Two other matters had to be dealt with before Richard’s preparations for departure were completed. To guard his realm from external disturbance, he must secure the fealty of the vassal-rulers of Scotland and Wales. To guard it against internal treason, he must, if such a thing were possible, secure the loyalty of the brother whom he was leaving behind him. The first was at once the less important and the easier matter of the two. Rees of South Wales had indeed profited by the change of rulers in England to break the peace which he had been compelled to maintain with King Henry, and after the council of Pipewell Richard sent John against him at the head of an armed force. The other Welsh princes came to meet John at Worcester and made submission to him as his brother’s representative;[1390] Rees apparently refused to treat with any one but the king in person, and accordingly he came back with John as far as Oxford, but Richard would not take the trouble to arrange a meeting, and was so unconcerned about the matter that he let him go home again without an audience, and, of course, in a state of extreme indignation.[1391] His threatening attitude served as an excuse for raising a scutage, nominally for a Welsh war;[1392] but the expedition was never made. The king of Scots was otherwise dealt with. Early in December, while Richard was at Canterbury on his way to the sea, William the Lion came to visit him, and a bargain was struck to the satisfaction of both parties. Richard received from William a sum of ten thousand marks, and his homage for his English estates, as they had been held by his brother Malcolm; in return, he restored to him the castles of Roxburgh and Berwick, and released him and his heirs for ever from the homage for Scotland itself, enforced by Henry in 1175.[1393]

Richard’s worst difficulty however was still unsolved: how to prevent John from trying to supplant him in his absence. Richard knew that this lad, ten years younger than himself, had been his rival ever since he was of an age to be a rival to any one; and he knew his brother’s character as, perhaps, no one else did know it as yet—for their mother had scarcely seen her youngest child since he was six years old. In the light of later history, it is impossible not to feel that Richard’s wisest course, alike for his own sake and for England’s, would have been to follow the instinct which had once prompted him to insist that John should go with him to the crusade. In this case however he was now led astray by the noblest feature in his character, his unsuspecting confidence and generosity. From the hour of their reconciliation after their father’s death, Richard’s sole endeavour respecting John was to gain his affection and gratitude by showering upon him every honour, dignity and benefit of which it was possible to dispose in his favour. The grant of the county of Mortain made him the first baron of Normandy, and it was accompanied by a liberal provision in English lands. To these were added, as soon as the brothers reached England, a string of “honours”—Marlborough, Luggershall, Lancaster, each with its castle; the Peak, Bolsover, and the whole honour of Peverel; those of Wallingford and Tickhill, and that of Nottingham, including the town; and the whole shire of Derby;[1394] besides the honour of Gloucester, which belonged to John’s betrothed bride Avice, and which Richard secured to him by causing him to be married to her at Marlborough on August 29,[1395] in spite of Archbishop Baldwin’s protests against a marriage between third cousins without dispensation from the Pope. Baldwin at once laid all the lands of the young couple under interdict; but John appealed against him, and a papal legate who came over in November to settle Baldwin’s quarrel with his own monks confirmed the appeal and annulled the sentence of the primate.[1396] At the same time Richard bestowed upon his brother four whole shires in south-western England—Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Dorset—with the ferms and the entire profits of jurisdiction and administration.[1397] More than this even Richard could not give; if more was needed to hold John’s ambition in check, he could only trust to the skilful management of Eleanor. She was left, seemingly without any formal commission, but with the practical authority of queen-regent, and with the dowries of two former queens in addition to her own.[1398]

One important part of Richard’s administrative arrangements was however already upset: William de Mandeville, having gone to Normandy on business for the king, died there on November 14.[1399] Earl of Essex by grant of Henry II., count of Aumale by marriage with its heiress, William had been through life one of Henry’s most faithful friends; he was honoured and esteemed by all parties on both sides of the sea; there was no one left among the barons who could command anything like the same degree of general respect; and Richard for the moment saw no means of filling his place. He therefore left Bishop Hugh of Durham as sole chief justiciar; but he made a change in the body of subordinate justiciars appointed at Pipewell. Two of them were superseded; one was replaced by Hugh Bardulf, and the other, it seems, by the chancellor William of Longchamp, who, in addition to the office which he already held, was put in charge of the Tower of London, and intrusted with powers which virtually made him equal in authority to the chief justiciar.[1400]

