History of England 1-6

Richard had not been unduly alarmed by his brother’s rebellion. He is reported to have said, while still held in captivity, that ‘John is not the man to conquer a country if there is a single person prepared to resist his attempt’. In this he was proved to be right. And, on his return, he showed himself to be remarkably magnanimous to his sibling. John had remained in Normandy, fearful of returning to England, and when the king himself sailed across the Channel John paid obeisance to him in tears. ‘You are a child,’ Richard told him. ‘You have had bad companions.’ He knew well enough that John might himself one day assume the throne, and did not wish to alienate him entirely. He had in any case taken the precaution of proclaiming his nephew, Arthur of Brittany (son of his brother, Geoffrey, killed at the Parisian tournament), as his heir; but who knew better than he the vicissitudes of fortune? Richard himself had married while on his way to the Holy Land, but had no children. It has often been assumed, on no evidence at all, that like other martial heroes he was homosexual.

The king performed a solemn ritual of ‘crown-wearing’ in Winchester Cathedral after his return from imprisonment. It was a way of impressing his subjects with the undiminished majesty of his sovereignty. He did not stay in England for very long. Less than two months later he crossed the Channel in order to reclaim the territories of Normandy that had been conquered by the king of France and to reduce to obedience some rebellious lords of Aquitaine. His sojourn in prison, from which it was always possible that he would not escape alive, had encouraged revolt. He stayed in France for the next five years, burning towns and besieging castles, subduing the surrounding country with sword and flame. His demands upon his English subjects, for money and for men, were prodigious; the country, according to a contemporary writer, was reduced to poverty from sea to sea.

In the last summer of his life the king was visited by Hugh, bishop of Lincoln, who had come to the grand castle of Château-Gaillard in Normandy to seek an audience; he wished to plead for the return of the confiscated estates of his see. He found Richard in the chapel, attending Mass, seated on his royal throne with the bishops of Durham and Ely standing on each side. Hugh greeted the king, but Richard turned his face away. ‘Lord king, kiss me,’ Hugh said. Richard still looked away. Then the bishop took hold of the king’s tunic. ‘You owe me a kiss,’ he said, ‘because I have come a long way to see you.’ ‘You deserve no kiss from me,’ the king replied. The bishop shook the king’s cloak. ‘I have every right to one. Kiss me.’ Then Richard, with a smile, concurred. He said later that ‘if the other bishops were like him, no king or ruler would dare raise his hand against them’.

Another sign of restlessness and upheaval became evident as a result of the king’s exactions. The citizens of London believed that they were being unfairly and even perniciously taxed, and their complaints were taken up by William Fitz-Osbert or William the Beard. He grew his hair and beard long in token of his Saxon ancestry. He was styled the ‘advocate of the people’, and at St Paul’s Cross argued that the rich should bear the burden of war finance. 52,000 Londoners were said to have supported him, but the authorities in the city hunted him down. He killed the officer sent to arrest him and fled to sanctuary in the church of St Mary-le-Bow, where after four days a providential fire forced him out. He was stabbed by the son of the officer whom he had killed but, while wounded, he was arrested and dragged at the tail of a horse to the gallows at Tyburn. His associates then proclaimed him to be a martyr and the chain that bound him to the gallows was the source of miraculous cures. The gallows itself was venerated, and so great was the press of people taking the bloody earth from the spot where he had died that a large pit was created.

Richard I never did come back to the land he ruled but did not love. He died from a gangrenous wound while fighting in Limousin, and on his deathbed he decreed that his heart should be interred in the cathedral at Rouen and that his body should be lowered into the tomb of his father within the abbey church of Fontevrault. So much for England.