Lionheart (39 page)

To squeeze the last drops of wealth out of a country exhausted by the ransom, Richard named William Longchamp chancellor once more, because he knew more than anyone else alive about milking England down to its last penny, jewel and fleece. In addition to some new taxes, the pre-conquest land tax last levied in 1162 was reintroduced. Known as Danegeld, its rate was set at 2 shillings for every hide of cultivated land recorded in the Domesday Book, with none of the traditional exemptions for Church lands, so the money-less monasteries that had no rents or precious objects to sell were ordered to surrender their wool-clip for the second year running in settlement of their assessments. The Pipe Rolls show the cost of hauling wool from the Cistercian foundations in Yorkshire to Holme in Norfolk and hiring ships to transport it to Germany.
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Among the many individual victims was William the Marshal, required to pay 4 shillings for his wife’s estates in Sussex.
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The last debate of the council concerned Richard’s oath of fealty to Henry Hohenstaufen and his undertaking to pay an annual fee to the emperor. To the assembled barons this was a shameful act, unworthy of the dignity of their king, to reaffirm which it was decided that Richard should be re-crowned at Winchester. Although Richard adored ceremonial for which he could dress up and in which he was the central figure, matters of state bored him, so it is possible that the idea came from Eleanor. Either way, there was a problem. It was almost forty years since she and Henry II had held a ceremonial crown-wearing and nobody could remember the proper ritual. So messengers posted to Canterbury Cathedral, to consult the records of the ceremonial used when Stephen of Blois had been re-crowned there in 1141 to reaffirm his sovereignty after release from imprisonment by Empress Matilda.
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It seems that Eleanor stayed close to prevent Richard’s impatience causing further problems. On 8 April she was one of the witnesses to his charter setting out the honours due to King William of Scotland when called to the English court. At Winchester on 17 April, which was either just before or just after her seventy-third birthday, she sat in state on a specially built dais in the cathedral surrounded by a bevy of noble heiresses waiting to be bestowed as rewards upon those who had served the Crown well in the recent troubled times while he took communion in preparation for his coronation.
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Although the official queen of England, poor Berengaria was far away in Poitiers. So, fittingly, it was Eleanor who played the role of queen in Winchester Cathedral on that morning when her son processed with William Longchamp on his right side from nearby St Swithin’s priory and up the aisle beneath a canopy borne by a count and three earls, one of whom was one of Henry II’s bastards named William Longsword,
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to the altar where Archbishop Hubert Walter was waiting.

Business after the ceremony included setting the ransoms for the most important prisoners taken at Tickhill and Nottingham, the lesser rebels being freed against a surety of 100 marks each, to stand trial later. Fetters and chains costing the considerable sum of 29 shillings and 9 pence were purchased to ensure that the conditions in which the prisoners were confined would be as distressing as possible. The large number of estates confiscated were not sold, but administered for the Exchequer.
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Almost as an afterthought, 10,000 marks were despatched to Germany to ransom Archbishop Walter of Rouen and a few others, but no provision was made for obtaining the release of the many other hostages kept there against payment of the outstanding balance of his ransom. Richard was chafing at the bit, his normal impatience not helped by more bad news from France that made him regard every pound raised for the hostages’ ransom as better applied to financing his war against Philip Augustus. Just one week after the coronation, on 24 April he and Eleanor arrived at the walled city of Portsmouth, where he planned to construct a fortified harbour for a fleet of galleys – whose manoeuvrability, especially against unfavourable winds, had impressed him in the Mediterranean – and use them to blockade Philip Augustus’ ports.

