still in exile, with their children, including the infant William, who had been born at Winchester the previous summer, and whose direct descendants were long afterwards to come to the throne of his grandfather with the accession of the house of Hanover. Even Queen Eleanor was present at this festival, for she had been released for a time at the request of her daughter Matilda.
One more year of the half decade which still remained of life to Henry was to pass with only a slight foreshadowing, near its close, of the anxieties which were to fill the remainder of his days. The first question of importance which arose in 1185 concerned the kingdom of Jerusalem. England had down to this time taken slight and only indirect part in the great movement of the crusades. The Christian states in the Holy Land had existed for nearly ninety years, but with slowly declining strength and defensive power. Recently the rapid progress of Saladin, creating a new Mohammedan empire, and not merely displaying great military and political skill, but bringing under one bond of interest the Saracens of Egypt and Syria, whose conflicts heretofore had been among the best safeguards of the Christian state, threatened the most serious results. The reigning king of Jerusalem at this moment was Baldwin IV, grandson of that Fulk V, Count of Anjou, whom we saw, more than fifty years before this date, handing over his French possessions to his son Geoffrey, newly wedded to Matilda the Empress, and departing for the Holy Land to marry its heiress and become its king. Baldwin was therefore the first cousin of Henry II, and it was not unnatural that his kingdom should turn in the midst of the difficulties that surrounded it to the head of the house of Anjou now so powerful in the west. The embassy which came to seek his cousin’s help was the most dignified and imposing that could be sent from the Holy Land, with Heraclius the patriarch of Jerusalem at its head, supported by the grand-masters of the knights of the Temple and of the Hospital. The grand-master of the Templars died at Verona on the journey, but the survivors landed in England at the end of January, 1185, and Henry who was on his way to York turned back and met them at Reading. There Heraclius described the evils that afflicted the Christian kingdom so eloquently that the king and all the multitude who heard were moved to sighs and tears. He offered to Henry the keys of the tower of David and of the holy sepulchre, and the banner of the kingdom, with the right to the throne itself.
To such an offer in these circumstances there was but one reply to make, and a king like Henry could never have been for a moment in doubt as to what it should be. His case was very different from his grandfather’s when a similar offer was made to him. Not merely did the responsibility of a far larger dominion rest on him, with greater dangers within and without to be watched and overcome, but a still more important consideration was the fact that there was no one of his sons in whose hands his authority could be securely left. His departure would be the signal for a new and disastrous civil war, and we may believe that the character of his sons was a deciding reason with the king. But such an offer, made in such a way, and backed by the religious motives so strong in that age, could not be lightly declined. A great council of the kingdom was summoned to meet in London about the middle of March to consider the offer and the answer to be made. The king of Scotland and his brother David, and the prelates and barons of England, debated the question, and advised Henry not to abandon the duties which rested upon him at home. It is interesting to notice that the obligations which the coronation oath had imposed on the king were called to mind as determining what he ought to do, though probably no more was meant by this than that the appeal which the Church was making in favour of the crusade was balanced by the duty which he had assumed before the Church and under its sanction to govern well his hereditary kingdom. Apparently the patriarch was told that a consultation with the king of France was necessary, and shortly after they all crossed into Normandy. Before the meeting of the council in London Baldwin IV had closed his unhappy reign and was succeeded by his nephew Baldwin V, a child who never reached his majority. In France the embassy succeeded no better. At a conference between the kings the promise was made of ample aid in men and money, but the great hope with which the envoys had started, that they might bring back with them the king of England, or at least one of his sons, to lead the Christian cause in Palestine, was disappointed; and Heraclius set out on his return not merely deeply grieved, but angry with Henry for his refusal to undertake what he believed to be his obvious religious duty.
Between the meeting of the council in London and the crossing into Normandy, Henry had taken steps to carry out an earlier plan of his in regard to his son John. He seems now to have made up his mind that Richard could never be induced to give up Aquitaine or any part of it, and he returned to his earlier idea of a kingdom of Ireland. Immediately after the council he knighted John at Windsor and sent him to take possession of the island, not yet as king but as lord (dominus). On April 25 he landed at Waterford, coming, it is said, with sixty ships and a large force of men-at-arms and foot-soldiers. John was at the time nearly nineteen years old, of an age when men were then expected to have reached maturity, and the prospect of success lay fair before him; but he managed in less than six months to prove conclusively that he was, as yet at least, totally unfit to rule a state. The native chieftains who had accepted his father’s government came in to signify their obedience, but he twitched their long beards and made sport before his attendants of their uncouth manners and dress, and allowed them to go home with anger in their hearts to stir up opposition to his rule. The Archbishop of Dublin and the barons who were most faithful to his father offered him their homage and support, but he neglected their counsels and even disregarded their rights. The military force he had brought over, ample to guard the conquests already made, or even to increase them, he dissipated in useless undertakings, and kept without their pay that he might spend the money on his own amusements, until they abandoned him in numbers, and even went over to his Irish enemies. In a few months he found himself confronted with too many difficulties, and gave up his post, returning to his father with reasons for his failure that put the blame on others and covered up his own defects. Not long afterwards died Pope Lucius III, who had steadily refused to renew, or to put into legal form, the permission which Alexander III had granted to crown one of Henry’s sons king of Ireland; and to his successor, Urban III, new application was at once made in the special interest of John, and this time with success. The pope is said even to have sent a crown made of peacock’s feathers intertwined with gold as a sign of his confirmation of the title.
John was, however, never actually crowned king of Ireland, and indeed it is probable that he never revisited the island. In the summer of the next year, 1186, news came, in the words of a contemporary, “that a certain Irishman had cut off the head of Hugh of Lacy.” Henry is said to have rejoiced at the news, for, though he had never found it possible to get along for any length of time without the help of Hugh of Lacy in Ireland, he had always looked upon his measures and success with suspicion. Now he ordered John to go over at once and seize into his hand Hugh’s land and castles, but John did not leave England. At the end of the year legates to Ireland arrived in England from the pope, one object of whose mission was to crown the king of Ireland, but Henry was by this time so deeply interested in questions that had arisen between himself and the king of France because of the death of his son Geoffrey, the Count of Britanny, that he could not give his attention to Ireland, and with the legates he crossed to Normandy instead, having sent John over in advance.
Affairs in France had followed their familiar course since the conference between Henry and Philip on the subject of the crusade in the spring of 1185. Immediately after that meeting Henry had proceeded with great vigour against Richard. He had Eleanor brought over to Normandy, and then commanded Richard to surrender to his mother all her inheritance under threat of invasion with a great army. Richard, whether moved by the threat or out of respect to his mother, immediately complied, and, we are told,[48] remained at his father’s court “like a well-behaved son,” while Henry in person took possession of Aquitaine. In the meantime the war between Philip II and the Count of Flanders had gone steadily on, the king of England declining to interfere again. At the end of July, 1185, the count had been obliged to yield, and had ceded to Philip Amiens and most of Vermandois, a very important enlargement of territory for the French monarchy. This first great success of the young king of France was followed the next spring by the humiliation and forced submission of the Duke of Burgundy.
In all these events the king of England had taken no active share. He was a mere looker-on, or if he had interfered at all, it was rather to the advantage of Philip, while the rival monarchy in France had not merely increased the territory under its direct control, but taught the great vassals the lesson of obedience, and proclaimed to all the world that the rights of the crown would be everywhere affirmed and enforced. It was clearly the opening of a new era, yet Henry gave not the slightest evidence that he saw it or understood its meaning for himself. While it is certain that Philip had early detected the weakness of the Angevin empire, and had formed his plan for its destruction long before he was able to carry it out, we can only note with surprise that Henry made no change in his policy to meet the new danger of which he had abundant warning. He seems never to have understood that in Philip Augustus he had to deal with a different man from Louis VII. That he continued steadily under the changed circumstances his old policy of non-intervention outside his own frontiers, of preserving peace to the latest possible moment, and of devoting himself to the maintenance and perfection of a strong government wherever he had direct rule, is more creditable to the character of Henry II than to the insight of a statesman responsible for the continuance of a great empire, and offered the realization of a great possibility. To Philip Augustus it was the possibility only which was offered; the empire was still to be created: but while hardly more than a boy, he read the situation with clear insight and saw before him the goal to be reached and the way to reach it, and this he followed with untiring patience to the end of his long reign.
When Henry returned to England at the end of April, 1186, he abandoned all prospect of profiting by the opportunity which still existed, though in diminished degree, of checking in its beginning the ominous growth of Philip’s power, an opportunity which we may believe his grandfather would not have overlooked or neglected. By the end of the summer all chance of this was over, and no policy of safety remained to Henry but a trial of strength to the finish with his crafty suzerain, for Philip had not merely returned successful from his Burgundian expedition, but he had almost without effort at concealment made his first moves against the Angevin power. His opening was the obvious one offered him by the dissensions in Henry’s family, and his first move was as skilful as the latest he ever made. Richard was now on good terms with his father; it would even appear that he had been restored to the rule of Aquitaine; at any rate Henry’s last act before his return to England in April had been to hand over to Richard a great sum of money with directions to subdue his foes. Richard took the money and made successful and cruel war on the Count of Toulouse, on what grounds we know not. Geoffrey, however, offered himself to Philip’s purposes. Henry’s third son seems to have been in character and conduct somewhat like his eldest brother, the young king. He had the same popular gifts and attractive manners; he enjoyed an almost equal renown for knightly accomplishments and for the knightly virtue of “largesse”; and he was, in the same way, bitterly dissatisfied with his own position. He believed that the death of his brother ought to improve his prospects, and his mind was set on having the county of Anjou added to his possessions. When Richard and his father refused him this, he turned to France and betook himself to Paris. Philip received him with open arms, and they speedily became devoted friends. Just what their immediate plans were we cannot say. They evidently had not been made public, and various rumours were in circulation. Some said that Geoffrey would hold Britanny of Philip; or he had been made seneschal of France, an office that ought to go with the county of Anjou; or he was about to invade and devastate Normandy. It is probable that some overt action would have been undertaken very shortly when suddenly, on August 19, Geoffrey died, having been mortally hurt in a tournament, or from an attack of fever, or perhaps from both causes. He was buried in Paris, Philip showing great grief and being, it is said, with difficulty restrained from throwing himself into the grave.
The death of Geoffrey may have made a change in the form of Philip’s plans, and perhaps in the date of his first attempt to carry them out, but not in their ultimate object. It furnished him, indeed, with a new subject of demand on Henry. There had been no lack of subjects in the past, and he had pushed them persistently: the question of Margaret’s dower lands,–the return of the Norman Vexin,–and of the payment of her money allowance, complicated now by her second marriage to Bela, king of Hungary; the standing question of the marriage of Philip’s sister Adela; the dispute about the suzerainty of Auvergne still unsettled; and finally Richard’s war on the Count of Toulouse. Now was added the question of the wardship of Britanny. At the time of his death one child had been born to Geoffrey of his marriage with Constance,–a daughter, Eleanor, who was recognized as the heiress of the county. Without delay Philip sent an embassy to Henry in England and demanded the wardship of the heiress, with threats of war if the demand was not complied with. The justice of Philip’s claim in this case was not entirely clear since he was not the immediate lord of Britanny, but kings had not always respected the rights of their vassals in the matter of rich heiresses, and possibly Geoffrey had actually performed the homage to Philip which he was reported to be planning to do. In any case it was impossible for Henry to accept Philip’s view of his rights, but war at the moment would have been inconvenient, and so he sent a return embassy with Ranulf Glanvill at its head, and succeeded in getting a truce until the middle of the winter. Various fruitless negotiations followed, complicated by an attack made by the garrison of Gisors on French workmen found building an opposing castle just over the border. Henry himself crossed to Normandy about the middle of February, 1187, but personal interviews with Philip led to no result, and the situation drifted steadily toward war. The birth of a posthumous son to Geoffrey in March–whom the Bretons insisted on calling Arthur, though Henry wished to give him his own name, a sure sign of their wish for a more independent position–brought about no change. Philip had protected himself from all danger of outside interference by an alliance with the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and was determined on war. By the middle of May both sides were ready. Henry divided his army into four divisions and adopted a purely defensive policy.
