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BOOK III
RICHARD AND EUROPE
1192-1199
CHAPTER I
RICHARD AND THE EMPIRE
1192-1193
There was I beaten down by little men,
Mean knights, to whom the moving of my sword
And shadow of my spear had been enow
To scare them from me once.
After a last visit to Cyprus—perhaps for the
purpose of removing the officers whom he had placed there and transferring the
custody of the island to representatives of Guy— Richard directed his course
straight for Marseille, and in less than a month was off the coast of Barbary,
within three days’ sail of his destination. Disquieting rumours had, however, reached him; from passing ships, or at seaports where he had
touched, there had come to him repeated warnings that the count of Toulouse, so
long his determined enemy and now his unwilling vassal, was in league with some
of the neighbouring princes and nobles to seize him
as soon as he should land. He could not but suspect that Philip Augustus was
either an accomplice in the plot or would at least be only too ready to support
the plotters; he therefore suddenly altered his course, and sailed to Corfu.
It is difficult to guess why he did not
proceed through the Pillars of Hercules direct to England. Instead, he seems to
have deliberately chosen the much more hazardous adventure of a voyage up the
Adriatic and an overland journey through the territories of the Empire. His
motives for this strange choice can only be conjectured. He may have counted on
a personal meeting with Henry VI as a means of renewing and cementing the old
alliance of England with the Empire, and thus securing a valuable support in
the struggle with France for which he knew he must prepare himself in every
possible way. But if so, the moment and the circumstances were extraordinarily
ill chosen. Richard indeed could not fully know how untoward the circumstances
really were. That the young Emperor was as unscrupulous and false as his father
had been upright and honourable; that he was just
then making an attempt—destined to failure—to obtain possession of Naples; that
on his way back to Germany Philip would meet him; and that there were symptoms
of coming trouble in the Empire from the party of Richard’s brother-in-law
Henry of Saxony, to whom Richard, like his father, had given shelter and
protection, and at whose return to Germany in violation of an oath to set foot
there no more Richard was said to have connived—all these things Richard could
not know. But he did know, or ought to have known, that the German contingent
had been a source of constant disturbance in the crusading host; that his own
alliance with Tancred, the Emperor’s successful rival for the crown of Sicily,
had made the Emperor his natural enemy; and that he had also a personal
enemy—again of his own making—in Duke Leopold of Austria, who, though his
territorial possessions were insignificant, was of considerable importance in
German politics by reason of his close family connexion with the imperial house and with several of the chief feudataries of both the German and Italian realms.
Richard’s scheme seems, in fact, to have been
prompted by the spirit of sheer adventure and knight-errantry; and in the same
spirit he set out to carry it into effect. On reaching Corfu he saw three
galleys lying off the coast of the mainland; he at once put off in a little
boat to hail them. Their crews were pirates, and instantly attacked
the boat; but Richard, through one of his sailors, entered into a parley with
them, and for their laudable bravery and boldness made a bargain that they
should carry him, with a few attendants, for two hundred marks of silver, to
Ragusa. Probably, and not unreasonably, he preferred to embark with
a crew as familiar with the intricacies of the Dalmatian coast as they were
hardened to its perils. So furiously, however, did the wind drive the ships up
the gulf that a wreck seemed imminent; and the king made a solemn vow to spend
a hundred thousand ducats in building a church on whatever spot he should come
safe to land. He found refuge on a little rocky island called Lacroma, lying half a mile south of Ragusa, and at that
time forming part of the territory of that city, which was an independent
republic. The rulers of Ragusa, on hearing of his arrival, begged him to accept
a lodging in their city, and gave him a respectful and hospitable welcome. The
chief inhabitants of Lacroma were a community of
Benedictine monks; Richard at once proposed to fulfil his vow by rebuilding
their monastic church. The rulers of the republic, however, represented to him
that the sum which he had vowed was out of all proportion to the size of the
monastery and the requirements of the monks, and would be far better employed
in rebuilding the cathedral church of Ragusa on a scale befitting its
metropolitan dignity. To this he agreed, on condition that the republic should
obtain the Pope’s sanction to this deviation from the terms of his vow, and
should at its own cost rebuild the little church on the island; and that,
further, the abbot of Lacroma, assisted by his monks,
should have in perpetuity the privilege of celebrating Mass in the cathedral
church once a year, on the feast of the Purification of our Lady. Hereupon, it
seems, “the good king having borrowed a large sum of
money for the purpose,” the work was begun immediately. The zeal of the pilgrim king fired that
of the people of the diocese, and his gift, supplemented by contributions from
them, resulted in the erection of a church which for nearly five centuries
stood without a peer in Illyria for the stately grace of its proportions and
the beauty of its architectural details. An earthquake destroyed it in 1667;
but Richard had, all unknowing, laid in a nation’s heart the foundation of something
more precious and more lasting than any material edifice. The little republic
of Ragusa kept her independence till 1810, when she was conquered by Napoleon.
Four years later she was annexed to Dalmatia under the yoke of Austria.
Although never before incorporated into any of the Slavonic states which
surrounded her, she had a natural affinity with them; the greater part of her
inhabitants were, like theirs, of Serbian blood. Her cause thus became bound
up with that of the whole Serb race in its aspirations after freedom and a
national existence. When there came upon that sorely tried race the darkest
hour it had ever yet known, a Serbian statesman publicly appealed, as the
ground of his confidence in England’s help, to the memory of the mutual
obligations formed more than seven centuries before between Ragusa and Richard
the Lion Heart.
