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RICHARD THE LION HEART
BOOK I
RICHARD OF AQUITAINE
CHAPTER ITHE BOY DUKE1157-1179
“The eagle of the broken covenant shall rejoice
in her 1157 third nesting”—thus ran one of the predictions in the so-called
“prophecy of Merlin” which in the latter half of the twelfth century was
generally regarded as shadowing forth the destiny of Henry Fitz-Empress and his
family. “The queen” said those who interpreted the prophecy after the event,
“is called the eagle of the broken covenant because she spread out her wings
over two realms, France and England, but was separated from the one by divorce
and from the other by long imprisonment. And whereas her first-born son,
William, died in infancy, and the second, Henry, in rebellion against his
father, Richard, the son of her third nesting, strove in all things to bring
glory to his mother’s name”.
There was nothing to mar the rejoicing of
either Eleanor or Henry in September 1157. The young king had overcome the
difficulties which had beset him at the opening of his reign. Public order and
the regular administration of public justice had been restored throughout his
realm. He had obtained the French king’s recognition of his rights over
Normandy and the Angevin lands, and also over Eleanor’s duchy of, Aquitaine,
where in the winter of 1156 he had received the homage of the barons and kept
the Christmas festival with her at Bordeaux. King and queen 1157 returned to
England in the spring. Soon afterwards the last remnant of
opposition to the rule of the Angevin king in England had been disarmed in the
persons of Earl Hugh of Norfolk and Count William of Boulogne; Henry had
“subdued all the Welsh to his will” and received, together with the homage of
Malcolm of Scotland, a formal restitution of Northumberland, Westmorland and
Cumberland, which had been in the possession of the Scots since 1136. From
these successes Henry had either just returned, or was on his way back to
rejoin his queen at Oxford, when their third son was born there—no doubt in
Beaumont palace—on September 8. A woman of S. Alban’s was chosen for the boy’s
nurse and fostered him together with her own son, born on the same night and
afterwards known as Alexander Neckam, author of a
treatise on natural science or what passed for science in his time. Her name
was Hodierna; in later days she had from the royal
domains in Chippenham an annuity of seven pounds, doubtless granted to her by
her royal nursling, whom she seems to have survived by some twenty years. Whether
she dwelt at the court while he was under her charge, or whether, like 1157 his
ancestor Geoffrey Martel, he was sent to dwell with his foster-mother, there is
nothing to show. Before he was two years old his destiny was planned by the
king; Richard was to be heir to the dominions of his mother.
“Aquitaine” says an English writer of the
time, “abounding in riches of many kinds, excels other parts of the western
world in such wise that it is reckoned by historians as one of the happiest
and most fertile among the provinces of Gaul. Although its fields respond
abundantly to culture, its vines to propagation, and its woodlands to the
chase, yet nevertheless it takes its name not from any of these advantages, but
from its waters (aquae), haply esteeming as alone worthy of account among its
delights that which its health-giving water brings forth either to be returned
to the sea, or uplifted in the air. If, indeed, we track the Garonne from its
fount along its rapid course to the sea, and if we also follow the line of the
Pyrenean mountains, all the country that lies between derives its name from the
beneficent waters that flow through it. Furthermore, in those parts smoothness
of tongue is so general that it promises impunity to everybody, and any one who knows not the manner of that people cannot know
whether they are more constant in deed than in word. When they set themselves
to tame the pride of their enemies, they do it in earnest; and when the labours of battle are over and they settle down to rest in
peace, they give themselves up wholly to pleasure”.
Whatever may be thought of Dean Ralph’s
etymology, there was an element of truth in his description, half jesting
though it seems to be, of the country and the character of its people. He gives
indeed hardly sufficient prominence to the pugnacious side of the latter; and
the boundaries which he assigns to the former are considerably narrower than
those of the duchy of Aquitaine as it stood at the time of Richard’s birth.
That duchy comprised, in theory at least, fully one-third of the kingdom of
France. As counts of Poitou its dukes bore direct sway over a territory bounded
on the north by Britanny, Anjou, and Touraine, on the
west by the sea from the bay now known as that of Bourgneuf to the mouth of the Charente, and on the east (roughly) by the course of the
river Creuse from a little distance below Argenton to
its junction with the Vienne; and also over the dependent district of Saintonge
on the north side of the estuary of the Garonne, or Gironde. As counts of
Gascony they were overlords of a number of lesser counties and lordships,
extending from the mouth of the Garonne to the Pyrenees, and forming a
territory nearly twice the size of Poitou. Between Poitou and Gascony lay the
counties of Angouleme, La Marche, and Perigord, and,
between the two latter, a cluster of minor fiefs which collectively formed the
district known as the Limousin, and of which the most
important was the viscounty of Limoges. All these had from early times owned
the overlordship of the Poitevin counts in their
ducal capacity. So, too, had Berry, an extensive district lying to the north of
La Marche. The north-eastern portion of Berry, which formed the viscounty of
Bourges, had, however, for a long time past been lost to the dukes and reckoned
as part of the Royal Domain of France. On the eastern and south-eastern borders
of the duchy lay the counties of Auvergne and Toulouse. Toulouse, with its
dependencies—the Quercy or county of Cahors, Alby,
Foix, Carcassonne, Cerdagne and Roussillon—had always
been a separate fief held directly of the Crown; but the right to its ownership
had for the last sixty years been in dispute between the Poitevin counts and its actual holders, the house of St. Gilles, who also held the neighbouring county of Rouergue and with it the overlordship of a number of smaller fiefs along the southern
coast. Auvergne, originally a part of the Aquitanian duchy, was strongly
disposed to reject the authority of the Poitevin dukes; and both Auvergne and Toulouse were more or less openly supported in
this matter by the French king. Nor were 1157 the other underfiefs of the duchy, or even the barons of Poitou, by any means models of feudal
obedience. For a century or more the dukes had been periodically at strife with
the counts of Angouleme, the counts of La Marche, the lords of Lusignan (in
Poitou), the viscounts of Limoges, and the neighbours and rivals of these last. It was little more than twenty years since Count
William of Angouleme had carried off from Poitiers Eleanor’s stepmother, the
Countess Emma, “by the counsel of the chiefs of the Limousin who feared lest the Poitevin yoke should be laid more
heavily upon them” owing to her marriage with the duke, she being a daughter
and a possible co-heiress of the viscount of Limoges. At Limoges itself,
moreover, there seems to have been a perennial rivalry between the bishop, the
viscount, the abbot of the great abbey of S. Martial, and the townsfolk.
