Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/370

344 of his times, he said his say about it shortly. "I would take it," he declared, "were its walls of iron!" To which Richard replied tersely: "I would hold it were its walls of butter." Philip, in a way, won out on his boast. He did take Château Gaillard—but, discreetly, he did not begin his famous siege of it until the body of its builder, in scattered sections, was safely underground.

Only a few months after his gaillard castle was finished, while trying to commit a burglary, Richard Cœur de Lion was shot by a policeman—and so came to an appropriate end. This is a critically and etymologically accurate statement of fact. Britton, who was of Richard's time, defines a "burgesour" as one who "feloniously, in time of peace, breaks into churches or other buildings, or through the walls or gates of our cities or towns"; a policeman, broadly, is a civic guard: and it was while feloniously trying in time of peace to break into a town that Richard was killed by a bowman, a civic guard, on the town wall.

The whole performance was characteristic of Richard and of his time. For the war that he was bent upon waging against Philip he needed money: and the news came to him, opportunely, that a great treasure—the golden effigies of twelve knights seated around a golden table was the story—had been found by the Lord of Chaluz, his vassal, in a subterranean chamber in the fields of the Limousin. Treasure-trove, by the common law, belonged to the King—and Richard went down into the Limousin (1199) with all promptness to claim his vassal's findings. The Lord of Chaluz seems to have taken the civil-law view of the matter. Certainly, he shut fast his gates and refused to recognize his sovereign's claim. Richard pressed the siege and raged like the heathen that he was: swearing that when Chaluz fell he would hang everybody—man and woman, the very child at the breast! Then came the bow-shot from the wall—and that properly styled lion-hearted king ceased to be a dangerous beast of prey. Fate has its equities as well as its ironies. In Richard's ending there was a touch of both.

Following upon the accession of King John came Philip's opportunity to clear all northern France from English rule; and he accomplished that large contract in statesmanship virtually at a single blow—the mastering blow that he struck against the Château Gaillard.

It was the murder by John of his nephew Arthur of Brittany (1203) that brought things to a crisis. Philip—who could not have been trusted around a corner with a nephew of his own—sentenced John to forfeiture; and followed up his sentence by invading Normandy and laying siege to the castle that he had declared he would take were its walls of iron. What would have happened had Richard been alive to back his boast about the walls of butter can be only guesswork. What did happen—at the end of a great siege, lasting for more than a year, which John vainly tried to break, and during which horrors went on too desperate to be told of here—was the castle's fall; and its fall in so mean a way that its builder well might have risen in furious anger from his several graves.

Richard probably was not a regular church-goer—for the seven years preceding his death he abstained from confession because he desired to hold fast to his hatred of Philip, and he died blasphemously mocking the priests who sought to minister to him—and in building the Château Gaillard he either had omitted a chapel altogether or had been content with one that did not satisfy John's nicer sense of religious propriety. To set the matter right, John built a very large chapel in the southwest angle of the main work; and—most characteristically—placed a substructure beneath it (according to one chronicler) or a smaller building directly beside it (according to another) that was intended for uses as far as possible removed from sacerdotal and that was the least entitled to respect of all the edifices within the chateau: and he committed the military error—of which Richard, assuredly, never would have been guilty—of piercing an opening, big enough for a foeman to enter by, from that building to the fosse through the castle's outer wall.

As though to complete the indignity of the fall of the strongest fortress in Normandy, the name (presumably the nickname) of the foeman who did enter, to the castle's undoing, by that ignoble passage