At Ragusa the king took ship again. What port
he really made for we cannot tell; for he was wrecked a second time, and came
finally ashore somewhere between Aquileia and Venice. Stranded in this remote
corner of the Italian border-land, where almost every local magnate was a connexion or a dependent of either the house of
Montferrat, the duke of Austria, or the Emperor, or of all three, Richard
suddenly awoke to his danger. He despatched one of
his followers to ask Count Mainard of Gorizia, the
most powerful noble of the district, for a safe-conduct for the little party;
he bade the messenger describe them as Baldwin de Bethune (who really was one
of them), a merchant called Hugh, and their companions, all pilgrims returning
from Jerusalem; and he also—most unwisely—sought to gain the favour of the count by sending him, in the name of the “merchant
Hugh,” a valuable ruby ring. Mainard, who was a
nephew of the marquis of Montferrat, gazed intently at the ring, and then said:
“ His name is not Hugh; it is Richard, the king. I have sworn to seize all
pilgrims coming from those parts and to accept no gift from any of them; but
for the worthiness of this gift, and of him who has honoured me, a man unknown to him, by sending it, I return it and give him free leave to
depart.” On receiving this message the terrified pilgrims bought some horses
and set off in the middle of the night, Richard, according to one account,
disguised in the habit of the Temple, of which Order there were several in the
little company. Their fears were well founded; Mainard and his men pursued them and captured eight of the party. The rest made their
way through Friuli to Freisach in Carinthia; but Mainard had
sent spies to dog their steps all the way, and warned his brother, Frederic of Pettau, to lie in wait for them there. Frederic chanced to
have in his household a Norman from Argenton, named Roger, who had been in his
service twenty years and whom he trusted implicitly. He bade this man search
the houses where pilgrims were wont to lodge, if haply he might recognize the
king by his speech or other token; promising Roger half of the town if the
prize were captured. Roger soon penetrated his native sovereign’s disguise, and
instead of delating him, besought him with tears to flee at once, gave him an
excellent horse for the purpose, and then returned and told his lord that the
reports about Richard were all false. Frederic flew into a rage and ordered all
the pilgrims to be arrested. Meanwhile, however, Richard with two companions
had slipped out of the town. For three days and three nights they rode without
food; then hunger compelled them to halt at a little inn close to Vienna. Dec.
To pay for his lodging Richard was obliged to
send one of his attendants, who could speak German, into the city to change
some bezants. The lad made too much display of his commission and of his
self-importance; detained and questioned by the citizens, he said that he was
in the service of a rich merchant who was coming to the city in three days.
They let him go, and he hurried back to his master and urged him to instant
flight. Richard, however, was so exhausted by his adventures by sea and land
that he determined to risk a few days’ longer stay, and sent the lad into the
town again several times to make purchases. Once—on December 20 or 21—the
messenger was careless enough to go with his master’s gloves stuck in his belt.
He was seized by the authorities, beaten, and tortured till he confessed who
his master really was. The duke of Austria, who was in the city, was
immediately informed and the king’s lodging surrounded. Richard, feeling
himself helpless among such a crowd of “barbarians,” managed to make them understand
that he was, willing to surrender, but only to the duke in person. Leopold
came; Richard went forth to meet him and gave up his sword. Leopold sent him to Dirmstein Dirnstein or Diirrenstein, a remote castle in the mountains near Krems, and placed him in charge of a strong guard who were
to keep watch over him with drawn swords day and night. A week later the
Emperor triumphantly announced to Philip of France the fate which had overtaken
“that foe of our Empire and disturber of your realm, the king of England.”
Henry was anxious to get Richard into his own
keeping; but Leopold was not disposed to part unconditionally with such
a valuable prize. On January 6 he brought his prisoner before the Emperor at
Ratisbon. “The evil counsels of Duke Leopold’s rivals,” says an Austrian
chronicler, “prevented an immediate conclusion of the matter”; Richard was
taken back to his Austrian prison, and it was not till February 14
that the Emperor and the duke came to terms. They began by laying down
conditions to be required of the king for his release. They decided that he
should give the Emperor a hundred thousand marks of silver, whereof Leopold
should have half as the dowry of Richard’s niece Eleanor of Britanny,
who should marry Leopold’s son: the marriage to take place and half the ransom
to be paid and divided at Michaelmas, the other half
in the following Lent. Richard was to set free, without ransom, Leopold’s
relations Isaac of Cyprus and his daughter. He was to give the Emperor fifty
galleys manned and furnished at his own cost, and carrying a hundred knights
and fifty crossbowmen; he was also to go in person, with another hundred
knights and fifty crossbowmen, with Henry to Sicily and help him to conquer it.
