The conference had been held “between Gaillon and Andely,”[1235] or as another writer puts it, “at the Isle,”[1236] most likely the Isle of the Three Kings, whose name suggests that it had been the scene of meetings between Philip and the two Henrys, and which lies in the Seine almost under the shadow of the Rock of Andely. Probably this was the occasion on which Philip first saw the castle, then fast rising on that rock, and the completed square of walls enclosing the Lesser Andely, with the bridges and fortified outpost on the smaller island, barring the river. His courtiers—so runs 1197? the story told by Gerald of Wales—could not refrain from expressing their admiration of this wonderful piece of military architecture. Irritated by their praise of his rival’s work, he swore aloud that he wished the new fortifications were built wholly of iron, for if they were, he would none the less bring all Normandy, and Aquitaine as well, under his rule. The boast was reported to Richard: “By God’s throat!” swore the Lion-heart, “if yon castle were built of neither iron nor stone, but wholly of butter, I would without hesitation undertake to hold it securely against him and all Oct. 16 his forces.”[1237] A month after the conference the exchange of lands between duke and primate was formally completed at the Castle on the Rock, by a charter in which Richard 1197 set forth his motive for the transaction: “The town of Andely and certain adjacent places which belonged to the see of Rouen being insufficiently fortified, the way through the same into our land of Normandy was open to our enemies.”[1238] That way was now so effectually barred that six years were to elapse before the enemy, notwithstanding his boast, made any attempt to cross or break the barrier; and when it fell at last after a six months’ siege, its fall was due less to the skill of its assailant than to the apathy of Richard’s successor in its defence.
The truce was scarcely made when politics of a wider range began to claim the attention of both the rival kings. The Emperor Henry VI was still under sentence of excommunication for his treatment of the captive king of England and for other violations of international right and justice committed in his pursuit of a dream of world-conquest in which he seems to have curiously anticipated a much later bearer of the Imperial title. The aged Pope Celestine had warned him in 1195—“What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”[1239] and the warning came back to him when on his way to Holy Land in autumn 1197 he fell sick unto death at Messina. He hurriedly restored to the Roman See the property of which he had robbed it, and despatched an envoy to Richard, offering to refund his ransom in the form of either money or lands. Before an answer could be received he died, on Michaelmas eve. The Pope ordered that he should not be buried, unless with Richard’s expressed consent, until this offer was fulfilled. While Richard was keeping Christmas at Rouen, envoys from the archbishops of Cologne and Mentz and other German princes came to tell him that all the magnates of Germany were to assemble at Cologne on February 22 to elect an Emperor; “and they bade him, in virtue of the oath and fidelity by which he was bound to the Emperor and to the Roman Empire, come to Cologne at the aforesaid time without fail, in order that he, as a chief member of the Empire, might be with them to elect, by God’s help, an 1197 Emperor fit for the imperial office.” After some consideration and consultation Richard sent back with the envoys some bishops and nobles to be present at the election in his stead. “He,” says Roger of Howden, “greatly feared to go there himself, lest he should again fall into their hands, unless security were given him of a safe-conduct for the journey there and back; and no wonder, for he had not yet paid to the German magnates all that he had promised them for helping to his liberation; and it was on account of him that the Emperor’s body was still unburied.”[1240] The German electors were much divided among themselves. The late Emperor’s only son was already, by the Pope’s consent, crowned king of Sicily;[1241] but he was a child; nobody wanted an infant Emperor. Some of the magnates seem to have thought that jealousy and rivalry among themselves might be best appeased by setting, or at least proposing to set, over all of them a sovereign of another nationality; certain of them nominated King Richard of England. It was probably merely in opposition to this party that some others—“but they were few”—proposed Philip of France.