When Henry II went to Limoges after his
marriage in 1152 he seems to have been welcomed as duke by the viscount; but
strife arose between his followers and the citizens which so enraged him that
he ordered the recently built walls of the town to be razed and the bridge to
be destroyed. As the town—locally called “the castle”—was held by the viscount
of the abbot, this was an offence to all parties at once; and the abbot
retorted by refusing to grant the duke’s claim to a procuration in the
city—that is, outside the walls—saying he was only bound to grant it within the
enclosure of the “castle”. Henry, though angry, had his mind fixed on more
important matters, and let the insult pass; but on his next visit to Limoges,
in 1156, he successfully asserted his ducal rights. In the spring or early
summer of 1159 he again went to Aquitaine, to prosecute by force of arms his
claim, as Eleanor’s husband, to the county of Toulouse. The support of the Count
of Barcelona and his wife, the Queen of Aragon, was purchased by a promise that
Richard should wed their infant daughter and should on his marriage receive the
Dukedom of Aquitaine. The Quercy was conquered by
Henry and held for him awhile after he had abandoned the siege of Toulouse and
returned to Normandy. A treaty made between Henry and Louis of France in May
1160 contained a provision for a year’s truce between Henry and Raymond of
Toulouse, during which Henry was to keep whatever he at the date of the treaty
had of the honour of Toulouse, Cahors, or Quercy. This was
probably not much, as his troops had already been withdrawn from the conquered
territory; the greater part of it seems to have fallen back into Raymond’s
hands, and we hear nothing more of the relations between him and Henry for
nearly thirteen years.
Where and how the future duke of Aquitaine
was being brought up there is nothing to show. All that we know about him, till
he was well advanced in his thirteenth year, is that the sheriffs of London
paid ten pounds six and eightpence for his travelling expenses on some
occasion—probably his elder brother’s birthday feast—in 1163, and that in May
1165 he went with his mother and eldest sister to join the king in Normandy.
Henry’s quarrel with S. Thomas of Canterbury was then at its height; and
Henry’s discontented subjects in Aquitaine were quick to take advantage of the
opportunity for mischief given them by the difficulties with France in which
that quarrel involved him. On the pretext of “certain liberties whereof he had
deprived them” some of them became so troublesome—chiefly, it seems, by their
intrigues with King Louis—that in November 1166 he summoned them to a
conference at Chinon. It took place on Sunday,
November 19, with so little result that he sent Eleanor, who had apparently
been trying to maintain order in the duchy during his absence, back to England
and himself went to keep Christmas at Poitiers. Whether Richard went with his
mother or stayed with his father does not appear.
In March Henry had a conference with Raymond
of Toulouse at Grandmont. Shortly afterwards he tried
to assert his ducal authority over the count of Auvergne. The only result was a
fresh rupture with Louis, which was temporarily patched up by a truce made in
August to last till Easter next, March 31, 1168. Before that date a formidable
rebellion broke out in Aquitaine. The counts of Angouleme and La Marche, the
viscount of Thouars, Robert of Seilhac in the Limousin and his brother Hugh, Aimeric of Lusignan in Poitou, Geoffrey of Rancogne in the 1168 county of Angouleme, “with many
others,” sought to rebel against the king, and went about ravaging with fire
and sword. When the king heard of this he hurried to the place, took the strong
castle of Lusignan and made it stronger still, and destroyed the villages and
fortresses of the rebels.” He then revictualled his own castles, and left the
duchy under the charge of Eleanor (who had rejoined him after Christmas) and of
Earl Patrick of Salisbury, while he himself went to meet Louis on the Norman
border on April 7. The truce between the kings was now expired, and
Henry desired a treaty of peace; but meanwhile the southern rebels were urging
Louis to insist that Henry should indemnify them for the loss and damage which
he had inflicted upon them, and which they represented as a breach of his truce
with France, the French king being supreme lord of Aquitaine. They even placed
in the hands of Louis the hostages which they had promised to Henry. Louis did
not go to the conference in person, but sent some nobles to represent him. To
them Henry proposed a new scheme for the future of Aquitaine : that its young
duke-designate should marry the youngest daughter of Louis. The French envoys
refused to bind their sovereign to this unexpected condition; it was, however,
agreed “that if Richard should ask for
his rights over the Count of St. Gilles”—that is, of Toulouse—“the king of
France should try the cause in his court”. Thus the settlement of Aquitaine on
Richard was, by implication at least, recognized by France, although Richard
himself was not yet eleven years old. As to the aggrieved nobles, Henry
promised them restitution; but Louis would not give up the hostages; and the
conference ended in another truce to last till the octave of midsummer.
