The Conquering Family (36 page)

The news of what had happened threw all England into loud protest. The outcry against the action of the archbishop was not directed, however, at the summary execution of the leader of the people. The primate was condemned instead because he had violated sanctuary, and it was on
this ground that Richard agreed to dismiss his minister from his secular posts.

Walter’s plan of taxation, by which a fixed sum was levied on a community and the apportionment of the payments was placed in the hands of the people concerned, had been the direct cause of the trouble and bloodshed in London. He probably did not realize the importance of the principle he had evolved and the form it would take later, when all control of taxation became the sole function and the chief weapon of the House of Commons. The method was no more than a sop to still some of the opposition to the ever-mounting tax burden. That great good would come out of it ultimately had not entered the mind of the man who devised it and set it into operation.

No pair of shoulders loaded with the cares of the kingdom ever carried them with more ability and decision, but Hubert Walter was at the same time a man of the coldest calculation, with neither scruples nor humane impulses, and even of questionable honesty. The sentiments he stirred in other men were never more openly stated than by Hugh of Lincoln, who was then a very old man. He had repeatedly spoken out against the arbitrary actions of the primate but he reserved the final barb for the last moments of his life. Hubert Walter came to his bedside and declared that he forgave him all the harsh criticisms of the past.

“Indeed, Your Grace,” said the dying man, “there have been passages of words between us, and I have much to regret in relation to them. It is not, however, what I have said to you for which I should now be pardoned but for what I have omitted to say. I have more feared to offend Your Grace than to offend my Father in Heaven. I have withheld words which I ought to have spoken and have thus sinned against you. Should it please God to spare my life, I purpose to amend that fault.”

The Bishop of Beauvais, who happened to be a near relation of Philip of France, got into armor to fight against the English. He was captured and thrown into prison, where he was loaded down with chains. The Pope heard of the bishop’s plight and sent a request to the English King for the release of his son, as he called His Grace of Beauvais. Richard’s answer was to send the bishop’s shirt of chain mail, which was covered with blood, to the Vatican. With it went a letter: “This have we found. Know thou if it is thy son’s coat or not?” The prisoner was not released until he paid his ransom the same as any other man who had taken the sword, a substantial one in this instance, for the revenues of Beauvais were fat.

This incident is typical of the spirit displayed on both sides in the war
between the two embittered kings. They harried and burned and took castles and lost castles. The only way they had of venting their mutual spleen was, seemingly, to render thousands of each other’s subjects homeless and to kill as many as they could catch.

A peace was patched up finally—which neither of them meant to keep—and then Richard, instead of going home and giving some attention to the sorry condition of his people in England, proceeded to carry out one of the pet plans of a lifetime. On the Seine River, south of Rouen, there was an ideal spot for a great castle which would provide perfect protection against invasion. Here, where the river bends sharply and the valley of Les Andelys breaks the high line of the banks, a spur of rock juts out into the water. A minor Gibraltar, six hundred feet long, two hundred wide, and three hundred above the level of the water, it commands the river and all the surrounding country. Here the English King built his famous Château Gaillard, which has been considered the masterpiece of the age.

At the lip of the rock he erected an octagonal fort with walls ten feet thick and a ditch hewed out of the solid stone. Behind this was the main fort, a tower-flanked structure with a great citadel which followed the conformation of the spur. Fortresses are sometimes said to frown. This one scowled, a belligerent scowl, as though daring the French King to lead his forces up against Normandy. The walls rose so unexpectedly and sharply from the river that they seemed to reach up endlessly into the sky, their impregnability obvious at a glance.

Richard took a year in the building and poured money into it as fast as it could be squeezed out of the English people. His pleasure in what he was doing had some of the naïve delight of a boy piling up a high tower of blocks. When it was finished, he walked to one of the ogive windows at the top of the dungeon tower in the citadel, from which he could see up and down the river and well out over the high chalk cliffs. His eyes lighted up. “How pretty,” he cried, “is this child of mine, this child of one year!”

