Lionheart (36 page)

Still too weak from the malaria to mount a horse and flee yet again when the youth did not return, Richard was alarmed when the tavern was surrounded by a hostile crowd and men-at-arms. Discarding the disguise of the rich merchant, he endeavoured to disguise himself as a scullion, turning the spit on which a brace of spatchcocks was roasting. Sick he might be, but he still refused to surrender until Duke Leopold left his Christmas court in Vienna to accept Richard’s sword and order his old enemy nursed back to health, well guarded, in the castle of Dürnstein on the banks of the Danube to the west of Vienna, intending to demand a ransom of 150,000 marks.
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Some news travelled fast, even then. Before the celebration of Twelfth Night, Eleanor learned that Philip Augustus had received a letter from Henry Hohenstaufen, according to which her son was a prisoner of the duke of Austria, whom he had so atrociously insulted at Acre. The letter ended:

… inasmuch as he is now within our power, and has always done his utmost for your annoyance and disturbance … we have thought proper to notify your nobleness … knowing that the same is well pleasing to [you].
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Immediately Eleanor charged the abbots of Boxley in Kent and Robertsbridge in Sussex to travel to the Hohenstaufen court and ascertain where exactly Richard was being held and what were the terms for his release. On the same mission went Bishop Savaric of Bath, who was related to the emperor. En route between Rome and England, Bishop Hubert Walter changed course and also headed eastwards.
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That indefatigable opportunist William Longchamp, who claimed to have seen the original letter at Philip’s court in Paris, scuttled after them to see what he could find out.

Refraining from taking ship for Germany herself because she did not trust Prince John and Philip Augustus once her back was turned, Eleanor wrote to remind Celestine III that both Richard and his father had supported him when the pope was still a cardinal, and requested his help in the cause of a returning crusader who had been arrested in defiance of the Peace of God. That she was right to leave the on-the-ground quest to the bishops was proven when John sneaked across the Channel and demanded fealty of the barons who held property in Normandy, arguing that Philip was their common overlord, and that Richard was as good as dead already.
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Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
Four centuries were to elapse before Sir John Harington penned this epigram, but Seneca had said more or less the same thing:
prosperum ac felix scelus virtus vocatur
– the favourable and fruitful crime is called virtue. The dilemma of the Anglo-Norman nobility on both sides of the Channel was as old as Babylon: if Richard were succeeded by John after dying in captivity, who would then be considered loyal by the new king, and who a traitor?

However, their reaction being a resounding vote of no-confidence in him, Prince John abandoned his court in Alençon and fled to the safety of Paris, where Philip Augustus humoured his pretensions to be duke of Normandy in return for an undertaking to marry Alais, still a prisoner in Rouen, after he had divorced his wife of three years, Isabelle of Gloucester, on the grounds of their widely known consanguinity.
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Deciding that this was a propitious moment to invade the Vexin, Philip took the castle of Gisors and demanded the surrender of Rouen and the release of his half-sister.
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Unimpressed by the numbers and equipment of the small Frankish force, the earl of Leicester retorted from within the city that he had no orders from King Richard to hand over his hostage, but if the king of the Franks wished to sample Norman hospitality, he only had to cross the drawbridge alone. With no intention of being taken hostage and traded for Richard, Philip swore to exact revenge for this insult
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and provided Prince John with the funds to hire a small army of Flemish mercenaries with whom to invade England at the end of Lent.

Eleanor’s solution was not to pursue John, which might provoke open conflict with his supporters, but to order Crown officers in the English Channel ports – reinforced by a
fyrd
of local men who had good reason to remember the depredations of King Stephen’s Flemings in south-east England – to arrest any of those mercenaries who set foot ashore and frighten the others away back to Flanders.
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During all this to-ing and fro-ing a political tug-of-war erupted in the Holy Roman Empire over who should hold the royal prisoner. Duke Leopold claimed the right both because it was he who had been insulted at Acre and who had taken Richard’s sword. As his suzerain, the emperor reminded him that ‘duke of Austria’ was a courtesy title for a vassal whose true rank was that of count; for a count to hold a king prisoner was contrary to feudal custom, and therefore Richard must be handed over to him.
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At a meeting in Würzburg during February 1193, Leopold and the emperor came to terms. Reducing his sights more than somewhat, the insulted duke of Austria accepted the promise of 20,000 marks from the eventual ransom in return for transferring his prisoner from Dürnstein into imperial custody at Ratisbon (modern Regensburg) and then Würzburg.

Less than three months after the emperor’s letter had been received in Paris – on Palm Sunday 21 March 1193 – Eleanor’s emissaries tracked Richard down at Ochsenfurt, on his way under escort to the emperor’s Easter court at Speier (modern Speyer). Either Longchamp beat them to it or he arrived soon afterwards
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to find Richard apparently in good health and high spirits, popular with his guards and their masters and assuming that, like any knight captured in a
mêlée
, he would shortly be ransomed for a sum commensurate with his high rank.

When given the news of Prince John’s latest treason, he refused to take seriously the idea of his weakling younger brother usurping the throne, with or without Philip’s help, and despatched Hubert Walter back to England with a handwritten letter, from which Eleanor learned on 20 April that her adored favourite son was alive and in good health. A second letter conferred on Hubert Walter the office of archbishop of Canterbury.

Gossip at the imperial court was that a sum of 100,000 marks would be demanded for Richard’s ransom, but the royal prisoner had not been accorded an interview with the emperor to confirm this. Back in England, the population rejoiced that the king was not dead and the nobility had a second reason to celebrate on learning that Hubert Walter, and not William Longchamp, was the new primate of England. While Eleanor and the justiciars waited for confirmation of the ransom amount, they used the news that Richard was definitely alive to abate the unrest among the nobility that John had stirred up. Eleanor’s constitutionally ambiguous position made her the ideal intermediary in this. John might have refused to surrender his castles peacefully to the justiciars, but agreed to hand over to her the castles at Windsor, Wallingford and the Peak – on the understanding that they were to be returned to him if Richard were not, for whatever reason, released.

