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BOOK I

RICHARD OF AQUITAINE, 1157-1189

FATHER AND SONS, 1179-1183 32

KING HENRY'S HEIR, 1183-1189 57

BOOK II

RICHARD'S CRUSADE, 1189-1192

THE YEAR OF PREPARATION, 1189-1190 91

THE OUTWARD VOYAGE, 1190-1191 119

THE FALL OF ACRE, 1191 152

FROM ACRE TO JOPPA, 1191 176

THE ADVANCE ON JERUSALEM, 1191-1192 193

RICHARD AND SALADIN, 1192 230

RICHARD AND EUROPE, 1192-1199

RICHARD AND THE EMPIRE, 1192-1194 264

RICHARD AND FRANCE, 1194-1199 294

NOTES

INDEX 341

ERRATA

BOOK I

RICHARD OF AQUITAINE

In Regum serie scribatur Dux Aquitanorum et Vasconum Ricardus, qui ad probitatis opera nunquam exstitit tardus, cujus adolescentia magna floret industria. .

THE BOY DUKE

Bonum est viro cum portaverit jugum adolescentia sua.

"The eagle of the broken covenant shall rejoice in her third nesting"--thus ran one of the predictions in the so-called "prophecy of Merlin," which in the latter half of the twelfth century was generally regarded as shadowing forth the destiny of Henry Fitz-Empress and his family. "The queen," said those who interpreted the prophecy after the event, "is called the eagle of the broken covenant because she spread out her wings over two realms, France and England, but was separated from the one by divorce and from the other by long imprisonment. And whereas her first-born son, William, died in infancy, and the second, Henry, in rebellion against his father, Richard, the son of her third nesting, strove in all things to bring glory to his mother's name."

There was nothing to mar the rejoicing of either Eleanor or Henry in September 1157. The young king had overcome the difficulties which had beset him at the opening of his reign. Public order and the regular administration of public justice had been restored throughout his realm. He had obtained the French king's recognition of his rights over Normandy and the Angevin lands, and also over Eleanor's duchy of Aquitaine, where in the winter of 1156 he had received the homage of the barons and kept the Christmas festival with her at Bordeaux. King and queen returned to England in the spring. Soon afterwards the last remnant of opposition to the rule of the Angevin king in England had been disarmed in the persons of Earl Hugh of Norfolk and Count William of Boulogne; Henry had "subdued all the Welsh to his will," and received, together with the homage of Malcolm of Scotland, a formal restitution of Northumberland, Westmorland and Cumberland, which had been in the possession of the Scots since 1136. From these successes Henry had either just returned, or was on his way back to rejoin his queen at Oxford, when their third son was born there--no doubt in Beaumont palace--on September 8. A woman of S. Alban's was chosen for the boy's nurse and fostered him together with her own son, born on the same night and afterwards known as Alexander Neckam, author of a treatise on natural science or what passed for science in his time. Her name was Hodierna; in later days she had from the royal domains in Chippenham an annuity of seven pounds, doubtless granted to her by her royal nursling, whom she seems to have survived by some twenty years. Whether she dwelt at the court while he was under her charge, or whether, like his ancestor Geoffrey Martel, he was sent to dwell with his foster-mother, there is nothing to show. Before he was two years old his destiny was planned by the king; Richard was to be heir to the dominions of his mother.

"Aquitaine," says an English writer of the time, "abounding in riches of many kinds, excels other parts of the western world in such wise that it is reckoned by historians as one of the happiest and most fertile among the provinces of Gaul. Although its fields respond abundantly to culture, its vines to propagation, and its woodlands to the chase, yet nevertheless it takes its name not from any of these advantages, but from its waters , haply esteeming as alone worthy of account among its delights that which its health-giving water brings forth either to be returned to the sea, or uplifted in the air. If, indeed, we track the Garonne from its fount along its rapid course to the sea, and if we also follow the line of the Pyrenean mountains, all the country that lies between derives its name from the beneficent waters that flow through it. Furthermore, in those parts smoothness of tongue is so general that it promises impunity to everybody, and any one who knows not the manner of that people cannot know whether they are more constant in deed than in word. When they set themselves to tame the pride of their enemies, they do it in earnest; and when the labours of battle are over and they settle down to rest in peace, they give themselves up wholly to pleasure."

