The Art of Kingship: Richard I, 1189-99

For anyone who wishes to understand the art of kingship the reign of Richard I (1189-99) makes an ideal starting-point. For one thing it is conveniently short and for another there can have been few kings who have been so lavishly praised by contemporary historians and so fiercely criticised by modern ones. English writers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were unanimous in looking upon him as a model king. They reported visions in which Richard was seen ascending into heaven - one of them a vision granted to St Edmund Rich, Archbishop of Canterbury (1233-40), while he was in a state of levitation. The St Albans chronicler Roger of Wendover described Richard not merely as 'the most victorious' - that a modern reader might expel - but also as 'pious, most merciful and most wise'. Even writers from a very different cultural background were equally convinced of Richard's outstanding qualities. In the view of Ibn-al-Athir, the most influential Muslim historian of the thirteenth century, Richard's courage, shrewdness, energy and patience made him the most remarkable ruler of his times’ - times, be it noted which included such rulers as Saladin and Philip Augustus. In other words if we wish to know how a king was to behave if he was to satisfy contemporary ideals of kingship then Richard the Lionheart is our man.

Yet in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries most historians learned to take a very different view. 'One of the worst kings ever to rule England' - even historians who disagree on almost everything else have managed to agree on this. In writing that ‘Richard was not a good king. He cared only for his soldiers', L. Du Garde Peach (author of Richard the Lionheart, Ladybird History Book, 1965), was faithfully reflecting received academic opinion. How are we to explain this striking discrepancy between medieval and modern?