Richard & John: Kings at War (51 page)

Leaving Chinon on 15 March 1199, Richard headed for Limoges to link up with Mercadier, intending to extirpate once and for all the rebellious sept of Aimar, viscount of Limoges and his son Guy. He and Mercadier then proceeded to besiege the viscount’s castle at Châlus-Chabrol, south of Limoges. For three days he directed a close investment of the fortress, having his bowmen shower the battlements with cascades of arrows while his sappers, protected by a ‘shield’ of thick canvas, undermined the walls. Since the garrison was tiny, with no more than forty defenders, there could only be one outcome to the siege. But Saladin, who had warned Richard that his Achilles heel was the gallery touch - the obsessive need to undertake minor operations which did not require his presence yet endangered his life - proved a true prophet. At dusk on the evening of 29 March, Richard left the comfort of his tent for the trivial pleasure of taking potshots at the castle walls with a crossbow - for the king fancied himself as an expert archer. He wore no armour and relied for protection simply on a large rectangular shield. There was only one man on the castle parapet, a bowman who liked to fire off quarrels at the besiegers as a token gesture of defiance. Fascinated by the man’s marksmanship, Richard either did not see the shaft heading towards him in the gloom, or overrated his own reflexes. At any rate, the bolt found its mark and buried itself in the king’s flesh, in the left shoulder. It was a serious wound but it should not have been a fatal one. Perhaps Richard’s mistake was not to ask one of his men to pull the missile out there and then, but maybe he feared the effect on their morale. Staggering back to his tent with remarkable stoicism, he tried to pull the bolt out cleanly - clearly it was a job for a skilled physician - but botched the job. The wooden shaft snapped off, leaving the iron barb still deeply embedded in his flesh. Finally a surgeon arrived and with great difficulty and much gore managed to remove the bolt; it is speculated that in the bad light of sundown the ham-fisted physician prodded around inexpertly with his scalpel, causing fresh wounds. Finally, the badly butchered shoulder was patched up and bandaged, but septicaemia, that reliable scourge of medieval battlefields had already taken a hand. Gangrene set in, the wound worsened and Richard, veteran of so many fatal encounters, knew the end was near. He sent for his mother, allowed only four trusted comrades to know the reality of his situation, and waited for the inevitable. The castle fell while he lay dying, but Richard barely took this in. Having received the last rites of the Church, he expired in the early evening of 6 April, the Tuesday before Palm Sunday, around 7 p.m. Abbot Milo of the Cistercian abbey of Le Pin near Poitiers heard his last confession, gave extreme unction and closed the dead man’s mouth and eyes.
³

Richard left exact instructions for the disposal of his body. His brains and entrails were buried at the abbey of Charroux on the Poitou-Limousin border, probably because Charlemagne was said to be the founder of the abbey. His heart went to Rouen to be buried next to the Young King; here at last we depart from Napoleonic comparisons, for the king’s heart was said to have been unusually large, whereas the examining physicians on St Helena found all the French emperor’s organs to have been on the small side.
⁴
The rest of his remains, together with the Crown and regalia he had worn at the second coronation at Winchester were buried at Fontevraud, at his father’s feet. The effigy on the tomb declares the glory of the Lionheart: a king in gorgeous apparel, sceptred and crowned, his Excalibur-like sword at his side.
⁵
Hugh, bishop of Lincoln, was the man chosen to conduct the Fontevraud service on Palm Sunday, 11 April. For reasons not entirely clear Berengaria did not attend the funeral, so bishop Hugh visited her at Beaufort on his way to the funeral. Those present at the funeral included Aimeri, viscount of Thouars and his brother Guy, William des Roches, Peter Savaric, Maurice, bishop of Poitiers, William, bishop of Angers, Miles, abbot of Le Pin and Luke, abbot of Torpenay.
⁶
But the most significant presence was that of Eleanor of Aquitaine, at the side of her beloved son in death as in life. She had been with him during the last days, and five years later would follow him into the family vaults at Fontevraud.
⁷
It is difficult not to contrast the dominant role of Queen Eleanor, present at the second coronation at Winchester, present at Richard’s deathbed, present at his funeral, with the unexplained absence of Queen Berengaria from all these events.
⁸

