The bronze warrior towering above you is Richard I, known as Richard the Lionheart, one of England's most celebrated and most absent kings. He ruled from 1189 to 1199, yet spent only six months of that entire reign on English soil. Born in Oxford, raised in France, he considered England more of a treasury than a home.
His great obsession was the Third Crusade, a Christian military campaign to recapture Jerusalem from the Muslim leader Saladin. Crowned at Westminster Abbey just behind you in September 1189, Richard barely paused before sailing east. He won major victories at Acre and Arsuf, earning his fearsome reputation, though his methods were brutal. At Acre, he ordered the execution of 2,700 prisoners of war.
Returning home in 1192, he was captured in Austria and held for ransom. England paid 150,000 marks of silver to free him, nearly bankrupting the kingdom. He died in France in 1199, aged 41, from an infected arrow wound during a minor castle siege.
This statue by Italian sculptor Carlo Marochetti was installed here in 1860. During World War II, a German bomb exploded nearby, bending Richard's sword and peppering the bronze with shrapnel still visible today. A warrior king, scarred even in statue form.
Sources. Story: en.wikipedia.org Photos: Adam Bishop, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