Philip’s attack fell on the lands of disputed allegiance on the eastern edge of the duchy of Aquitaine near his own possessions, and after a few minor successes he laid siege to the important castle of Chateauroux. This was defended by Richard in person, with his brother John, but Philip pressed the siege until Henry drew near with an army, when he retired a short distance and awaited the next move. Negotiations followed, in the course of which the deep impression that the character of Philip had already made on his great vassals is clearly to be seen.[49] Henry’s desire was to avoid a battle, and this was probably the best policy for him; it certainly was unless he were willing, as he seems not to have been, to bring on at once the inevitable mortal struggle between the houses of Capet and Anjou. Unimportant circumstances on both sides came in to favour Henry’s wish and to prevent a battle, and finally Henry himself, by a most extraordinary act of folly, threw into the hands of Philip the opportunity of gaining a greater advantage for his ultimate purposes than he could hope to gain at that time from any victory. Henry’s great danger was Richard. In the situation it was incumbent on him from every consideration of policy to keep Richard satisfied, and to prevent not merely the division of the Angevin strength, but the reinforcement of the enemy with the half of it. He certainly had had experience enough of Richard’s character to know what to expect. He ought by that time to have been able to read Philip Augustus’s. And yet he calmly proceeded to a step from which, it is hardly too much to say, all his later troubles came through the suspicion he aroused in Richard’s mind,–a step so unaccountable that we are tempted to reject our single, rather doubtful account of it. He wrote a letter to Philip proposing that Adela should be married to John, who should then be invested with all the French fiefs held by the house of Anjou except Normandy, which with the kingdom of England should remain to Richard.[50] If Henry was blind enough to suppose that the Duke of Aquitaine could be reconciled to such an arrangement, Philip saw at once what the effect of the proposal would be, and he sent the letter to Richard.
The immediate result was a treaty of peace to continue in force for two years, brought about apparently by direct negotiations between Richard and Philip, but less unfavourable to Henry than might have been expected. It contained, according to our French authorities, the very probable agreement that the points in dispute between the two kings should be submitted to the decision of the curia regis of France, and Philip was allowed to retain the lordships of Issoudun and Freteval, which he had previously occupied, as pledges for the carrying out of the treaty. The ultimate result of Philip’s cunning was that Richard deserted his father and went home with the king of France, and together they lived for a time in the greatest intimacy. Philip, it seemed, now loved Richard “as his own soul,” and showed him great honour. Every day they ate at table from the same plate, and at night they slept in the same bed. One is reminded of Philip’s ardent love for Geoffrey, and certain suspicions inevitably arise in the mind. But at any rate the alarm of Henry was excited by the new intimacy, and he did not venture to go over to England as he wished to do until he should know what the outcome was to be. He sent frequent messengers to Richard, urging him to return and promising to grant him everything that he could justly claim, but without effect. At one time Richard pretended to be favourably inclined, and set out as if to meet his father, but instead he fell upon the king’s treasure at Chinon and carried it off to Aquitaine to use in putting his own castles into a state of defence. His father, however, forgave even this and continued to send for him, and at last he yielded. Together they went to Angers, and there in a great assembly Richard performed liege homage to his father once more and swore fealty to him “against all men,” a fact which would seem to show that Richard had in some formal way renounced his fealty while at Philip’s court, though we have no account of his doing so. During this period, in September, 1187, an heir was born to King Philip, the future Louis VIII.
As this year drew to its close frequent letters and messengers from the Holy Land made known to the west one terrible disaster after another. Saladin with a great army had fallen on the weak and divided kingdom and had won incredible successes. The infant king, Baldwin V, had died before these events began, and his mother Sibyl was recognized as queen. She immediately, against the expressed wish of the great barons, gave the crown to her husband, Guy of Lusignan. He was a brave man and an earnest defender of the Holy Land, but he could not accomplish the impossible task of maintaining a kingdom, itself so weak, in the face of open and secret treachery. In October the news reached Europe of the utter defeat of the Christians, of the capture of the king, and worse still of the true Cross by the infidels. The pope, Urban III, died of grief at the tidings. His successor, Gregory VIII, at once urged Europe to a new crusade in a long and vigorous appeal. Very soon afterwards followed the news of the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin. The Emperor Frederick was anxious to put himself at the head of the armies of Christendom, as he was entitled to do as sovereign of the Holy Roman Empire, and lead them to recover the holy places. But while most princes delayed and waited to know what others would do, the impulsive and emotional Richard took the cross the next morning, men said, after he had learned the news. This he did without the knowledge of his father who was shocked to learn of it, and shut himself up for days, understanding more clearly than did his son what the absence of the heir to the throne on such a long and uncertain expedition would mean at such a time.
The advisability, the possibility even, of such a crusade would all depend upon Philip, and the movements of Philip just then were very disquieting. About the beginning of the new year, 1188, he returned from a conference with the Emperor Frederick, which in itself could bode no good to the father-in-law and supporter of Henry the Lion, and immediately began collecting a large army, “impudently boasting,” says the English chronicler of Henry’s life, “that he would lay waste Normandy and the other lands of the king of England that side the sea, if he did not return to him Gisors and all that belonged to it or make his son Richard take to wife Adela the daughter of his father Louis.” Philip evidently did not intend to drop everything to go to the rescue of Jerusalem nor was he inclined at any expense to his own interests to make it easy for those who would. Henry who was already at the coast on the point of crossing to England, at once turned back when he heard of Philip’s threats, and arranged for a conference with him on January 21. Here was the opportunity for those who were urging on the crusade. The kings of France and England with their chief barons were to be together while the public excitement was still high and the Christian duty of checking the Saracen conquest still keenly felt. The Archbishop of Tyre, who had come to France on this mission, gave up all his other undertakings as soon as he heard of the meeting and resolved to make these great princes converts to his cause. It was not an easy task. Neither Henry nor Philip was made of crusading material, and both were far more interested in the tasks of constructive statesmanship which they had on hand than in the fate of the distant kingdom of Jerusalem. A greater obstacle than this even was their fear of each other, of what evil one might do in the absence of the other, the unwillingness of either to pledge himself to anything definite until he knew what the other was going to do, and the difficulty of finding any arrangement which would bind them both at once. It is practically certain that they yielded at last only to the pressure of public opinion which must have been exceedingly strong in the excitement of the time and under the impassioned eloquence of a messenger direct from the scene of the recent disasters. It was a great day for the Church when so many men of the highest rank, kings and great barons, took the cross, and it was agreed that the spot should be marked by a new church, and that it should bear the name of the Holy Field.
Whatever may be true of Philip, there can, I think, be no doubt that, when Henry took the cross, he intended to keep his vow. It was agreed between them that all things should remain as they were until their return; and Henry formally claimed of his suzerain the protection of his lands during his absence, and Philip accepted the duty.[51] A few days after taking the cross Henry held an assembly at Le Mans and ordered a tax in aid of his crusade. This was the famous Saladin tithe, which marks an important step in the history of modern taxation. It was modelled on an earlier tax for the same purpose which had been agreed upon between France and England in 1166, but it shows a considerable development upon that, both in conception and in the arrangements for carrying out the details of the tax. The ordinance provided for the payment by all, except those who were themselves going on the crusade, of a tenth, a “tithe,” of both personal property and income, precious stones being exempt and the necessary tools of their trade of both knights and clerks. Somewhat elaborate machinery was provided for the collection of the tax, and the whole was placed under the sanction of the Church. A similar ordinance was shortly adopted by Philip for France, and on February 11, Henry, then in England, held a council at Geddington, in Northamptonshire, and ordained the same tax for England.
In the meantime the crusade had received a check, and partly, at least, through the fault of its most eager leader, Richard of Poitou. A rebellion had broken out against him, and he was pushing the war with his usual rapidity and his usual severities, adopting now, however, the interesting variation of remitting all other penalties if his prisoners would take the cross. If Richard was quickly master of the rebellion, it served on the one hand to embitter him still more against his father, from the report, which in his suspicious attitude he was quick to believe, that Henry’s money and encouragement had supported the rebels against him; and on the other, to lead to hostilities with the Count of Toulouse. The count had not neglected the opportunity of Richard’s troubles to get a little satisfaction for his own grievances, and had seized some merchants from the English lands. Richard responded with a raid into Toulouse, in which he captured the chief minister of the count and refused ransom for him. Then the count in his turn arrested a couple of English knights of some standing at court, who were returning from a pilgrimage to St. James of Compostella. Still Richard refused either ransom or exchange, and an appeal to the king of France led to no result. Richard told his father afterwards that Philip had encouraged his attack on the count. Soon, however, his rapid successes in Toulouse, where he was taking castle after castle, compelled Philip to more decided interference; probably he was not sorry to find a reason both to postpone the crusade and to renew the attack on the Angevin lands. First he sent an embassy to Henry in England to protest against Richard’s doings, and received the reply that the war was against Henry’s will, and that he could not justify it. With a great army Philip then invaded Auvergne, captured Chateauroux and took possession of almost all Berri. An embassy sent to bring Philip to a better mind was refused all satisfaction, and Henry, seeing that his presence was necessary in France, crossed the channel for the last of many times and landed in Normandy on July 1, 1188.
All things were now, indeed, drawing to a close with Henry, who was not merely worn out and ill, but was plunged into a tide of events flowing swiftly against all the currents of his own life. Swept away by the strong forces of a new age which he could no longer control, driven and thwarted by men, even his own sons, whose ideals of conduct and ambition were foreign to his own and never understood, compelled to do things he had striven to avoid, and to see helplessly the policy of his long reign brought to naught, the coming months were for him full of bitter disasters which could end only, as they did, in heartbreak and death. Not yet, however, was he brought to this point, and he got together a great army and made ready to fight if necessary. But first, true to his policy of negotiation, he sent another embassy to Philip and demanded restitution under the threat of renouncing his fealty. Philip’s answer was a refusal to stop his hostilities until he should have occupied all Berri and the Norman Vexin. War was now inevitable, but it lingered for some time without events of importance, and on August 16 began a new three days’ conference at the historic meeting-place of the kings near Gisors. This also ended fruitlessly; some of the French even attacked the English position, and then cut down in anger the old elm tree under which so many conferences had taken place. Philip was, however, in no condition to push the war upon which he had determined. The crusading ardour of France which he himself did not feel, and which had failed to bring about a peace at Gisors, expressed itself in another way; and the Count of Flanders and Theobald of Blois and other great barons of Philip notified him that they would take no part in a war against Christians until after their return from Jerusalem.
Philip’s embarrassment availed Henry but little, although his own force remained undiminished. A sudden dash at Mantes on August 30, led only to the burning of a dozen or more French villages, for Philip by a very hurried march from Chaumont was able to throw himself into the city, and Henry withdrew without venturing a pitched battle. On the next day Richard, who till then had been with his father, went off to Berri to push with some vigour the attack on Philip’s conquests there, promising his father faithful service. A double attack on the French, north and south, was not a bad plan as Philip was then situated, but for some reason not clear to us Henry seems to have let matters drift and made no use of the great army which he had got together. The king of France, however, saw clearly what his next move should be, and he sent to propose peace to Henry on the basis of a restoration of conquests on both sides. Henry was ever ready for peace, and a new conference took place at Chatillon on the Indre, where it was found that Philip’s proposition was the exchange of his conquests in Berri for those of Richard in Toulouse, and the handing over to him of the castle of Pacy, near Mantes, as a pledge that the treaty would be kept. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Philip knew that this demand would be refused, as it was, and that he had only made the proposal of peace in order to gain time to collect a new force. In this he must now have succeeded, for he immediately took the offensive in Berri and added somewhat to his conquests, probably by hiring the German mercenaries whom we learn he shortly afterwards defrauded of their pay.
