April Queen (49 page)

During all this time Eleanor had to keep her eye on John, who was forbidden to leave England and had all his incoming mail from Paris intercepted. She was also haranguing the pope at a distance for what she considered his lukewarm support. Her secretary, Peter of Blois, now archdeacon of Bath, was famous for his witty puns and epigrams. In accusing Celestine III of keeping the sword of St Peter in its sheath and failing three times to send papal intermediaries, he punned that the legates had been leashed and not loosed upon the emperor: in succinct Latin, they had been
potius ligati quam legati
.

Complaining that, if her son had been rich, they would have come running to be rewarded by generosity, Eleanor signed herself not
‘Queen by the Grace of God' but ‘Queen of the English by God's anger'.
³⁵
As duchess of Aquitaine, she was also not above including a thinly veiled hint that the Cathar heresy so widespread in the south of France would be allowed to flourish there unchecked if the papacy did not earn her gratitude.
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Double standards indeed for Eleanor, who had herself turned away cardinals Agnani, Jordan and Octavian when it suited her. And what more could the pope do? He had excommunicated Duke Leopold for laying hands on a crusader and threatened Philip with excommunication under the Peace of God if he took advantage of Richard's captivity. He had even waved the threat of interdict over England, should the ransom not be forthcoming. With vast Church possessions at risk in Germany and Henry Hohenstaufen having large forces still in Italy, he could not force the emperor to do anything.

In Midsummer 1193 Richard was moved yet again – this time to Worms on the Rhine, where his charm earned him the liberty to order his falconer and favourite birds sent out from England, with a consignment of clothes and utensils for his personal use. At a five-day plenary court, the emperor weighed all the possibilities in the light of Philip's representations and confirmed that the royal prisoner would be released against sureties when two-thirds of the ransom had been brought to Germany at his risk in transit. The bad news was that the amount was to be increased by 50 per cent – the extra 50,000 marks being in lieu of Richard's direct help in the campaign against his ally Tancred. The number of hostages was increased accordingly.

Henry Hohenstaufen seems to have been in two minds about Richard's claim that he had persuaded the German bishops to end their long dispute, but the change of episcopal policy was due to Celestine's urgings on his behalf. In addition, Richard was responsible for a reconciliation between the houses of Hohenstaufen and Saxony, with Henry the Lion being offered the emperor's cousin Constance as bride for his son, a nephew of the royal captive.

It was probably at Worms that Richard composed a
sirventès
addressed to his half-sister Marie de Champagne sometime towards the end of 1193 expressing his impatience with the pace at which his subjects were getting the money together.

The emperor having addressed a letter to the magnates of England on 20 December confirming that he had set 17 January as the day for the release of his ‘dear friend Richard',
³⁷
the dear friend summoned the archbishop of Rouen and Eleanor to join him at Speyer for Christmas with all the money so far collected, so he could be sure both it and the hostages would all be handed over by the due date. Before leaving England with an impressive retinue and large escort, Eleanor appointed Archbishop Hubert Walter chief justiciar on Richard's instructions, which made him the indisputable ruler of the country in her absence or until the king should return.

On 6 January 1194 they arrived in Cologne. On 17 January at Speyer she was informed that her son's release was to be delayed after all, an alternative offer having been received from Paris. Philip was bidding 50,000 marks and John 30,000 marks if Richard were kept prisoner until Michaelmas – by which time they hoped to have possessed themselves of the continental Plantagenet assets. Alternatively, they offered monthly instalments of £1000 so long as Richard was held captive. On learning of this, the Great Council deprived John of all his possessions, in addition to which he and his chief partisans were excommunicated. Under Hubert Walter's guidance the council also denounced Longchamp to the pope in a letter heavy with all their seals, which was to be shown first to Richard in Germany so that he would know what they thought of his ex-chancellor.

