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Makers of History
Richard I.
BY JACOB ABBOTT
WITH ENGRAVINGS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1902
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight
hundred and fifty-seven, by
HARPER & BROTHERS,
in the Clerk's office of the District Court of the Southern District
of New York.
Copyright, 1885, by BENJAMIN VAUGHAN ABBOTT, AUSTIN ABBOTT,
LYMAN ABBOTT, and EDWARD ABBOTT.
PREFACE.
The author of this series has made it his special object to confine
himself very strictly, even in the most minute details which he
records, to historic truth. The narratives are not tales founded upon
history, but history itself, without any embellishment, or any
deviations from the strict truth so far as it can now be discovered by
an attentive examination of the annals written at the time when the
events themselves occurred. In writing the narratives, the author has
endeavored to avail himself of the best sources of information which
this country affords; and though, of course, there must be in these
volumes, as in all historical accounts, more or less of imperfection
and error, there is no intentional embellishment. Nothing is stated,
not even the most minute and apparently imaginary details, without
what was deemed good historical authority. The readers, therefore, may
rely upon the record as the truth, and nothing but the truth, so far
as an honest purpose and a careful examination have been effectual in
ascertaining it.
CONTENTS.
Chapter Page
I. KING RICHARD'S MOTHER 13
II. RICHARD'S EARLY LIFE 35
III. FAIR ROSAMOND 53
IV. ACCESSION OF RICHARD TO THE THRONE 66
V. THE CORONATION 79
VI. PREPARATIONS FOR THE CRUSADE 89
VII. THE EMBARKATION 101
VIII. KING RICHARD AT MESSINA 117
IX. BERENGARIA 143
X. THE CAMPAIGN IN CYPRUS 160
XI. VOYAGE TO ACRE 185
XII. THE ARRIVAL AT ACRE 196
XIII. DIFFICULTIES 204
XIV. THE FALL OF ACRE 211
XV. PROGRESS OF THE CRUSADE 229
XVI. REVERSES 249
XVII. THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS 267
XVIII. THE BATTLE OF JAFFA 283
XIX. THE TRUCE 297
XX. THE DEPARTURE FROM PALESTINE 305
XXI. RICHARD MADE CAPTIVE 312
XXII. THE RETURN TO ENGLAND 324
ENGRAVINGS.
Page
MAP 14
PREACHING THE CRUSADES 19
PORTRAIT OF KING HENRY II. 49
VIEW OF WOODSTOCK 55
FINAL BURIAL OF ROSAMOND 64
PORTRAIT OF RICHARD I. 90
RICHARD PURSUING HIS JOURNEY 113
THE BATTERING-RAM 137
THE BALLISTA 139
THE CATAPULTA 140
THE LETTER 152
ROUTE OF RICHARD'S FLEET 164
KING RICHARD'S SEAL 167
RAMPARTS OF ACRE 189
THE ASSAULT 207
THROWING SHELLS 231
SALADIN'S PRESENT 294
CASTLE AND TOWN OF TIERNSTEIGN 321
KING RICHARD I.
CHAPTER I.
KING RICHARD'S MOTHER.
1137-1154
Richard the Crusader.--A quarrelsome king.--Richard's
kingdom.--Union of England and Normandy.--England was a
possession of Normandy.--Eleanora of Aquitaine.--The
contemporaries of Eleanora.--Royal match-making.--The
conditions of the marriage.--Apparent prosperity of
leanora.--Eleanora's accomplishments.--The Crusades.--A monk
preaching the Crusades.--The reasons why Louis and Eleanora
undertook a crusade.--Amazons.--The power of ridicule.--The
plans and purposes of the female Crusaders.--Antioch.--Meeting
the Saracens.--Choosing an encampment.--The result of the queen's
generalship.--A quarrel.--The queen at Jerusalem.--A divorce
proposed.--The failure of the crusade.--Returning to France.--The
queen's new lover.--A divorce again proposed.--The motives of
Henry.--Controversy among historians.--The real motives in the
divorce.--A violent courtship and a narrow escape.--Geoffrey's
designs upon Eleanora.--Customs of old times.--Eleanora eluded
Geoffrey.--She is married to Henry.--Henry's expedition to
England.--His final coronation.--Eleanora Queen of England.
King Richard the First, the Crusader, was a boisterous, reckless, and
desperate man, and he made a great deal of noise in the world in his
day. He began his career very early in life by quarreling with his
father. Indeed, his father, his mother, and all his brothers and
sisters were engaged, as long as the father lived, in perpetual wars
against each other, which were waged with the most desperate
fierceness on all sides. The subject of these quarrels was the
different possessions which the various branches of the family held or
claimed in France and in England, each endeavoring to dispossess the
others. In order to understand the nature of these difficulties, and
also to comprehend fully what sort of a woman Richard's mother was, we
must first pay a little attention to the map of the countries over
which these royal personages held sway.
