Lionheart (42 page)

Three knights unhorsed with one lance! The Marshal was not boasting, for it was not the first time he had achieved such a hat-trick. It is interesting also to note that the Flemings under Mercadier kept their own captives for ransom in addition to their pay. Or was Richard letting them loot and take hostages for ransom in lieu of payment from him? The record is mute.

From Rome at Christmas 1197 came Cardinal Peter of Capua on a mission to bring peace to France. William the Marshal’s squire described the man as having been to a school where he had learned to prove black was white,
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but all the dialectic in the world could not have reconciled Richard with the suzerain who had betrayed him during his exile. Nor was he amused when the cardinal changed tack and argued that under canon law a bishop could not be imprisoned. His point was that Richard should immediately release the battling bishop of Beauvais, who had the misfortune to be captured by Mercadier in May 1197 and was currently held in the tower of Caen. For the mercenaries who took him prisoner, the bishop represented a source of ransom, but Richard refused to let them accept the 10,000 silver marks offered by the cardinal. The reason was not just that the prisoner was a cousin of Philip Augustus, but that he was one of the many lay and religious in the Frankish host with whom Richard had fallen out personally in the Holy Land. A war of words between them saw each blistering
sirventès
from Richard answered by an equally well-composed poem from the bishop.

To Peter of Capua’s pleading that he should release this cleric who had the effrontery to confront him on crusade, Richard furiously compared the futility of the Church when he was a prisoner in Germany with its lively interest in the bishop’s predicament,
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which had nothing to do with his religious office. He had been captured in armed combat with his helm closed, so that he was unidentifiable.
²¹
The cardinal was dismissed with a warning that, had he not been protected by his status as a papal envoy, he would have been castrated, as a warning to the pope not to meddle in affairs that had nothing to do with him. In a fit of rage reminiscent of Henry II, Richard locked himself in his bedchamber in a foul sulk.
²²

On a visit to Caen, Eleanor tried to pour oil on troubled waters by asking to have the captive bishop brought before her during one of Richard’s many absences on campaign – a command that his gaolers dared not refuse. On his way to the audience, the battling bishop managed to break away from his guards, despite being fettered hand and foot, and hurled himself at the door of a church, to claim sanctuary. The door was locked, so he clung to the ring handle of the latch desperately invoking the Peace of God at the top of his voice. Eleanor’s plan came to naught when Richard refused to recognise the bishop’s right to sanctuary, after which he was transferred to stricter confinement in Chinon Castle.

N
OTES

1.
  
The Autobiography of Gerald of Wales
(Giraldus Cambrensis De Rebus a se Gestis), ed. and trans. H.E. Butler (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), p. 153.

2.
  
Recueil
, Vol 17, p. 573–4.

3.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 3, p. 290.

4.
  Ibid, Vol 4, p. 3.

5.
  Biography of Hubert Walter by Kaye Norgate in Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP), Vol 28 (online version).

6.
  William of Newburgh,
Historia Rerum Anglicarum
, Vol 2, pp. 464–5.

7.
  Boyd,
Eleanor
, p.307; Stubbs,
Roger of Howden
, Vol 3, pp. 18, 42; Vol 4 pp. 5, 6, 48 (fully quoted in note 6, above); also entry in
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(Oxford: OUP, 2004–13).

8.
  Ibid.

9.
  Richard, A.,
Histoire
, Vol 2, p. 305.

10.
  Matthew Paris,
Historia Anglorum
, ed. F. Madden (London: Longmans, 1869), Vol 2, p. 104.

11.
  Benedict of Peterborough,
Gesta Henrici
, Vol 2, p. 146.

12.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 4, p. 37.

13.
  Richard, A.,
Histoire
, Vol 2, p. 313.

14.
  Ibid.

15.
  
Flores Historiarum
, ed. H.R. Luard, Rolls Series No 95 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1890), Vol 2, p. 117.

16.
  Kelly,
Eleanor of Aquitaine
, pp. 313–14, 337.

17.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 4, p. 56.

18.
  Powicke,
The Loss of Normandy
, p. 122.

19.
  Meyer,
Guillaume le Maréchal
, Vol 3, p. 152.

20.
  Ibid, p. 156.

21.
  Ibid, Vol 2, pp. 52–3.

22.
  J.R. Crosland,
William the Marshal
(London: Owen, 1962), pp. 78–81.

21

Death in Agony

W
e owe the knowledge that many medieval diplomatic marriages of noble and royal daughters were arranged by their mothers or other noblewomen largely to academics working in women’s studies. Eleanor now turned to a traditional method of bridging rifts between royal houses and cast around for a suitable granddaughter who could be married off to Philip’s son Prince Louis. On the same wavelength, it seemed to her that her 31-year-old daughter Joanna was serving no purpose. Joanna’s dowry, clawed back from Tancred by Richard during the winter on Sicily, had all been spent to pay the expenses of the crusade, so a match would not make her new husband rich, though she had, like Henry II’s mother the Empress Matilda, kept her title as queen of Sicily.

