The fall of Henry the Second only showed the strength of the system he
had built up on this side the sea. In the hands of the Justiciar, Ranulf
de Glanvill, England remained peaceful through the last stormy months of
his reign, and his successor Richard found it undisturbed when he came
for his crowning in the autumn of 1189. Though born at Oxford, Richard
had been bred in Aquitaine; he was an utter stranger to his realm, and
his visit was simply for the purpose of gathering money for a Crusade.
Sheriffdoms, bishopricks, were sold; even the supremacy over Scotland was
bought back again by William the Lion; and it was with the wealth which
these measures won that Richard made his way in 1190 to Marseilles and
sailed thence to Messina. Here he found his army and a host under King
Philip of France; and the winter was spent in quarrels between the two
kings and a strife between Richard and Tancred of Sicily. In the spring
of 1191 his mother Eleanor arrived with ill news from England. Richard
had left the realm under the regency of two bishops, Hugh Puiset of
Durham and William Longchamp of Ely; but before quitting France he had
entrusted it wholly to the latter, who stood at the head of Church and
State as at once Justiciar and Papal Legate. Longchamp was loyal to the
king, but his exactions and scorn of Englishmen roused a fierce hatred
among the baronage, and this hatred found a head in John. While richly
gifting his brother with earldoms and lands, Richard had taken oath from
him that he would quit England for three years. But tidings that the
Justiciar was striving to secure the succession of Arthur, the child of
his elder brother Geoffry and of Constance of Britanny, to the English
crown at once recalled John to the realm, and peace between him and
Longchamp was only preserved by the influence of the queen-mother
Eleanor. Richard met this news by sending Walter of Coutances, the
Archbishop of Rouen, with full but secret powers to England. On his
landing in the summer of 1191 Walter found the country already in arms.
No battle had been fought, but John had seized many of the royal castles,
and the indignation stirred by Longchamp's arrest of Archbishop Geoffry
of York, a bastard son of Henry the Second, called the whole baronage to
the field. The nobles swore fealty to John as Richard's successor, and
Walter of Coutances saw himself forced to show his commission as
Justiciar, and to assent to Longchamp's exile from the realm.
The tidings of this revolution reached Richard in the Holy Land. He had
landed at Acre in the summer and joined with the French king in its
siege. But on the surrender of the town Philip at once sailed home, while
Richard, marching from Acre to Joppa, pushed inland to Jerusalem. The
city however was saved by false news of its strength, and through the
following winter and the spring of 1192 the king limited his activity to
securing the fortresses of southern Palestine. In June he again advanced
on Jerusalem, but the revolt of his army forced him a second time to fall
back, and news of Philip's intrigues with John drove him to abandon
further efforts. There was need to hasten home. Sailing for speed's sake
in a merchant vessel, he was driven by a storm on the Adriatic coast, and
while journeying in disguise overland arrested in December at Vienna by
his personal enemy, Duke Leopold of Austria. Through the whole year John,
in disgust at his displacement by Walter of Coutances, had been plotting
fruitlessly with Philip. But the news of this capture at once roused both
to activity. John secured his castles and seized Windsor, giving out that
the king would never return; while Philip strove to induce the Emperor,
Henry the Sixth, to whom the Duke of Austria had given Richard up, to
retain his captive. But a new influence now appeared on the scene. The
see of Canterbury was vacant, and Richard from his prison bestowed it on
Hubert Walter, the Bishop of Salisbury, a nephew of Ranulf de Glanvill,
and who had acted as secretary to Bishop Longchamp. Hubert's ability was
seen in the skill with which he held John at bay and raised the enormous
ransom which Henry demanded, the whole people, clergy as well as lay,
paying a fourth of their moveable goods. To gain his release however
Richard was forced besides this payment of ransom to do homage to the
Emperor, not only for the kingdom of Arles with which Henry invested him
but for England itself, whose crown he resigned into the Emperor's hands
and received back as a fief. But John's open revolt made even these terms
welcome, and Richard hurried to England in the spring of 1194. He found
the rising already quelled by the decision with which the Primate led an
army against John's castles, and his landing was followed by his
brother's complete submission.
