Lionheart (38 page)

26.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 3, p. 210.

27.
  Stubbs,
Gervase of Canterbury
, Vol 2, p. 110.

28.
  M. Powicke,
The Loss of Normandy
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 93.

29.
  Kelly,
Eleanor of Aquitaine
, p. 307.

30.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 2, p. 288.

31.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 2, p. 127.

32.
  Peter of Blois,
Epistolae
in Patrologia Latina Vol 207, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris: Garnier, 1890), Vol 207, Col 341.

33.
  Richard, A.,
Histoire
, Vol 2, p. 283.

34.
  Kelly,
Eleanor of Aquitaine
, pp. 314–15, quoting Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 3, p. 227.

19

Richard and Robin Hood? Maybe

O
n 6 January 1194 there arrived in Cologne a considerable host of Richard’s religious and lay vassals, some of them designated as hostages to remain in Germany until the ransom was paid in full, plus the armed guards for the chests of treasure, those nobles who were to attend Richard at the coronation and the usual household of chaplains, clerks, stewards, grooms, squires and cooks. Archbishop Walter of Rouen and Eleanor accompanied the vast treasure to Germany in order to record in person the delivery of the treasure and ensure that the first selected hostages were handed over in return. Ever one to dress up for a special occasion, Richard had also charged them to bring along his royal regalia with a suitable retinue to impress the emperor’s court.

Before leaving England, Eleanor appointed Archbishop Hubert Walter chief justiciar on Richard’s instructions, which made him effectively the regent in her absence or, should anything happen to her, until the king should return. On 17 January at Speier she was informed that her son’s release was to be delayed because an alternative offer had been received from Philip Augustus at a meeting with the emperor in Vaucouleurs, where he had bid 50,000 marks, plus 30,000 marks from Prince John, if Richard were kept prisoner until Michaelmas – by which time they hoped to have taken control of the continental Plantagenet possessions. Alternatively, they offered monthly instalments of £1,000 so long as Richard was held captive in Germany. On learning of this treason, the Great Council of England deprived John of all his English possessions, in addition to which he and his chief partisans were excommunicated. Under Hubert Walter’s guidance, the council also denounced Longchamp to the pope in a letter heavy with all their seals, which was to be shown first to Richard in Germany so that he would know what they thought of his ex-chancellor.

At Mainz on 2 February 1194, Eleanor’s joy at seeing her son for the first time in three and a half years was tempered by an unpleasant surprise: Philip had raised the French offer to 100,000 marks, with another 50,000 from John, if Richard were handed over to them or held in Germany for another year. This was equivalent to the whole ransom from England.
¹

Seeking a counter-counter-offer, the emperor showed the letter from Paris to Eleanor and to Richard. Whatever the barons and bishops of England thought of William Longchamp, he was still an able advocate when addressing the imperial court at the castle of Mayence in Eleanor’s presence that day. His argument was simple, but to the point: Philip and John had no chance of amassing the colossal sums being bandied about, and which totalled many times the annual taxation income of the whole of France, even if they did manage to conquer and plunder Normandy and the other Plantagenet possessions. Their offer was therefore invalid, whereas Richard’s vastly greater territory could certainly assemble the agreed ransom.

The political complication for Henry Hohenstaufen was that in allowing Richard to walk free he would lose French support in the dispute with his bishops. The
quid pro quo
was that Richard pay homage, admitting that he held England as a vassal of the emperor.
²
Eleanor’s retinue may have been horrified, but to her flexible mind, it mattered little if Richard thus denied his feudal allegiance to the House of Capet, which, in the person of Philip Augustus, had shown itself to be unworthy of it, and doffed his bonnet to place it in the emperor’s hands, signifying that he was henceforth a vassal of the House of Hohenstaufen. As to the annual tribute of £5,000 demanded by the emperor, what was a promise like that worth in the mouth of a son of Henry of Anjou?

After swearing fealty to Henry and declaring with his customary eloquence that he held his possessions on both sides of the Channel as a vassal of the emperor, Richard was at last released on 4 February after agreeing to one last requirement: that the archbishop of Rouen, who had played a leading part in the negotiations, should be left behind as a hostage.

Philip managed to get a message to Prince John in England, warning him, ‘The devil has broken his chains.’ Terrified, John fled the country and took refuge in Paris.
³
Given the widespread unrest and disaffection in England during the Third Crusade and the long captivity in Germany, one would think that Richard would hurry home to punish those who had committed treason. Was it Eleanor’s influence that persuaded him to take the leisurely but statesmanlike route they followed, spending a weekend as guest of the bishop of Cologne and stopping in Brussels and other cities to make alliances that might one day be useful on this, the eastern flank of Philip’s realm? Six weeks after leaving Mayence, they were guests of the duke of Louvain in his castle at Antwerp, and may have been feeling a certain uneasiness at spending so long on Hohenstaufen territory.

In the port of Antwerp, the faithful Stephen of Turnham welcomed Eleanor and the king aboard the
Trenchemer.
It is unlikely that this was the same vessel that had taken part in the naval action off Tyre, and there was a shipmaster in Richard’s service named Alan Trenchemer, so this might be the name not of the vessel but of its master. From this they trans-shipped to a larger vessel at the mouth of the Schelde for safety during the night and then moved back to the swifter
Trenchemer
for the Channel crossing the next day.
⁴
In case Philip had set naval patrols to intercept the royal party, they weighed anchor in the evening under cover of darkness. With 100 miles to row – possibly with a following wind and favourable tides – they are reported as landing at Sandwich ‘at the ninth hour of the day’ – meaning after noon – on 12 March. Six weeks after leaving Speyer, they rode 12 miles to give thanks at Becket’s tomb in Canterbury Cathedral. Somewhere near Rochester, Archbishop Hubert Walter met the royal party and dismounted to kneel before the king. Richard too dismounted, knelt and embraced his fellow crusader with tears in his eyes, showing more emotion and gratitude than to all his other subjects. That night was spent in the keep of Rochester Castle, which still stands, bleak and grim beside the cathedral.

