Richard & John: Kings at War (48 page)

Piqued by this setback, Philip switched fronts and made another probe in the south. News had come in that there were two separate revolts in Aquitaine, one in the Perigord and another, more familiar manifestation, involving treasonous border lords in collusion with Raymond of Toulouse. Seeing a unique chance opening up, Philip appeared before the town of Issoudoun in Berry and took it after a very short siege; the garrison in the castle, however, continued to hold out. This was the kind of challenge at which Richard excelled. Leaving orders for his army to follow him with all speed on forced marches, he and a picked company of knights rode south at great speed, covering three days’ journey in a single day. At Issoudoun Richard and his company broke through the French besiegers and appeared in the castle to the joy of the defenders. Philip thought that by his quixotry Richard had placed himself in a trap and continued with the siege, hoping soon to do with the Lionheart what Henry VI had done the year before. Suddenly the main Anglo-Norman army appeared in his rear, and he realised to his horror that he was caught between two fires; the hunter became the hunted. Out-thought, outclassed and outgeneralled, Philip swallowed hard and accepted the humiliation of an imposed truce on 5 December.
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It was agreed that all troops would go to their homes, that the truce would last until 13 January 1196, and that the two kings would then meet again to see if the temporary peace terms could be made more permanent.
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Richard spent a satisfied Christmas at Poitiers, sufficiently relaxed to take an interest in the election of a new bishop of Durham.
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The peace conference at Louviers in the Seine valley in January 1196 showed clearly that in the struggle for northern France Richard currently held the advantage. He had expelled the French from all Channel ports, regained all of Normandy except the Vexin, and got Philip to agree that in the south Raymond of Toulouse was no more than a warmonger, and his allies illegitimate rebels against the count of Aquitaine, to whom in feudal law they properly owed homage and service.
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The French consoled themselves by the thought that in the treaty of Louviers Richard had implicitly abandoned for all time his claim to the Norman Vexin. Naturally Richard himself did not construe the treaty in that way at all; for him it was merely a means of buying time until the time came to renew the peace in June.
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The common rallying point of the two monarchs was their joint dislike of the archbishop of Rouen, in their eyes yet another turbulent priest. The archbishop had grievances against the two kings because of the damage done by both to his churches in Normandy, and even tried to place Philip’s lands under interdict. Richard tried to silence the archbishop by making him surety for a payment of 2,000 marks to Philip, but the divine refused and fled to sanctuary with the archbishop of Cambrai, where the two ecclesiastics devised a kind of mutual assistance pact, to protect themselves against powerful temporal lords. But Richard was before him. As soon as the archbishop withdrew from the Louviers conference, Richard decreed that if the churchman refused to act as his surety for the 2,000 marks, he would be banished from Normandy and not allowed to return until he had either paid the 2,000 marks or secured King Philip’s permission to come back.
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Richard demonstrated on this occasion that he could be just as tough as his father on any prince of the Church who overstepped his due bounds.

That the peace of Louviers was shaky was immediately demonstrated when Philip changed tack on the affair of the archbishop of Rouen. First he issued safe-conducts for him and his confederate the archbishop of Cambrai. Then he promised to make restitution of all the losses sustained by the bishop. Seeing himself in danger of being marginalised as an enemy of the Church, Richard then wrote to Rouen, assuring him of his benevolence and releasing him from the onus of being a surety for the 2,000 marks. In return he asked that the archbishop help him get the earl of Leicester (still a prisoner in Philip’s hands, even though he had promised, in the treaty, to release him) freed by offering as a quid pro quo the withdrawal of the episcopal interdict.
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When Rouen proved amenable, this particular headache seemed ended. But an even greater one almost at once supervened. Ever since Henry II’s death, Britanny had been a weak link in the Angevin empire, so Richard decided to summon to his court his late brother Geoffrey’s wife Constance, who had since remarried (to Ranulf of Chester) in a bizarre marriage of convenience, where the husband lived in England and the wife in Britanny. Apparently Richard had decided that holding Constance’s daughter Eleanor as his ward was not enough for effective control of Britanny, that he needed Constance too. But this turn of events was too much for the absentee husband. Suddenly he appeared in Britanny and kidnapped his wife even as she prepared to obey Richard’s summons.
