On returning to England, John raised an army to support his pretensions, while his confederate, Philip, took up arms in his behalf in France, and, entering Normandy, overran a great part of that duchy, although Rouen, the capital, was preserved principally by the exertions of the Earl of Essex, lately one of Richard's companions in the Holy Land. In England, also, John met with a general opposition to his usurpation of the regal authority, which soon compelled him to conclude an armistice with a council of regency that had been appointed by the prelates and barons. This was the position of affairs when Longchamp, having discovered Richard's place of confinement, after much solicitation prevailed upon the emperor to allow the royal prisoner to be brought before the diet at Hagenau, where, accordingly, he made his appearance on April 13, 1193, and defended himself with so much eloquence against the several charges made against him in regard to Tancred and the kingdom of Sicily, to his conquest of Cyprus, and to the murder of Conrad of Montferrat, that Henry found himself compelled by the general sentiment of the diet to order his chains to be immediately struck off, and to agree to enter upon negotiations for his ransom. Longchamp was immediately despatched to England with a letter to the council of regency, and the result was, that, notwithstanding the insidious efforts both of John and his friend, Philip of France, to prevent the conclusion of the treaty, Richard was at last liberated, on February 4, 1194, after seventy thousand marks had been actually paid to the emperor, and hostages given for the payment of thirty thousand more. The English king had also engaged to release both Isaac of Cyprus and his daughter, and he had besides, at the persuasion, it is said, of his mother, Eleanor, the more effectually to conciliate Henry, formally resigned his crown into the hand of the emperor, who immediately restored it to him to be held as a fief of the empire, and burdened with a yearly feudal payment to his superior lord of five thousand pounds. This strange transaction rests on the authority of the contemporary annalist Hoveden. Richard, descending the Rhine as far as Cologne, proceeded thence across the country to Antwerp, and, embarking there on board his own fleet, landed at Sandwich on March 13th.
Most of John's strongholds had been wrested from his hands before his brother's return, and now the rest immediately surrendered and he himself fled the country, and with his principal adviser, Hugh, Bishop of Coventry, having been charged with high treason, and not appearing to plead after forty days, was outlawed and divested of all his possessions.
Meanwhile it was thought necessary that Richard should be crowned again, and that ceremony was accordingly performed at Winchester by Hubert, Archbishop of Canterbury, on April 17th. Then, leaving Hubert guardian of England and grand justiciary, on May 2d, following, having, with his characteristic activity employed almost every moment since his arrival in raising an army and procuring funds for its maintenance by all sorts of exactions and the most unscrupulous use of every means in his power, he again set sail from Portsmouth, his whole soul bent on chastising the King of France. Owing to adverse winds he was a fortnight in reaching Barfleur, in Normandy, where, as soon as he landed, he was met by his brother John, who professed contrition and implored his pardon, which, on the intercession of his mother, Eleanor, was granted. Richard now marched against Philip, and several engagements took place between them, in most of which the English king was successful. But the war, though it lasted for some years, was distinguished by few remarkable events. A truce for one year was agreed to on July 23d, and although hostilities were resumed some time before the expiration of that term, a peace was again concluded in the end of the following year, which lasted till the beginning of 1197.
All this time Hubert, assisted by Longchamp, who had been restored to his office of chancellor, is said to have presided over the government at home with great ability. Hubert had been educated under the famous Glanvil, and he seems, in the spirit of his master, to have exerted himself in re-establishing and maintaining the authority of the law, by which alone, even if he did no more, he must have materially contributed to the revival of industry. The large sums, however, which he was obliged to raise by taxation to meet the expenses of the war, in the exhausted state to which the country had been reduced provoked much popular dissatisfaction; and the third year of the king's absence in particular was distinguished by the remarkable commotion excited by William Fitz-Osbert, styled Longbeard, a citizen of London, who is admitted to have possessed both eloquence and learning, and whose whole character and proceedings might not improbably, if he had had his own historian, have assumed a very different complexion from what has been given to him. Longbeard, who acquired the names of the Advocate and King of the Poor, is affirmed to have had above fifty thousand of the lower orders associated with him by oaths which bound them to follow whithersoever he led. When an attempt was made to apprehend him by two of the wealthier citizens, he drew his knife and stabbed one of them, named Geoffrey, to the heart, and then took refuge in the church of St Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside, the tower of which he and his followers fortified, and held for three days, when they were at last (April 7, 1196), dislodged by fire being set to the building. Fitz-Osbert was first dragged at a horse's tail to the Tower, and then to the Elms in West Smithfield, where he was hanged, with nine of his followers. The people, however, long continued to regard him as a martyr.
The war between Richard and Philip broke out again in 1197, and in the course of this campaign Richard had the gratification of capturing the Bishop of Beauvais, a personage whom he had reason to regard as a main instigator of the severities and indignities which he had sustained at the hands of the emperor. The bishop was taken armed cap-à-pie and fighting, and when Pope Celestine recommended him to the clemency of Richard as his son, the English king sent his holiness the bishop's coat of mail, with the following verse of Scripture attached to it: "This have we found; know now whether it be thy son's coat, or no." This same year, too, finished the career of the Emperor Henry, who, in his last moments, is said to have expressed the extremest remorse for the manner in which he had treated the great champion of the Cross. Richard's other enemy, Leopold, Duke of Austria, had been killed by a fall from his horse two years before.
A truce, as usual, at the end of the year, again suspended hostilities for a space. The war was renewed on its termination, and in this campaign (of the year 1198) Richard gained one of his greatest victories near Gisors, when Philip in his flight fell into the river Epte, and was nearly drowned. After this, by the intercession of the Pope's legate, a truce was concluded between the two kings for five years, and they never met again in fight; although they probably would, notwithstanding the truce, if both had lived. But on March 26th in the following year, 1199, as Richard was engaged in reducing the castle of Chaluz, the stronghold of one of his Aquitanian vassals, Vidomar, Viscount of Limoges, who it seems had refused to surrender a treasure found on his estate, to which the king laid claim in right of his feudal superiority, Cœur de Lion was struck in the left shoulder by an arrow, aimed from the rampart of the castle by a youth named Bertrand de Gurdun. The wound would not have been dangerous but for the mismanagement of the surgeon in his attempts to extract the arrow-head, which had broken off in the flesh. As it was, Richard lived only till Tuesday, April 16th. The shot was a fatal one in every way; in the fury into which the wound of the king threw the besieging army the castle was taken by storm, and all the persons found in it were immediately hanged, as some authorities say, by the king's orders, with the exception only of Gurdun. He was brought into the presence of his dying victim, when Richard, under the impulse of generosity or compunction, gave him his liberty, with a hundred shillings to take him home; but after the king's death he was flayed alive, and then hanged, by order of Marchadee, the leader of the Brabantine mercenaries serving in Richard's army.
The character of Richard is, of course, not to be judged without reference to the general manners of the age in which he lived. It is probable enough that there was hardly an excess, either of violence or licentiousness, into which his impetuous temperament did not occasionally precipitate him; but he seems to have had nothing base or malignant in his composition; and that he was as capable of acts of extraordinary generosity and disinterestedness as of excesses of brutal fury or profligacy. Of the courage and strength of will proper to his race, he had his full share, with more than his share of their strength of thew and sinew; and his intellectual powers, both natural and acquired, were also of a high order. He was renowned in his own day not only as beyond all dispute the stoutest and most gallant of living heroes, but as likewise occupying a place in the foremost rank of those who excelled in wit, in eloquence, and in song.[Back to Contents]