The news of Richard’s return had preceded them, giving the citizens of London time to deck with banners and bunting the city that had contributed a sizeable share of the ransom. To the ringing of all the bells within the walls, Richard was led in procession to St Paul’s, now emptied of the treasure hoard. Agents of Henry Hohenstaufen present to oversee payment of the balance outstanding had expected to find a country on its knees after all the exactions.
⁷
In the countryside there was visible hardship, but the pace of business in London made them comment that the ransom had been set far too low.

Richard’s gratitude to the jubilant Londoners was limited to a stay of a few hours only. On 18 March he was at Bury St Edmunds – giving thanks at the shrine of one of his favourite saints, the eponymous martyred king of East Anglia. Eleanor travelled with him because he knew nothing of England or its customs and she feared that the arrogance which had caused all his problems in Outremer might otherwise alienate Anglo-Norman vassals who had still to make good their pledges for the unpaid part of the ransom.

After the Great Council meeting that dispossessed John, Archbishop Hubert Walter departed at the head of an army equipped to reduce his castles with copious supplies of arrows, armour and shields as well as pitch and sulphur to make Greek fire – the formula of which must have been brought to England by returning crusaders – plus a battery of mangonels. Marlborough surrendered in a few days, as did Lancaster. John’s castle at St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall did not require a siege: its castellan dropped dead from a heart attack when he heard Richard was back in England,
⁵
but when the garrison at Tickhill Castle offered to surrender if he would guarantee their lives, he refused – in exactly the intransigent mood that Eleanor had feared. Fortunately, Bishop Hugh of Durham, commanding the loyalist besiegers, took it upon himself to agree terms.

Nottingham held out until Richard arrived there on 25 March, the garrison not believing who he was, even when he donned his armour and led the assault, taking the outerworks and many prisoners, whom he hanged on a gallows erected in full view of the castle. Hubert Walter arrived with reinforcements for the besiegers’ ranks. Two days later, Hugh of Durham arrived with the prisoners he had taken at Tickhill, but Nottingham continued to hold out until two knights of the garrison had been given a safe conduct to see for themselves that the commander of the besiegers was indeed their lawful king.

When Nottingham surrendered, the rebellion was over. A Great Council was summoned there, in the heart of the territory that had been loyal to John. While its members were assembling, Richard amused himself for a few days at one of Henry II’s old haunts, Clipstone on the fringes of Sherwood Forest, where the hunting of stag and boar so pleased him that he compared it favourably with his own forest of Talmont in far-off Poitou. This was the stuff of the triumphal return at the end of every Robin Hood film, although whether a meeting in some greenwood glade between a loyal outlaw and the returned crusader king – as described in the fourteenth-century
Ballad of Robin Hood
– actually took place, is anyone’s guess.

On Wednesday 30 March in the hastily repaired great hall of Nottingham Castle, 72-year-old Eleanor in all her majesty as dowager queen surveyed with understandable cynicism the assembled earls of the realm and the bishops and archbishops doing homage to Richard, whose safe return she had done more than anyone else to secure. Unfortunately, his current mood cut short the national elation and thanksgiving for his return. Furious with his English subjects who had paid the lion’s share of the ransom too slowly, in his view, and blaming them and not himself for the fifteen months’ imprisonment, he cared nothing for their acclamations, wanting from them only more money to hire mercenaries and buy materiel with which to fulfil his main priority: to repulse Philip’s incursions into Normandy. To raise this money, all the offices and privileges bought five years earlier at such high prices to finance the abortive crusade now had to be bought anew. To the few office-holders who dared protest, he replied that whilst he and his heroic crusaders had faced death, all the stay-at-homes had been growing fat on the profits of war, which they could now cough up in his new hour of need.

As always, some took advantage of the situation. Henry Longchamp, imprisoned after William’s flight to France from Dover Castle, bought the office of sheriff of Worcestershire, while his brother Osbert was named sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk. The hated bishop of Ely offered 1,500 marks down and 500 marks annually per county to be named sheriff of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire, but was outbid for Yorkshire by Geoffrey the Bastard, who offered 3,000 marks for that county alone to ensure that William Longchamp had no authority in his see. Even Prince John’s unhappy wife, Isabel or Hawise of Gloucester, had to pay £200 to keep her dowry lands and marriage portion.

Teams of clerks laboured day and night keeping the accounts. On the third day of the council, Richard moved on to the question of taxation, in particular the arrears in payment of the ransom contribution levies, for which final demands were issued – with the implication that failure to pay could indeed prove final. In addition, he announced his requirement that every knight in the realm should perform one-third of his annual forty days’ knight service by crossing to Normandy with him, to confront Philip Augustus.
⁶
This would have produced a total cavalry force of around 2,000 knights, but the demand was more probably intended to raise the scutage paid in lieu of knight service, so that he could hire mercenaries. Here he was on thin ice for, as Bishop Hugh of Lincoln had ruled in 1197, knight service was owed by Anglo-Norman vassals for warfare on English soil – in other words, to suppress a rebellion, but not for wars the king wished to wage abroad.