None of these appointments was in itself unwise; but two worse-matched yokefellows than the justiciar and the chancellor it would have been difficult to find. Hugh of Puiset—or “Pudsey,” as his English flock called him—had stood high in both Church and state ever since the days of the civil war. Through his mother he was a great-grandson of the Conqueror, and thus cousin in no remote degree to Henry Fitz-Empress and Richard Cœur-de-Lion, as well as to Philip of France. We saw him more than forty years ago, as archdeacon and treasurer of York, meeting the ecclesiastical censures of his metropolitan with a retort on equal terms, and wielding not unsuccessfully the weapons both of spiritual and temporal warfare in the cause of his cousin William of York and his uncle Henry of Winchester. Since 1153 he had been bishop of Durham; certainly not an ideal successor of S. Cuthbert; yet his appointment had been sanctioned by the saintly archbishop Theobald; and throughout his long episcopate he shewed himself by no means ill-fitted, on the whole, for his peculiar position. That position, it must be remembered, had more than that of any other English bishop an important political side. The bishop of Durham was earl palatine of his shire; its whole administration, secular as well as ecclesiastical, was in his hands. His diocesan jurisdiction, again, extended over the whole of Northumberland, and thus brought him into immediate contact with the Scots across the border. His diocese was in fact a great marchland between England and Scotland; he was the natural medium of communication or negotiation between the two realms; and on him depended in no small degree the security of their relations with each other. For such a post it was well to have a strong man, in every sense of the words; and such a man was Hugh of Puiset. His strength was not based solely upon an unscrupulous use of great material and political resources. He was a popular man with all classes; notwithstanding his unclerical ways, he never fell into any ecclesiastical disgrace except with his own metropolitan, for whom he was generally more than a match; and he was one of the very few prelates who managed to steer their way through the Becket quarrel without either damaging their reputation as sound churchmen or forfeiting the confidence of Henry II. His intrigues with the Scot king and the rebel barons in 1174 failed so completely and so speedily that Henry found it scarcely worth while to punish them in any way; and on the other hand, Hugh’s position was already so independent and secure that he himself never found it worth while to renew them. In his own diocese, whatever he might be as a pastor of souls, he was a vigorous and on the whole a beneficent as well as magnificent ruler; the men of the county palatine grumbled indeed at his extravagance and at the occasional hardships brought upon them by his inordinate love of the chase, but they were none the less proud of his splendid buildings, his regal state, and his equally regal personality. His appearance and manners corresponded with his character and his rank; he was tall in stature, dignified in bearing, remarkably attractive in look, eloquent and winning in address.[1401] Moreover, he had lived so long in England, and all his interests had so long been centred there, that for all practical purposes, social as well as political, he was a thorough Englishman—certainly far more of an Englishman than his young English-born cousin, King Richard. For the last eight years, indeed, he had held in the north much the same position as had belonged in earlier times to the archbishops of York; for the northern province had been without a metropolitan ever since the death of Roger of Pont-l’Evêque in November 1181,[1402] and the supreme authority, ecclesiastical as well as secular, had thus devolved upon the bishop of Durham. He was now threatened with the loss of this pre-eminence; but he had no intention of giving it up without a struggle, in which his chances of success were at least as good as those of his rival the archbishop-elect; and whatever the result might be with respect to his ecclesiastical independence, he had secured a formidable counterpoise to the primate’s territorial influence by his purchase of Northumberland, which made him sole head, under the Crown, of the civil administration of the whole country between the Tweed and the Tees.

Alike in himself and in his antecedents Hugh of Puiset was the very antithesis to William of Longchamp. William had nothing of the stately presence and winning aspect which distinguished the bishop of Durham; on the contrary, he laboured under personal disadvantages which should have entitled him to sympathy, but which one of his political opponents was heartless enough to caricature, after his fall, in order to make him an object of vulgar contempt and disgust. His stature was diminutive, his countenance swarthy and ill-favoured, his figure mis-shapen, and he was moreover very lame.[1403] His origin was as lowly as his person. His father was a certain Hugh of Longchamp who in 1156 received from the king a grant of lands in Herefordshire,[1404] and about the time of the barons’ revolt was fermor of the honour of Conches in Normandy.[1405] His grandfather was said to have been a French serf who had fled from the justice of his lord and found a refuge in the Norman village whence his descendants took their name.[1406] In Henry’s latter years Hugh of Longchamp was deep in debt and disgrace,[1407] and his six sons had to make their way in the world as best they could under the shadow of the king’s displeasure.[1408] William, whose physical infirmities must have shut him out from every career save that of a clerk, first appears under the patronage of Geoffrey the chancellor, as his official in one of his many pieces of Church preferment, the archdeaconry of Rouen.[1409] The king, however, remonstrated strongly with his son on the danger of associating with a man whom he declared to be “a traitor, like his father and mother before him.”[1410] The end of his remonstrances was that, shortly before the last outbreak, William fled from Geoffrey to Richard, and, according to one account, became the chief instigator of Richard’s rebellion.[1411] However this may be, it is certain that Richard, while still merely duke of Aquitaine, employed William as his chancellor,[1412] and that he was not only so well satisfied with his services as to retain him in the same capacity after his accession to the crown, but had formed such a high opinion of his statesmanship and his fidelity as to make him his chief political adviser and confidant. Richard, like his father, was constant in his friendships, and very unwilling to discard those to whom he had once become really attached; his trust in William remained unshaken to the end of his life, and in some respects it was not misplaced. William seems to have been thoroughly loyal to his master, and his energy and industry were as unquestionable as his loyalty. As Richard’s most intimate companion, confidential secretary, and political adviser in foreign affairs, William was in his right place; but he was by no means equally well fitted to be Richard’s representative in the supreme government and administration of England. He had the primary disqualification of being a total stranger to the land, its people and its ways. Most likely he had never set foot in England till he came thither with Richard in 1189; he was ignorant of the English tongue;[1413] his new surroundings were thoroughly distasteful to him; and as he was by no means of a cautious or conciliatory temper, he expressed his contempt and dislike of them in a way which was resented not only by the people, but even by men whose origin and natural speech were scarcely more English than his own.[1414] He had in short every qualification for becoming an extremely unpopular man, and he behaved as if he desired no other destiny. The nation at large soon learned to return his aversion and to detest him as a disagreeable stranger; his colleagues in the administration despised him as an upstart interloper; the justiciar, in particular, keenly resented his own virtual subordination to one whom he naturally regarded as his inferior in every way.[1415] It was sound policy on Richard’s part to place a check upon Hugh of Durham; and it was not unnatural that he should select his chancellor for that purpose. The seven happiest years of Henry Fitz-Empress had been the years during which another chancellor had wielded a power almost as great as that which Richard intrusted to William of Longchamp. But, on the other hand, any one except Richard might have seen at a glance that of all statesmen living, William of Longchamp was well-nigh the least fitted to reproduce the career of Thomas of London.