A King's Ransom (132 page)

As with virtually every episode of Richard’s life, there are conflicting stories about his capture outside Vienna. The most reliable English source is the Cistercian monk Ralph of Coggeshall, for he is believed to have gotten his information from Richard’s chaplain, Anselm, and his is the most detailed account. Roger de Hoveden reported that Richard was sleeping when Duke Leopold’s men arrived, which makes sense in light of his illness. Years later, the German chroniclers put about a more colorful story—that he’d attempted to escape detection by pretending to be a servant, roasting a chicken on a spit in the hearth, and he was given away because he’d forgotten to remove a valuable ring. But this rather unlikely tale appears in none of the accounts by Austrian chroniclers, as the German historian Dr. Ulrike Kessler points out in her biography of Richard. I was skeptical, too, even before I realized the “chicken on a spit” story was refuted by the Church calendar itself, for Richard was captured on December 21, during Advent, when Christians were forbidden to eat meat of any kind.

The letter that the Holy Roman Emperor, Heinrich, wrote to the French king gives us a glimpse of Heinrich’s nasty nature, while providing invaluable details about Richard’s capture. The English chroniclers said that Richard was accompanied by only one knight, Sir Guillain de l’Etang, and a young translator. But since Heinrich claimed that Richard had two knights with him, I was able to bring Morgan along for the ride. Arne is a name of my choosing, as the boy’s real name was not reported. We know only that he spoke German, that he was courageous, and very loyal to Richard, for he had to be tortured by Duke Leopold’s men before he finally revealed that the English king was in Ertpurch, today called Erdburg.

According to William Marshal’s
Histoire
, Richard hated Philip de Dreux, the Bishop of Beauvais, more than any other man, blaming Beauvais for his harsh treatment at Trifels, where he was—in his own words—“loaded down with chains so heavy that a horse would have struggled to move.” In light of that graphic description, my fictional Richard may have been luckier than the real Richard, for I did let Markward spare him the leg shackles.

I’m on the record as stating that Richard I is the historical figure whom I found the most surprising, and new readers have occasionally asked me to elaborate upon this statement. I had not expected to learn that he’d been seriously ill so often, that his marriage appeared to get off to a promising start, that he was as careful with the lives of his soldiers as he was reckless with his own life. But I was utterly astonished to discover that he’d formed friendships with some of Saladin’s emirs and Mamluks, even knighting a few of them, and that his political skills were almost as impressive as his military skills. What he accomplished at Heinrich’s Imperial Diet in Speyer is remarkable, a bravura performance that even his enemies were forced to acknowledge.

I was not surprised, though, to find no evidence to support the popular belief that Richard preferred men to women as bed partners, for by the time I began researching
Devil’s Brood
I already knew that this claim was founded upon an erroneous understanding of medieval custom and culture. For a supposition that was first raised only in 1948 by J. H. Harvey in
The Plantagenets
, it gained traction due in some measure perhaps to the success of the wonderful film
The Lion in Winter
, one of my favorites. I made my own small contribution to the new legend by not researching what was essentially a walk-on role for Richard in
Here Be Dragons
,
and in recent years I’ve been punished for that by having to explain often to puzzled readers why the Richard in
Here Be Dragons
is not the same man in
Devil’s Brood
and
Lionheart
.

I first addressed the question of Richard’s sexuality in the
Devil’s Brood
Author’s Note. J. H. Harvey decided that Richard was gay because he’d misread a passage in Roger de Hoveden’s
Annals
(fully quoted in
Devil’s Brood
), which described a visit Richard paid to the French king’s court in 1187, writing that Philippe held Richard in such high esteem that they ate from the same table and from the same dish and at night shared the same chamber. In our age, we would naturally assume they had a sexual relationship. But in the Middle Ages, it was quite common for people to share beds, even with strangers in inns. More to the point, such ostentatious intimacy was a way to demonstrate royal favor, a means of flaunting political alliances and mending political fences. Edward IV, one of the most heterosexual of English kings, shared a bedchamber with the rebel Earl of Somerset to dramatize their reconciliation. And Roger de Hoveden’s matterof-fact tone clearly shows that he understood Richard and Philippe were deliberately sending Henry a message, which Henry understood all too well, for he at once postponed his plans to return to England, fearing that they were plotting against him.