Whatever may be thought of Dean Ralph's etymology, there was an element of truth in his description, half jesting though it seems to be, of the country and the character of its people. He gives indeed hardly sufficient prominence to the pugnacious side of the latter; and the boundaries which he assigns to the former are considerably narrower than those of the duchy of Aquitaine as it stood at the time of Richard's birth. That duchy comprised, in theory at least, fully one-third of the kingdom of France. As counts of Poitou its dukes bore direct sway over a territory bounded on the north by Britanny, Anjou, and Touraine, on the west by the sea from the bay now known as that of Bourgneuf to the mouth of the Charente, and on the east by the course of the river Creuse from a little distance below Argenton to its junction with the Vienne; and also over the dependent district of Saintonge on the north side of the estuary of the Garonne, or Gironde. As counts of Gascony they were overlords of a number of lesser counties and lordships, extending from the mouth of the Garonne to the Pyrenees, and forming a territory nearly twice the size of Poitou. Between Poitou and Gascony lay the counties of Angoul?me, La Marche, and P?rigord, and, between the two latter, a cluster of minor fiefs which collectively formed the district known as the Limousin, and of which the most important was the viscounty of Limoges. All these had from early times owned the overlordship of the Poitevin counts in their ducal capacity. So, too, had Berry, an extensive district lying to the north of La Marche. The north-eastern portion of Berry, which formed the viscounty of Bourges, had, however, for a long time past been lost to the dukes and reckoned as part of the Royal Domain of France. On the eastern and south-eastern borders of the duchy lay the counties of Auvergne and Toulouse. Toulouse, with its dependencies--the Quercy or county of Cahors, Alby, Foix, Carcassonne, Cerdagne and Roussillon--had always been a separate fief held directly of the Crown; but the right to its ownership had for the last sixty years been in dispute between the Poitevin counts and its actual holders, the house of St. Gilles, who also held the neighbouring county of Rouergue and with it the overlordship of a number of smaller fiefs along the southern coast. Auvergne, originally a part of the Aquitanian duchy, was strongly disposed to reject the authority of the Poitevin dukes; and both Auvergne and Toulouse were more or less openly supported in this matter by the French king. Nor were the other underfiefs of the duchy, or even the barons of Poitou, by any means models of feudal obedience. For a century or more the dukes had been periodically at strife with the counts of Angoul?me, the counts of La Marche, the lords of Lusignan , the viscounts of Limoges, and the neighbours and rivals of these last. It was little more than twenty years since Count William of Angoul?me had carried off from Poitiers Eleanor's stepmother, the Countess Emma, "by the counsel of the chiefs of the Limousin who feared lest the Poitevin yoke should be laid more heavily upon them" owing to her marriage with the duke, she being a daughter and a possible co-heiress of the viscount of Limoges. At Limoges itself, moreover, there seems to have been a perennial rivalry between the bishop, the viscount, the abbot of the great abbey of S. Martial, and the townsfolk.

When Henry II went to Limoges after his marriage in 1152 he seems to have been welcomed as duke by the viscount; but strife arose between his followers and the citizens which so enraged him that he ordered the recently built walls of the town to be razed and the bridge to be destroyed. As the town--locally called "the castle"--was held by the viscount of the abbot, this was an offence to all parties at once; and the abbot retorted by refusing to grant the duke's claim to a procuration in the city--that is, outside the walls--saying he was only bound to grant it within the enclosure of the "castle." Henry, though angry, had his mind fixed on more important matters, and let the insult pass; but on his next visit to Limoges, in 1156, he successfully asserted his ducal rights. In the spring or early summer of 1159 he again went to Aquitaine, to prosecute by force of arms his claim, as Eleanor's husband, to the county of Toulouse. The support of the Count of Barcelona and his wife, the Queen of Aragon, was purchased by a promise that Richard should wed their infant daughter and should on his marriage receive the Dukedom of Aquitaine. The Quercy was conquered by Henry and held for him awhile after he had abandoned the siege of Toulouse and returned to Normandy. A treaty made between Henry and Louis of France in May 1160 contained a provision for a year's truce between Henry and Raymond of Toulouse, during which Henry was to keep "whatever he at the date of the treaty had of the honour of Toulouse, Cahors, or Quercy." This was probably not much, as his troops had already been withdrawn from the conquered territory; the greater part of it seems to have fallen back into Raymond's hands, and we hear nothing more of the relations between him and Henry for nearly thirteen years.