In the meantime Richard and Philip were drawing together again, in what way exactly we do not know. We suspect some underhanded work of Philip’s which would be easy enough. Evidently Richard was still very anxious about the succession, and it seems to have occurred to him to utilize his father’s desire for peace on the basis of Philip’s latest proposition, to gain a definite recognition of his rights. At any rate we are told that he brought about the next meeting between the kings, and that he offered to submit the question of the rights or wrongs of his war with Toulouse to the decision of the French king’s court. This dramatic and fateful conference which marks the success of Philip’s intrigues began on November 18 at Bonmoulins, and lasted three days. Henry was ready to accept the proposal now made that all things should be restored on both sides to the condition which existed at the taking of the cross, but here Richard interposed a decided objection. He could not see the justice of being made to restore his conquests in Toulouse which he was holding in domain, and which were worth a thousand marks a year, to get back himself some castles in Berri which were not of his domain but only held of him. Then Philip for him, evidently by previous agreement, brought forward the question of the succession. The new proposition was that Richard and Adela should be married and that homage should be paid to Richard as heir from all the Angevin dominions. It seems likely, though it is not so stated, that on this condition Richard would have agreed to the even exchange of conquests. As time went on the discussion, which had been at first peaceable and calm, became more and more excited so that on the third day the attendants came armed. On that day harsh words and threats were exchanged. To Richard’s direct demand that he should make him secure in the succession, Henry replied that he could not do it in the existing circumstances, for, if he did, he would seem to be yielding to threats and not acting of his own will. Then Richard, crying out that he could now believe things that had seemed incredible to him, turned at once to Philip, threw off his sword, and in the presence of his father and all the bystanders offered him his homage for all the French fiefs, including Toulouse, saying his father’s rights during his lifetime and his own allegiance to his father. Philip accepted this offer without scruple, and promised to Richard the restoration of what he had taken in Berri, with Issoudun and all that he had conquered of the English possessions since the beginning of his reign.
To one at least of the historians of the time Richard’s feeling about the succession did not seem strange, nor can it to us.[52] For this act of Richard, after which peace was never restored between himself and his father, Henry must share full blame with him. Whether he was actuated by a blind affection for his youngest son, or by dislike and distrust of Richard, or by a remembrance of his troubles with his eldest son, his refusal to recognize Richard as his heir and to allow him to receive the homage of the English and French barons, a custom sanctioned by the practice of a hundred years in England and of a much longer period in France, was a political and dynastic blunder of a most astonishing kind. Nothing could show more clearly how little he understood Philip Augustus or the danger which now threatened the Angevin house. As for Richard, he may have been quick-tempered, passionate, and rash, not having the well-poised mind of the diplomatist or the statesman, at least not one of the high order demanded by the circumstances, and deceived by his own anger and by the machinations of Philip; yet we can hardly blame him for offering his homage to the king of France. Nor can we call the act illegal, though it was extreme and unusual, and might seem almost revolutionary. An appeal to his overlord was in fact the only legal means left him of securing his inheritance, and it bound Philip not to recognize any one else as the heir of Henry. Philip was clearly within his legal rights in accepting the offer of Richard, and the care with which Richard’s declaration was made to keep within the law, reserving all the rights which should be reserved, shows that however impulsive his act may have seemed to the bystanders, it really had been carefully considered and planned in advance. The conference broke up after this with no other result than a truce to January 13, and Richard rode off with Philip without taking leave of his father.
For all that had taken place Henry did not give up his efforts to bring back Richard to himself, but they were without avail. He himself, burdened with anxiety and torn by conflicting emotions, was growing more and more ill. The scanty attendance at his Christmas court showed him the opinion of the barons of the hopelessness of his cause and the prudence of making themselves secure with Richard. He was not well enough to meet his enemies in the conference proposed for January 13, and it was postponed first to February 2 and then to Easter, April 9. It was now, however, too late for anything to be accomplished by diplomacy. Henry could not yield to the demands made of him until he was beaten in the field, nor were they likely to be modified. Indeed we find at this time the new demand appearing that John should be made to go on the crusade when Richard did. Even the intervention of the pope, who was represented at the conferences finally held soon after Easter and early in June, by a cardinal legate, in earnest effort for the crusade, served only to show how completely Philip was the man of a new age. To the threat of the legate, who saw that the failure to make peace was chiefly due to him, that he would lay France under an interdict if he did not come to terms with the king of England, Philip replied in defiant words that he did not fear the sentence and would not regard it, for it would be unjust, since the Roman Church had no right to interfere within France between the king and his rebellious vassal and he overbore the legate and compelled him to keep silence.
After this conference events drew swiftly to an end. The allies pushed the war, and in a few days captured Le Mans, forcing Henry to a sudden flight in which he was almost taken prisoner. A few days later still Philip stormed the walls of Tours and took that city. Henry was almost a fugitive with few followers and few friends in the hereditary county from which his house was named. He had turned aside from the better fortified and more easily defended Normandy against the advice of all, and now there was nothing for him but to yield. Terms of peace were settled in a final conference near Colombieres on July 4, 1189. At the meeting Henry was so ill that he could hardly sit his horse, though Richard and Philip had sneered at his illness and called it pretence, but he resolutely endured the pain as he did the humiliation of the hour. Philip’s demands seem surprisingly small considering the man and the completeness of his victory, but there were no grounds on which he could demand from Henry any great concession. One thing he did insist upon, and that was for him probably the most important advantage which he gained. Henry must acknowledge himself entirely at his mercy, as a contumacious vassal, and accept any sentence imposed on him. In the great task which Philip Augustus had before him, already so successfully begun, of building up in France a strong monarchy and of forcing many powerful and independent vassals into obedience to the crown, nothing could be more useful than this precedent, so dramatic and impressive, of the unconditional submission of the most powerful of all the vassals, himself a crowned king. All rights over the disputed county of Auvergne were abandoned. Richard was acknowledged heir and was to receive the homage of all barons. Those who had given in their allegiance to Richard should remain with him till the crusade, which was to be begun the next spring, and 20,000 marks were to be paid the king of France for his expenses on the captured castles, which were to be returned to Henry.
These were the principal conditions, and to all these Henry agreed as he must. That he intended to give up all effort and rest satisfied with this result is not likely, and words he is said to have used indicate the contrary, but his disease and his broken spirits had brought him nearer the end than he knew. One more blow, for him the severest of all, remained for him to suffer. He found at the head of the list of those who had abandoned his allegiance the name of John. Then his will forsook him and his heart broke. He turned his face to the wall and cried: “Let everything go as it will; I care no more for myself or for the world.” On July 6 he died at Chinon, murmuring almost to the last, “Shame on a conquered king,” and abandoned by all his family except his eldest son Geoffrey, the son, it was said, of a woman, low in character as in birth.
[48] Gesia Henrici, i. 338.
[49] Gervase of Canterbury, i. 371; Giraldus Cambrensis, De Principis Instructione, iii. 2. (Opera, viii. 231.)
[50] Giraldus Cambrensis, De Principis Instructione. (Opera, viii. 232.)
[51] Ralph de Diceto, ii. 55.
[52] Gervase of Canterbury, i. 435.
CHAPTER XVII
RICHARD I AND THE CRUSADE
The death of Henry II may be taken to mark the close of an epoch in English history, the epoch which had begun with the Norman Conquest. We may call it, for want of a better name, the feudal age,–the age during which the prevailing organization, ideals, and practices had been Norman-feudal. It was an age in which Normandy and the continental interests of king and barons, and the continental spirit and methods, had imposed themselves upon the island realm. It was a time in which the great force in the state and the chief factor in its history had been the king. The interests of the barons had been on the whole identical with his. The rights which feudal law and custom gave him had been practically unquestioned, save by an always reluctant Church, and baronial opposition had taken the form of a resistance to his general power rather than of a denial of special rights. Now a change had silently begun which was soon to show itself openly and to lead to great results. This change involved only slowly and indirectly the general power of the king, but it takes its beginning from two sources: the rising importance of England in the total dominions of the king, and the disposition to question certain of his rights. Normandy was losing its power over the English baron, or if this is too strong a statement for anything that was yet true, he was beginning to identify himself more closely with England and to feel less interest in sacrifices and burdens which inured only to the benefit of the king and a policy foreign to the country. To the disposition to question the king’s actions and demands Henry had himself contributed not a little by the frequency and greatness of those demands, and by the small regard to the privileges of his vassals shown in the development of his judicial reforms and in his financial measures these last indeed under Henry II violated the baronial rights less directly but, as they were carried on by his sons, they attacked them in a still more decisive way. When once this disposition had begun, the very strength of the Norman monarchy was an element of weakness, for it gave to individual complaints a unity and a degree of importance and interest for the country which they might not otherwise have had. In this development the reign of Richard, though differing but little in outward appearance from his father’s, was a time of rapid preparation, leading directly to the struggles of his brother’s reign and to the first great forward step, the act which marks the full beginning of the new era.
Richard could have felt no grief at the death of his father, and he made no show of any. Geoffrey had gone for the burial to the nunnery of Fontevrault, a favourite convent of Henry’s, and there Richard appeared as soon as he heard the news, and knelt beside the body of his father, which was said to have bled on his approach, as long as it would take to say the Lord’s prayer. Then we are told he turned at once to business. The first act which he performed, according to one of our authorities, on stepping outside the church was characteristic of the beginning of his reign. One of the most faithful of his father’s later servants was William Marshal, who had been earlier in the service of his son Henry. He had remained with the king to the last, and in the hurried retreat from Le Mans he had guarded the rear. On Richard’s coming up in pursuit he had turned upon him with his lance and might have killed him as he was without his coat of mail, but instead, on Richard’s crying out to be spared, he had only slain his horse, and so checked the pursuit, though he had spared him with words of contempt which Richard must have remembered: “No, I will not slay you,” he had said; “the devil may slay you.” Now both he and his friends were anxious as to the reception he would meet with from the prince, but Richard was resolved to start from the beginning as king and not as Count of Poitou. He called William Marshal to him, referred to the incident, granted him his full pardon, confirmed the gift to him which Henry had recently made him of the hand of the heiress of the Earl of Pembroke and her rich inheritance, and commissioned him to go at once to England to take charge of the king’s interests there until his own arrival. This incident was typical of Richard’s action in general. Henry’s faithful servants suffered nothing for their fidelity in opposing his son; the barons who had abandoned him before his death, to seek their own selfish advantage because they believed the tide was turning against him, were taught that Richard was able to estimate their conduct at its real worth.
Henry on his death-bed had made no attempt to dispose of the succession. On the retreat from Le Mans he had sent strict orders to Normandy, to give up the castles there in the event of his death to no one but John. But the knowledge of John’s treason would have changed that, even if it had been possible to set aside the treaty of Colombieres. There was no disposition anywhere to question Richard’s right. On July 20 at Rouen he was formally girt with the sword of the duchy of Normandy, by the archbishop and received the homage of the clergy and other barons. He at once confirmed to his brother John, who had joined him, the grants made or promised him by their father: L4000 worth of land in England, the county of Mortain in Normandy, and the hand and inheritance of the heiress of the Earl of Gloucester. To his other brother, Geoffrey, he gave the archbishopric of York, carrying out a wish which Henry had expressed in his last moments; and Matilda, the daughter of Henry the Lion, was given as his bride to another Geoffrey, the heir of the county of Perche, a border land whose alliance would be of importance in case of trouble with France. Two days later he had an interview with King Philip at the old meeting-place near Gisors. There Philip quickly made evident the fact that in his eyes the king of England was a different person from the rebellious Count of Poitou, and he met Richard with his familiar demand that the Norman Vexin should be given up. Without doubt the point of view had changed as much to Richard, and he adopted his father’s tactics and promised to marry Adela. He also promised Philip 4000 marks in addition to the 20,000 which Henry had agreed to pay. With these promises Philip professed himself content. He received Richard’s homage for all the French fiefs, and the treaty lately made with Henry was confirmed, including the agreement to start on the crusade the next spring.
In the meantime by the command of Richard his mother, Eleanor, was set free from custody in England; and assuming a royal state she made a progress through the kingdom and gave orders for the release of prisoners. About the middle of August Richard himself landed in England with John. No one had any grounds on which to expect a particularly good reign from him, but he was everywhere joyfully received, especially by his mother and the barons at Winchester. A few days later the marriage of John to Isabel of Gloucester was celebrated, in spite of a formal protest entered by Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, because the parties were related within the prohibited degrees. The coronation took place on Sunday, September 3, and was celebrated apparently with much care to follow the old ritual correctly and with much formal pomp and ceremony, so that it became a new precedent for later occasions down to the present day.
