RICHARD I. 



RICHARD IF. 



Richard was at last liberated, on the 4th of February, 1194, after 

 70,000 marks had been actually paid to the emperor, and hostages 

 given for the payment of 30,000 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 the 13th of March. 



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 the 17th of April. Then, 

 leaving Hubert guardian of England and grand-justiciary, on the 2nd 

 of May following, having, with his characteristic activity, employed 

 almost every moment since his arrival in raining an army and pro- 

 curing 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 the 23rd of July ; 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 bis office of chancellor, is said to have presided over the government 

 at home with great ability. Hubert had been educated under the 

 famous Qlanvil, 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 contri- 

 buted 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 

 50,000 of the lower orders aesociated 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 (7th of April 1196) dislodged by fire being set to the 

 building. Fitz-Osbert was first dragged at a horse's tail to the Towt r, 

 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 Beauvai., a personage whom he had reason to regard an 

 a main instigator of the severities and indignities which ho had sus- 

 tained at the hands of the emperor. The bishop was taken armed 

 cap-a-pie and fighting, and when Pope Celestino 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 extremcKt 

 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 11 98) 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 intervention 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, notwith- 



BIOG. DIV. VOL. v. 



standing tho truce, if both had lived. But on the 26th of March iu 

 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, Coeur de Lion was struck in the left shoulder by an arrow, 

 aimed from the rampart of the castlo by a youth named Bertrand de 

 Gurdun. The wound would not have been dangerous but for tho 

 mismanagement of the surgeon in his attempts to extract the arrow- 

 head, which bad broken off in the flesh. As it was, Richard lived only 

 till Tuesday, the 16th of April. 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. 



Richard I. had no issue by his wife Berengaria, but he is said to 

 have had one or two natural children. He was succeed', d on the throne 

 by his youngest brother, John, to the exclusion of Arthur of Bretagne, 

 the legitimate heir, as being the son of his next brother, Geoffrey. 

 [JOHN.] 



The character of Richard is one of course not to be judged without 

 reference to the general manners of the age in which he lived. He is 

 charged by writers of his own or near his own time with crimes of all 

 sorts, and 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, besides the sanction or 

 indulgence for all this accorded by public opinion and the universal 

 example, it is also to be said for Richard that, with all his passion and 

 recklessness if his ungrateful rebellion against his father be left out 

 of account 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 pro- 

 fligacy. 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 

 beyoud 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. A few of Richard's poetical 

 compositions have been preserved, and may be found in the following 

 works: 'La Tour Tdndbresse,' 1705, which contains a love-song in 

 Norman -French, and another chanson in mixed Romance andProven9al, 

 said to be the joint composition of Richard and his favourite minstrel 

 Blondel de Nesle, and to be that by which Blondel, according to the 

 well-known story, now generally believed to be a fiction, discovered 

 his master's prison ; Walpole's ' Royal and Noble Authors,' which 

 contains a poem of about forty lines in Provencal, from a manuscript 

 in the Laurentine Library at Florence, another version of which iu 

 Norman-French (by some supposed to bo the original), is given by 

 Sismondi, ' Literature du Midi de 1'Europe,' vol. i., p. 149, and of which 

 there are two English versions, one published in Burney's ' History of 

 Music,' another by the late George Ellis, in Park's edition of YValpole's 

 work ; Raynouard's ' Choix des Poesies des Troubadours,' vol. iv., 

 containing tho Provenal version of the same poem ; and the ' Parnasse 

 Occitanien,' Toulouse, 1819, in which another poem of Richard's is 

 given. Richard is also a distinguished character in romance ; on which 

 subject it may be sufficient to refer the reader to Ellis's ' Specimens of 

 Early English Romances,' vol. ii., pp. 175-290 (edit, of 1811). 



The claim of Richard I. to the authorship of the ancient maritime 

 code called the ' Laws of Oleron,' has been proved to be unfounded. 

 Almost the only improvement in the laws or institutions of England 

 which is attributed to him is some reform of the institution of justices- 

 itinerant introduced by his father, but it is not very clear in what this 

 consisted ; and, whatever it was, the merit of it appears to belong 

 not to Richard, but to his viceroy Hubert. He is al-o said to have 

 abolished some of the most cruel penalties of the forest laws, although 

 he enforced that code generally with great exactness. What is called 

 the time of legal memory, or the term requisite to establish immemorial 

 usage, dates from the commencement of the reign of this king. 



RICHARD II. (suruamed of Bordeaux), King of England, was tho 

 second but only surviving son of Edward, styled the Black Prince, 

 eldest son of King Edward III., by his wife Joanna of Kent 

 [EDWABD III.], and was born at Bordeaux on tho 3rd of April 1366. 

 He was consequently ten years and two months old when he lost his 

 father, and not quite eleven years and three months when he suc- 

 ceeded to the throne on the death of his grandfather. His reign is 

 reckoned to have commenced on the day following that event, the 

 22nd of June 1377. His coronation did not take place till the 16th 

 of July. 



On the accession of a king who was still a minor, tho powers of 

 government were, by an assembly of the prelates and barons, vested 

 in twelve counsellors, who were appointed to assist, in other words to 

 direct and control, the chancellor and treasurer. From this council 



o 