In March Henry had a conference with Raymond of Toulouse at Grandmont. Shortly afterwards he tried to assert his ducal authority over the count of Auvergne. The only result was a fresh rupture with Louis, which was temporarily patched up by a truce made in August to last till Easter next, March 31, 1168. Before that date a formidable rebellion broke out in Aquitaine. The counts of Angoul?me and La Marche, the viscount of Thouars, Robert of Seilhac in the Limousin and his brother Hugh, Aimeric of Lusignan in Poitou, Geoffrey of Rancogne in the county of Angoul?me, "with many others," sought to rebel against the king, and went about ravaging with fire and sword. When the king heard of this he hurried to the place, took the strong castle of Lusignan and made it stronger still, and destroyed the villages and fortresses of the rebels. He then revictualled his own castles, and left the duchy under the charge of Eleanor and of Earl Patrick of Salisbury, while he himself went to meet Louis on the Norman border on April 7. The truce between the kings was now expired, and Henry desired a treaty of peace; but meanwhile the southern rebels were urging Louis to insist that Henry should indemnify them for the loss and damage which he had inflicted upon them, and which they represented as a breach of his truce with France, the French king being supreme lord of Aquitaine. They even placed in the hands of Louis the hostages which they had promised to Henry. Louis did not go to the conference in person, but sent some nobles to represent him. To them Henry proposed a new scheme for the future of Aquitaine: that its young duke-designate should marry the youngest daughter of Louis. The French envoys refused to bind their sovereign to this unexpected condition; it was, however, agreed "that if Richard should ask for his rights over the Count of St. Gilles"--that is, of Toulouse--"the king of France should try the cause in his court." Thus the settlement of Aquitaine on Richard was, by implication at least, recognized by France, although Richard himself was not yet eleven years old. As to the aggrieved nobles, Henry promised them restitution; but Louis would not give up the hostages; and the conference ended in another truce to last till the octave of midsummer.

Scarcely had the parties separated when tidings came that Earl Patrick had been slain in a fight with some of the malcontents. Henry was too much overburdened with other cares to attempt during the rest of that year any personal intervention in Aquitaine. Eleanor seems to have urged him to make it formally over to Richard. She probably saw that there was no likelihood of a good understanding between her people and her Angevin husband, and hoped to be more successful in governing them herself in the name of her son. Her suggestion, and that which Henry had made nine months before to the representatives of Louis, were both carried into effect on January 6, 1169, when the two kings made peace at Montmirail. The two elder sons of Henry and Eleanor were both present at the meeting. Henry himself first did homage to Louis for his continental possessions; young Henry did the like for Britanny, Anjou and Maine; then Richard was betrothed to the French king's daughter Aloysia, and likewise performed the homage due to Louis for the county of Poitou and the duchy of Aquitaine.

The feudal situation created by these transactions was a strange one. It was capable of at least two different interpretations, and its practical result, so far as Aquitaine was concerned, was that for the next twenty years there were two dukes of that country. Henry's purpose in thus making his sons do homage to Louis was to guard against the possibility of dispute, after his own death, as to the portion of his dominions to which each of them was entitled. In his eyes the homage was anticipatory of a future and perhaps--for he was not yet thirty-six--still very remote event, and its effect was merely prospective. But, so far as can be seen, no such limitation of its scope was expressed in the act of homage; and the legal effect of that act therefore was not merely prospective, but immediate; it at once made the younger Henry and Richard respectively count of Anjou and duke of Aquitaine, not under the suzerainty of their father, but under the direct overlordship of the French king. Such at least would be its legal effect as soon as the boys were old enough to govern for themselves; and this age young Henry had almost reached, for he was in his fourteenth year. Their father, on the other hand, as the sequel shows, never intended to give during his own lifetime any real authority at all to young Henry, nor did he intend to give any to Richard otherwise than with a tacit but perfectly well understood reservation of his own right of intervention and control whenever he might choose to exercise it; and he still remained legally both count and duke, for he had just repeated, in both capacities, his own homage to Louis. There can be no doubt that Louis was fully alive to the advantages which the French Crown might derive from this complicated state of affairs. But he was, of course, not desirous of pointing them out to his rival; and during the next four years he carefully refrained from all interference with the affairs of the Angevin dominions. The new duke of Aquitaine was, however, not yet twelve years old, and it was clearly with the French king's sanction that his father, in the spring, marched into the duchy and forcibly brought the counts of Angoul?me and La Marche and most of the other rebels to submission.

