Lionheart (44 page)

At Fontevraud, the time for mourning Richard was curtailed by news that a consortium of Breton vassals under Arthur and his mother Constance had been reinforced by barons from Maine and Anjou. Marching against Angers, only a day’s ride from Fontevraud, they took it without opposition.
²⁰
Le Mans and several other cities went over to them and Viscount Aymar of Limoges took revenge for Richard’s unjustified siege of Châlus by lining up too on Arthur’s side. Reluctantly, Eleanor gave her backing to John, who hurried north to be invested on 25 April by Archbishop Walter of Rouen with the ritual sword and golden crown of the dukes of Normandy. The ceremonial was a farce, John joking with his cronies throughout and even dropping the sword but, once officially duke of Normandy, he sent the ever-loyal William the Marshal and Archbishop Hubert Walter across the Channel with orders to see every royal castle in England prepared for civil war
²¹
and to force all free men to swear an oath of fealty to Henry II’s last surviving son.

Apart from John’s few partisans, the Anglo-Norman magnates gathered in council at Nottingham could find little good in him, deciding to accept him on conditions that laid the foundation for Magna Carta sixteen years later. In Normandy, so little confidence did his vassals have in John’s ability to keep Philip at bay that many barons and knights avoided taking sides before the political-military situation had stabilised by going on pilgrimage or taking the Cross for the Fourth Crusade.
²²

So John had Normandy and was king-designate of England, but Eleanor was not prepared to give him Poitou and Aquitaine. Luckily she had Mercadier, who ordered his mercenaries back from the Limousin and led them against the coalition forces invading from the north in the rare phenomenon of two medieval armies confronting each other, each in the service of a woman. Constance’s forces fell back on Le Mans, leaving Angers to be sacked by Eleanor’s men under Mercadier, whose reward was to hold its principal citizens for ransom.

Meanwhile, John, as duke of Normandy, was leading a force of Normans into Maine. In retaking Le Mans, fire and sword were again the order of the day, but Constance had slipped away with Arthur to Tours, where Philip Augustus again took charge of the boy as an important piece to be saved for later in the game. The immediate danger over, Eleanor wheeled south to make a regal progress through her own domains of Poitou and Aquitaine accompanied by an impressive retinue of bishops and barons. She did not solicit her vassals’ loyalty to John, who was to them a distant figure who had spent much of his life on the wrong side of the Channel and had neither Richard’s valour nor his poetic prowess to commend him. Instead, she reintroduced herself to her vassals – most of whom had not been born when she inherited the duchy in 1137 – as mother of one legendary dead hero and granddaughter of the great crusading troubadour-duke William IX.

Maintaining that Richard’s title to the duchy had been valid for his lifetime only and was not therefore part of his inheritable estate to be claimed by John, she reasserted plenary powers for herself on the grounds that she had never actually renounced her titles as countess of Poitou and duchess of Aquitaine, even during the fifteen agonising years when Henry used every trick to force her to do so. She then ceded Poitou and Aquitaine to John on condition that he swear fealty to her and renounce all his rights for the duration of her lifetime or until such earlier time as might suit her. Her price was that he confirm all her prerogatives as queen of England, which kept her still the richest woman in the world. That was the best she could do; after that, she retired to Fontevraud for the rest of her days. There, although she did not seek the world, it came to her in the persons of nobles and churchmen who brought her news – none of it good.

N
OTES

1.
  J. Vaissete,
Abrégé de l’histoire générale de Languedoc
(Paris, 1799), Vol 3, pp. 219–40.

2.
  Richard, A.,
Histoire
, Vol 2, p. 299.

3.
  Ralph of Coggeshall,
Chronicon Anglicarum
, p. 96.

4.
  Richard, A.,
Histoire
, Vol 2, p. 324.

5.
  J. Bradbury,
The Medieval Archer
(Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002), p. 77.

6.
  Ibid.

7.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 4, p. 83.

8.
  Ralph of Coggeshall,
Chronicon Anglicarum
, p. 96.

9.
  Ibid, p. 98.

10.
  Ibid, p. 96.

11.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 4, p. 83.

12.
  Ibid, p. 84.

13.
  Meyer,
Guillaume le Maréchal
, Vol 3, pp. 159–60.

14.
  
Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis Episcopi Lincolniensis
, ed. J.F. Dimock, Rolls Series No. 37 (London: Longmans, 1864), pp. 282–3.

15.
  Richard, A.,
Histoire
, Vol 2, p. 332–3.

16.
  Dimock,
Vita
, pp. 286–7.

17.
  Ibid, p. 288.

18.
  Ibid, pp. 290–3.

19.
  Richard, A.,
Histoire
, Vol 2, p. 333.

20.
  
Recueil
, Vol 18, p. 325.

21.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 4, p. 88.

