Richard & John: Kings at War (50 page)

Richard’s run of diplomatic successes continued with many notable defections from Philip’s camp: the Bretons, the barons of Champagne and many other notable local magnates (including those of Blois, Perche, Brienne, Guînes and St Pol). By far the most spectacular catch for the Angevins was Count Renaud of Boulogne, regarded as the best warrior among Philip’s vassals; the French king’s tit-for-tat alliance with the rebel lords Aimar of Limoges and Ademar of Angoulême, long-term malcontents, was poor compensation for these losses.
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Naturally, most of Richard’s converts came over not through ideology or personal loyalty but for money. Like a more famous cold war eight hundred years later, the ‘phoney war’ of 1198 turned into a massive spending contest, where the Angevin coffers seemed deeper.
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At last, in September that year Richard thought the time was right to make the cold war a hot one. Baldwin invaded Artois, always disputed territory between France and Flanders, captured Aire and, together with the new ally Renaud of Boulogne, laid siege to St Omer. The burghers there sent word to Philip that they would surrender if he did not come with all speed. Philip promised he would be there by the end of the month, but was distracted when Richard opened his Normandy offensive as part of a two-pronged strategy. Since both the Angevin and Capetian kings were perennially obsessed with the Norman Vexin, it was not surprising that, faced with the threat on his western flank, Philip Augustus soon forgot about Flanders. After a six-week siege, St Omer capitulated, and Baldwin marched in on 13 October.
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Philip Augustus could not even boast successes in Normandy to set against this, for he had sustained two serious defeats at Richard’s hands. In the first of these, Richard had retreated before the French, waiting for reinforcements to come up. When these arrived, led by Mercadier, the Lionheart fell on the French rear, whose soldiers were overconfident as they had been looting without being disturbed. The tally from this attack was thirty knights and one hundred horses captured and a number of French troops killed.
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The second defeat of Philip by Richard was a notable achievement, but written up and absurdly exaggerated by all the English king’s hagiographers. By the end of September Richard was closing the ring on Gisors by capturing the nearby fortresses of Dangu and Courcelles. Not knowing that it had already fallen, Philip set out with a large army, including 300 knights, to relieve Courcelles. Richard’s patrols picked up the movement of the French army - and it may even have been the English king himself who noticed it, as he still went out on patrol just as he had done in the Holy Land.
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He decided on an immediate attack, before Philip realised that Courcelles was in enemy hands and started withdrawing, but was short of numbers for a full engagement. He therefore sent for reinforcements from Dangu. But when Philip’s army continued on the march at a good clip, Richard feared the day would end before his own army was at full strength. He therefore ordered an immediate assault. The element of surprise, and the impetuous charge Richard directed - William Marshal said it was like a starving lion scenting prey - threw the French into confusion. It takes time for a marching army to get into battle formation, and time was what Richard did not allow the foe.
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Philip panicked and ordered a withdrawal to Gisors, but the retreat soon became a rout. In the mad scramble to get back into Gisors, the leaderless and panic-stricken infantry crowded over the bridge to the town in such numbers that it broke beneath them, pitching large numbers to their death, including twenty knights. Others were left outside when the gates were closed before them. Richard and his men rode many of them down with their lances but took more than a hundred prisoners, presumably the valuable ones who could be ransomed - an inference strengthened by other figures that speak of French losses of ninety knights and 200 horses. Mercadier alone notched up thirty knights in his tally of captives. Philip, having initially fallen into the waters of the river Epte, scrambled back to safety, concealed, it was said, by the clouds of dust churned up on the dry roads; the high tally of knights captured was allegedly because they had remained behind to hack out an escape path for their king. Lacking siege engines with which to make an impression on Gisors, Richard withdrew to Dangu to count his prisoners and their likely ransoms.
