Kate Norgate

“ If we may trust an English chronicler whose information was probably derived from an eye-witness, Richard never gave his jailers the satisfaction of seeing a cloud on his brow; he was “always cheery and full of jest in talk, fierce and bold in action, according to circumstances. He would tease his warders with rough jokes, and enjoy the sport of making them drunk, and of trying his own strength against that of their big bodies.” ”

“ Richard’s coronation is in one way the most memorable in all English history, for it is the occasion on which the form and manner of crowning a king of England were, in every essential point and in most of the lesser particulars, fixed for all after-time. ”

“ Henry of Hohenstaufen was a political visionary, obsessed, more strongly perhaps than any other German ruler before our own day, by the German dream of world-dominion; yet even he can scarcely have had any real hope of extorting Richard’s consent to the terms laid down in this curious document. Leopold of Austria was a practical-minded person, and moreover knew Richard too well to have any illusions on the subject; hence the strong safeguards by which he secured his claims as the original captor of the prize—safeguards which Henry dared not refuse to grant him. ”

“ All Henry’s barons were to swear that if he broke his plighted word with regard to anything in the agreement they would support Philip and Richard against him; and it seems that Philip and Richard, while restoring all their other conquests, were to retain either Tours, Le Mans, and the castles of Château-du-Loir and Trou, or Gisors, Pacy, and Nonancourt, “until all the things above determined by the king of France should be fulfilled.” ”

“ At the back of the troops was the fortified town, overtopped by a lofty castle or citadel built on the rock. [601] The Crusaders could land only by means of their boats. Knights and crossbowmen hurriedly obeyed the king’s order, and all weary and worn with long tossing on the sea and laden with their heavy armour and cumbrous weapons, crowded into the tiny cockle-shells [602] to join battle as foot-soldiers with an army of which part at least was well provided with good horses and mules, and which, moreover, was on its own soil; “but,” as one of the pilgrims says, “we knew the most about war.” ”

“ Richard in fact, while the garrison were waiting for him to land, was waiting to ascertain what had become of them, for the shore was lined and the town, to all appearance, filled with Mussulman troops, so that the whole place, as seen from the sea, looked as if it were in the enemy’s hands. On the other hand, it seems that only a small part of the fleet was as yet visible from the castle-tower. The garrison therefore, growing hopeless of rescue, yielded to Bohadin’s urgency and began to march out. Forty-nine men, besides some women and some horses, thus came forth. ”

“ A public confirmation of the rights of King Henry’s eldest surviving son as heir to the crown of England and to the headship of the house of Anjou, such as would safeguard those rights until the son’s return from Holy Land in case the father should die before the Crusade was over, was a measure of obvious prudence not merely for the personal interest of the heir but also for the security of the Angevin dominion as a whole. ”

“ In the sculptured effigies of Richard at Fontevraud and at Rouen the outlines of the face give so little indication of age as to suggest that in the living model they may have been—except for the beard and moustache—almost the same at forty-one as at twenty-one; the features are well proportioned and finely formed. In life they were crowned with a profusion of hair “of a colour midway between red and yellow”—in other words, of the rare golden or still rarer auburn hue. ”

“ In birth Conrad was much more than Guy’s equal; the marquisate of Montferrat, to which he succeeded in 1188, ranked among the chief principalities of the kingdom of Italy, and his mother was granddaughter to one emperor, sister to another, and aunt to a third; while Guy was merely the youngest of the five brothers of that Geoffrey of Lusignan who had been a ringleader in almost every Aquitanian revolt from 1167 onward, and who had finally, some months after Conrad’s arrival at Tyre, gone to expiate in Palestine the last and worst of his offences against Duke Richard. ”

“ The booty was immense; there were more than four thousand camels laden with precious stores of the most varied kind, gold and silver, silks and purple cloth, grain and flour, sugar and spices, tents, hides, [238] 1192 arms of all sorts; the horses and mules were “altogether beyond counting”; and besides all this, the Egyptian contingent so eagerly awaited by Saladin had lost nearly two thousand men [949] and suffered a most ignominious defeat. “No tidings,” says Bohadin, “ever dealt a more grievous wound to the heart of the Sultan than those which were brought to him at the close of that day.” ”

“ The retention of the castles was quite unnecessary to the security of England; it must inevitably be a source of constant irritation to the Scots, and thus tend to endanger rather than to safeguard the tranquillity of the border; and the restitution of them was the only real sacrifice which the treaty involved. Richard’s charter is most cautiously worded; he renounces nothing except the direct homage of the Scot king’s subvassals and the explicit mention of “Scotland” by name in William’s own act of homage on this occasion. ”

“ Richard’s military instinct told him that the plan with which they had set out from Acre—the securing of the whole coast before they risked any attempt on the interior—was the only sound one. “The Turks are razing Ascalon; they dare not fight us. Let us go and recover it. All the world ought to hasten thither!” he pleaded. But the duke of Burgundy and the French party urged that the shortest route to the goal of their pilgrimage was the route which started not from Ascalon but from the place where they now were, and that Joppa should be rebuilt and made the base for an advance upon Jerusalem. ”

“ Reinforcements came up rapidly, and the French, seeing themselves outnumbered, urged their sovereign to make overtures for peace. Richard had arrayed his men for battle and placed himself, as usual, Dec. 5 at their head. Philip rode forward to meet him, and the two kings, on horseback and in armour, parleyed alone together while their followers stood around awaiting the result. At last they were seen to dismount, bare their heads, and exchange the kiss of peace. [1200] According to Philip’s biographer, Richard there and then renewed his homage to Philip. ”

