Richard & John: Kings at War (25 page)

By settling on a wife, Richard was at least answering the charges that he had rushed off on crusade without even providing the Angevin empire with an heir apparent, leaving a possible chaos world to open up if he died and the ambitious John disputed the succession with the infant Arthur. Freed from the tortuous negotiations with Sancho, he headed north again to put the finishing touches to his crusading army. At Chinon in June 1190 he issued a series of draconian laws that would govern military and naval discipline on the way to the first rendezvous near Lisbon at the mouth of the Tagus. The ‘ordinance’ contained the following: ‘Any man who kills another shall be bound to the dead man and, if at sea, be thrown overboard; if on land, he will be buried with him. If it be proved by lawful witnesses that any man has drawn his knife against another, his hand shall be cut off. If any man shall punch another without drawing blood, he shall be immersed three times in the sea. The penalty for abusive or blasphemous language shall be a fine of one ounce of silver for each occasion. Any man caught stealing will have his head shaved, be tarred and feathered and then put ashore at the first landfall. ’
⁴⁹
All this sounds severe, but the sequel shows clearly that Richard knew what he was doing. While he proceeded south overland for another meeting with Philip, sixty-three ships under Robert de Sable and Richard de Canville, full of crusaders who had embarked at La Rochelle and Rochefort, stood away from the Ile d’Oléron to brave the storms and snares of the Bay of Biscay. After a terrible storm, which allegedly only the interceding St Thomas Becket was able to allay, they reached the Tagus estuary safely but, during shore leave, the soldiers started a riot in Lisbon, at first targeting Jews and Muslims but soon burning and plundering everything in sight. The so-called soldiers of God indulged in an orgy of rape, and marked their passage with gutted buildings, trampled vineyards and devastated orchards. It says much for the forebearance of the king of Portugal that, when he eventually restored order, he merely jailed the offenders instead of hanging them as he would have been entitled to. The papal proscription against harming crusaders saved a pack of unworthy rapists and murderers from the gallows they richly deserved.
⁵⁰

After his decrees of Chinon, Richard moved to Tours (24-27 June) where he received the traditional pilgrim’s staff, which broke when he leaned on it.
⁵¹
This was the second bad omen for the Third Crusade this year - the first had been the death of Philip’s queen Isabella, which was immediately interpreted by the superstitious as a sign of God’s displeasure. The third, news of the death of Frederick Barbarossa, was soon to follow. On 2 July Richard rendezvoused with Philip at Vézelay, on French territory, and made plans for a reunion of both armies in Sicily; Western Europe could not support up to 20,000 troops all travelling by the same route, and Messina was the only deep-sea port capable of sustaining the combined Anglo-French fleet.
⁵²
At Vézelay the two kings concluded a further agreement and bound themselves to it by oath: that they intended to win new lands, new domains and new wealth and that whatever they conquered they should share.
⁵³
Richard and most impartial observers sensibly concluded that the compact related to territories they conquered together, that Philip would not pretend a claim to anything Richard obtained unilaterally. Unfortunately Philip concluded (or said he did) that the accord meant a fifty-fifty division of any crusader acquisition; as usual with Franco-Angevin agreements, the two parties did not put their signatures to a written minute of the agreement, so that scope for misunderstanding remained as wide as it had been in the days of Henry II and Louis VII.
⁵⁴
From Vézelay the two kings rode down to Lyons, travelling via Corbigny, Moulins and Belleville-sur-Saône, where the fourth of the year’s ill-omened events occurred. A wooden bridge over the Rhône collapsed under the weight of mailed knights and pitched a hundred riders into the river; whether through luck or skill only two of them died.
⁵⁵
At Lyons on 10 July Philip and Richard parted company, Philip bound for Genoa, Richard for Marseilles. On 13 July the English king began the 220-mile journey to Marseilles, travelling via Vienne, Valence and Montelimar, Orange and Avignon.
⁵⁶
But the pattern of delays and plans going adrift continued. At Marseilles Richard expected to rendezvous with the seaborne army from the Ile d’Oléron, but the sixty-three ships were still labouring through the Straits of Gibraltar after the Lisbon debacle; this fleet would take a month to sail from the Tagus into the Mediterranean and along the Spanish coast to Marseilles.

