evertheless, Richard has had bad press since his own era, at once, according to his detractors, a bad king and, as Sellars and Yeatman would have it, a ‘bad thing’. Many have echoed Roger of Howden’s verdict: “bad to all, worse to his friends, and worst of all to himself.” Yet it seems to me that much of his poor reputation rests on anachronistic misunderstandings or is the product of humbug. ‘Crusader’ may be the ‘boo word’ par excellence in Islamic vocabulary (the equivalent perhaps of ‘elitist’ sexist’ and ‘racist’ in Western politically correct discourse), but considered in the light of medieval Christian modes of thought, to go on crusade to the Holy Land was to fulfil a sacred duty. As has been well said, modern writers no more understand the medieval notion of crusade than medieval chroniclers would understand the idea of landing a man on the Moon. But, it may be alleged, even if we absolve him from the charge of being a murderous aggressor against Islam, was he not anyway simply a militaristic blockhead, who gloried in war and lived only for conquest and martial glory? Here is where humbug enters the picture. Why is that the three greatest US presidents are habitually identified as Washington, Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Simply because they were wartime leaders, who achieved their great fame through presiding over a nation at war. Even in the case of the generally dismal roster of twentieth-century British prime ministers, scholars usually single out Churchill and Lloyd George for honorific mention: again, wartime leaders. Why, in such a context, England’s greatest warrior king must be apologised for is a nice question.

ery well, say the critics, let us leave on one side Richard’s military talents and the glory that war sheds on wartime leaders, however much this may dismay pacifists and liberals. The core issue surely is that Richard was a disastrous King of England. Here is a recent summing-up in a widely used textbook: “He used England as a bank on which to draw and overdraw to finance his ambitious exploits abroad.” Some say that Henry II had left as much as 900,000 marks (£600,000) in the state treasury, and that Richard ran through it all in a trice. It is true that taxation in England was at record levels in Richard’s reign (1189-1199). But why was this? There were two reasons. One was the so-called ‘Saladin Tithe’, a national effort to raise revenue for the crusades. But we must remember that the Saladin Tithe was introduced by Richard’s father Henry II in 1187, after Saladin’s defeat of the Christian kingdoms of Palestine at Hattin, when the Pope pronounced the holy places of Jerusalem in danger and called for a European crusade. The other reason for the high taxation was that, while he was returning from the Third Crusade, Richard was kidnapped by agents of Leopold of Austria and handed over to the Machiavellian German emperor Henry VI, who held the English king for ransom. We have to remember that kidnapping and ransoming a fellow monarch was against all the canons of international law, rudimentary as this was at the time, and that any ruler impeding the actions of a crusading head of state was automatically excommunicate; the Pope had made this an express condition of the Third Crusade, to allay fears of treachery by fellow-rulers. The sum demanded for Richard’s ransom was 100,000 marks or £66,000 sterling –an enormous sum for those times and the equivalent of about two billion pounds in today’s money. Not surprisingly, England had to be virtually ransacked to raise such a vast amount of cash. So the accusation that Richard used England as a cash-cow to finance hare brained schemes overseas evaporates. The huge sums that were raised were a direct consequence of the Third Crusade, and that in turn can be condemned only if we use anachronistic hindsight.

he other count in the charge-sheet against Richard as ‘bad king’ is that he spent only six months of his ten-year reign in England, and that he notoriously declared that he cared ‘not an egg’ for England. It is true that he was scarcely seen in the kingdom: he came to it on 13 August 1189, left it four months later to go on crusade, and then revisited it for just two months on his release from captivity in 1194. But here we have to remember that Richard, like his father, was not just king of England but the ruler of an Angevin ‘empire’ that stretched from Scotland to the Pyrenees. Richard was raised and ‘formed’ in an Aquitaine culture, his native language was French, he was deeply influenced by the troubadour culture of southern France, and he shared the love of his mother (Eleanor of Aquitaine) for the deep south. To Richard, the title of duke of Aquitaine was more important than that of king of England. With hindsight, we can blame Richard for neglecting the affairs of England for those of France, but how was Richard supposed to know that it was England, rather than Aquitaine or Normandy, that had the glittering future? By looking into a crystal ball? By his own lights, side-lining England made sense. Besides, Richard was a good delegator and left England in good hands during his absence. The only troubles in England while he was away were those deliberately fomented by his treacherous brother John. Mention of John brings us to another point. John was, in terms of ‘presentism’ a true king of England, but that was mainly because he had little choice: by his own incompetence he lost Normandy to king Philip of France. And what was the result of John’s being almost permanently in England? A stupid quarrel with Pope Innocent III which led to England’s being placed under papal interdict and deprived of the consolations of religion; tensions with the barons which ultimately erupted into civil war in 1215; and a French invasion of England which led to three years of military chaos. There must have been many who wished that John had been an absent king of England, a la Richard. Finally, it is worth mentioning that during Richard’s reign, because of his tact and diplomacy, there was no trouble with the Celtic fringes. Both Henry II and John faced major crises in Wales, Scotland and Ireland and had to wage military campaigns there, in contrast to the tranquil situation under Richard.

Richard can be criticised for many things and was by no means perfect, but history has been unfair to him. Far more plaudits have been showered by Little Englanders on those notable Tudor tyrants, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. Henry, the ‘Bluff King Hal’ of legend, managed to kill 150,000 of his three million subjects, while Elizabeth brought the country close to disaster by her aggressive policy towards Philip of Spain. Both showed none of Richard’s political savvy, and significantly, both believed that the headman’s axe was the solution to all political problems. Yet, ironically, it is Richard the Lionheart, who fought only for the Angevin empire or for Christendom –in other words for the aims a good and dutiful ruler of the late twelfth century had to fight for –who comes down through history as the militarist and the man who believed only in force. When all allowances have been made, and when all anachronism and humbug has been consigned to the refuse bin, it turns out that Richard fully deserves his triumphalist statue in Westminster.