Richard the Lion Heart

by Kate Norgate

Almost instantly the league fell asunder. The object which its non-Aquitanian members had in view was to break the power of Henry II; they had found a priceless tool for their purpose in his eldest son, who, being like himself a crowned and anointed king, could be set up as a rival head of the Angevin house; the Aquitanian revolt had offered a promising opportunity for using that tool to their advantage. When young Henry was gone, their purpose in joining the league was ruined; the internal quarrels of Aquitaine and its rulers had no interest for them. Accordingly Hugh of Burgundy and Raymond of Toulouse “hurried away after their own affairs”;[206] and instead of the great coalition which was to have ringed in the Angevins from the Pyrenees to the Channel, Henry and Richard had now only to face the enfeebled remains of a local revolt. The news came to Richard when he was besieging Aixe, which young Henry had seized a few weeks before.[207] The king, when the first shock of grief was over, resumed the siege of Limoges; Geoffrey seems to have slipped away to Britanny; once more, on Midsummer day, Aimar surrendered the town and renounced all dealings with his brothers of Angoulême “till they should deserve grace of the king and the duke”; and once more the new fortifications were levelled to the ground.[208] For what remained to be done Henry’s presence was needless. At the end of the month he went back to his northern 1183 dominions, while Alfonso of Aragon joined Richard in laying siege to Hautefort. In a week (June 30-July 6) Bertrand de Born was forced to surrender it; and a punitive harrying of Périgord by Richard brought the revolt to an end.[209]

Brief as the war had been, it was not without results. A few at least of the insurgent barons had made their profit out of the general confusion. It must have been during this time that the Lusignans gained a hold on La Marche which they never entirely lost. Richard’s efforts to establish Maud as countess of Angoulême may have been continued for a while longer, but they were doomed to fail sooner or later by reason of Philip’s grant of the city to the rival claimant. Bertrand de Born, in spite of the warning given him some months before by the duke himself, had persisted in his defiance to the uttermost. He was captured with his castle, brought before his conqueror, and compelled to resign his claim to its ownership.[210] He implored the duke’s mercy, and Richard at once granted him his full forgiveness,[211] but gave back Hautefort to Constantine.[212] This decision, however, was reversed by King Henry,[213] probably on an appeal from the troubadour. Richard appears to have acquiesced without difficulty in his father’s decision on the point;[214] and Richard, not Henry, was destined to reap its results. Bertrand had already declared that if the duke would be gracious and generous to him he should find him as true as steel,[215] and he kept his word; for he perceived that his talents for fighting, and for setting others to fight, might after all be exercised not less actively, and with less danger of disastrous consequences to himself, on the side of the duke than on that of the duke’s enemies.

CHAPTER III
KING HENRY’S HEIR
1183-1189

Et vos, patres, nolite in iracundiam provocare filios vestros.

1183

It was into the life of Richard himself that his brother’s death brought the most important change. He was now the eldest son of Henry II, heir to the headship of the houses of Anjou and Normandy and to the crown of England. Some re-adjustment of his feudal relations both with his father and with the King of France would seem to be a probable consequence of this change in his prospects. Henry was not likely to repeat the mistake which he had made thirteen years before in crowning his heir; but Richard might naturally expect that the other measures which had been taken to secure the Angevin and Norman heritages for young Henry would be renewed in his own behalf. He was evidently quite unprepared for the step which his father actually took. In September or October Henry summoned him to Normandy, and on his arrival “bade him grant the duchy of Aquitaine to his brother John and receive John’s homage for it.”[216]

In all Henry’s plans for the future of his dynasty there was assumed a fundamental principle, implied rather than expressed, because (to him at least) too self-evident to need expression: that the territories which he had inherited from his parents, Anjou, Normandy, and England, must remain united under the direct control of the head of the family. Any deviation from this principle would, he saw, endanger the stability of the Angevin dominion, for it would be a breaking-up of the foundation on which that dominion was 1183 based. The devolution of Aquitaine and of Britanny to junior branches of the Angevin house, under the overlordship of its head, would not involve the same danger; and thus after his agreement with Conan of Britanny in 1166 Henry had ready to his hand the means of making a fair and substantial provision for two younger sons; but when a fourth son was born, he saw so little chance of being able to provide for the child on anything like the same scale that he at once called him “John Lackland,” and, it seems, placed him when little more than a twelvemonth old as an oblate in the abbey of Fontevraud.[217] At the age of six years, however, if not sooner, John was brought back to his father’s court, and in the next ten years scheme after scheme for his future was planned by Henry, but without success. Now at last, just when John had reached an age at which he must have begun to feel keenly the difference between his prospects and those of Richard and Geoffrey, the death of the eldest brother opened a possible way—possible at least in Henry’s eyes—for redressing this inequality. We cannot tell what was the precise form of the proposition made by Henry to Richard; but if the report of it given by a contemporary English chronicler be correct, it clearly involved a tacit, if not an explicit, recognition of Richard as heir to the headship of the royal house of England and Anjou, and, as such, to the overlordship of the whole of the Angevin dominions, including Aquitaine. The chronicler’s words do not, on the other hand, necessarily or even probably imply that Henry contemplated an immediate transfer of the fief which he desired Richard to “grant” to John. John was not yet seventeen; he seems to have been brought up partly in England, partly in Normandy; it would have been sheer madness to think of setting him to take the command of affairs in a country which the united energies of Richard and of Henry himself scarcely sufficed to keep under control. In all likelihood the settlement 1183 which the king desired to make had reference, like that of 1169, wholly to the future, and was designed to confirm the earlier settlement, only with a change of persons; as Richard must take the place of the dead Henry, John was to take the place of Richard.