[Illustration: MAP]
We have already seen, in another volume of this series,[A] how the two
countries of Normandy on the Continent, and of England, became united
under one government. England, however, did not conquer and hold
Normandy; it was Normandy that conquered and held England. The
relative situation of these two countries is shown on the map.
Normandy, it will be seen, was situated in the northern part of
France, being separated from England by the English Channel. Besides
Normandy, the sovereigns of the country held various other possessions
in France, and this French portion of the compound realm over which
they reigned they considered as far the most important portion.
England was but a sort of appendage to their empire.
[Footnote A: History of William the Conqueror.]
You will see by the map the situation of the River Loire. It rises in
the centre of France, and flows to the westward, through a country
which was, even in those days, very fertile and beautiful. South of
the Loire was a sort of kingdom, then under the dominion of a young
and beautiful princess named Eleanora. The name of her kingdom was
Aquitaine. This lady afterward became the mother of Richard. She was
very celebrated in her day, and has since been greatly renowned in
history under the name of Eleanora of Aquitaine.
Eleanora received her realm from her grandfather. Her father had gone
on a crusade with his brother, Eleanora's uncle, Raymond, and had
been killed in the East. Raymond had made himself master of Antioch.
We shall presently hear of this Raymond again. The grandfather
abdicated in Eleanora's favor when she was about fourteen years of
age. There were two other powerful sovereigns in France at this time,
Louis, King of France, who reigned in Paris, and Henry, Duke of
Normandy and King of England. King Louis of France had a son, the
Prince Louis, who was heir to the crown. Eleanora's grandfather formed
the scheme of marrying her to this Prince Louis, and thus to unite his
kingdom to hers. He himself was tired of ruling, and wished to resign
his power, with a view of spending the rest of his days in penitence
and prayer. He had been a very wicked man in his day, and now, as he
was growing old, he was harassed by remorse for his sins, and wished,
if possible, to make some atonement for them by his penances before he
died.
So he called all his barons together, and laid his plans before them.
They consented to them on two conditions. One was, that Eleanora
should first see Louis, and say whether she was willing to have him
for her husband. If not, she was not to be compelled to marry him. The
other condition was, that their country, Aquitaine, was not to be
combined with the dominions of the King of France after the marriage,
but was to continue a separate and independent realm, to be governed
by Louis and Eleanora, not as King and Queen of France, but as Duke
and Duchess of Aquitaine. Both these conditions were complied with.
The interview was arranged between Louis and Eleanora, and Eleanora
concluded that she should like the king for a husband very much. At
least she said so, and the marriage was concluded.
Indeed, the match thus arranged for Eleanora was, in all worldly
respects, the most eligible one that could be made. Her husband was
the heir-apparent to the throne of France. His capital was Paris,
which was then, as now, the great centre in Europe of all splendor and
gayety. The father of Louis was old, and not likely to live long;
indeed, he died very soon after the marriage, and thus Eleanora, when
scarcely fifteen, became Queen of France as well as Duchess of
Aquitaine, and was thus raised to the highest pinnacle of worldly
grandeur.
She was young and beautiful, and very gay in her disposition, and she
entered at once upon a life of pleasure. She had been well educated.
She could sing the songs of the Troubadours, which was the
fashionable music of those days, in a most charming manner. Indeed,
she composed music herself, and wrote lines to accompany it. She was
quite celebrated for her learning, on account of her being able both
to read and write: these were rare accomplishments for ladies in those
days.
She spent a considerable portion of her time in Paris, at the court of
her husband, but then she often returned to Aquitaine, where she held
a sort of court of her own in Bordeaux, which was her capital. She led
this sort of life for some time, until at length she was induced to
form a design of going to the East on a crusade. The Crusades were
military expeditions which went from the western countries of Europe
to conquer Palestine from the Turks, in order to recover possession of
Jerusalem and of the sepulchre where the body of Christ was laid.
It had been for some time the practice for the princes and knights,
and other potentates of France and England, to go on these
expeditions, on account of the fame and glory which those who
distinguished themselves acquired. The people were excited, moreover,
to join the Crusades by the preachings of monks and hermits, who
harangued them in public places and urged them to go. At these
assemblages the monks held up symbols of the crucifixion, to inspire
their zeal, and promised them the special favor of heaven if they
would go. They said that whoever devoted himself to this great cause
should surely be pardoned for all the sins and crimes that he had
committed, whatever they might be; and whenever they heard of the
commission of any great crimes by potentates or rulers, they would
seize upon the occasion to urge the guilty persons to go and fight for
the cross in Palestine, as a means of wiping away their guilt.
