That the foes in Richard’s own household should league themselves against him with Philip, as he had done in earlier days against his own father, was, so far as Richard himself is concerned, no more than retributive justice. Philip’s alliance with John had proved a failure; but it was not long before he saw a chance of securing a more useful tool in the person of little Arthur of Britanny. English historians tell us that when Richard and Philip made their treaty at Messina in March 1191 Richard obtained a formal acknowledgement of his rights, as duke of Normandy, to the overlordship of Britanny and the liege homage of its duke.[1842] The text of the treaty of Messina, however, contains not a word on this subject; the agreement, if made at all, must have been drawn up in a separate form; and it seems to have remained a dead letter, like another agreement made at the same place a few months earlier—the treaty with Tancred whereby Richard had engaged to recognize Arthur of Britanny as his successor in default of direct heirs. Although after five years of marriage Queen Berengaria was still childless, no such recognition had yet been made. Richard on his return to Europe probably perceived that Arthur’s succession would be impossible in England, and in Gaul would be fatal to the independence of the Angevin house. Accordingly, he was once more doing all in his power to win the attachment of John; and John, having at length discovered that his own interests could be better served by supporting his brother than by intriguing against him, proved an active and useful ally in the war against Philip.[1843] On the other hand, Richard seems never to have received Arthur’s homage for Britanny; and those who had the control of political affairs in that country were determined that he never should. The dispute between Henry and Philip for the wardship of the two children of Geoffrey and Constance had apparently ended in a compromise. Eleanor, the elder child, was now under the care of her uncle Richard;[1844] but Constance seems to have succeeded in keeping her infant boy out of the reach of both his would-be guardians, and, moreover, in governing her duchy without any reference to either of them, for nearly seven years after the death of her father-in-law King Henry. She had been given in marriage by him, when scarcely twelve months a widow, to Earl Ralf of Chester,[1845] son and successor of Earl Hugh who had been one of the leaders in the revolt of 1173. As the earls of Chester were hereditary viscounts of the Avranchin—the border-district of Normandy and Britanny—this marriage would have furnished an excellent means of securing the Norman hold upon the Breton duchy, if only Ralf himself could have secured a hold upon his wife. In this however he completely failed. Safe in her hereditary dominions, with her boy at her side, and strong in the support of her people rejoicing in their newly-regained independence, Constance apparently set Ralf, Richard and Philip all alike at defiance, till in 1196 Richard summoned her to a conference with himself in Normandy, and she set out to obey the summons. Scarcely had she touched the soil of the Avranchin at Pontorson when she was caught by her husband and imprisoned in his castle of S. James-de-Beuvron.[1846] It is hard not to suspect that Richard and Ralf had plotted the capture between them; for Richard, instead of insisting upon her release, at once renewed his claim to the wardship of Arthur, and prepared to enforce it at the sword’s point. The Bretons first hurried their young duke away to the innermost fastnesses of their wild and desolate country under the care of the bishop of Vannes,[1847] and then, after a vain attempt to liberate his mother, intrusted him to the protection of the king of France,[1848] who of course received him with open arms, and sent him to be educated with his own son.[1849]

Philip had now got the old Angevin patrimony between two fires; but the Bretons were so little accustomed to act in concert even among themselves, far less with any other power, that he found it impossible to make any real use of them as allies either for military or political purposes. The independent warfare which they carried on with Richard across the south-western border of Normandy[1850] had little effect upon that which Richard and Philip were carrying on along its eastern border; and upon the Angevin lands which lay directly between Britanny and France the Breton revolt had no effect at all. To the end of Richard’s life, we hear of no further troubles in Maine or Anjou. Nay more, we hear of no further troubles in Aquitaine. If Philip had in some sense turned Richard’s flank in the west, Richard had turned Philip’s flank far more effectually in the south. The unwonted tranquillity there may indeed have been partly due to the fact that one of the chief sources of disturbance was removed in 1196 by the withdrawal of Bertrand de Born into a monastery;[1851] but it was also in great measure owing to Richard’s quickness in seizing an opportunity which presented itself, in that same eventful year, of forming a lasting alliance with the house of Toulouse. His old enemy Count Raymond V. was dead;[1852] he now offered the hand of his own favourite sister, the still young and handsome Queen Jane of Sicily, to the new Count Raymond VI.;[1853] and thenceforth the eastern frontier of his Aquitanian duchy was as secure under the protection of his sister’s husband as its southern frontier under that of his wife’s brother, the king of Navarre.

