At the same time King Philip’s invasion of Normandy was
repulsed by the barons of the duchy. Richard’s faithful ministers,
despite of all their distractions, succeeded in raising the
first instalment of his ransom by grinding taxation—a fourth
part of the revenue of all lay persons, a tithe from ecclesiastical
land, was raised, and in addition much church plate was seized,
though the officials who exacted it were themselves prelates.
John and Philip wrote to the emperor to beg him to detain his
captive at all costs, but Henry VI. pocketed the ransom money
and set Richard free. He reached England in March 1194, just
in time to receive the surrender of the last two castles which were
holding out in his treacherous brother’s name. With astonishing,
and indeed misplaced, magnanimity, Richard pardoned his
brother, when he made a grovelling submission, and restored him
to his lordship of Ireland and to a great part of his English lands.
The king abode for no more than three months in England; he got himself recrowned at Winchester, apparently to wipe out the stain of his German captivity and of an enforced homage which the emperor had extorted from him. Then he raised a heavy tax from his already impoverished subjects, sold a number of official posts and departed to France—never to return, though he had still five years to live. He left behind Archbishop Hubert Walter as justiciar, a faithful if a somewhat high-handed minister.
Richard’s one ruling passion was now to punish Philip of France for his unfriendly conduct during his absence. He plunged into a war with this clever and shifty prince, which lasted—with certain short breaks of truces and treaties—till his death. He wasted his considerable military talents in a series of skirmishes and sieges which had no great results, and after spending countless treasures and harrying many regions, perished obscurely by a wound from a cross-bow-bolt, received while beleaguering Châlus, a castle of a rebellious lord of Aquitaine, the viscount of Limoges (April 6, 1199).
During these years of petty strife England was only reminded at intervals of her king’s existence by his intermittent demands for money, which his ministers did their best to satisfy. The machine of government continued to work without his supervision. It has been observed that, from one English constitutional development. point of view, England’s worst kings have been her best; that is to say, a sovereign like Richard, who persistently neglected his duties, was unconsciously the foster father of constitutional liberty. For his ministers, bureaucrats of an orderly frame of mind, devised for their own convenience rules and customs which became permanent, and could be cited against those later kings who interfered more actively in the details of domestic governance. We may trace back some small beginnings of a constitution to the time of Henry II.—himself an absentee though not on the scale of his son. But the ten years of Richard’s reign were much more fruitful in the growth of institutions which were destined to curb the power of the crown. His justiciars, and especially Hubert Walter, were responsible for several innovations which were to have far-spreading results. The most important was an extension of the use of juries into the province of taxation. When the government employs committees chosen by the taxpayers to estimate and assess the details of taxation, it will find it hard to go back to arbitrary exactions. Such a practice had been first seen when Henry II., in his last year, allowed the celebrated “Saladin Tithe” for the service of the crusade to be assessed by local jurors. In Richard’s reign the practice became regular. In especial when England was measured out anew for the great carucage of 1197—a tax on every ploughland which replaced the rough calculation of Domesday Book—knights elected by the shires shared in all the calculations then made for the new impost. Another constitutional advance was that which substituted “coroners,” knights chosen by the county court, for the king’s old factotum the sheriff in the duty of holding the “pleas of the crown,” i.e. in making the preliminary investigations into such offences as riot, murder or injury to the king’s rights or property. The sheriff’s natural impulse was to indict every man from whom money could be got; the new coroners were influenced by other motives than financial rapacity, and so were much more likely to deal equitably with accusations. The towns also profited in no small degree from Richard’s absence and impecuniosity. One of the most important charters to London, that which granted the city the right of constituting itself a “commune” and choosing itself a mayor, goes back to October 1191, the troubled month of Longchamp’s expulsion from England. It was given by Prince John and the ministers, who were then supporting him against the arrogant chancellor, to secure the adherence of London. Richard on his return seems to have allowed it to stand. Lincoln was also given the right of electing its own magistrates in 1194, and many smaller places owe grants of more or less of municipal privilege to Hubert Walter acting in the name of the absent king. The English nation began to have some conception of a régime of fixed custom, in which its rights depended on some other source than the sovereign’s personal caprice. The times, it may be remembered, were not unprosperous. There had been no serious civil war since the baronial rising of 1173. Prince John’s turbulence had only affected the neighbourhood of a few royal castles. Despite of the frequent and heavy demands for money for the king’s service, wealth seems to have been increasing, and prosperity to have been widespread. Strong and regular governance had on the whole prevailed ever since Henry II. triumphed over baronial anarchy.
III. The Struggle for Constitutional Liberty (1199–1337)
Richard’s queen, Berengaria of Navarre, had borne him no
children. At the moment of his premature death his nearest
kinsmen were his worthless brother John, and the boy
Arthur of Brittany, the heir of Geoffrey, the third son
of Henry II. On his death-bed the king had designated
Accession
of John.
John as his successor, holding apparently that a bad ruler who
was at least a grown man was preferable to a child. John’s claim
prevailed both in Normandy and in England, though in each,
as we are told, there were those who considered it a doubtful
point whether an elder brother’s son had not a better right than
a younger brother. But the ministers recognized John, and the
baronage and nation acquiesced, though with little enthusiasm.
In the lands farther south, however, matters went otherwise.
The dowager duchess Constance of Brittany raised her son’s
claim, and sent an army into Anjou, and all down the Loire
many of the nobles adhered to his cause. The king of France
announced that he should support them, and allowed Arthur to
do him homage for Anjou, Maine and Touraine. There would
have been trouble in Aquitaine also, if the aged Queen Eleanor
had not asserted her own primary and indefeasible right to her
ancestral duchy, and then declared that she transferred it to her
best loved son John. Most of her subjects accepted her decision,
and Arthur’s faction made no head in this quarter.
It seemed for a space as if the new king would succeed in retaining the whole of his brother’s inheritance, for King Philip very meanly allowed himself to be bought off by the cession of the county of Evreux, and, when his troops were withdrawn, the Angevin rebels were beaten down, and the duchess of Brittany had to ask for peace for her son. But it had not long been granted, when John proceeded to throw away his advantage by acts of reckless impolicy. Though cunning, he was destitute alike of foresight and of self-control; he could never discern the way in which his conduct would be judged by other men, because he lacked even the rudiments of a conscience. Ere he had been many months on the throne he divorced his wife, Isabella of Gloucester, alleging that their marriage had been illegal because they were within the prohibited degrees. This act offended the English barons, but in choosing a new queen John gave much greater offence abroad; he carried off Isabella of Angoulême from her affianced husband, Hugh of Lusignan, the son of the count of la Marche, his greatest vassal in northern Aquitaine, and married her despite the precontract. This seems to have been an amorous freak, not the result of any deep-laid policy. Roused by the insult the Lusignans took arms, and a great part of the barons of Poitou joined them. They appealed for aid to Philip of France, who judged it opportune to intervene once