Richard’s famous encounter with the hermit is also cited by those who’ve accepted J. H. Harvey’s premise. Again, if we place a modern interpretation upon the hermit’s warning, we conclude that Richard was being accused of sodomy. Yet this reading disregards the fact that the “destruction of Sodom” had a wider meaning in the Middle Ages, often used to refer to the apocalyptic nature of the punishment, not the nature of the offense. Even the term “sins of Sodom” referred to a broad spectrum of sins, not just sodomy, some not even sexual. The French chronicler Guillaume Le Breton declared that Richard had brought about his death at Châlus because he’d offended against the “laws of nature.” But he was referring to Richard’s war against his own father. Dr. Gillingham has an interesting discussion of all this in his biography of Richard. Not all historians agree with this reading of the “destruction of Sodom,” of course. So were there any suggestions made during Richard’s lifetime to indicate he was homosexual or bisexual? The answer is no.

Both of the chroniclers who accompanied Richard on crusade believed that he’d desired Berengaria long before he’d married her, Ambroise even describing her as his “beloved.” I thought that was sweet, but unlikely, for medieval marriages were matters of state, and I don’t think Richard had a romantic bone in his entire body. Their comments do show, though, that they believed his sexual tastes were “conventional,” as Dr. Gillingham put it. Legend had it that Richard demanded women to be brought to him on his deathbed, thus hastening his death; Guillaume Le Breton reported that Richard had preferred the “joys of Venus” to “salubrious counsel”—the advice of his doctors. Like so many of Richard’s legends, this seems improbable, for gangrene is fast-acting and he’d have known very soon that he was doomed. Eleanor was one hundred forty miles away at Fontevrault, and for her to have reached him in time he must have sent for her within a day or so of his wounding. So I very much doubt that a man in such severe pain would have been carousing with camp whores. Yet the French chronicler’s comment does tell us that he, too, assumed Richard’s sexuality was “conventional.”

Even more tellingly, the Bishop of Lincoln took Richard to task for adultery, not sodomy, and St Hugh was famed for his blunt speaking and strong sense of morality. The bishop’s lecture actually occurred in 1198, but I was unable to dramatize it in the chapter for that year and I had to move it back to Chapter 26 in 1195. So Richard’s repentance and reconciliation with Berengaria after his sudden illness in 1195 did not last long, and he was soon straying from his marriage bed again.

Sadly, I think some of the criticism directed against Richard hints at an anti-gay bias. Accusing him of being irresponsible and careless echoes the stereotype that many who are homophobic have of gay men.

I tend to agree with the British historian Elizabeth Hallam, who concluded that what little evidence there is paints Richard as a womanizer, if not on the epic scale of his father and brother John. When considering Richard’s sexuality, we must always place it in the context of his times, though. I am proud to live in one of the sixteen states in which same-sex marriage is now legal. They were not as enlightened in the Middle Ages, and the Church taught that a man who bedded other men was guilty of a mortal sin. And this makes the utter silence of the French chroniclers highly significant.

Philippe’s court historians, Rigord and Guillaume Le Breton, did all in their power to portray Richard as the Antichrist. They accused him of murdering Conrad of Montferrat, of poisoning the Duke of Burgundy, of sending Saracen Assassins to Paris to kill Philippe, of taking bribes from the Saracens, and even of betraying Christendom by a secret alliance with Saladin. Yet they never accused Richard of sodomy, a sin that would have stained his honor and damned his immortal soul. If they’d had such a lethal weapon at hand, I cannot believe they would not have used it. But I suspect that this debate will continue, for it is the Age of the Internet, people enjoy speculating about the sex lives of celebrities, and we can never be utterly sure of another person’s sexuality, especially one who has been dead for over eight hundred years.