Nor were Richard’s alliances confined within the boundaries of Gaul. His year of captivity in Germany had not been all wasted time. When he parted from his imperial jailor in the spring of 1194, they were, at any rate in outward semblance, close political allies; and at the same time Richard had succeeded in gaining over his bitterest foe, Leopold of Austria, by an offer of his niece Eleanor of Britanny as wife to Leopold’s son.[1854] The marriage-contract was however not yet executed when the Austrian duke met with a fatal accident and died in agony, owning with his last breath that his miserable end was a just retribution for his conduct towards the English king.[1855] The impression made by this event deepened the feeling of respect and awe which the captive lion had already contrived to inspire in the princes of the Empire. Meanwhile Henry VI. had made himself master of Sicily;[1856] and now the old dream by which the German Emperors never quite ceased to be haunted, the dream of re-asserting their imperial supremacy over Gaul, was beginning to shape itself anew in his brain. In the summer of 1195 he sent to Richard a golden crown and a message charging him, on his plighted faith to the Emperor and on the very lives of his hostages, to invade the French kingdom at once, and promising him the support and co-operation of the imperial forces. Richard, suspecting a trap, despatched William of Longchamp to inquire into the exact nature, extent and security of Henry’s promised assistance; Philip vainly tried to intercept the envoy as he passed through the royal domains;[1857] and the negotiations proved so far effectual that Henry remitted seventeen thousand marks out of the ransom, as a contribution to Richard’s expenses in his struggle with Philip.[1858] When, on Michaelmas Eve 1197, Henry VI. died,[1859] the use of that homage on Richard’s part which his English subjects had resented so bitterly was made apparent to them at last. While the English king was holding his Christmas court at Rouen there came to him an embassy from the princes of Germany, summoning him, as chief among the lay members of the Empire[1860] by virtue of his investiture with the kingdom of Arles, to take part with them in the election of a new Emperor at Cöln on February 22.[1861] Richard himself could not venture to leave Gaul; but the issue proved that his presence at Cöln was not needed to secure his interests there. He wished that the imperial crown should be given to his nephew Duke Henry of Saxony, eldest son and successor of Henry the Lion. This scheme, however, when laid before the other electors by the envoys whom he sent to represent him at Cöln, was rejected on account of the duke’s absence in Holy Land.[1862] The representatives of the English king then proposed Henry’s brother Otto, for whom Richard had long been vainly endeavouring to find satisfactory provision on either side of the sea,[1863] and who seems really to have been his favourite nephew. The result was that, on the appointed day, Otto was elected Emperor of the Romans,[1864] and on July 12 he was crowned king of the Germans at Aachen by the archbishop of Cöln.[1865]

For a moment, at the mere prospect of beholding a grandson of Henry Fitz-Empress seated upon the imperial throne of the west, there had flashed across the mind of at least one friend of the Angevin house a fancy that the world-wide dominion which seemed to be passing away from the heirs of Fulk the Good was to be renewed for yet one more generation.[1866] There was indeed an opposition party in Germany, who set up a rival Emperor in the person of Philip of Suabia, a brother of Henry VI.;[1867] and he at once made common cause with his French namesake.[1868] This Suabian alliance, however, and the support of the count of Ponthieu—purchased two years before with the hand of the unhappy Adela, whom Richard had at last restored to her brother[1869]—could not much avail Philip Augustus against such a league as was now gathering around the English king. The vast sums which Hubert Walter had been sending, year after year, to his royal master over sea were bringing a goodly interest at last. Flanders, Britanny, Champagne, had all been secretly detached from the French alliance and bought over to the service of Richard;[1870] the Flemish count had already drawn Philip into a war in which he narrowly escaped being made prisoner;[1871] and in the summer of 1198, when the imperial election was over, not only Baldwin of Flanders, Reginald of Boulogne, Baldwin of Guines, Henry of Louvain, Everard of Brienne, Geoffrey of Perche and Raymond of Toulouse, but even the young count Louis of Blois and the boy-duke Arthur of Britanny himself, one and all leagued themselves in an offensive and defensive alliance with Richard against the French king.