Richard & John: Kings at War (23 page)

Richard had John with him at Barfleur, but insisted that his brother disembark at Dover while he made a triumphal landfall at Portsmouth. Probably Richard wanted nothing to distract from his own pomp and glory; that the entire progress through England was being stage-managed became clear when he brought with him, like a Roman victor, an eminent captive in chains, none other than the widely unpopular Stephen of Tours, loathed and despised as Henry’s most sycophantic servitor when he was seneschal of Anjou.
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Richard posed as a Nerva, the merciful emperor succeeding after the tyranny of Domitian, the bringer of hope and light, the symbol of a new age. In the euphoria of the moment the people of England allowed themselves to believe the hype.
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From Portsmouth he proceeded to Winchester, where John joined him. The royal procession continued via Salisbury and Marlborough to Windsor, where Geoffrey Plantagenet, the half-brother, joined him. Richard started as he meant to go on by dismissing the old justiciar Ranulf Glanville and making him pay a heavy fine to be reinstated in the royal favour. He then informed Geoffrey that he would be made archbishop of York but would have to pay 3,000 marks for the privilege. Then he completed the final lap of the journey to London. His coronation in Westminster Abbey on Sunday 3 September continued the purposive pageantry. After making a procession from St Paul’s Cathedral to Westminster Palace through beflagged and garlanded streets, where crowds cheered at the sight of Eleanor of Aquitaine in her robes of miniver, linen and sable, Richard entered the abbey. The archbishop of Canterbury anointed him on chest, head and hands before crowning him; Richard, anticipating Napoleon, picked up the Crown himself and handed it to the archbishop. Once again the superstitious shuddered at a bad omen, when a bat flitted around the throne in broad daylight.
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The supposed portent was ignored in the carousing and feasting that followed as a thousand or so earls, barons, knights and clergy gorged themselves on beef, venison and wine. Allegedly ‘the wine flowed along the pavement and walls of the palaces’
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but then it always does in medieval chronicles on such occasions. While the feasting went on, something happened outside the palace that would have grave repercussions throughout England. Some of London’s wealthier Jews, eager to establish themselves with the new king, arrived bearing gifts. Somehow the Christian crowds at the gate got it into their heads that this was a blasphemous insult to the newly crowned king; this was, after all, an era in which Jews were doubly execrated - for being the killers of Christ and for usury, defined in canon law as the lending of money at interest, even the most microscopic amounts. Moreover, Jews were loathed for their conspicuous consumption, their sumptuary splendour and the ostentatious wealth that a few of the more incautious Israelites liked to display. Additionally, they were widely believed to murder Christian children for ritual purposes, and the well-known legend of ‘Little St William of Norwich’ was based on this canard. There were also many great aristocratic families, abbeys and religious houses in debt to Jewish moneylenders, people who would shed no tears if their debts were fortuitously wiped out by the death of their creditors.

Not surprisingly, in such a climate a riot developed, swords were drawn and soon Christians were slaughtering Jews. The rampaging crowd spread fire and sword into the city of London itself, killing, maiming, wounding, looting and gutting houses. To his credit, Richard dealt harshly with the rioters once order was restored; his motive was not philo-Semitism so much as aristocratic outrage that the vulgar mob had so defiled his coronation day. He hanged three of the ringleaders and ostentatiously conducted back into the bosom of his co-religionists a terrified Jew who had ‘converted’ the day before to escape death. He then sent orders to every shire in England that Jews were not to be harmed and, as an afterthought, extended the prescription to his domains in Normandy and Poitou.