Richard had not even quit European shores before his carefully-skeined reorganisation of England began to unravel. Immediately after dismissing Ranulf Glanville as justiciar, he had, as related, replaced him with the two-man rule of Hugh du Puiset, bishop of Durham, and William of Mandeville, the latter one of Henry’s old faithfuls like William Marshal and, like him, promoted for fidelity on Richard’s accession. Unfortunately he died on the very day Richard was crossing from Dover to Calais.
⁵⁷
Hugh du Puiset naturally expected that, left as sole justiciar, he would be given the Small (Exchequer) Seal of the kingdom (Richard took the Great Seal with him) and wardenship of the Tower of London. But Richard not only gave these to William Longchamp, bishop of Ely, but appointed Longchamp joint justiciar, with instructions that he was to have full powers south of the Humber and du Puiset was to have them north of that river. This was a demotion in anybody’s language. The proud and ambitious du Puiset took this hard. He was an aristocrat of ancient lineage, linked by kinship to any number of counts and princelings, a veteran of the wars of King Stephen, a man of wide culture with a vast library. Sheriff of Northumberland and connected through his wife Adelaide with the influential house of Percy, good-looking, handsome, regal, with natural authority and gravitas, du Puiset looked the part of great magnate and justiciar. Although Longchamp was no whit inferior in intellect or culture - he was the author of a learned treatise on civil war and much admired by the scholarly dean of St Paul’s - he most emphatically did not look the part, and his unprepossessing physical appearance lent colour to the gibes of his enemies, who whispered that he was the grandson of a runaway serf. It was true that he came from humble origins and did not have du Puiset’s pedigree but what told against him most was his dwarf-like stature - Gerald of Wales said he looked more ape than man.
⁵⁸

Richard favoured Longchamp against du Puiset because he trusted him utterly, and there is ample evidence that Longchamp repaid the trust with an energetic pursuit of the king’s interests.
⁵⁹
Unfortunately, he shared one of Richard’s failings: as a Norman he had no real knowledge of England and its political nuances. Chillingly ambitious and nepotistic, he stuffed the offices of England with his kin: his brother Henry became sheriff of Herefordshire, his brother Osbert sheriff of Yorkshire, Suffolk and Norfolk; he used his power to secure rich heiresses and wardships for his extended family. He marginalised Hugh du Puiset and, by the time Richard left Marseilles, had all but eliminated him as a political force. He affected kingly graces and made quasi-royal progresses around the country, quartering a vast cohort of hangers-on in reluctant abbeys and priories. He made the Tower of London something of a personal fortress and brought in mercenaries from abroad.
⁶⁰
Longchamp hardly helped his case by the elan with which he continued to raise money for Richard (to say nothing of himself) so that, less than a year after the king’s departure from English shores, he was already wildly unpopular. As the holder of the three offices of justiciar, chancellor and papal legate he combined all powers in his person, but thereby made a threefold clutch of enemies. Clerks were reduced to ridiculing his brother by drawing funny faces inside the capital letter O of Osbert’s name.
⁶¹
The barons despised him as a low-born, obscure foreigner; administrators and clerks hated him as a typical example of the here-today-gone-tomorrow jack-in-office; the other bishops deeply resented the power Pope Clement III gave him as papal legate in June 1190 (at Richard’s urging).
⁶²
As William of Newburgh, who detested him, remarked: ‘The laity found him more than king, the clergy more than Pope, and both an intolerable tyrant.’
⁶³