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Perplexed by this enigmatic sequence of events, Constance’s Breton advisers appealed to Philip on the grounds that their duchess had been kidnapped by the Lionheart. Philip loved fishing in such troubled waters and engineered a virtual coup in Britanny, whereby the duchy revoked its allegiance to the Angevin empire. Richard could not stand idly by and tolerate such a signal threat to his sea power and cross-Channel communications, so invaded Britanny and swept all before him (in the Easter week of 1196).
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The defeated Breton oligarchs responded by whisking Richard’s heir-apparent Arthur off to Philip in Paris. When Philip publicly granted Arthur asylum, he made a virtual declaration of war against Richard. The English king responded by writing to Hubert Walter, urgently calling for more knights for a long campaign against France.
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The Arthur affair was a straw in the wind. By summer 1196, the diplomatic advantage seemed to have shifted to Philip. He had persuaded Baldwin IX, the new count of Flanders and Hainault, to join his anti-Angevin alliance, and with Baldwin and his (Philip’s) brother-in-law the count of Ponthieu, he launched an attack on Aumale in July.
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Richard retaliated by seizing Nonancourt, suborning the castellan so that it surrendered without a fight. From there he marched to Aumale but now, for the first time ever in his career, the God of war deserted him. Richard sustained his first serious reverse at the hands of Philip’s forces - a defeat so embarrassing that the English chroniclers of his reign prefer to pass it by in silence. It seems that Richard failed to realise how gravely he was outnumbered and, once he did, faced the unpalatable choice of retreating and losing face or pressing on against impossible odds.
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There was only one possible course for a Lionheart, but the dice was loaded against him, as events proved. On 20 August Aumale fell, and Richard had the further humiliation of having to pay 3,000 marks to ransom the garrison.
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Although the French had taken heavy losses during the siege and from Richard’s diversionary attack - which seems to have been directed at particularly strong French entrenchments - they completed the Angevin shame by not leaving one stone of Aumale standing on another.
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That summer, 1196 turned into a disaster for Richard. Philip recaptured Nonancourt, the Lionheart himself was wounded by a crossbow quarrel and, as if to add insult to injury, the despised John took the fortress of Gamaches in the Norman Vexin.
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Once again both sides paused for breath. Increasingly convinced that his reconquest of the Vexin - his abiding aim - was not something that could be achieved by the previous strategy of lightning campaigns, however flamboyant and spectacular his individual victories might prove to be, Richard settled in for the long haul. His new project was the construction of a fortress in the Seine valley that would rival for impregnability the great crusader castles like Krak des Chevaliers. Château-Gaillard, as the new castle was called, was Richard’s version of the Arthurian Joyous Garde. Built on a limestone rock 300 feet above the Seine and its companion new town Les Andelys, the castle had a most elaborate network of defences: outworks linking it to the town, which in turn was protected by bridged waterways and a stockade built across the river on the south side of the rock. A veteran of dozens of sieges, Richard knew all about the blind spots that allowed attackers to get inside the guard of defenders and be secure from their missiles - the so-called ‘dead angles’ - and combated them with curvilinear walls. Château-Gaillard turned out to be a mathematical gem: citadel, fortifications, crenellations, embrasures interlinking and in turn interpenetrating with the island town and the stockade so that the whole had the pleasing symmetry of a Bach sonata.
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This was Richard the mathematician at work, in this, as in so much else, anticipating Napoleon. Throughout the winter of 1196, into the new year, and well into 1198 Richard kept his architects and builders, his masons and engineers, his soldiers and his civilian labourers hard at work completing his masterpiece. Chroniclers reported an anthill of activity, with water-carriers, carpenters, quarrymen, woodmen, miners, blacksmiths, hodcarriers and stonecutters all competing against each other for piece-work bonuses. Delighted with his handiwork, Richard declared that he would eventually be able to hold Château-Gaillard against all comers; the layout permitted a concentration of force at any locality such that he felt confident of defending the walls, as he put it, even if they were made of butter.
