Richard & John: Kings at War (24 page)

Yet the criticism of later generations over the deal with Scotland was as nothing compared with the contumely attracted by Richard in his ruthless quest for money to finance the crusades. For the first time Richard appears in the eyes of history to be no longer a knight
sans peur et sans reproche
driven to distraction by his father’s duplicity but a ruthless militarist, the kind of fanatic who redoubles his efforts as he loses sight of his aims. For the first time it began to be whispered that here was a truly bad king: ‘bad to all, worse to his friends and worst of all to himself’, as Roger of Howden put it.
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Henry II had left the English treasury in a healthy state, despite the huge expenditure on the wars in France: contemporaries estimated the surplus at anything between 100,000 and 900,000 marks.
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Within days of his arrival in England Richard started running through this sum: first there was the 24,000 owed to Philip of France; then the huge cost of the coronation and associated ceremonies and banqueting; finally the massive and overgenerous amounts handed to John. On top of this he had to raise money for the crusade and, after the Saladin Tithe, another round of taxation would lead to serious civil unrest. A cynical student of human nature, Richard simply decided to mulct the rich, to seize and squeeze, to follow his father’s example in never guaranteeing a steady revenue through taxation but through ad hoc profiteering. Henry II had always done this, to the point where one observer wrote: ‘The King is like a robber permanently on the prowl, always probing, always searching for the weak spot where there is something for him to steal.’
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Richard’s ‘daylight robbery’ project was made easier by the concentration of England’s wealth into the hands of a few, all known to the king and his officials, all of them bound to him by feudal ties and politico-legal clientelism. There was no hiding place, no medieval equivalent of tax evasion. Ambitious nobles were willing to pay a lot for lucrative offices, titles, places and other privileges. Custom and tradition also made it easy for an unscrupulous king to make rich pickings from death or bequest. When the bishop of Ely died intestate, Richard helped himself to his ‘portable property’: not just 3,000 marks in coin but also gold and silver plate, horses, livestock, granaries, carpets, tapestries and other fine cloths.
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The office of sheriff was particularly sought after, and in a ‘sale of the century’ Richard sold them off to the highest bidder. In order to gain control of local castles and become sheriff of Hampshire, Godfrey de Luci, bishop of Winchester paid out more than 4,000 marks. Hugh du Puiset, bishop of Durham, paid out 2,000 marks for the sheriffdom of Northumberland and another 1,000 for his recognition of the honour of being made justiciar.
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But the royal scamming did not end just with the disposal of sheriffdoms, for a ruthless monarch would dismiss the incumbent sheriffs, fine them for malfeasance, nonfeasance or misfeasance (this could amount to 1,000 marks per sacking) and then make another appointment for another 2-3,000 marks. Given that levels of civil discontent were not high in Henry II’s England, it was implausible that Richard really needed to dismiss twenty-two of the twenty-seven sheriffs in office when the Old King died. But every hiring or firing transaction brought in more money. However, it by no means follows that the new appointees were all rich sycophants: to his credit Richard required both money and ability before he would appoint a man to be sheriff.
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Another quick means of raising money, much copied by modern states in modern combats, was to allow people to buy themselves out of military service in the Holy Land. Many people had taken the crusading vow in a moment of euphoria, uplift and hysteria and then realised next morning the potentially horrific implications of what they had done. For such people Richard offered a simple way out: pay for military exemption. It hardly needs to be said that such exemptions were not bought cheaply. It might seem that in a religious age buying oneself out would have been considered blasphemous or heretical, but the Pope himself provided a loophole by sanctioning this system of ‘compounding’ for those deemed essential to national security or stability at home while the monarch was leading armies abroad, or even for those deemed to be providing ‘essential’ administrative duties.
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As with all such ‘essential war work’, the opportunities for shirking for those with a deep purse were almost infinite. Richard is often considered an obtuse warmonger, unalive to the nuances of administration and unversed in political subtlety, but there was much method in his apparent money-madness in 1189-90. At one stroke he could raise money and unseat all his father’s old followers, as Roger of Howden pointed out: ‘The king removed from office Ranulf Glanville, the justiciar of England, and almost all their sheriffs and officers; the closer they had been to his father, the more he oppressed them. Anyone who did not have as much as he demanded was immediately sent to jail where there was weeping and gnashing of teeth; then he appointed other sheriffs in their place. Everything was for sale - offices, lordships, earldoms, sheriffdoms, castles, towns, lands, the lot.’