The deaths of great men are nearly always swathed in mystery and legend; we see this clearly in the case of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon and Lincoln, and the virus also infects the not-so-great but celebrated (William Rufus, Hitler, John F. Kennedy). It was scarcely to be expected that a celebrity as famous as Richard the Lionheart would be allowed to die a pointless death, as the result of mere chance. Modern mindsets do not appreciate raw contingency, and medieval sensibilities liked it even less. It followed, then, for his contemporaries, that his death had to have an ulterior or profounder meaning. The story the Lionheart’s contemporary chroniclers liked to tell was that he met his end through greed, while engaged in a demeaning hunt for treasure.
⁹
The quest for hidden gold, silver or other riches is a staple of medieval mythology and fairy tale, and continued to fascinate down the ages; the conquistadors’ conquest of the Americas, the downfall of the Jacobites, the last days of the Jesuits and the Nazis - all are allegedly concerned with buried treasure; tales of hidden treasure are a favourite device for explaining the otherwise inexplicable; and in psychological terms Jung has written extensively about the Nibelungen hoards as metaphor - ‘the treasure hard to attain’.
¹⁰
The men of the Middle Ages were similarly awestruck. Roger of Howden’s version was that the viscount of Limoges found a hoard of gold and silver on his land, offered Richard his liege lord a share, but that the avaricious Richard saw no reason why he should have merely a cut when he could have it all. The same story, with some name changes, occurs in the French chronicles of Rigord and William the Breton. The siege of Châlus-Chabrol then becomes a story, not of putting down rebellion, but of sordid treasure hunting. Howden named the bowman who fired the fatal bolt at Richard as Bertrand de Gurdon. He goes on to tell how Richard forgave him on his deathbed after he had heard how Angevin armies had killed his father and two brothers. Howden thus gets across a hamfisted fable about an allegedly wicked king showing repentance and contrition on his deathbed, pointing a Christian moral.
¹¹
Ralph of Coggleshall indicts Richard for his financial greed, laments the burden of taxation placed on England by Richard, and says that God struck him down because of his avarice. However, since Richard was always a loyal son of the Church and had never sought to make money out of ecclesiastical preferments, there was every reason to think that his stay in Purgatory would be a brief one and that he would attain the kingdom of Heaven.
¹²

Medieval writers naturally conceived of human life as fulfilling a pattern - the aleatory, the contingent, the adventitious, and the chaotic were to them manifestations of the Devil. The pattern was either Aristotelian - what could, might and even
ought
to have happened, rather than what actually did in brute fact - or providential, evincing God’s purposes; it followed that a random death of a king was outside the medieval writers’ universe of discourse, for this would make God appear a jester or a dice-player. French chroniclers were particularly confused on the issue: William of Breton said Richard’s death showed clearly that God was on Philip’s side and had come to the aid of France by striking down her most dangerous enemy; but Rigord thought that Philip’s imprisonment of Queen Ingeborg after repudiating her was the decade’s real sin crying to Heaven for vengeance, and was therefore puzzled as to why Richard, not Philip, was the monarch who was stricken.
¹³
By contrast, the English view was more one-dimensional. Although both Coggleshall and Howden are invaluable as historical sources when their preconceptions and
parti pris
do not intrude, clearly in this case they did. There may well have been a minor incident involving treasure which aroused Richard’s wrath - in that simulated but serious mode we have already discussed - but that was not his motive for the siege of the castle where he received his death-wound. That was a simple case of suppressing a rebellion.
¹⁴
Medieval historians, and some modern ones who follow them uncritically, like the story of treasure trove as it fits the picture of an irresponsible king; not surprisingly, this story has always been popular among the anti-Lionheart school of history. Yet the most serious strike against the treasure story is that it is not mentioned in the most authentic account of Richard’s death, by Bernard Itier, a monk in the Benedictine abbey of St Martial in Limoges, who had access to all the most reliable eyewitnesses.
¹⁵
Many historians, even until recently, knew nothing of Itier’s account, partly, the historian John Gillingham suggests plausibly, because they still cleave to the old fallacy that Richard is important only as king of England, and therefore totally ignore Aquitaine and its local historians.
¹⁶
At least three other major sources follow Itier and make no mention of treasure.
¹⁷

