PREPARATIONS FOR THE CRUSADE.
1189
Richard was thirty-two years of age at his accession.--His
ardent desires for distinction in crusades.--Motives
of the crusaders.--A strange delusion.--The
preparations.--Navies.--Armies.--Accoutrements.--Customs of
old times.--Richard's reckless course.--Richard sold lands,
offices, and titles of honor.--Extortion under pretense of
public justice.--Creating a regency.--Richard's regents.--John's
acquiescence.--The time for sailing appointed.--Richard crosses
the Channel.--Fears of treachery.--The treaty of alliance between
Richard and Philip.--Completion of the preparations.
At the time of his accession to the throne, Richard, as has already
been remarked, was about thirty-two years of age. On the following
page you have a portrait of him, with the crown upon his head.
This portrait is taken from a sculpture on his tomb, and is
undoubtedly a good representation of him as he appeared when he was
alive.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF RICHARD I.]
The first thing that Richard turned his attention to, when he found
himself securely seated on his throne, was the preparation for a
crusade. It had been the height of his ambition for a long time to
lead a crusade. It was undoubtedly through the influence of his
mother, and of her early conversations with him, that he imbibed his
extraordinary eagerness to seek adventures in the Holy Land. She had
been a crusader herself during her first marriage, as has already been
related in this volume, and she had undoubtedly, in Richard's early
life, entertained him with a thousand stories of what she had seen,
and of the romantic adventures which she had met with there. These
stories, and the various conversations which arose out of them,
kindled Richard's youthful imagination with ardent desires to go and
distinguish himself on the same field. These desires had been greatly
increased as Richard grew up to manhood by observing the exalted
military glory to which successful crusaders attained. And then,
besides this, Richard was endued with a sort of reckless and lion-like
courage, which led him to look upon danger as a sport, and made him
long for a field where there were plenty of enemies to fight, and
enemies so abhorred by the whole Christian world that he could indulge
in the excitement of hatred and rage against them without any
restraint whatever. He could there satiate himself, too, with the
luxury of killing men without any misgiving of conscience, or, at
least, without any condemnation on the part of his fellow-men, for it
was understood throughout Christendom that the crimes committed
against the Saracens in the Holy Land were committed in the name of
Christ. What a strange delusion! To think of honoring the memory of
the meek and lowly Jesus by utterly disregarding his peaceful precepts
and his loving and gentle example, and going forth in thousands to the
work of murder, rapine, and devastation, in order to get possession of
his tomb.
* * * * *
In preparing for the crusade, the first and most important thing to
be attended to, in Richard's view, was the raising of money. A great
deal of money would be required, as has already been intimated, to fit
out the expedition on the magnificent scale which Richard intended.
There was a fleet of ships to be built and equipped, and stores of
provisions to be put on board. There were armies to be levied and
paid, and immense expenses were to be incurred in the manufacture of
arms and ammunition. The armor and the arms used in those days,
especially those worn by knights and noblemen, and the caparisons of
the horses, were extremely costly. The armor was fashioned with great
labor and skill out of plates or rings of steel, and the helmets, and
the bucklers, and the swords, and all the military trappings of the
horses and horsemen, being fashioned altogether by hand, required
great labor and skill in the artisan who made them; and then,
moreover, it was customary to decorate them very profusely with
embroidery, and gold, and gems. At the present day, men display their
wealth in the costliness of their houses, and the gorgeousness and
luxury of the furniture which they contain. It is not considered in
good taste--except for ladies--to make a display of wealth upon the
person. In those days, however, the reverse was the case. The knights
and barons lived in the rudest stone castles, dark and frowning
without, and meagerly furnished and comfortless within, while all the
means of display which the owners possessed were lavished in arming
and decorating themselves and their horses magnificently for the field
of battle.
For all these things Richard knew that he should require a large sum
of money, and he proceeded at once to carry into effect the most
wasteful and reckless measures for obtaining it. His father, Henry the
Second, had in various ways acquired a great many estates in different
parts of the kingdom, which estates he had added to the royal domains.
These Richard at once proceeded to sell to whomsoever would give the
most for them. In this manner he disposed of a great number of
castles, fortresses, and towns, so as greatly to diminish the value of
the crown property. The purchasers of this property, if they had not
money enough of their own to pay for what they bought, would borrow of
the Jews. Some of the king's counselors remonstrated with him against
this wasteful policy, but he replied that he needed money so much for
the crusade, that, if necessary, he would sell the city of London
itself to raise it, if he could only find a man rich enough to be the
purchaser.
After having raised as much money as he could by the sale of the royal
lands, the next resource to which Richard turned was the sale of
public offices and titles of honor. He looked about the country for
wealthy men, and he offered them severally high office on condition of
their paying large sums of money into the treasury as a consideration
for them. He sold titles of nobility, too, in the same way. If any man
who was not rich held a high or important office, he would find some
pretext for removing him, and then would offer the office for sale.
