1193Two other visitors besides the abbots seem to have found their way to Richard before his incarceration at Triffels; the English Bishop Hubert of Salisbury, who, learning in Sicily on his way home from Palestine what had befallen his sovereign, changed his own course and hurried to seek him out;[1093] and a Norman chaplain, William of Sainte-Mère-Eglise. This latter Richard, before his own removal from Spire, despatched to England on business connected with the arrangements for the fulfilment of his promises to Henry, and also for the elevation of Hubert to the see of Canterbury.[1094] Hubert followed about the middle of April.[1095] Meanwhile Bishop William of Ely had also come to the help of his royal master and friend. He had been exiled from England by the queen-mother and the justiciars in 1191 for misgovernment; but his personal loyalty to the king seems never to have failed, and was certainly not doubted by Richard, who had never deprived him of his office of chancellor. Through his diplomacy the Emperor was induced to let his prisoner be brought to meet April 19 him at Hagenau. On April 19 Richard, writing thence to his mother and his lieges in England, related that the Emperor and Empress and their court had welcomed him with all honour and loaded him with gifts, and that “an indissoluble mutual bond of love” had been formed between him and Henry, each promising to help the other to obtain and retain his rights against all men; and that he was “staying with the Emperor”[1096] till some other matters should be settled between them and seventy thousand marks of the ransom paid. He urgently desired that this sum and hostages for the rest should be collected with all speed and sent over under the care of the bishop of Ely, whom he was apparently despatching to England for that purpose. “Know ye for certain,” he added, “that were we in England 1193 and free, we would give as great a sum, or a greater, to secure the conditions which by God’s grace we have obtained, and if we had not the money to our hand we would give our own person in pledge for it to the Emperor rather than leave uncompleted that which has been done.”[1097]
Richard evidently anticipated a speedy release, for he sent to England not only for money and hostages, but also for ships, and for the captain of his own ship, Alan Trenchemer; and bade Robert of Turnham proceed thither “with his” (i. e. the king’s) “military accoutrements”—as if he expected soon to require them there.[1098] He seems to have really believed that the new agreement secured for him the Emperor’s active support in the matter about which he was most anxious—the impending struggle with Philip. The seneschal and baronage of Normandy, as a body, had rejected the treasonable proposals of John; but there was one traitor among them; on April 12[1099] Gilbert of Vacoeil, the constable of Gisors and Néaufle, surrendered these two castles to the king of France. With these keys of the border in his hands, Philip had no difficulty in entering the duchy. In a few weeks he was master of the whole Vexin, the county of Aumale, and the lands of Vaudreuil, Neufbourg, April-May Evreux, and Gournay.[1100] He was thus in full career of success when on hearing of the Hagenau agreement he urgently besought the Emperor either to hand Richard over to him free “as his homager,” or to keep him in a German prison as long as possible; and he backed his request with a heavy bribe in money.[1101] Henry saw that he could not make friends of both kings, and he was in doubt which of the two would be the most useful friend or the most 1193 dangerous foe; so he staved off the decision for a time, placed Richard in confinement at Worms,[1102] and arranged to hold a conference with Philip at Vaucouleurs on June 24 or 25.[1103] Before that day came, however, the French alliance had ceased to be of much consequence to Henry; for the matter in which he had been most anxious to obtain Philip’s support, his quarrel with his own feudataries, had been settled by other means. Richard, fearing that if Henry and Philip should meet he would be given up to the latter, “exerted himself greatly” that the meeting should be prevented, and, to this end, that the Emperor and the German magnates should come to an agreement; which, “owing to his urgency,” they did.[1104] The result was that instead of a conference with Philip at Vaucouleurs, Henry on June 25 opened at Worms a great Court[1105] which sat for five days, and at which there were present, besides a crowd of his own vassals, spiritual and temporal, four representatives of King Richard—the bishops of Bath and Ely, and two of the justiciars from England[1106]—and on the 29th the whole assembly confirmed by an oath “on the soul of the Emperor” a new agreement between Henry and his royal prisoner.[1107] The money total for the ransom was now raised to a hundred and fifty thousand marks, of which a hundred thousand were to be fetched from England by envoys who were to be despatched thither by both sovereigns immediately. Richard was to give sixty hostages to Henry for thirty thousand marks more, and seven hostages to Leopold for the remaining twenty thousand. When these hostages and the first hundred thousand marks were all received, Richard was to be set free. There was, however, an alternative: 1193 “If the king should fulfill the promise which he formerly made to the Emperor concerning Henry sometime Duke of Saxony, the Emperor, letting the king off fifty thousand marks, shall pay for him twenty thousand to the Duke of Austria”; no hostages would then be required, and Richard should be liberated as soon as the hundred thousand June 29 marks were paid and his promise fulfilled. Furthermore, Richard took an oath that in either case he would within seven months of his return home send his niece to Germany to be married to Leopold’s son.[1108]