The tenacious hold of legend on Richard’s death can be seen from a number of different angles. Freudians, who like to link Eros and Thanatos, will doubtless relish the persistent canard that Richard disregarded the advice of his physicians and weakened himself still further by a prolonged bout of lovemaking as he lay dying; unfortunately, it is only the pedlars of tall stories who insist that this last sexual fling was with boys rather than women.
¹⁸
Christian apologists spread the rumour that Richard had not attended Mass for seven years, since his hatred for Philip of France was so strong he could not in conscience take the sacraments or even witness the Consecration, though this sounds like an obvious riff on the old Melusine and ‘Devil’s Brood’ stories.
¹⁹
Mythmakers, determined to rewrite his somewhat depressing and meaningless death into something more like romance, liked to transfer his death away from Châlus to more glamorous and well-known sights, to Chinon, Loches or Château-Gaillard.
²⁰
Confused as to the identity of the king’s killer, the chroniclers opt for a number of different names for the crossbowman: in Itier’s account he appears as Peter Basil, in William the Breton’s verse epic he is Dudo, while in Roger of Howden’s history he is confidently assigned the handle Bertrand de Gurdon.
²¹
There seems to be agreement that Richard did forgive the man on his deathbed, but less consensus on what happened afterwards. One plausible version is that the dying king’s instructions were set aside and that Mercadier had him flayed alive. Another story is that Mercadier thirsted for the man’s death but did not dare disregard the Lionheart’s last wishes openly, so sent him secretly to Joan (now wife of Raymond of Toulouse) who put him to death in some gruesome way.
²²

So passed the most famous king in English history. Whatever final judgement historians reach on the personality, reign and achievements of the Lionheart, no other English or British monarch comes close to him in terms of his impact on the wider world, and hence his status in myth and legend. Comparisons with the historical and mythical great are almost commonplace in the writings of posterity about Richard I: Alexander, Augustus and Charlemagne figure most prominently as examples of the former, with Arthur, Gawain and Roland as favourites in the latter category.
²³
The legendary stories told about Richard are legion.
²⁴
Apart from Blondel and Robin Hood, two especially stand out. In one fable Richard fights Saladin in single combat and worsts him. In another, significant in that it shows the Lionheart entering legend as a heterosexual rather than as the homosexual beloved by twentieth-century mythographers, Richard falls in love with the German emperor’s daughter during his famous captivity. Angry at the real or imagined seduction of his daughter, the emperor releases a lion into Richard’s cell, but the king kills the beast by distracting its attention with forty silk handkerchiefs received from his lady fair, putting his arm down the lion’s throat and ripping out its heart; actually, in mythical terms, the emperor was a fool for, by the canons that governed medieval fiction, lions cannot harm anointed kings.
²⁵
Although there are passing references to Richard in Chaucer and Shakespeare, it is generally considered that Richard was too much of a colossus to be a manageable subject even for a genius like the Bard, who preferred (when not dealing with the remote Ancient World) to base his dramas on obscure or little-known rulers; though some allege that there is a lost Shakespearean play about Richard.
²⁶
In literature Richard’s great significance is his massive influence on Arthuriana in general and in particular the medieval literature of Spain and Germany.
²⁷
In the wider world of Islam, Richard was regarded as a greater figure than Saladin. As with Napoleon centuries later, mothers would frighten their babies with talk of the English ogre who would come and eat them if they misbehaved.
²⁸