April Queen (50 page)

The last subject on the agenda was Richard's oath of fealty to the emperor and his undertaking to pay an annual fee to Henry Hohenstaufen. To the barons of the realm this was a shameful thing,
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to offset which it was decided that the king should be recrowned at Winchester. It was almost forty years since Henry had last held a ceremonial crown-wearing; no one could remember the ritual. So messengers sped off to Canterbury to consult the records of the ceremonial used when Stephen of Blois had been recrowned at Canterbury in 1141 to reaffirm his sovereignty after release from imprisonment by Empress Matilda.
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Resenting the delay this meant in his departure for Normandy, Richard agreed reluctantly. Knowing how quickly matters of state wearied him, Eleanor stayed close, witnessing on 8 April his charter setting out the honours due to King William of Scotland when called to the English court. A week later she was still at his side when he dined at Winchester Castle on Saturday 16 April. The following day, which was either just before or just after her seventy-third birthday, she sat in state on the gospel side of the cathedral on a specially built dais surrounded by her court of young ladies – the noble heiresses waiting to be bestowed as rewards upon those who had served the Crown well in the recent troubled times.
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Poor unwanted Berengaria was conveniently out of the way in Poitiers. Alais was a prisoner in Rouen. It was Eleanor in all her regal glory who was the only queen in England that morning when her son processed with Longchamp on his right side from nearby St Swithin's Priory and up the aisle beneath a canopy borne by a count and three earls, one of whom was his bastard half-brother William Longsword of Salisbury, to the altar where Archbishop Hubert Walter was waiting.

Business after the ceremony included setting the ransoms for the noble prisoners taken at Tickhill and Nottingham and dispatching 10,000 marks to Germany to ransom Archbishop Walter of Rouen. Hoping to make the collection of his prisoners' ransoms quicker than his had been, Richard authorised a considerable expenditure on fetters and chains to make sure the conditions in which they were kept were less comfortable than his in Germany.

Second seal of Richard

His habitual impatience was not helped by more bad news from France. On 24 April, less than six weeks after the landing at Sandwich, he and Eleanor arrived at Portsmouth. In the East Richard had been impressed by the manoeu-vrability of galleys, far less dependent on the wind than traditional English ships, and determined to build a fleet of them, with which to control the Channel. Portsmouth, surrounded by a wall, was to be his admiralty, shipyard and homeport where the newly constructed galleys would safely berth in a fortified harbour. With his customary enthusiasm for everything martial, he threw himself into this new enterprise, but also found time to go hunting, interrupting his sport when riots broke out between his Welsh and Flemish mercenaries, turning the half-built streets of Portsmouth into a battleground.

No sooner was everything ready than the weather changed. Chafing at the bit, Richard ignored the advice of his captains and ordered men and horses to embark on Monday 2 May. After a day and a night being driven everywhere but towards France, with the horses cooped up in their stalls suffering more and more, he abandoned the attempt and returned to land, to everyone's great relief. The prolonged stay cost over £100 in lodgings. It was not until 12 May that the fleet of 100 vessels great and small carrying the levied English knights and the mercenary force could weigh anchor and set sail for the port of Barfleur.
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Richard's second visit to England as king had lasted – although far longer than he wished – a bare two months. Neither he nor Eleanor would ever set eyes on the island realm again.

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leanor's reappearance from across the sea at Richard's side had for their continental vassals all the characteristics of a dual return from the dead. If his mother seemed almost supernatural by virtue of her great age and extraordinary vitality, there was no doubt that the king in his prime was flesh and blood – the greatest warrior in Christendom, so far as his loyal subjects were concerned.

The squire of William the Marshal reported how at the news of his coming, church bells rang out everywhere and the common people expressed their joy in hymns and dances
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while the turncoats among the marcher lords prepared to change sides yet again as Eleanor and he progressed in state from Barfleur to Caen and Bayeux.

Their third or fourth night after disembarking was spent in the house at Lisieux of Archdeacon John of Alençon – the trusted messenger who brought to Richard in the Holy Land Eleanor's appeal that finally set him on the homeward path. Here they received a visitor under cover of darkness. Deprived of Philip's subsidies, dispossessed of his own castles and revenues by the Great Council, John Lackland now merited the sobriquet Lack-all. Fearing Richard's anger and hoping that she would mediate for him, he sought an interview with Eleanor first.
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Richard had been trying to persuade his troops to ride through the night to relieve the siege of Verneuil. He assured John of Alençon he held no animosity for his brother. So apt to use floods of tears on occasion himself, he was often moved by the penitential weeping of others. And so it proved this time. Echoing Henry's words when the princes repented of their treason, he pardoned John and blamed instead the evil advisers who had led his ‘little brother' astray.
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John was twenty-six at the time. Sitting down to a freshly cooked salmon Richard had been given for his own dinner, he must have been immensely relieved at this reception. To prove on whose side he now was, he was given a retinue of knights and men-at-arms with whom to relieve the garrison of Evreux by cutting Philip's lines of communication and forcing him to withdraw.
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In dealing with the Frankish incursions, Richard was at his best: his genius for assessing military priorities and driving horses and machines to destruction and men to their limits of endurance had his excommunicated enemy on the run within days. Archbishop Walter of Rouen joined him in Normandy with William Longchamp, leaving England in the capable hands of Archbishop Hubert Walter of Canterbury, who as chief justiciar ruled the kingdom wisely and well for the rest of Richard's reign, being made a cardinal the following March.

