Free Lionheart by Douglas Boyd Page B

all of his own making and had nothing to do with religion.
    The motto of Hitler’s propaganda minister Josef Goebbels – that a big lie will succeed where a smaller one may be questioned – was already understood by Eleanor and used by her, for Richard was held prisoner not by the Saracen enemy in the Holy Land, but by the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, Henry VI Hohenstaufen. He had not been captured fighting heroically in battle, but while slinking homewards incognito at the end of his pointless crusade which cost tens of thousands of lives on both sides, leaving an undying legacy of hatred in the Muslim world, where malik Rik is still a name with which to frighten disobedient little boys. Although the Church protected the persons and property of crusaders during their absence from their homelands, even the pope did little to protect this English king from Hohenstaufen and his vassal Duke Leopold of Austria, one of many European fellow-crusaders humiliated and alienated by Richard’s arrogance during the abortive Third Crusade.
    As Bishop Stubbs knew well, Richard had spent his whole life shedding blood, not tactically and face-to-face with a more or less equally matched enemy, but strategically, by slaughtering defenceless peasant men, women and children, laying waste their fields and cutting down their orchards to bring starvation to the survivors, thus depriving a noble enemy of the support base for his unproductive way of life. It was, to use a modern expression, total war. Because of the enormous suffering thus inflicted on millions of innocent people, the Church pronounced the slaughter of farm animals and the destruction of agricultural implements in war to be a sin. Although professedly devout on occasion, Richard was not deterred by this interdiction.
    Edward Gibbon held that history was ‘little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind’. No other single life better illustrates that judgement than the life of King Richard I. This, then, is the story, warts and all , of a man born to parents of unsurpassed intelligence, wealth and achievements and whose birthright raised him to world-wide fame, yet who died in agony, ‘naked as he came into this world’.
    Douglas Boyd
    South West France, 2014
    N OTES
1.   Stubbs, W.,ed., Itinerarium peregrinorum et gesta regis ricardi , Rolls Series (1864), pp. 17, 21, 27.
2.   Quoted in S. Runciman, A History of the Crusades (Cambridge: CUP, 1954), Vol 3, p. 75.

6
    Death of a Prince
    H enry II held his Christmas court of 1174 at Argentan in Normandy, after which he obliged his sons to accompany him on a lengthy pacification of the continental possessions to ensure they were seen by his vassals to be again under his thumb. In Poitou and Aquitaine, the castles of vassals that had remained loyal to him were strengthened and allowed to stand with garrisons sufficient to put down any further unrest; those castles reinforced by the rebels were reduced to the state in which they had been fifteen days before the outbreak of hostilities. Cities like La Rochelle that had not taken part in the uprising were rewarded with new privileges. That done, he departed for England in May with Young Henry, whose loyalty he still mistrusted.
    According to Alfred Richard, the nineteenth-century archivist of the départment of Vienne and therefore custodian of the charters of the counts of Poitou, Henry II had no such worries about Richard. He judged correctly that his second son would be no threat, once given a significant force, paid for from the taxes of Poitou and Aquitaine, to satisfy his vanity and lust for warfare. Starting in midsummer, Richard set out at the head of a small army, augmented by the household knights of several vassals, to punish his former supporters as cruelly as he had attacked the partisans of his father during the rebellion, tearing down their castles and spreading terror in his wake. By no means every vassal backed down on hearing of