The firmness of Hubert Walter had secured order in England, but oversea
Richard found himself face to face with dangers which he was too
clear-sighted to undervalue. Destitute of his father's administrative
genius, less ingenious in his political conceptions than John, Richard
was far from being a mere soldier. A love of adventure, a pride in sheer
physical strength, here and there a romantic generosity, jostled roughly
with the craft, the unscrupulousness, the violence of his race; but he
was at heart a statesman, cool and patient in the execution of his plans
as he was bold in their conception. "The devil is loose; take care of
yourself," Philip had written to John at the news of Richard's release.
In the French king's case a restless ambition was spurred to action by
insults which he had borne during the Crusade. He had availed himself of
Richard's imprisonment to invade Normandy, while the lords of Aquitaine
rose in open revolt under the troubadour Bertrand de Born. Jealousy of
the rule of strangers, weariness of the turbulence of the mercenary
soldiers of the Angevins or of the greed and oppression of their
financial administration, combined with an impatience of their firm
government and vigorous justice to alienate the nobles of their provinces
on the Continent. Loyalty among the people there was none; even Anjou,
the home of their race, drifted towards Philip as steadily as Poitou. But
in warlike ability Richard was more than Philip's peer. He held him in
check on the Norman frontier and surprised his treasure at Fréteval while
he reduced to submission the rebels of Aquitaine. Hubert Walter gathered
vast sums to support the army of mercenaries which Richard led against
his foes. The country groaned under its burdens, but it owned the justice
and firmness of the Primate's rule, and the measures which he took to
procure money with as little oppression as might be proved steps in the
education of the nation in its own self-government. The taxes were
assessed by a jury of sworn knights at each circuit of the justices; the
grand jury of the county was based on the election of knights in the
hundred courts; and the keeping of pleas of the crown was taken from the
sheriff and given to a newly-elected officer, the coroner. In these
elections were found at a later time precedents for parliamentary
representation; in Hubert's mind they were doubtless intended to do
little more than reconcile the people to the crushing taxation. His work
poured a million into the treasury, and enabled Richard during a short
truce to detach Flanders by his bribes from the French alliance, and to
unite the Counts of Chartres, Champagne, and Boulogne with the Bretons in
a revolt against Philip. He won a yet more valuable aid in the election
of his nephew Otto of Saxony, a son of Henry the Lion, to the German
throne, and his envoy William Longchamp knitted an alliance which would
bring the German lances to bear on the King of Paris.
But the security of Normandy was requisite to the success of these wider
plans, and Richard saw that its defence could no longer rest on the
loyalty of the Norman people. His father might trace his descent through
Matilda from the line of Hrolf, but the Angevin ruler was in fact a
stranger to the Norman. It was impossible for a Norman to recognize his
Duke with any real sympathy in the Angevin prince whom he saw moving
along the border at the head of Brabançon mercenaries, in whose camp the
old names of the Norman baronage were missing and Merchade, a Provençal
ruffian, held supreme command. The purely military site that Richard
selected for a new fortress with which he guarded the border showed his
realization of the fact that Normandy could now only be held by force of
arms. As a monument of warlike skill his "Saucy Castle," Château
Gaillard, stands first among the fortresses of the Middle Ages. Richard
fixed its site where the Seine bends suddenly at Gaillon in a great
semicircle to the north, and where the valley of Les Andelys breaks the
line of the chalk cliffs along its banks. Blue masses of woodland crown
the distant hills; within the river curve lies a dull reach of flat
meadow, round which the Seine, broken with green islets and dappled with
the grey and blue of the sky, flashes like a silver bow on its way to
Rouen. The castle formed part of an entrenched camp which Richard
designed to cover his Norman capital. Approach by the river was blocked
by a stockade and a bridge of boats, by a fort on the islet in mid
stream, and by a fortified town which the king built in the valley of the
Gambon, then an impassable marsh. In the angle between this valley and
the Seine, on a spur of the chalk hills which only a narrow neck of land
connects with the general plateau, rose at the height of three hundred
feet above the river the crowning fortress of the whole. Its outworks and
the walls which connected it with the town and stockade have for the most
part gone, but time and the hand of man have done little to destroy the
fortifications themselves--the fosse, hewn deep into the solid rock, with
casemates hollowed out along its sides, the fluted walls of the citadel,
the huge donjon looking down on the brown roofs and huddled gables of Les
Andelys. Even now in its ruin we can understand the triumphant outburst
of its royal builder as he saw it rising against the sky: "How pretty a
child is mine, this child of but one year old!"