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Cynics said he cared nothing for Jews, but saw them as a rich source of funds and did not want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. But it was difficult to convince the Crusade-happy mob that Jews should be left alone. If Saracens were to be slaughtered by European armies for occupying the holy places in Jerusalem, how much more deserving of death were the people who had actually crucified the Saviour? This was the kind of fanatical feeling that lay behind the anti-Semitic riots that followed in East Anglia and the Wash (Stamford, Norwich, King’s Lynn, Lincoln). Worst of all atrocities was the pogrom at York in March 1190 when Richard had already left the country. Here a mob, urged on by a twelfth-century Rasputin, began by slaughtering all Jews they could lay hands on and then pursued the pitiful remnants (about 150 souls) to the castle. When the Jews realised they could not hold out long in the citadel, they enacted a macabre rerun of Masada in AD 73: first they killed their wives and children, then committed suicide. A handful, not relishing such a death, foolishly believed promises that they would be unharmed if they surrendered, emerged from the castle, and were massacred on the spot.
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Before he departed on crusade, Richard had five main matters to attend to: putting the Church on a sound footing; installing the men who would be de facto Regents in his absence; securing the Welsh marches; keeping Scotland quiet in his absence, and, above all, raising the vast sums of money needed to finance the expedition to Outremer. He began by appointing four new bishops, including his favourite William Longchamp, who was given the see at Ely, several new abbots and making a number of other changes in the senior ecclesiastical hierarchy. Once again there was an element of showmanship in all this, for Richard meant to distinguish his rule clearly from that of his father; Henry II had been infamous for his practice of keeping major livings vacant so that he could pocket the revenue.
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Richard’s most important church appointment was also shrewd politics. In nominating Henry’s natural son Geoffrey to the archbishopric of York, he was removing an important political player from the board. Geoffrey Plantagenet was rumoured to have ambitions to emulate William the Conqueror and become a bastard king. This was why he had resigned the see of Lincoln earlier, as he would have had to take Holy Orders and thus waive his political ambitions. Richard forced the issue, overcame theological objections to the appointment and even had it ratified by a papal legate. The reluctant Geoffrey was virtually carried kicking and screaming to his investiture as priest, but once ordained he ceased to be a possible pretender to the throne. Outwitted, he salved his anger by a career of defiance towards Richard and the canons of his own cathedral.
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Richard set the capstone on his ecclesiastical reforms by resolving a complex, tortuous but essentially arcane dispute between Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury and the monks of his cathedral priory, which was essentially a clash between Cistercian (Baldwin) modalities and Benedictine sensibilities.
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The problem of civilian administration was a tougher nut to crack. The two key offices in England were the justiciar and the chancellor. Theoretically the justiciar was the chief legal officer, dispensing the king’s justice, while the chancellor was a kind of primitive secretary of state, though over time the two offices tended to merge in function. Some authorities distinguish the royal household element (the chancellor) which moved around with the king on his travels, and the common administrative element (justiciar) which appeared in other parts of the Angevin empire as well as England.
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Richard began well by removing Ranulph Glanville as justiciar and putting in his place a Church-civilian ‘dyarchy’ - the aged William de Mandeville, count of Aumale and the earl of Essex, and the oligarchic Bishop Hugh du Puiset of Durham. As Chancellor he put in William Longchamp, bishop of Ely and veteran administrator of Aquitaine, who thus combined the Church and civilian roles in one office. As his official heir Richard chose the four-year-old Arthur of Britanny, thus putting John’s nose out of joint. But Richard expected that the liberality he showered on John would keep his younger brother quiet. Loaded with fiefs, titles and revenues, John also took a wife at this point - none other than the wealthy heiress Isabelle of Gloucester who had long been earmarked for him. There was some opposition to the marriage from the archbishop of Canterbury - on the grounds that John and Isabelle were second cousins without a papal licence to marry - but Richard steam-rollered the match through anyway. He wanted John safely wed, so that the idea of his marrying Alice could never be resurrected.
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John was now lord of Ireland, Mortmain and Gloucester and a number of other fiefs, including those he already held and new ones, such as Lancaster, that Richard added to his portfolio. Perhaps Richard’s most stunning gift to John was a six-county benefice: Derby, Nottingham, Somerset, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall. Short of money for the crusade, Richard nonetheless allowed John to keep the entire revenues from all six counties, which would otherwise have accrued to the royal treasury; the only insurance policy Richard took out was to retain control of key castles in the territories. But in return for this largesse John had to swear that he would stay out of England for three years.