[1872] The immediate consequence was that Philip begged Hubert Walter, who being just released from his justiciarship had rejoined his sovereign in Normandy, to make peace for him with Richard; and he even went so far as to offer the surrender of all the Norman castles which he had won, except Gisors. Richard however would listen to no terms in which his allies were not included.[1873] At last, in November, a truce was made, to last till the usual term, S. Hilary’s day.[1874] When it expired the two kings held a colloquy on the Seine between Vernon and Les Andelys, Richard in a boat on the river, Philip on horseback on the shore;[1875] this meeting was followed by another, where, by the mediation of a cardinal-legate, Peter of Capua, who had lately arrived in Gaul, they were persuaded to prolong their truce for five years.[1876]

Yet all the while, there lurked in Richard’s heart a misgiving that, in the last resort, his diplomacy would prove to have been in vain; that, strive as he might to turn away the tide of war from his own borders by stirring up north and east and south to overwhelm the Crown of France, still, after all, the day must come when the Angevins would have to stake their political existence solely upon their own military resources, and to stand at bay, unaided, unsupported, alone, behind whatever bulwark they might be able to devise by their own military genius. It was the genius and the foresight of Richard himself which insured that when the crisis came, the bulwark was ready, even though it were doomed to prove unavailing in the end. The last and mightiest of the many mighty fortresses reared by Angevin hands since the first great builder of the race had begun his castle-building in the Loire valley was the Château-Gaillard, the “saucy castle” of Richard the Lion-heart. He “fixed its site where the Seine bends suddenly at Gaillon in a great semicircle to the north, and where the valley of Les Andelys breaks the line of the chalk cliffs along its banks. Blue masses of woodland crown the distant hills; within the river curve lies a dull reach of flat meadow, round which the Seine, broken with green islets and dappled with the grey and blue of the sky, flashes like a silver bow on its way to Rouen.”[1877] Some three-quarters of a league from the right bank of the river, in a valley opening upon it from the eastward and watered by the little stream of Gambon, stood the town of Andely. Between the town and the river stretched a lake, or rather perhaps a marsh,[1878] through which the Gambon and another lesser rivulet descending from the hills to the north of Andely found their way by two separate issues into the Seine, nearly opposite two islets, of which the larger and more northerly was known as the Isle of Andely.[1879] The space enclosed between the three rivers and the marsh seems to have been a tract of waste land, occupied only by a toll-house for the collection of dues from the vessels passing up and down the Seine[1880]—dues which formed one of the most important items in the revenue of the archbishop of Rouen, to whom Andely and its neighbourhood belonged.[1881] Over against this spot, on the southern bank of the Gambon, in the angle formed by its junction with the Seine, a mass of limestone crag rose abruptly to the height of three hundred feet. Its western side, almost perpendicular, looked down upon the great river, the northern, scarcely less steep, over the Gambon and the lake beyond; to the north-east and south-west its rocky slopes died down into deep ravines, and only a narrow neck of land at its south-eastern extremity connected it with the lofty plateau covered with a dense woodland known as the Forest of Andely, which stretches along the eastern side of the Seine valley between Andely and Gaillon. One glance at the site was enough to rivet a soldier’s gaze. If, instead of the metropolitan church of Normandy, a lay baron had owned the soil of Andely, we may be sure that long ago that lofty brow would have received its fitting crown; if the power of Fulk the Builder had reached to the banks of the Seine, we may doubt whether the anathemas of the Norman primate would not have availed as little to wrest such a spot from his grasp as those of the archbishop of Tours had availed to wrest from him the site of Montrichard. But a greater castle-builder than Fulk Nerra himself was the architect of Château-Gaillard.