One of the historians of those times says that at this period
Richard's presence-chamber became a regular place of trade--like the
counting-room of a merchant or an exchange--where every thing that
could be derived from the bounty of the crown or bestowed by the royal
prerogative was offered for sale in open market to the man who would
give the best bargain for it.
Another of the modes which the king adopted for raising money, and in
some respects the worst of all, was to impose fines as a punishment
for crime, and then, in order to make the fines produce as much as
possible, every imaginable pretext was resorted to to charge wealthy
persons with offenses, with a view of exacting large sums from them as
the penalty. It was said that a great officer of state was charged
with some offense, and was put in prison and not released until he had
paid a fine of three thousand pounds.
One of the worst of these cases was that of his half-brother Geoffrey,
the son of Rosamond. Geoffrey had been appointed Archbishop of York in
accordance with the wish that his father Henry had expressed on his
death-bed. Richard pretended to be displeased with this. Perhaps he
wished to have had that office to dispose of like the rest. At any
rate, he exacted a very large sum from Geoffrey as the condition on
which he would "grant him his peace," as he termed it, and Geoffrey
paid the money.
When, by these and other similar means, Richard had raised all that he
could in England, he prepared to cross the Channel into Normandy, in
order to see what more he could do there. Before he went, however, he
had first to make arrangements for a regency to govern England while
he should be away. This is always the custom in monarchical countries.
Whenever, for any reason, the true sovereign can not personally
exercise the supreme power, whether from minority, insanity,
long-continued sickness, or protracted absence from the realm, a
regency, as it is called, is created to govern the kingdom in his
stead. The person appointed to act as regent is usually some near
relation of the king. Richard's brother John hoped to be made regent,
but this did not suit Richard's views, for he wished to make this
office the means, as all the others had been, of raising money, and
John had no money to give. For the same reason, he could not appoint
his mother, who in other respects would have been a very suitable
person. So Richard contrived a sort of middle course. He sold the
nominal regency to two wealthy courtiers, whom he associated together
for the purpose. One was a bishop, and the other was an earl. It may,
perhaps, be too much to say that he directly sold them the office,
but, at any rate, he appointed them jointly to it, and under the
arrangement that was made he received a large sum of money. He,
however, stipulated that John, and also his mother, should have a
large share of influence in deciding upon all the measures of the
government. John would have been by no means satisfied with this
divided and uncertain share of power were it not that he was so
desirous of favoring the expedition in every possible way, in hopes
that if Richard could once get to the Holy Land he would soon perish
there, and that then he should be king altogether. It was of
comparatively little consequence who was regent in the mean time. So
he resolved to make no objection to any plan that the king might
propose.
Richard was now ready to cross to Normandy; but just before he went
there came a deputation from Philip to consult with him in respect to
the plans of the crusade, and to fix upon the time for setting out.
The time proposed by Philip was the latter part of March. It was now
late in the fall. It would not be safe to set out before March on
account of the inclemency of the season, and Richard supposed that he
should have ample time to complete his preparations by the time that
Philip named. So both parties agreed to it, and they took a solemn
oath on both sides that they would all be ready without fail.
Soon after this Richard took leave of his friends, and, accompanied
by a long retinue of earls, barons, knights, and other adventurers who
were to accompany him to the Holy Land, he left England, and crossed
the Channel to Normandy.
In such cases as this there are always a great many last words to be
said and a great many last arrangements to be made, and Richard found
it necessary to see his mother and his brother John again before
finally taking his departure from Europe. So he sent for them to come
to Normandy, and there another great council of state was held, at
which every thing in relation to the internal affairs of his dominions
was finally arranged. There was still one other danger to be guarded
against, and that was some treachery on the part of Philip himself. So
little reliance did these valiant champions of Christianity place in
each other in those days, that both Richard and Philip, in joining
together to form this expedition, had many misgivings and suspicions
in respect to each other's honesty. Undoubtedly neither of them would
have thought it safe to leave his dominions and go on a crusade unless
the other had been going too. The one left behind would have been sure
to have found some pretext, during the absence of his neighbor, to
invade his dominions and plunder him of some of his possessions. This
was one reason why the two kings had agreed to go together; and now,
as an additional safeguard, they made a formal treaty of alliance and
fraternity, in which they bound themselves by the most solemn oaths to
stand by each other, and to be faithful and true to each other to the
last. They agreed that each would defend the life and honor of the
other on all occasions; that neither would desert the other in the
hour of danger; and that, in respect to the dominions that they were
respectively to leave behind them, neither would form any designs
against the other, but that Philip would cherish and protect the
rights of Richard even as he would protect his own city of Paris, and
that Richard would do the like by Philip, even as he would protect his
own city of Rouen.
It is a curious circumstance that in this treaty Richard should name
Rouen, and not London, as his principal capital. It confirms what is
known in many other ways, that the kings of this line, reigning over
both Normandy and England, considered Normandy as the chief centre of
their power, and England as subordinate. It may be, however, that one
reason why Rouen was named in this instance may have been because it
was nearer to the dominions of the King of France, and so better known
to him.
This treaty was signed in February, and the preparations were now
nearly complete for setting forth on the expedition in March, at the
appointed time.