Scarcely had the parties separated when
tidings came that Earl Patrick had been slain in a fight with some of the
malcontents. Henry was too much overburdened with other cares to attempt during
the rest of that year any personal intervention in Aquitaine. Eleanor seems to
have urged him to make it formally over to Richard. She probably saw that there
was no likelihood of a good understanding between her people and her Angevin
husband, and hoped to be more successful in governing them herself in the name
of her son. Her suggestion, and that which Henry had made nine months before to
the representatives of Louis, were both carried into effect on January 6, 1169,
when the two kings made peace at Montmirail. The two
elder sons of Henry and Eleanor were both present at the meeting. Henry himself
first did homage to Louis for his continental possessions; young Henry did the
like for Britanny, Anjou and Maine; then Richard was
betrothed to the French king’s daughter Aloysia, and
likewise performed the homage due to Louis for the county of Poitou and the
duchy of Aquitaine. The feudal situation created by these transactions was a
strange one. It was capable of at least two different interpretations, and its
practical result, so far as Aquitaine was concerned, was that for the next
twenty years there were two dukes of that country. Henry’s purpose in thus
making his sons do homage to Louis was to guard against the possibility of
dispute, after his own death, as to the portion of his dominions to which each
of them was entitled. In his eyes the homage was anticipatory of a future and
perhaps—for he was not yet thirty-six—still very remote event, and its effect'
was merely prospective. But, so far as can be seen, no such limitation of its
scope was expressed in the act of homage; and the legal effect of that act
therefore was not merely prospective, but immediate; it at once made the
younger Henry and Richard respectively count of Anjou and duke of Aquitaine,
not under the suzerainty of their father, but under the direct overlordship of
the French king. Such at least would be its legal effect as soon as the boys
were old enough to govern for themselves; and this age young Henry had almost
reached, for he was in his fourteenth year. Their father, on the other hand, as
the sequel shows, never intended to give during his own lifetime any real
authority at all to young Henry, nor did he intend to give any to Richard
otherwise than with a tacit but perfectly well understood reservation of his
own right of intervention and control whenever he might choose to exercise it;
and he still remained legally both count and duke, for he had just repeated, in
both capacities, his own homage to Louis. There can be no doubt that Louis was
fully alive (although it seems that Henry was not) to the advantages which the
French Crown might derive from this complicated state of affairs. But he was,
of course, not desirous of pointing them out to his rival; and during the next
four years he carefully refrained from all interference with the affairs of the
Angevin dominions. The new duke of Aquitaine was, however, not yet twelve years
old, and it was clearly with the French king’s sanction that his father, in the
spring, marched into the duchy and forcibly brought the counts of Angouleme and
La Marche and most of the other rebels to submission.
Our only certain notice of Richard between
January 1169 and June 1172 shows him to
have been, at some time in 1170, at Limoges with his mother, laying the
foundation-stone of the abbey of S. Augustine. On the Octave of Whit-Sunday,
June 11, 1172, his formal installation as duke took place at Poitiers. In the
abbey church of S. Hilary he was placed, according to custom, in the abbot’s
chair, and the sacred lance and banner which were the insignia of the ducal
office were given to him by the Archbishop of Bordeaux and the Bishop of
Poitiers. He afterwards proceeded to Limoges, where he was received with a
solemn procession; the ring of S. Valeria, the protomartyr of Aquitaine, was
placed on his finger, and he was then proclaimed as “the new Duke”—for it was
in virtue of this double investiture, given not by the king of France, but by
the local prelates and clergy as representatives of the local saints of the
land, that the dukes of Aquitaine claimed to hold their dukedom.
Eight months later another important ceremony
took place at Limoges. Henry and Eleanor, accompanied by their two elder sons,
held court in the castle for a week with the kings of Aragon and Navarre, and
the counts of Toulouse and Maurienne. Alfonso of
Aragon, Raymond of Toulouse, and Humbert of Maurienne had met Henry at Montferrand in Auvergne, the
last-named to make a treaty of marriage between his daughter and Henry’s
youngest son, John, the two former to seek the king’s mediation in a quarrel
between themselves. Alfonso was the son of Queen Petronilla and Raymond of
Barcelona, and brother of the girl to whom Richard had been betrothed in 1159.
He and Raymond of Toulouse were at strife about the homage of Cerdagne, Foix, and Carcassonne; both were anxious for the
friendship of their nearest and most powerful neighbour.
Henry “made peace between them” and Raymond, whose territories were ringed in
by those of Aragon and Aquitaine, paid the peacemaker his price; “he became the
man of the king, and of the new king his son, and of Count Richard of Poitou,
to hold Toulouse of them”—that is, to hold it immediately of Richard, who held
it under his elder brother and his father—“as a hereditary fief, by military
service at the summons of either king or count, and by a yearly payment of a
hundred marks of silver or of ten destriers worth at least ten marks each.”
A few months later Richard entered actively
on public life; and he made a bad beginning. Towards the end of March the
younger King Henry fled from his father’s court in Normandy to that of Louis.
The elder Henry had been warned at Limoges by Raymond of Toulouse that “his
wife and his sons had formed a conspiracy against him”; but he had
disregarded the warning, and left Richard and Geoffrey in Aquitaine under the
guardianship of their mother. Early in the summer both the lads joined their
elder brother in France, and all three pledged themselves by a solemn oath, at
a great council in Paris, “not to forsake the king of France, nor to make any
peace with their father save through him (Louis) and the French barons”; Louis
in return swearing, and causing his barons to swear, “that he would help the
young king and his brothers, to the utmost of his power, to maintain their war
against their father and to gain possession of the kingdom of England for young
Henry”.
