April Queen (46 page)

When the ransom was delayed, Richard decided to stop feeding the useless mouths of the surrendered inhabitants of Acre, and personally supervised the slaughter of 2,700 soldiers of the garrison and 300 women and children belonging to them, including infants at the breast.
Roped together in one mass of terrified flesh, they were hacked and stabbed and stoned to death, their bellies slit open in the search for valuables they might have swallowed and the bodies afterwards burned so that the ashes could be sifted for gold or precious stones.
²⁶

Such massacres were ‘justified’ militarily on the grounds that news of them would incline the inhabitants of cities similarly besieged in the future to surrender swiftly in the hope of milder treatment. However, even by the standards of medieval warfare and after a century of conflict between European Christians and Muslims in the Middle East, an atrocity on this scale made Richard the bogey man used by Arab mothers for centuries to come to frighten naughty children: ‘Be good or
melek Ric
[King Richard] will get you.’

The only real battle of the campaign took place two weeks after leaving Acre. In the forest of Arsouf, south of Jerusalem, massed charges of the heavy Christian cavalry were claimed to have left 7,000 Turks dead on the field of battle, but since Saladin was able to continue harassing the Christian column two days later,
²⁷
this seems an exaggerated body count. Even casualties on a quarter of that scale, together with their injured and dead horses, makes an appalling scene, with wounded Saracens afterwards stripped and killed or left to die in the open. On the winning side, this second victory led to high hopes for the crusade.

In Rome, with the traces of his illness evident on his face and body, Philip was released from his crusader’s vow by Pope Celestine.
²⁸
His request to be allowed a dispensation from the Peace in order to seize the opportunity to right the wrongs of the Alais/Vexin/Flanders complex met with no such success, probably because Eleanor on her stopover in Rome had briefed the pope on the Plantagenet reaction to any such move.
²⁹

Further north, Philip had a meeting with the German Emperor. Henry Hohenstaufen was settling scores with Tancred and ready to listen to all the Franks’ tales discrediting the Plantagenet ally of his Sicilian enemies. He was also related to both the insulted duke of Austria and the imprisoned king of Cyprus and his daughter, still held prisoner in Joanna’s household. However, the claim that he swore there and then to take personal revenge on Richard, should he pass through any part of the empire on his way home,
³⁰
sounds like a later invention, for there was no particular reason at that moment for Richard to travel across his domains.

In England, William Longchamp had been making enemies at every level. Nobody loved the rapacious chancellor whose exactions drained
the country to finance the absent king’s distant enterprise, certainly not his fellow bishops, who had only one thought when Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury died on the crusade. Fearful that Longchamp’s intimacy with the king would give him the leverage to have himself installed as primate of all England,
³¹
they found the moment to strike after Geoffrey the Bastard was consecrated by Archbishop Bartholomew at Tours and invested with the
pallium
.

Not wishing to lose the revenues of the see of York, which had been coming to the Crown as did those of all vacant sees, Longchamp peremptorily ordered the widowed countess of Flanders to prevent Geoffrey reaching England from any of her ports. Diplomatically, she allowed his household, who were under no such embargo, to cross on 13 September and shut her eyes to Geoffrey crossing more quietly the following day. Landing at Dover in mid-morning, he was ordered by the water-guard to report to Longchamp’s sister Richeut, wife of the absent castellan, but fled to Canterbury, where Longchamp’s men arrested him in St Martin’s Priory. Dragged outside with his head banging on the ground, screaming excommunications on those who had laid hands on him,
³²
Geoffrey was offered a mount, but refused it as belonging to men he had excommunicated and was forced to walk the twenty miles back to Dover.

His arrest was seen by the bishops as an affront to their collective dignity – an attitude that John was happy to exploit by championing their cause at the Council of Reading. On the strength of the empowerment prudently obtained by Eleanor in Rome, which permitted Archbishop Walter of Rouen to call the chancellor to account if necessary, Longchamp was summoned from Windsor, one day’s ride to the east. Learning when halfway there the strength of the forces arrayed against him, he turned tail and took refuge in the Tower of London,
³³
for which disobedience he was excommunicated by the archbishop of Rouen. That night the jubilant citizens defied his orders to keep the gates of London closed against his pursuers.