At Mainz on 2 February 1194, Eleanor's joy at seeing her son for the first time in three and a half years was tempered by an unpleasant surprise on learning that Philip had raised the French offer to 100,000 marks, with another 50,000 from John – a sum equivalent to the whole ransom from England – if Richard were handed over to them or held in Germany for another year.
³⁸

Seeking a counter-counter-offer, the Emperor showed the letters to her and Richard. Whatever the barons and bishops of England thought of Longchamp, he still enjoyed the king's favour and was one of the
spokesmen who addressed the imperial court in Eleanor's presence that day, pointing out that Philip and John had no chance of amassing the colossal sums, totalling many times the annual taxation income of the whole of France, even if they did manage to conquer and plunder Normandy and the other Angevin continental possessions.

The political complication for Henry Hohenstaufen was that, if he allowed Richard to walk free he would lose the French support in the dispute with his bishops at a time when the English were hardly going to love him. He therefore demanded that Richard admit he held England as a vassal of the emperor.
³⁹
The king's advisers were horrified, but what did it matter to Eleanor if he thus changed allegiance from Capet to Hohenstaufen? As to an annual tribute demanded, what was a promise of that worth to a son of Henry of Anjou?

On 4 February, Richard was at last released after swearing fealty to the emperor and declaring with his customary eloquence that he held his possessions on both sides of the Channel as a vassal of the Emperor, to whom he would pay a yearly fee of £5,000. Doffing his bonnet, he placed it in the emperor's hands, signifying that he renounced his vassalage to the house of Capet. One last requirement was that the archbishop of Rouen, who had played a leading part in the negotiations, should be left behind as a hostage.

Learning that his enemy was free, Philip managed to get a message to Prince John in England, warning him that ‘the devil was loose'. In terror, John fled the country and took refuge in Paris.
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Given the unrest he had fomented in England during the crusade and the long captivity, it was Richard's nature to hurry home and punish those who had committed treason. Only Eleanor's influence can have persuaded him to the roundabout but statesmanlike route they followed, spending a weekend with the bishop of Cologne, staying with the duke of Louvain in his castle at Antwerp, and stopping at Brussels and many other places to make and confirm alliances that might one day be useful on this, the eastern flank of Philip's realm.

At Antwerp, the faithful Stephen of Turnham welcomed Eleanor and his king aboard the
Trenchemer
, from which they trans-shipped to a larger vessel at the mouth of the Schelde for the night and back to the faster
Trenchemer
for the Channel crossing next day. Fearing the patrols which Philip was suspected of having set to intercept them,
⁴¹
they weighed anchor in the evening, landing at Sandwich ‘at the ninth hour of the day' on 12 March.
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Six weeks after leaving Speyer, they rode from there to give thanks at Becket's tomb in Canterbury Cathedral and spent the night in Rochester Castle.

This may have been Eleanor's way of giving the citizens of London time to deck with banners and bunting the city that had contributed a sizeable share of the ransom. To the ringing of all the bells in London, Richard was led in procession to St Paul's, now empty of its treasures. Agents of the emperor come to oversee payment of the balance outstanding had expected to find a country on its knees after all the exactions.
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Hardship there was in the country, but the pace of business in London made them comment that the ransom had been set far too low.

Richard's gratitude to his jubilant subjects was limited to a stay of a few hours only. On 18 March he was at Bury St Edmunds – giving thanks at the shrine of one of his favourite saints, the eponymous martyred king of East Anglia – before heading north to Nottingham, where a small-scale but bitter civil war had just ended. Eleanor travelled with him all the way because he knew nothing of English or Anglo–Norman customs and sensitivities and she did not want the arrogance that had caused all his problems in Outremer to alienate his vassals who had still to make good their pledges for the unpaid part of the ransom.

After the Great Council meeting that dispossessed John, Archbishop Hubert Walter had departed at the head of an army equipped to reduce his castles with copious supplies of arrows, armour, shields, pitch and sulphur for Greek fire, plus mangonels to hurl it. Marlborough surrendered in a few days, Lancaster too. John's castellan at St Michael's Mount in Cornwall dropped dead from a heart attack when he heard Richard was back in England.
⁴⁴
But John's castle at Tickhill was still holding out. The garrison offered to surrender if he would guarantee their lives. The king refused, but Bishop Hugh of Durham, commanding the loyalist besiegers, took it upon himself to agree terms.