The “young king” was eighteen years old; he
was as shallow-minded and selfish as he was handsome and superficially
attractive; and he had fallen under the influence of Louis, to whose daughter
he was married. Crowned in 1170 as his father’s heir, he chose to consider
himself aggrieved by being given no share in the government of England or of
the Angevin homelands. He may have persuaded his brothers to consider themselves
as victims of a similar grievance with regard to their duchies of Aquitaine and Britanny. He and Louis were naturally anxious to
secure the forces of those two duchies in support of their scheme of ousting
the elder King Henry from his dominions, continental and insular; and they
hoped that the example of the boy-dukes might help to detach their respective
vassals from their father’s cause. But the lads had a nearer counsellor than
young Henry or Louis, and one to whose counsels it was only natural, and in a
measure right, that they should listen with reverence and submission. Eleanor
unquestionably sided with her elder son against her husband, for she was caught
in the act of trying to make her way from Aquitaine to the French court
disguised in the dress of a man. Certainly nothing can justify, or even excuse,
the duplicity of this “eagle of the broken covenant” towards the husband and
sovereign who, even when his eyes were fully opened to the treason of their
eldest son, still put such confidence in her loyalty as to leave the younger
eaglets in her charge. But there is a very considerable excuse for Richard and
Geoffrey. On the ground of that feudal loyalty which was a principle of such
importance in the life of those days, there was, indeed, something to be said
for all three of the brothers, and more especially for Richard. None of them
were homagers of Henry II; all of them were, homagers of Louis and of Louis alone. For Richard it might
further be urged that if he was under any other feudal obligation, it was more
to his mother than to his father; his possession of Aquitaine was their joint
gift, but it was on Eleanor’s consent that the validity of the gift really
rested; Henry possessed the dukedom only in right of his wife. On the higher ground
of filial duty Henry’s and Eleanor’s claims to the obedience of their children
were equal; Richard and Geoffrey suddenly found that those claims were
conflicting, and that a choice must be made between the two. That the choice
really lay between right and wrong is much plainer to us than it could be to
these lads, of whom the elder was not yet sixteen, and both of whom were under
the direct personal influence of their mother. On her, rather than on them,
lies the responsibility for their wrong choice.
Eleanor, captured by some of her husband’s
scouts, was at once placed by him in strict confinement. Her eldest son’s cause
gained practically nothing by the adhesion of his young brothers. According to
one account, both of them accompanied him to the siege of Drincourt in July. The success of that siege, however, was due, not to any of
the three, but to their allies the counts of Flanders and Boulogne; moreover,
the death of the latter soon afterwards caused the Flemish troops to withdraw
to their own country, and nothing further came of the expedition. The rebel
barons of Geoffrey’s duchy all submitted to his father in the autumn. At a
conference on September 25 at Gisors Henry made fair
offers to all three of his sons; “but the king of France did not deem it
advisable that the [English] king’s sons should make peace with their father.”
At some time before the end of the year Richard was knighted by Louis. Young
Henry and Geoffrey seem to have remained at the French court through the
winter, but Richard characteristically went his own way; he returned to
Aquitaine. Considering the extent of that country and the character of its
previous relations with Henry II, it seems to have furnished a very small
proportion of names to the list of avowed partizans of the young king; and the more important Aquitanian names which we do find
there are those of men whose disobedience is very unlikely to have been in any
way connected with that of Richard—Count William of Angouleme, Geoffrey of Rancogne, Geoffrey and Guy of Lusignan, William of Chauvigny, and Thomas of Coulonges in Poitou, Charles of Rochefort in Saintonge, Robert of Blé in the Limousin, and in Gascony Jocelyn of Maulay and Archbishop William of Bordeaux. The
first four of these needed no incitement from the young duke’s example, and the
last two are not likely to have been influenced by it, to throw off their
allegiance to his father. The Aquitanian rebels in 1173 would probably have
been more numerous had not the barons of the Limousin been at that time too busy fighting among themselves to give much heed to
disagreements between their rival rulers. The confusion in those parts was
aggravated by a swarm of “Brabantines,” or foreign
mercenaries, probably brought in by Henry at an earlier time, and now roving
about the land and preying on it wholly at their own will and pleasure. There
was no one to control either Brabantines or barons,
since Richard’s withdrawal and Eleanor’s imprisonment had left Aquitaine
without any resident governor at all, till in the winter Richard went back to
put himself single-handed at the head of affairs. We hear of him as far south
as Bordeaux, where he was no doubt sure of a welcome from Archbishop William,
and secured the support of another great churchman, the abbot of S. Cross, by confirming
the privileges of the abbey. He tried to win to his cause the rising town of La
Rochelle; but in this he failed; the townsfolk shut their gates in his face.
He soon, however, had under his command a considerable force of knights which at
Whitsuntide 1174 seized the city of Saintes. Henry was then at Poitiers; at the
head of a body of loyal Poitevins he marched upon
Saintes and drove out the intruders, and recovered possession of several other
rebel fortresses. The hopes of young Henry and Louis had broken down
both in Aquitaine and in Normandy. In England they broke down still more
completely; and the failure of the rebellion there led to the reopening of
negotiations for peace.
Some ten or fifteen years later a bitter
enemy of Henry II described the characters of young Henry and of Richard both
at once in the form of a comparison, or rather contrast, between them. The
contrast showed itself even in the ill-omened first stage of their political
and military careers. Throughout the rebellion of 1173-4 the young king was a
mere tool—and a very inefficient one—in the hands of Louis. At the instigation
of Louis he had entered upon the war, and at the dictation of Louis he was
ready to accept terms of peace. Geoffrey was apparently contented with a similar
position; but not so Richard. Eleanor might have made a tool of her second son,
but no one else could do so. It was not for love of either young Henry or Louis
that he had sided with them, and not at their behest would he give up the
struggle. On his seventeenth birthday the kings met at Gisors;
but “they could not come to a settlement because of the absence of Count
Richard, who at that time was in Poitou, making war on the castles and men of
his father”. The conference ended in a truce till Michaelmas,
on the understanding that meanwhile Henry should subdue Richard by force without hindrance from Louis, young
Henry, or their adherents. Richard was not yet hardened enough to contemplate
fighting his father in person; “when King Henry was come into Poitou, his son
Richard dared not await him, but fled from every place at his approach,
abandoning all the, fortresses that he had taken, not daring to hold them
against his father”. When he learned the terms of the truce, his indignation at
being thus deserted by his supposed allies made him suddenly determine on a
better course. “He came weeping, and fell with his face on the ground at the
feet of the king his father, beseeching his forgiveness”. It was granted
instantly and completely. Father and son re-entered Poitiers
together. At Henry’s suggestion Richard went in person to assure his elder
brother and Louis that he was no longer an obstacle to the conclusion of peace;
and on September 30 the peace was made at Montlouis in Touraine. Henry’s three sons placed themselves at his mercy and “returned to
him and to his service as their lord.” He promised to each of them a specified
provision; and they all pledged themselves to accept these provisions as final
and nevermore to require anything further from him save at his own pleasure,
nor to withdraw themselves or their service from him. Richard and Geoffrey also
did homage to him “for what he granted and gave them.” Young Henry would have
done likewise, but his father would not permit it “because he was a king.” This
treaty seems to have been afterwards put into writing and formally executed at
Falaise, probably on October 11. Early in 1175 Richard and Geoffrey
did homage to their father again at Le Mans, and on April 1 their elder brother
did the same at Bures.
