Richard I

Richard I (1157–99), king of England (1189–99). Richard has attracted legends as bees are proverbially attracted to the honey-pot. The process began in his own lifetime. Already, by 1199, the epithet Cœur de Lion/Lionheart was being applied, and within another 50 years certain episodes in his life had taken on a legendary significance. The myth-making has continued ever since with inevitable distortions and misunderstandings of the historical Richard.

In the popular imagination today, Richard is a national English hero, the valorous warrior and glorious crusader who struggled against all the odds to come within an ace of recapturing Jerusalem from the equally legendary Saladin on the Third Crusade. On returning from crusade, he was shipwrecked and captured by Duke Leopold of Austria, who shamelessly sold him on to Emperor Henry VI. This allowed John, Richard's evil brother, to scheme with Philip II of France. But Richard so impressed his imperial captor by his courtesy, dignity, bearing, and self-possession that he was soon released—to turn the tables on his enemies at home. The massive bronze statue of Richard in Westminster Palace Yard captures superbly the Ricardian qualities admired for centuries. A powerfully muscular Richard, imposing and magnificent, sits on horseback, in full armour and wearing a crown, his sword triumphantly raised aloft.

Yet English Richard was not, nor even Anglo-Norman. Although born in Oxford, he briefly visited England just twice before his accession in 1189. As king, he spent a mere six months in England. He was born of French parents, Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and only from Edith (Matilda), his great-grandmother, wife of King Henry I, did he derive any ‘English’ blood. Richard spoke no English; his vernacular tongue was the French of Poitou, in which he composed troubadour poetry. He willed his body for burial in Fontevraud abbey (Poitou), his heart for interment in Rouen cathedral (Normandy). He was French through and through.

Despite this, most modern historians have judged him from an Anglocentric viewpoint. He might have been a warrior second to none, they argue, but he was an utterly irresponsible king of England, who plundered English wealth in pursuit of his own glory in France and the Holy Land, and who recklessly endangered the security and stability of his island realm. In lighter vein, but just as telling, are the words of Sellar and Yeatman: ‘he went roaring about the Desert making ferocious attacks on the Saladins and the Paladins, and was thus a very romantic king. Whenever he returned to England he always set out again immediately for the Mediterranean and was therefore known as Richard Gare de Lyon.’

Since 1948 another legend has grown up. This was when J. H. Harvey, in his book The Plantagenets, sought to prove that Richard was homosexual. His claims have come to be widely accepted, and it is as a homosexual that Richard appears in many modern novels, films, and plays, and even in Encyclopaedia Britannica. Gillingham has effectively demolished Harvey's claims, but this one has taken deep root.

Modern scholarship is at last beginning to reveal another Richard, more balanced and credible. This has only become possible by considering him as not first and foremost an English king, but rather the lord of the French-based Angevin empire which he inherited as a whole in 1189; by allowing for the international pull of the crusade and the duty to participate therein, an imperative acknowledged by contemporary western princes; and by examining carefully Richard's political and diplomatic skills. His military reputation remains intact. Indeed, it has been enhanced. The inspired battlefield commander of tradition, and brilliant tactician—as evidenced, for example, by the march from Acre to Jaffa and the battle of Arsuf (1191)—is increasingly seen as a master of planning and logistics. His crusade, involving the raising, fitting out, and dispatch of a fleet from northern waters to the east Mediterranean, is a superb example of administrative efficiency. His campaigns in France on his return, to undo the damage wrought by his treacherous brother John in concert with Philip II, reveal not just military competence of the highest order, but also a very sure sense of strategy backed up by effective diplomacy. For Richard set about constructing an international coalition against Philip, designed to enable him to concentrate on the struggle in the crucial heartland of the Angevin empire.

It has also become apparent that had Richard not been shipwrecked and captured, he would have returned home to find the governmental structure of the Angevin empire intact as he had established it before departure for the crusade in 1190. Far from setting out on crusade without a care for the security of his various dominions, England included, Richard did what he could in the short time available to him. In brief, he was one of the ablest men to have sat on the throne of England.

S. D. Lloyd

Bibliography

Gillingham, J. B. , Richard the Lionheart (2nd edn. 1989);
—— Richard Coeur de Lion: Kingship, Chivalry and War in the Twelfth Century (1994).