In other words, the king of England was to be brought down to the level of the
dukes of Austria and Suabia and Bavaria as a vassal
of the Empire, within which neither he nor any of his predecessors, English, Norman,
Angevin, or Poitevin, had ever held a particle of land. For the fulfilment of these conditions he was to give Henry two
hundred hostages, who were not to be released till he had, furthermore,
obtained for Leopold absolution from Rome—for the Pope on hearing of the
capture of the royal Crusader had at once excommunicated his captor. If Richard
did not fulfil all these conditions within a year, fifty of his hostages or he
himself, as Leopold might choose, should be restored to the latter. The Emperor
had to give his Austrian vassal two hundred sureties for the fulfilment of two
further stipulations exacted by Leopold before he would part with his prize. In
case of Henry’s death while Richard was in his custody, Richard was to be given
back to Leopold; and in case of Leopold’s death his son was to step into his
place for all the purposes of the treaty.
Henry of Hohenstaufen was a political
visionary, obsessed, more strongly perhaps than any other German ruler before
our own day, by the German dream of world-dominion; yet even he can scarcely
have had any real hope of extorting Richard’s consent to the terms laid down in
this curious document. Leopold of Austria was a practical-minded person, and
moreover knew Richard too well to have any illusions on the subject; hence the
strong safeguards by which he secured his claims as the original captor of the
prize—safeguards which Henry dared not refuse to grant him. The Emperor could
not afford to forfeit either the friendship of the duke of Austria or the
advantages which the possession of Richard’s person would involve. In the
autumn of 1191 Henry had made an attempt to take possession of Naples, and it
had failed. The Guelfs had profited by his absence from Germany to stir up
discontent and prepare a rising there. In November 1192 the bishop of Liege was
murdered; the malcontents ascribed the sacrilegious crime to the instigation of
the Emperor. The dukes of Brabant and Limburg (one of whom was brother and the
other uncle to the murdered prelate) and the archbishop of Cologne were soon
up in arms; the archbishop of Mentz, the duke of Bohemia, and other feudataries quickly followed their example; and at the back
of the whole disturbance was King Richard’s brother-in-law, the old Saxon
“Lion.” Nearly half Germany was in revolt. It was thus a matter of the utmost
importance for the Emperor to secure the support of the duke of Austria, whose
power and influence already extended considerably beyond the limits of the
little territory from which he took his chief title. Outside his own realm Henry
of Germany had now one ally, though the alliance was a secret one. Philip of
France had travelled home from Palestine very leisurely by way of Italy; early
in December he had met the Emperor at Milan, and their meeting had resulted in
an agreement, private and informal, but well understood between them, to make
common cause for the ruin of Richard. The capture of the English king gave them
an opening for joint action sooner than they could have expected; and it also
gave Henry an opportunity of posing before his malcontent vassals as supreme
ruler, judge, and arbiter of all Europe. The actual transfer of Richard from
Leopold’s custody to Henry’s did not take place till more than a month after
the Wurzburg compact was made; it was evidently thus arranged that it might
coincide with the gathering of the imperial court for the Easter festival. On
the Tuesday in Holy Week, probably at Spire, Richard was brought before the
Emperor. Henry seems to have begun by demanding the full terms drawn up at
Wurzburg; we are told that he “required many things to which the king felt he
could not consent, were it to save his very life.” Next, the Emperor brought
against his captive a string of accusations, charging him with betrayal of the
Holy Land, complicity in the death of Conrad, and violation of some agreement
or compact said to have been made with Henry himself. Finally, some envoys from
France, whose appearance at this opportune moment must surely have been
pre-arranged, came forward and publicly “defied” the English king in their
sovereign’s name. Richard, however, was ready with an answer to everything; he
offered to stand to right in Philip’s court concerning the matters in dispute
between Philip and himself, and met the Emperor’s charges with a fearless
readiness which enhanced the general admiration already won for him by his
frank yet dignified bearing. Henry saw that the feeling of the assembly was
with the prisoner; so he suddenly changed his tone, assumed the character of
Richard’s protector and friend, undertook to make agreement between him and
Philip, and while “the people who stood around wept for joy,” showered upon him
tokens of honour and promises of aid and publicly
gave him the kiss of peace. Hereupon Richard, through the mediation of the duke
of Austria, promised the Emperor a hundred thousand marks by way of ransom and
reward. Henry answered that if his arbitration should not be successful he
would be satisfied without any payment at all; but according to some envoys
from England who were present, he on Maunday Thursday
formally accepted Richard’s offer with the addition of a promise on Richard’s
part to furnish him with fifty fully equipped galleys and two hundred knights
for a year’s service. The show of friendliness was maintained, it seems, till
the Easter festivities were over; then, when the court broke up, Henry despatched his prisoner to Triffels,
a strong fortress on the highest point of the mountains between Suabia and Lorraine.
The castle was said to have been built specially to serve as a prison for
traitors to the Empire, and the imperial insignia were also kept in it. Here
the king was placed under a strong guard of soldiers picked out from among all
the Germans for strength and bravery. Girt with swords, they kept watch on him,
as Leopold’s soldiers had done, day and night, and formed round his bed a ring
which none of his own servants who shared his captivity were ever allowed to
penetrate.
