April Queen (52 page)

A huge comet was sighted in July 1198 and, like all natural phenomena of this nature, considered an evil omen, although it is hard to imagine what could have been feared as worse than the famine and the ceaseless laying waste of vast tracts of land as first Philip's and then Richard's forces advanced and retreated. At long last, during a meeting in January 1199 conducted between Richard shouting his terms from a boat in mid-river and Philip on horseback on the bank, a five-year truce was agreed, motivated on both sides not so much by the approach of Lent as financial exhaustion. Neither monarch could have known that before the expiration of the five years, Normandy would be lost to the English Crown. The captains and the kings departed, the mercenaries too: returning to Flanders, Mercadier and his men found a bonus by plundering the merchants at the great fair of Abbeville.

After Richard's departure from the talks with Peter of Capua, his representatives had recourse to the traditional method of bridging rifts between royal houses, and cast around for a daughter of the house of Anjou who could be married to Philip's son Prince Louis. However, before anything could come of this, tragedy stalked Eleanor yet again.

Despite twice capturing the Capetian treasury, Richard had spent every penny on paying his mercenaries, strengthening old fortresses and constructing new ones, of which his pride was the
bellum castrum de rupe
or Château Gaillard – the ‘Mighty Castle' at Les Andelys, supposedly impregnable due to all the latest ideas in castle-building that he had picked up on his travels, including rock-cut ditches and concentric walls and flanking towers with carefully worked-out fields of fire.
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The cost rocketed to 11,500 pounds Angevin over two years, more than any other castle had ever cost.

Despite scutages raised in England during three years in succession from 1194, compared with seven in the thirty-five years of Henry's reign, Richard was always bemoaning the lot of a sovereign whose vassals did not hear his summons when his purse was empty. The country was suffering famine and epidemics of unidentified plague, during which unrest had broken out in a quickly suppressed popular rebellion in London. In a
sirventès
addressed to the count of Auvergne, who was once again exploring the possibilities of direct allegiance to Philip, Richard included these reproachful lines:

It seemed like an answer to Richard's prayers when he heard of a hoard of Roman gold unearthed on the land of Count Aymar of Limoges shortly before Easter 1199,
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the pride of which was a plaque depicting a king or chieftain seated at table surrounded by courtiers or members of his family. To his demand that the trove be handed over to him, Count Aymar offered to go halves – a reply that incensed Richard, coming as it did from a vassal who had been attempting to undo the knots of his allegiance by going over to Philip, and should have been all too eager to ingratiate himself.

The gold had been taken for safekeeping to the castle of Châlus, held by two sergeants-at-arms. Being low-born, their names were never certain, but were probably Pierre Brun and Pierre Basile. With them was a makeshift garrison totalling thirty-eight men, women and children.
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An alternative explanation of the siege is that Richard had set his sights on capturing the largest gold mine in France, not far from Châlus. Whichever is true, he defied the Lenten truce by sending Mercadier to besiege the castles of Nontron and Piégut, while he headed for Châlus with about one hundred men. At their approach on 25 March, the defenders were desperate because he had already announced that he would give no quarter.

It says much for the construction of the castle that the paltry force of defenders held out for three days. What happened after its fall is a
good example of the level of violence and bloodshed in the routine siege of a relatively unimportant castle. On the evening of 26 March, Richard was checking the progress of the conscripted local peasants labouring for his sappers undermining the wall. Its entrance shielded by wattle fences from the hail of missiles, they had dug a huge cavern in the hillside. The roof was propped up with tree trunks copiously packed with pig carcasses smeared with pitch and other combustible material which, when fired, would consume the props and bring the wall down, making a breach through which the attackers could swarm.

Richard was wearing a helmet but no armour and carrying a buckler to fend off stray missiles fired from the arrow slits high up in the walls of the keep. Their own supplies of arrows long since exhausted, the garrison was reduced to scrambling about at risk to life and limb, picking up missiles that had been fired at them and failed to break or deform on landing. Pierre Basile had spent the day dodging the incoming fire under the shelter of a huge frying pan from the castle kitchen used as a shield and was now at the arrow slit still visible in the wall of the keep, hoping for a target of opportunity before the light went (plate 21).

There are two versions of what happened next. In the first, distracted for a moment, Richard let his shield drop at the very second a reused arrow from his own armoury flew through the air to pierce his shoulder. Giving no sign to the mercenaries around him of the pain he was suffering, he mounted his horse and rode back to the house commandeered for his use.

The more credible version is that the missile was a reused crossbow quarrel. Robin Hood and William Tell apart, the longbow as a military weapon was used less for marksmanship than to provide a massive barrage of missiles falling from the sky into which enemy troops had to advance through a dangerous confusion of terrified and injured horses.