[Illustration: PREACHING THE CRUSADES.]
One of these preachers charged such a crime upon Louis, the husband
of Eleanora. It seems that, in a quarrel which he had with one of his
neighbors, he had sent an armed force to invade his enemy's dominions,
and in storming a town a cathedral had been set on fire and burned,
and fifteen hundred persons, who had taken refuge in it as a
sanctuary, had perished in the flames. Now it was a very great crime,
according to the ideas of those times, to violate a sanctuary; and the
hermit-preacher urged Louis to go on a crusade in order to atone for
the dreadful guilt he had incurred by not only violating a sanctuary,
but by overwhelming, in doing it, so many hundreds of innocent women
and children in the awful suffering of being burned to death. So Louis
determined to go on a crusade, and Eleanora determined to accompany
him. Her motive was a love of adventure and a fondness for notoriety.
She thought that by going out, a young and beautiful princess, at the
head of an army of Crusaders, into the East, she would make herself a
renowned heroine in the eyes of the whole world. So she immediately
commenced her preparations, and by the commanding influence which she
exerted over the ladies of the court, she soon inspired them all with
her own romantic ardor.
The ladies at once laid aside their feminine dress, and clothed
themselves like Amazons, so that they could ride astride on horseback
like men. All their talk was of arms, and armor, and horses, and
camps. They endeavored, too, to interest all the men--the princes, and
barons, and knights that surrounded them--in their plans, and to
induce them to join the expedition. A great many did so, but there
were some that shook their heads and seemed inclined to stay at home.
They knew that so wild and heedless a plan as this could end in
nothing but disaster. The ladies ridiculed these men for their
cowardice and want of spirit, and they sent them their distaffs as
presents. "We have no longer any use for the distaffs," said they,
"but, as you are intending to stay at home and make women of
yourselves, we send them to you, so that you may occupy yourselves
with spinning while we are gone." By such taunts and ridicule as this,
a great many were shamed into joining the expedition, whose good sense
made them extremely averse to have any thing to do with it.
The expedition was at length organized and prepared to set forth. It
was encumbered by the immense quantity of baggage which the queen and
her party of women insisted on taking. It is true that they had
assumed the dress of Amazons, but this was only for the camp and the
field. They expected to enjoy a great many pleasures while they were
gone, to give and receive a great many entertainments, and to live in
luxury and splendor in the great cities of the East. So they must
needs take with them large quantities of baggage, containing dresses
and stores of female paraphernalia of all kinds. The king remonstrated
against this folly, but all to no purpose. The ladies thought it very
hard if, in going on such an expedition, they could not take with them
the usual little comforts and conveniences appropriate to their sex.
So it ended with their having their own way.
The caprices and freaks of these women continued to harass and
interfere with the expedition during the whole course of it. The army
of Crusaders reached at length a place near Antioch, in Asia Minor,
where they encountered the Saracens. Antioch was then in the
possession of the Christians. It was under the command of the Prince
Raymond, who has already been spoken of as Eleanora's uncle. Raymond
was a young and very handsome prince, and Eleanora anticipated great
pleasure in visiting his capital. The expedition had not, however,
yet reached it, but were advancing through the country, defending
themselves as well as they could against the troops of Arab horsemen
that were harassing their march.
The commanders were greatly perplexed in this emergency to know what
to do with the women, and with their immense train of baggage. The
king at last sent them on in advance, with all his best troops to
accompany them. He directed them to go on, and encamp for the night on
certain high ground which he designated, where they would be safe, he
said, from an attack by the Arabs. But when they approached the place,
Eleanora found a green and fertile valley near, which was very
romantic and beautiful, and she decided at once that this was a much
prettier place to encamp in than the bare hill above. The officers in
command of the troops remonstrated in vain. Eleanora and the ladies
insisted on encamping in the valley. The consequence was, that the
Arabs came and got possession of the hill, and thus put themselves
between the division of the army which was with Eleanora and that
which was advancing under the king. A great battle was fought. The
French were defeated. A great many thousand men were slain. All the
provisions for the army were cut off, and all the ladies' baggage was
seized and plundered by the Arabs. The remainder of the army, with the
king, and the queen, and the ladies, succeeded in making their escape
to Antioch, and there Prince Raymond opened the gates and let them in.
As soon as Eleanora and the other ladies recovered a little from their
fright and fatigue, they began to lead very gay lives in Antioch, and
before long a serious quarrel broke out between Louis and the queen.
