These great offices were due to his personal merit and to the great
services he rendered to his country; but they appear to have been the
result, also, of the personal friendship and affection of the King. He
was one of the witnesses to Henry’s will, and a trustee of the King’s
bequest of 5,000 marks of silver to certain religious and charitable
institutions, and of 300 marks of gold for marrying poor free women
of England. He was named by Henry as custodian of Queen Eleanor, and
as treasurer of his private fortune. A pretty picture of the King’s
feeling toward him occurs in the account of the arrival of Glanville’s
messenger in London, after the battle of Alnwick. The messenger
arrived at midnight and insisted on seeing the King. Being admitted to
the royal chamber he boldly approached the King’s bed and roused him
from sleep. He, springing up, cried, “Who is it?” “I am the messenger
of Ranulph of Glanville, your faithful subject, and I come from him
to your highness as a bearer of good tidings.” “Is our Ranulph well?”
cried the King, moved less by the promised good tidings than by his
love for the sender of them. “My lord is well,” was the answer, “and he
holds your enemy, the King of the Scots, a prisoner at Richmond.”
Upon the death of Henry, Glanville’s position was a difficult one.
Henry, conservative, though a reformer, had established the government
of his kingdom on a foundation of law and justice, and had created an
effective and pure administrative machine. The new King appeared to
have no sympathy with his father’s principles of government. He was
rash, radical and careless of regular details of administration, and
Glanville, in the words of a contemporary, “In his old age saw the King
doing many things in a newfangled way, without wisdom or forethought.”
He was present at the coronation of Richard, and was sent by him to
quell a riot against the Jews which disgraced the ceremony. About his
next acts we have different accounts. He had taken the cross in 1186.
Whether he asked and received his dismissal from Richard in order to
join the army, then about to start for the Holy Land, or whether, as
another account has it, he was removed and imprisoned by Richard and
obliged to purchase his freedom by a fine of 15,000 pounds of silver,
we cannot certainly tell. At any rate, he set out for Palestine
together with Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his nephew Hubert,
then bishop of Salisbury; the three were placed in command of the
English forces by Richard (who was obliged to delay his own departure),
and Glanville in 1190 died before Acre, by disease, the result of the
unhealthy climate. He left one son and three daughters, whom he had
already enriched from his great fortune. He founded the priory of
Butley, the Abbey of Leiston, and a hospital at Somerton.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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