The new provision for Richard did not include
his reinstatement as duke of Aquitaine or count of Poitou. It consisted merely
of “two fitting dwelling-places, whence no damage could come to the king, in
Poitou”, and half the revenues of that county in money. The strict letter of
the treaty of Montlouis (or of Falaise) in fact
reinstated Henry II as sole ruler of all the Angevin dominions, and reduced all
his sons to the position of dependents on his bounty. Henry, however, soon
showed that he had no intention of enforcing this punishment to the uttermost
on Richard and Geoffrey. The treaty ordained that all lands and castles
belonging to the king and his loyal barons were to be restored to their owners
and to the condition in which they had been fifteen days before “the king’s
sons departed from him”; so, too, were the lands of the rebels, but in their
case no mention was made of their castles. With these castles,
therefore, Henry was left free to deal at his pleasure. Accordingly, when early
in 1175 he set himself to carry out this clause of the treaty in Anjou and
Maine, he not only revictualled and repaired whatever fortresses of his own had
suffered damage, and destroyed whatever new fortifications had been added to
the castles whose owners had defied or resisted him, but also ordered that some
of these latter should be razed. Geoffrey was sent to carry out this process in Britanny, and Richard in Aquitaine, while the two
Henrys returned to England together on May 9.
Besides the avowed partizans of young Henry in Aquitaine, there were others who had seized the opportunity
afforded them by the war to fortify their castles and set the ducal authority
at defiance. The men of the South for the most part would at any moment gladly
have flung off that authority altogether, no matter whether it was wielded by
the heiress of the old ducal house, her husband, or her son. The Aquitanian
barons whose castles had in the time of the war been fortified or held against
Henry II made it clear that they were not disposed to give them up to Richard.
He therefore, in pursuance of his father’s orders, set out “to reduce the said
castles to nothing”. He began after midsummer by marching into the county of Agen, where Arnald of Bonville
had fortified Castillon against him, “and would not
give it up.” This place, fortified by both nature and art, held out against the
duke and his engines of war for nearly two months; at last he took it, and in
it thirty knights whom he kept in his own hands. We have no certain knowledge
of his further movements till the following spring, When he and Geoffrey of Britanny went to England together. They landed on Good
Friday, April 7. Richard’s purpose seems to have been to seek counsel and help
in the difficult task which his father had assigned to him, for when the Easter
festivities were over it was arranged by the elder Henry that the younger one
should go with Richard into Poitou “to subdue his enemies.” Young Henry went to
Normandy on April 20; Richard probably returned about the same time, though the
brothers did not cross the Channel together. During his absence Vulgrin of Angouleme, a son of the reigning count William Taillefer, had “presumed” to march into Poitou at the head
of a troop of Brabantines. The bishop of Poitiers had
at once resolved, with Theobald Chabot, who was the leader of Duke Richard’s
soldiery, to deliver the people committed to him out of the hand of their
enemies, and the invaders, although they far outnumbered the forces of the
bishop and the constable, had been completely routed near Barbezieux.
Richard made straight for Poitou and called out its feudal levies, and a great
multitude of knights from the regions round about flocked to him, for the wages
that he gave them. He began by punishing some of the rebels in Poitou; next,
after Whitsuntide (May 23), he marched against Vulgrin’s Brabantines and defeated them in a pitched battle
between St. Maigrin and Bouteville,
near the western border of the Angoumois. Thence he led his host into the Limousin, to punish Count Aimar of Limoges, who also had taken advantage of the duke’s absence to commit some
breaches of the peace. First, Richard besieged and took Aimar’s castle of Aixe with its garrison of forty knights.
Then he attacked Limoges, and in a few days was master of the city and all its
fortifications. All this was the work of a month. Shortly after midsummer he
returned to Poitiers; there he was at last joined by the young king. After
taking counsel with the Poitevin barons it was
decided that the next step should be the punishment of Vulgrin of Angouleme. The brothers led their united forces to Chateauneuf on the Charente, south-west of Angouleme, and won the place after a fortnight’s
siege. Thereupon young Henry would stay with his brother no longer, but
following evil counsel departed from him. Richard, thus suddenly deserted,
moved cautiously further away from Angouleme to Moulineuf,
another castle belonging to Vulgrin; this he captured
in ten days. Then he turned back again and laid siege to Angouleme itself.
Within its walls were not only Vulgrin and his
father, Count William, but also Aimar of Limoges and
two other rebel leaders, the viscounts of Ventadour and of Chabanais. In six days Count William was
forced to surrender into Richard’s hands himself, his city, and all its
contents, his castles of Bouteville, Archiac, Montignac, Jarnac, La Chaise, and Merpins,
and to give hostages for his submission to the mercy of Richard and of King
Henry, to whom Richard immediately sent him and the other nobles who had
surrendered with him. They presented themselves before Henry at Winchester on
September 21, fell at his feet, and obtained mercy from him; that is to say,
he, it seems, sent them back again with instructions that they should be
temporarily reinstated in their possessions, pending a fuller consideration
which he purposed to give to their case when he should return to Normandy.