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One of his followers gently put it to Richard that he was overdoing the financial side of things. He replied dismissively: ‘I would sell London itself if I could find a buyer.’
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Most modern criticisms of Richard as king of England focus on two things that were apparent in 1189: Richard cared little for England and he used it as a gigantic cash-cow. The first proposition is surely incontestable: he came to England on 13 August 1189 and left it four months later, on 12 December, then revisited it for two months in 1194 - six months in all during a ten-year reign. His preference for Aquitaine was overwhelming, and although he spoke Latin as well as his native French, he never spoke English. The criticism of using England like a bank is valid with hindsight, but Richard genuinely believed in the crusade and, if it was to be effective, he had no choice but to raise vast sums of money; it was either that or see his armies annihilated by better fed, armed and equipped Saracens. It is perfectly permissible for modern critics to say that,
sub specie aeternitatis
, the Frankish nations of the West should never have gone on crusade but, given the beliefs and ideologies of the time, it is an anachronistic judgement. It is significant that, of all contemporary chroniclers, only William of Newburgh raised the point that a king of England’s proper place was to be in England, permanently, but in the light of the sensibilities of the time this would have been considered an eccentric point of view. It was only in the seventeenth century that the perception gained ground that an absentee king was the worst possible species. Hence the paradox that the one King Richard who was a paladin of chivalry and a military genius should ultimately have suffered in comparison with the two other King Richards, who died in abject defeat and disgrace.

Where both contemporary and modern critics are on surer (and unexceptionable) ground is their focus on Richard’s absurdly myopic treatment of his brother John.
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After granting him six whole counties, on top of the lordships he already held, Richard both shrank his own revenue base - for Nottingham, Derby, Somerset, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall contributed nothing to the exchequer until 1194 - and created a kind of kingdom within a kingdom, with John in possession of about a third of the kingdom of England. Richard of Devizes thought this was the wrong way to deal with John: his ambition was so evident that Richard should have moved in the opposite direction and taken him down a peg or two.
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Defenders of Richard point out that he had little choice in his treatment of his brother, that harsher treatment would have made him certain to rebel. In terms of money John had all he could desire, but not in terms of power or prospects. If Richard had been generous in the power stakes, he might have given him Aquitaine or Normandy. As it was, John could legitimately complain that he had less power now that Richard was king than Richard or the Young King had had while Henry was alive. Some scholars even argue that, to head off John’s ambitions, he should have given him
more
power. Perhaps the solution was to compel John to come on crusade? But Richard feared that the scheming John might do to him with Philip Augustus what he (Richard) had done with Philip to his father; the obvious way to deal with this was to make sure John and Philip never met. And it is true that a combination of Eleanor of Aquitaine and the ministers Richard appointed to serve in his absence should have been able to see off John quite easily.
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But no one has satisfactorily explained why Richard rescinded his earlier demand that John stay out of England while the crusade was in progress. That was the truly cardinal error.

Having, at least to his own satisfaction, settled the affairs of England, Richard made the eight-hour crossing from Dover to Calais on 12 December 1189, proceeded to Normandy and spent Christmas at Lyons-la-Forêt.
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On 30 December he held another conference with King Philip at Nonancourt. A non-aggression pact was agreed, whereby an attack on the lands of one would be regarded as an attack on the lands of the other; since Richard and Philip were the only conceivable such aggressors in western Europe, the accord effectively guaranteed peace while the two monarchs were on crusade. More controversially, Richard renewed his pledge to marry Alice when he was already engaged in serious negotiations for the hand of Berengaria of Navarre - a duplicitous move which predictably aroused the selective fury of Bertran de Born.