The following morning, several thousand of them gathered in the open ground east of the Tower and called Longchamp to come out and defend himself, which he did astutely and bravely enough, warning them all against John’s ambitions and the danger of treason, for which they risked not only temporal justice but also the sanctions of the Church so long as Richard was on crusade. But his arguments were in vain. Two days later, meeting at St Paul’s, the Great Council listened to the archbishop of Rouen and William the Marshal read the letters brought back by Eleanor from Messina,
³⁴
after which they banished Longchamp and replaced him as chancellor by Walter of Rouen.

Exceeding their brief, the council gave Prince John the fine-sounding but constitutionally meaningless title ‘supreme governor of the realm’,
³⁵
which purported to give him precedence over even the chief justiciar. Longchamp’s men were summarily dismissed and new castellans, sheriffs and other officials sworn in. Interestingly, in the context of the growth of non-feudal power, the citizens of London exacted from the assembled magnates as the price for their support a recognition of their commune, entitled to elect its mayor, aldermen and other officers.

Holed up in the Tower, Longchamp argued that surrendering his seal and castles would be treason, but gave in after long negotiation. Allowed to keep the castles of Dover, Cambridge and Hereford because they were so far apart as to constitute no threat, he gave his word that he would not leave England without permission, handing over his brothers and chamberlain as sureties. On 12 October he was escorted to the castle at Dover, where his sister had held Geoffrey prisoner.

Lying low there with her for five days, he abandoned his brothers to their fate on emerging the following Thursday disguised as a woman in a long green gown, with the hood pulled over his face. For once, his small and unimposing stature was an asset until, waiting on the foreshore while his servants attempted to hire a boat to take them across the Channel, he was accosted and groped by a curious fisherman. His sex revealed, Longchamp was rescued by his servants, but on being questioned in English by a local woman and being unable to reply, he was attacked by a suspicious crowd and locked up in a cellar.
³⁶

The universal ridicule earned by his attempted escape was thought punishment enough for the former papal legate who had been so puffed up with pride as to use the royal ‘we’ on occasion. Before the end of the month, Prince John gave orders that Longchamp should be allowed to leave the country. Spirits rising once across the Channel, the disgraced prelate followed the same path as the Plantagenet princes when they had fallen out with Henry, travelling to Paris, where he was acclaimed with all appropriate ecclesiastical dignity – some said, in return for bribes.
³⁷
Confusingly, he was also confirmed in office by cardinals Jordan and Octavian, in the city on papal business.
³⁸

Hearing rumours that they had come to repair the breach between Rouen and Ely, and suspecting anyone who came to her from the direction of Paris, Eleanor declined to receive them when they crossed into her territory at Gisors, ordering the seneschal of Normandy to inform the prelates that they could travel no further without her safe-conduct. Their reply in retreating was to excommunicate the seneschal
and his garrison, and place the duchy of Normandy under interdict – without excommunicating its duchess who had neatly avoided putting her name to any specific action for which she could be so punished.

Emboldened by the cardinals’ support, Longchamp ignored his own excommunication and excommunicated just about everyone in England who had taken sides openly against him with the exception of Prince John. This incited Geoffrey the Bastard to excommunicate his own suffragan, the bishop of Durham. The archbishop of Rouen escalated matters by placing Longchamp’s diocese of Ely under interdict. Even the bishops themselves disagreed about who could excommunicate whom, with results that would have been comic if they were not taken seriously by the mass of the population.