Richard was then just coming to the end of his thirty-second year. In physical appearance he was not like either the Norman or the Angevin type, but was taller and of a more delicate and refined cast, and his portrait shows a rather handsome face. In character and ambitions also he was not a descendant of his father’s line. The humdrum business of ruling the state, of developing its law and institutions, of keeping order and doing justice, or even of following a consistent and long-continued policy of increasing his power or enlarging his territories, was little to his taste. He was determined, as his father had been, to be a strong king and to put down utterly every rebellion, but his determination to be obeyed was rather a resolution of the moment than a means to any foreseen and planned conclusion. He has been called by one who knew the time most thoroughly “the creation and impersonation of his age,” and nothing better can be said. The first age of a self-conscious chivalry, delighting intensely in the physical life, in the sense of strength and power, that belonged to baron and knight, and in the stirring scenes of castle and tournament and distant adventure, the age of the troubadour, of an idealized warfare and an idealized love, the age which had expressed one side of itself in his brother Henry, expressed a more manly side in Richard. He was first of all a warrior; not a general but a fighter. The wild enthusiasm of the hand-to-hand conflict, the matching of skill against skill and of strength against strength, was an intense pleasure to him, and his superiority in the tactics of the battle-field, in the planning and management of a fight, or even of a series of attacks or defences, a march or a retreat, placed him easily in the front rank of commanders in an age when the larger strategy of the highest order of generalship had little place. Of England he had no knowledge. He was born there, and he had paid it two brief visits before his coronation, but he knew nothing of the language or the people. He had spent all his life in his southern dominions, and the south had made him what he was. His interest in England was chiefly as a source of supplies, and to him the crusade was, by the necessities of his nature, of greater importance than the real business of a king. For England itself the period was one during which there was no king, though it was by the authority of an absent king that a series of great ministers carried forward the development of the machinery and law which had begun to be put into organized form in Henry’s reign, and carried forward also the training of the classes who had a share in public affairs for the approaching crisis of their history. From this point of view the exceedingly burdensome demands of Richard upon his English subjects are the most important feature of his time.
At the beginning of his reign Richard had, like his father, a great work to do, great at least from his point of view; but the difference between the two tasks shows how thoroughly Henry had performed his. Richard’s problem was to get as much money as possible for the expenses of the crusade, and to arrange things, if possible, in such a shape that the existing peace and quiet would be undisturbed during his absence. About the business of raising money he set immediately and thoroughly. The medieval king had many things to sell which are denied the modern sovereign: offices, favour, and pardons, the rights of the crown, and even in some cases the rights of the purchaser himself. This was Richard’s chief resource. “The king exposed for sale,” as a chronicler of the time said,[53] “everything that he had”; or as another said,[54] “whoever wished, bought of the king his own and others’ rights”: not merely was the willing purchaser welcome, but the unwilling was compelled to buy wherever possible. Ranulf Glanvill, the great judge, Henry’s justiciar and “the eye of the king,” was compelled to resign and to purchase his liberty with the great sum, it is asserted, of L15,000. In most of the counties the former sheriffs were removed and fined, and the offices thus vacated were sold to the highest bidder. The Bishop of Durham, Hugh de Puiset, bought the earldom of Northumberland and the justiciarship of England; the Bishop of Winchester and the Abbot of St. Edmund’s bought manors which belonged of right to their churches; the Bishop of Coventry bought a priory and the sheriffdoms of three counties; even the king’s own devoted follower, William of Longchamp, paid L3000 to be chancellor of the kingdom. Sales like these were not unusual in the practice of kings, nor would they have occasioned much remark at the time, if the matter had not been carried to such extremes, and the rights and interests of the kingdom so openly disregarded. The most flagrant case of this sort was that relating to the liege homage of the king of Scotland, which Henry had exacted by formal treaty from William the Lion and his barons. In December, 1189, King William was escorted to Richard at Canterbury by Geoffrey, Archbishop of York and the barons of Yorkshire, and there did homage for his English lands, but was, on a payment of 10,000 marks, released from whatever obligations he had assumed in addition to those of former Scottish kings. Nothing could show more clearly than this how different were the interests of Richard from his father’s, or how little he troubled himself about the future of his kingdom.
Already before this incident, which preceded Richard’s departure by only a few days, many of his arrangements for the care of the kingdom in his absence had been made. At a great council held at Pipewell abbey near Geddington on September 15, vacant bishoprics were filled with men whose names were to be conspicuous in the period now beginning. Richard’s chancellor, William Longchamp, was made Bishop of Ely; Richard Fitz Nigel, of the family of Roger of Salisbury, son of Nigel, Bishop of Ely, and like his ancestors long employed in the exchequer and to be continued in that service, was made Bishop of London; Hubert Walter, a connexion of Ranulf Glanvill, and trained by him for more important office than was now intrusted to him, became Bishop of Salisbury; and Geoffrey’s appointment to York was confirmed. The responsibility of the justiciarship was at the same time divided between Bishop Hugh of Durham and the Earl of Essex, who, however, shortly died, and in his place was appointed William Longchamp. With them were associated as assistant justices five others, of whom two were William Marshal, now possessing the earldom of Pembroke, and Geoffrey Fitz Peter himself afterwards justiciar. At Canterbury, in December, further dispositions were made. Richard had great confidence in his mother, and with good reason. Although she was now nearly seventy years of age, she was still vigorous in mind and body, and she was always faithful to the interests of her sons, and wise and skilful in the assistance which she gave them. Richard seems to have left her with some ultimate authority in the state, and he richly provided for her wants. He assigned her the provision which his father had already made for her, and added also that which Henry I had made for his queen and Stephen for his, so that, as was remarked at the time, she had the endowment of three queens. John was not recognized as heir nor assigned any authority. Perhaps Richard hoped to escape in this way the troubles of his father, but, perhaps remembering also how much a scanty income had had to do with his brother Henry’s discontent, he gave him almost the endowment of a king. Besides the grants already made to him in Normandy, and rich additions since his coming to England, he now conferred on him all the royal revenues of the four south-western counties of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, and Somerset. He already held the counties of Derby and Nottingham. Richard plainly intended that political rights should not go with these grants, but he shows very little knowledge of John’s character or appreciation of the temptation which he put in his way in the possession of a great principality lacking only the finishing touches.
John’s position was not the only source from which speedy trouble was threatened when Richard crossed to Normandy on December 11. He had prepared another, equally certain, in the arrangement which had been made for the justiciarship. It was absurd to expect Hugh of Puiset and William Longchamp to work in the same yoke. In spirit and birth Hugh was an aristocrat of the highest type. Of not remote royal descent, a relative of the kings both of England and France, he was a proud, worldly-minded, intensely ambitious prelate of the feudal sort and of great power, almost a reigning prince in the north. Longchamp was of the class of men who rise in the service of kings. Not of peasant birth, though but little above it, he owed everything to his zealous devotion to the interests of Richard, and, as is usually the case with such men, he had an immense confidence in himself; he was determined to be master, and he was as proud of his position and abilities as was the Bishop of Durham of his blood. Besides this he was naturally of an overbearing disposition and very contemptuous of those whom he regarded as inferior to himself in any particular. Hugh in turn felt, no doubt, a great contempt for him, but Longchamp had no hesitation in measuring himself with the bishop. Soon after the departure of the king he turned Hugh out of the exchequer and took his county of Northumberland away from him. Other high-handed proceedings followed, and many appeals against his chancellor were carried to Richard in France. To rearrange matters a great council was summoned to meet in Normandy about the end of winter. The result was that Richard sustained his minister as Longchamp had doubtless felt sure would be the case. The Humber was made a dividing line between the two justiciars, while the pope was asked to make Longchamp legate in England during the absence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was going on the crusade. Perhaps Richard now began to suspect that he had been preparing trouble for England instead of peace, for at the same time he exacted an oath from his brothers, Geoffrey, whose troubles with his church of York had already begun, and John, not to return to England for three years; but John was soon after released from his oath at the request of his mother.
Richard was impatient to be gone on the crusade, and he might now believe that England could be safely left to itself; but many other things delayed the expedition, and the setting out was finally postponed, by agreement with Philip, to June 24. The third crusade is the most generally interesting of all the series, because of the place which it has taken in literature; because of the greatness of its leaders and their exploits; of the knightly character of Saladin himself; of the pathetic fate of the old Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who lost his life and sacrificed most of his army in an attempt to force his way overland through Asia Minor; and of its real failure after so great an expenditure of life and effort and so many minor successes–the most brilliant of all the crusades, the one great crusade of the age of chivalry: but it concerns the history of England even less than does the continental policy of her kings. It belongs rather to the personal history of Richard, and as such it serves to explain his character and to show why England was left to herself during his reign.
Richard and Philip met at Vezelai at the end of June, 1190, to begin the crusade. There they made a new treaty of alliance and agreed to the equal division of all the advantages to be gained in the expedition, and from thence Richard marched down the Rhone to Marseilles, where he took ship on August 7, and, by leisurely stages along the coast of Italy, went on to Messina which he reached on September 23. Much there was to occupy Richard’s attention in Sicily. Philip had already reached Messina before him, and many questions arose between them, the most important of which was that of Richard’s marriage. Towards the end of the winter Queen Eleanor came to Sicily, bringing with her Berengaria, the daughter of the king of Navarre, whom Richard had earlier known and admired, and whom he had now decided to marry. Naturally Philip objected, since Richard had definitely promised to marry his sister Adela; but now he flatly refused to marry one of whose relations with his father evil stories were told. By the intervention of the Count of Flanders a new treaty was made, and Richard was released from his engagement, paying 10,000 marks to the king of France. Quarrels with the inhabitants of Messina, due partly to the lawlessness of the crusaders and partly to Richard’s overbearing disposition, led to almost open hostilities, and indirectly to jealousy on the part of the French. Domestic politics in the kingdom of Sicily were a further source of trouble. Richard’s brother-in-law, King William, had died a year before the arrival of the crusaders, and the throne was in dispute between Henry VI, the new king of Germany, who had married Constance, William’s aunt and heiress, and Tancred, an illegitimate descendant of the Norman house. Tancred was in possession, and to Richard, no doubt, the support of Sicily at the time seemed more important than the abstract question of right or the distant effect of his policy on the crusade. Accordingly a treaty was made, Tancred was recognized as king, and a large sum of money was paid to Richard; but to Henry VI the treaty was a new cause of hostility against the king of England, added to his relationship with the house of Guelf. The winter in Sicily, which to the modern mind seems an unnecessary waste of time, had added thus to the difficulties of the crusade new causes of ill-feeling between the French and English, and given a new reason for suspicion to the Germans.
It was only on April 10, 1191, that Richard at last set sail on the real crusade. He sent on a little before him his intended bride, Berengaria, with his sister Joanna, the widowed queen of Sicily. The voyage proved a long and stormy one, and it was not until May 6 that the fleet came together, with some losses, in the harbour of Limasol in Cyprus. The ruler of Cyprus, Isaac, of the house of Comnenus, who called himself emperor, showed so inhospitable a mein that Richard felt called upon to attack and finally to overthrow and imprison him and to take possession of the island. This conquest, in a moment of anger and quite in accordance with the character of Richard, though hardly to be justified even by the international law of that time, was in the end the most important and most permanent success of the third crusade. Shortly before his return home Richard gave the island to Guy of Lusignan, to make up to him his loss of the kingdom of Jerusalem; and his descendants and their successors retained it for four centuries, an outpost of Christendom against the advancing power of the Turks. In Cyprus Richard was married to Berengaria, and on June 5 he set sail for Acre, where he arrived on the 8th.
The siege of the important port and fortress of Acre, which had been taken by Saladin shortly before the fall of Jerusalem, had been begun by Guy of Lusignan at the end of August, 1189, as the first step toward the recovery of his kingdom. Saladin, recognizing the importance of the post, had come up with an army a few days later, and had in turn besieged the besiegers. This situation had not materially changed at the time of Richard’s arrival. Both the town and the besiegers’ camp had remained open to the sea, but though many reinforcements of new crusaders had come to the Christians almost from the beginning of the siege, little real progress had been made; even the arrival of King Philip in April had made no important change. Richard, on landing, found a condition of things that required the exercise of the utmost tact and skill. Not merely was the military problem one of the greatest difficulty, but the bitter factional dissensions of the native lords of Palestine made a successful issue almost hopeless. Guy of Lusignan had never been a popular king, and during the siege his wife Sibyl and their two daughters had died, while his rival, Conrad marquis of Montferrat, had persuaded his sister Isabel to divorce her husband and to marry him. The result was a conflict for the crown, which divided the interests and embittered the spirits of those whom the crusaders had come to aid. Philip had declared for Conrad. Guy was a man somewhat of Richard’s own type, and he would have been attracted to him apart from the natural effect of Philip’s action. One who is disposed to deny to Richard the qualities of the highest generalship must admit that he handled the difficult and complicated affairs he had to control with great patience and unusual self-command, and that he probably accomplished as much in the circumstances as any one could have done.
