Nor were Richard’s alliances confined within the boundaries of Gaul. His year of captivity in Germany had not been all wasted time. When he parted from his imperial jailor in the spring of 1194, they were, at any rate in outward semblance, close political allies; and at the same time Richard had succeeded in gaining over his bitterest foe, Leopold of Austria, by an offer of his niece Eleanor of Britanny as wife to Leopold’s son.[1854] The marriage-contract was however not yet executed when the Austrian duke met with a fatal accident and died in agony, owning with his last breath that his miserable end was a just retribution for his conduct towards the English king.[1855] The impression made by this event deepened the feeling of respect and awe which the captive lion had already contrived to inspire in the princes of the Empire. Meanwhile Henry VI. had made himself master of Sicily;[1856] and now the old dream by which the German Emperors never quite ceased to be haunted, the dream of re-asserting their imperial supremacy over Gaul, was beginning to shape itself anew in his brain. In the summer of 1195 he sent to Richard a golden crown and a message charging him, on his plighted faith to the Emperor and on the very lives of his hostages, to invade the French kingdom at once, and promising him the support and co-operation of the imperial forces. Richard, suspecting a trap, despatched William of Longchamp to inquire into the exact nature, extent and security of Henry’s promised assistance; Philip vainly tried to intercept the envoy as he passed through the royal domains;[1857] and the negotiations proved so far effectual that Henry remitted seventeen thousand marks out of the ransom, as a contribution to Richard’s expenses in his struggle with Philip.[1858] When, on Michaelmas Eve 1197, Henry VI. died,[1859] the use of that homage on Richard’s part which his English subjects had resented so bitterly was made apparent to them at last. While the English king was holding his Christmas court at Rouen there came to him an embassy from the princes of Germany, summoning him, as chief among the lay members of the Empire[1860] by virtue of his investiture with the kingdom of Arles, to take part with them in the election of a new Emperor at Cöln on February 22.[1861] Richard himself could not venture to leave Gaul; but the issue proved that his presence at Cöln was not needed to secure his interests there. He wished that the imperial crown should be given to his nephew Duke Henry of Saxony, eldest son and successor of Henry the Lion. This scheme, however, when laid before the other electors by the envoys whom he sent to represent him at Cöln, was rejected on account of the duke’s absence in Holy Land.[1862] The representatives of the English king then proposed Henry’s brother Otto, for whom Richard had long been vainly endeavouring to find satisfactory provision on either side of the sea,[1863] and who seems really to have been his favourite nephew. The result was that, on the appointed day, Otto was elected Emperor of the Romans,[1864] and on July 12 he was crowned king of the Germans at Aachen by the archbishop of Cöln.[1865]

For a moment, at the mere prospect of beholding a grandson of Henry Fitz-Empress seated upon the imperial throne of the west, there had flashed across the mind of at least one friend of the Angevin house a fancy that the world-wide dominion which seemed to be passing away from the heirs of Fulk the Good was to be renewed for yet one more generation.[1866] There was indeed an opposition party in Germany, who set up a rival Emperor in the person of Philip of Suabia, a brother of Henry VI.;[1867] and he at once made common cause with his French namesake.[1868] This Suabian alliance, however, and the support of the count of Ponthieu—purchased two years before with the hand of the unhappy Adela, whom Richard had at last restored to her brother[1869]—could not much avail Philip Augustus against such a league as was now gathering around the English king. The vast sums which Hubert Walter had been sending, year after year, to his royal master over sea were bringing a goodly interest at last. Flanders, Britanny, Champagne, had all been secretly detached from the French alliance and bought over to the service of Richard;[1870] the Flemish count had already drawn Philip into a war in which he narrowly escaped being made prisoner;[1871] and in the summer of 1198, when the imperial election was over, not only Baldwin of Flanders, Reginald of Boulogne, Baldwin of Guines, Henry of Louvain, Everard of Brienne, Geoffrey of Perche and Raymond of Toulouse, but even the young count Louis of Blois and the boy-duke Arthur of Britanny himself, one and all leagued themselves in an offensive and defensive alliance with Richard against the French king.[1872] The immediate consequence was that Philip begged Hubert Walter, who being just released from his justiciarship had rejoined his sovereign in Normandy, to make peace for him with Richard; and he even went so far as to offer the surrender of all the Norman castles which he had won, except Gisors. Richard however would listen to no terms in which his allies were not included.[1873] At last, in November, a truce was made, to last till the usual term, S. Hilary’s day.[1874] When it expired the two kings held a colloquy on the Seine between Vernon and Les Andelys, Richard in a boat on the river, Philip on horseback on the shore;[1875] this meeting was followed by another, where, by the mediation of a cardinal-legate, Peter of Capua, who had lately arrived in Gaul, they were persuaded to prolong their truce for five years.[1876]

Plan VII.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

Yet all the while, there lurked in Richard’s heart a misgiving that, in the last resort, his diplomacy would prove to have been in vain; that, strive as he might to turn away the tide of war from his own borders by stirring up north and east and south to overwhelm the Crown of France, still, after all, the day must come when the Angevins would have to stake their political existence solely upon their own military resources, and to stand at bay, unaided, unsupported, alone, behind whatever bulwark they might be able to devise by their own military genius. It was the genius and the foresight of Richard himself which insured that when the crisis came, the bulwark was ready, even though it were doomed to prove unavailing in the end. The last and mightiest of the many mighty fortresses reared by Angevin hands since the first great builder of the race had begun his castle-building in the Loire valley was the Château-Gaillard, the “saucy castle” of Richard the Lion-heart. He “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.”[1877] Some three-quarters of a league from the right bank of the river, in a valley opening upon it from the eastward and watered by the little stream of Gambon, stood the town of Andely. Between the town and the river stretched a lake, or rather perhaps a marsh,[1878] through which the Gambon and another lesser rivulet descending from the hills to the north of Andely found their way by two separate issues into the Seine, nearly opposite two islets, of which the larger and more northerly was known as the Isle of Andely.[1879] The space enclosed between the three rivers and the marsh seems to have been a tract of waste land, occupied only by a toll-house for the collection of dues from the vessels passing up and down the Seine[1880]—dues which formed one of the most important items in the revenue of the archbishop of Rouen, to whom Andely and its neighbourhood belonged.[1881] Over against this spot, on the southern bank of the Gambon, in the angle formed by its junction with the Seine, a mass of limestone crag rose abruptly to the height of three hundred feet. Its western side, almost perpendicular, looked down upon the great river, the northern, scarcely less steep, over the Gambon and the lake beyond; to the north-east and south-west its rocky slopes died down into deep ravines, and only a narrow neck of land at its south-eastern extremity connected it with the lofty plateau covered with a dense woodland known as the Forest of Andely, which stretches along the eastern side of the Seine valley between Andely and Gaillon. One glance at the site was enough to rivet a soldier’s gaze. If, instead of the metropolitan church of Normandy, a lay baron had owned the soil of Andely, we may be sure that long ago that lofty brow would have received its fitting crown; if the power of Fulk the Builder had reached to the banks of the Seine, we may doubt whether the anathemas of the Norman primate would not have availed as little to wrest such a spot from his grasp as those of the archbishop of Tours had availed to wrest from him the site of Montrichard. But a greater castle-builder than Fulk Nerra himself was the architect of Château-Gaillard.