“ Besides the avowed partizans of young Henry in Aquitaine, there were others who had seized the opportunity afforded them by the war to fortify their castles and set the ducal authority at defiance. The men of the South for the most part would at any moment gladly have flung off that authority altogether, no matter whether it was wielded by the heiress of the old ducal house, her husband, or her son. The Aquitanian barons whose castles had in the time of the war been fortified or held against Henry II made it clear that they were not disposed to give them up to Richard. ”

“ The low, soft chalk-hills of the Shephelah are not a range; they lie in groups and clusters interspersed with level spaces and valleys opening into the plain on the west, and falling on the east into the long, deep trench which runs between the “Lowlands” and the “Highlands” like—as a modern writer says—“a great fosse planted along the ramparts of Judea.” At the mouth of the northernmost of these cross-valleys—Joshua’s Valley of Ajalon—Lydda and Ramlah were frontier towns of the Shephelah and the maritime plain. ”

“ First the Crusaders who had been at the siege before the kings arrived—some of them ever since its beginning—claimed a share of the spoil, and threatened to desert if it were not given to them. The kings put them off with a promise. Then Richard proposed that he, the king of France, and all the men of their respective armies should bind themselves by oath not to leave the Holy Land for three years unless the whole of it should before the end of that time be surrendered by Saladin. Philip, however, refused to take such an oath. ”

“ During this breathing-space Richard’s chief concern was the collecting of money for a renewal of the war. England had been so drained for his ransom that he, or his justiciar who acted for him, did not venture on demanding a “scutage of Normandy” till the following year (1195) . [1176] Nor did the king attempt to carry out at this time—if indeed he had momentarily entertained it—the project ascribed to him by Roger of Howden, of annulling all grants made under the existing Great Seal, of course for the purpose of compelling their holders to pay for a renewal of them. ”

“ There was another young king in whom, although his kingship was merely nominal, Bertrand saw a yet more desirable tool for the purposes of the league. Before young Henry joined his father and brother at the siege of Puy-St.-Front, he had been “joyfully received” by the monks of S. Martial’s at Limoges [160] —perhaps not by the monks only. The careless, easy, shallow disposition of Eleanor’s eldest son was far more in accord than the energetic temper of Richard with the ideas of the Aquitanian nobles as to what their duke should be. The policy of setting him up as Richard’s rival was obvious ”

“ He brought letters from the justiciars beseeching the king to return at once, as John was trying, with a considerable prospect of success, to make himself master of the realm. Richard called the barons together and set forth the matter fully to them. He added that if he should be, as he feared, obliged to depart from Syria, he would leave three hundred knights and two thousand men-at-arms to continue serving there at his expense; and he asked his own followers to let him know who among them wished to go with him, and who wished to stay, for he would put no constraint upon any man. ”

“ As the archbishop of Canterbury had previously returned from Normandy, [378] the coronation might have taken place immediately, had the new king desired it. But, unlike every other king of England since the Norman conquest, Richard was in no haste to be crowned. There was no need for haste; he had no rival; he had, in England, no enemies; and he had made for himself a host of friends by a proclamation which during the last five weeks “honourable men” sent out by Eleanor according to instructions from him had been publishing and carrying into effect in every county. ”

“ In this district of tumbled hill and dale, moorland, glen, and torrent-bed, of chalky slopes and limestone boulders covered with thick scrub and brushwood that sheltered caves and hiding-places innumerable, these light-armed Saracen horsemen were at home, and had every advantage for the guerilla warfare in which they excelled; and the ease and rapidity with which they could move about through the intricacies of the hills enabled them to swoop down suddenly from the most unexpected quarters, with fatal effect, upon foraging or reconnoitring parties and convoys. ”

“ Some of the magnates seem to have thought that jealousy and rivalry among themselves might be best appeased by setting, or at least proposing to set, over all of them a sovereign of another nationality; certain of them nominated King Richard of England. It was probably merely in opposition to this party that some others—“but they were few”—proposed Philip of France. [1242] The majority inclined to Duke Henry of Saxony, Richard’s sister’s son, who by birth was head of the most illustrious of the princely houses of Germany, and had in 1196 succeeded his father-in-law as Count Palatine. ”

“ Four names on the English (or Angevin) side were suggested to Henry by William the Marshal; Richard was offended because his own name was not among them. “You have done me grievous wrong; of all the men of my father’s lands I was deemed one of the best to defend him; but you give him to understand otherwise.” The Marshal protested that Richard misinterpreted his motive: “You are our lord the king’s most direct heir; it would be an outrage and crime to risk your life in such a business.” “It is true, Richard,” interposed Henry, “what he has said is but right” ”

“ Stormy wind and tempest, torrential rain and hail, beat down or tore up the tents; armour rusted, clothes rotted, biscuits and bacon were so soaked that they became putrid; horses died, men sickened; and in less than a week “the wise Templars, the brave Hospitaliers, and the men of the land” came to the conclusion that under the existing circumstances an attempt to besiege Jerusalem could lead to nothing but disaster. ”

“ The Emperor Henry VI was still under sentence of excommunication for his treatment of the captive king of England and for other violations of international right and justice committed in his pursuit of a dream of world-conquest in which he seems to have curiously anticipated a much later bearer of the Imperial title. The aged Pope Celestine had warned him in 1195—“What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” [1239] and the warning came back to him when on his way to Holy Land in autumn 1197 he fell sick unto death at Messina. ”

“ Hugh acquitted himself of the debt by assigning to the king the most valuable of Philip’s Saracen prisoners, who were still in Conrad’s custody at Tyre; but he made no sign of rejoining the Crusade. Such a state of affairs threatened ruin to the whole enterprise, and after long and anxious deliberation in his own mind Richard took private counsel with the “elders and wise men of the land” as to what had best be done. They gave their judgement that the marquis had forfeited his rights under the settlement of July 1191, and should be deprived of the revenues then assigned to him in the kingdom. ”