#hilary fucking loves richard and writes a mini novel

[qqueenofhades]

I know you've professed your love for Richard I and I've clicked on your tags of past postings but many of the links back are now broken. I always think of the line from the '95 Sense & Sensibility movie - Margaret is reeling of the kings of England "Good King Richard, Bad King John" While I know he led crusades and performed admirably in battle; considering how little time he spent there before and during his reign, was he, in fact a "good king" for England and its people?

(If you want to find my old Richard posts. my tag is here. Heh.)

Honestly, one of the things I love best about Richard is that he was so complicated. It is very, very rare to find a historical figure conveyed to us so vividly through the limited and biased nature of primary sources, and when you read them, you can understand why his contemporaries found him so striking and controversial (as he still is today, obviously) and generally larger than life. As I said in my answer to the John ask, the Plantagenets were almost all incredibly talented, dynamic, colorful, driven people, and they were likewise almost always just as flawed as they were gifted. That is rich stuff for both a historian and a novelist to explore (hence why they’ve become such popular subject) and yet it often gets flattened and used to paint a simplistic black-and-white portrait. I love Richard because there is so much depth and interest and complexity that comes through just in terms of what people wrote about him, and which must have been so much more in what he was like in real life (if definitely not pleasant at times, especially if you were on his bad side).

As for the basic question of whether Richard was a good king for England, it is inextricably tied up with his status as a crusader. In the nineteenth century, when the British Empire was at its height and going overseas and colonizing the “savages” was cool, Richard was treated as the perfect idealized king, pinnacle of chivalry and nineteenth-century Victorian values, etc. It was not an accurate picture of him, and nor was the twentieth-century reaction to that image, which became about pointing at the crusades as the epitome of fanatical religious violence (which we supposedly don’t do anymore, to which I say HA and also LOL) and in turn framing Richard as the embodiment of that mindset, he was unworthy of his heroic status, Look How Bad He Actually Was, we are smarter than ye olde dumb people now, etc etc. I have never seen any medieval figure attract the same kind of lightning-rod controversy that Richard does, and so much made of his personal flaws – which were not terribly different from that of any king of the period, and in some places much more admirable. It is also absolutely tied to the debate around his sexuality, and good old-fashioned Straight Historian homophobia. So you have this project of people trying to deconstruct Richard’s heroic image, while insisting that our violence against Muslims is super different from the crusading era’s violence against Muslims, while also insisting (as I’ve written about) that either Richard was a good king because he was straight, or a bad king because he was gay. So yes.

The comparison is especially interesting because the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin and his forces in October 1187 was twelfth century Western Europe’s 9/11. It was that shocking and marked that much of an upheaval of/violation of the homeland. The Christian kingdom of Jerusalem had been established after the successful (and extremely bloody) capture of the city in 1099, at the end of the First Crusade. To have it fall back to the Muslims (especially after the West had ignored the Frankish settlers’ calls for help for decades, and then were shocked when the kingdom was conquered, kind of like how we repeatedly ignored intelligence warnings about 9/11 and then were shocked when it happened) was a watershed moment for medieval Christendom. George W. Bush had something like 90%-95% public support for bombing Afghanistan after 9/11; support for the Third Crusade, which was called as a direct result of Jerusalem’s fall, was at similar levels. 

Richard going on crusade soon after he was crowned is framed as him haring off on some personal religious vendetta and leaving England behind (often from English-nationalist historians whose view on Richard’s success or failure focus very myopically on England), but the fact was, the entire leadership of Western Europe was going on crusade – Richard, Philip II of France, most of the French territorial lords, the Italian city-states, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, etc. Richard’s father, Henry II, had sworn a crusade vow before his death (although it was doubtful he ever intended to go). This was not a thing which anyone was opting out of, and was part of the entire accepted paradigm of political leadership (similarly, one might remark, to the Western world banding together for the “war on terror.”) England WANTED Richard to go on crusade, and they remained, on the whole, incredibly supportive of him while he was away, especially while John and Philip II (who came in for all kinds of criticism for leaving the crusade early) were making trouble. Richard was doing the right thing, in their view, by going on this expedition, and that was what they wanted their king to be doing.

