreed that the emperor’s envoys would accompany the English king’s messengers back to London, and there receive 100,000 marks of pure silver; Richard would also provide a further 50,000 marks for Leopold of Austria. Hostages would be taken and released when two-thirds of the total ransom (i.e. 100,000 marks) was paid. Some details of this accord are obscure. Why the increase in the total sum? Some speculate that the extra 50,000 marks were a quid pro quo in exchange for releasing Richard from the initial pledge to campaign alongside the emperor against Tancred of Sicily. Subordinate clauses appeared to suggest that if Richard was able to bring about a lasting reconciliation between the emperor and Henry the Lion, formerly duke of Saxony, Henry VI would waive the payment of half of the money due to him, reducing the ransom once again to a total of 100,000 marks. If Richard was unable to reconcile the two Henrys within seven months, he would have to pay the 50,000 marks originally waived. Moreover, also within seven months, Richard undertook to marry his niece Eleanor of Britanny to the duke of Austria’s son.
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