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Richard kept the Alice card in play throughout 1188-89, first to get Philip on his side against his father, and then to make sure the crusade proceeded, though he managed to avoid direct perjury on the issue. For his lies and half-truths on this matter he has been much pilloried, but if he blatantly stated that he would never marry Alice, war with Philip was the likely result. It needs to be reiterated that with Alice Richard was in a trap not of his own making. It by no means follows that he was homosexual, overly squeamish or absurdly fastidious in not marrying his father’s mistress. The true cause of all this trouble was Henry. Like Louis XV of France and many another ruler, he had allowed his lusts to triumph over considerations of hard politics, and now his son was having to pick up the pieces. But the issue of Alice was a running sore between Philip and Richard, and made a poisonous and inauspicious start to the Third Crusade.
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The crusade was meant to be a tripartite effort by the German emperor and the kings of France and England. Aware that the aged emperor Frederick Barbarossa was proceeding overland to the Holy Land, via the Danube and Asia Minor, Richard went about his preparations in a leisurely way and spent six months touring his continental domains, appointing seneschals in Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine and granting charters under the inevitable formula
teste me ipso
(with me myself as the witness).
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There was another meeting between Richard and Philip at Dreux on 16 March - slightly overshadowed by the news of the death in childbirth of Philip’s wife Isabel - to confirm the peace terms agreed at Nonancourt, with the added proviso that the Church would excommunicate anyone breaking the conditions of the covenant. The two kings agreed that, since preparations for the expedition were behind schedule, they should fix a departure date of 24 June.
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Then Richard headed south, and by May was in the Pyrenees. He visited Bayonne, and made a brief foray into the county of Bigorre, where he hanged the lord of the castle of Chis for highway robbery, specifically the plunder of pilgrims passing through this territory to and from Santiago de Compostela.
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Richard wanted to make his presence felt in this region, for his old enemy Raymond of Toulouse was the one great prince of France who had not taken the Cross. It did not require a genius to guess what Raymond’s intentions might be once Richard was on the other side of the Mediterranean. Richard’s obvious counterstrike was to strengthen his old alliance with Alfonso II of Aragon which had been so useful in the late 1180s. Since Alfonso was now in alliance with King Sancho VI of Navarre against Alfonso of Castile, it made sense for Richard to energise this new alliance against sleeping but not yet moribund dogs like Raymond of Toulouse. Hard
realpolitik
turned out to be the genesis of Richard’s sudden marriage, just as it had hitherto been the reason for his stalling on the issue of Alice.

Since about 1188 there had been rumours that Richard intended to contract a Spanish marriage, with Berengaria, daughter of Sancho of Navarre. The rumours finally proved to be true, but there was much about the match that was puzzling. Most obviously there was the length of time it took to solemnise it: it was not until May 1191, in Cyprus, that Richard finally took Berengaria to wife.
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The problem was, of course, Richard’s pre-existing pledge to marry Alice of France. How could Sancho look kindly on a proposal for the hand of his daughter from a man who was already publicly committed to marry Alice? Richard already had a track record, with both Alice and Berengaria, of offering marriage (or seeming to) and then withdrawing the offer. Did this not mean that Richard was as double-dealing, devious and mendacious as his father? The why of the marriage - Sancho to shield Richard from Raymond of Toulouse and Richard to protect Sancho from the encroachments of Castile - was obvious but the how seemed impossible. The breakthrough came in Normandy in March 1190. Four days before Richard met Philip at Dreux, he had assembled a huge body of key nobles and churchmen - including Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, his brother John, his half-brother Geoffrey - to discuss the intricacies of canon law and the implications of dynastic marriage. The most significant participants, newly arrived from England, were Eleanor of Aquitaine and Alice herself. It seems clear that at the Dreux meeting four days later Philip promised to consider rescinding the proposed marriage of Richard to Alice, paving the way for Richard’s dash to the deep south, although Philip did not formally relent on the issue for another year (March 1191). In the Pyrenees Richard met Sancho of Navarre, and some days of hard bargaining followed. Since Philip had still not formally consented to release Richard from his ‘proposal’ to Alice, Sancho was torn between the promise of a glittering match for his daughter Berengaria and his uncertainty about how far he could trust Richard. The details of the Pyrenean conference remain obscure, but Richard must have made some hefty private commitments and probably disbursed a lot of gold from his purse to make the Spanish king release his daughter.
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