The siege was now pressed with more vigour, and before the middle of July, Acre surrendered. Then Philip, whose heart was always in his plans at home, pleaded ill health and returned to France. After this began the slow advance on Jerusalem, Saladin’s troops hanging on the line of march and constantly attacking in small bodies, while the crusaders suffered greatly from the climate and from lack of supplies. So great were the difficulties which Richard had not foreseen that at one time he was disposed to give up the attempt and to secure what he could by treaty, but the negotiations failed. The battle of Arsuf gave him an opportunity to exercise his peculiar talents, and the Saracens were badly defeated; but the advance was not made any the easier. By the last day of the year the army had struggled through to within ten miles of the holy city. There a halt was made; a council of war was held on January 13,1192, and it was decided, much against the will of Richard, to return and occupy Ascalon before attempting to take and hold Jerusalem–probably a wise decision unless the city were to be held merely as material for negotiation. Various attempts to bring the war to an end by treaty had been going on during the whole march; Richard had even offered his sister, Joanna, in marriage to Saladin’s brother, whether seriously or not it is hardly possible to say; but the demands of the two parties remained too far apart for an agreement to be reached. The winter and spring were occupied with the refortification of Ascalon and with the dissensions of the factions, the French finally withdrawing from Richard’s army and going to Acre. In April the Marquis Conrad was assassinated by emissaries of “the Old Man of the Mountain”; Guy had little support for the throne except from Richard; and both parties found it easy to agree on Henry of Champagne, grandson of Queen Eleanor and Louis VII, and so nephew at once of Philip and Richard, and he was immediately proclaimed king on marrying Conrad’s widow, Isabel. Richard provided for Guy by transferring to him the island of Cyprus as a new kingdom. On June 7 began the second march to Jerusalem, the army this time suffering from the heats of summer as before they had suffered from the winter climate of Palestine. They reached the same point as in the first advance, and there halted again; and though all were greatly encouraged by Richard’s brilliant capture of a rich Saracen caravan, he himself was now convinced that success was impossible. On his arrival Richard had pushed forward with a scouting party until he could see the walls of the city in the distance, and obliged to be satisfied with this, he retreated in July to Acre. One more brilliant exploit of Richard’s own kind remained for him to perform, the most brilliant of all perhaps, the relief of Joppa which Saladin was just on the point of taking when Richard with a small force saved the town and forced the Saracens to retire. On September 2 a truce for three years was made, and the third crusade was at an end. The progress of Saladin had been checked, a series of towns along the coast had been recovered, and the kingdom of Cyprus had been created; these were the results which had been gained by the expenditure of an enormous treasure and thousands of lives. Who shall say whether they were worth the cost.
During all the summer Richard had been impatient to return to England, and his impatience had been due not alone to his discouragement with the hopeless conditions in Palestine, but partly to the news which had reached him from home. Ever since he left France, in fact, messages had been coming to him from one and another, and the story they told was not of a happy situation. Exactly those things had happened which ought to have been expected. Soon after the council in Normandy, William Longchamp had freed himself from his rival Hugh of Durham by placing him under arrest and forcing him to surrender everything he had bought of the king. Then for many months the chancellor ruled England as he would, going about the country with a great train, almost in royal state, so that a chronicler writing probably from personal observation laments the fact that a house that entertained him for a night hardly recovered from the infliction in three years. Even more oppressive on the community as a whole were the constant exactions of money which he had to make for the king’s expenses. The return of John to England in 1190, or early in 1191, made at first no change, but discontent with the chancellor’s conduct would naturally look to him for leadership, and it is likely John was made ready to head an active opposition by the discovery of negotiations between Longchamp and the king of Scotland for the recognition of Arthur of Britanny as the heir to the kingdom, negotiations begun–so the chancellor said–under orders from Richard. About the middle of summer, 1191, actual hostilities seemed about to begin. Longchamp’s attempt to discipline Gerard of Camville, holder of Lincoln castle and sheriff of Lincolnshire, was resisted by John, who seized the royal castles of Nottingham and Tickhill. Civil war was only averted by the intervention of Walter of Coutances, Archbishop of Rouen, who had arrived in England in the spring with authority from the king to interfere with the administration of Longchamp if it seemed to him and the council wise to do so. By his influence peace was made, at an assembly of the barons at Winchester, on the whole not to the disadvantage of John, and embodied in a document which is almost a formal treaty. One clause of this agreement is of special interest as a sign of the trend of thought and as foreshadowing a famous clause in a more important document soon to be drawn up. The parties agreed that henceforth no baron or free tenant should be disseized of land or goods by the king’s justices or servants without a trial according to the customs and assizes of the land, or by the direct orders of the king. The clause points not merely forward but backward, and shows what had no doubt frequently occurred since the departure of the king.
About the middle of September a new element of discord was brought into the situation by the landing of Geoffrey, who had now been consecrated Archbishop of York, and who asserted that he, as well as John, had Richard’s permission to return. Longchamp’s effort to prevent his coming failed; but on his landing he had him arrested at the altar of the Priory of St. Martin’s, Dover, where he had taken sanctuary, and he was carried off a prisoner with many indignities. This was a tactical mistake on Longchamp’s part. It put him greatly in the wrong and furnished a new cause against him in which everybody could unite. In alarm he declared he had never given orders for what was done and had Geoffrey released, but it was too late. The actors in this outrage were excommunicated, and the chancellor was summoned to a council called by John under the forms of a great council. At the first meeting, held between Reading and Windsor on October 5, he did not appear, but formal complaint was made against him, and his deposition was moved by the Archbishop of Rouen. The meeting was then adjourned to London, and Longchamp, hearing this, left Windsor at the same time and took refuge in the Tower. For both parties, as in former times of civil strife, the support of the citizens of London was of great importance. They were now somewhat divided, but a recognition of the opportunity inclined them to the stronger side; and they signified to John and the barons that they would support them if a commune were granted to the city.[55] This French institution, granting to a city in its corporate capacity the legal position and independence of the feudal vassal, had as yet made no appearance in England. It was bitterly detested by the great barons, and a chronicler of the time who shared this feeling was no doubt right in saying that neither Richard nor his father would have sanctioned it for a million marks, but as he says London found out that there was no king.[56] John was in pursuit of power, and the price which London demanded would not seem to him a large one, especially as the day of reckoning with the difficulty he created was a distant one and might never come. The commune was granted, and Longchamp was formally deposed. John was recognized as Richard’s heir, fealty was sworn to him, and he was made regent of the kingdom; Walter of Rouen was accepted as justiciar; and the castles were disposed of as John desired. Longchamp yielded under protest, threatening the displeasure of the king, and was allowed to escape to the continent.
The action of John and the barons in deposing Longchamp made little actual change. John gained less power than he had expected, and found the new justiciar no more willing to give him control of the kingdom than the old one. The action was revolutionary, and if it had any permanent influence on the history of England, it is to be found in the training it gave the barons in concerted action against a tyrannous minister, revolutionary but as nearly as possible under the forms of law. While these events were taking place, Philip was on his way from Tyre to France. He reached home near the close of the year, ready for the business for which he had come, to make all that he could out of Richard’s absence. Repulsed in an attempt to get the advantage of the seneschal of Normandy he applied to John, perhaps with more hope of success, offering him the hand of the unfortunate Adela with the investiture of all the French fiefs. John was, of course, already married, but that was a small matter either to Philip, or to him. He was ready to listen to the temptation, and was preparing to cross to discuss the proposition with Philip, when his plans were interrupted by his mother. She had heard of what was going on and hastily went over to England to interfere, where with difficulty John was forced to give up the idea. The year 1192 passed without disturbance. When Longchamp tried to secure his restoration by bribing John, he was defeated by a higher bid from the council. An attempt of Philip to invade Normandy was prevented by the refusal of his barons to serve, for without accusing the king, they declared that they could not attack Normandy without themselves committing perjury. At the beginning of 1193 the news reached England that Richard had been arrested in Germany and that he was held in prison there.
[53] Benedict of Peterborough, ii. 90.
[54] Roger of Howden, iii. 18.
[55] Round, Commune of London, ch. xi.
[56] Richard of Devizes, Chronicles of Stephen, iii. 416.
CHAPTER XVIII
WAR AND FINANCE
Richard was indeed in prison in Germany. To avoid passing through Toulouse on account of the hostility of the count he had sailed up the Adriatic, hoping possibly to strike across into the northern parts of Aquitaine, and there had been shipwrecked. In trying to make his way in disguise through the dominions of the Duke of Austria he had been recognized and arrested, for Leopold of Austria had more than one ground of hatred of Richard, notably because his claim to something like an equal sovereignty had been so rudely and contemptuously disallowed in the famous incident of the tearing down of his banner from the walls of Acre. But a greater sovereign than Leopold had reason to complain of the conduct of Richard and something to gain from his imprisonment, and the duke was obliged to surrender his prisoner to the emperor, Henry VI.
When the news of this reached England, it seemed to John that his opportunity might at last be come, and he crossed over at once to the continent. Finding the barons of Normandy unwilling to receive him in the place of Richard, he passed on to Philip, did him homage for the French fiefs, and even for England it was reported, took oath to marry Adela, and ceded to him the Norman Vexin. In return Philip promised him a part of Flanders and his best help to get possession of England and his brother’s other lands. Roger of Howden, who records this bargain, distinguishes between rumour and what he thought was true, and it may be taken as a fair example of what it was believed John would agree to in order to dispossess his imprisoned brother. He then returned to England with a force of mercenaries, seized the castles of Wallingford and Windsor, prepared to receive a fleet which Philip was to send to his aid, and giving out that the king was dead, he demanded the kingdom of the justices and the fealty of the barons. But nobody believed him; the justices immediately took measures to resist him and to defend the kingdom against the threatened invasion, and civil war began anew. Just then Hubert Walter, Bishop of Salisbury, arrived from Germany, bringing a letter from Richard himself. It was certain that the king was not dead, but the news did not promise an immediate release. The emperor demanded a great ransom and a crowd of hostages of the barons. The justices must at once set about raising the sum, and a truce was made with John until autumn.
The terms of his release which Richard had stated in his letter did not prove to be the final ones. Henry VI was evidently determined to make all that he could out of his opportunity, and it was not till after the middle of the year 1193 that a definite agreement was at last made. The ransom was fixed at 150,000 marks, of which 100,000 were to be on hand in London before the king should go free. It was on the news of this arrangement that Philip sent his famous message to John, “Take care of yourself: the devil is loosed.” In John’s opinion the best way to take care of himself was to go to Philip’s court, and this he did on receiving the warning, either because he was afraid of the view Richard might take of his conduct on his return, or because he suspected that Philip would throw him over when he came to make a settlement with Richard. There were, however, still two obstacles in the way of Richard’s return: the money for the ransom must be raised, and the emperor must be persuaded to keep his bargain. Philip, representing John as well, was bidding against the terms to which Richard had agreed. They offered the emperor 80,000 marks, to keep him until the Michaelmas of 1194; or L1000 a month for each month that he was detained; or 150,000 marks, if he would hold him in prison for a year, or give him up to them. Earlier still Philip had tried to persuade Henry to surrender Richard to him, but such a disposition of the case did not suit the emperor’s plans, and now he made Philip’s offers known to Richard. If he had been inclined to listen, as perhaps he was, the German princes, their natural feeling and interest quickened somewhat by promises of money from Richard, would have insisted on the keeping of the treaty. On February 4, 1194, Richard was finally set free, having done homage to the emperor for the kingdom of England and having apparently issued letters patent to record the relationship,[57] a step towards the realization of the wide-reaching plans of Henry VI for the reconstruction of the Roman Empire, and so very likely as important to him as the ransom in money.