Our only certain notice of Richard between January 1169 and June 1172 shows him to have been, at some time in 1170, at Limoges with his mother, laying the foundation-stone of the abbey of S. Augustine. On the Octave of Whit-Sunday, June 11, 1172, his formal installation as duke took place at Poitiers. In the abbey church of S. Hilary he was placed, according to custom, in the abbot's chair, and the sacred lance and banner which were the insignia of the ducal office were given to him by the Archbishop of Bordeaux and the Bishop of Poitiers. He afterwards proceeded to Limoges, where he was received with a solemn procession; the ring of S. Valeria, the protomartyr of Aquitaine, was placed on his finger, and he was then proclaimed as "the new Duke"--for it was in virtue of this double investiture, given not by the king of France, but by the local prelates and clergy as representatives of the local saints of the land, that the dukes of Aquitaine claimed to hold their dukedom.

Eight months later another important ceremony took place at Limoges. Henry and Eleanor, accompanied by their two elder sons, held court in the castle for a week with the kings of Aragon and Navarre, and the counts of Toulouse and Maurienne. Alfonso of Aragon, Raymond of Toulouse, and Humbert of Maurienne had met Henry at Montferrand in Auvergne, the last-named to make a treaty of marriage between his daughter and Henry's youngest son, John, the two former to seek the king's mediation in a quarrel between themselves. Alfonso was the son of Queen Petronilla and Raymond of Barcelona, and brother of the girl to whom Richard had been betrothed in 1159. He and Raymond of Toulouse were at strife about the homage of Cerdagne, Foix, and Carcassonne; both were anxious for the friendship of their nearest and most powerful neighbour. Henry "made peace between them," and Raymond, whose territories were ringed in by those of Aragon and Aquitaine, paid the peacemaker his price; "he became the man of the king, and of the new king his son, and of Count Richard of Poitou, to hold Toulouse of them"--that is, to hold it immediately of Richard, who held it under his elder brother and his father--"as a hereditary fief, by military service at the summons of either king or count, and by a yearly payment of a hundred marks of silver or of ten destriers worth at least ten marks each."

A few months later Richard entered actively on public life; and he made a bad beginning. Towards the end of March the younger King Henry fled from his father's court in Normandy to that of Louis. The elder Henry had been warned at Limoges by Raymond of Toulouse that "his wife and his sons had formed a conspiracy against him"; but he had disregarded the warning, and left Richard and Geoffrey in Aquitaine under the guardianship of their mother. Early in the summer both the lads joined their elder brother in France, and all three pledged themselves by a solemn oath, at a great council in Paris, "not to forsake the king of France, nor to make any peace with their father save through him and the French barons"; Louis in return swearing, and causing his barons to swear, "that he would help the young king and his brothers, to the utmost of his power, to maintain their war against their father and to gain possession of the kingdom of England" for young Henry.