Richard’s historical connexion with the “rock of Andely” has its ill-omened beginning in a ghastly story of the fate of three French prisoners whom he flung from its summit into the ravine below, in vengeance for the slaughter of some Welsh auxiliaries who had been surprised and cut to pieces by the French king’s troops in the neighbouring valley.[1882] By the opening of 1196, however, he had devised for it a more honourable use. In a treaty with Philip, drawn up in January of that year, the fief of Andely was made the subject of special provisions whereby it was reserved as a sort of neutral zone between the territories of the two kings, and a significant clause was added: “Andely shall not be fortified.”[1883] As by the same treaty the older bulwarks of Normandy—Nonancourt, Ivry, Pacy, Vernon, Gaillon, Neufmarché, Gisors—were resigned into Philip’s hands, this clause, if strictly fulfilled, would have left the Seine without a barrier and Rouen at the mercy of the French king. The agreement in short, like all those which bore the signatures of Philip and Richard, was made only to be broken; both parties broke it without delay; and while Philip was forming his league with the Bretons for the ruin of Anjou, Richard was tracing out in the valley of the Gambon and on the rock of Andely the plan of a line of fortifications which were to interpose an insurmountable barrier between his Norman capital and the French invader. His first act was to seize the Isle of Andely.[1884] Here he built a lofty octagonal tower, encircled by a ditch and rampart, and threw a bridge over the river from each side of the island, linking it thus to either shore.[1885] On the right, beyond the eastern bridge, he traced out the walls of a new town, which took the name of the New or the Lesser Andely,[1886] a secure stronghold whose artificial defences of ramparts and towers were surrounded by the further protection of the lake on its eastern side, the Seine on the west, and the two lesser rivers to north and south, a bridge spanning each of these two little streams forming the sole means of access from the mainland.[1887] The southern bridge, that over the Gambon, linked this New Andely with the foot of the rock which was to be crowned with the mightiest work of all. Richard began by digging out to a yet greater depth the ravines which parted this rock from the surrounding heights, so as to make it wholly inaccessible save by the one connecting isthmus at its south-eastern extremity. On its summit, which formed a plateau some six hundred feet in length and two hundred in breadth at the widest part, he reared a triple fortress. The outer ward consisted of a triangular enclosure; its apex, facing the isthmus already mentioned, was crowned by a large round tower,[1888] with walls ten feet in thickness; the extremities of its base were strengthened by similar towers, and two smaller ones broke the line of the connecting curtain-wall. This was surrounded by a ditch dug in the rock to a depth of more than forty feet, and having a perpendicular counterscarp. Fronting the base of this outer fortress across the ditch on its north-western side was a rampart surmounted by a wall ninety feet long and eight feet thick, also flanked by two round towers; from these a similar wall ran all round the edges of the plateau, where the steep sides of the rock itself took the place of rampart and ditch. The wall on the south-west side—the river-front—was broken by another tower, cylindrical without, octagonal within; and its northern extremity was protected by two mighty rectangular bastions. Close against one of these stood a round tower, which served as the base of a third enclosure, the heart and citadel of the whole fortress. Two-thirds of its elliptical outline, on the east and south, were formed by a succession of semicircular bastions, or segments of towers, seventeen in number, each parted from its neighbour by scarcely more than two feet of curtain-wall—an arrangement apparently imitated from the fortress of Cherbourg, which was accounted the greatest marvel of military architecture in Normandy, until its fame was eclipsed by that of Richard’s work.[1889] This portion of the enclosure was built upon a rampart formed by the excavation of a ditch about fifteen to twenty feet in width; the counterscarp, like that of the outer ditches, was perpendicular; and a series of casemates cut in the rock ran along on this side for a distance of about eighty feet. On the western side of the citadel stood the keep, a mighty circular tower, with walls of the thickness of twelve feet, terminating at an angle of twenty feet in depth where it projected into the enclosure; it had two or perhaps three stages,[1890] and was lighted by two great arched windows, whence the eye could range at will over the wooded hills and dales of the Vexin, or the winding course of the river broadening onward to Rouen. Behind the keep was placed the principal dwelling-house, and under this a staircase cut out of the rock gave access to an underground passage leading to some outworks and a tower near the foot of the hill, whence a wall was carried down to the river-bank, just beyond the northern extremity of a long narrow island known as the “isle of the Three Kings”—doubtless from some one of the many meetings held in this district by Louis VII. or Philip Augustus and the two Henrys.[1891] The river itself was barred by a double stockade, crossing its bed from shore to shore.[1892]