None of the dead king’s friends had thought it necessary to wait for any instructions from his heir. The marshal, however, had sent to apprise Richard of his father’s death, and delayed the burial long enough to give him an opportunity of attending it if he chose to do so. The other barons were in great dread of meeting the future king against whom they had been in arms; and several of them were even more anxious for the marshal than for themselves, for they could not but imagine that Richard’s heaviest vengeance would fall upon the man who had unhorsed and all but killed him at Le Mans. More than one of them offered to place himself and all his possessions at the service of the comrade whom they all held in such reverence, if thereby anything could be done to save him from Richard’s wrath. But he only answered quietly: “Sirs, I do not repent me of what I did. I thank you for your proffers; but, so help me God, I will not accept what I cannot return. Thanks be to Him, He has helped me ever since I was made a knight; I doubt not He will help me to the end.”[1324] Before nightfall Richard overtook them.[1325] He came, it seems, alone. Vainly did the bystanders seek to read his feelings in his demeanour; he shewed no sign of either grief or joy, penitence or wrath; he “spoke not a word, good or bad,”[1326] but went straight to the church and into the choir, where the body lay.[1327] For awhile he stood motionless before the bier;[1328] then he stepped to the head, and looked down at the uncovered face.[1329] It seemed to meet his gaze with all its wonted sternness; but there were some who thought they saw a yet more fearful sight—a stream of blood which flowed from the nostrils, and ceased only on the departure of the son who was thus proclaimed as his father’s murderer.[1330] Richard sank upon his knees; thus he remained “about as long as one would take to say the Lord’s Prayer;”[1331] then he rose and, speaking for the first time, called for William the Marshal. William came, accompanied by a loyal Angevin baron, Maurice of Craon. Richard bade them follow him out of the church; outside, he turned at once to the marshal: “Fair Sir Marshal, you had like to have slain me; had I received your spear-thrust, it would have been a bad day for both of us!” “My lord,” answered William, “I had it in my power to slay you; I only slew your horse. And of that I do not repent me yet.” With kingly dignity Richard granted him his kingly pardon at once;[1332] and on the morrow they stood side by side while Henry Fitz-Empress was laid in his grave before the high altar by Archbishop Bartholomew of Tours.[1333]

CHAPTER VII.
RICHARD AND ENGLAND.
1189–1194.

All doubts as to the destination of Henry’s realms after his death were settled at once by the discovery of John’s treason. Throughout the Angevin dominions not a voice was raised to challenge the succession of Richard. The English marshal and the Angevin barons gathered at Fontevraud received him unquestioningly as their lord, and were at once accepted as loyal subjects. One of them indeed, the seneschal of Anjou, Stephen of Turnham or of Marçay, was flung into prison for failing to surrender the royal treasure;[1334] but the reason of his failure seems to have been simply that the treasury was empty.[1335] According to one contemporary historian, Richard sealed his forgiveness of William the Marshal by at once despatching him to England with a commission to hold the country for him—in effect, to act as justiciar—till he could proceed thither himself.[1336] In all probability, however, William was authorized to do nothing more than set Eleanor at liberty; it was she who, by her son’s desire, undertook the office of regent in England,[1337] which she fulfilled without difficulty for the next six weeks. Geoffrey the chancellor resigned his seal into his half-brother’s hands as soon as the funeral was over.[1338] The promise of the Norman castellans to Henry that they would surrender to no one but John was of course annulled by later events. John himself hastened to join his brother; Richard gave him a gracious welcome, and they returned to Normandy together.[1339] At Séez the archbishops of Canterbury and Rouen came to meet them, and absolved Richard from the excommunication[1340] laid on him by the legate John of Anagni. Thence they all proceeded to Rouen. On July 20 Richard went in state to the metropolitan church, where Archbishop Walter girded him with the ducal sword and invested him with the standard of the duchy.[1341] On the same day he received the fealty of the Norman barons,[1342] and held his first court as duke of Normandy, and also, it seems, as king-elect of England, although there had been no formal election. He at once made it clear that the abettors of his revolt had nothing to hope from him—three of the most conspicuous had been deprived of their lands already[1343]—and that his father’s loyal servants had nothing to fear, if they would transfer their loyalty to him. He shewed indeed every disposition to carry out his father’s last wishes; he at once nominated Geoffrey for the see of York, and confirmed Henry’s last grant to John, consisting of the Norman county of Mortain and four thousand pounds’ worth of land in England;[1344] at the same time he bestowed upon William the Marshal the hand of Isabel de Clare, daughter and heiress of Earl Richard of Striguil, and upon the son of the count of Perche a bride who had already been sought by two kings—his niece, Matilda of Saxony.[1345]