Having for the moment reduced northern
Aquitaine to subjection, Richard set himself to a like task in Gascony. After
keeping Christmas at Bordeaux he marched upon Dax, which had been fortified
against him by its viscount with the help of the count of Bigorre.
Its recovery by Richard was quickly followed by that of Bayonne, held against
him by its viscount Ernald Bertram. Thence he marched
up to the very “Gate of Spain”—St. Pierre de Cize, on
the Navarrese border at the foot of the Pyrenees—took the castle of St. Pierre
in one day, razed it, compelled the Basques and Navarrese to swear that they
would keep the peace, “destroyed the evil customs which had been introduced at Sorde and Lesperon” (two towns in
the Landes) “where it was customary to rob pilgrims
on their way to or from S. James”, and by Candlemas was back at Poitiers,
having—for the moment—restored all the provinces to peace. The count of Bigorre in the south and a few barons of Saintonge and of
the Limousin had not yet submitted; Richard, however,
made no further movement against any of them for many months. His inaction may
have been due to instructions from his father, who was probably unwilling to
let him engage in another campaign against these rebels at a moment when all
the available forces of the Angevin house and the presence of Richard himself
seemed likely to be needed in another quarter.
The richest baron of Aquitanian Berry, Ralf
of Déols, the lord of Chateauroux, whose lands were
said to be worth as much as the whole ducal domains of Normandy, had died at
the close of 1176 leaving as his sole heir a daughter three years old. The
wardship of this child and of her heritage belonged of right to her
suzerain, the Duke of Aquitaine; but her relations were resolved to keep, if
possible, both herself and her lands in their own power, so they carried her
off to La Chatre, and prepared her castles and their
own for defence and defiance. When these tidings
reached King Henry in England, he sent urgent orders to his eldest son to
assemble the Norman host without delay and take forcible possession of the
lands of Déols. Henry’s action in this matter is
noticeable as showing that he regarded Richard’s tenure of the dukedom of
Aquitaine at this period as merely nominal or delegated; he claimed Denise of Déols as his own vassal, not as Richard’s. It is, however,
not at once apparent why, since he had intrusted to
Richard the task of subduing the other Aquitanian rebels, he did not leave the
affair of Déols to the same hands. The reason may
have been mainly a geographical one. These things may have taken place at a
moment when Henry knew Richard to be busily engaged at the very opposite end of
the duchy, at any rate somewhere in Gascony, perhaps at its extreme southern
border. The young king, on the other hand, was in Normandy, whence it would be
easy for him to lead a force through Maine and Touraine into Berry. On
receiving his father’s instructions he did so, and laid siege to Chateauroux,
which surrendered to him at once. He did not, however, gain possession of the
little heiress or of the rest of her lands; for the matter now became
complicated by the intervention of the supreme lord of Berry and of Aquitaine,
King Louis.
For more than eight years, ever since January
1169, Aloysia of France had been in Henry’s
guardianship as the destined bride of Richard. According to one of the best
informed English writers of the time, Louis, when this engagement was made, had
promised that on the marriage of the young couple he would make over to
Richard, as Aloysia’s dowry, the city of Bourges with
all its appurtenances; that is, the portion of Berry the ownership of which
was in dispute between France and Aquitaine. Ten years before—in the year of Aloysia’s birth—he had promised to King Henry a like
cession of the Vexin, the disputed borderland of
France and Normandy, as the dowry of Aloysia’s sister
Margaret on her intended marriage with Henry’s eldest son, and Henry had taken
advantage of the ambiguous wording of a clause in the treaty to have the two
children—contrary to Louis’s intention—at once formally married in church;
whereby he gained immediate possession, not indeed of the whole Vexin, but of that portion of it which had once been Norman
and which contained its most valuable fortresses, these being surrendered to
him by the Templars, who were by the treaty to have them in custody till the
marriage should take place. That marriage, nevertheless, had brought more
advantage to Louis than to Henry, by bringing Margaret’s husband, as soon as he
reached manhood, under the influence of his father-in-law in opposition to his
own father. There was but too much reason to fear a like result in the case of
Richard; and the dangers of such a result were even greater in this case than
in the former one, owing to special circumstances connected with the betrothal
of Richard and Aloysia. That betrothal was the price,
or part of the price, paid by Henry at Montmirail in
1169 for Louis’s sanction, as overlord, to the scheme devised by Henry for
securing a certain distribution of his dominions among his sons. Henry’s own
renewal of homage to Louis on that occasion for all his continental territories
was a token that he did not intend to renounce his personal rights over any of
his lands, but merely to secure for himself the power of sharing those rights
with his sons whenever he might choose to do so, and for the boys an
unquestionable right of succession at his death to their respective shares of
the Angevin heritage. But, somewhat like Louis nine years before, Henry made a
mistake which rendered it possible for his adversary to put another
construction upon the matter. He secured young Henry’s claims to the future
possession of the heritage of Geoffrey of Anjou and Maud of Normandy, and
Richard’s claim to the heritage of Eleanor, by making them do homage to Louis
for Anjou and Aquitaine respectively; but he omitted to secure the
subordination of their claims to his own during his lifetime by making them do
homage to himself. Owing to this omission, it was open to Louis to assert, if
he chose, that the Angevin counties and the Norman duchy legally belonged to
young Henry and the duchy of Aquitaine to Richard, in virtue of the homage
rendered by them for those lands direct to himself as .overlord; Henry II—so he
might argue—having by his consent to that homage tacitly renounced all claim to
the lands for which it was rendered, and being thenceforth merely in temporary
charge of them as guardian of the boys. The promise of the cession of Bourges
was a very small price to pay for a weapon so tremendous as that which Henry
had thus, it seems, unconsciously placed in the hands of an enemy whose mean
jealousy and unscrupulous astuteness he appears never to have fully realized.