The term “post-traumatic stress disorder” is a new one, only dating from 1980, but PTSD has always been with us. In my Acknowledgments, I cite a book,
Achilles in Vietnam
, whose author makes a convincing case that Homer understood the psychological damage wrought by war and the impact combat and imprisonment could have upon men, more than twenty-five centuries before PTSD was even diagnosed. He also shows that William Shakespeare recognized it, too, for his Hotspur in
Henry IV
suffers from many of the symptoms of those afflicted with PTSD. But few of us have the insight of a Homer or a Shakespeare. While chroniclers like Ralph de Coggeshall were aware that Richard had come home from his German imprisonment a changed man, they would not have understood why.

Can I prove that Richard suffered from PTSD? Of course not. It is challenging even to attempt to reconstruct the physical outlines of a medieval life; it would be impossible to map a man’s interior world. But we know enough about PTSD and the human psyche now to recognize how difficult captivity would have been for a proud, willful, hot-tempered king like Richard.

We all hold certain basic assumptions that allow us to find order in the midst of chaos, and the shattering of those assumptions can be devastating. The risk of PTSD is much higher if the traumatic event is sudden, unpredictable, of long duration, involves a serious risk to life or personal safety, and the person feels powerless. For fifteen months, Richard was balanced on the crumbling edge of a cliff, knowing that Heinrich was quite capable of turning him over to the French king, a fate truly worse than death, and, indeed, Heinrich played masterfully upon this fear. The emperor only overreached himself at the end, with that eleventh-hour double cross at Mainz, and even then Heinrich still managed to extort one final concession, the forced homage that shamed Richard to the depths of his soul. For a crusader king, his ordeal must have seemed utterly inexplicable. How could he not question why God had let this happen? And how could those questions not erode the foundations of his faith?

Did his imprisonment leave psychic scars? Well, his temper became even more combustible after his captivity. He was less inclined to pardon. His relationship with his wife had seemed amicable enough when they were in the Holy Land, but deteriorated dramatically upon his return from Germany, as often happens with PTSD. Despite a love of pomp and pageantry, he had to be coaxed into the crown-wearing ceremony and his Christmas courts were surprisingly low-key. And his hatred for the French king was all-consuming. If seen in isolation, these actions may not seem meaningful. Seen as a pattern of behavior, they reveal a man haunted by memories he could neither understand nor escape.

There has been some confusion among medieval chroniclers as to the identity of the man who shot Richard at the siege of Châlus. The usually reliable Roger de Hoveden was less so when he wrote of affairs in Aquitaine and the Limousin, for he had to depend upon secondhand accounts and rumors. The best sources for the events at Châlus are Ralph de Coggeshall, who seems to have had an eyewitness to Richard’s last days, probably the Abbot of Le Pin, and Bernard Itier, the librarian of Saint-Martial, a monastery less than twenty miles from Châlus. It is from Bernard Itier that we learn there were only two knights and thirty-eight people within the castle at the time of the siege. He identified the crossbowman as Peire Basile, a local knight from the Limousin, but he said nothing of the fate of Peire Basile or the castle garrison.

Roger de Hoveden is the only chronicler who reported that Richard ordered the hanging of the castle garrison and that Mercadier disregarded Richard’s pardon of Peire Basile and “after the king’s death, first flaying him alive, had him hanged.” This has been the accepted story, one I’d never thought to question. But then I found
Histoire de Châlus et sa région
, by Paul Patier, and was taken aback to learn that the author is convinced Peire Basile was not flayed alive. He cites a charter dated June 6, 1239, as proof that Peire Basile survived for years after the fall of Châlus. Is he right? I do not know; he himself admits that the Peire Basile mentioned in this charter is
“très probablement”
the same Peire Basile whose crossbow bolt killed Richard. I decided that “very probably” was not enough to rewrite history. The author also contends that the other knight taken at Châlus, Peire Brun, was later permitted to reclaim his castle at Montbrun. If this is true, it would mean that the Châlus garrison were not hanged, either, and Roger de Hoveden’s account was merely a rumor that he’d found credible. I would like to believe he was in error, that Peire Basile was spared such an agonizing death at Mercadier’s order. But until a French historian decides to do some serious research about Richard’s death and the fate of the men captured at Châlus, I can only accept the “traditional” account by Roger de Hoveden, perhaps with an asterisk added.