The accurate range of a crossbow was greater and the speed of the quarrel faster than an arrow, which is why the weapon had been outlawed by the Lateran Council of 1139 as being unchivalrous. Ironically, Richard was one of the kings whose troops had used this weapon in defiance of the ban both in Cyprus and the Holy Land. He was also credited by Guillaume le Breton with introducing the weapon into France.
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Caught literally off guard, he was hit by the quarrel where the neck joined the left shoulder.
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While it would have been difficult to conceal an arrow nearly three feet long sticking out of his neck, a far shorter quarrel could have been hidden in the poor light in order not to depress
the mercenaries' morale. He had many times been wounded, and this was not the first crossbow bolt to pierce his skin. After riding back to his quarters, he was laid on a couch, where Mercadier's medic attempted to pull out the missile in the flickering light of torches. The wooden shaft broke off, as it was designed to do, revealing the mark of the Angevin armoury at Chinon but leaving the metal head still in the wound. In his clumsy efforts to remove this, the medic cut deeper and deeper into the shoulder muscles.
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Bandaged and plastered and fortified with alcohol, the only analgesic available, Richard carried on directing the siege next day, but infection had entered his tissues, whether on the quarrel or the hands and knife of the medic. By the morning of 28 March the stench of gas gangrene and steadily increasing pain told him that an agonising death lay ahead. In his years of campaigning he had personally seen thousands of men, women and children dying at his command or in his cause. He therefore had no illusions what was happening and sent a sealed letter to Eleanor in Fontevraud, instructing her to come to Châlus with all possible speed.

She in turn dispatched the Abbess Matilda of Bohemia, who was the most discreet of messengers, to tell Berengaria to come from Maine. That errand discharged, she was to try to find John, whose precise whereabouts in the north were unknown. Eleanor's choice of a nun for the second part of this errand hints that she suspected John of being in an area where an Angevin knight, or even a cleric from Fontevraud, might not be welcome.

Setting out herself with the abbot of Turpenay and a small escort, she covered the distance of more than one hundred miles that separated Fontevraud from Châlus by travelling day and night.
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Despite her speed, the stink of the gases formed by bacteria in the wound and the discoloration of the necrosed tissue told her that her son was beyond any help save spiritual consolation from his chaplain and crusading comrade, Pierre Milo.
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However, Eleanor had come not to nurse, nor to give way to her feelings, but to safeguard the succession and discreetly unburden Richard of his last wishes. Who was present, apart from herself, remains a mystery. If a testament was dictated to Milo or the Abbot, it was never to see the light of day although Otto was said to have been generously remembered, as were Richard's favourite religious foundations like La Sauve Majeure, east of Bordeaux. As to the succession, there is no record of the clause in the Treaty of Messina appointing Arthur ever being rescinded; had Richard changed his
mind and named John, Eleanor would have acted differently in the immediate future.

Putting his spiritual affairs in order, the dying king was up against the awkward fact that his last confession was before the wedding to Berengaria seven years before. This was later camouflaged by the chroniclers pretending that the soul of the great hero of Christen-dom had been labouring under an unchristian hatred for Philip, which he had not been prepared to renounce.
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The more likely reason not to have confessed was the refusal of a genuinely pious believer to pretend contrition for his homosexuality so that he could take the sacrament after absolution. Only on his deathbed could he sincerely say that he would not commit the sin again.

As one of the final acts before meeting his Maker, he had the now victorious mercenaries, who had slaughtered all the other defenders, haul Pierre Basile before him in chains, and pardoned the sergeant-at-arms as being the instrument of God's displeasure at his defiance of the Lenten truce.
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Despite the royal pardon and the gift of a pouch of gold coins from Richard, Basile was later flayed alive by the mercenaries and hanged from the battlements.
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Disposing of the parts of his own body, Richard commended his heart to Rouen, where Young Henry lay among the former dukes of Normandy, and his body to Fontevraud, there to be buried at the feet of his father in atonement for a son's betrayal. To England, he gave not a thought. About 7 p.m. on 6 April, eleven days after he was wounded, and after receiving absolution and communion from Milo the Chaplain, Eleanor's favourite son died in agony at the age of forty-two.

What happened to the treasure of Châlus, the greed for which had caused Richard's death, is unknown. Was the flaying alive of Pierre Basile an act of vengeance for daring to kill a king or a torture to make him betray the whereabouts of the treasure? Since it was never heard of again, the likelihood is that either it never existed or was hacked up and shared out among the mercenaries, later being melted down.

Fortz chausa es,
wrote Gaucelm Faidit: it is a awful thing …

Despite her grief, Eleanor could not permit herself the luxury of mourning. There was no time for that. Torn between the total unsuitability of both Arthur and John as successors to all Richard's titles, she rode back to Fontevraud at the slower pace of a funeral cortège, using the time to try to find a way of ensuring that the empire she and Henry had built should not crumble to dust one short decade after his death.