The raising of this money in England and the other lands of the king was not an easy task, not merely because the sum itself was enormous for the time, but also because so great an amount exceeded the experience, or even the practical arithmetic of the day, and could hardly be accurately planned for in advance. It was, however, vigorously taken in hand by Eleanor and the justices, assisted by Hubert Walter, who had now become Archbishop of Canterbury by Richard’s direction and who was soon made justiciar, and the burden seems to have been very patiently borne. The method of the Saladin tithe was that first employed for the general taxation by which it was proposed to raise a large part of the sum. All classes, clerical and feudal, burgess and peasant, were compelled to contribute according to their revenues, the rule being one-fourth of the income for the year, and the same proportion of the movable property; all privileges and immunities of clergy and churches as well as of laymen were suspended; the Cistercians even who had a standing immunity from all exactions gave up their whole year’s shearing of wool, and so did the order of Sempringham; the plate and, jewels of the churches and monasteries, held to be properly used for the redemption of captives, were surrendered or redeemed in money under a pledge of their restoration by the king. The amount at first brought in proved insufficient, and the officers who collected it were suspected of peculation, possibly with justice, but possibly also because the original calculation had been inaccurate, so that a second and a third levy were found necessary. It was near the end of the year 1193 before the sum raised was accepted by the representatives of the emperor as sufficient for the preliminary payment which would secure the king’s release.
Richard, set free on February 4, did not feel it necessary to be in haste, and he only reached London on March 6. There he found things in as unsettled a state as they had been since the beginning of his imprisonment. He had made through Longchamp a most liberal treaty with Philip to keep him quiet during his imprisonment; he had also induced John by a promise of increasing his original grants to return to his allegiance to himself: but neither of these agreements had proved binding on the other parties. John had made a later treaty with Philip, purchasing his support with promises of still more extensive cessions of the land he coveted, and under this treaty the king of France had taken possession of parts of Normandy, while the justiciar of England, learning of John’s action, had obtained a degree of forfeiture against him from a council of the barons and had begun the siege of his castles. This war on John was approved by Richard, who himself pushed it to a speedy and successful end. Then on March 30 the king met a great council of the realm at Nottingham. His mother was present, and the justiciar, and Longchamp, who was still chancellor, though he had not been allowed to return to England to remain until now. By this council John was summoned to appear for trial within forty days on pain of the loss of all his possessions and of all that he might expect, including the crown. Richard’s chief need would still be money both for the war in France and for further payments on his ransom; and he now imposed a new tax of two shillings on the carucate of land and called out one-third of the feudal force for service abroad. Many resumptions of his former grants were also made, and some of them were sold again to the highest bidders. Two weeks later the king was re-crowned at Winchester, apparently with something less of formal ceremony than in his original coronation, but with much more than in the annual crown-wearings of the Norman kings, a practice which had now been dropped for almost forty years. Whether quite a coronation in strict form or not, the ceremony was evidently regarded as of equivalent effect both by the chroniclers of the time and officially, and it probably was intended to make good any diminution of sovereignty that might be thought to be involved in his doing homage to the emperor for the kingdom.
Immediately after this the king made ready to cross to France, where his interests were then in the greatest danger, but he was detained by contrary winds till near the middle of May. In the almost exactly five years remaining of his life Richard never returned to England. He belonged by nature to France, and England must have seemed a very foreign land to him; but in passing judgment on him we must not overlook the fact that England was secure and needed the presence of the king but little, while many dangers threatened, or would seem to Richard to threaten, his continental possessions. Even a Henry I would probably have spent those five years abroad. Richard found the king of France pushing a new attack on Normandy to occupy the lands which John had ceded him, but the French forces withdrew without waiting to try the issue of a battle. Richard had hardly landed before another enemy was overcome, by his own prudence also, and another example given of the goodness of Richard’s heart toward his enemies and of his willingness to trust their professions. He had said that his brother would never oppose force with force, and now John was ready to abandon the conflict before it had begun. He came to Richard, encouraged by generous words of his which were repeated to him, and threw himself at his feet; he was at once pardoned and treated as if he had never sinned, except that the military advantages he had had in England through holding the king’s castles were not given back to him. Along all the border the mere presence of Richard seemed to check Philip’s advance and to bring to a better mind his own barons who had been disposed to aid the enemy. About the middle of June almost all the details of a truce were agreed upon by both sides, but the plan at last failed, because Richard would not agree that the barons who had been on the opposing sides in Poitou should be made to cease all hostilities against each other, for this would be contrary, he said, to the ancient custom of the land. The war went on a few weeks longer with no decisive results. Philip destroyed Evreux, but fell back from Freteval so hastily, to avoid an encounter with Richard, that he lost his baggage, including his official records, and barely escaped capture himself. On November 1 a truce for one year was finally made, much to the advantage Philip, but securing to the king of England the time he needed for preparation.
When Richard crossed to Normandy not to return, he left England in the hands of his new justiciar, Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, and soon to be appointed legate of the pope, at once the head of Church and State. No better man could have been found to stand in the place of the king. Nephew of the wife of Glanvill, the great judge of Henry II’s time, spending much of his youth in the household of his uncle and some little time also in the service of the king, he was by training and by personal experience fitted to carry on the administration of England along the lines laid down in the previous reign and even to carry forward law and institutions in harmony with their beginnings and with the spirit of that great period. Indeed the first itinerant justices’ commission in definite form that has come down to us dates but a few weeks after the king’s departure, and is of especial interest as showing a decided progress since the more vague provisions of the Assize of Clarendon. A possible source of danger to a successful ministry lay in the quarrelsome and self-assertive Archbishop of York, the king’s brother Geoffrey; but soon after Richard’s departure Hubert deprived him of power by a sharp stroke and a skilful use of the administrative weapons with which he was familiar. On complaint of Geoffrey’s canons against him he sent a commission of judges to York to examine the case, who ordered Geoffrey’s servants to be imprisoned on a charge of robbery, and on the archbishop’s refusal to appear before them to answer for himself they decreed the confiscation of his estates. Geoffrey never recovered his position in Richard’s time.
The year 1195 in England and abroad passed by with few events of permanent interest. Archbishop Hubert was occupied chiefly with ecclesiastical matters and with the troubles of Geoffrey of York, and conditions in the north were further changed by the closing of the long and stormy career of the bishop, of Durham, Hugh of Puiset. In France the truce was broken by Philip in June, and the war lingered until December with some futile efforts at peace, but with no striking military operations on either side. Early in December the two kings agreed on the conditions of a treaty, which was signed on January 15, 1196. The terms were still unfavourable to Richard; for Philip at last had Gisors and the Norman Vexin ceded to him by competent authority and a part of his other conquests and the overlordship of Angouleme, while Richard on his side was allowed to retain only what he had taken in Berri.
As this treaty transferred to France the old frontier defences of Normandy and opened the way down the Seine to a hostile attack upon Rouen, the question of the building of new fortifications became an important one to both the kings. The treaty contained a provision that Andely should not be fortified. This was a most important strategic position on the river, fitted by nature for a great fortress and completely covering the capital of Normandy. At a point where the Seine bends sharply and a small stream cuts through the line of limestone cliffs on its right bank to join it, a promontory of rock three hundred feet above the water holds the angle, cut off from the land behind it except for a narrow isthmus, and so furnished the feudal castle-builder with all the conditions which he required. The land itself belonged to the Archbishop of Rouen, but Richard, to whom the building of a fortress at the place was a vital necessity, did not concern himself seriously with that point, and began the works which he had planned soon after the signing of the treaty in which he had promised not to do so. The archbishop who was still Walter of Coutances, Richard’s faithful minister of earlier days, protested without avail and finally retired to Rome, laying the duchy under an interdict. Richard was no more to be stopped in this case by an interdict than by his own promises, and went steadily on with his work, though in the end he bought off the archbishop’s opposition by a transfer to him in exchange of other lands worth intrinsically much more than the barren crag that he had seized. The building occupied something more than a year, and when it was completed, the castle was one of the strongest in the west. Richard had made use in its fortification of the lessons which he learned in the Holy Land, where the art of defence had been most carefully studied under compulsion; and the three wards of the castle, its thick walls and strong towers, and the defences crossing the river and in the town of New Andely at its foot, seemed to make it impregnable. Richard took great pride in his creation. He called it his fair child, and named it Chateau-Gaillard or “saucy castle.”
Philip had not allowed all this to go on without considering the treaty violated, but the war of 1196 is of the same wearisome kind as that of the previous year. The year brought with it some trouble in Britanny arising from a demand of Richard’s for the wardship of his nephew Arthur, and resulting in the barons of Britanny sending the young prince to the court of Philip. In England the rising of a demagogue in London to protest against the oppression of the poor is of some interest. The king’s financial demands had never ceased; they could not cease, in fact, and though England was prosperous from the long intervals of peace she had enjoyed and bore the burden on the whole with great patience, it was none the less heavily felt. In London there was a feeling not merely that the taxes were heavy, but that they were unfairly assessed and collected, so that they rested in undue proportion on the poorer classes. Of this feeling William Fitz Osbert, called “William with the Beard,” made himself the spokesman. He opposed the measures of the ruling class, stirred up opposition with fiery speeches, crossed over to the king, and, basing on the king’s interest in the subject a boast of his support, threatened more serious trouble. Then the justiciar interfered by force, dragged him out of sanctuary, and had him executed. The incident had a permanent influence in the fact that Hubert Walter, who was already growing unpopular, found his support from the clergy weakened because of his violation of the right of sanctuary. He was also aggrieved because Richard sent over from the continent the Abbot of Caen, experienced in Norman finance, to investigate his declining revenues and to hold a special inquisition of the sheriffs. The inquisition was not held because of the death of the abbot, but later in the year Hubert offered to resign, but finally decided to go on in office for a time longer.
The year 1197 promised great things for Richard in his war with the king of France, but yielded little. He succeeded in forming a coalition among the chief barons of the north, which recalls the diplomatic successes of his ancestor, Henry I. The young Count Baldwin of Flanders and Hainault had grievances of his own against Philip which he was anxious to avenge. Count Philip, who had exercised so strong an influence over King Philip at the time of his accession, had died early in the crusade, and the Count of Hainault on succeeding him had been compelled to give up to France a large strip of territory adjoining Philip’s earlier annexation, and on his death Count Baldwin had had to pay a heavy relief. The coalition was joined by the Counts of Boulogne and Blois, and Britanny was practically under the control of Richard. Philip, however, escaped the danger that threatened him by some exercise of his varied talents of which we do not know the exact details. Led on in pursuit of the Count of Flanders until he was almost cut off from return, he purchased his retreat by a general promise to restore the count all his rights and to meet Richard in a conference on the terms of peace. On Richard’s side the single advantage gained during the campaign was the capture of the cousin of the French king, Philip of Dreux, the warlike Bishop of Beauvais, whose raids along the border and whose efforts at the court of Henry VI of Germany against his release from imprisonment had so enraged Richard that he refused upon any terms or under any pressure to set him free as long as he lived. The interview between the kings took place on September 17, when a truce for something more than a year was agreed upon to allow time for arranging the terms of a permanent peace.
The year closed in England with an incident of great interest, but one which has sometimes been made to bear an exaggerated importance. At a council of the kingdom held at Oxford on December 7, the justiciar presented a demand of the king that the baronage should unite to send him at their expense three hundred knights for a year’s service with him abroad. Evidently it was hoped that the clergy would set a good example. The archbishop himself expressed his willingness to comply, and was followed by the Bishop of London to the same effect. Then Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, being called upon for his answer, to the great indignation of the justiciar, flatly refused on the ground that his church was not liable for service abroad. The Bishop of Salisbury, next called upon, made the same refusal; and the justiciar seeing that the plan was likely to fail dissolved the council in anger. One is tempted to believe that some essential point is omitted from the accounts we have of this incident, or that some serious mistake has been made in them, either in the speech of Bishop Hugh given us in his biography or in the terms of Richard’s demand recorded in two slightly different forms. Hubert must have believed that the baronage in general were going to follow the example given them by the two bishops and refuse the required service, or he would not have dissolved the council and reported to the king that his plan had failed. But to refuse this service on the ground that it could not be required except in England was to go against the unbroken practice of more than a hundred years. Nor was there anything contrary to precedent in the demand for three hundred knights to serve a year. The union of the military tenants to equip a smaller force than the whole service due to the lord, but for a longer time than the period of required feudal service, was not uncommon. The demand implied a feudal force due to the king from England of less than three thousand knights, and this was well within his actual rights, though if we accept the very doubtful statement of one of our authorities that their expenses were to be reckoned at the rate of three shillings per day, the total cost would exceed that of any ordinary scutage.
