[Sidenote:  Richard and Philip]

The firmness of Hubert Walter had secured order in England, but oversea Richard found himself face to face with dangers which he was too clear-sighted to undervalue.  Destitute of his father’s administrative genius, less ingenious in his political conceptions than John, Richard was far from being a mere soldier.  A love of adventure, a pride in sheer physical strength, here and there a romantic generosity, jostled roughly with the craft, the unscrupulousness, the violence of his race; but he was at heart a statesman, cool and patient in the execution of his plans as he was bold in their conception.  “The devil is loose; take care of yourself,” Philip had written to John at the news of Richard’s release.  In the French king’s case a restless ambition was spurred to action by insults which he had borne during the Crusade.  He had availed himself of Richard’s imprisonment to invade Normandy, while the lords of Aquitaine rose in open revolt under the troubadour Bertrand de Born.  Jealousy of the rule of strangers, weariness of the turbulence of the mercenary soldiers of the Angevins or of the greed and oppression of their financial administration, combined with an impatience of their firm government and vigorous justice to alienate the nobles of their provinces on the Continent.  Loyalty among the people there was none; even Anjou, the home of their race, drifted towards Philip as steadily as Poitou.  But in warlike ability Richard was more than Philip’s peer.  He held him in check on the Norman frontier and surprised his treasure at Freteval while he reduced to submission the rebels of Aquitaine.  Hubert Walter gathered vast sums to support the army of mercenaries which Richard led against his foes.  The country groaned under its burdens, but it owned the justice and firmness of the Primate’s rule, and the measures which he took to procure money with as little oppression as might be proved steps in the education of the nation in its own self-government.  The taxes were assessed by a jury of sworn knights at each circuit of the justices; the grand jury of the county was based on the election of knights in the hundred courts; and the keeping of pleas of the crown was taken from the sheriff and given to a newly-elected officer, the coroner.  In these elections were found at a later time precedents for parliamentary representation; in Hubert’s mind they were doubtless intended to do little more than reconcile the people to the crushing taxation.  His work poured a million into the treasury, and enabled Richard during a short truce to detach Flanders by his bribes from the French alliance, and to unite the Counts of Chartres, Champagne, and Boulogne with the Bretons in a revolt against Philip.  He won a yet more valuable aid in the election of his nephew Otto of Saxony, a son of Henry the Lion, to the German throne, and his envoy William Longchamp knitted an alliance which would bring the German lances to bear on the King of Paris.