When Count Raymond V of Toulouse died early in January 1195, his son Raymond VI decided to confirm allegiance to Philip Augustus, whose cousin he was. Since neither her father, either of her husbands nor Richard had solved the long-term problem of the breakaway county by force of arms, Eleanor’s pragmatic mind began exploring a different solution. She dangled before Raymond VI the idea of rejecting his second wife Bourguigne de Lusignan and becoming the husband of a titular queen by a marriage that would safeguard the eastern frontier of Aquitaine. With Navarre already on-side through Berengaria, it was a brilliant idea.

Raymond was still excommunicate for the repudiation of his first wife and the Church would not look kindly on him sending away his second spouse, but there was always a complaisant churchman to sort out that kind of problem, so the marriage duly took place in Rouen during October 1196.
¹
Among the witnesses was Richard’s neglected wife, who otherwise lived quietly in her dower lands. Eleanor insisted that the marriage contract include a provision for Joanna’s offspring by Raymond to inherit the county of Toulouse on his death – and could afford to feel pleased that, after three generations, the county of Toulouse was reattached to Aquitaine. Joanna, of course, had no more say in the matter than when Henry despatched her as a child bride to William II in Sicily. But what was love, except a game of
What If?
played by poets, maidens and married women yearning for an emotionally richer life? Even that great romantic Bernat de Ventadorn, who had sworn to be true to Eleanor until death, wrote before he died, probably in 1195:

Estat ai com om esperdutz

per amor un long estatge

mas era’m reconogutz

qu’ieu avia faih folatge.

[I was a man by love destroyed. / It ruled my mind for far too long. / But now at last I’ve understood / that I have lived my life all wrong.]

Another loveless arranged marriage of that year ensured Richard the gratitude of his bastard half-brother William Longsword, who was awarded the daughter of the count of Salisbury.
²
A hint of satisfaction can be read on the eroded features of Longsword’s effigy in Salisbury Cathedral, despite the year in question being recorded as one of famine and disease so rampant in England that corpses of the rural poor were dumped en masse into communal graves because there was no time to bury them individually.

In July 1198 large stones fell from the sky in and around Paris, presumably from an asteroid that had fragmented in the upper atmosphere. At the same time, terrible thunderstorms ravaged crops in England, with hailstones so large that they killed many birds. In November a bright comet was sighted on fifteen consecutive nights. Like all unusual meteorological phenomena, these events were considered evil omens, although it is hard to imagine what could have been more feared in France than the bloodshed and the famine that came from the ceaseless laying waste of vast tracts of land as first Philip’s and then Richard’s forces advanced and retreated. At long last, during a meeting on 13 January 1199 conducted between Richard, shouting his terms from a boat in the middle of the Seine a few miles up-river from Les Andelys, and Philip on horseback on the bank, a five-year truce was agreed, motivated on both sides not so much by the approach of Lent as financial exhaustion. Despite twice capturing the Capetian treasury, Richard had spent every penny of the scutage levies in England in three consecutive years starting in 1194 on paying his mercenaries and building and strengthening fortresses. This compared with only seven scutages in the thirty-five years of Henry II’s reign. Neither he nor Philip Augustus then knew that before the expiration of the five years, one of them would be dead and Normandy would be lost to the English Crown forever.

In Kipling’s phrase, the captains and the kings departed. So did the mercenaries; on the way home to Flanders, Mercadier and his men awarded themselves a bonus by plundering the great fair held outside the walls of Abbeville and robbing all the merchants assembled there. But Richard’s empty purse could not be filled so easily. He was always bemoaning the lot of a sovereign whose vassals did not hear his summons when his purse was empty. In a
sirventès
addressed to the count of Auvergne, who was once again exploring the possibilities of reaffirming allegiance to Philip Augustus, Richard included these reproachful lines:

Vos me laïstes aidier per treive de guierdon

e car saviès qu’a Chinon non a argent ni denier.

[You no longer support me since my pay ceased to flow. / My treasury’s empty, as you very well know.]

It seemed like a temporary answer to Richard’s prayers when he heard that a hoard of Roman gold had been unearthed on the land of Viscount Aymar of Limoges shortly before Easter 1199.
³
The most valuable piece – a ceremonial shield or breastplate – was said to depict a king or chieftain seated at table surrounded by courtiers or members of his family. When he demanded that this treasure trove be handed over to him, Aymar offered to go halves – a reply that incensed Richard, coming as it did from a vavasour who should have been eager to ingratiate himself, in Richard’s opinion at least. The gold had been taken for safekeeping to the castle of Châlus. Although a castle might be manned by 1,000 soldiers or more during periods of hostilities, at other times a handful of men sufficed so long as the drawbridge was up and the portcullis down. Châlus was held by two sergeants-at-arms. Being lowborn, their names were never certainly recorded, but they were probably Pierre Brun and Pierre Basile. With them inside the walls were a total of thirty-eight men, women and children.
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