As soon as the justiciars in England heard of
their sovereign’s captivity they took what steps they could in his behalf. They
sent Bishop Savaric of Bath, who claimed some kinship
with the house of Hohenstaufen, to negotiate with the Emperor for his release,
and they endeavoured to ascertain where he was
confined. All the world knows the story, put into its earliest and most
charming literary shape by a French minstrel some seventy years later, which
has for all after-time linked the name of its hero Blondel with that of the
royal trouveur. Blondel de Nesle,
a trouveur of some distinction, was a
contemporary of Richard, and the story in itself is not impossible. The
minstrel of Reims represents Blondel as having found Richard in the custody of
the duke of Austria; if so, he must have set out at the very first tidings of
the capture. The searchers officially sent from England, the abbots of Boxley and Robertsbridge, evidently went after the object
of their search was known to have been transferred into the hands of the
Emperor. They wandered over all Alemannia (western Germany or Suabia) without finding him, till they met him on Palm
Sunday (March 21) at Ochsenfurt on his way to Spire.
His guards evidently allowed them to confer with him freely; he was naturally
delighted at the meeting, and questioned them eagerly about the state of his
realm and the attitude of his vassals. The tidings they had to give him were
not altogether satisfactory. England was tranquil and loyal, in spite of John’s
efforts to make it otherwise. In Aquitaine a rising of the count of Perigord, the viscount of La Marche, and nearly all the
Gascon barons, had been crushed by the seneschal of Gascony with the help of
Richard’s brother-in-law, the son of the king of Navarre, and the victors had
swept the country almost to the gates of Toulouse. But the Norman and Angevin
lands sorely needed the presence of their lord. At the close of 1191 King Philip
had reached Paris, and invited or summoned the seneschal and magnates of
Normandy to a meeting which took place at Gisors on
January 20, 1192. He demanded the restitution of Aloysia (who was in the tower at Rouen) and of Gisors, and
the cession of the counties of Eu and Aumale, in
virtue, seemingly, of a document which he exhibited as the agreement made
between himself and the king of England at Messina. They answered that they had
no orders from Richard on the subject and would not act without them. Philip
then invited John to come over from England and receive investiture of all
Richard’s continental territories, and the hand of Aloysia. John was nothing loth, but was detained in England
by a threat from his mother and the justiciars to seize all his castles there
if he crossed the sea. Next, Philip summoned his host for an invasion of
Normandy; but his, barons refused to attack the lands of an absent Crusader.
Early in the following year—as soon as Richard was known to be safely out of
the way in a German prison—John made another attempt to seduce the Norman
barons from their allegiance. Failing in this, he proceeded into France and did
homage to Philip on the conditions which had been proposed a year before.
Thus matters stood when the two English
abbots set out on their quest. They were present at the Maunday Thursday assembly at Spire, and on their return home reported that peace had
been there made between the Emperor and the king. If Richard was under the same
delusion, he must have been speedily undeceived when he found himself shut up
within the gloomy walls of Triffels and denied all
further access to Henry’s presence. On the other hand, Henry was in all
likelihood quite as much disappointed by the failure of all attempts to break
the spirit of his prisoner. If we may trust an English chronicler whose
information was probably derived from an eyewitness, Richard never gave his
jailers the satisfaction of seeing a cloud on his brow; he was always cheery
and full of jest in talk, fierce and bold in action, according to
circumstances. He would tease his warders with rough jokes, and enjoy the sport
of making them drunk, and of trying his own strength against that of their big
bodies. His deeper feelings were expressed in a song, addressed to his
half-sister Countess Mary of Champagne, which he seems to have composed in two
languages, French and Provençal, in the autumn or early in the winter of 1193,
and which may be roughly translated thus :
“Feeble the words, and faltering the tongue
Wherewith a prisoner moans his doleful plight
;
Yet for his comfort he may make a song.
Friends have I many, but their gifts are
slight;
Shame to them if unransomed I, poor wight,
Two winters languish here!
“English and Normans, men of Aquitaine,
Well know they all who homage owe to me
That not my lowliest comrade in campaign
Should pine thus, had I gold to set him free;
To none of them would I reproachful be—
Yet—I am prisoner here !
“This have I learned, here thus unransomed left,
That he whom death or prison hides from sight
Of kinsmen and of friends is clean bereft;
Woe’s me ! but greater woe on these will
light,
Yea, sad and full of shame will be their
plight
If long I languish here.
“No marvel is it that my heart is sore
While my lord tramples down my land, I trow;
Were he but mindful of the oath we swore
Each to the other, surely do I know
That thus in duresse I should long ago
Have ceased to languish here.
“My comrades whom I loved and still do love—
The neighbour-lords
who were my friends of yore—
Strange tales have reached me that are hard
to prove;
I ne’er
was false to them; for evermore
Vile would men count them, if their arms they
bore
’Gainst me, a prisoner
here!
“And they, my knights of Anjou and Touraine—
Well know they, who now sit at home at ease,
That I, their lord, in far-off Allemaine
Am captive. They should help to my release;
But now their swords are sheathed, and rust
in peace,
While I am prisoner here.”