The "young king" was eighteen years old; he was as shallow-minded and selfish as he was handsome and superficially attractive; and he had fallen under the influence of Louis, to whose daughter he was married. Crowned in 1170 as his father's heir, he chose to consider himself aggrieved by being given no share in the government of England or of the Angevin home-lands. He may have persuaded his brothers to consider themselves as victims of a similar grievance with regard to their duchies of Aquitaine and Britanny. He and Louis were naturally anxious to secure the forces of those two duchies in support of their scheme of ousting the elder King Henry from his dominions, continental and insular; and they hoped that the example of the boy-dukes might help to detach their respective vassals from their father's cause. But the lads had a nearer counsellor than young Henry or Louis, and one to whose counsels it was only natural, and in a measure right, that they should listen with reverence and submission. Eleanor unquestionably sided with her elder son against her husband, for she was caught in the act of trying to make her way from Aquitaine to the French court disguised in the dress of a man. Certainly nothing can justify, or even excuse, the duplicity of this "eagle of the broken covenant" towards the husband and sovereign who, even when his eyes were fully opened to the treason of their eldest son, still put such confidence in her loyalty as to leave the younger eaglets in her charge. But there is a very considerable excuse for Richard and Geoffrey. On the ground of that feudal loyalty which was a principle of such importance in the life of those days, there was, indeed, something to be said for all three of the brothers, and more especially for Richard. None of them were homagers of Henry II; all of them were homagers of Louis and of Louis alone. For Richard it might further be urged that if he was under any other feudal obligation, it was more to his mother than to his father; his possession of Aquitaine was their joint gift, but it was on Eleanor's consent that the validity of the gift really rested; Henry possessed the dukedom only in right of his wife. On the higher ground of filial duty Henry's and Eleanor's claims to the obedience of their children were equal; Richard and Geoffrey suddenly found that those claims were conflicting, and that a choice must be made between the two. That the choice really lay between right and wrong is much plainer to us than it could be to these lads, of whom the elder was not yet sixteen, and both of whom were under the direct personal influence of their mother. On her, rather than on them, lies the responsibility for their wrong choice.

Eleanor, captured by some of her husband's scouts, was at once placed by him in strict confinement. Her eldest son's cause gained practically nothing by the adhesion of his young brothers. According to one account, both of them accompanied him to the siege of Drincourt in July. The success of that siege, however, was due, not to any of the three, but to their allies the counts of Flanders and Boulogne; moreover, the death of the latter soon afterwards caused the Flemish troops to withdraw to their own country, and nothing further came of the expedition. The rebel barons of Geoffrey's duchy all submitted to his father in the autumn. At a conference on September 25 at Gisors Henry made fair offers to all three of his sons; "but the king of France did not deem it advisable that the king's sons should make peace with their father." At some time before the end of the year Richard was knighted by Louis. Young Henry and Geoffrey seem to have remained at the French court through the winter, but Richard characteristically went his own way; he returned to Aquitaine. Considering the extent of that country and the character of its previous relations with Henry II, it seems to have furnished a very small proportion of names to the list of avowed partizans of the young king; and the more important Aquitanian names which we do find there are those of men whose disobedience is very unlikely to have been in any way connected with that of Richard--Count William of Angoul?me, Geoffrey of Rancogne, Geoffrey and Guy of Lusignan, William of Chauvigny, and Thomas of Coulonges in Poitou, Charles of Rochefort in Saintonge, Robert of Bl? in the Limousin, and in Gascony Jocelyn of Maulay and Archbishop William of Bordeaux. The first four of these needed no incitement from the young duke's example, and the last two are not likely to have been influenced by it, to throw off their allegiance to his father. The Aquitanian rebels in 1173 would probably have been more numerous had not the barons of the Limousin been at that time too busy fighting among themselves to give much heed to disagreements between their rival rulers. The confusion in those parts was aggravated by a swarm of "Brabantines," or foreign mercenaries, probably brought in by Henry at an earlier time, and now roving about the land and preying on it wholly at their own will and pleasure. There was no one to control either Brabantines or barons, since Richard's withdrawal and Eleanor's imprisonment had left Aquitaine without any resident governor at all, till in the winter Richard went back to put himself single-handed at the head of affairs. We hear of him as far south as Bordeaux, where he was no doubt sure of a welcome from Archbishop William, and secured the support of another great churchman, the abbot of S. Cross, by confirming the privileges of the abbey. He tried to win to his cause the rising town of La Rochelle; but in this he failed; the townsfolk shut their gates in his face. He soon, however, had under his command a considerable force of knights which at Whitsuntide 1174 seized the city of Saintes. Henry was then at Poitiers; at the head of a body of loyal Poitevins he marched upon Saintes and drove out the intruders, and recovered possession of several other rebel fortresses. The hopes of young Henry and Louis had broken down both in Aquitaine and in Normandy. In England they broke down still more completely; and the failure of the rebellion there led to the reopening of negotiations for peace.