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The French had lost the flower of their chivalry, with many famous names among the slain, including William de Barres’s brother. Passions ran high on the French side after this major setback. There were many disloyal murmurings in the Capetian camp, with many opining that the disaster was so egregious it stood in need of some special application. The devout explained it as God’s punishment for Philip’s persecution of priests and his defiance of Pope Innocent III’s interdict; as the penalty for setting aside Ingeborg and living with the ‘whore’ Agnes; or for tolerating Jews and allowing them into his domains.
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Philip struck back at the enemy by declaring
guerre à outrance
, with no quarter asked or given. Atrocities began to mount. Philip routinely blinded enemy prisoners as if he was in Byzantium; under pressure from his own men to retaliate in kind, a reluctant Richard did so; needless to say, French propagandists then falsely alleged that Richard had started the escalating cycle of barbarism. Both sides began to target objectives
in terrorem
, without regard to their military or strategic value. Philip sent a force of incendiaries to burn down Evreux, south of the Seine, to which Richard responded by dispatching Mercadier and the very worst of his cut-throat band of routiers to plunder the town of Abbeville during a trade fair.
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Even so, Richard was clearly winning the war and it was evident that Philip did not have the resources to wage a two-front war. If he wanted to regain Artois, then clearly he had to give ground in Normandy. In October he therefore proposed peace terms on the basis that he gave up all conquests in Normandy except for Gisors; the future of that castle would be determined by a panel of six Norman barons chosen by Philip and six by Richard. But when Richard insisted that Baldwin and his other allies must be included in any treaty, the talks broke down. Finally, in desperation, Philip agreed these conditions, but only for a short truce, to last until 13 January 1199.
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After spending Christmas at Domfront, on 13 January Richard duly appeared at a rendezvous on the Seine, between Les Andelys and Vernon, for the talks with Philip supposed to secure a lasting peace. In yet another uncanny Napoleonic pre-echo (this time foreshadowing Napoleon’s famous meeting with Czar Alexander on a raft at Tilsit in 1807), the two kings conferred aboard Richard’s galley in the middle of the river. A vague five-year truce based on the status quo, but with no minutiae clarified, was agreed, pending more detailed negotiations to feature a papal legate as mediator. Innocent was more than ever anxious to see an end to the feuding between Capetians and Angevins - for him the interminable struggle for Gisors and the Vexin really was two bald men fighting over a comb - since he had just proclaimed the Fourth Crusade. Unfortunately the go-between he appointed was not a happy choice for the job. The papal legate Peter of Capua displayed from the very first a pronounced pro-French bias, and his oily prolixity particularly angered William Marshal, who described him as a French puppet with a sickening aura of unctuous rectitude, physically unappealing to boot, with a complexion as yellow as a stork’s foot.
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Richard’s position was quite simple: in the interests of peace he was prepared to forgo all indemnities and reparations for war damage provided Philip returned all the lands he had illegally filched through conquest. Peter of Capua made the mistake of trying to get him to soften his stance, on the grounds that the kingdom of Jerusalem was in deadly peril from the Saracens. This was teaching grandmothers to suck eggs, with a vengeance. Angrily Richard reminded the legate that but for Philip’s departure to France from the Holy Land, Jerusalem would probably already be in Christian possession; he himself had left Outremer only because Philip, in defiance of God’s law, papal edict and his oath as a crusader, had begun attacking the Angevin empire even while its king was fighting Saladin. Richard then launched into a vehement attack on Philip’s treacherous behaviour during his captivity in Germany. Peter of Capua merely added insult to injury by spouting bland nonsense. ‘Ah, sire,’ were his reported words, ‘how true it is that no one can have everything he wants.’
