In the spring of 1194 the emperor gave Richard his liberty, after receiving the stipulated sum and making his prisoner swear an oath of homage to him for his kingdom of England. But this preposterous vow of allegiance was not taken seriously by Richard or by England, being wrung by force from a helpless captive. On reaching England, the king put himself at the head of the army which was operating against the rebels, and took Nottingham and Tickhill, the two last strongholds which held out. John himself fled over-sea; some months later he was pardoned by his long-suffering brother.
Thus Richard was once more a free man, and in full possession of his realm. There was much in the state of England that required the master's eye, but the king was far more set on punishing his neighbour, King Philip, than on attending to the wants of his subjects. After appointing new officials to take charge of the kingdom, and raising great sums of money, he hurried over to Normandy to plunge into hostilities with the French.
War with France.—Taxation and discontent.
England never saw Richard again; indeed, in the whole course of his ten years' reign, he only spent seven months on this side of the channel. His heart was always in France, where he had been bred up, and not in England, though he had been born in the palace of Beaumont, in Oxford, not fifty yards from the spot where these lines are written. The remaining six years of Richard's reign were entirely occupied in fruitless and weary border wars with the French king. It was a war of sieges and skirmishes, not of great battles. Richard held his own, in spite of the rebellions stirred up by Philip among his vassals in Aquitaine; but he did not succeed in crushing his adversary, as might have been expected from his superior military skill. In England the struggle was only felt through the heavy taxation which the king imposed on the land, to keep up his large mercenary army over-sea. Archbishop Hubert Walter ruled as Justiciar with considerable wisdom and success, and as long as Richard was sent the money that he craved, he left the realm to itself. Hubert's rule was not altogether a quiet one, but the very troubles that arose against him show the growing strength of national feeling and liberty in England. In 1198, the Great Council, headed by Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, refused the king's newest and most exorbitant schemes of taxation, and Hubert could not force them to pay. London in the same year was disturbed by a great democratic rising of the poorer citizens, headed by one William Fitz-Osbert, called Longbeard, who rose in riot to compel the aldermen to readjust the taxes of the city, and the Justiciar had to take arms to put it down. Fitz-Osbert fortified himself in Bow Church, but was wounded, taken, and hung.
Death of Richard.
An obscure and unworthy end was reserved for the restless and reckless son of the great Henry. He heard that Widomar, Viscount of Limoges, one of his vassals in Aquitaine, had found a great treasure-trove of gold, and bade him give it up. The viscount would not surrender all his find, so Richard laid siege to his castle of Chaluz. The place was taken, but while directing the attack the king received a wound from a crossbow bolt in his shoulder. His unskilful surgeons could not cure him, the wound gangrened, and Richard saw that his days were numbered. When the castle fell, Bertrand de Gourdon, the archer who had discharged the fatal bolt, was sought out and brought to his bedside. "What had I done that you should deal thus with me?" asked the king. "You slew my father and my two brothers with your own hands," replied the soldier, "and now I am ready to bear any torture since I know that you have to die." The fierce answer touched a chord to which Richard could respond. He bade his officers send the man away unharmed, but Mercadet, the chief among his mercenary captains, kept Gourdon in bonds till the king breathed his last, and then flayed him alive (April 6, 1199).
Rule of the Justiciar.—Coroners.
Of all the kings who ever ruled in this land Richard cared least for England, and paid least attention to its needs. But his reign was not therefore one that was harmful to his realm. The yoke of an absent king, even if he be a spendthrift, is not so hard as that of a tyrant who dwells at home, and England has known much worse days than those of the later years of Richard Cœur de Lion. His ministers kept up the traditions of the administration of Henry II., and ruled the land with law and order, duly summoning the Great Council, assessing taxation with its aid, and levying it with as little oppression as they could, through agents selected by the nation. One considerable advance in the direction of liberty was granted by Richard, when he allowed the shire-moots to choose for themselves "coroners," officials who were to take charge of the royal prerogatives in the counties in place of the sheriff; they were to investigate such matters as murder, riot, or injury to the king's lands or revenues, and the other offences which were called "the pleas of the crown." Thus an officer chosen by the people was substituted for one chosen by the crown, a great advantage to those who were to come under his hand. The "coroner" still survives in England, but all his duties save that of inquiring into cases of suspicious death have long been stripped from him.
John and Arthur of Brittany.—War in France.
Richard the Lion-hearted left two male kinsmen to dispute about his vast dominions. These were Arthur of Brittany, the son of his next brother Geoffrey, and John of Cornwall, his false and turbulent youngest brother. The English Great Council chose John as king without any hesitation; they would not take Arthur, a mere boy of twelve, who had never been seen in England; they preferred John in spite of his great and obvious faults. But in the continental dominions of Richard there was no such unanimity: the unruly barons of Anjou and Aquitaine thought they would gain through having a powerless boy to reign over them, rather than the unscrupulous and grasping Earl John. If it had not been for the old queen dowager, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who came forward to defend her best-loved son's claims, and to persuade her Gascon vassals to adhere to his cause, John would never have obtained any hold on the continent. By Eleanor's aid he triumphed for a moment, but baron after baron rose against him, using Arthur's name as his pretence, and civil war never ceased from the moment of John's accession. Philip of France, who now, as always, had his own ends to serve, feigned to espouse the cause of Arthur, and acknowledged him as his uncle's heir alike in Normandy, Anjou, and Aquitaine. Thus the war between France and England, which had dragged on through the reign of Richard, continued in a new form all through the time of John. There was a partial pacification in 1200, when Philip was bought off from Arthur's cause by the cession of the county of Evreux; but he took arms again in 1202, on the flimsy pretext that John, as Duke of Normandy, refused to plead in French law courts against his own vassals.