[1242] The majority inclined to Duke Henry of Saxony, Richard’s sister’s son, who by birth was head of the most illustrious of the princely houses of Germany, and had in 1196 succeeded his father-in-law as Count Palatine. For Henry Richard, 1197-8 through his representatives at Cologne, threw all his influence into the scale. But Henry himself was absent in Holy Land, and it was felt that to leave the Empire without a head till his return might involve grave danger; his partizans, including Richard, therefore transferred their support to his brother Otto, whose life had been spent almost entirely in Normandy and England, at the court first of his grandfather Henry II and afterwards at that of his uncle Richard, and who was perhaps the more acceptable to the German electors because he neither held nor could claim any territorial possessions in Germany;[1243] his sole personal connexion with it was his marriage with a daughter of the duke of Louvain, one of the North German 1197-8 feudataries with whom Richard had made alliance in 1194. Otto was accordingly elected, and on July 12, 1198, he was crowned at Aix.[1244]
One of the warmest advocates of the election of Otto was Count Baldwin of Flanders, chiefly because the king of England was known to be on the same side.[1245] The king of France, on the other hand, naturally took alarm at a choice which promised to strengthen the alliance between Richard and Baldwin and give to both these princes the countenance, if not the active support, of the greater part of the German feudataries and of their sovereign. There was one disappointed candidate for the imperial crown who openly refused to acknowledge the authority of his successful rival. This was Philip, duke of Suabia, the late Emperor’s brother. Between him and his royal French namesake an alliance was concluded on S. Peter’s day.[1246] It could, however, be of little avail to either of them against the coalition by which in a few weeks they were confronted. Henry of Saxony, returned from Holy Land, was welcomed by his English uncle at Les Andelys,[1247] and thence proceeding to his homeland gave his unqualified assent and approval to the election of his brother as Emperor.[1248] Before the end of August, the duke of Louvain, the counts of Brienne, Flanders, Guines, Boulogne, Perche, Blois, and Toulouse, with Arthur of Britanny (or rather the nobles who governed the duchy in his name) “and many others,” made a confederacy with Richard, swearing to him and he to them that neither they nor he would make peace with the king of France without the common consent of them all.[1249] On September 6 Baldwin of Flanders laid siege to St. Omer; its surrender, three weeks later, was followed by that of Sept. 27 Aire and several other neighbouring towns.[1250] At the same time the truce was broken on the Norman border. One contemporary English writer represents Philip as the aggressor; but his story seems to be only a confused enlargement 1197-8 on the contents of a letter written by Richard in which there is no suggestion of any such thing. Richard, according to his own account, on Sunday, September 27, crossed the Epte by the ford near Dangu, surprised and captured two neighbouring castles with their garrisons and contents, and Sept. 28 returned at night by the same way. Next day he learned that Philip, having heard of this inroad, was setting out from Mantes with some five or six hundred men. Richard at once went forth with a few attendants, but left the main body of his troops on the river-bank, thinking the French would cross the ford and encounter them on the other side. Philip, however, turned towards Gisors. Before he could reach it he was almost surrounded by the troops of Richard and Mercadier. They chased him so hotly and pressed him so closely that the bridge at Gisors broke down under the weight of horses and men crowding upon it. The French king himself was reported to have “swallowed some water,” as his rival jestingly expressed it; he escaped, however, unharmed, but twenty of his knights were drowned; three were prostrated by Richard’s own lance, a hundred captured by his men, and a hundred others fell into the hands of Mercadier and his Brabantines; there were countless prisoners of lower rank, and the captured destriers numbered two hundred, “of which one hundred were covered with iron.”[1251]
This affair was one of Richard’s most daring personal adventures; he himself acknowledged that he had “staked his own head and his kingdom to boot, overriding the advice of all his counsellors”—“but,” he added, “it was not we who thus defeated the king of France, but God and our right did so by our means.”