Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 5.djvu/126

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

72 WORKMEN AND HEROES homage and swore fealty to their father. Nevertheless Richard continued from this time to hold the government of the whole of Aquitaine, and to be usually styled, as before, Duke of Aquitaine, or Duke of Poitou (which were considered as the same title), although it appears that King Henry now looked upon the arrangements made at the treaty of Montmirail as annulled, and that dukedom to have actually reverted to himself. In 1183 Richard refused, when commanded by his father, to do homage for Aquitaine to his elder brother, Henry; on which his brothers Henry and Geoffrey invaded the duchy, and a new war ensued be- tween them and their father, who was assisted by Richard, which, however, was terminated by the death of the eldest of the three brothers in June of that same year, when Richard became his father's heir-apparent. But at an interview between King Henry and Philip Augustus, now King of France, in November, 1 1 88, Richard, apparently impelled by a suspicion that his father intended to leave his crown to his younger brother, John, and also professing to resent his father's conduct in withholding from him his affianced bride, the French king's sister, suddenly declared himself the liegeman of Philip for all his father's dominions in France ; whence arose a new war, in which Philip and Richard speedily compelled King Henry to yield to all their demands, and a treaty to that effect was about to be signed when King Henry died, on July 6, 1 189. Richard was present at the burial of his father in the choir of the convent of Fontevrault. Notwithstanding his apprehensions, real or affected, of his brother John, Rich- ard made no particular haste to come over to England, but, contenting himself with ordering his mother, Queen Eleanor, to be liberated from confinement, and to be invested with the regency of that kingdom, he first proceeded to Rouen, where he was formally acknowledged as Duke of Normandy on July aoth, and it was August 1 3th before he arrived at Portsmouth (or, as others say, at South- ampton). His coronation, from which the commencement of his reign is dated, took place in Westminster Abbey on September 3d. It was on occasion of that ceremony that a furious riot broke out among the Jews in London, which was in the course of the next six months renewed in most of the great towns through- out the kingdom^ At York, in March, 1190, a body of 500 Jews, with their wives and children, having taken refuge in the castle, found no other way of sav- ing themselves from their assailants than by first cutting the throats of the women and children and then stabbing one another. A short time before his father's death Richard, and his then friend, Philip Augustus, had, as it was expressed, taken the cross, that is to say, had publicly vowed to proceed to the Holy Land, to assist in recovering from the infidels the city and kingdom of Jerusalem, which had recently (1187) fallen into the hands of the great Saladin. The mighty expedition, in which all the principal nations of Western Christendom now joined, for the accomplishment of this object is known by the name of the Third Crusade. Leaving the government of his kingdom during his absence in the hands of William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely and chan- cellor, and Hugh Pudsey, Bishop of Durham and justiciary, Richard took his de- parture from England on December nth of this same year, 1 189, and proceeding