The History of England From the Norman Conquest to the Death of John Richard I and the Crusade byAdams, George Burton
The death of Henry II may be taken to mark the close of an epoch in
English history, the epoch which had begun with the Norman Conquest. We
may call it, for want of a better name, the feudal age,--the age during
which the prevailing organization, ideals, and practices had been
Norman-feudal. It was an age in which Normandy and the continental
interests of king and barons, and the continental spirit and methods, had
imposed themselves upon the island realm. It was a time in which the
great force in the state and the chief factor in its history had been the
king. The interests of the barons had been on the whole identical with
his. The rights which feudal law and custom gave him had been practically
unquestioned, save by an always reluctant Church, and baronial opposition
had taken the form of a resistance to his general power rather than of a
denial of special rights. Now a change had silently begun which was soon
to show itself openly and to lead to great results. This change involved
only slowly and indirectly the general power of the king, but it takes
its beginning from two sources: the rising importance of England in the
total dominions of the king, and the disposition to question certain of
his rights. Normandy was losing its power over the English baron, or if
this is too strong a statement for anything that was yet true, he was
beginning to identify himself more closely with England and to feel less
interest in sacrifices and burdens which inured only to the benefit of
the king and a policy foreign to the country. To the disposition to
question the king's actions and demands Henry had himself contributed not
a little by the frequency and greatness of those demands, and by the
small regard to the privileges of his vassals shown in the development of
his judicial reforms and in his financial measures these last indeed
under Henry II violated the baronial rights less directly but, as they
were carried on by his sons, they attacked them in a still more decisive
way. When once this disposition had begun, the very strength of the
Norman monarchy was an element of weakness, for it gave to individual
complaints a unity and a degree of importance and interest for the
country which they might not otherwise have had. In this development the
reign of Richard, though differing but little in outward appearance from
his father's, was a time of rapid preparation, leading directly to the
struggles of his brother's reign and to the first great forward step, the
act which marks the full beginning of the new era.
Richard could have felt no grief at the death of his father, and he made
no show of any. Geoffrey had gone for the burial to the nunnery of
Fontevrault, a favourite convent of Henry's, and there Richard appeared
as soon as he heard the news, and knelt beside the body of his father,
which was said to have bled on his approach, as long as it would take to
say the Lord's prayer. Then we are told he turned at once to business.
The first act which he performed, according to one of our authorities, on
stepping outside the church was characteristic of the beginning of his
reign. One of the most faithful of his father's later servants was
William Marshal, who had been earlier in the service of his son Henry. He
had remained with the king to the last, and in the hurried retreat from
Le Mans he had guarded the rear. On Richard's coming up in pursuit he had
turned upon him with his lance and might have killed him as he was
without his coat of mail, but instead, on Richard's crying out to be
spared, he had only slain his horse, and so checked the pursuit, though
he had spared him with words of contempt which Richard must have
remembered: "No, I will not slay you," he had said; "the devil may slay
you." Now both he and his friends were anxious as to the reception he
would meet with from the prince, but Richard was resolved to start from
the beginning as king and not as Count of Poitou. He called William
Marshal to him, referred to the incident, granted him his full pardon,
confirmed the gift to him which Henry had recently made him of the hand
of the heiress of the Earl of Pembroke and her rich inheritance, and
commissioned him to go at once to England to take charge of the king's
interests there until his own arrival. This incident was typical of
Richard's action in general. Henry's faithful servants suffered nothing
for their fidelity in opposing his son; the barons who had abandoned him
before his death, to seek their own selfish advantage because they
believed the tide was turning against him, were taught that Richard was
able to estimate their conduct at its real worth.
Henry on his death-bed had made no attempt to dispose of the succession.
On the retreat from Le Mans he had sent strict orders to Normandy, to
give up the castles there in the event of his death to no one but John.