He unintentionally made this possible construction of the treaty of Montmirail still more plausible through the crowning of his
eldest son in 1170 and the solemn installation of the second as duke of
Aquitaine in 1172. Louis acted upon it in 1173, although he does not seem ever
to have put it into formal words; and his action, coupled with that of the
ungrateful sons urged on by their mother, must have opened Henry’s eyes to the
peril in which he had involved himself through his misplaced confidence in the
loyalty both of his overlord and of his own family. It showed that as soon as
Richard and Aloysia were married, Louis might and in
all probability would demand the recognition of his new son-in-law as sole
ruler of Aquitaine, independent of any superior save Louis himself.
At the close of 1175 or early in 1176 Louis,
it seems, reminded Henry that, Richard being now in his nineteenth year and Aloysia in her sixteenth, it was full time for the contract
of marriage between them to be carried into effect; but the answer which he
received was so unsatisfactory that he referred the matter to the Pope. We have
no actual record of any communication between the kings on the subject at this
time, but something of the kind must have taken place to cause the Pope’s
action. In May 1176 Alexander bade Cardinal Peter, then legate in France, lay
the whole of Henry’s lands on both sides of the sea under Interdict “unless he
(Henry) would permit Richard and Aloysia to be
married without delay.” The legate, however, seems to have done nothing in the
matter for more than a year. Probably the two kings were negotiating; but we
hear nothing of their negotiations till June 1177, when Henry sent an embassy
to France to convene Louis about the dowries which he had promised to give with
his two daughters to the young king and to Richard—to wit, the Vexin (that is, its eastern or French part, which was still
in Louis’s hands) and the viscounty of Bourges. It seems that Henry,
having found Margaret’s marriage fail to give him the control over her promised
lands, demanded to be put in possession of those of Aloysia before he would allow her to marry Richard. But meanwhile the Pope had in May
renewed the injunctions which he had issued to Cardinal Peter eleven months
before; and on July 12 the English envoys returned with the news that Peter was
instructed to lay the whole of their sovereign’s dominions, insular and
continental, under Interdict, unless Richard were at once permitted to take for
his wife the maiden whom Henry “had so long already, and longer than had been
agreed, had in his custody for the said Richard.” Henry at once made the
English bishops appeal to the Pope. Illness detained him in England for nearly
five weeks; then he went to Normandy (August 18), and on September
21 met Louis and the legate at Nonancourt. In the
legate’s presence he promised that Richard should wed Aloysia,
if Louis gave Bourges to Richard and the Vexin to the
young king as previously agreed. Whether the wedding or the cession was to take
place first, however, seems to have been left an open question; and four days
later the whole matter was again postponed indefinitely by a treaty whereby the two elder kings pledged themselves to take the Cross and go to the Holy
Land together, and meanwhile, as brother Crusaders, to lay aside all mutual
strife and make no claims or demands upon each other’s possessions as they held
them at that moment, except with regard to Auvergne and to any encroachments
which the men of either party might have made upon those of the other in the
territory of Chateauroux or of the lesser fiefs on the border of their
respective lands in Berry. If on these excepted matters they could not agree
between themselves, twelve arbitrators were to decide according to the sworn
evidence of the men of the lands in question.
All immediate danger of interference from
either Louis or the Legate being thus removed, Henry summoned the Norman host
to meet at Argentan on October 9 for an expedition
against the rebels in Berry. Young Henry and Richard had, by his desire, joined
him on his arrival in Normandy; the former was now despatched in advance into Berry, and when the king’s host reached the Norman border at
Alençon Richard was detached from it and once more sent into Poitou to subdue
the enemies there, while the king himself marched upon Chateauroux. After
receiving its formal surrender he proceeded to La Châtre;
this place, and the little Lady of Déols, were also
given up to him at once. Thence he proceeded into the Limousin and called upon those of its nobles and knights who had taken part in the
rebellion of 1173 to give an account of their conduct; one of the most
important of them, the viscount of Turenne, surrendered his chief castle, “strongly
fortified by both art and nature with the others Henry dealt according as each of them deserved. He then
hurried back to Graçay in Berry, to meet Louis and
the commissioners who were to report to the two kings the result of their
investigations about Auvergne. What that result was we are nowhere directly
told; we only hear that both the rivals declared themselves content to abide by
it. The next reference to the overlordship of Auvergne, however, some twelve
years later, seems to indicate that the commissioners gave their award in favour of the duke of Aquitaine.
Another of Henry’s vassals in Berry, Odo of Issoudun, had lately died
leaving an infant heir, and this child had been stolen by his kinsman the duke
of Burgundy. The custody of his fief was offered to the king by the barons who
had it in their keeping, but he refused to receive it without the child, whom
he made no attempt to reclaim. It was not worth while to risk an embroilment with Burgundy about a petty lordship in Berry at the
moment when an opportunity was just presenting itself for annexing to the Poitevin domains a valuable fief of the duchy of Aquitaine,
the county of La Marche, which lay between Berry and the Limousin.
Count Adalbert V of La Marche had separated from his wife, lost his only son,
and seemingly disinherited his only daughter with her own consent; the kinship
between him and his only other surviving relatives was so remote that he deemed
himself free to dispose of his county without regard to them; and he now
offered to sell it to its overlord, King Henry, for a sum of money wherewith he
himself might go to end his lonely days in the Holy Land. In December Henry
went to meet him at Grandmont; the bargain was
quickly struck, the conveyance executed, and the purchase money—less than a
third of what Henry is said to have estimated the county as worth—paid down,
and the barons and knights of La Marche did homage to Henry as their immediate
liege lord.