Nottingham itself held out until Richard arrived there on 25 March. The defenders did not believe who he was until he donned his armour and led the assault, taking the outerworks and many prisoners, whom he hanged on a gallows erected in full view of the castle. Hubert Walter arrived with reinforcements for the besiegers' ranks. Two days later, Hugh of Durham arrived with the prisoners he had taken at Tickhill. Within twenty-four hours, Nottingham too had surrendered and the rebellion was over.

A Great Council was summoned there, in the heart of the territory that had been loyal to John. While its members were assembling, Richard amused himself for a few days at one of Henry's old haunts, Clipstone on the fringes of Sherwood Forest, where the hunting of stag and boar so pleased him that he compared it favourably with
his own Talmont. This was the stuff of the triumphal return at the end of every Robin Hood film, although whether a meeting in some greenwood glade between a loyal outlaw and the returned crusader king – as described in the fourteenth-century
Ballad of Robin Hood
– actually took place, is anyone's guess.

On Wednesday 30 March, in the hastily repaired great hall of Nottingham Castle, 72-year-old Eleanor in all her majesty as dowager queen surveyed the assembled earls of the realm and the bishops and archbishops doing obeisance to her son, whose return she had done more than anyone else to secure. But the moment of national elation and thanksgiving for the king's salvation was brief. He was angry with his English subjects, who had paid the lion's share of the ransom too slowly, as though the fifteen months' imprison-ment was their fault. He wanted not their acclamations, but more money to hire mercenaries and buy equipment to repulse Philip's advances in Normandy, where he had already taken several castles and appeared before the walls of Rouen.
⁴⁵

All the offices and privileges bought five years earlier now had to be bought anew. To the few protesters, he replied that while he and his heroic crusaders had faced death, all the stay-at-homes had been growing fat on the profits of war.

Those survivors
par excellence
, the three Longchamp brothers, were again in the ascendant. Henry, imprisoned after William's flight to France from Dover Castle, bought the office of sheriff of Worcestershire, while Osbert was named sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk. The hated bishop of Ely offered 1,500 marks down and 500 marks annually per county to be named sheriff of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire, but was outbid for Yorkshire by Geoffrey the Bastard, who offered 3,000 marks for that county alone to ensure that William Longchamp had no authority in his see. Even Prince John's unhappy wife, Isabelle or Hawise of Gloucester, had to pay £200 to keep her dowry lands and marriage portion.

Teams of clerks were kept busy day and night noting all this down. On the third day, Richard moved on to the question of taxation. Demands for the arrears in payment of ransom contributions were sent out. In addition, he announced his requirement that every knight in the realm should perform one-third of his knight service by crossing to Normandy with him.
⁴⁶
This would have produced a total force of around 2,000 knights, but the demand was more probably intended to raise the scutage paid in lieu, so that he could hire mercenaries. Here he was on thin ice for, as Bishop Hugh of Lincoln asserted in 1197, knight service was owed to the king by his English vassals for war in England, not abroad.

To squeeze the last drops of wealth out of a country exhausted by the ransom, Richard named Longchamp chancellor once more, for who knew more than he about milking England down to its last penny? In addition to new taxes, the pre-Conquest land-tax last levied in 1162 was reintroduced. Known as Danegeld, its rate was set at two shillings for every hide of cultivated land recorded in the Domesday Book, with none of the traditional exemption for Church lands. The poor monasteries that had no precious objects to sell were ordered to surrender their wool-clip for the second year running in settlement of their assessments. The Pipe Rolls show the cost of hauling wool from the Cistercian foundations in Yorkshire to Holme in Norfolk and hiring ships to transport it to Germany.
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Among the many individual victims was William the Marshal, called on to pay four shillings for his wife's estates in Sussex.
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