Two other visitors besides the abbots seem to
have found their way to Richard before his incarceration at Triffels;
the English Bishop Hubert of Salisbury, who, learning in Sicily on his way home
from Palestine what had befallen his sovereign, changed his own course and
hurried to seek him out; and a Norman chaplain, William of Sainte-Mère-Eglise. This latter Richard,
before his own removal from Spire, despatched to
England on business connected with the arrangements for the fulfilment of his
promises to Henry, and also for the elevation of Hubert to the see of
Canterbury. Hubert followed about the middle of April. Meanwhile Bishop William
of Ely had also come to the help of his royal master and friend. He had been
exiled from England by the queen-mother and the justiciars in 1191 for
misgovernment; but his personal loyalty to the king seems never to have failed,
and was certainly not doubted by Richard, who had never deprived him of his
office of chancellor. Through his diplomacy the Emperor was induced to let his
prisoner be brought to meet him at Hagenau. On April
19 Richard, writing thence to April his mother and his lieges in England,
related that the Emperor and Empress and their court had welcomed
him with all honour and loaded him with gifts, and
that an indissoluble mutual bond of love had been formed between him and Henry,
each promising to help the other to obtain and retain his rights against all
men; and that he wasstaying with the Emperor till
some other matters should be settled between them and seventy thousand marks of
the ransom paid. He urgently desired that this sum and hostages for the rest
should be collected with all speed and sent over under the care of the bishop
of Ely, whom he was apparently despatching to England
for that purpose. “Know ye for certain,” he added, “that were we in England and
free, we would give as great a sum, or a greater, to secure the conditions
which by God’s grace we have obtained, and if we had not the money to our hand
we would give our own person in pledge for it to the Emperor rather than leave
uncompleted that which has been done.” Richard evidently anticipated a speedy
release, for he sent to England not only for money and hostages, but also for
ships, and for the captain of his own ship, Alan Trenchemer;
and bade Robert of Turnham proceed thither “with his” (i.e. the king’s) “military accoutrements”—as if he expected soon to require them
there. He seems to have really believed that the new agreement secured for him
the Emperor’s active support in the matter about which he was most anxious—the
impending struggle with Philip. The seneschal and baronage of Normandy, as a
body, had rejected the treasonable proposals of John; but there was one traitor
among them; on April 12 Gilbert of Vacoeil, the
constable of Gisors and Neaufle,
surrendered these two castles to the king of France. With these keys of the
border in his hands, Philip had no difficulty in entering the duchy. In a few
weeks he was master of the whole Vexin, the county of Aumale, and the lands of Vaudreuil, Neufbourg, Evreux, and Gournay.
He was thus in full career of success when on hearing of the Hagenau agreement he urgently besought the Emperor either
to hand Richard over to him free “as his homager,” or
to keep him in a German prison as long as possible; and he backed his request
with a heavy bribe in money. Henry saw that he could not make friends of both
kings, and he was in doubt which of the two would be the most useful friend or
the most dangerous foe; so he staved off the decision for a time, placed
Richard in confinement at Worms, and arranged to hold a conference with Philip
at Vaucouleurs on June 24 or 25. Before
that day came, however, the French alliance had ceased to be of much
consequence to Henry; for the matter in which he had been most anxious to
obtain Philip's support, his quarrel with his own feudataries,
had been settled by other means. Richard, fearing that if Henry and Philip
should meet he would be given up to the latter, exerted himself greatly that
the meeting should be prevented, and, to this end, that the Emperor and the
German magnates should come to an agreement; which, owing to his urgency, they
did. The result was that instead of a conference with Philip at Vaucouleurs, Henry on June 25 opened at Worms a great Court
which sat for five days, and at which there were present, besides a crowd of
his own vassals, spiritual and temporal, four representatives of King
Richard—the bishops of Bath and Ely, and two of the justiciars from England—and
on the 29th the whole assembly confirmed by an oath “on the soul of the Emperor”
a new agreement between Henry and his royal prisoner. The money total for the
ransom was now raised to a hundred and fifty thousand marks, of which a hundred
thousand were to be fetched from England by envoys who were to be despatched thither by both sovereigns immediately. Richard
was to give sixty hostages to Henry for thirty thousand marks more, and seven
hostages to Leopold for the remaining twenty thousand. When these hostages and
the first hundred thousand marks were all received, Richard was to be set free.
There was, however, an alternative : “If the king should fulfill the promise
which he formerly made to the Emperor concerning Henry sometime Duke of Saxony,
the Emperor, letting the king off fifty thousand marks, shall pay for him
twenty thousand to the Duke of Austria”; no hostages would then be required,
and Richard should be liberated as soon as the hundred thousand June marks were
paid and his promise fulfilled. Furthermore, Richard took an oath that in
either case he would within seven months of his return home send his niece to
Germany to be married to Leopold’s son.
What was the promise which Richard had made
to the Emperor concerning Henry the Lion, when it was made, and whether or not
it was ever fulfilled, we cannot tell; the only known mention of the matter is
the passage quoted above. From the fact that Richard did on his release leave
some hostages in Germany we might infer that he had not done what he had
promised; but this inference is doubtful, for we shall see that the conditions
of his release were altered again before Henry let him go. Richard’s next step
was to seize his opportunity, while negotiations between Henry and Philip were
at a standstill, to make overtures to Philip. Immediately after the council at
Worms he despatched William of Ely to France with
orders to make “some sort of a peace” for him with the king. This William did
at Mantes on July 9. The terms consisted of a promise in Richard’s name that he
would leave to Philip’s discretion the disposal of whatever territories within
the Angevin dominions were then occupied by Philip himself or by his men; that
he would perform the homages and services due for all and each of his French
fiefs, would grant an amnesty and restitution of their lands to certain of his
vassals who had incurred forfeiture, and would clear off the debt which, it
seems, Philip still claimed under the treaty of 1189, by paying him twenty
thousand marks in half-yearly instalments of five thousand marks each, the
first instalment to be paid within six months after the payer’s release from
captivity, and Philip meanwhile to hold in pledge the castles of Loches,
Chatillon-sur-Indre, Driencourt and Arques; one of these to be restored to Richard on the
payment of each instalment of the money. Philip promised that meanwhile, as
soon as the castles were placed in his custody, he would “receive the King of
England into his favour and make request to the
Emperor for his liberation.”