In all these proceedings of Henry in
Aquitaine there is no reference to Richard. They clearly indicate that the
elder holder of the ducal title still claimed the ducal power and authority as
his own, not his son’s. He seems, however, to have left to Richard the
punishment of one important Limousin rebel whose case
he had a year before expressly reserved for his own judgement; for it was
Richard who now took away the castle’—that is, the fortified town—at Limoges
where S. Martial rests in his minster from the viscount; and it served the
viscount right, adds a Norman chronicler, for helping the count of Angouleme
against the duke. This seems to have been about the time when Henry was in
Aquitaine, and it is the only act of Richard’s mentioned by any chronicler
between Henry’s arrival in Normandy in August 1177 and his return to England in
July 1178. We may infer, almost with certainty, that it was done by
Henry’s order; and, with considerable probability, that the unusual state of
quiescence in which Richard seems to have passed these eleven months was due in
part at least to the restraint placed on him by Henry’s presence on the
continent. So long as Richard remained in the dependent position to which he
had been reduced by the agreement at Montlouis, it
would be impossible for him to take any considerable military or political
action, unless by his father’s order, while his father was within reach.
But in the autumn of 1178, when Henry was
once more in England, Richard’s activity recommenced. With a great host he again proceeded into Gascony as far as
Dax. There, to his delight, he found that the count of Bigorre,
who two winters before had helped the viscount of Dax to hold the city against
the duke, had somehow incurred the displeasure of the citizens and was fast in
their prison. They seem to have handed him over to Richard; but King Alfonso of
Aragon, grieving that his friend the count of Bigorre was held in chains, came to the said duke, and entreating that his friend might
be liberated, stood surety for him that he would do the will of the duke and of
his father the king of England; and the count of Bigorre,
that he might be set free, gave up to the duke Clermont and the castle of Montbron. Richard then went northward again, and after
keeping Christmas at Saintes gathered another great host for the subjugation of
Saintonge and the Angoumois. These two districts had been for years, and indeed
for generations, a seed-plot of rebellion. Richard seems to have been bent upon
reducing them to order once for all. The moving spirits of defiance there were Vulgrin of 1178 Angouleme and Geoffrey of Rancogne. Count William of Angouleme, after being
re-instated by Henry in his capital city, seems to have made over the
government of his county to his eldest son, Vulgrin,
who had headed the resistance to Richard in 1176. Geoffrey of Rancogne took his name from a place in the same county, and
was also owner of two lordships of far greater importance in Saintonge, one of
which, Pons, lay close to the border of the Angoumois, and the other, Taillebourg, was a fortress of great strength, about half
way between Saintes and St. Jean d’Angely. It was to
Pons that Richard now laid siege. After some weeks, finding that he made no
progress, he left his constables there with a part of his forces, and led the
rest, in Easter 1179 week (April 1-8), into the Angoumois. A three days’ siege
won the castle of Richemont; four other castles—Genzac, Marcillac, Gourville, Auville—were taken in the last fortnight of April and
levelled with the ground. Then he turned westward again, recrossed the border,
and marched upon Taillebourg.
By Richard’s contemporaries the siege of Taillebourg was looked upon as a most desperate enterprize, which none of his predecessors had ever
ventured to attempt. Never before had a hostile force so much as looked upon
the castle. It seems indeed to have been not merely a castle but a strongly
fortified, though small, town, the castle proper—perched on the summit of a
rock of which three sides were inaccessible by nature and the fourth was defended
by art—forming the citadel. “Girt with a triple ditch; defying from behind a
triple wall every external authority; amply secured with weapons, bolts, and
bars; crowned with towers placed at regular intervals; furnished with a handy
stone laid ready for casting from every loophole; well stocked with victuals;
filled with a thousand men ready for fight,” this virgin fortress “was in no
wise affrighted” at the duke’s approach. Richard, however, had made up his mind
to subdue the pride of Geoffrey of Rancogne once for
all. He had collected auxiliaries from every quarter; and he set them all to
work as soon as the host reached Geoffrey’s border. He carried off the wealth
of the farms; he cut down the vines; he fired the villages; whatever was left
he pulled down and laid waste; and then he pitched his tents on the outskirts
of the castle close to the walls, to the great alarm of the townsfolk, who had
expected nothing of the kind. At the end of a week (May 1-8), deeming it a
disgrace that so many high-spirited and well-proved knights should tamely
submit to be shut up within the walls, they agreed to sally forth and fall upon
the duke’s host at unawares. But the duke bade his men fly to arms, and forced
the townsmen to retire. The mettle of horses, the worth of spears, swords, helmets,
bows, arbalests, shields, mailcoats, stakes, clubs,
were all put to proof in the stubborn fight that raged at the gates, till the
townsmen could no longer withstand the fierce onslaught of the duke’s van
headed by the duke himself. As they retired helter-skelter within the walls, he
by a sudden dash made his way with them into the town. The citadel now became
their only refuge from their assailants, who rushed about the streets
plundering and burning at their will. Two days later—on Ascension Day, May 10—the
castle was surrendered, seemingly by Geoffrey in person; and in a few days more
the whole of its walls were levelled with the ground.
The capture of Taillebourg was Richard’s first great military exploit. It laid the foundation of his
military fame, not so much by the intrinsic importance of the exploit itself as
by the revelation, in the campaign of which it was at once the turning-point
and the crown, of the character and capability of the young duke. Its immediate
result was the complete submission of the rebels against whom that campaign was
directed. Not only did Geoffrey of Rancogne surrender
Pons, but Vulgrin of Angouleme, before the end of the
month, gave up his capital city and his castle of Montignac;
and when Richard, after razing the walls of all these places, sailed for
England, he left in Aquitaine, for the moment at least, all things settled
according to his will. He seems to have visited the tomb of S. Thomas the
Martyr at Canterbury before joining his father. Henry received him with great honour and gave him his reward; when the young conqueror
returned to Aquitaine shortly before Michaelmas, he
returned not merely as his father’s lieutenant, but as once again, with his
father’s sanction, count of Poitou.
BOOK I. RICHARD OF AQUITAINE , 1157-1189CHAPTER IIFATHER AND SONS1179-1183
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