Philip was enraged over the erection of Château Gaillard because there was a clause in one of their many treaties forbidding the fortification of this particular point. Hate flared up between them.

“I will reduce this castle of his,” cried Philip, “if the walls are of iron!”

“I could hold my castle against
him
,” answered Richard scornfully, “if the walls were of butter!”

Soon after this Richard became seriously ill of a distemper. It was natural that he should begin to think of his sins. One of the priests about him pointed out that he had been very unfair to his consort. The ailing King agreed that this was so and he issued orders at once for Berengaria to
join him. She came with the greatest gladness and helped to nurse him back to health.

When his health had been sufficiently restored, they went together to Aquitaine and spent a Christmas there. The weather was perfect, which means it was warm enough for troubadours to come from all over the golden provinces to amuse the King and his lady, and for gleemen to sing in the gardens. If Richard and Berengaria ever achieved any degree of happiness in each other’s company, it was during this short Christmas celebration; short, because Richard was off again almost as soon as the new year started. The struggle with Philip had broken out in its final phase.

The King allowed Berengaria to accompany him on his campaigning this time. This did not mean that she saw much of him. It meant staying in the manor houses of small nobility some distance back from the line while Richard was directing the movements of his troops. Occasionally there would be a sound of furious galloping and she would see the standard of England and her husband riding in the van, his breastplate and taces flecked with foam, his heaume removed from his head so that the wind carried his great yellow mane behind him like a tawny streamer. This was the greatest pleasure she was able to get from his permission to follow him to the front, a glimpse every now and then of Richard riding by.

Greed was the cause of Richard’s death, which came about soon after. His war chest was nearly empty and the justiciar who had replaced Hubert Walter was unable to raise much money. It came to the war-mad monarch’s ears that a great treasure had been found near the castle of Chaluz in Limousin. The nature of the find was exaggerated as the story continued to spread, and when it finally reached the avid King it had become a dozen figures of knights cast in pure gold around a table of the same precious metal. As suzerain of Limousin, he was entitled to half of any treasure-trove and so he was both incredulous and angry when the lord of Chaluz reported that what he had found in reality was only a few old coins. Richard decided he would collect by force and he led a band of his Brabançon mercenaries, under a captain named Marcadie, into Limousin. They besieged the castle and Richard, in an ever-mounting rage at the resistance of his vassal, swore that he would hang every man, woman, and child in the place. He would probably have done so if an archer had not aimed well from the top of the beleaguered walls and lodged his arrow in the royal shoulder.

The wound was not deep, nor had a vital spot been touched. The surgeon made awkward work of extracting the bolt, however, and as a result gangrene set in. It became apparent then that Richard was going to die. Realizing it himself, he forgave the archer (but Marcadie afterward flayed
the man alive and then hanged him) and tried to make up in penitence and prayer for all his many sins.

Berengaria was with him at the end. She sat beside his couch and saw his strength ebb away and the high color of his cheeks change to the gray of death. She was beside him when he breathed his last. If Valhalla had resounded with toasts when he came into the world, there must have been a stirring in the Elysian fields when his soul departed.

He had been King for ten years, this violent man who died of violence. The tower of blocks had toppled over for good; and with the death of Richard the Angevin empire, left to the care of John, toppled also.

It would be pleasant if it could be recorded that Berengaria’s life flowed in easy courses after Richard’s death, but unfortunately she continued the victim of fate’s buffeting. Within a few weeks she lost her only sister Blanche and the friend who had stood by her in all her trials, the King’s sister Joanna. The latter had married again, a genuine love match, and her husband, Raimund of Toulouse, became involved in the religious persecutions of the Albigenses in the south of France. In his behalf Joanna came to beg Richard’s assistance and arrived soon after her brother’s death. The shock caused her to give birth prematurely to a son, and she died herself the following day.