This last match was evidently intended to secure the attachment of the important little border-county of Perche in case of a rupture with France, which seemed by no means unlikely. The alliance of Philip and Richard had expired with King Henry; now that Richard stood in his father’s place, Philip saw in him nothing but his father’s successor—the head of the Angevin house, whose policy was to be thwarted and his power undermined on every possible occasion and by every possible means. This was made evident at a colloquy held on S. Mary Magdalene’s day to settle the new relations between the two princes; Philip greeted his former ally with a peremptory demand for the restitution of the Vexin.[1346] Richard put him off with a bribe of four thousand marks, over and above the twenty thousand promised by Henry at Colombières; and on this condition, accompanied, it seems, by a vague understanding that Richard and Adela were to marry after all,[1347] Philip agreed to leave Richard in undisturbed possession of all his father’s dominions, including the castles and towns which had been taken from Henry in the last war,[1348] except those of Berry and Auvergne.[1349] Thus secured, for the moment at least, in Normandy, Richard prepared to take possession of his island realm. He had paved the way for his coming there by empowering Eleanor to make a progress throughout England, taking from all the freemen of the land oaths of fealty in his name, releasing captives, pardoning criminals, mitigating, so far as was possible without upsetting the ordinary course of justice, the severe administration of the late king. Richard himself now restored the earl of Leicester and the other barons whom Henry had disseized six years before.[1350] The next step was to send home the archbishop of Canterbury and three other English prelates who were with him in Normandy.[1351] On August 12 they were followed by Richard himself.[1352]

His politic measures of conciliation, executed by his mother with characteristic intelligence and tact, had secured him a ready welcome. It was only by slow degrees, and with the growing experience of years, that the English people learned how much they owed to the stern old king who was gone. At the moment they thought of him chiefly as the author of grievances which his son seemed bent upon removing.[1353] Richard’s mother, with a great train of bishops and barons, was waiting to receive him at Winchester;[1354] there, on the vigil of the Assumption, he was welcomed in solemn procession;[1355] and there, too, he came into possession of the royal treasury, whose contents might make up for the deficiencies in that of Anjou.[1356] So complete was his security that instead of hastening, as his predecessors had done, to be crowned as soon as possible, he left Eleanor nearly three weeks in which to make the arrangements for that ceremony,[1357] while he went on a progress throughout southern England,[1358] coming back at last to be crowned by Archbishop Baldwin at Westminster on September 3.[1359] No charter was issued on the occasion. The circumstances of the new king’s accession were not such as to make any special call for one; they were sufficiently met by a threefold oath embodied in the coronation-service, pledging the sovereign to maintain the peace of the Church, to put down all injustice, and to enforce the observance of righteousness and mercy.[1360] In the formal election by clergy and people which preceded the religious rite,[1361] and in the essentials of the rite itself, ancient prescription was strictly followed. The order of the procession and the details of the ceremonial were, however, arranged with unusual care and minuteness; it was the most splendid and elaborate coronation-ceremony that had ever been seen in England, and it served as a precedent for all after-time.[1362] Richard had none of his father’s shrinking from the pageantries and pomps of kingship; he delighted in its outward splendours almost as much as in its substantial powers.[1363] He himself, with his tall figure, massive yet finely-chiselled features, and soldierly bearing, must have been by far the most regal-looking sovereign who had been crowned since the Norman Conqueror; and when Archbishop Baldwin set the crown upon his golden hair, Englishmen might for a moment dream that, stranger though he had been for nearly thirty years to the land of his birth, Richard was yet to be in reality what he was in outward aspect, a true English king.