The execution of this project required the consent of two persons: Richard and the King of France. Richard’s consent proved harder to win than Henry seems to have expected. There was a fundamental though unexpressed difference between the views taken by the father and the son of the place actually held by the son in Aquitaine. Henry’s intention apparently had been from the outset, and was still, that Aquitaine should during his own lifetime be governed by his son—whether Richard or John—as his representative, and after his death should become an underfief of the Angevin dominion—as Britanny already was—in the hands of that same son and his heirs. Unluckily he had allowed one part of this intention to be obscured, and in practice well-nigh defeated, by his anxiety to secure the fulfilment of the other part. From Henry’s point of view, Richard in 1183 was simply his homager for the county of Poitou, his lieutenant over the rest of the duchy, heir to the whole of it when he himself should die, and, after young Henry’s death, heir also to the headship of the royal house of England, Normandy and Anjou. But Richard could, and did in effect, claim to be already duke of Aquitaine in his own right, by virtue of his homage to France and his investiture at Limoges. Moreover, Eleanor’s duchy held a different place in the estimation of her son—the son who from his infancy had been her recognized heir—from that which it held in the estimation of her husband. Henry looked upon it as a mere appendage to his ancestral territories; Richard looked upon it as his own especial possession, and a possession which ought to rank in the future, as it always had ranked in the past, on a footing of equality with them. The same feeling which made Henry shrink from reducing the heritage of Geoffrey Plantagenet or that of Maud of Normandy to the position of an underfief would make Richard shrink from contemplating a like alteration in 1183 the status of the heritage of his mother. The tragedy of the last summer and the sudden change in his own prospects had so far chastened his impetuous temper that he did not at once refuse his father’s demand, but asked for two or three days delay that he might consult with friends before giving a reply. Then he withdrew from the court; at nightfall he mounted his horse, and rode southward with all speed, sending word to his father that “he would never grant Poitou to be held by anyone but himself.”[218]

At the Christmas feast, which he kept at Talmont—a favourite hunting seat of the Poitevin counts, on the coast near La Rochelle—Richard “showed himself lavish in the distribution of gifts.”[219] Some of these were probably rewards to vassals who had kept their allegiance during the recent war; others may have purchased the withdrawal from the country, or the permanent enlistment under the ducal banner, of some of the mercenary leaders whom it was needful to dispose of in one way or the other, if the ducal government was to be carried on at all. The various bands of Routiers, left suddenly without employers by the submission of Aimar of Limoges, the death of young Henry, and the collapse of the league, had scattered in all directions. Raymond “the Brown” seemingly went into the Angoumois; on August 10 (1183) he was slain at Châteauneuf.[220] One large body under Curbaran swept across Berry into the Orléanais, only to be almost destroyed at Châteaudun on July 30 by the “Peace-makers,” a sworn brotherhood formed among the country folk to resist the marauders and restore peace to the land.[221] Curbaran himself was among the prisoners, who were all hanged.[222] Sancho was still in the Limousin with his followers; and Curbaran’s place seems to have been taken by a man who in the “tongue of oc” bore the name of “Lo Bar,”[223] a name 1183 which, transmuted by northern speakers into “Louvrekaire” or “Lupicar,” was in later days to be closely associated with the last struggle of the Angevins to keep their hold on Normandy. The privilege of private warfare, which was 1183-4 the most cherished birthright of the barons of Aquitaine, enabled Aimar of Limoges to supply Lobar and Sancho and “a countless host” with occupation which they supplemented by harrying monasteries from Yssandon to Orleans, and ravaging “the king of England’s lands” in the Limousin and La Marche. Richard evidently suspected, perhaps knew, that in this last matter the hand of Aimar was with them. It is at this juncture that the most famous of all the Routiers of the period, Mercadier, first appears in Richard’s service. “Under the protection of the duke Mercadier and his troop dashed across Aimar’s territory, and on the 1184 first day of the second week of Lent (1184) cruelly ravaged the town of Excideuil and its suburbs” are almost the last words that have come down to us from the chronicler who thus far has been our chief authority for the history of Aquitaine under duke Richard.[224]