The king left England on December 11.[1416] William was consecrated, together with Richard Fitz-Nigel, on December 31,[1417] and on the feast of the Epiphany he was enthroned at Ely.[1418] Immediately afterwards he began to assert his temporal authority. At a meeting of the Court of Exchequer the bishop of Durham was turned out by the chancellor’s orders; presently after he was deprived of his jurisdiction over Northumberland. Soon after this, Bishop Godfrey of Winchester was dispossessed not merely of his sheriffdom and castles, but even of his own patrimony.[1419] For this last spoliation there is no apparent excuse; that a man should hold a sheriffdom together with a bishopric was, however, contrary alike to Church discipline and to sound temporal policy; and the non-recognition of Hugh’s purchase of Northumberland might be yet further justified by the fact that the purchase-money was not yet paid.[1420] In February 1190 Richard summoned his mother, his brothers and his chief ministers to a final meeting in Normandy;[1421] the chancellor, knowing that complaints against him would be brought before the king, hurried over in advance of his colleagues, to justify himself before he was accused,[1422] and he succeeded so well that Richard not only sent him back to England after the council with full authority to act as chief justiciar as well as chancellor,[1423] but at the same time opened negotiations with Rome to obtain for him a commission as legate[1424]—an arrangement which, the archbishop of Canterbury being bound on crusade like the king, would leave William supreme both in Church and state.

The new justiciar’s first act on his return was to fortify the Tower of London;[1425] his next was to punish a disturbance which had lately occurred at York. During the last six months the long-suppressed hatred which the Jews inspired had broken forth into open violence. The first pretext had been furnished by a misunderstanding on the coronation-day. Richard, who had some very strict ideas about the ceremonials of religion, had given orders that no Jew should approach him on that solemn occasion; in defiance or ignorance of the prohibition, some rich Jews came to offer gifts to the new sovereign; the courtiers and the people seized the excuse to satisfy at once their greed and their hatred; the unwelcome visitors were driven away, robbed, beaten, some even slain;[1426] and the rage of their enemies, once let loose, spent itself throughout the night in a general sack of the Jewish quarter. Richard, engaged at the coronation-banquet, knew nothing of what had happened till the next day,[1427] when he did his best to secure the ringleaders, and punished them severely.[1428] When he was gone, however, the spark thus kindled burst forth into a blaze in all the chief English cities in succession, Winchester being almost the sole exception.[1429] Massacres of Jews took place at Norwich on February 6, at Stamford on March 7, at S. Edmund’s on March 18, Palm Sunday.[1430] A day before this last, a yet worse tragedy had occurred at York. The principal Jews of that city, in dread of a popular attack, had sought and obtained shelter in one of the towers of the castle, under the protection of its constable and the sheriff of Yorkshire.[1431] Once there, they refused to give it up again; whereupon the constable and the sheriff called out all the forces of city and shire to dislodge them. After twenty-four hours’ siege the Jews offered to ransom themselves by a heavy fine; but the blood of the citizens was up, and they rejected the offer. The Jews, in desperation, resolved to die by their own hands rather than by those of their Gentile enemies; the women and children were slaughtered by their husbands and fathers, who flung the corpses over the battlements or piled them up in the tower, which they fired.[1432] Nearly five hundred Jews perished in the massacre or the flames;[1433] and the citizens and soldiers, baulked of their expected prey, satiated their greed by sacking and burning all the Jewish houses and destroying the bonds of all the Jewish usurers in the city.[1434] At the end of April or the beginning of May[1435] the new justiciar came with an armed force to York to investigate this affair. The citizens threw the whole blame upon the castellan and the sheriff; William accordingly deposed them both.[1436] As the castle was destroyed, he probably thought it needless to appoint a new constable until it should be rebuilt; for the sheriff—John, elder brother of William the Marshal—he at once substituted his own brother Osbert.[1437] Most of the knights who had been concerned in the tumult had taken care to put themselves out of his reach; their estates were, however, mulcted and their chattels seized;[1438] and the citizens only escaped by paying a fine[1439] and giving hostages who were not redeemed till three years later, when all thought of further proceedings in the matter had been given up.[1440] Even the clergy of the minster had their share of punishment, although for a different offence: William, though his legatine commission had not yet arrived, claimed already to be received as legate, and put the church under interdict until his claim was admitted.[1441]