The season of Advent leading to Christmas 1191 was fraught, with entire counties denied the sacrament in the Plantagenet domains on both sides of the Channel. Church bells had been removed and laid on the ground, as were the statues within; weddings could not be celebrated; the dead had to be temporarily buried in fields, awaiting the lifting of the sanctions to be interred in consecrated ground. The man who had caused all this anguish for the common people now attempted to enlist Eleanor in his cause, without success. At Rouen, where she had taken up residence, she avoided meeting Longchamp on the pretext that it was forbidden for a Christian to eat, drink or have any dealings with an excommunicate. At the same time she showed what she personally thought of the widespread abuse of ecclesiastical sanctions by appealing successfully to Celestine to undo all the chaos due to his cardinals’ espousal of Longchamp’s cause.
³⁹
Visiting the unhappy diocese of Ely a few months later, she took mercy on the population and had the archbishop of Rouen lift the interdict under which they suffered.
⁴⁰

To make matters worse, while she was still at Bures holding court for Richard’s Norman vassals, Philip returned to Paris on 31 December with the pope’s blessing. Holding his court in Fontainebleau, he was hailed a hero of Christendom, much as his father had been after returning from Outremer in 1149. The spin-doctors on the Ile de la Cité acclaimed him as the chief architect of the fall of Acre, whose illness on crusade was due to poison introduced into his food or drink by the enemies whose repeated treachery had eventually forced him to flee the Holy Land.
⁴¹
As to who the chief of these enemies might be, there was only one answer. Who would seek to injure a Christian prince dedicated to the salvation of the Holy Sepulchre, if not the family responsible for so many other woes of the Capetian realm?

To reinforce his alibi, Philip went everywhere with a strengthened bodyguard and ordered his vassals to strengthen their fortifications, as though already under threat from Normandy and Anjou. Seeing in this the preparation for a pre-emptive strike, Eleanor in turn ordered similar preparations on her side of the uneasy frontier. On 20 January 1192 Philip met the constable of Normandy near Gisors, showed him the settlement with Richard brokered by the Count of Flanders in Messina, and demanded the return of Alais with her castles.

This being refused despite menaces, he retired with the promise of returning in far greater force, to gain by arms what he could not obtain by negotiation.
⁴²
On other fronts, his return from the Holy Land was enabling him quietly to expand his power base. The succession of Flanders gained him much of Artois, the Amiénois, Vermandois and Beauvais. Having lost most of his father’s chief vassals to disease and combat during the crusade, he was determined that their successors would know a strong suzerain from the outset.

About this time Eleanor heard from England that Prince John was planning to stab her in the back, having assembled a small army of mercenaries, with whom to perform knight service as Philip’s vassal, invading Normandy alongside the Frankish forces, after which he would marry Alais and be declared duke of Normandy.
⁴³
Refusing to withdraw to her own inherited possessions and lie low while these troubles in the north resolved themselves, Eleanor’s instinct was to attack fast. John may have thought that Philip intended establishing him as duke of Normandy and quietly retiring, but she had no illusions that Frankish incursions would stop there; once having transgressed against the Peace of God, Philip would have nothing to lose by moving against the whole Plantagenet Empire, province by province.

Travelling with something like Henry’s speed in similar circumstances, she defied the elements in yet another winter crossing of the Channel. Landing at Portsmouth, she ignored Prince John making his preparations in nearby Southampton, rightly reasoning that he was impotent if deprived of the sources of his wealth. Instead, she convened in Windsor, London, Oxford and Winchester a series of meetings of the Great Council.
⁴⁴
The magnates had been prepared to stand aside from John’s manoeuvrings with Philip on condition that their own fiefs in Normandy were not directly threatened. Employing all the tricks of dialectic that she had learned so long ago on the Ile de la Cité and invoking the Peace of God in Richard’s protection, Eleanor convinced them that their rightful king was still very much alive and would shortly return from the Holy Land to call them all to account for their actions in his absence.

Talked around by this woman old enough to be their mother – in some cases, their grandmother – the magnates were coerced into threatening John with the confiscation of all the possessions they had allowed him to keep, should he cross the Channel. Sulkily, but without bloodshed, he retired to his castle at Wallingford after dismissing his disappointed mercenaries. Eleanor’s political
coup
was a masterly solution to a situation that could have cost thousands of lives, but the respite it bought was short because the game was changed by the reappearance on the board of a piece everyone had thought out of play.