In less than six months the German envoys
returned from England, bringing with them “he greater part of the
ransom—seemingly the stipulated hundred thousand marks, for the Emperor wrote
on December 20 to the English prelates, barons, and people, and Richard on
December 22 to the new archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, announcing that
the captive’s liberation was to take place on Monday, January 17; adding that
on the following Sunday (January 23, 1194) he was to receive the crown of the
kingdom of Provence which the Emperor had granted to him. Richard’s place of
confinement at this time was probably Spire. There, on the appointed day, Henry
held a council which after long discussion was adjourned to reassemble at Mentz
on Candlemas Day. At this adjourned meeting Richard was present, with his
mother, Archbishop Walter of Rouen, and the bishops of Ely and Bath, who had
all come to witness his release. To the amazement of all parties, Henry
proposed a yet further delay, and shamelessly avowed his motive for the
proposal. He had received in a private audience at Spire, in January, some
messengers charged with letters from Philip and John. He now brought these
messengers before the council, and handed the letters to Richard. In them the
Lion-Heart’s overlord and his brother made to the Emperor three alternative
offers. He should receive from Philip fifty thousand marks and from John thirty
thousand if he would keep Richard prisoner till Michaelmas;
or a thousand pounds of silver (seemingly from the two jointly) every month, so
long as he chose to keep him; or a hundred thousand marks from Philip and fifty
thousand marks from John if he would either keep him another twelvemonth or
deliver him up to them. Richard, in utter desperation, appealed to the prelates
and princes who had stood surety for the Emperor’s fulfilment of the treaty
drawn up at Worms. Two of them—the archbishops of Mentz and Cologne—protested
strongly against a breach of so solemn an agreement; the other members of the
council seem to have taken the same side; and after two days’ struggle Henry
yielded.
The day was a Friday; an unlucky day, remarks
an English chronicler of the time. There was a special reason for the remark.
Henry, as we have seen, had promised to invest Richard on his release with the
kingdom of Arles or Burgundy. This kingdom, as such, had ceased to exist more
than a century and a half before, and over a great part of the lands which had
composed it the German Emperors had now no practical authority or control. It
seems that at the last moment Henry suddenly required his prisoner to do him
homage, not for Burgundy—of which we hear no more—but for all the possessions
of the Angevin house, including the kingdom of England; and Richard, seeing no
way of escape, and urged by his mother, went through a ceremony of surrender,
investiture and homage which, if it had been binding, would have made him a
vassal of the Empire for the whole of his dominions. Such a transaction was,
however, void in law, on two grounds. Firstly, no account was taken in it either
of the French king’s rights as overlord of Richard’s continental territories,
or of the immemorial right of the English Crown to absolute independence.
Secondly, Richard had been driven to it under compulsion, as the only means of
regaining his freedom and rescuing his dominions from imminent peril—for a
refusal would certainly have resulted in an immediate alliance between Henry
and Philip. Homage done under such conditions was a mere empty form, a
concession to the vanity of the Emperor, who was ready to clutch at any
expedient for magnifying himself in the eyes of his own vassals and inflicting
as much outward degradation as be dared on the captive whom he—seeing that he
could now wring out of him no further, profit, financial or political—
thereupon set at liberty.
Richard’s first act was the despatch of a messenger to Henry of Champagne and the other
Christian nobles in Syria to tell them that he was free, and that, if God would
avenge him of his enemies and grant him peace, he would at the appointed time
come to help them against the heathens. On the same day the Emperor and his
magnates wrote to Philip and John bidding them deliver up immediately whatever
they had taken from Richard during his captivity; otherwise restitution would
be enforced by the writers to the uttermost of their power. Protected by an
imperial safe-conduct to Antwerp, and accompanied by his mother and his
chancellor, Richard set out on a leisurely progress down the Rhine. At Cologne
he was sumptuously entertained for three days in the archbishop’s palace, and
on the third day was asked to attend Mass in the church of S. Peter. The day
was probably the festival of S. Peter’s Chair at Antioch (February 22);
Archbishop Adolf chose to act as precentor, and began the Mass not with the
proper introit, but with that of the feast of S. Peter in Chains—“Now know I of
a surety that the Lord hath sent His Angel and hath delivered me out of the
hand of Herod.” The choice was doubtless made in compliment to the royal guest;
whether the archbishop failed to notice, or deliberately ignored, the
comparison of the Emperor to Herod which it involved, we are not told. Adolf
indeed was only one of a crowd of imperial feudataries who were eager to make a friend of the English king. By the time Richard
arrived at Antwerp not only Adolf but also the archbishop of Mentz, the
bishop-elect of Liege, the dukes of Austria, Suabia,
Louvain, and Limburg, the count of Holland, the son of the count of Hainaut,
the marquis of Montferrat, and many others, were bound to him by homage and
fealty—saving, of course, their fealty to the Emperor—for certain revenues
which he granted them by charter, on condition of their help against the king
of France. Possibly the Emperor may have taken alarm at these alliances between
his vassals and his late captive, for one English chronicler tells us that he
sent out some men to overtake and recapture him. Richard, however, under the
personal escort of Archbishop Adolf, passed through the lands of the duke of
Louvain to Antwerp, where some of his own ships awaited him. The wind being unfavourable for a direct passage to England, he slowly
made his way by sea to a port which Roger of Howden calls “Swine in Flanders, in the lands of the Count of Hainaut”—either Swyn, between Breeden and Ostend, in the present West
Flanders, or Zwin, on the Belgian frontier of the
Dutch province of Seeland—coasting along by day in Alan Trenchemer's galley because in that it was easier to pass through among the islands and
spending the nights on a large and splendid ship which had come from Rye. Swine
was reached in three days; five more were spent in waiting there for a wind; at
last, on March 12 or 13, 1994, the king landed at Sandwich, and straightway went to offer up
his thanksgivings at the shrine of S. Thomas the Martyr at Canterbury. On March
16 he entered London in a triumphal procession to March S. Paul’s. Clergy and
people gave him a rapturous welcome; and the sumptuous decorations of the city
were beheld with amazement by some German nobles who accompanied him, and who
had supposed the wealth of England to be exhausted by his ransom. One of them,
it is said, actually told him that he would not have been released without a
much heavier payment if the Emperor could have known that such riches existed
in the island realm.