The cause of this quarrel was Raymond. He was a young and handsome
man, and he soon began to show such fondness for Eleanora that the
king's jealousy was aroused, and at length the king discerned, as he
said, proofs of such a degree of intimacy between them as to fill him
with rage. He determined to leave Antioch immediately, and take
Eleanora with him. She was very unwilling to go, but the king was so
angry that he compelled her to accompany him. So he went away
abruptly, scarcely bidding Raymond good-by at all, and proceeded with
Eleanora and nearly all his company to Jerusalem. Eleanora submitted,
though she was exceedingly out of humor.
The king, too, on his part, was as much out of humor as the queen. He
determined that he would not allow her to accompany him any more on
the campaign; so he left her at Jerusalem, a sort of prisoner, while
he put himself at the head of his army and went forth to prosecute the
war. By-and-by, when he came back to Jerusalem, and inquired about his
wife's conduct while he had been gone, he learned some facts in
respect to the intimacy which she had formed with a prince of the
country during his absence, that made him more angry than ever. He
declared that he would sue for a divorce. She was a wicked woman, he
said, and he would repudiate her.
One of his ministers, however, contrived to appease him, at least so
far as to induce him to abandon this design. The minister did not
pretend to say that Eleanora was innocent, or that she did not deserve
to be repudiated, but he said that if the divorce was to be carried
into effect, then Louis would lose all claim to Eleanora's
possessions, for it will be recollected that the dukedom of Aquitaine,
and the other rich possessions which belonged to Eleanora before her
marriage, continued entirely separate from the kingdom of France, and
still belonged to her.
The king and Eleanora had a daughter named Margaret, who was now a
young child, but who, when she grew up, would inherit both her
father's and her mother's possessions, and thus, in the end, they
would be united, if the king and queen continued to live together in
peace. But this would be all lost, as the minister maintained in his
argument with the king, in case of a divorce.
"If you are divorced from her," said he, "she will soon be married
again, and then all her possessions will finally go out of your
family."
So the king concluded to submit to the shame of his wife's dishonor,
and still keep her as his wife. But he had now lost all interest in
the crusade, partly on account of his want of success in it, and
partly on account of his domestic troubles. So he left the Holy Land,
and took the queen and the ladies, and the remnant of his troops, back
again to Paris. Here he and the queen lived very unhappily together
for about two years.
At the end of this time the queen became involved in new difficulties
in consequence of her intrigues. The time had passed away so rapidly
that it was now thirteen years since her marriage, and she was about
twenty-eight years of age--old enough, one would think, to have
learned some discretion. After, however, amusing herself with various
lovers, she at length became enamored of a young prince named Henry
Plantagenet, who afterward became Henry the Second of England, and was
the father of Richard, the hero of this history. Henry was at this
time Duke of Normandy. He came to visit the court of Louis in Paris,
and here, after a short time, Eleanora conceived the idea of being
divorced from Louis in order to marry him. Henry was a great deal
younger than Eleanora, being then only about eighteen years of age;
but he was very agreeable in his person and manners, and Queen
Eleanora was quite charmed with him. It was not, however, to be
expected that he should be so much charmed with her; for, although she
had been very beautiful, she had now so far passed the period of her
youth, and had been subjected to so many exposures, that the bloom of
her early beauty was in a great measure gone. She was now nearly
thirty years old, having been married twelve or thirteen years. She,
however, made eager advances to Henry, and finally gave him to
understand, that if he would consent to marry her, she would obtain a
divorce from King Louis, and then endow him with all her dominions.
Now there was a strong reason operating upon Henry's mind to accept
this proposal. He claimed to be entitled to the crown of England. King
Stephen was at this time reigning in England, but Henry maintained
that he was a usurper, and he was eager to dispossess him. Eleanora
represented to Henry that, with all the forces of her dominions, she
could easily enable him to do that, and so at length the idea of
making himself a king overcame his natural repugnance to take a wife
almost twice as old as he was himself, and she, too, the divorced and
discarded wife of another man. So he agreed to Eleanora's proposal,
and measures were soon taken to effect the divorce.
There is some dispute among the ancient historians in respect to this
divorce. Some say that it was the king that originated it, and that
the cause which he alleged was the freedom of the queen in her love
for other men, and that Eleanora, when she found that the divorce was
resolved upon, formed the plan of beguiling young Henry into a
marriage with her, to save her fall. Others say that the divorce was
her plan alone, and that the pretext for it was the relationship that
existed between her and King Louis, for they were in some degree
related to each other; and the rules of the Church of Rome were very
strict against such marriages. It is not improbable, however, that the
real reason of the divorce was that the king desired it on account of
his wife's loose and irregular character, while Eleanora wished for it
in order to have a more agreeable husband. She never had liked Louis.