The easy reduction of Normandy on the fall of Château Gaillard at a later
time proved Richard's foresight; but foresight and sagacity were mingled
in him with a brutal violence and a callous indifference to honour. "I
would take it, were its walls of iron," Philip exclaimed in wrath as he
saw the fortress rise. "I would hold it, were its walls of butter," was
the defiant answer of his foe. It was Church land and the Archbishop of
Rouen laid Normandy under interdict at its seizure, but the king met the
interdict with mockery, and intrigued with Rome till the censure was
withdrawn. He was just as defiant of a "rain of blood," whose fall scared
his courtiers. "Had an angel from heaven bid him abandon his work," says
a cool observer, "he would have answered with a curse." The twelve
months' hard work, in fact, by securing the Norman frontier set Richard
free to deal his long-planned blow at Philip. Money only was wanting; for
England had at last struck against the continued exactions. In 1198 Hugh,
Bishop of Lincoln, brought nobles and bishops to refuse a new demand for
the maintenance of foreign soldiers, and Hubert Walter resigned in
despair. A new justiciar, Geoffry Fitz-Peter, Earl of Essex, extorted
some money by a harsh assize of the forests; but the exchequer was soon
drained, and Richard listened with more than the greed of his race to
rumours that a treasure had been found in the fields of the Limousin.
Twelve knights of gold seated round a golden table were the find, it was
said, of the Lord of Châlus. Treasure-trove at any rate there was, and in
the spring of 1199 Richard prowled around the walls. But the castle held
stubbornly out till the king's greed passed into savage menace. He would
hang all, he swore--man, woman, the very child at the breast. In the
midst of his threats an arrow from the walls struck him down. He died as
he had lived, owning the wild passion which for seven years past had kept
him from confession lest he should be forced to pardon Philip, forgiving
with kingly generosity the archer who had shot him.
The Angevin dominion broke to pieces at his death. John was acknowledged
as king in England and Normandy, Aquitaine was secured for him by its
duchess, his mother Eleanor; but Anjou, Maine, and Touraine did homage to
Arthur, the son of his elder brother Geoffry, the late Duke of Britanny.
The ambition of Philip, who protected his cause, turned the day against
Arthur; the Angevins rose against the French garrisons with which the
French king practically annexed the country, and in May 1200 a treaty
between the two kings left John master of the whole dominion of his
house. But fresh troubles broke out in Poitou; Philip, on John's refusal
to answer the charges of the Poitevin barons at his Court, declared in
1202 his fiefs forfeited; and Arthur, now a boy of fifteen, strove to
seize Eleanor in the castle of Mirebeau. Surprised at its siege by a
rapid march of the king, the boy was taken prisoner to Rouen, and
murdered there in the spring of 1203, as men believed, by his uncle's
hand. This brutal outrage at once roused the French provinces in revolt,
while Philip sentenced John to forfeiture as a murderer, and marched
straight on Normandy. The ease with which the conquest of the Duchy was
effected can only be explained by the utter absence of any popular
resistance on the part of the Normans themselves. Half a century before
the sight of a Frenchman in the land would have roused every peasant to
arms from Avranches to Dieppe. But town after town surrendered at the
mere summons of Philip, and the conquest was hardly over before Normandy
settled down into the most loyal of the provinces of France. Much of this
was due to the wise liberality with which Philip met the claims of the
towns to independence and self-government, as well as to the overpowering
force and military ability with which the conquest was effected. But the
utter absence of opposition sprang from a deeper cause. To the Norman his
transfer from John to Philip was a mere passing from one foreign master
to another, and foreigner for foreigner Philip was the less alien of the
two. Between France and Normandy there had been as many years of
friendship as of strife; between Norman and Angevin lay a century of
bitterest hate. Moreover, the subjection to France was the realization in
fact of a dependence which had always existed in theory; Philip entered
Rouen as the overlord of its dukes; while the submission to the house of
Anjou had been the most humiliating of all submissions, the submission to
an equal. In 1204 Philip turned on the south with as startling a success.
Maine, Anjou, and Touraine passed with little resistance into his hands,
and the death of Eleanor was followed by the submission of the bulk of
Aquitaine. Little was left save the country south of the Garonne; and
from the lordship of a vast empire that stretched from the Tyne to the
Pyrenees John saw himself reduced at a blow to the realm of England.
