Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Kings & Queens (9 page)

P
robably his upbringing in Poitiers at his mother’s court sowed the seeds of Richard’s love affair with chivalric combat. Every day he would take part in jousting tournaments and receive expert training in the art of war. No wonder his heart was inflamed with the romance of medieval battle.

So was born England’s brave knightly king, dubbed Coeur de Lion, or ‘Lionheart’. His love of fighting was such that in the ten years of his reign (1189-99) only a few months were ever spent in England.

Richard I and Saladin in combat

Richard’s greatest endeavour was leading the Third Crusade. On hearing the news that Saladin had invaded the Holy Land, Richard was champing at the bit to take the cross.

Within months of being crowned king, Lionheart was laying plans to rescue the Holy Land from the Muslim infidel. The ‘Saladin Tithe’ was raised to fund the expedition. Those who joined the crusade would be exempt from the tax which demanded ten per cent of all revenues.

Allied with Philip II of France, his friend and possible lover, the two kings led a huge army across Europe in the summer of 1190. Two interludes delayed the expedition: while overwintering in Sicily Richard’s mother arrived and presneted him with a bride, Berengaria of Navarre. This match angered Philip who thought Richard should marry his sister Alice, and the two friends fell out. After capturing Cyprus Richard satisfied his mother’s demand and married Berengaria.

Cyprus would serve as a base for supplying future crusaders. Richard took his new queen with him to the Holy Land where she witnessed his conquest of Acre and Jaffa. The army then turned inland and headed for the dream goal of their cause, Jerusalem.

Harassed all the way by Saladin’s army, the crusaders got within sight of the Holy City. But then Richard received news that his brother John had joined forces with his former friend King Philip and the two were taking control of Normandy castles.

As the situation worsened by the day Richard was forced to make peace with Saladin, having spent 15 months in Palestine. The outcome was deeply frustrating for the English king, for without recapturing Jerusalem the crusade was technically a failure. Nevertheless much of the expedition had been a success: he had recovered the coastal strip; the political turmoil in Jerusalem was resolved; and Christians and Saracens were allowed safe passage to and from the Holy Sepulchre.

Having sent his wife on before him, Richard travelled back to western Europe. He was shipwrecked near Venice and is said to have made his way on foot disguised as a pilgrim. The king was spotted, however, and taken prisoner by the Duke of Austria. He passed Richard to Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor, who saw a neat opportunity to raise much needed war funds.

The emperor ransomed Richard for 150,000 marks, a sum greater than the entire Saladin Tithe raised to finance the Third Crusade. To release Richard, the English people, who had hardly ever seen their king, were asked to stump up a quarter of the value of their property. In their scheming ways, John and Philip of France even offered the German Emperor a sum to keep Richard locked up, but it was turned down.

Fortunately for Richard, England prospered from its thriving wool industry and he regained his freedom. But happiness proved shortlived. On his return he discovered a whole swathe of Normandy and Touraine had been taken by John and Philip.

Painstakingly he devoted the last five years of his reign struggling to recover lost land. But this he did. By the time he died, from a crossbow bolt to the shoulder which turned gangrenous, Richard had restored much of his dominion.

T
he unexpected death of Richard I led to great confusion in courtly circles about his succession. There were two rival candidates: Richard’s brother John and Arthur of Brittany, grandson of Henry II.

When the news broke, John was actually staying with Arthur in Brittany. In a tense situation John politely made his adieus and hastened to London to claim his crown.

A nervous character, John had an unfortunate upbringing. His mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was 45 when she bore him, the last of eight children and probably unwanted. Soon after his birth Elanor was placed under house arrest and his brothers despised him. He also inherited no territory, and was nicknamed ‘Lackland’ for the humiliation. Unsurprisingly, John became a vengeful person, known to be cruel and untrustworthy – the sort who would grab at any useful opportunity whether right or wrong.