[1252] These words and the action on which they are a comment are alike characteristic of the Lion-heart. Amid all the overwhelming political, diplomatic, and financial cares of his latter years, he was still knight-errant enough to glory in a wholly 1197-8 unnecessary adventure which might have cost him his life, and which had, after all, failed of its practical object, the capture of Philip. It may, however, have been partly prompted by another motive than the spirit of mere knightly daring. Richard was literally at his wits’ end for money; and without money the league which he had been forming against Philip was certain to break up ere long. His alliances with Flanders and the other feudataries of the Empire and with some of the French king’s own subjects rested on a basis of subsidies, revenues, or substantial rewards of some kind, promised to the nobles in consideration of their pledge to assist him against Philip. To none of them had he as yet been able to fulfil his plighted word in this respect. Château-Gaillard was well worth the cost of its building, but the cost was great. “You know there is not a penny at Chinon” (where the Angevin treasure was kept), he wrote in a sirventes addressed to the brother-counts of Auvergne some time in the years 1197-9.[1253] His means were, in fact, insufficient for the payment of even the troops absolutely necessary to guard the Norman frontier. When he found himself so close to Philip on the road to Gisors there may have flashed across his excited brain the dream of a capture which should not only place his rival in his power, but lead to the filling of his coffers as those of the Emperor had so recently been filled, with the ransom of a king. He had already been reduced to the expedient of a change of his royal seal, the repudiation of all grants made under the old one, and the exaction of heavy payments for their confirmation or renewal.[1254] On his new seal the three lions passant-gardant appeared for the first time as the armorial bearings of the king of England. Its earliest impression now known is attached to a charter dated May 22, 1198[1255]; and the process of cancelling old grants 1197-8 and selling new ones went on till the very eve of his death eleven months later.[1256]
Neither Richard nor Philip, in fact, was in a position to make war on a scale large enough to bring it to a decisive issue. The raids and counter-raids therefore continued. Sept. Philip burned Evreux, ravaged the country as far as Beaumont-le-Roger, and would have burned Neufbourg, had not John anticipated him by firing it at the moment of the French attack. Mercadier raided Abbeville at fair-time, and returned with a mass of plunder taken from the French merchants there. The earl of Leicester made an attempt on Pacy.[1257] Richard built a new fort on an island in the Seine and gave it the provocative name of Boutavant, “Push-forward”; Philip began to build one facing it, which in a like spirit of bravado he called Gouletot, “Swallow-all.”[1258] An obscure entry in the Norman Exchequer Roll for the year seems to imply that the kings reverted for a moment to a scheme which four years before had been proposed and rejected, for the settlement of their quarrel by a fight between selected champions, to be held in presence of both at Les Andelys[1259]; but again the proposal led to nothing. At length Archbishop Hubert, being in Normandy, went at Philip’s desire and with Richard’s consent to the French court to discuss terms of peace. Philip offered to restore all the territory and castles which he had seized except Gisors, concerning the rightful ownership of which he declared himself willing to accept the decision of six Norman barons to be chosen by himself and six French barons to be chosen by Richard. The English king, however, would make no peace save on condition of its including the count of Flanders and all the other feudataries of France who had transferred their homage to himself; so the negotiations resulted only in another truce 1199 till S. Hilary’s day.[1260] At the appointed time the kings Jan. 13 came to a meeting between Vernon and Les Andelys; Richard on the Seine in a boat, from which he refused to land, Philip on horseback on the river-bank. The colloquy was adjourned, seemingly to give opportunity for the intervention of a mediator, Peter of Capua, a cardinal Jan. whom the new Pope Innocent III had recently sent to France as legate. By the advice of Peter and of some magnates on both sides, the truce was prolonged for a term of five years; it was confirmed by oath, and both kings dismissed their troops, bidding them return to their homes.[1261]