For the moment William’s power was undisputed even in the north; for Hugh of Durham was still in Gaul. Now, however, there came a notice from the king that he was about to send Hugh back to England as justiciar over the whole country north of the Humber.[1442] Hugh himself soon afterwards arrived, and hurried northward, in the hope, it seems, of catching the chancellor on the further side of the Humber and thus compelling him to acknowledge his inferiority.[1443] In this hope he was disappointed; they met at Blyth in Nottinghamshire.[1444] Hugh, impetuous in old age as in youth, talked somewhat too much as the chancellor had acted—“as if all the affairs of the realm were dependent on his nod.”[1445] At last, however, he produced the commission from Richard upon which his pretensions were founded;[1446] and William, who could read between the lines of his royal friend’s letters, saw at once that he had little to fear.[1447] He replied simply by expressing his readiness to obey the king’s orders,[1448] and proposing that all further discussion should be adjourned to a second meeting a week later at Tickhill. There Hugh found the tables turned. The chancellor had reached the place before him; the bishop’s followers were shut out from the castle; he was admitted alone into the presence of his rival, who, without giving him time to speak, put into his hands another letter from Richard, bidding all his English subjects render service and obedience to “our trusty and well-beloved chancellor, the bishop of Ely,” as they would to the king himself. The letter was dated June 6—some days, if not weeks, later than Hugh’s credentials;[1449] and it seems to have just reached William together with his legatine commission, which was issued on the previous day.[1450] He gave his rival no time even to think. “You had your say at our last meeting; now I will have mine. As my lord the king liveth, you shall not quit this place till you have given me hostages for the surrender of all your castles. No protests! I am not a bishop arresting another bishop; I am the chancellor, arresting his supplanter.”[1451] Hugh was powerless; yet he let himself be dragged all the way to London before he would yield. Then he gave up the required hostages,[1452] and submitted to the loss of all his lately-purchased honours—Windsor, Newcastle, Northumberland, even the manor of Sadberge which he had bought of the king for his see[1453]—everything, in short, except his bishopric. For that he set out as soon as he was liberated; but at his manor of Howden he was stopped by the chancellor’s orders, forbidden to proceed further, and again threatened with forcible detention. He promised to remain where he was, gave security for the fulfilment of his promise, and then wrote to the king his complaints of the treatment which he had received.[1454] All the redress that he could get, however, was a writ commanding that Sadberge should be restored to him at once and that he should suffer no further molestation.[1455]

The chancellor’s first rival was thus suppressed; but already he could see other stumbling-blocks arising in his path, not a few of them placed there by the shortsighted policy of his royal master. Richard’s reckless bestowal of lands and jurisdictions would, if left undisturbed, have put the administration of at least ten whole shires practically beyond the control of the central government. The bishops of Durham, Winchester and Coventry or Chester would have had everything their own way, in temporal matters no less than in spiritual, throughout their respective dioceses. To this state of things William had summarily put an end in the cases of Northumberland and Hampshire; in those of Leicestershire, Staffordshire and Warwickshire the primate had been induced to remonstrate with Hugh of Coventry upon the impropriety of a bishop holding three sheriffdoms, and Hugh had accordingly given up two of them, though he managed to get them back after Baldwin’s death at the close of 1190.[1456] There were however still four shires in the south-west and one in Mid-England over which the king’s justiciar was not only without practical, but even without legal jurisdiction. In these, and in a number of “honours” scattered over the midland shires from Gloucester to Nottingham, the whole rights and profits of government, administration and finance belonged solely to John; for his exercise of them he was responsible to no one but the king; and thus, as soon as Richard was out of reach, John was to all intents and purposes himself king of his own territories. For the present indeed he was unable to set foot in his little realm: Richard in the spring had made both his brothers take an oath to keep away from England for three years.