Longchamp’s short-term problem was his ‘colleague’ du Puiset, and he dealt with him with astounding ruthlessness. Using the excuse of an administrative error, that had led to an overdue payment from the county,
⁶⁴
Longchamp first deprived his rival of the sheriffdom of Northumberland. Next, a meeting was arranged between the two justiciars at Tickhill, which ended with du Puiset being placed under arrest. Taken to London, and subjected to a variety of duress, du Puiset was then forced to surrender the castles of Windsor and Newcastle, plus the manor of Sadberge which he had recently bought from the king for 600 marks, and in addition was obliged to give hostages for his ‘good behaviour’.
⁶⁵
Not content with this, Longchamp had his brother Osbert arrest the ageing bishop on his way home to Durham. Imprisoned at Howden while Osbert helped himself to the sheriffdoms of the north, du Puiset then had the blame fastened on him for the anti-Semitic murders in York, on the grounds that the ringleaders were friends of his.
⁶⁶
That was the end of du Puiset as a political force. But Longchamp’s long-term and perennial problem was John, now officially count of Mortain. John bided his time in Angevin France, gleefully receiving news of Longchamp’s growing unpopularity, calculating the right moment for the protracted campaign of usurpation he had in mind. His confidence was increased by the widespread feeling that Richard would never return from the crusades, that, as Newburgh put it, his return was not merely uncertain but against all laws of probability. Richard of Devizes described England without Richard as a land of gloom, chaos and instability, with every man for himself. ‘As the earth grows dark when the sun departs, so the face of the kingdom was changed by the absence of the king. All the barons were disturbed, castles were strengthened, towns fortified, ditches dug.’
⁶⁷
From France John directed a kind of rival administration in the counties Richard had given him, with his own justiciar, chancellor, seneschal and seal-bearer.

What forced John’s hand and led him to land in England despite his oath was news that Richard, in a formal treaty with Tancred of Sicily in November 1190, had formally recognised Arthur of Britanny as the heir-presumptive.
⁶⁸
So urgently did Richard need Longchamp to be informed of this that he sent another trusted follower, Hugh Bardolf, on the long journey from Sicily with secret instructions for his justiciar. Bardolf completed the journey in record time and a month later was at Longchamp’s side in London.
⁶⁹
Longchamp guessed what John’s next step would be, but was in a difficult position. On the one hand Richard had bound John by oath not to return to England within three years; on the other he had semi-retracted the restriction and made it depend on Longchamp’s discretion. Like many essentially weak men, Longchamp only liked battles he was sure to win, such as the struggle for supremacy with du Puiset. He did not relish having to be the one to deny John permission to land in England; John was frighteningly powerful with many secret friends in high places, and would make a dangerous and implacable enemy for life even if Richard did return. And what if he did not? The upshot was that, some time in the early new year of 1191, John crossed into England and Longchamp did not lift a finger to stop him. He had by this time taken his own precautions: two of his brothers had already travelled to Scotland to get the help of King William in the event that Arthur was proclaimed king and John contested the succession.
⁷⁰
Naturally, John’s spies kept him abreast of that development also. John then ingeniously claimed that Longchamp’s failure to stop him entering the country was a de facto absolution by the chancellor of the oath sworn by him (John) to Richard.
⁷¹

News of John’s actions in turn reached Richard. In February 1191 he sent another emissary to England, together with letters directing that the new man be appointed a justiciar and admitted to the highest decision-making councils in London. This man was Walter of Coutances, archbishop of Rouen. A native of Cornwall, a scholar and administrator, Walter had served as archdeacon at Oxford (1175-82) and briefly been bishop of Lincoln before his appointment to the see of Rouen.
⁷²
Richard gave him virtually plenipotentiary powers, for Walter carried two different sets of instructions: one made him Longchamp’s colleague but the other allowed him to supersede and dismiss Longchamp if necessary for, as Richard said, ‘we have opened our heart to him and confided our secret thoughts to him’.
⁷³
Clearly Richard had lost confidence in Longchamp: the order to admit John to England at his discretion, if indeed it ever existed, was obviously predicated on Richard’s mistaken certainty that Longchamp never in fact would do anything so foolish. The new envoy took his sweet time about travelling to England - three months as against Hugh Bardolf’s one; it seems that he stopped off in Rome to attend the consecration of Pope Celestine III and to get the new pope’s endorsement of the consecration of Geoffrey as archbishop of York.
⁷⁴
Accompanied by Eleanor of Aquitaine (who had been with him all the way from Sicily) he eventually headed north and reached England on 27 June. He arrived to find Longchamp and John at each other’s throats. Temporarily popular as a reflex action against Longchamp’s dimmed star, John had taken full advantage of the situation, seized castles and encouraged rebellion among the sheriffs; Gerard de Camville, sheriff of Lincolnshire, flatly told his nominal overlord, chancellor Longchamp, that he was answerable to no one but John. Roger Mortimer meanwhile raised the standard of revolt on the Welsh borders, and John seized the castles of Tickhill and Nottingham. When Walter of Coutances arrived, Longchamp had just completed the siege of Lincoln castle, for which he had hired mercenaries.
⁷⁵