Of course, Richard’s capture by Henry Hohenstaufen on the way home from the Holy Land, and subsequent very expensive ransom, is pointed to as another example of Richard “costing England.” (Funnily, the people who gripe about this don’t often discuss that Louis IX of France was captured TWICE on his crusades and cost his kingdom even more money to free him – again, this becomes something that somehow only Richard did wrong.) Richard also had to recapture the territory that Philip II had pilfered while he was away, and since those two had an extremely personal rivalry, this became an ongoing war. Again – all medieval kings, including literally every king of England through the Hanovers, were engaged in various land maneuvering and attempts to defend or expand their territory, but this again becomes only Richard’s fault. 

It is true that Richard does not seem to have been terribly personally fond of England (and likewise, the English nationalist historians clutch their pearls over this, because not liking England is a terrible crime in their eyes) but there is no indication that he treated it differently or ignored it altogether. He was very lucky to have his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was an incredibly shrewd political operator, and played a major role in governance especially while he was away. But the fact is, Richard wasn’t in England during the latter half of his reign because England didn’t need him there. He had set up the advisory council that more or less managed to run the place, and mostly counted on England to provide him money to fund his defense of his French lands against Philip. England did this fairly well, if not without several inventive stunts on Richard’s part, so that was its overall use. Richard’s premier title was obviously king of England; all his French territories were technically subordinate to Philip, which was a constant sticking point, so England was the association and the rank that was the most important to be emphasized. And since the one constant throughout all of English history has been hating the French, if Richard was sitting on his ass at home while the French were trying to steal his stuff, this would not have made him at all popular. Indeed, one of the major criticisms of John was that he could not defend the English crown’s incredibly important, wealthy, and prestigious French territories as well as Richard had, and ended up losing nearly all of them to Philip. 

This ties into the fact that successful medieval kingship had something of a recognizable political/diplomatic/statecraft element to it, especially in the later medieval era, but was still first and foremost about being a soldier, defending territory, and defeating enemies. You could disqualify someone from the throne by blinding them so they couldn’t fight or lead armies, as in fact happened fairly often (especially among the Byzantines). Richard, whatever else he was, was a hella good soldier and strategist who beat nearly everyone who tried to match wits with him, and this was what made John and Jane Q. Medieval Public think, hey this guy is a good king. Richard remained popular in his own day, by and large, because of his prestige as a crusader and his talent on the battlefield. His financial exactions, to be sure, were not as popular, but no tax, ever, in the history of anywhere has been appreciated by the public. So regardless of whether we look at his rule and say that he was a good or bad king, England at the time did not view him any more unfavorably than any of their other rulers, and oftentimes much more favorably (and certainly more than John).

Frankly, I love Richard because of that color and vibrance and talent and controversy and strengths and flaws that are so easily visible around him. He was a crusader who approached the project from a thoroughly pragmatic, rather than religious, perspective (which ended up biting him in the ass). He consistently punished those responsible for riots against the Jews, which were a major and unfortunate part of crusading fever, and in 1194 made a law protecting them, which literally nobody else in Europe was doing. He went to the Holy Land as part of the twelfth-century War on Terror and then announced he liked the Muslims better than his scheming and self-serving Christian allies. He and Saladin admired the hell out of each other, he called Saladin’s brother al-Adil (known as Saif al-Din or Saphadin) “my brother and my friend,” he cultivated numerous high-level Muslim diplomatic contacts, including al-Mashtuq, a commander of Saladin’s whom he had once held as a prisoner, and which ended up with al-Mashtuq arguing on Richard’s behalf during treaty negotiations. He was a six-foot-four (or thereabouts) redhead who swore like a sailor; he would have been literally larger than life when the average guy was five-foot-eight. He had an absolutely wicked sense of black humor. He was queer (gay or bisexual, and you can fight me on this.) He was clever and flawed and violent and educated (he spoke at least three languages and probably more, and wrote songs and poetry) and nobody who met him EVER forgot the experience. As I said, he comes through in the primary sources in a way that very few figures ever do, and we get such a clear and compelling picture of him as a result.

I have actually applied to give a paper at next year’s International Medieval Congress about Richard, and how modern treatments of him and his personal character (especially said queerness) is directly tied to our memory of the crusades, our institutionalized homophobia and view of crusading masculinities, our discomfort with the project of a “war on terror” against the Muslims in various ways, and our determination to insist that We’re Not Like Those There Fanatics Back Then In Ye Olde Dark Ages. The Straight Historians and the academy in general have done all kinds of things with him that they haven’t with other kings, and while in one sense it’s to be expected with someone whose legend has acquired such stature, in another it really needs to be looked at and challenged, and that is what I have become so interested in doing.