[1457] It was however easy enough for John to govern his part of England, as the whole of it had often been governed for years together, from the other side of the Channel. He had his staff of ministers just like his brother—his justiciar Roger de Planes,[1458] his chancellor Stephen Ridel,[1459] his seneschal William de Kahaines, and his butler Theobald Walter;[1460] the sheriffs of his five counties and the stewards or bailiffs of his honours were appointed by him alone, and exercised their functions solely for his advantage, without reference to the king’s court or the king’s exchequer.[1461] It is evident that, even though as yet the sea lay between them, John had already the power to make himself, if he were so minded, a serious obstacle to the chancellor’s plans of governing England for Richard. Moreover, before Richard finally quitted Gaul, his mother persuaded him to release John from his oath of absence;[1462] and William of Longchamp himself, in his new character of legate, was obliged to confirm the release with his absolution.[1463] In view of the struggle which he now saw could not be far distant, William began to marshal his political forces and concert his measures of defence. On August 1 he held a Church council at Gloucester, in the heart of John’s territories;[1464] on October 13 he held another at Westminster;[1465] and he seems to have spent the winter in a sort of half legatine, half vice-regal progress throughout the country, for purposes of justice and finance and for the assertion of his own authority. This proceeding stirred up a good deal of discontent. Cripple though he was, William of Longchamp seems to have been almost as rapid and restless a traveller as Henry II.; one contemporary says he “went up and down the country like a flash of lightning.”[1466] It may be however that these words allude to the disastrous effects of the chancellor’s passage rather than to its swiftness and suddenness; for he went about in such state as no minister except Henry’s first chancellor had ever ventured to assume. His train of a thousand armed knights, besides a crowd of clerks and other attendants, was a ruinous burthen to the religious houses where he claimed entertainment; and the burthen was made almost unbearable by the heavy exactions, from clerk and layman alike, which he made in his master’s name.[1467]

That master was now with Philip of France at Messina,[1468] preparing for his departure from Europe. When he would come back—whether he ever would come back at all—was felt by all parties to be doubtful in the extreme. With his ardent zeal, rash valour and peculiar health, he was little likely to escape both the chances of war and the effects of the eastern climate;[1469] and the question of the succession was therefore again becoming urgent. There was indeed not much latitude of choice; the male line of Anjou, already extinct in Palestine, had in Europe only three representatives—Richard himself, John, and their infant nephew Arthur of Britanny. By the strict feudal rule of primogeniture, Arthur, being Geoffrey’s son, would have after Richard the next claim as head of the Angevin house. By old English constitutional practice, John, being a grown man and the reigning sovereign’s own brother, would have a much better chance of recognition as his successor than his nephew, a child not yet four years old. Neither alternative was without drawbacks. Richard himself had made up his mind to the first; early in November 1190 he arranged a marriage for Arthur with a daughter of King Tancred of Sicily, on a distinct understanding that in case of his own death without children Arthur was to succeed to all his dominions;[1470] while at the same time William of Longchamp was endeavouring to secure the Scot king’s recognition of Arthur as heir-presumptive to the English crown.[1471] The queen-mother was unwilling to contemplate the succession of either Arthur or John; she was anxious to get Richard married. Knowing that he never would marry the woman to whom he had been so long betrothed, she took upon herself to find him another bride. Her choice fell upon Berengaria, daughter of King Sancho VI. of Navarre;[1472] it was accepted by Richard; early in February 1191[1473] she went over to Gaul; there she met her intended daughter-in-law, whom she carried on with her into Italy, and by the end of March they were both with Richard at Messina.[1474] On the very day of their arrival Philip had sailed.[1475] After long wrangling with him, Richard had at last succeeded in freeing himself from his miserable engagement to Adela;[1476] he at once plighted his troth to Berengaria; and when his mother, after a four days’ visit, set out again upon her homeward journey,[1477] his bride remained with him under the care of his sister the widowed queen Jane of Sicily[1478] till the expiration of Lent and the circumstances of their eastward voyage enabled them to marry. The wedding was celebrated and the queen crowned at Limasol in Cyprus on the fourth Sunday after Easter.[1479]