Richard clearly believed, as did his justiciar, that he was making no illegal demand, for he ordered the confiscation of the baronies of the two bishops, and Herbert of Salisbury was obliged to pay a fine. It was only a personal journey to Normandy and the great reputation for sanctity of the future St. Hugh of Lincoln that relieved him from the same punishment. The importance of the right of consent to taxation in the growth of the constitution has led many writers to attach a significance to this incident which hardly belongs to it. Whatever were the grounds of his action, the Bishop of Lincoln could have been acting on no general constitutional principle. He must have been insisting on personal rights secured to him by the feudal law. If his action contributed largely, as it doubtless did, to that change of earlier conditions which led to the beginning of the constitution, it was less because he tried to revive a principle of general application, which as a matter of fact had never existed, than because he established a precedent of careful scrutiny of the king’s rights and of successful resistance to a demand possibly of doubtful propriety. It is as a sign of the times, as the mark of an approaching revolution, that the incident has its real interest.
About the time that Richard sent over to England his demand for three hundred knights news must have reached him of an event which would seem to open the way to a great change in continental affairs. The far-reaching plans of the emperor, Henry VI, had been brought to an end by his death in Sicily on September 28, 1197, in the prime of his life. His son, the future brilliant Emperor Frederick II, was still an infant, and there was a prospect that the hold of the Hohenstaufen on the empire might be shaken off. About Christmas time an embassy reached Richard from the princes of Germany, summoning him on the fealty he owed the empire to attend a meeting at Cologne on February 22 to elect an emperor. This he could not do, but a formal embassy added the weight of his influence to the strong Guelfic party; and his favourite nephew, who had been brought up at his court, was elected emperor as Otto IV. The Hohenstaufen party naturally did not accept the election, and Philip of Suabia, the brother of Henry VI, was put up as an opposition emperor, but for the moment the Guelfs were the stronger, and they enjoyed the support of the young and vigorous pope, Innocent III, who had just ascended the papal throne, so that even Philip II’s support of his namesake of Suabia was of little avail.
From the change Richard gained in reality nothing. It was still an age when the parties to international alliances sought only ends to be gained within their own territories, or what they believed should be rightfully their territories, and the objects of modern diplomacy were not yet regarded. The truce of the preceding September, which was to last through the whole of the year 1198, was as little respected as the others had been. As soon as it was convenient, the war was reopened, the baronial alliance against the king of France still standing, and Baldwin of Flanders joining in the attack. At the end of September Richard totally defeated the French, and drove their army in wild flight through the town of Gisors, precipitating Philip himself into the river Epte by the breaking down of the bridge under the weight of the fugitives, and capturing a long list of prisoners of distinction, three of them, a Montmorency among them, overthrown by Richard’s own lance, as he boasted in a letter to the Bishop of Durham. Other minor successes followed, and Philip found himself reduced to straits in which he felt obliged to ask the intervention of the pope in favour of peace. Innocent III, anxious for a new crusade and determined to make his influence felt in every question of the day, was ready to interfere on his own account; and his legate, Cardinal Peter, brought about an interview between the two kings on January 13, 1199, when a truce for five years was verbally agreed upon, though the terms of a permanent treaty were not yet settled.
In the meantime financial difficulties were pressing heavily upon the king of England. Scutages for the war in Normandy had been taken in 1196 and 1197. In the next year a still more important measure of taxation was adopted, which was evidently intended to bring in larger sums to the treasury than an ordinary scutage. This is the tax known as the Great Carucage of 1198. The actual revenue that the king derived from it is a matter of some doubt, but the machinery of its assessment is described in detail by a contemporary and is of special interest.[58] The unit of the new assessment was to be the carucate, or ploughland, instead of the hide, and consequently a new survey of the land was necessary to take the place of the old Domesday record. To obtain this, practically the same machinery was employed as in the earlier case, but to the commissioners sent into each county by the central government two local knights, chosen from the county, were added to form the body before whom the jurors testified as to the ownership and value of the lands in their neighbourhoods. Thanks to the rapid judicial advance and administrative reforms of the past generation, the jury was now a familiar institution everywhere and was used for many purposes. Its employment in this case to fix the value of real property for taxation, and of personal property as in the Saladin tithe of 1188, though but a revival of its earlier use by William I, marks the beginning of a continuous employment of jurors in taxation in the next period which led to constitutional results–the birth of the representative system, and we may almost say to the origin of Parliament in the proper meaning of the term–results of even greater value in the growth of our civil liberty than any which came from it in the sphere of judicial institutions important as these were.
Now in the spring of 1199 a story reached Richard of the finding of a wonderful treasure on the land of the lord of Chalus, one of his under vassals in the Limousin. We are told that it was the images of an emperor, his wife, sons, and daughters, made of gold and seated round a table also of gold. If the story were true, here was relief from his difficulties, and Richard laid claim to the treasure as lord paramount of the land. This claim was of course disputed, and with his mercenaries the king laid siege to the castle of Chalus. It was a little castle and poorly defended, but it resisted the attack for three days, and on the third Richard, who carelessly approached the wall, was shot by a crossbow bolt in the left shoulder near the neck. The wound was deep and was made worse by the surgeon in cutting out the head of the arrow. Shortly gangrene appeared, and the king knew that he must die. In the time that was left him he calmly disposed of all his affairs. He sent for his mother who was not far away, and she was with him when he died. He divided his personal property among his friends and in charity, declared John to be his heir, and made the barons who were present swear fealty to him. He ordered the man who had shot him to be pardoned and given a sum of money; then he confessed and received the last offices of the Church, and died on April 6, 1199, in the forty-second year of his age.
The twelfth century was drawing to its end when Richard died, but the close of the century was then as always in history a purely artificial dividing line. The real historical epoch closed, a new age began with the granting of the Great Charter. The date may serve, however, as a point from which to review briefly one of the growing interests of England that belongs properly within the field of its political history–its organized municipal life. The twelfth century shows a slow, but on the whole a constant, increase in the number, size, and influence of organized towns in England, and of the commerce, domestic and foreign, on which their prosperity rested. Even in the long disorder of Stephen’s reign the interruption of this growth seems to have been felt rather in particular places than in the kingdom as a whole, and there was no serious set-back of national prosperity that resulted from it. Not with the rapidity of modern times, but fairly steadily through the century, new articles appear in commerce; manufactures rise to importance, like that of cloth; wealth and population accumulate in the towns, and they exert an unceasing pressure on the king, or on the lords in whose domain they are, for grants of privileges.
Such grants from the king become noticeably frequent in the reign of Richard and are even more so under John. The financial necessities of both kings and their recklessness, at least that of Richard, in the choice of means to raise money, made it easy for the boroughs to purchase the rights or exemptions they desired. The charters all follow a certain general type, but there was no fixed measure of privilege granted by them. Each town bargained for what it could get from a list of possible privileges of some length. The freedom of the borough; the right of the citizens to have a gild merchant; exemption from tolls, specified or general, within a certain district or throughout all England or also throughout the continental Angevin dominions; exemption from the courts of shire and hundred, or from the jurisdiction of all courts outside the borough, except in pleas of the crown, or even without this exception; the right to farm the revenues of the borough, paying a fixed “firma,” or rent, to the king, and with this often the right of the citizens to elect their own reeve or even sheriff to exempt them from the interference of the king’s sheriff of the county. This list is not a complete one of the various rights and privileges granted by the charters, but only of the more important ones.
To confer these all upon a town was to give it the fullest right obtained by English towns and to put it practically in the position which London had reached in the charter of Henry I’s later years. London, if we may trust our scanty evidence, advanced at one time during this period to a position reached by no other English city, to the position of the French commune.[59] Undoubtedly the word “commune,” like other technical words, was sometimes used at the time loosely and vaguely, but in its strict and legal sense it meant a town raised to the position of a feudal vassal and given all the rights as well as duties of a feudal lord, a seigneurie collective populaire, as a French scholar has called it.[60] Thus regarded, the town had a fulness of local independence to be obtained in no other way. To such a position no English city but London attained, and it may be thought that the evidence in London’s case is not full enough to warrant us in believing that it reached the exact legal status of a commune.
We find it related as an incident of the struggle between John and Longchamp in 1191, when Longchamp was deposed, that John and the barons conceded the commune of London and took oath to it, and about the same time we have proof that the city had its mayor. Documentary evidence has also been discovered of the existence at the same date of the governing body known on the continent as the echevins. But while the mayor and the echevins are closely associated with the commune, their presence is not conclusive evidence of the existence of a real commune, nor is the use of the word itself, though the occurrence of the two together makes it more probable. Early in 1215, when John was seeking allies everywhere against the confederated barons, he granted a new charter to London, which recognized the right of the citizens to elect their own mayor and required him to swear fealty to the king. If we could be sure that this oath was sworn for the city, it would be conclusive evidence, since the oath of the mayor to the lord of whom the commune as a corporate person “held” was a distinguishing mark of this relationship. The probability that such was the case is confirmed by the fact that a few weeks later, in the famous twelfth clause of the Great Charter, we find London put distinctly in the position of a king’s vassal. This evidence is strengthened by a comparison with the corresponding clause of the Articles of the Barons, a kind of preliminary draft of the Great Charter, and much less carefully drawn, where there is added to London a general class of towns whose legal right to the privilege granted it would not have been possible to defend.[61] That London maintained its position among the king’s vassals in the legally accurate Great Charter is almost certain proof that it had some right to be classed with them. But even if London was for a time a commune, strictly speaking, it did not maintain the right in the next reign, and that form of municipal organization plays no part in English history.[62] It is under the form of chartered towns, not communes, that the importance of the boroughs in English commercial and public life continued to increase in the thirteenth as it had in the twelfth century.
[57] Ralph de Diceto, ii, 113.
[58] Roger of Howden, iv. 46.
[59] Round, The Commune of London.
[60] Luchaire, Communes Francaises, 97.
[61] Articles of the Barons, c. 32; Stubbs, Select Charters, 393.
[62] See London and the Commune in Engl. Hist. Rev., Oct. 1904.
CHAPTER XIX
THE LOSS OF NORMANDY
The death of Richard raised a question of succession new in the history of England since the Norman Conquest. The right of primogeniture, the strict succession of the eldest born, carrying with it the right of the son of a deceased elder brother to stand in the place of his father, the principle which was in the end to prevail, had only begun to establish itself. The drift of feeling was undoubtedly towards it, but this appeared strongly in the present crisis only in the northwestern corner of the Angevin dominions in France, where it was supported by still stronger influences. The feudal law had recognized, and still recognized, many different principles of succession, and the prevailing feeling in England and Normandy is no doubt correctly represented in an incident recorded by the biographer of William Marshal. On receiving the news of Richard’s death at Rouen, William went at once to consult with the archbishop and to agree on whom they would support as heir. The archbishop inclined at first to Arthur, the son and representative of John’s elder brother, Geoffrey, but William declared that the brother stood nearer to his father and to his brother than the grandson, or nephew, and the archbishop yielded the point without discussion. Neither in England nor in Normandy did there appear the slightest disposition to support the claims of Arthur, or to question the right of John, though possibly there would have been more inclination to do so if the age of the two candidates had been reversed, for Arthur was only twelve, while John was past thirty.
Neither of the interested parties, however, was in the least disposed to waive any claims which he possessed. John had had trouble with Richard during the previous winter on a suspicion of treasonable correspondence with Philip and because he thought his income was too scanty, and he was in Britanny, even at the court of Arthur, when the news of Richard’s death reached him. He at once took horse with a few attendants and rode to Chinon, where the king’s treasure was kept, and this was given up without demur on his demand by Robert of Turnharn, the keeper. Certain barons who were there and the officers of Richard’s household also recognized his right, on his taking the oath which they demanded, that he would execute his brother’s will, and that he would preserve inviolate the rightful customs of former times and the just laws of lands and people. From Chinon John set out for Normandy, but barely escaped capture on the way, for Arthur’s party had not been idle in the meantime. His mother with a force from Britanny had brought him with all speed to Angers, where he was joyfully received. William des Roches, the greatest baron of the country and Richard’s seneschal of Anjou, had declared for him at the head of a powerful body of barons, who probably saw in a weak minority a better chance of establishing that local freedom from control for which they had always striven than under another Angevin king. At Le Mans Arthur was also accepted with enthusiasm as count a few hours after a cold reception of John and his hasty departure.