But the knowledge of John's treason would have changed that, even if it
had been possible to set aside the treaty of Colombières. There was no
disposition anywhere to question Richard's right. On July 20 at Rouen he
was formally girt with the sword of the duchy of Normandy, by the
archbishop and received the homage of the clergy and other barons. He at
once confirmed to his brother John, who had joined him, the grants made
or promised him by their father: £4000 worth of land in England, the
county of Mortain in Normandy, and the hand and inheritance of the
heiress of the Earl of Gloucester. To his other brother, Geoffrey, he
gave the archbishopric of York, carrying out a wish which Henry had
expressed in his last moments; and Matilda, the daughter of Henry the
Lion, was given as his bride to another Geoffrey, the heir of the county
of Perche, a border land whose alliance would be of importance in case of
trouble with France. Two days later he had an interview with King Philip
at the old meeting-place near Gisors. There Philip quickly made evident
the fact that in his eyes the king of England was a different person from
the rebellious Count of Poitou, and he met Richard with his familiar
demand that the Norman Vexin should be given up. Without doubt the point
of view had changed as much to Richard, and he adopted his father's
tactics and promised to marry Adela. He also promised Philip 4000 marks
in addition to the 20,000 which Henry had agreed to pay. With these
promises Philip professed himself content. He received Richard's homage
for all the French fiefs, and the treaty lately made with Henry was
confirmed, including the agreement to start on the crusade the next
spring.
In the meantime by the command of Richard his mother, Eleanor, was set
free from custody in England; and assuming a royal state she made a
progress through the kingdom and gave orders for the release of
prisoners. About the middle of August Richard himself landed in England
with John. No one had any grounds on which to expect a particularly good
reign from him, but he was everywhere joyfully received, especially by
his mother and the barons at Winchester. A few days later the marriage of
John to Isabel of Gloucester was celebrated, in spite of a formal protest
entered by Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, because the parties were
related within the prohibited degrees. The coronation took place on
Sunday, September 3, and was celebrated apparently with much care to
follow the old ritual correctly and with much formal pomp and ceremony,
so that it became a new precedent for later occasions down to the present
day.
Richard was then just coming to the end of his thirty-second year. In
physical appearance he was not like either the Norman or the Angevin
type, but was taller and of a more delicate and refined cast, and his
portrait shows a rather handsome face. In character and ambitions also he
was not a descendant of his father's line. The humdrum business of ruling
the state, of developing its law and institutions, of keeping order and
doing justice, or even of following a consistent and long-continued
policy of increasing his power or enlarging his territories, was little
to his taste. He was determined, as his father had been, to be a strong
king and to put down utterly every rebellion, but his determination to be
obeyed was rather a resolution of the moment than a means to any foreseen
and planned conclusion. He has been called by one who knew the time most
thoroughly "the creation and impersonation of his age," and nothing
better can be said. The first age of a self-conscious chivalry,
delighting intensely in the physical life, in the sense of strength and
power, that belonged to baron and knight, and in the stirring scenes of
castle and tournament and distant adventure, the age of the troubadour,
of an idealized warfare and an idealized love, the age which had
expressed one side of itself in his brother Henry, expressed a more manly
side in Richard. He was first of all a warrior; not a general but a
fighter. The wild enthusiasm of the hand-to-hand conflict, the matching
of skill against skill and of strength against strength, was an intense
pleasure to him, and his superiority in the tactics of the battle-field,
in the planning and management of a fight, or even of a series of attacks
or defences, a march or a retreat, placed him easily in the front rank of
commanders in an age when the larger strategy of the highest order of
generalship had little place. Of England he had no knowledge. He was born
there, and he had paid it two brief visits before his coronation, but he
knew nothing of the language or the people. He had spent all his life in
his southern dominions, and the south had made him what he was. His
interest in England was chiefly as a source of supplies, and to him the
crusade was, by the necessities of his nature, of greater importance than
the real business of a king. For England itself the period was one during
which there was no king, though it was by the authority of an absent king
that a series of great ministers carried forward the development of the
machinery and law which had begun to be put into organized form in
Henry's reign, and carried forward also the training of the classes who
had a share in public affairs for the approaching crisis of their
history. From this point of view the exceedingly burdensome demands of
Richard upon his English subjects are the most important feature of his
time.