With his customary enthusiasm for everything martial, Richard threw himself into this enterprise, but spared the time to go hunting in the New Forest, interrupting his sport when riots broke out between his Welsh and Flemish mercenaries, who turned the streets of Portsmouth into a battleground. No sooner was he ready to cross to France than the weather changed. Ignoring the advice of his captains, he ordered men and horses to embark on Monday 2 May. For a whole day and night his fleet of 100 vessels was driven everywhere except towards France, the horses cooped up in their stalls suffering more and more. At last, he abandoned the crossing and returned to land, to everyone’s great relief. The prolonged stay cost over £100 in lodgings and lasted until 12 May when his small army of levied English knights and the mercenaries weighed anchor and set course for the port of Barfleur, to resume his favourite occupation: warfare.
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Richard’s second visit to England as monarch had lasted barely two months and he was never to set foot in the island realm again. Eleanor’s reappearance on French soil had, for his continental vassals, something of the characteristics of a return from the dead: she seemed almost supernatural by virtue of her great age, her legendary travels, her imperiousness and her extraordinary physical vitality as she rode with Richard through Normandy. The squire of William the Marshal reported that church bells greeted them everywhere and the common people sang hymns of thanksgiving while the turncoats among the marcher lords changed sides yet again as Eleanor and her son progressed in state from Barfleur to Caen and Bayeux. Many Norman nobles had believed Richard dead long since and thus given their support to Prince John during the long years he had been absent from his continental domains. They now hastened to reaffirm their loyalty, those who delayed suffering the penalty as Richard’s levied knights and the mercenaries under Mercadier embarked on three months of bloody reprisals.

Yet the greatest traitor went unpunished. On the third or fourth night after disembarking at Barfleur, Richard was staying at Lisieux in the house of Archdeacon John of Alençon, one of the messengers whom Eleanor had despatched to the Holy Land with the news that finally set her son on his disastrous voyage homeward. Richard was not resting, but was attempting to persuade his household knights to ride through the night to relieve a fortress besieged by Philip’s forces, when he received a visitor under cover of darkness. Abandoned by Philip Augustus as nothing but a liability and dispossessed of his English properties and revenues by the Great Council, John Lackland now merited the sobriquet ‘John Lack-all’. Desperate to enlist, if not an ally, at least a mediator before the confrontation with the elder brother who could reasonably have ordered his execution for treason or alternatively sentenced him to life imprisonment, John begged an interview with Eleanor beforehand.
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Subsequently sounded out by John of Alençon, Richard said he bore no animosity against his brother. Although having frequently employed floods of crocodile tears on similar occasions himself, he was nevertheless moved by others’ penitential weeping – even John’s. Echoing their father’s words when his sons repented of their treason, he pardoned John and blamed instead the evil advisers who had led his ‘little brother’ astray, never mind that John was 26 years old at the time.
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Sitting down to dine on a freshly cooked salmon that had been presented to Richard for his own dinner, John must have been immensely relieved when given a chance to prove on whose side he now was by providing a retinue of knights and men-at-arms with whom to relieve the garrison at Évreux by cutting Philip’s lines of communication.
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Philip’s betrayal of a vassal protected, as a crusader, by the Peace of God already had him excommunicated. If taken prisoner in that condition, no protection or assistance would be forthcoming from the Church to secure him the feudal kiss of peace;
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if killed, his soul would go straight to hell. Unquestionably in the right this time, Richard excelled himself in this campaign. His ability to weigh up military priorities and drive horses and machines to destruction and men to their limits of endurance had Philip beating his retreat within days. Freshly arrived from Germany, Archbishop Walter of Rouen and William Longchamp joined Richard in Normandy, leaving the governance of England in the hands of Archbishop Hubert Walter of Canterbury, who ruled the kingdom wisely and well for the rest of Richard’s reign, and was made a cardinal the following March.

Attempting to relieve the siege of Aumale during the Norman campaign, Richard narrowly escaped capture by Guillaume des Barres, his old enemy from the winter on Sicily who had fought alongside him on the crusade, and who now abandoned three other captives in the attempt, thereby losing their ransoms. Another of Philip’s men, Alain de Dinan, unhorsed Richard, who managed to remount in the skirmish and make good his escape. At Gaillon on the Seine, which he was besieging in order to get money for the construction of a new castle to replace Gisors, now in Philip’s hands, Richard was wounded in the knee by a crossbow bolt fired by Cadoc, Philip’s mercenary castellan. His equally stricken horse falling on top of him, Richard’s injuries took a month to heal.