The welcome was mainly a clerical and popular
one, because most of the lay barons were occupied in trying to put down a
revolt stirred up by John. They had made some progress towards this end before
Richard’s arrival; most of John’s castles had been captured, but two,
Nottingham and Tickhill, were still holding out. Richard went to work
leisurely. He spent scarcely a day’ in London; but he left it to make another
pilgrimage, to S. Edmund’s. He knew that he could afford to wait.
Both castles were closely besieged, the one by the earls of Huntingdon,
Chester, and Ferrars, the other by the bishop of
Durham. Another great rebel stronghold, Mount Saint Michael’s in Cornwall, had
surrendered before the king’s return because at the tidings of his coming its
commandant died of fright. The garrison of Tickhill now sent two knights to
ascertain whether the king was really home, and if he were, to offer him the
castle. He refused to receive it unless they would all surrender at discretion.
While the envoys carried this message back to Tickhill, he marched upon
Nottingham, and on March 25 arrived there with such a numerous force
and such a noise of trumpets and horns as greatly alarmed the garrison;
nevertheless, hoping that all this was merely a display contrived by the nobles
to make them believe the king had returned, they continued to shoot from the
walls, and shot down some of his men almost at his feet. At this he waxed wroth
and assaulted the castle. One rebel knight was killed by a bolt from Richard’s
own crossbow; the barbicans were taken and the outer gates burnt. The place
was, however, of such strength as to appear, if well defended, impregnable
except by starvation; and it was amply supplied with provisions as well as with
men. Next morning Richard began to prepare his stonecasters,
and also set up in view of the castle a gallows on which he hanged some of
John’s men-at-arms who had been captured outside it. Meanwhile Tickhill had
been surrendered to Bishop Hugh on his assurance that the lives of the garrison
should be spared; and on March 27 he, with his prisoners, joined the king. That
day, while the king was at dinner, the constables of Nottingham castle sent two
men to see him and report what they saw and heard. Till then the Nottingham
constables had not believed that their sovereign was really in England. Their
messengers looked at him well, and recognized him.
‘Am I the king ? What think you?’ he asked
them.
They said ‘ Yes.’
‘Then you may go back; go free, as is right;
and do the best you can.
On their report the two constables, with
twelve followers, went and placed themselves at Richard’s mercy; and on the
morrow the castle was surrendered on the same terms by the rest of the
garrison, of whom some were imprisoned and others put to ransom.
Richard spent the next day in visiting two
royal Forests which he had never seen before, Clipstone and Sherwood; and they pleased him well. At night he returned to Nottingham,
where he had summoned a council to meet on the following day. It was a great
assembly, at which the queen-mother, the two archbishops, and a number of
prelates and magnates were present. The king opened the proceedings by disseising two of John’s chief partizans,
Gerard de Camville and Hugh Bardolf,
of the sheriffdoms and royal castles which they held—Lincoln shire and castle,
held by Gerard; Yorkshire and Westmorland by Hugh— all of which he put up for
sale and sold to the highest bidder. On the second day of the
council (March 31) he asked for judgement upon Count John and upon Hugh of Nonant, the bishop of Coventry, John’s chief ally. And it was judged that they should be
peremptorily cited, and that if they failed to come and stand to right, Count
John should be declared to have forfeited all claim to the crown and the bishop
be subjected to the judgement of his fellow-prelates as bishop and that of the
lay barons as sheriff. On the third day (April 1), the king ordered that for
every carucate of land throughout England a contribution of two shillings
should be made to him; and that every man should render to him the third part
of the military service due from his fee, to go with him (the king) into
Normandy. He also demanded of the Cistercians all the year’s wool of their
flocks : but for this they compromised by a fine. The fourth day was employed
in hearing appeals from Archbishop Geoffrey of York and Gerard de Camville; in neither case did the council arrive at any
decision. Lastly, the king appointed his crowning to take place at Winchester
at the close of Easter (April 17), and ordered that on the day after that event
all the prisoners taken in John’s castles should be brought before him.