At the beginning of his reign Richard had, like his father, a great work
to do, great at least from his point of view; but the difference between
the two tasks shows how thoroughly Henry had performed his. Richard's
problem was to get as much money as possible for the expenses of the
crusade, and to arrange things, if possible, in such a shape that the
existing peace and quiet would be undisturbed during his absence. About
the business of raising money he set immediately and thoroughly. The
medieval king had many things to sell which are denied the modern
sovereign: offices, favour, and pardons, the rights of the crown, and even
in some cases the rights of the purchaser himself. This was Richard's
chief resource. "The king exposed for sale," as a chronicler of the time
said,53 "everything that he had"; or as another said,54 "whoever
wished, bought of the king his own and others' rights": not merely was the
willing purchaser welcome, but the unwilling was compelled to buy wherever
possible. Ranulf Glanvill, the great judge, Henry's justiciar and "the eye
of the king," was compelled to resign and to purchase his liberty with the
great sum, it is asserted, of £15,000. In most of the counties the former
sheriffs were removed and fined, and the offices thus vacated were sold to
the highest bidder. The Bishop of Durham, Hugh de Puiset, bought the
earldom of Northumberland and the justiciarship of England; the Bishop of
Winchester and the Abbot of St. Edmund's bought manors which belonged of
right to their churches; the Bishop of Coventry bought a priory and the
sheriffdoms of three counties; even the king's own devoted follower,
William of Longchamp, paid £3000 to be chancellor of the kingdom. Sales
like these were not unusual in the practice of kings, nor would they have
occasioned much remark at the time, if the matter had not been carried to
such extremes, and the rights and interests of the kingdom so openly
disregarded. The most flagrant case of this sort was that relating to the
liege homage of the king of Scotland, which Henry had exacted by formal
treaty from William the Lion and his barons. In December, 1189, King
William was escorted to Richard at Canterbury by Geoffrey, Archbishop of
York and the barons of Yorkshire, and there did homage for his English
lands, but was, on a payment of 10,000 marks, released from whatever
obligations he had assumed in addition to those of former Scottish kings.
Nothing could show more clearly than this how different were the interests
of Richard from his father's, or how little he troubled himself about the
future of his kingdom.
Already before this incident, which preceded Richard's departure by only
a few days, many of his arrangements for the care of the kingdom in his
absence had been made. At a great council held at Pipewell abbey near
Geddington on September 15, vacant bishoprics were filled with men whose
names were to be conspicuous in the period now beginning. Richard's
chancellor, William Longchamp, was made Bishop of Ely; Richard Fitz
Nigel, of the family of Roger of Salisbury, son of Nigel, Bishop of Ely,
and like his ancestors long employed in the exchequer and to be continued
in that service, was made Bishop of London; Hubert Walter, a connexion of
Ranulf Glanvill, and trained by him for more important office than was
now intrusted to him, became Bishop of Salisbury; and Geoffrey's
appointment to York was confirmed. The responsibility of the
justiciarship was at the same time divided between Bishop Hugh of Durham
and the Earl of Essex, who, however, shortly died, and in his place was
appointed William Longchamp. With them were associated as assistant
justices five others, of whom two were William Marshal, now possessing
the earldom of Pembroke, and Geoffrey Fitz Peter himself afterwards
justiciar. At Canterbury, in December, further dispositions were made.
Richard had great confidence in his mother, and with good reason.
Although she was now nearly seventy years of age, she was still vigorous
in mind and body, and she was always faithful to the interests of her
sons, and wise and skilful in the assistance which she gave them. Richard
seems to have left her with some ultimate authority in the state, and he
richly provided for her wants. He assigned her the provision which his
father had already made for her, and added also that which Henry I had
made for his queen and Stephen for his, so that, as was remarked at the
time, she had the endowment of three queens. John was not recognized as
heir nor assigned any authority. Perhaps Richard hoped to escape in this
way the troubles of his father, but, perhaps remembering also how much a
scanty income had had to do with his brother Henry's discontent, he gave
him almost the endowment of a king. Besides the grants already made to
him in Normandy, and rich additions since his coming to England, he now
conferred on him all the royal revenues of the four south-western
counties of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, and Somerset. He already held the
counties of Derby and Nottingham. Richard plainly intended that political
rights should not go with these grants, but he shows very little
knowledge of John's character or appreciation of the temptation which he
put in his way in the possession of a great principality lacking only the
finishing touches.