The biographer of Philip Augustus says that “through the trickery of the king of England” the agreement was not confirmed by an exchange of hostages.[1262] It may have been on this plea that four French counts through whose territories Mercadier and his men had to pass on their way southward ventured to ignore the truce and set upon the Routiers, many of whom they slew. Philip swore that this outrage had no sanction from him. Presently afterwards, however, when Richard, thinking Normandy was safe for a while, was on his way to visit his southern dominions, Philip not only resumed the fortification of Gouletot, but also destroyed the neighbouring forest. At these tidings Richard hurried back to Normandy, and sent his chancellor to the French court to declare the truce dissolved unless Philip would pull down the new fortress. Philip, urged by the legate, promised to do so. Then Richard declared he would have either a full settlement of all their disputes or no peace at all. A form of peace was drawn up; its provisions were that the king of France should restore to the king of England all the lands which he had taken from him either in war or by any other means, except Gisors, in compensation for which he granted to Richard the gift of the archbishopric of Tours; Philip’s son Louis was to marry Richard’s niece, the daughter of the 1199 king of Castille; and furthermore, Philip was to swear that he would to the utmost of his power assist Richard’s nephew Otto to obtain the imperial crown. Richard on his part was to give to Louis of France, with the hand of his niece, twenty thousand marks of silver and the castle of Gisors as her dowry. The execution of the treaty, however, was postponed till Richard should return from Poitou.[1263]
The word “Poitou” had in recent years acquired another meaning besides its original one. Richard had never styled himself count of Poitou since his accession to the Crown[1264]; it is doubtful whether he had ever done so since its restoration to his mother in 1185. The title by which he asserted his rights over his southern dominions was that of “Duke of the Aquitanians.” His grant of the county of Poitou to Otto in 1195 seems to have been merely verbal, ratified by neither charter nor investiture, and carrying with it no permanent authority and no legal claim to the higher dignity of the Aquitanian dukedom; and on Otto’s return to Germany in June 1198 Richard resumed full possession of the county.[1265] The word “Aquitaine” was dropping out of use. The administration of all the king-duke’s dominions south of the Loire was carried on by seneschals appointed by and acting for him, one for “Gascony” and one for “Poitou”; the former appellation representing the country south of the Garonne, the latter embracing the county of Poitou proper and all its dependencies or underfiefs between the Garonne and the Loire.[1266] Richard’s last visit to any part of these dominions had been a flying one in December 1195, when he kept Christmas at Poitiers.[1267] A double motive seems now to have urged him southward. The troublesome half-brothers Aimar of Angoulême and Aimar of Limoges were, it appears, again plotting or at least credibly suspected of plotting treason against him.[1268] He 1199 had also been informed of a wonderful treasure-trove on the land of a baron in the Limousin. A peasant ploughing near Châlus had met with an obstacle which, when disinterred, proved to consist of something which is described March as “an Emperor with his wife, sons, and daughters, all of pure gold, and seated round a golden table,” and also, it appears, some ancient coins.[1269] The lord of Châlus was one Achard[1270]; from him the treasure was claimed by the viscount Aimar as overlord. Richard, as Aimar’s overlord, claimed it in his turn,[1271] and by the law of treasure-trove his claim seems to have been justified. According to one account, Aimar actually sent him no small portion of what had been found; but Richard would be content with nothing short of the whole.[1272] He seems to have suspected that the remainder was still hidden at Châlus, for it was to Châlus that he laid siege, on Wednesday, March 4.[1273] Achard himself had fled to the viscount of Limoges for protection.[1274] In vain he begged for a truce till after Easter, and offered to submit to a sentence of the royal court of France.[1275]
The castle of Châlus, whose ruined keep-tower still stands on a low hill above the little river Tardoire, contained at the 1199 moment about forty persons; only two of these were knights, and some of the others were women.[1276] For three March
24-6 days Richard’s miners dug under the walls while he with his crossbowmen rode round about them, discharging a shower of missiles into the enclosure.[1277] On the third day Friday