Rival camps voiced their support. The archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, advised against John’s coronation, telling his advisors, ‘Mark my words, you will never regret anything in your life as much as this [crowning John]’. But in honour of his father’s deathbed wish, John was duly crowned king in 1199. An axis of opposition was thereby created. Whilst England and Normandy accepted John, the provinces of Anjou, Maine and Touraine all sided with Arthur.

John knew he had to dispose of his twelve-year-old nephew at the first opportunity if he was going to rid himself of a powerful rival. This opportunity did not arise for a few years but when it did John seized it with both hands.

While only 16, Arthur mysteriously disappeared. He was captured by John’s forces in the Battle of Mirabeau and held in the castle of Falaise. The grandson of Henry II was a hero to the Breton people and his imprisonment caused great anger.

It was reported that John had ordered the royal chamberlain, at whose castle Arthur was held, to blind and castrate the boy, but the deed was never done. Instead the chamberlain announced that the boy had died of a heart attack. But when John realised the chamberlain had been lying, he took matters into his own hands. It is said that after inviting the teenager to dinner, John fell into a drunken state and murdered the boy. The king then personally disposed of the body by hurling it into the River Seine.

This despicable act set the tone for the rest of John’s innings, which went from bad to worse. More and more of his empire was being eroded away in wars with France, and it would not be long before France and England became separate political entities.

Given John’s irascible nature, it was perhaps inevitable that he would fall out with the Pope over the issue of who should be the next archbishop at Canterbury. The king’s excommunication was followed by a papal ‘interdict’ banning all church services in England except for burying the dead. No church bells rang in England for six years.

H
enry III was known to be a cultured monarch. He preferred the arts to war and led his nation into a golden age of church building in the Early Gothic style so popular in northern France. Having inherited a kingdom in disarray at the age of nine – his father John had lost nearly all the overseas possessions of the Angevin Empire; only Gascony and Perigord remained in English hands – Henry relied on having competent advisors to get his reign off to a good start. Fortunately they were, and the country united behind its promising young monarch.

Henry endeavoured to form useful political alliances with European leaders, seeing this to be the way to keeping the realm peaceful and happy. But what he did not anticipate was that his marriage to Eleanor of Provence in 1236, coupled with his own endearing charm, encouraged a swarm of foreigners to flood into the country. Relatives and friends of the new queen regarded England as the fashionable land of commercial opportunity now that the Holy Land no longer provided rich pickings for crusaders.

But this mass immigration of French aristocrats did not go down well with Henry’s barons who felt their noses put out of joint. Their resentment reached a peak when the king made the eccentric decision to invade Sicily with the intention of giving the land, albeit with the Pope’s consent, to his ten-year-old second son, Edmund. When the venture turned into a fiasco, causing huge expense to the treasury, the barons were outraged.

Exasperated, the English barons decided enough was enough and would put a stop to Henry’s fickle ideas. In 1258 the earl of Leicester and the king’s brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort, led a committee of 24 barons to confront the king.

However, their intention was not so much to coerce the king with force, but to persuade him with tact of the better course of government they could recommend. On arriving at Westminster Hall the barons left their swords outside, and while they professed loyalty to the king demanded a prerogative to make reforms to state affairs which, to be frank, were a mess.

Together the barons governed the country for several years. But it was an uneasy arrangement, and culminated in Simon de Montfort doing battle with the king’s army in 1264 and capturing both Henry and his young warrior son Edward (future Edward I) at the Battle of Lewes. A year in precarious power saw de Montfort’s baronial support wane and the king’s wax. The two forces came head to head at the Battle of Evesham, where the earl of Leicester was slain. King Henry could now reassert his authority.

After the drawn out turbulence of much of his reign Henry was content to hand over the running of the country to his forceful son Edward, while he concentrated his energies on what he loved best: art and architecture (of which his greatest achievement was to rebuild Westminster Abbey).

Henry was 65 when he died and despite the upheavals had held the throne for the longest of any English monarch to date, at 56 years.