John's position was not the only source from which speedy trouble was
threatened when Richard crossed to Normandy on December 11. He had
prepared another, equally certain, in the arrangement which had been made
for the justiciarship. It was absurd to expect Hugh of Puiset and William
Longchamp to work in the same yoke. In spirit and birth Hugh was an
aristocrat of the highest type. Of not remote royal descent, a relative
of the kings both of England and France, he was a proud, worldly-minded,
intensely ambitious prelate of the feudal sort and of great power, almost
a reigning prince in the north. Longchamp was of the class of men who
rise in the service of kings. Not of peasant birth, though but little
above it, he owed everything to his zealous devotion to the interests of
Richard, and, as is usually the case with such men, he had an immense
confidence in himself; he was determined to be master, and he was as
proud of his position and abilities as was the Bishop of Durham of his
blood. Besides this he was naturally of an overbearing disposition and
very contemptuous of those whom he regarded as inferior to himself in any
particular. Hugh in turn felt, no doubt, a great contempt for him, but
Longchamp had no hesitation in measuring himself with the bishop. Soon
after the departure of the king he turned Hugh out of the exchequer and
took his county of Northumberland away from him. Other high-handed
proceedings followed, and many appeals against his chancellor were
carried to Richard in France. To rearrange matters a great council was
summoned to meet in Normandy about the end of winter. The result was that
Richard sustained his minister as Longchamp had doubtless felt sure would
be the case. The Humber was made a dividing line between the two
justiciars, while the pope was asked to make Longchamp legate in England
during the absence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was going on the
crusade. Perhaps Richard now began to suspect that he had been preparing
trouble for England instead of peace, for at the same time he exacted an
oath from his brothers, Geoffrey, whose troubles with his church of York
had already begun, and John, not to return to England for three years;
but John was soon after released from his oath at the request of his
mother.
Richard was impatient to be gone on the crusade, and he might now believe
that England could be safely left to itself; but many other things
delayed the expedition, and the setting out was finally postponed, by
agreement with Philip, to June 24. The third crusade is the most
generally interesting of all the series, because of the place which it
has taken in literature; because of the greatness of its leaders and
their exploits; of the knightly character of Saladin himself; of the
pathetic fate of the old Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who lost his life
and sacrificed most of his army in an attempt to force his way overland
through Asia Minor; and of its real failure after so great an expenditure
of life and effort and so many minor successes--the most brilliant of all
the crusades, the one great crusade of the age of chivalry: but it
concerns the history of England even less than does the continental
policy of her kings. It belongs rather to the personal history of
Richard, and as such it serves to explain his character and to show why
England was left to herself during his reign.
Richard and Philip met at Vézelai at the end of June, 1190, to begin the
crusade. There they made a new treaty of alliance and agreed to the equal
division of all the advantages to be gained in the expedition, and from
thence Richard marched down the Rhone to Marseilles, where he took ship
on August 7, and, by leisurely stages along the coast of Italy, went on
to Messina which he reached on September 23. Much there was to occupy
Richard's attention in Sicily. Philip had already reached Messina before
him, and many questions arose between them, the most important of which
was that of Richard's marriage. Towards the end of the winter Queen
Eleanor came to Sicily, bringing with her Berengaria, the daughter of the
king of Navarre, whom Richard had earlier known and admired, and whom he
had now decided to marry. Naturally Philip objected, since Richard had
definitely promised to marry his sister Adela; but now he flatly refused
to marry one of whose relations with his father evil stories were told.