King William of Scotland was now on his way
to a conference with his English overlord. They met at Southwell on the Monday before Easter and travelled together on the Tuesday to Malton; there William asked for the dignity and honours which his predecessors had had in England, and also
for the restoration of Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancaster,
which he claimed by right of his ancestors. Richard answered that he would act
according to the counsel of his barons. The two kings spent the rest of Holy
Week together in a progress by Geddington to
Northampton, where they kept Easter. On Easter Monday Richard laid William’s
requests before the council, and gave his reply. He told the king of Scotland
that he ought on no account to have made his demand about Northumberland,
especially in those days, when nearly all the nobles of the French kingdom had
become his (Richard’s) enemies; for if he were to grant this, it would look as
if he did it more from fear than from favour. About
the other counties he seems to have said nothing; but they were doubtless
understood to be included in his refusal. William apparently made no
remonstrance and was pacified by a charter providing minutely for the proper
escort and entertainment of the Scot kings when summoned to the English court.1 He accompanied or followed Richard to Winchester for the coronation on Low
Sunday, when he carried one of the swords of state before his overlord in the
procession.
The precise significance of this so-called
“coronation” is not easy to determine. Richard, we are told, when he had called
together the prelates of England, asked and received from them counsel that he
should renew his kingship and permit the crown to be placed on his head by the
archbishop of Canterbury at the Easter festival. He followed this counsel of
the prelates; and as there was not time to prepare for so great a solemnity by
Easter Day, it was deferred until the octave. And because the manner of a
crowning of this sort had for many years passed away from the minds of men, the
directions for it were sought and found in the church of Canterbury, where
Stephen had been thus crowned with his queen. These directions clearly apply
not to a coronation in the usual sense of the word—a ceremony of which the
pattern for all after-time in England had been set less than five years
before—but to the old English custom, obsolete since 1157, of “wearing the
crown” in public on certain high festivals. The king was arrayed in his full
robes, the sceptre and verge were placed in his
hands, and the crown set upon his head by the archbishop, not in the church,
but in the royal chamber; thence he was conducted in procession to the church,
where he was enthroned with special prayers and suffrages; after which the Mass
was celebrated and he made his offering and his Communion. When the service was
ended the procession returned to the royal apartments, and the king, after
changing his heavy crown for a lighter one, sat down with his magnates to a
banquet, held on this occasion in the refectory of the cathedral monastery. “Thus,” says Gervase of Canterbury, “by the counsel of the prelates was
King Richard crowned on the octave of Easter at Winchester, because being set
free from captivity he had unexpectedly returned to his kingdom.” The revival
of the old custom which Henry II had abandoned thirty-seven years before seems
to be thus sufficiently explained as an expression of the joy and thankfulness
of king, Church, and nation at a deliverance of which they had almost
despaired, and which promised the beginning of a new era in his reign. There
are, however, indications of something behind this. One phrase used by Gervase,
and two other phrases used by other writers of the time, suggest that during
Richard’s captivity something had taken place, or was supposed or suspected in
England to have taken place, derogatory to his regal dignity and making it
advisable for that dignity to be publicly re-asserted or “renewed.” That
something, if not altogether imaginary, could hardly be anything else than his
alleged homage to the Emperor; and if that homage were, or were understood to
be, merely for the kingdom of Burgundy, it could scarcely be regarded as
affecting his position or his dignity as king of England. The evidence is,
however, too scanty and too vague to warrant any definite conclusion on the
point.
Little was now needed to complete such a
resettlement of affairs in England as would enable Richard safely to leave the
government of the kingdom in Archbishop Hubert’s hands and devote himself to
the more anxious task which he knew awaited him across the Channel. Two days
after the coronation the old bishop of Durham resigned the sheriffdom of
Northumberland, whereupon William of Scotland offered Richard fifteen thousand
marks for the county and its appurtenances. Richard, after consulting his
ministers, said that for this sum William might have the county, but without
its castles; William refused this offer, and went home grieved and humbled,
after another vain attempt to make his overlord change his mind; Richard was
immoveable on the point for the moment, though he held out a hope that he might
yield it “on his return from Normandy.” The prisoners taken at Nottingham and
Tickhill and in John’s other castles were disposed of by putting the wealthier
of them in prison till they should ransom themselves, and letting the rest go
free on their giving security that they would come up for judgement whenever
summoned. John himself was in France. On April 25 the king went to Portsmouth,
where a fleet of a hundred ships was assembled to carry him and his fighting men
over sea; but their crossing was delayed by bad weather for more than three
weeks. Once, on May 2, the king in his impatience to be gone caused the whole
fleet to be loaded up ready for departure, and himself, in defiance of the
counsel of his sailors, went on board a “long ship” and put to sea; and though
the wind was against him he would not turn back, so while the other ships
remained in port, the king and those who accompanied him were tossed about by
the waves, for there was a great storm. Next day he was compelled to land in
the Isle of Wight and return to Portsmouth. On May 12 he was at last able to
get across with all his fleet to Barfleur.
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