Some ten or fifteen years later a bitter enemy of Henry II described the characters of young Henry and of Richard both at once in the form of a comparison, or rather contrast, between them. The contrast showed itself even in the ill-omened first stage of their political and military careers. Throughout the rebellion of 1173-4 the young king was a mere tool--and a very inefficient one--in the hands of Louis. At the instigation of Louis he had entered upon the war, and at the dictation of Louis he was ready to accept terms of peace. Geoffrey was apparently contented with a similar position; but not so Richard. Eleanor might have made a tool of her second son, but no one else could do so. It was not for love of either young Henry or Louis that he had sided with them, and not at their behest would he give up the struggle. On his seventeenth birthday the kings met at Gisors; but "they could not come to a settlement because of the absence of Count Richard, who at that time was in Poitou, making war on the castles and men of his father." The conference ended in a truce till Michaelmas, on the understanding that meanwhile Henry should subdue Richard by force without hindrance from Louis, young Henry, or their adherents. Richard was not yet hardened enough to contemplate fighting his father in person; "when King Henry was come into Poitou, his son Richard dared not await him, but fled from every place at his approach, abandoning all the fortresses that he had taken, not daring to hold them against his father." When he learned the terms of the truce, his indignation at being thus deserted by his supposed allies made him suddenly determine on a better course. "He came weeping, and fell with his face on the ground at the feet of the king his father, beseeching his forgiveness." It was granted instantly and completely. Father and son re-entered Poitiers together. At Henry's suggestion Richard went in person to assure his elder brother and Louis that he was no longer an obstacle to the conclusion of peace; and on September 30 the peace was made at Montlouis in Touraine. Henry's three sons placed themselves at his mercy and "returned to him and to his service as their lord." He promised to each of them a specified provision; and they all pledged themselves to accept these provisions as final and nevermore to require anything further from him save at his own pleasure, nor to withdraw themselves or their service from him. Richard and Geoffrey also did homage to him "for what he granted and gave them." Young Henry would have done likewise, but his father would not permit it "because he was a king." This treaty seems to have been afterwards put into writing and formally executed at Falaise, probably on October 11. Early in 1175 Richard and Geoffrey did homage to their father again at Le Mans, and on April 1 their elder brother did the same at Bures.

The new provision for Richard did not include his reinstatement as duke of Aquitaine or count of Poitou. It consisted merely of "two fitting dwelling-places, whence no damage could come to the king, in Poitou," and half the revenues of that county in money. The strict letter of the treaty of Montlouis in fact reinstated Henry II as sole ruler of all the Angevin dominions, and reduced all his sons to the position of dependents on his bounty. Henry, however, soon showed that he had no intention of enforcing this punishment to the uttermost on Richard and Geoffrey. The treaty ordained that all lands and castles belonging to the king and his loyal barons were to be restored to their owners and to the condition in which they had been fifteen days before "the king's sons departed from him"; so, too, were the lands of the rebels, but in their case no mention was made of their castles. With these castles, therefore, Henry was left free to deal at his pleasure. Accordingly, when early in 1175 he set himself to carry out this clause of the treaty in Anjou and Maine, he not only revictualled and repaired whatever fortresses of his own had suffered damage, and destroyed whatever new fortifications had been added to the castles whose owners had defied or resisted him, but also ordered that some of these latter should be razed. Geoffrey was sent to carry out this process in Britanny, and Richard in Aquitaine, while the two Henrys returned to England together on May 9.