For more than thirty years thereafter Berengaria lived quietly at the city of Mans, where she founded the abbey of L’Espan. While John was King she had continual trouble in getting her pension, which was all she had to live on, and she found it necessary to write letters to Queen Eleanor and Pope Innocent III about it. The Queen, who had always been fond of her, arranged the matter at once. Later the Pope had to threaten an interdict on a number of John’s castles and honors to make him pay the poor Queen what he owed her. When John died there was a matter of more than four thousand pounds owing to Berengaria, and the debt was compounded in some way. Thereafter she seems to have received the payments with regularity. She died in 1230 and was buried in the abbey she had founded. It is said she was glad to be rid of the cares of this life.

Few figures in history have been as unfortunate as this Navarrese princess. Poor little linnet wedded to a falcon! Poor little neglected Queen! Of all the royal ladies of the island kingdom, she shared one distinction with none—she never saw England!

H
ISTORY
has depicted John as a monster of wickedness and his reign as an unrelieved record of cruelty and oppression. The once landless prince who succeeded to the throne in spite of being the fourth of Henry II’s stalwart and healthy sons was probably as bad as he has been presented, selfish, cruel, shameless, cynical, lustful, dishonorable, and utterly false. The available facts justify this far from pleasant portrait.

He was not one of the fair-haired and handsome Plantagenets. It has already been noted that he was somewhat fattish as a boy, and he had now developed into a broad and heavy man, almost squat, and with a square face which was showing more than a trace of jowl. His eyes were dark and he wore a black beard which avoided stringiness by a process of much curling and waxing. But in spite of not possessing that outward guise of nobility which the rest of the brood had and which sometimes concealed the lack of it within, John had a way of making friends. The facetious strain which had cropped out first in William Rufus had been handed on to him and, when he wished, he could be highly amusing. There is too often about men of the worst character a capacity to compel interest and sometimes admiration. The picture of Satan which has been conceived and developed over the years is proof of the fascination he exerts on most people—the hypnotic eye, the strongly marked features, the polished and sophisticated manner. There was something mephistophelean about the new King. Men enjoyed his company, and he had a definite attraction for women. Those who yielded to this attraction always had reason to regret it. He had so little honor in him that the plucking and crushing of a bud were almost simultaneous, and he was so lacking in what might be termed the decencies of dalliance that he would seduce a woman one night and boast of it openly at supper the next.

He had the same irreverence as Richard, but unlike the lionhearted brother who could blaspheme freely and refuse the sacrament for seven years without any feeling of penitence or fear, John had such a belief in
later punishment that his slips from grace were invariably followed by much frantic seeking for forgiveness. There was in him a noticeable tendency to model himself after the great brother in small ways. “By God’s feet!” had been the invocation which Richard had rolled out in his fine voice at moments of stress and anger. John, whose voice could be a little shrill, made his, “By God’s teeth!”

Strangely enough, he had more of a turn for scholarship than any of the kings from William the Conqueror down, including that so-called man of learning, Henry I. He was known to have read Hugh of St. Victor on the sacraments, the
Sentences
of Peter Lombard,
The Romance of the History of England
, and
The Treatise of Origen
, which was an extensive browsing into the field of learning for a king in those days. He was a hard worker and a continuous traveler.

Such, then, was the man. There is even less good to be said for him as a king. He ruled as though only his own interests and desires counted. He had no wisdom and not a trace of statesmanship, but on many occasions he showed a degree of political craft. If he failed in the resolution to fight an issue or a battle to a finish, he had some sagacity both in government and generalship. He possessed a keen capacity in money matters. One instance will show how much shrewdness he could show on occasion. The city of Liverpool owes its early rise in importance to a flash of good sense which John had the first time he passed the Mersey and saw that here was the place for the much-needed northern port. There was ruthless management in the way he changed the little collection of mud huts into a flourishing town, planning it himself in the form of a cross with seven side streets, and allowing immunity to runaway villeins and slaves while there (how the lords of the manor protested!) and their freedom if they remained a year and a half. Such episodes, unfortunately, were not frequent.