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Worn down by the monotonous prattling from the legate about the Holy Land, Richard finally agreed to an ‘as-is’ five-year truce. But the foolish legate could not count his blessings and leave well enough alone. He then raised the issue of Philip’s cousin, the bishop of Beauvais, still languishing in an Angevin dungeon, and began waffling and prating about men of the cloth who were both anointed and consecrated. At this Richard exploded. With many a ‘by God’s legs!’ he reiterated that the bishop of Beauvais had not been wrenched from an altar like Thomas Becket but had been captured in full armour, for all the world a warrior. Cursing Peter as a fool and humbug, he told him that if he were not the papal envoy, he would send Innocent back something he would not soon forget. At the implied threat of murder or castration, the legate went weak at the knees, but Richard had not finished. ‘The Pope! The Pope did not raise a finger to help me when I was in prison. And now he asks me to free a robber and arsonist who has never done me anything but harm! Get out of here, you liar, hypocrite, scoundrel and bought-and-paid-for so-called churchman, and never let me see you again.’
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Paroxysmic with rage after this interview, and now more than ever recalling his father, he stormed to his chamber and left word he was not to be disturbed. For a long time he lay fuming on his bed, in the dark with the shutters closed, unable to contain his rage at the monstrous impertinence of the legate. He was finally roused by the only man in the empire who had the gravitas and prestige to risk the royal wrath. William Marshal, who had by no means always seen eye to eye with Richard, had in the later years of the king’s reign become a trusted counsellor, and on this occasion his advice was sound. He put it to Richard that Philip was in financial straits, and that his retaining the castles he had illegally obtained would simply stretch his meagre resources to snapping point. Richard’s best course was harassment: close investment of these castles so that the castellans and their men could not sortie to collect feudal revenues or even reprovision; Philip would thus have a full-time logistical task simply keeping his garrisons in the illegal fortresses in being.
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Richard accepted the advice. Some have speculated that Richard’s anger was totally histrionic, a gallery touch used to manipulate the French, to make them think he was more discontented with the terms of the truce than he really was. The most plausible explanation is that Richard’s outburst contained both rage and controlled anger. If rage is a purely negative emotion while anger, properly channelled, can be used constructively, it may well be the case, as the shrewdest scholars have concluded, that Richard’s anger was both genuine and calculated.
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And yet this is the man who, according to his detractors, was a militaristic blockhead!

12

THE TRUCE BETWEEN RICHARD and Philip was no sooner signed than broken. Still plagued by revolts in the south, Richard sent Mercadier and his routiers to deal with them in their usual brutal way, but on the march down to Aquitaine they were ambushed by some French counts and their levies. Richard immediately claimed that the interceptors must have been working in collusion with Philip Augustus. Naturally Philip denied it, but as soon as Richard himself went south to retrieve the situation, he began fresh castle-building on the Seine in defiance of the ceasefire terms. Richard’s chancellor Eustace of Ely gave due warning that unless this activity ceased, a state of war would automatically exist, and the shaken Peter of Capua warned Philip that he would be unable to cover for him unless he observed the truce conditions strictly. The papal legate then got down to work on a draft treaty to ensure that the peace really would hold. This time the dynastic intermarriage proposal was for a match between Philip’s son Louis and Richard’s Spanish niece, daughter of the king of Castile, to be cemented by a grant of 20,000 marks from Richard and the castle of Gisors donated in perpetuity. In return for this generous marriage, Philip would pledge himself to abandon Philip of Swabia and work for German unification under Otto of Brunswick.
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While a draft of these proposals was sent to Richard, Philip showed clearly that he was unhappy with them by some spectacular stirring of the pot. He informed Richard that John had deserted to the French side and sent him some documentary evidence of a circumstantial kind. Although John had kept his head down for five years and served Richard faithfully on the battlefield and in the council chamber, his previous sins came back to haunt him. Knowing how untrustworthy his brother was, Richard not unnaturally believed the bad news and ordered John’s property seized. The old John might have stormed off to Paris in dudgeon, but the 32-year-old was no longer the ‘child’ of 1194 and calmly refuted Philip’s ‘evidence’ which turned out to be paper-thin. Richard restored his estates, though his suspicions were not entirely assuaged.
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