22.
  Powicke,
The Loss of Normandy
, p. 128.

22

Of a Siege, Sex and Saddles

T
he troubadour Gaucelm Faidit composed a
planh
lamenting the death of Richard. The first verse runs:

Fortz chausa es car cel q’era de valor caps e paire

lo rics valens Richartz, reis dels Engles

es mortz. Ai Dieus, cals perd’e cals dan es!

Cant estrains motz e cant greus ad ausir.

Ben a dur còr totz hom qu’o pot sofrir.

[It is an awful thing, for the very father-figure of valour, /

brave Richard, king of the English, / is dead.

God knows, ’tis terrible news to hear. / Only the hardest-hearted man can learn such cruel news without shedding a tear.]

That was conventional lip service on the lines of the lament on the death of the Young King composed by Bertran de Born. There were many who recalled instead Richard’s arrogance and the heedless avarice that had caused his death. As to his boast that the most costly castle in the world was impregnable, over the winter of 1203/04 a six-month siege of Château Gaillard by Philip Augustus forced the capitulation of the castellan Roger de Lacy. About 2,000 civilians took refuge inside the walls at the start of the siege when their homes in the village below were destroyed by the invaders. Twice de Lacy evicted groups of 500 of these ‘useless mouths’ to economise food stocks and these people were allowed to pass through the siege lines. After Philip Augustus learned of this, he forbade any further clemency, so when de Lacy evicted the remaining 1,000 civilians – mainly old men, women and children – the besiegers opened fire on them, driving them back to the castle walls, where they were trapped with the gates firmly closed against them. Hundreds died in the midwinter cold, including at least one woman in childbirth, and the others from starvation and exposure, until Philip took mercy on the few gaunt survivors and allowed them to leave.

The castle was finally taken after the wall of the outer bailey was undermined through the solid limestone bedrock. One of Philip’s men then led a storming party through the breach into the second bailey through an unguarded latrine chute associated with a chapel, said to be a modification by John of Richard’s original design. The small group of attackers lit fires once inside, which panicked the garrison into thinking the whole building was on fire. This enabled the invaders to lower the drawbridge over the dry moat. De Lacy’s force retreated into the inner bailey. When the wall of this was also breached, they withdrew into the
donjon
itself. There, running out of food and everything else, de Lacy and twenty knights with 120 men-at-arms surrendered on 6 March 1204.

The fall of Château Gaillard was followed, a fortnight later, by the death of Eleanor of Aquitaine, which spared her the sight of the Plantagenet Empire she had made with Henry II subsiding into the quicksands of time.

How is one to sum up Richard’s life? It is impossible to use modern criteria to assess a prince living in a period that more resembled the Dark Ages than, say, the time of Henry V or VIII. In his time, each lord and baron may have inherited title to his land and the people on that land, but he was only master of it and of them so long as he could dominate his vassals, fight off his neighbours and take part in greater struggles, aligning himself with this or that powerful suzerain. On that score, Richard comes out well. He spent his whole adolescence and adult life in warfare. Lacking Henry II’s statesmanship, he did not expand the Plantagenet Empire, but neither did he directly contribute to its demise.

But in one significant duty he failed – by not begetting a warrior prince to defend the empire by force of arms after his death. He must have been aware that his brother John would never be able to hold together the empire assembled by their parents, so why, whatever his sexual preferences, did he not sire a legitimate son or daughter as a duty to the state? Homosexuals have had children for all sorts of reasons, and what more important reason was there than to provide an heir for an empire?

But was he homosexual, as some historians have inferred? Was his bastard Philip of Cognac the result of possibly a single aberration from his normal preference? ‘The love that dare not speak its name’, as Oscar Wilde termed it, was a taboo subject for the Victorian divines who translated from Latin the chronicles and charters that continue to illuminate twelfth-century history for modern readers – and this prudery continued for the first half of the twentieth century. Yet, Ralph of Diceto and Gervase are among the chroniclers who commented on Richard’s treatment of women. Roger of Howden went so far as to write, ‘He carried off his subjects’ wives, daughters and kinswomen by force and made them his concubines. When he had sated his own lust on them, he handed them down for his soldiers to enjoy.’
¹
Alfred Richard, among others, lent credence to this allegation.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, when the media search for scandal made celebrities’ sex lives a fertile field for journalists to plough, historians reflected that trend by attributing to homosexuality Richard’s lack of legitimate progeny, his tolerance of, and closeness to, pederast William Longchamp, his preference for male company and especially his period of intense intimacy with Philip Augustus. The pendulum effect has recently seen some biographers leaning the other way, pointing out that hand-holding between men – normal conduct in many Arab countries today – and even sharing bed and board with Philip Augustus did not at the time necessarily indicate sexual congress any more than the symbolic kiss of peace implied genuine affection.