What was the promise which Richard had made to the Emperor concerning Henry the Lion, when it was made, and whether or not it was ever fulfilled, we cannot tell; the only known mention of the matter is the passage quoted above. From the fact that Richard did on his release leave some hostages in Germany we might infer that he had not done what he had promised; but this inference is doubtful, for we shall see that the conditions of his release were altered again before Henry let him go. Richard’s next step was to seize his opportunity, while negotiations between Henry and Philip were at a standstill, to make overtures to Philip. Immediately after the council at Worms he despatched William of Ely to France with orders to make “some sort of a peace” for him with the king. This William did at Mantes on July 9. The terms consisted of a promise in Richard’s name that he would leave to Philip’s discretion the disposal of whatever territories within the Angevin dominions were then occupied by Philip himself or by his men; that he would perform the homages and services due for all and each of his French fiefs, would grant an amnesty and restitution of their lands to certain of his vassals[1109] who had incurred forfeiture, and would clear off the debt which, it seems, Philip still claimed under the treaty of 1189, by 1193 paying him twenty thousand marks in half-yearly instalments of five thousand marks each, the first instalment to be paid within six months after the payer’s release from captivity, and Philip meanwhile to hold in pledge the castles of Loches, Châtillon-sur-Indre, Driencourt and Arques; one of these to be restored to Richard on the payment of each instalment of the money. Philip promised that meanwhile, as soon as the castles were placed in his custody, he would “receive the King of England into his favour and make request to the Emperor for his liberation.”[1110]
In less than six months the German envoys returned from England, bringing with them “the greater part” of the ransom—seemingly the stipulated hundred thousand marks, for the Emperor wrote on December 20 to the English prelates, barons, and people, and Richard on December 22 to the new archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, announcing that the captive’s liberation was to take place on Monday, January 17; adding that on the following Sunday (January 23, 1194) he was to receive the crown of the kingdom of Provence which the Emperor had granted to him.[1111] Richard’s place of confinement at this time was 1194 Jan. 17 probably Spire. There, on the appointed day, Henry held a council which “after long discussion” was adjourned to re-assemble at Mentz on Candlemas Day.[1112] At this adjourned Feb. 2 meeting Richard was present, with his mother, Archbishop Walter of Rouen, and the bishops of Ely and Bath, who had all come to witness his release. To the amazement of all parties, Henry proposed a yet further delay, and shamelessly avowed his motive for the proposal. He had received in a private audience at Spire, in January, some messengers charged with letters from Philip and John. He now brought these messengers before the council, and handed the letters to Richard. In them the Lion-Heart’s overlord and his brother made to the Emperor three alternative offers. He should receive from Philip fifty thousand marks and from John thirty thousand if he would keep Richard prisoner till 1194 Michaelmas; or a thousand pounds of silver (seemingly from the two jointly) every month, so long as he chose to keep him; or a hundred thousand marks from Philip and fifty thousand marks from John if he would either keep him another twelvemonth or deliver him up to them. Richard, in utter desperation, appealed to the prelates and princes who had stood surety for the Emperor’s fulfilment of the treaty drawn up at Worms.[1113] Two of them—the archbishops of Mentz and Cologne—protested strongly against a breach of so solemn an agreement; the other members of the council seem to have taken the same side; and after a Feb. 4 two days’ struggle Henry yielded.[1114]
The day was a Friday; “an unlucky day,” remarks an English chronicler of the time.[1115] There was a special reason for the remark. Henry, as we have seen, had promised to invest Richard on his release with the kingdom of Arles or Burgundy. This kingdom, as such, had ceased to exist more than a century and a half before, and over a great part of the lands which had composed it the German Emperors had now no practical authority or control. It seems that at the last moment Henry suddenly required his prisoner to do him homage, not for Burgundy—of which we hear no more—but for all the possessions of the Angevin house, including the kingdom of England; and Richard, seeing no way of escape, and urged by his mother, went through a ceremony of surrender, investiture and homage Which, if it had been binding, would have made him a vassal of the Empire for the whole of his dominions.[1116] Such a transaction was, however, void in law, on two grounds. Firstly, no account was taken in it either of the French king’s rights as overlord of Richard’s continental territories, or of the immemorial right of the English Crown to absolute independence. Secondly, Richard had been driven to it under compulsion, as the only means of regaining his freedom and rescuing his dominions from imminent peril—for a refusal would certainly have resulted in an immediate 1194 alliance between Henry and Philip. Homage done under such conditions was a mere empty form, a concession to the vanity of the Emperor, who was ready to clutch at any expedient for magnifying himself in the eyes of his own vassals and inflicting as much outward degradation as he dared on the captive whom he—seeing that he could now wring out of him no further profit, financial or political—thereupon set at liberty.[1117]
Richard’s first act was the despatch of a messenger to Henry of Champagne and the other Christian nobles in Syria to tell them that he was free, “and that, if God would avenge him of his enemies and grant him peace, he would at the appointed time come to help them against the heathens.” Feb. 4 On the same day the Emperor and his magnates wrote to Philip and John bidding them deliver up immediately whatever they had taken from Richard during his captivity; otherwise restitution would be enforced by the writers to the uttermost of their power.[1118] Protected by an imperial safe-conduct to Antwerp, and accompanied by his mother and his chancellor, Richard set out on a leisurely progress down the Rhine. At Cologne he was sumptuously Feb.
