Richard & John: Kings at War (46 page)

As William made his way dejectedly north from Winchester, Richard moved rapidly south towards Portsmouth, intending to cross the Channel as soon as possible. There was bad news from France, for Philip Augustus had found a pretext to denounce the truce, which should have lasted until 5 June. Pausing only at Bishop’s Waltham, where he thought it best to conciliate the peevish archbishop of York, his half-brother Geoffrey (Geoffrey had pointedly stayed away from the coronation at Winchester), by restoring him to his lands in Anjou, Richard, in company with his mother Eleanor, arrived in Portsmouth on 24 April. But the elements were against him, so that he had to wait for fair weather for three weeks; an impatient attempt to clear for France in a gale had to be aborted with loss of face.
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Fuming with frustration, Richard spent a day hunting at Stansted, then rationalised his compulsory sojourn by the great natural harbour by deciding to make Portsmouth the site of a great naval base; Richard was always interested in sea power, and some scholars are even prepared to date the first glimmerings of Britain’s eventual naval hegemony to this decision. Portsmouth as an arsenal also made sense in terms of the geopolitics of the Angevin empire, for troops could be rushed from England to troublespots in Normandy, Poitou and Aquitaine.
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On 12 May Richard finally set sail and landed the same day at Barfleur in Normandy. No one had any reason to think he would never see England again, as turned out to be the case. He has been much criticised for his alleged neglect of his island kingdom, and his dismissive remark is often quoted that he cared ‘not an egg’ for England. Richard spoke no English and undoubtedly had no particular sentimental attachment for the country, as he had for Aquitaine. It is also true that England seems to have borne a disproportionate share of the financial burden of his ransom from captivity, though, if the hyperbolic boasts of Hubert Walter can be believed, this soon came to seem almost a drop in the ocean; Hubert claimed in 1196 that in the last two years he had raised over a million marks for him.
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In light of the oft-heard criticism that Richard neglected England and treated her simply as a cash-cow, it might be appropriate to highlight four specific areas of achievement, where it can be proved that Richard performed right royally. The first was in his relations with the Celtic fringes: with a few marginal exceptions, England had no trouble with Ireland, Scotland or Wales during his reign.
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The second was in his military reforms. Having observed the calibre of French knights on the crusade and (to his own satisfaction at least) having established that this was because they trained hard by jousting, Richard decided to follow their example and ignore the papal interdict on tournaments. He designated five venues (in Warwickshire, Northamptonshire, Suffolk, Nottinghamshire and Wiltshire) as tournament sites, all licensed, taxed and directed from the centre by administrators close to Hubert Walter (his brother was appointed collector of tournament fees). William Marshal later testified that the quality of English knighthood increased exponentially in just five years (1194-99).
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Yet it was the overall excellence of English administration and the efficiency of tax-collection that was probably most impressive in Richard’s reign. Some say that Richard was lucky, that he inherited a well-oiled machine from Henry II, which was why England was able to sustain the burden of the 150,000 mark ransom. Others push beyond this to the assertion that Richard was a mindless warmonger with no interest in economics or administration, that he was lucky in having in his service an organiser of genius like Hubert Walter.
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The best scholarship, however, reveals Richard as a highly intelligent monarch who knew exactly what he was doing when he delegated authority in England. The introduction of customs duty - a new tax that substantially enabled him to make war on Philip Augustus for the five years of 1194-99 - shows both ingenuity and imagination.
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One must, however, concede a partial role to contingency and luck, for in Hubert Walter Richard found a rare jewel. Having caught Richard’s eye on crusade and further enhanced his prospects by his diplomatic skill in Germany, the new archbishop of Canterbury turned out to be in reality what Henry II had only been able to dream about in the case of Thomas Becket. Longchamp had been loyal but lacking the essential political skill and administrative gifts. Hubert, appointed chief justiciar in succession to Walter of Coutances at Christmas 1193 and made a papal legate two years later, was a brilliant combination of all the talents needed to govern England as Richard’s right arm.
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Naturally the combination of offices in Hubert’s hands attracted great envy and jealousy and he was therefore much maligned by hostile critics, especially the more saintly bishops who thought him a wordly cleric, but no one has seriously questioned his credentials or his role as Richard’s cynosure. It is sometimes insinuated that England without Richard worked on a kind of automatic ‘cruise control’, but it must never be forgotten that, for all Hubert’s brilliance, it was the shrewd Lionheart who had talent-spotted and headhunted him for his dominant role.