He was a very grave and even gloomy man, who thought of nothing but
the Church, and his penances and prayers, so that Eleanora said he was
more of a monk than a king. This monkish turn of mind had increased
upon the king since his return from the Crusades. He made it a matter
of conscience to wear coarse and plain clothes instead of dressing
handsomely like a king, and he cut off the curls of his hair, which
had been very beautiful, and shaved his head and his mustaches. This
procedure disgusted Eleanora completely. She despised her husband
herself, and ridiculed him to others, saying that he had made himself
look like an old priest. In a word, all her love for him was entirely
gone. Both parties being thus very willing to have the marriage
annulled, they agreed to put it on the ground of their relationship,
in order to avoid scandal.
At any rate, the marriage was dissolved, and Eleanora set out from
Paris to return to Bordeaux, the capital of her own country. Henry was
to meet her on the way. Her road lay along the banks of the Loire.
Here she stopped for a day or two. The count who ruled this province,
who was a very gay and handsome man, offered her his hand. He wished
to add her dominions to his own. Eleanora refused him. The count
resolved not to take the refusal, and, under some pretext or other, he
detained her in his castle, resolving to keep her there until she
should consent. But Eleanora was not a woman to be conquered by such a
method as this. She pretended to acquiesce in the detention, and to be
contented, but this was only to put the count off his guard; and then,
watching her opportunity, she escaped from the castle in the night;
and getting into a boat, which she had caused to be provided for the
purpose, she went down the river to the town of Tours, which was some
distance below, and in the dominions of another sovereign.
In going on from Tours toward her own home, she encountered and
narrowly escaped another danger. It seems that Geoffrey Plantagenet,
the brother of Henry, whom she had engaged to marry, conceived the
design of seizing her and compelling her to marry him instead of his
brother. It may seem strange that any one should be so unprincipled
and base as to attempt thus to circumvent his own brother, and take
away from him his intended wife; but it was not a strange thing at all
for the members of the royal and princely families of those days to
act in this manner toward each other. It was the usual and established
condition of things among these families that the different members of
them should be perpetually intriguing and manoeuvring one against
the other, brother against sister, husband against wife, and father
against son. In a vast number of instances these contentions broke out
into open war, and the wars thus waged between the nearest relatives
were of the most desperate and merciless character.
It was therefore a very moderate and inconsiderable deed of brotherly
hostility on the part of Geoffrey to plan the seizure of his brother's
intended wife, in order to get possession of her dominions. The plan
which he formed was to lie in wait for the boat which was to convey
Eleanora down the river, and seize her as she came by. She, however,
avoided this snare by turning off into a branch of the river which
came from the south. You will see the course of the river and the
situation of this southern branch on the map.[B] The branch which
Eleanora followed not only took her away from the ambush which
Geoffrey had laid for her, but conducted her toward her own home,
where, after meeting with various other adventures, she arrived safely
at last. Here Henry Plantagenet soon joined her, and they were
married. The marriage took place only six weeks after her divorce from
her former husband. This was considered a very scandalous transaction
throughout, and Eleanora was now considered as having forfeited all
claims to respectability of character. Still she was a great duchess
in her own right, and was now wife of the heir-apparent of the English
throne, and so her character made little difference in the estimation
in which she was held by the world.
[Footnote B: See page 14.]
From the time of her first engagement with Henry nearly two years had
elapsed before all the proceedings in relation to the divorce had been
completed so as to prepare the way for the marriage, and now Eleanora
was about thirty-two years of age, while Henry was only twenty. Henry
seems to have felt no love for his wife. He had acceded to her
proposal to marry him only in order to obtain the assistance which the
forces of her dominions might supply him in gaining possession of the
English throne.
Accordingly, about a year after the marriage, a military expedition
was fitted out to proceed to England. The expedition consisted of
thirty-six ships, and a large force of fighting men. Henry landed in
England at the head of this force, and advanced against Stephen. The
two princes fought for some time without any very decisive success on
either side, when at length they concluded to settle the quarrel by a
compromise. It was agreed that Stephen should continue to hold the
crown as long as he lived, and then that Henry should succeed him.
When this arrangement had been made, Henry returned to Normandy; and
then, after two or three years, he heard of Stephen's death. He then
went immediately to England again, and was universally acknowledged as
king. Eleanora went with him as queen, and very soon they were crowned
at Westminster with the greatest possible pomp and parade.
And thus it was that Eleanora of Aquitaine, the mother of Richard, in
the year eleven hundred and fifty-four, became queen-consort of
England.