By the intervention of the Count of Flanders a new treaty was made, and
Richard was released from his engagement, paying 10,000 marks to the king
of France. Quarrels with the inhabitants of Messina, due partly to the
lawlessness of the crusaders and partly to Richard's overbearing
disposition, led to almost open hostilities, and indirectly to jealousy
on the part of the French. Domestic politics in the kingdom of Sicily
were a further source of trouble. Richard's brother-in-law, King William,
had died a year before the arrival of the crusaders, and the throne was
in dispute between Henry VI, the new king of Germany, who had married
Constance, William's aunt and heiress, and Tancred, an illegitimate
descendant of the Norman house. Tancred was in possession, and to
Richard, no doubt, the support of Sicily at the time seemed more
important than the abstract question of right or the distant effect of
his policy on the crusade. Accordingly a treaty was made, Tancred was
recognized as king, and a large sum of money was paid to Richard; but to
Henry VI the treaty was a new cause of hostility against the king of
England, added to his relationship with the house of Guelf. The winter in
Sicily, which to the modern mind seems an unnecessary waste of time, had
added thus to the difficulties of the crusade new causes of ill-feeling
between the French and English, and given a new reason for suspicion to
the Germans.
It was only on April 10, 1191, that Richard at last set sail on the real
crusade. He sent on a little before him his intended bride, Berengaria,
with his sister Joanna, the widowed queen of Sicily. The voyage proved a
long and stormy one, and it was not until May 6 that the fleet came
together, with some losses, in the harbour of Limasol in Cyprus. The
ruler of Cyprus, Isaac, of the house of Comnenus, who called himself
emperor, showed so inhospitable a mein that Richard felt called upon to
attack and finally to overthrow and imprison him and to take possession
of the island. This conquest, in a moment of anger and quite in
accordance with the character of Richard, though hardly to be justified
even by the international law of that time, was in the end the most
important and most permanent success of the third crusade. Shortly before
his return home Richard gave the island to Guy of Lusignan, to make up to
him his loss of the kingdom of Jerusalem; and his descendants and their
successors retained it for four centuries, an outpost of Christendom
against the advancing power of the Turks. In Cyprus Richard was married
to Berengaria, and on June 5 he set sail for Acre, where he arrived on
the 8th.
The siege of the important port and fortress of Acre, which had been
taken by Saladin shortly before the fall of Jerusalem, had been begun by
Guy of Lusignan at the end of August, 1189, as the first step toward the
recovery of his kingdom. Saladin, recognizing the importance of the post,
had come up with an army a few days later, and had in turn besieged the
besiegers. This situation had not materially changed at the time of
Richard's arrival. Both the town and the besiegers' camp had remained
open to the sea, but though many reinforcements of new crusaders had come
to the Christians almost from the beginning of the siege, little real
progress had been made; even the arrival of King Philip in April had made
no important change. Richard, on landing, found a condition of things
that required the exercise of the utmost tact and skill. Not merely was
the military problem one of the greatest difficulty, but the bitter
factional dissensions of the native lords of Palestine made a successful
issue almost hopeless. Guy of Lusignan had never been a popular king, and
during the siege his wife Sibyl and their two daughters had died, while
his rival, Conrad marquis of Montferrat, had persuaded his sister Isabel
to divorce her husband and to marry him. The result was a conflict for
the crown, which divided the interests and embittered the spirits of
those whom the crusaders had come to aid. Philip had declared for Conrad.
Guy was a man somewhat of Richard's own type, and he would have been
attracted to him apart from the natural effect of Philip's action. One
who is disposed to deny to Richard the qualities of the highest
generalship must admit that he handled the difficult and complicated
affairs he had to control with great patience and unusual self-command,
and that he probably accomplished as much in the circumstances as any one
could have done.
The siege was now pressed with more vigour, and before the middle of
July, Acre surrendered. Then Philip, whose heart was always in his plans
at home, pleaded ill health and returned to France. After this began the
slow advance on Jerusalem, Saladin's troops hanging on the line of march
and constantly attacking in small bodies, while the crusaders suffered
greatly from the climate and from lack of supplies. So great were the
difficulties which Richard had not foreseen that at one time he was
disposed to give up the attempt and to secure what he could by treaty,
but the negotiations failed. The battle of Arsuf gave him an opportunity
to exercise his peculiar talents, and the Saracens were badly defeated;
but the advance was not made any the easier. By the last day of the year
the army had struggled through to within ten miles of the holy city.