March 26 the little garrison offered to surrender on condition of safety for life and limb and the retention of their arms; but Richard refused, swearing he would capture and hang them all.[1278] That afternoon he again rode forth, accompanied by Mercadier, round about the castle, shooting with his crossbow at any man whom he saw on the wall; and this time he rashly went without any defensive armour except an iron headpiece and a buckler. His daring was more than equalled by one man among the besieged, who with a crossbow in one hand and a frying-pan in the other had stood nearly all day on a bastion of the tower, dexterously turning aside with his makeshift shield every missile aimed at him, and carefully scanning the ranks of the besiegers,[1279] evidently in the hope of discovering their leader. From one account it appears that when at last his opportunity came, he had discharged all his quarrels, and the bolt which he shot at the unprotected figure was one of the enemy’s own which he snatched from a crevice in the wall where it had stuck just within his reach.[1280] Richard, hearing the sound of the missile in the air, looked up and greeted the bowman with a shout of applause. That look cost him his life. He bent down to shelter himself under his shield, but too late to avoid the arrow; it struck his left shoulder at the joint of the neck, glanced downward, and became fixed in his side.[1281] No one but Mercadier was near enough to see exactly what had occurred. To him Richard gave orders for a general assault to be made on 1199 the castle[1282]; then, quietly and alone, he rode back to his tent. There he tried to pull out the arrow; the shaft broke, leaving the barb imbedded in the wound, and he was compelled to send for a surgeon to extract it. One was found, says an English chronicler, “among that accursed tribe, the followers of the impious Mercadier,” and it is to this man’s handling of the case that the same writer ascribes its fatal termination; but this is sufficiently accounted for by his own description of the drawbacks attending the operation, performed hurriedly by lantern-light on a patient so fat that the steel, buried in his flesh, was extremely difficult to find, and when found, still more difficult to remove[1283]; a patient, moreover, whose character combined with his physical constitution to make him an extremely unmanageable invalid. A second doctor seems to have been afterwards called in;[1284] but in spite of all the remedies that were applied the wound grew daily more painful and its swelling and discoloration more ominous.[1285]
A furious assault made by Mercadier on Châlus after the king was wounded had resulted in the capture of the castle and its defenders. Richard caused them all to be hanged, except the man who had shot him.[1286] He then despatched some of his troops to besiege two neighbouring castles, Nontron and Montagut, “for he purposed in his heart to destroy all the castles and towns of the viscount of Limoges.”[1287] Soon, however, he began to realize that his days were numbered. He wrote to his mother, who was at Fontevraud, asking her to come to him. Every precaution had been taken to prevent his condition becoming known outside the little group of four trusted nobles who alone were admitted to his presence;[1288] from these he now exacted an oath of fealty to John as his destined successor, to whom he devised the kingdom of England and all his 1199 other lands. He ordered that all his castles and three parts of his treasure should likewise be delivered to John; he bequeathed all his jewels to his nephew Otto of Germany, and the remaining fourth part of his treasure to be distributed among his servants and the poor.[1289] He sent for the captive crossbowman and questioned him: “What evil have I done to thee? Why hast thou slain me?” “Thou didst slay my father and my two brothers with thine own hand; thou wouldst have slain me likewise. Take on me what vengeance thou wilt; freely will I suffer the greatest torments thou canst think of, now that thou, who hast brought so many and so great evils on the world, art stricken to death.” Richard answered, “I forgive thee my death,” and ordered that the man should be liberated and sent away safely with a gift of a hundred English shillings.[1290] Then he called for a chaplain, made his confession and received the Holy Communion.[1291] By this time probably his mother was with him; she herself records that she was present at his death, and that he “placed all his trust, after God, in her, that she would make provision for his soul’s welfare with motherly care to the utmost of her power.”[1292] He made his own arrangements for the disposal of his body, ordering that his brain and some internal 1199 organs should be buried in the ancient Poitevin abbey of Charroux, his heart at Rouen, and the embalmed corpse at his father’s feet in the abbey church of Fontevraud.[1293] He April 6 received Extreme Unction on April 6, the Tuesday in Passion week, “and as the day was closing, he also ended his earthly April 11 day.”[1294] On Palm Sunday his body, wrapped in the robe in which he had been attired at his crown-wearing at Winchester five years before,[1295] was buried by his father’s old friend Bishop Hugh of Lincoln and his mother’s friend Abbot Luke of Torpenay in the place which he had chosen for it.[1296] His heart—said to be remarkable for its great size[1297]—was enclosed in a casket of gold and silver and placed, as a most precious treasure, among the holy relics in the cathedral church of Rouen.[1298]