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Nothing could halt the frenzied pace of the building work on the fair castle of the rock (bellum castrum de Rupe). On 8 May 1197 there was a fall of red rain, which the superstitious interpreted as a shower of blood. Richard brushed aside the ill omen and said the work would go ahead even if an angel descended from heaven and ordered him to stop.
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Château-Gaillard became something close to monomania with him, and its cost was astronomical - £12,000 in two years as against £7,000 spent on all other castles for the whole of Richard’s reign. Even Henry II had not spent more than £7,000 on his showpiece, Dover Castle, which took twelve years to complete (1179-91). It is likely that Château-Gaillard was the most expensive castle built in all Europe until that date; it was certainly the most famous fortress in the Middle Ages.
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Richard’s obsession with his Camelot had some rational basis, for the castle was designed both as the ultimate in defence, blocking the direct route to Rouen, and as a command post from which he would launch an offensive to regain the Vexin, when the time was ripe.
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In tandem with Château-Gaillard, which provided the funnel through which troops from Rouen could be poured into the marchlands of eastern Normandy, Richard developed his inchoate ideas on sea power, tested on the Mediterranean and against Saladin’s fleets on the Seine, building a fleet of ‘galleys’ (probably versions of the Viking longship) with shallow hulls, designed for speed and riverine warfare.
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Under the protective shelter of Château-Gaillard Richard built a port in the new town of Les Andelys for his pilot version of the flyboat. There was thus an elaborate network of sea power extending from Portsmouth to Rouen and up the Seine. To set the capstone on his great achievement, Richard built a palace in the town, which became by far his favourite residence.
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For the rest of his life he was absent from the urban complex Les Andelys-Château-Gaillard only when campaigning.

The one snag with Château-Gaillard was that the territory of Les Andelys was technically the manor of Richard’s old gadfly the archbishop of Rouen. The problems with this fiery cleric, which had only just been damped down, flared up once more as the archbishop strenuously objected to Richard’s despotic and ‘illegal’ action in so contemptuously riding roughshod over his (Rouen’s) prerogatives. To the archbishop it seemed the last straw that the king of England, who had devastated so much of his church property during the late war, should now filch the jewel in his episcopal crown - for the toll-house at Andeli, collecting dues from ships plying up and down the Seine, was one of his principal sources of income. Richard made the archbishop many tempting financial offers, but the stubborn divine turned them all down.
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Angered and frustrated, Richard simply moved in and started the building work anyway. The archbishop thereupon laid Normandy under an interdict and set out for Rome to lay his case before the Pope.
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Not wishing to share Leopold of Austria’s fate at the hands of the papacy, Richard sent his own rival embassy, principally the troika of Philip of Poitou (bishop elect of Durham), the bishop of Lisieux, and his old warhorse, the faithful William Longchamp. Richard’s mission began badly when Longchamp suddenly died at Poitiers, having barely begun the long journey.
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In Rome the ambassadors fared better, since Pope Celestine and his cardinals were sympathetic to Richard; as many of them said, the entire war and castle-building programme was only taking place because Philip had defied a previous papal bull and seized the Vexin while Richard was on crusade. Celestine additionally thought that the archbishop of Rouen was being greedy and had been offered a fair price for Les Andelys, and moreover was guilty of the sin of pride, leaving the bodies of the dead in Normandy unburied simply because of a wrangle over filthy lucre. In April 1197 he raised the interdict and sent the fire-eating bishop back to Normandy with instructions that he was to agree a settlement with the Lionheart. The litigious archbishop did not do badly out of the settlement, netting a net annual revenue of £1,405 (a vast fortune in those days) from the agreement signed with Richard.
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