11

RICHARD’S ARRIVAL IN BARFLEUR was an occasion for joyous celebration and feasting by his subjects, who were proud of their king, acknowledged throughout the Western world as the greatest warrior in Christendom. William Marshal testified that even in a long career of witnessing royal triumphs and processions, he had never seen anything quite like it.
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Richard brought with him a hundred ships, men, arms, siege engines and money, but he was under no illusions about the scale of the task in front of him. Ever since the fall of Gisors in April 1193 Philip Augustus had carried all before him, and now held large slabs of conquered territory in eastern Normandy, including the port of Dieppe. Most of the frontier lords on the marches between Normandy and France had gone over to Philip once they heard of Richard’s imprisonment in Germany and believed the widespread propaganda that he would never be freed. Having acquired Artois from Flanders in 1192, while Richard was still on crusade, Philip was already the most powerful king of France since Carolingian times, and some assessed his combined wealth and resources as greater than that of the Angevin empire.
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A host of rebel lords in Aquitaine had raised the banner on Philip’s behalf and, in northern France, he still possessed what looked like an invaluable asset in the person of Prince John, here acting in his capacity as count of Mortain. On paper Richard had few assets: the loyalty of the ex-crusader Earl Robert of Leicester, who had lost lands and castles through being true to his liege lord, and the dependable alliance with Sancho of Navarre, which had saved his position in Aquitaine.
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Part of Richard’s careful preparations for the coming titanic conflict involved assembling a totally professional army. Since feudal levies following their lords were limited by custom to military service of no more than forty days, Richard tried to dispense with technically feudal service altogether so as to create something resembling a standing army. This he did partly by requiring knights to serve for twelve months, partly by recruiting professional troops from Wales, and partly by the use of mercenaries. The regulars were well paid: a knight received one shilling a day, while Welsh men-at-arms got 4d a day if mounted and 2d a day if infantry. The mercenaries were of two kinds: the Genoese crossbowmen and others brought back from the crusade; and the desperadoes and adventurers generically known as Brabançons or routiers, recruited by his famous captains of irregulars like Mercadier or Gérard de Athée.
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Since the routiers were a byword for savagery, even Henry II had restricted their use in England to the single occasion of the 1173-74 revolt by the Young King, though the justiciars had employed them in Richard’s absence in 1193 to deal with John’s rebellion.
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Barbarous rapists and murderers who struck terror into every civilian’s heart, the Brabançons happily slaughtered old men and women, children, young women (after ravishing them), priests, civilians, traders - it mattered not, so long as they were in the path of the whirlwind. The use of routiers had been forbidden by the fifth canon of the Lateran Council in 1179, but the mindset denoted by the later famous question - ‘how many divisions has the pope?’ - was already in evidence in feudal Europe. Richard had scruples in warfare, but they did not extend to men who in his eyes were traitors and perjurers and those who abetted them; since this included Philip Augustus and all his allies, the luckless townsfolk of eastern Normandy and the Aquitaine were clearly in for a thin time from May 1194 on. Moreover, Richard had brought back from the Middle East new technologies acquired from the Saracens or refined in warfare against them, such as the dreaded Greek fire (a combustible mixture of sulphur, pitch and naphtha) first used in England at the siege of Nottingham in early 1194. He had even recruited some Saracen fighters - surprisingly this did not provoke the outcry in Christian Europe one might have expected - and they are recorded as being in the thick of fights at Domfront and in the forest of Le Passeis.
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There was supposed to be a truce in the whole of north-eastern France, but Philip had engineered a breakdown on the basis of some dubious raiding by a party of bandits allegedly from England.
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On 10 May he began the siege of the castle of Verneuil, and it was news of this action that made Richard champ and chafe in Portsmouth.
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Overconfident, presumably because they knew the Lionheart was on his way to relieve them, the defenders mocked and ridiculed Philip in crude burlesques, but this simply made him more determined to force the stronghold’s surrender. While storms and gales kept Richard hemmed in Portsmouth harbour, Philip brought up his strongest siege engines and managed to demolish part of the castle walls.
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It was 21 May before Richard arrived in the vicinity, and at Tuboeuf he met a knight who had managed to breach the blockade and ride for help. With his customary rapidity of thought, Richard devised a twofold stratagem: a picked force of knights, Welsh infantry and crossbowmen was sent to break through the French lines and relieve the garrison; while a larger force was sent round to the east of Verneuil to cut Philip’s communications. On 28 May Philip split his forces and rode off with half to Evreux, leaving the other half to continue the siege; but the detachment left behind, demoralised by their king’s sudden departure, promptly abandoned the task and fled. Richard’s forces, soon in hot pursuit, captured Philip’s entire siege train, and on 30 May the Lionheart himself entered the castle.
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So pleased was he by the garrison’s valour and steadfastness that he kissed each man in turn and marked them down for huge financial rewards, large enough to figure prominently in the 1195 Norman exchequer role.
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Why had Philip broken off a promising siege so abruptly? The answer lay with his untrustworthy ally John. Once Richard arrived on the soil of Normandy, John went to pieces, sped to Lisieux (where Richard was staying at the house of John of Alençon), and gambled on securing his brother’s forgiveness. Eyewitnesses reported John as being in a high state of nervous agitation before he went in for the interview but he was reassured when John of Alençon told him: ‘The king is merciful and straightforward, and kinder to you than you would be to him.’
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John entered the royal presence and fell at his brother’s feet. Richard raised him up and said soothingly, but with an oceanic subtext of patronising contempt, ‘Have no fear, John, you are but a child. It is those who led you astray who will be punished.’
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Richard’s merciful treatment contrasts strikingly with the brutality he could evince at other times, most notably to the Saracen prisoners after the fall of Acre. Some speculate that, like Napoleon, who demonstrated similar brutality in the very same theatre of war, Richard was excessively family-minded, that the up side of the ultra-competitive spirit among the siblings of the Devil’s Brood was a Mafia-like solidarity towards kin. We know that Eleanor of Aquitaine was at Lisieux, and her instinct was always on the side of patching up quarrels between John and her beloved Richard, if only because, if Richard died, she did not want the Crown passing out of the family. William Le Breton simply stated that, although Richard hated John for his cruelty, treachery and weakness, he still loved him as a brother should.
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Certainly John fared far better at Richard’s hands than he deserved to. John’s next action was typical of the man. Presumably to show his gratitude to his brother, John hastened back to Evreux and ordered all the French civilians there slaughtered, while announcing that he held the town now for Richard, not Philip.
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It was volcanic rage at this atrocity that led Philip to ride off to Evreux, leaving the investment of Verneuil to peter out. When he heard that John had compounded his treachery by inviting the principal French commanders to a meal and then having them cut down as they sat at table, Philip joined the epidemic of mindless fury by forcing John to retreat and then methodically sacking Evreux, as if it were the burghers who had been the treacherous ones. Coming on top of the Ingeborg fiasco and the previous outburst of rage when he had burned his own siege engines, even the official French historians were aghast at the crazed behaviour of their king.
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