20-22? entertained for three days in the archbishop’s palace, and on the third day was asked to attend Mass in the church of S. Peter. The day was probably the festival of S. Peter’s Chair at Antioch (February 22); Archbishop Adolf chose to act as precentor, and began the Mass not with the proper introit, but with that of the feast of S. Peter in Chains—“Now know I of a surety that the Lord hath sent His Angel and hath delivered me out of the hand of Herod.” The choice was doubtless made in compliment to the royal guest; whether the archbishop failed to notice, or deliberately ignored, the comparison of the Emperor to Herod which it involved, we are not told. Adolf indeed was only one of a crowd of imperial feudataries who were eager to make a friend of the English king. By the time Richard arrived at Antwerp not only Adolf but also the archbishop of Mentz, the bishop-elect of Liége, the 1194 dukes of Austria, Suabia, Louvain, and Limburg, the count of Holland, the son of the count of Hainaut, the marquis of Montferrat, and many others, were bound to him by homage and fealty—saving, of course, their fealty to the Emperor—for certain revenues which he granted them by charter, on condition of their help against the king of France.[1119] Possibly the Emperor may have taken alarm at Feb. these alliances between his vassals and his late captive, for one English chronicler tells us that he sent out some men to overtake and recapture him.[1120] Richard, however, under the personal escort of Archbishop Adolf, passed through the lands of the duke of Louvain to Antwerp, where some of his own ships awaited him.[1121] The wind being unfavourable for a direct passage to England,[1122] he slowly made his way by sea to a port which Roger of Howden calls “Swine in Flanders, in the lands of the Count of Hainaut”—either Swyn, between Breeden and Ostend, in the present West Flanders, or Zwin, on the Belgian frontier of the Dutch province of Seeland—coasting along by day in Alan Trenchemer’s galley “because in that it was easier to pass through among the islands,” and spending the nights on “a large and splendid ship which had come from Rye.” Swine was March
4-7 reached in three days; five more were spent in waiting there 1194 for a wind; at last, on March 12 or 13, the king landed at Sandwich, and straightway went to offer up his thanksgivings at the shrine of S. Thomas the Martyr at Canterbury.[1123] On March 16 March 16 he entered London in a triumphal procession to S. Paul’s.[1124] Clergy and people gave him a rapturous welcome; and the sumptuous decorations of the city were beheld with amazement by some German nobles who accompanied him, and who had supposed the wealth of England to be exhausted by his ransom. One of them, it is said, actually told him that he would not have been released without a much heavier payment if the Emperor could have known that such riches existed in the island realm.[1125]
The welcome was mainly a clerical and popular one, because most of the lay barons were occupied in trying to put down a revolt stirred up by John. They had made some progress towards this end before Richard’s arrival; most of John’s castles had been captured, but two, Nottingham and Tickhill, were still holding out. Richard went to work leisurely. He spent “scarcely a day” in London; but he left it to make another pilgrimage, to S. Edmund’s.[1126] He knew that he could afford to wait. Both castles were closely besieged, the one by the earls of Huntingdon, Chester, and Ferrars, the other by the bishop of Durham. Another great rebel stronghold, Mount Saint Michael’s in Cornwall, had surrendered before the king’s return because at the tidings of his coming its commandant died of fright. The garrison of Tickhill now sent two knights to ascertain whether the king was really home, and if he were, to offer him the castle. He refused to receive it unless they would all 1194 surrender at discretion. While the envoys carried this message back to Tickhill, he marched upon Nottingham,[1127] and on March 25 arrived there “with such a numerous force and such a noise of trumpets and horns” as greatly alarmed the garrison; nevertheless, hoping that all this was merely a display contrived by the nobles to make them believe the king had returned, they continued to shoot from the walls, and shot down some of his men almost at his feet. At this he waxed wroth and assaulted the castle. One rebel knight was killed by a bolt from Richard’s own crossbow; the barbicans were taken and the outer gates burnt.[1128] The place was, however, of such strength as to appear, if well defended, impregnable except by starvation; and it was amply supplied with provisions as well as with men.