At Speier, Emperor Henry Hohenstaufen was less impressed by Richard’s Poitevin eloquence than his previous captors had been.
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Before his principal vassals assembled for his Easter court, he charged Richard with a long list of crimes, including the murder of Conrad of Montferrat, who had been a close relative of Duke Leopold. Richard’s entourage at the hearing consisted of Bishop Savaric of Bath, the abbots of Boxley and Robertsbridge, plus his chaplain and Longchamp. His competence in Latin had enabled him on more than one occasion to mock Hubert Walter, who was famous for his frequent grammatical errors in that language.
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At the hearing, Richard did not use the bishops as spokesmen, but eloquently put his own case as being the epitome of knighthood on the greatest of all chivalric enterprises. Many of Hohenstaufen’s vassals were moved by this address,
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and all the more impressed when, at the end of the speech, the king of England knelt in submission before the emperor and burst into tears – it was a habit of his at such moments. Bowing to the general mood, Henry Hohenstaufen raised his prisoner to his feet and led him to share the dais.

Noblesse oblige
, but money was still money. The sum of 100,000 silver marks or £66,000 was now agreed as the price of Richard’s freedom, with him to be released when 70,000 marks had been paid, with 200 nobles to be sent to Germany as hostages in surety for the balance. This global sum covered retribution for the failure of Richard’s brother-in-law Henry the Lion of Saxony to support the imperial design and the compensation for the insult suffered by Leopold, which would provide a handsome dower on the marriage of his son to a bride who was a part of the price. She was to be Richard’s niece Eleanor of Brittany, whom he had already offered to Al-‘Adil after Joanna’s refusal to marry him.
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In addition, Hohenstaufen’s relative Isaac Comnenus was to be released from captivity and his daughter, who had accompanied Joanna and Berengaria to Rome, was to be restored to him. Lastly, in compensation for the Treaty of Messina having prejudiced the Empress Constance’s rights to Sicily, fifty galleys and 200 knights were to be furnished from Richard’s domains for Hohenstaufen’s war with Tancred.

On the day before Good Friday, Richard’s chaplain departed for England with the ransom demand and a letter from Richard to Eleanor informing her that Longchamp had stage-managed the all-important interview with the emperor and that she should oversee collection of the ransom, noting carefully how much each baron contributed, so that Richard would know how much gratitude he owed each vassal, or otherwise. If they wished to continue in office, the justiciars were to give a good example by their own generosity.

To prevent his golden tongue gaining him too many supporters, the emperor placed his VIP prisoner in close confinement at the treasure fortress of Trifels for the first three weeks of April until Longchamp succeeded in obtaining his removal to more relaxed surroundings at Hagenau. He then departed with his master’s blessing for England, to assemble the hostages who would be held surety.

Eleanor wasted no time in appointing five assessors to oversee the ransom collection from the kingdom already impoverished by Henry’s Saladin tithe and Richard’s crusading taxes.
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They were Hubert Walter, formally installed as archbishop of Canterbury on 30 May 1193, Bishop Richard of London, the earl of Arundel, the earl of Surrey and Henry fitz Ailwin, the first mayor of London, from whom the citizens learned there was a price to pay for their enfranchisement: like the barons, they were to shell out a quarter of their annual rents and revenues. In the lesser nobility, each knight saw his fee assessed at 20 shillings, which was a considerable sum for many of them.

Hubert Walter informed the bishops of the realm that they were responsible for collecting the tax from the clergy in their dioceses, with priests who lived on tithes required to contribute a tenth of their income. The canons of Geoffrey the Bastard’s cathedral at York refused to pay a quarter of their wealth, despite every abbey and cathedral being forced to empty its treasury of jewels and gold – in return for which promissory notes were given, payable after the king’s return. The abbeys of the Gilbertians and St Bernard’s Cistercians, who followed a rule of poverty, were obliged to give a whole year’s clip of wool from their flocks.
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Even had he known the details, Richard would have been untroubled, assuming that it was the duty of his subjects to cough up whatever sum was demanded in the same way that knights defeated in tournaments were ransomed. He was overlooking that fact that this unjust practice had been made illegal by his father in 1177, since when the captured knight had had to find his own ransom. With spring giving way to summer, Richard was moved to Hagenau and treated more as guest than prisoner at the emperor’s Pentecost court there. Sharing something of his prisoner’s musical talent, Hohenstaufen even indulged him in some of the poetry contests that Richard had enjoyed in his youth at Eleanor’s court in Poitiers.

The constant stream of prelates passing between the Plantagenet possessions on both sides of the Channel and Richard’s various places of detention in Germany had given him more ‘the prestige of an imperial statesman … than the forlorn dignity of a suppliant’ in the eyes of the German nobility.
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In consequence, the emperor’s plan to conspire with Philip Augustus in June 1193 was therefore put on hold. Incensed by Hohenstaufen’s failure to consult him since the original letter, Philip wanted to share in the ransom as compensation for the insults that he too had suffered at Richard’s hands during the crusade. As a gesture, he offered the archbishop of Reims as mediator in the current dispute between Henry Hohenstaufen and his disaffected bishops, but on condition that Richard stayed right where he was. Meeting Philip at midsummer in Lotharingen (now Lorraine), the emperor weighed in the balance a better relationship with his neighbour the king of the Franks against the money represented by the ransom.
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