There Constance and her son were met by the king of France, who, as soon as God had favoured him by the removal of Richard,–so the French regarded the matter,–seized the county of Evreux and pushed his conquests almost to Le Mans. Arthur did homage to Philip for the counties of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine; Tours received the young count as Angers and Le Mans had done; Philip’s right of feudal wardship was admitted, and Arthur was taken to Paris under his secure protection, secure for his own designs and against those of John. Philip could hardly do otherwise than recognize the rights of Arthur. It was perhaps the most favourable opportunity that had ever occurred to accomplish the traditional policy of the Capetians of splitting apart the dominions of the rival Norman or Angevin house. That policy, so long and so consistently followed by Philip almost from his accession to the death of Arthur, in the support in turn of young Henry, Richard, John, and Arthur against the reigning king, was destined indeed never to be realized in the form in which it had been cherished in the past; but the devotion of a part of the Angevin empire to the cause of Arthur was a factor of no small value in the vastly greater success which Philip won, greater than any earlier king had ever dreamed of, greater than Philip himself had dared to hope for till the moment of its accomplishment.
From Le Mans John went direct to Rouen. The barons of Normandy had decided to support him, and on April 25 he was invested with the insignia of the duchy by the archbishop, Walter of Coutances, taking the usual oath to respect the rights of Church and people. His careless and irreverent conduct during the ceremony displeased the clergy, as his refusal to receive the communion on Easter day, a week before, had offended Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, who came a part of the way with him from Chinon. As the lance, the special symbol of investiture, was placed in his hand, he turned to make some jocular remark to his boon companions who were laughing and chattering behind him, and carelessly let it fall, an incident doubtless considered at the time of evil omen, and easily interpreted after the event as a presage of the loss of the duchy. From Normandy John sent over to England to assist the justiciar, Geoffrey Fitz Peter, in taking measures to secure his succession, two of the most influential men of the land, William Marshal and Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, who had been in Normandy since the death of Richard, while he himself remained a month longer on the continent, to check, if possible, the current in favour of Arthur. He took Le Mans and destroyed its walls in punishment, and sent a force to aid his mother in Aquitaine; but the threatening attitude of Philip made it impossible for him to accomplish very much. No slight influence on the side of John was the strong support and vigorous action in his favour of that remarkable woman, Eleanor of Aquitaine, then about eighty years of age. She seems never to have cared for her grandson Arthur, and for this his mother was probably responsible. Constance appears to have been a somewhat difficult person, and what was doubtless still more important, she had never identified herself with the interests of her husband’s house, but had always remained in full sympathy with the separatist tendencies and independent desires of her own Britanny.[63] She had no right to count on any help from Eleanor in carrying out her ambitions, and Aquitaine was held as securely for John by his mother as Normandy was by the decision of its leading barons.
In England, although no movement in favour of Arthur is perceptible, there was some fear of civil strife, perhaps only of that disorder which was apt to break out on the death of the king, as it did indeed in this case, and many castles were put in order for defence. What disorder there was soon put down by the representatives of the king, whom John had appointed, and who took the fealty of the barons and towns to him. On the part of a considerable number of the barons–the names that are recorded are those of old historic families, Beaumont, Ferrers, Mowbray, De Lacy, the Earls of Clare and Chester–there was found to be opposition to taking the oath of fealty on the ground of injustice committed by the administration. Whether these complaints were personal to each baron, as the language has been taken to mean, or complaints of injustice in individual cases wrought by the general policy of the government, as the number of cases implies, it is hardly possible to say. The probability is that both explanations are true. Certainly the old baronage could easily find grounds enough of complaint in the constitutional policy steadily followed by the government of the first two Angevin kings. The crisis was wisely handled by the three able men whom John had appointed to represent him. They called an assembly of the doubtful barons at Northampton and gave to each one a promise that he should have his right (jus suum). In return for these promises the oaths were taken, but the incident was as ominous of another kind of trouble as the dropping of the lance at Rouen. We can hardly understand the reign of John unless we remember that at its very beginning men were learning to watch the legality of the king’s actions and to demand that he respect the limitations which the law placed on his arbitrary will.
On May 25, John landed in England, and on the 27th, Ascension day, he was crowned in Westminster by the Archbishop of Canterbury before a large assembly of barons and bishops. The coronation followed the regular order, and no dissenting voice made itself heard, though a rather unusual display of force seems to have been thought necessary. Two authorities, both years later and both untrustworthy, refer to a speech delivered during the ceremony by the archbishop, in which he emphasized the fact that the English crown was elective and not hereditary. Did not these authorities seem to be clearly independent of one another we should forthwith reject their testimony, but as it is we must admit some slight chance that such a speech was made. One of these accounts, in giving what purports to be the actual speech of Hubert Walter, though it must have been composed by the writer himself, states a reason for it which could not possibly have been entertained at the time.[64] The other gives as its reason the disputed succession, but makes the archbishop refer not to the right of Arthur, but to that of the queen of Castile, a reference which must also be untrue.[65] If such a speech was made, it had reference unquestionably to the case of Arthur, and it must be taken as a sign of the influence which this case certainly had on the development, in the minds of some at least, of something more like the modern understanding of the meaning of election, and as a prelude to the great movement which characterizes the thirteenth century, the rapid growth of ideas which may now without too great violence be called constitutional. If such a speech was made we may be sure also that it was not made without the consent of John, and that it contained nothing displeasing to him. One of his first acts as king was to make Hubert Walter his chancellor, and apparently the first document issued by the new king and chancellor puts prominently forward John’s hereditary right, and states the share of clergy and people in his accession in peculiar and vague language.[66]
John had no mind to remain long in England, nor was there any reason why he should. The king of Scotland was making some trouble, demanding the cession of Cumberland and Northumberland, but it was possible to postpone for the present the decision of his claims. William Marshal was at last formally invested with the earldom of Pembroke and Geoffrey Fitz Peter with that of Essex. More important was a scutage, probably ordered at this time, of the unusual rate of two marks on the knight’s fee, twenty shillings having been the previous limit as men remembered it. By June 20 John’s business in England was done, and by July 1 he was again at Rouen to watch the course of events in the conflict still undecided. On that day a truce was made with Philip to last until the middle of August, and John began negotiations with the Counts of Flanders and Boulogne and with his nephew, Otto IV of Germany, in a search for allies, from whom he gained only promises. On the expiration of the truce Philip demanded the cession of the entire Vexin and the transfer to Arthur of Poitou, Anjou, Maine, and Touraine,–a demand which indicates his determination to go on with the war. For Poitou Philip had already received Eleanor’s homage, and she in turn invested John with it as her vassal. In the beginning of the war which was now renewed Philip committed a serious error of policy, to which he was perhaps tempted by the steady drift of events in his favour since the death of Richard. Capturing the castle of Ballon in Maine he razed it to the ground. William des Roches, the leader of Arthur’s cause, at once objected since the castle should belong to his lord, and protested to the king that this was contrary to their agreement, but Philip haughtily replied that he should do as he pleased with his conquests in spite of Arthur. This was too early a declaration of intentions, and William immediately made terms with John, carrying over to him Arthur and his mother and the city of Le Mans. A slight study of John’s character ought to have shown to William that no dependence whatever could be placed on his promise in regard to a point which would seem to them both of the greatest importance. William took the risk, however, binding John by solemn oath that Arthur should be dealt with according to his counsel, a promise which was drawn up in formal charter. On the very day of his arrival, it is said, Arthur was told of John’s intention to imprison him, and he fled away with his mother to Angers; but William des Roches remained for a time in John’s service.
The year 1199 closed with a truce preliminary to a treaty of peace which was finally concluded on May 18. Philip II was at the moment in no condition to push the war. He was engaged in a desperate struggle with Innocent III and needed to postpone for the time being every other conflict. Earlier in his reign on a political question he had defied a pope, and with success; but Innocent III was a different pope, and on the present question Philip was wrong. In 1193 he had repudiated his second wife, Ingeborg of Denmark, the day after the marriage, and later married Agnes of Meran whom he had hitherto refused to give up at the demand of the Church. At the close of 1199 France was placed under an interdict until the king should yield, and it was in this situation that the treaty with John was agreed to. Philip for the moment abandoned his attempt against the Angevin empire. John was recognized as rightful heir of the French fiefs, and his homage was accepted for them all, including Britanny, for which Arthur then did homage to John. These concessions were not secured, however, without some sacrifices on the English side. John yielded to Philip all the conquests which had been made from Richard, and agreed to pay a relief of 20,000 marks for admission to his fiefs. The peace was to be sealed by the marriage of John’s niece, the future great queen and regent of France, Blanche of Castile, to Philip’s son Louis, and the county of Evreux was to be ceded as her dower. The aged but tireless Eleanor went to Spain to bring her granddaughter, and the marriage was celebrated four days after the signing of the treaty, Louis at the time being thirteen years old and Blanche twelve.
While his mother went to Spain for the young bride, John crossed to England to raise money for his relief. This was done by ordering a carucage at the rate of three shillings on the ploughland. The Cistercian order objected to paying the tax because of the general immunity which they enjoyed, and John in great anger commanded all the sheriffs to refuse them the protection of the courts and to let go free of punishment any who injured them, in effect to put them outside the law. This decree he afterwards modified at the request of Hubert Walter, but he refused an offer of a thousand marks for a confirmation of their charters and liberties, and returned to Normandy in the words quoted by the chronicler, “breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the servants of Christ.”
John was now in a position where he should have used every effort to strengthen himself against the next move of Philip, which he should have known was inevitable, and where, if ever, he might hope to do so. Instead of that, by a blunder in morals, in which John’s greatest weakness lay, by an act of passion and perfidy, he gave his antagonist a better excuse than he could have hoped for when he was at last ready to renew the war. John had now been for more than ten years married to Isabel of Gloucester, and no children had been born of the marriage. In the situation of the Angevin house he may well have wished for a direct heir and have been ready to adopt the expedient common to sovereigns in such cases. At any rate about this time he procured from the Bishops of Normandy and Aquitaine a divorce, a formal annulling of the marriage on the ground of consanguinity, the question raised at the time of their marriage never, it would seem, having been settled by dispensation. Then he sent off an embassy to ask for a daughter of the king of Portugal. In the meantime he went on a progress through the French lands which had been secured to him by treaty with Philip, and met the beautiful Isabel, daughter of the Count of Angouleme, then twelve years of age, and determined to marry her out of hand. The fact that she was already betrothed to Hugh “the Brown,” son and heir of his own vassal the Count of La Marche, and that she was then living in the household of her intended father-in-law, made no more difference to him than his own embassy to Portugal. It seems possible indeed that it was in the very castle of the Count of La Marche that the plan was formed. Isabel’s father also did not hesitate in the choice of sons-in-law, and his daughter having been brought home, she was at once married to John. An act of this kind was a most flagrant violation of the feudal contract, nor was the moral blunder saved from being a political one by the fact that the injured house was that of the Lusignans, great barons and long turbulent and unruly vassals of Aquitaine. John had given them now a legal right of appeal to his suzerain and a moral justification of rebellion.
After his marriage John went back to England for the coronation of his queen, which took place on October 8. At Lincoln he received the homage of William of Scotland and made peace with the Cistercians, and then went on a progress through the north as far as Carlisle. In the meantime, as was to be expected, hostilities had begun with the family of the Count of La Marche, and the king sent out a summons to the barons of England to meet him at Portsmouth at Whitsuntide prepared for service abroad. On receipt of this notice the earls held a meeting at Leicester and by agreement replied to the king that they would not go over sea with him unless he restored to them their rights. There is no evidence in the single account we have of this incident that the earls intended to deny their liability to service abroad. It is probable they intended to take their position on the more secure principle that services due to the suzerain who violated the rights of his vassal were for the time being, at least, suspended. If this is so, the declaration of the earls is the first clear evidence we have that the barons of England were beginning to realize their legal right of resistance and to get sight of the great principle which was so soon to give birth to the constitution. The result of the opposition to John’s summons we do not know, unless the statement which follows in the chronicle that the king was demanding the castles of the barons, and taking hostages if they retained them, was his answer to their demand. At any rate they appeared as required at Portsmouth ready for the campaign abroad, but John, instead of sending them over to France, took away the money which they had brought to spend in his service, and let them go home.
From the time of John’s landing in Normandy, about June 1, 1201, until the same time the next year, he was occupied with negotiating rather than with fighting. Philip was not yet ready to take part himself in the war, but he kept a careful watch of events and made John constantly aware that