[1129] Next morning Richard began to prepare his stone-casters, and also set up in view of the castle a gallows on which he hanged some of John’s men-at-arms who had been captured outside it. Meanwhile Tickhill had been surrendered to Bishop Hugh on his assurance that the lives of the garrison should be spared; and on March 27 he, with his prisoners, joined the king.[1130] That day, while the king was at dinner, the constables of Nottingham castle sent two men “to see him” and report “what they saw and heard.” Till then the Nottingham constables had not believed that their sovereign was really in England. Their messengers “looked at him well, and recognized him. ‘Am I the king? What think you?’ he asked them. They said ‘Yes.’ ‘Then you may go back; go free, as is right; and do the best you can.’”[1131] March 28 On their report the two constables, with twelve followers, went and placed themselves at Richard’s mercy; and on the morrow the castle was surrendered on the same terms by the rest of the garrison,[1132] of whom some were imprisoned and others put to ransom.[1133]
Richard spent the next day in visiting two royal Forests March 29 “which he had never seen before,” Clipstone and Sherwood; “and they pleased him well.” At night he returned to Nottingham, where he had summoned a council to meet on March 30 the following day. It was a great assembly, at which the queen-mother, the two archbishops, and a number of prelates and magnates were present.[1134] The king opened the proceedings by disseising two of John’s chief partizans, Gerard de Camville and Hugh Bardolf, of the sheriffdoms and royal castles which they held—Lincoln shire and castle, held by Gerard; Yorkshire and Westmorland by Hugh—all of which he put up for sale and sold to the highest bidder.[1135] On the second day of the council (March 31) he “asked for judgement upon Count John and upon Hugh of Nonant,” the bishop of Coventry, John’s chief ally. “And it was judged that they should be peremptorily cited, and that if they failed to come and stand to right, Count John should be declared to have forfeited all claim to the crown and the bishop be subjected to the judgement of his fellow-prelates as bishop and that of the lay barons as sheriff.” On the third day (April 1), the king ordered that for every carucate of land throughout England a contribution of two shillings should be made to him; and “that every man should render to him the third part of the military service due from his fee, to go with him” (the king) “into Normandy.” He also demanded of the Cistercians all the year’s wool of their flocks: but for this they compromised by a fine. The April 2 fourth day was employed in hearing appeals from Archbishop Geoffrey of York and Gerard de Camville; in neither case did the council arrive at any decision. Lastly, the king “appointed his crowning to take place at Winchester at the close of Easter” (April 17), and ordered that on the day after that event all the prisoners taken in John’s castles should be brought before him.[1136]
King William of Scotland was now on his way to a conference with his English overlord. They met at Southwell 1194 April 4 on the Monday before Easter and travelled together on the Tuesday to Malton; there William “asked for the April 5 dignity and honours which his predecessors had had in England,” and also for the restoration of Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancaster, which he claimed “by right of his ancestors.” Richard answered that he would act according to the counsel of his barons. The two kings spent the rest of Holy Week together in a progress April
10-12 by Geddington to Northampton, where they kept Easter. On Easter Monday Richard laid William’s requests before the council, and gave his reply. “He told the king of Scotland that he ought on no account to have made his demand about Northumberland, especially in those days, when nearly all the nobles of the French kingdom had become his (Richard’s) enemies; for if he were to grant this, it would look as if he did it more from fear than from favour.” About the other counties he seems to have said nothing; but they were doubtless understood to be included in his refusal. William apparently made no remonstrance and was pacified by a charter providing minutely for the proper escort and entertainment of the Scot kings when summoned to the English court.[1137] He accompanied or followed Richard to Winchester for the coronation on Low Sunday, when he carried one of the swords of state before his overlord in the procession.[1138]