Lionheart (37 page)

Authors: Douglas Boyd

BOOK: Lionheart

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Hoping to speed up his liberation, Richard was allowed to write to all and sundry, his captors having no objection if it would help to raise the ransom. Nor did they prevent the armour Richard had worn in the Holy Land from being taken by Stephen of Turnham to London for exhibition as an eloquent reproach to his subjects who had not yet paid their share.
³⁰No letter was sent to Berengaria, but Eleanor was greeted as ‘dear mother’ and also formally as ‘by the Grace of God, queen of the English’. He even wrote to the Old Man of the Mountains in faraway Syria, requesting him as chief of the sect of the Assassins to confirm that it was not the king of England who had commanded the killing of Conrad of Montferrat.
³¹Predictably, a mysterious reply was received, which Richard waved before the emperor, claiming complete exoneration on that charge. Whether or not the reply was genuine, other news did arrive from the Middle East. Saladin had died on 2 March 1193 at his home in Damascus aged only 55, his health broken by recurrent malaria. The efforts of the most famous doctor of the time, Musa ibn Maymun, also known as Maimonides, had failed to save his life.

In England, the ransom trickled in, slowed by the corruption of the unsupervised collectors working outside the normal Exchequer system, many of whom were afterwards accused of lining their own pockets. As and when each bullion train arrived in London, the gold and silver and precious objects were locked away in St Paul’s Cathedral under heavy guard, in sacks sealed with Eleanor’s own seal and that of Archbishop Hubert Walter. The first levies having proven insufficient, she ordered a second, and then a third, lambasting the tardy and the niggardly. Nor was it any easier to milk the impoverished continental possessions. Her sometime secretary Peter of Blois wrote to his friend the bishop of Mayence (modern Mainz) that:

… the ransom would not be drawn from the royal Exchequer, but from … the pitiful substance of the poor, the tears of widows, the pittance of monks and nuns, the dowries of maidens, the substance of scholars, the spoils of the Church.
³²

An even more unpopular task was the selection of hostages to serve as surety until the entire ransom had been paid. Longchamp returned from Hagenau not as chancellor and justiciar, but as bishop of Ely and therefore a loyal servant of the Crown, whose duty was to agree with Eleanor the selection of the noble hostages. To her agile mind, this became a threat that could be used to scare families which had not declared their true wealth, for the less the amount raised, the greater the number of hostages who would have to be sent to Germany. While drawing up the list of hostages with Longchamp at St Albans – the citizens of London refused him access to the city – she excluded her own grandson William of Winchester, son of Matilda and Henry the Lion, for the same reason that many other noble families baulked at sending their sons. Since the pederast bishop of Ely was not a fit person to have the care of boys, they sent their daughters instead.

During all this time Queen Eleanor also had to keep her eye on Prince John, who was forbidden to leave England and had all his incoming mail from Paris intercepted. She was also haranguing the pope at a distance for what she considered his less than enthusiastic support. Her secretary Peter of Blois, now archdeacon of Bath, was famous for witty puns and epigrams. In accusing Celestine III of keeping the sword of St Peter in its sheath and failing, despite three requests, to send papal intermediaries to Germany in support of a wronged crusader, he punned that the papal legates had been
potius ligati quam legati
– they had been leashed rather than loosed upon the emperor.

Complaining that, if her son had been rich, prelates would have come running to be rewarded by his generosity, Eleanor signed herself not
Alianor regina gratia dei –
queen by the Grace of God – but
regina angliorum ira dei –
queen of the English by God’s anger. As duchess of Aquitaine, she was also not above including a thinly veiled hint that the Cathar heresy so widespread in the south of France would be allowed to flourish in the duchy unchecked if the papacy did not do something to earn her gratitude.
³³

What more could the pope do? He had excommunicated Duke Leopold for laying hands on a crusader and threatened Philip Augustus with excommunication under the Peace of God for taking advantage of Richard’s captivity. He had even waved the threat of interdict over England, should the ransom not be forthcoming. With vast Church possessions in Germany at risk of seizure by Henry Hohenstaufen, who also had large forces stationed on the Italian Peninsula, Celestine could not force the emperor to do anything.

In midsummer of 1193, Richard was moved yet again, to Worms on the Rhine, where his charm earned him the liberty to have his falconer and favourite birds sent out from England, with a consignment of clothes and utensils for his personal use. At a five-day plenary court, the emperor weighed all the possibilities in the light of Philip’s representations before confirming that the royal prisoner would be released against the sureties when two-thirds of the ransom had arrived safely in Germany. The bad news was that the amount had now been increased by 50 per cent – the extra 50,000 marks being in lieu of Richard’s military help in the campaign against his ally Tancred. The number of hostages to be supplied was also increased accordingly.

Henry Hohenstaufen seems to have been in two minds about Richard’s claim that he had persuaded the German bishops to end their long dispute with their emperor, but the change of episcopal policy was due to Celestine’s urgings. However, Richard was responsible for a reconciliation between the houses of Hohenstaufen and Saxony. As a result, Henry the Lion mediated between Richard and the emperor in some way unclear to the chroniclers, and was offered Hohenstaufen’s cousin Constance as bride for his son Otto, who was a nephew of the royal captive, to cement the new
rapprochement
. The lady in question had already been offered to Philip Augustus who, after years of widowhood, had arranged to marry Princess Ingeborg, the sister of King Knut of Denmark, while allying himself with the Danes against England.

It was probably at Worms, during another five-day plenary session of the imperial court, that Richard composed a
sirventès
addressed to his half-sister Marie de Champagne, expressing his impatience with the pace at which his subjects were getting the money together
:

Ja nuls hom pres non dira sa razon

adrechament, si com hom dolens non

mas per confort deu hom faire canson.

Pro n’ay d’amis, mas paure son li don.

Ancta lur es, si per ma resenzon

soi sai dos yvers pres.

[No prisoner can put his case for long / without self-pity making it sound wrong / but still for comfort he can pen a song. / My many friends offer little, I hear. / Shame on them all if they leave me here / unransomed for a second long year.]

On 20 December the emperor wrote to the magnates of England:

Henry, by the grace of God, emperor of the Romans, and ever august, to his dearly beloved friends, the archbishops, earls, barons, knights, and all the faithful subjects of Richard, illustrious king of England, his favour and every blessing. We have thought proper to intimate to all and every one of you that we have appointed a certain day for the liberation of our dearly beloved friend, your lord Richard, the illustrious king of the English, being the second day of the week next ensuing after the expiration of three weeks from the day of the nativity of Our Lord, at Speier or else at Worms, and we have appointed seven days after that as the day of his coronation as king of Provence, which we have promised him; and this you are to consider certain and undoubted. For it is our purpose and our will to exalt and most highly honour your aforesaid lord, as being our special friend. Given at Thealluse on the vigil of St Thomas the Apostle.
³⁴

Provence, although lying within modern France, was then German territory under Hohenstaufen, with the Catalan Count Alfonso II as its titular ruler. The province had not had a king since the year 933, so presumably the title to be conferred on Richard was a courtesy only. The important thing in Hohenstaufen’s letter was that it translated as setting 17 January 1194 as the date for Richard’s release.

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