Such was the devastation from fire and sword that the Church once again called for a halt to the violence, resulting in a truce signed by Richard and Philip Augustus on 23 July. A month later, by a letter dated 22 August 1194, Richard made tournaments legal at five named places in England,
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ignoring his father’s ban on such events because they enabled several hundred knights, fully armed and accoutred, to assemble legally, and could thus mask preparations for rebellion. To counter the Church’s condemnation of the bloodshed, sin and widespread damage to property caused by
mêlées
, promulgated by Lateran councils in 1139 and 1179, Richard argued that the less than enthusiastic response of Anglo-Norman knights to the call for the Third Crusade justified the new tournaments to prepare them for what they would experience when he led them back to the Holy Land. Uppermost in his mind, of course, was the income he could expect from sales of licences to promote tournaments in England and the fees due from every participant, ranging from 20 marks for an earl down to 2 marks for a landless knight.
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After dealing rough justice to his Norman vassals, Richard swung south towards the Loire Valley to recover the castles handed over by John and those at Châteaudun and Loches, which he himself had yielded. The army now consisted of his Flemish mercenaries under Mercadier and a Navarrese force commanded by Berengaria’s brother Prince Sancho. It also included 150 artillerymen with trebuchets and other missile launchers, which were used to batter the refortified château of Taillebourg into submission, this time razing it to the ground shortly after Geoffroy de Rancon’s death so that hardly a trace of the substantial twelfth-century walls remains.

Each time Richard’s speed of advance caught him at a disadvantage, Philip fled. Near Vendôme, the latter abandoned all his siege engines and personal chapel fittings, as well as the Capetian treasury and the top-secret list of Richard’s vassals who had sworn allegiance to the House of Capet.
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This was given into William the Marshal’s safekeeping as Richard pressed onwards, at one point, after the Battle of Fréteval in July 1194, coming within minutes of capturing Philip and his personal escort. Told by a Flemish straggler met by the roadside that his prey was far ahead, Richard’s haste took him galloping straight past the humble country church in which his enemy was hiding. With Philip now behind his pursuers, Richard’s party was far into Frankish territory when his horse dropped dead from exhaustion and one of Mercadier’s men gave up his mount for the king, leaving him to ride back on the withers of a comrade’s horse. The saddles used had a high pommel and high cantle, like a modern western saddle, so this was no comfortable ride.
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Richard next rampaged into his own duchy of Aquitaine where the traditional internecine feuding had flourished unchecked during his long absence. There was little hope for the rebels holding out against him as all their fortresses were as familiar to his military mind as a sibling’s face, every strongpoint and every weakness known by heart. His forces ravaged the countryside throughout July. After taking the count of Angoulême’s fortress-city in a single evening, he wrote to Archbishop Hubert Walter that they had captured 40,000 men-at-arms and 300 ransomable knights. Like most modern battle statistics, that claim was probably exaggerated, but Richard’s generalship and ruthlessness in this brilliant campaign succeeded in restoring the
pax ricardi
throughout his continental possessions from the Channel to the Pyrenees.
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By now the hostages remaining as sureties in the hands of Leopold of Austria were becoming uneasy at his threats to execute some of them to speed up the final payment and the liberation of his kinswoman, the maid of Cyprus, who was still a captive in England. A group of the hostages were given permission to send Baldwin of Béthune – one of the small band of knights that had been captured with Richard in Austria – back to Britain to fetch her. Hearing on the return journey that Leopold had died in December 1194, Baldwin turned back with his charge and returned to England, whence she subsequently reappeared in southern France.
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Richard’s tardiness in paying off the ransom bore fruit when the German emperor waived the last 17,000 marks as a contribution to Richard’s war against their common enemy, Philip Augustus.