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Richard’s dispositions were essentially a balancing act, but the acrobats soon came toppling off the wire. First Essex died, and Richard made the mistake of making Longchamp one of the justiciars as well. But if Longchamp was already too prominent and thus destroying the balance of power, Richard made the further error of listening to his mother’s pleadings and partially releasing John from his oath to stay out of England: he made it dependent on Longchamp’s say-so. Nonetheless the oath still stood: despite John’s later lies, he had never been absolutely released from it.
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Wales was a permanent thorn in the Angevin side. For most of his reign Henry II had been content to accept the Welsh rulers’ fealty - and in a few cases their homage also - and leave it at that; some historians have compared the situation to that of the independent princelings in India during the Raj. By and large the Welsh borders had been peaceful.
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Henry, however, had used the security situation on his northern and western frontiers as the excuse for not going crusading; with Henry it was always falsehoods and deviousness, and he was the original man who could not lie straight in bed.
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The much more straightforward (naive, said his critics) Richard wanted open dealing on all sides and tried to get a permanent solution to Wales so that the Welsh would not go on the warpath as soon as he was out of the country. This was no confected fear: as soon as he heard that Henry II was dead the powerful chieftain Rhys of Deheubarth began raiding into English territory. He justified this on the grounds that, although he had sworn homage to Henry II, this was a personal oath that did not extend to the king’s successors.
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Richard sent John, now lord of Glamorgan, to deal with Rhys while he met the other Welsh chiefs and ‘kings’ at Worcester, who agreed not to attack England while he was away on crusade.
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John’s dealings with Rhys are much murkier. He met him and worked out an agreement, then took Rhys to Oxford to meet Richard. Informed by his spies that John had concluded a secret concordat with Rhys, Richard refused to meet the Welshman. For this Richard has been much criticised, particularly as Henry II regularly received Rhys, but the probability is that Richard was not being foolish so much as pragmatic. Rhys’s status as Henry’s ‘man’ had done little to dampen down anarchy and raiding in Wales, he had made a secret pact with John, the king’s advisers counselled him that little could be looked for from Rhys, and moreover Richard calculated that the Welsh chiefs he had made over at Worcester were strong enough to contain Rhys and his turbulent sons.
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The angry Rhys, smarting at the insult to his honour when Richard turned him from the door at Oxford, continued a form of guerrilla warfare for several years in south Wales. But the other Welsh leaders kept their promise to Richard, John was watchful of his interests as lord of Glamorgan and, very importantly, William Marshal, now lord of the Welsh marches, was a force any would-be leader of a general uprising in Wales would have to reckon with.

If Richard’s dealings with Wales had produced only middling outcomes, his diplomacy with the king of the Scots produced spectacular and lasting results. In November 1189 Richard’s half-brother Geoffrey persuaded King William to come south for talks and escorted him to Canterbury. There, in the famous Quit Claim treaty of 5 December Richard returned to William the castles of Roxburgh and Berwick - surrendered after the Young King’s disastrous rebellion in 1173-74 - and formally acknowledged Scotland’s independence from England. In return he received 10,000 marks for his crusading fund. Contemporary chroniclers, and advocates of a United Kingdom ever since, condemned this as a piece of egregious folly: Gerald of Wales denounced it as ‘a piece of vile commerce and a shameful loss to the English crown’.
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Scottish nationalists have, not surprisingly, seen the treaty in a very different light and have praised Richard as a second Daniel come to judgement. It is hard not to agree with the nationalists. Whatever our view of the crusades today, at the time people of all ranks accepted that regaining the Holy Land from Islam was a sacred duty; talk of the ‘real English national interests’ in such a context becomes metaphysical or theological. And the policy was a shrewd one. When John rebelled against Richard in 1193-94, the Scots did not join in. There is a strong case to be made that Richard’s policies on the Celtic fringes provided a tranquil situation that contrasted with almost all other post-1066 periods. Certainly most contemporaries thought that during his short stay in England he had performed wonders of diplomacy and statesmanship.
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