There a halt was made; a council of war was held on January 13,1192, and
it was decided, much against the will of Richard, to return and occupy
Ascalon before attempting to take and hold Jerusalem--probably a wise
decision unless the city were to be held merely as material for
negotiation. Various attempts to bring the war to an end by treaty had
been going on during the whole march; Richard had even offered his
sister, Joanna, in marriage to Saladin's brother, whether seriously or
not it is hardly possible to say; but the demands of the two parties
remained too far apart for an agreement to be reached. The winter and
spring were occupied with the refortification of Ascalon and with the
dissensions of the factions, the French finally withdrawing from
Richard's army and going to Acre. In April the Marquis Conrad was
assassinated by emissaries of "the Old Man of the Mountain"; Guy had
little support for the throne except from Richard; and both parties found
it easy to agree on Henry of Champagne, grandson of Queen Eleanor and
Louis VII, and so nephew at once of Philip and Richard, and he was
immediately proclaimed king on marrying Conrad's widow, Isabel. Richard
provided for Guy by transferring to him the island of Cyprus as a new
kingdom. On June 7 began the second march to Jerusalem, the army this
time suffering from the heats of summer as before they had suffered from
the winter climate of Palestine. They reached the same point as in the
first advance, and there halted again; and though all were greatly
encouraged by Richard's brilliant capture of a rich Saracen caravan, he
himself was now convinced that success was impossible. On his arrival
Richard had pushed forward with a scouting party until he could see the
walls of the city in the distance, and obliged to be satisfied with this,
he retreated in July to Acre. One more brilliant exploit of Richard's own
kind remained for him to perform, the most brilliant of all perhaps, the
relief of Joppa which Saladin was just on the point of taking when
Richard with a small force saved the town and forced the Saracens to
retire. On September 2 a truce for three years was made, and the third
crusade was at an end. The progress of Saladin had been checked, a series
of towns along the coast had been recovered, and the kingdom of Cyprus
had been created; these were the results which had been gained by the
expenditure of an enormous treasure and thousands of lives. Who shall say
whether they were worth the cost.
During all the summer Richard had been impatient to return to England,
and his impatience had been due not alone to his discouragement with the
hopeless conditions in Palestine, but partly to the news which had
reached him from home. Ever since he left France, in fact, messages had
been coming to him from one and another, and the story they told was not
of a happy situation. Exactly those things had happened which ought to
have been expected. Soon after the council in Normandy, William Longchamp
had freed himself from his rival Hugh of Durham by placing him under
arrest and forcing him to surrender everything he had bought of the king.
Then for many months the chancellor ruled England as he would, going
about the country with a great train, almost in royal state, so that a
chronicler writing probably from personal observation laments the fact
that a house that entertained him for a night hardly recovered from the
infliction in three years. Even more oppressive on the community as a
whole were the constant exactions of money which he had to make for the
king's expenses. The return of John to England in 1190, or early in 1191,
made at first no change, but discontent with the chancellor's conduct
would naturally look to him for leadership, and it is likely John was
made ready to head an active opposition by the discovery of negotiations
between Longchamp and the king of Scotland for the recognition of Arthur
of Britanny as the heir to the kingdom, negotiations begun--so the
chancellor said--under orders from Richard. About the middle of summer,
1191, actual hostilities seemed about to begin. Longchamp's attempt to
discipline Gerard of Camville, holder of Lincoln castle and sheriff of
Lincolnshire, was resisted by John, who seized the royal castles of
Nottingham and Tickhill. Civil war was only averted by the intervention
of Walter of Coutances, Archbishop of Rouen, who had arrived in England
in the spring with authority from the king to interfere with the
administration of Longchamp if it seemed to him and the council wise to
do so. By his influence peace was made, at an assembly of the barons at
Winchester, on the whole not to the disadvantage of John, and embodied in
a document which is almost a formal treaty. One clause of this agreement
is of special interest as a sign of the trend of thought and as
foreshadowing a famous clause in a more important document soon to be
drawn up. The parties agreed that henceforth no baron or free tenant
should be disseized of land or goods by the king's justices or servants
without a trial according to the customs and assizes of the land, or by
the direct orders of the king. The clause points not merely forward but
backward, and shows what had no doubt frequently occurred since the
departure of the king.