Before long Philip was backtracking in panic,
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abandoning equipment and supplies in the knowledge that his betrayal of Richard while imprisoned in Germany meant that he could expect, if taken prisoner, no feudal kiss of peace. After redressing the situation temporarily in Normandy, Richard swung south towards the Loire Valley to recover the castles handed over by John and those of Châteaudun and Loches, which he himself had yielded and now recovered with the aid of a mixed force of Flemings and Navarrese mercenaries led by Berengaria's brother Sancho, including probably a corps of the Genoese crossbowmen, in whom Richard placed great faith. Other specialists included 150 artillerymen with trebuchets and other missile launchers to batter the château of Taillebourg into submission, razing it so thoroughly to the ground shortly after Geoffroi de Rancon's death that no trace of the twelfth-century building remains.

Time and again Philip fled at Richard's approach, abandoning near Vendôme not only his siege-engines but also his chapel fittings, the treasury and the precious chancery documents listing Richard's vassals who had sworn direct allegiance to the Frankish Crown during the exile.
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While William the Marshal kept these safe, Richard pressed onwards with his Flemish mercenary commander Mercadier,
at one point after the battle of Fréteval in July 1194 coming within minutes of capturing Philip and his personal escort. Informed by a lone Fleming met by the roadside that his prey was far ahead, Richard galloped straight past the humble country church in which his enemy was hiding. He was well into Frankish-held territory when his horse foundered and Mercadier had to find him a remount on which to rejoin his own forces.
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Moving south, Richard tore into Aquitaine where the internecine feuding had flourished unchecked during his four-year absence. Here he was on home ground: the fortresses provisioned and manned against him were as familiar to his military mind as a sibling's face, every weakness known in advance. Throughout July he and Mercadier's men ravaged the countryside yet again. After taking the count of Angoulême's fortress-city in a single evening, he wrote to Archbishop Hubert Walter that they had captured 40,000 men-at-arms and 300 ransomable knights.
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The numbers were probably exaggerated, but Richard's swift decisions, martial prowess and personal courage succeeded within three months in restoring his continental possessions from the Channel to the Pyrenees to something like peace
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and in expunging the disgrace of his imprisonment.

One of the many promises on which he reneged was the undertaking in the Treaty of Worms to hand over to Duke Leopold within seven months of his liberation the daughter of Isaac Comnenus. With Leopold now threatening to execute his sureties in retaliation for this, Baldwin of Béthune – one of the small band that had been captured with Richard in Austria – was chosen by the other, more recent, hostages to travel to England and fetch the girl. However, hearing on the return journey that Leopold had died, he turned back with his charge and returned her to England.
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The ransom never was paid in its entirety, the German Emperor waiving the last 17,000 marks as a contribution to Richard's war against their common enemy, Philip.
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Eleanor's court at Poitiers had never recovered from Henry's purge of 1174, and she had not the energy to bring back to life the great audience hall beside the Maubergeonne Tower where Berengaria held her lonely and inconsequential court when not in her dower lands further north in Maine.
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The haven to which Eleanor retired in order to distance herself from the turmoil of the world was the monastery/convent to which Henry had sought to consign her. As Fat Louis had installed his chancery and war office in St Denis, so she set her modest staff up in Fontevraud, midway between the Channel coast and the Pyrenees. On her way to Mass each morning, she walked over the
permanent inhabitants of the abbey church and past Henry's tomb with its effigy showing his restless hands stilled at last and quietly holding the sceptre of state (plate 29).

Fontevraud's several thousand religious and lay inhabitants included an upper stratum of noble ladies whose husbands had tired of them or found a more advantageous match, plus those who had chosen to put the Peace of God between themselves and a society that used their bodies, titles and possessions as the disposable filling in the sandwiches of treaties and alliances. To this elegant society Eleanor came as a natural queen regardless of the worldly titles she claimed.

During the Norman campaign of 1194, Richard suffered several setbacks. Attempting to relieve the siege of Aumale, he narrowly escaped capture by Guillaume des Barres, his enemy from the winter on Sicily. The Frankish knight abandoned three other captives in the attempt, thereby losing their ransoms. Another of Philip's men, Alain de Dinan, did unhorse Richard, who managed to remount in the skirmish and make good his escape. At Gaillon on the Seine, which he was besieging in order to get money for the construction of a new castle to replace Gisors, now in Philip's hands, he was wounded in the knee by a crossbow bolt fired by Cadoc, Philip's mercenary castellan. His stricken horse falling on top of him, Richard's injuries took a month to heal.

Such was the devastation from fire and sword that the Church once again called for a halt to the violence, resulting in a truce signed by Richard and Philip on 23 July. A month later, by a letter dated 22 August, Richard made tournaments legal at five named places in England,
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ignoring the possibility this presented for an assembly of several hundred or more knights, fully armed and accoutred, being used to mask a nascent rebellion. His excuse to the Church was that tournaments prepared knights for what they would experience when he led them back to the Holy Land. Few English knights had responded to his call to take the cross; uppermost in his mind was the income he could expect from sales of licences to promote tournaments and the fees due from every participant, ranging from 20 marks for an earl down to 2 marks for a landless knight.
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