About the middle of September a new element of discord was brought into
the situation by the landing of Geoffrey, who had now been consecrated
Archbishop of York, and who asserted that he, as well as John, had
Richard's permission to return. Longchamp's effort to prevent his coming
failed; but on his landing he had him arrested at the altar of the Priory
of St. Martin's, Dover, where he had taken sanctuary, and he was carried
off a prisoner with many indignities. This was a tactical mistake on
Longchamp's part. It put him greatly in the wrong and furnished a new
cause against him in which everybody could unite. In alarm he declared he
had never given orders for what was done and had Geoffrey released, but it
was too late. The actors in this outrage were excommunicated, and the
chancellor was summoned to a council called by John under the forms of a
great council. At the first meeting, held between Reading and Windsor on
October 5, he did not appear, but formal complaint was made against him,
and his deposition was moved by the Archbishop of Rouen. The meeting was
then adjourned to London, and Longchamp, hearing this, left Windsor at the
same time and took refuge in the Tower. For both parties, as in former
times of civil strife, the support of the citizens of London was of great
importance. They were now somewhat divided, but a recognition of the
opportunity inclined them to the stronger side; and they signified to John
and the barons that they would support them if a commune were granted to
the city.55 This French institution, granting to a city in its corporate
capacity the legal position and independence of the feudal vassal, had as
yet made no appearance in England. It was bitterly detested by the great
barons, and a chronicler of the time who shared this feeling was no doubt
right in saying that neither Richard nor his father would have sanctioned
it for a million marks, but as he says London found out that there was no
king.56 John was in pursuit of power, and the price which London
demanded would not seem to him a large one, especially as the day of
reckoning with the difficulty he created was a distant one and might never
come. The commune was granted, and Longchamp was formally deposed. John
was recognized as Richard's heir, fealty was sworn to him, and he was made
regent of the kingdom; Walter of Rouen was accepted as justiciar; and the
castles were disposed of as John desired. Longchamp yielded under protest,
threatening the displeasure of the king, and was allowed to escape to the
continent.
The action of John and the barons in deposing Longchamp made little
actual change. John gained less power than he had expected, and found the
new justiciar no more willing to give him control of the kingdom than the
old one. The action was revolutionary, and if it had any permanent
influence on the history of England, it is to be found in the training it
gave the barons in concerted action against a tyrannous minister,
revolutionary but as nearly as possible under the forms of law. While
these events were taking place, Philip was on his way from Tyre to
France. He reached home near the close of the year, ready for the
business for which he had come, to make all that he could out of
Richard's absence. Repulsed in an attempt to get the advantage of the
seneschal of Normandy he applied to John, perhaps with more hope of
success, offering him the hand of the unfortunate Adela with the
investiture of all the French fiefs. John was, of course, already
married, but that was a small matter either to Philip, or to him. He was
ready to listen to the temptation, and was preparing to cross to discuss
the proposition with Philip, when his plans were interrupted by his
mother. She had heard of what was going on and hastily went over to
England to interfere, where with difficulty John was forced to give up
the idea. The year 1192 passed without disturbance. When Longchamp tried
to secure his restoration by bribing John, he was defeated by a higher
bid from the council. An attempt of Philip to invade Normandy was
prevented by the refusal of his barons to serve, for without accusing the
king, they declared that they could not attack Normandy without
themselves committing perjury. At the beginning of 1193 the news reached
England that Richard had been arrested in Germany and that he was held in
prison there.
Footnotes
[53] Benedict of Peterborough, ii. 90.
[54] Roger of Howden, iii. 18.
[55] Round, Commune of London, ch. xi.
[56] Richard of Devizes, Chronicles of Stephen, iii. 416.