Besides the avowed partizans of young Henry in Aquitaine, there were others who had seized the opportunity afforded them by the war to fortify their castles and set the ducal authority at defiance. The men of the South for the most part would at any moment gladly have flung off that authority altogether, no matter whether it was wielded by the heiress of the old ducal house, her husband, or her son. The Aquitanian barons whose castles had in the time of the war been fortified or held against Henry II made it clear that they were not disposed to give them up to Richard. He therefore, in pursuance of his father's orders, set out "to reduce the said castles to nothing." He began after midsummer by marching into the county of Agen, where Arnald of Bonville had fortified Castillon against him, "and would not give it up." This place, "fortified by both nature and art," held out against the duke and his engines of war for nearly two months; "at last he took it, and in it thirty knights whom he kept in his own hands." We have no certain knowledge of his further movements till the following spring, when he and Geoffrey of Britanny went to England together. They landed on Good Friday, April 7. Richard's purpose seems to have been to seek counsel and help in the difficult task which his father had assigned to him, for when the Easter festivities were over it was arranged by the elder Henry that the younger one should go with Richard into Poitou "to subdue his enemies." Young Henry went to Normandy on April 20; Richard probably returned about the same time, though the brothers did not cross the Channel together. During his absence Vulgrin of Angoul?me, a son of the reigning count William Taillefer, had "presumed" to march into Poitou at the head of a troop of Brabantines. The bishop of Poitiers had at once resolved, with Theobald Chabot, who was "the leader of Duke Richard's soldiery," to "deliver the people committed to him out of the hand of their enemies," and the invaders, although they far outnumbered the forces of the bishop and the constable, had been completely routed near Barbezieux. Richard made straight for Poitou and called out its feudal levies, "and a great multitude of knights from the regions round about flocked to him, for the wages that he gave them." He began by punishing some of the rebels in Poitou; next, after Whitsuntide , he marched against Vulgrin's Brabantines and defeated them in a pitched battle between St. Maigrin and Bouteville, near the western border of the Angoumois. Thence he led his host into the Limousin, to punish Count Aimar of Limoges, who also had taken advantage of the duke's absence to commit some breaches of the peace. First, Richard besieged and took Aimar's castle of Aixe with its garrison of forty knights. Then he attacked Limoges, and in a few days was master of the city and all its fortifications. All this was the work of a month. Shortly after midsummer he returned to Poitiers; there he was at last joined by the young king. After taking counsel with the Poitevin barons it was decided that the next step should be the punishment of Vulgrin of Angoul?me. The brothers led their united forces to Ch?teauneuf on the Charente, south-west of Angoul?me, and won the place after a fortnight's siege. Thereupon young Henry "would stay with his brother no longer, but following evil counsel departed from him." Richard, thus suddenly deserted, moved cautiously further away from Angoul?me to Moulineuf, another castle belonging to Vulgrin; this he captured in ten days. Then he turned back again and laid siege to Angoul?me itself. Within its walls were not only Vulgrin and his father, Count William, but also Aimar of Limoges and two other rebel leaders, the viscounts of Ventadour and of Chabanais. In six days Count William was forced to surrender into Richard's hands himself, his city, and all its contents, his castles of Bouteville, Archiac, Montignac, Jarnac, La Chaise, and Merpins, and to give hostages for his submission to the mercy of Richard and of King Henry, to whom Richard immediately sent him and the other nobles who had surrendered with him. They presented themselves before Henry at Winchester on September 21, fell at his feet, and "obtained mercy from him"; that is to say, he, it seems, sent them back again with instructions that they should be temporarily reinstated in their possessions, pending a fuller consideration which he purposed to give to their case when he should return to Normandy.

Having for the moment reduced northern Aquitaine to subjection, Richard set himself to a like task in Gascony. After keeping Christmas at Bordeaux he marched upon Dax, which had been fortified against him by its viscount with the help of the count of Bigorre. Its recovery by Richard was quickly followed by that of Bayonne, held against him by its viscount Ernald Bertram. Thence he marched up to the very "Gate of Spain"--St. Pierre de Cize, on the Navarrese border at the foot of the Pyrenees--took the castle of St. Pierre in one day, razed it, compelled the Basques and Navarrese to swear that they would keep the peace, "destroyed the evil customs which had been introduced at Sorde and Lesp?ron" "where it was customary to rob pilgrims on their way to or from S. James," and by Candlemas was back at Poitiers, having--for the moment--"restored all the provinces to peace." The count of Bigorre in the south and a few barons of Saintonge and of the Limousin had not yet submitted; Richard, however, made no further movement against any of them for many months. His inaction may have been due to instructions from his father, who was probably unwilling to let him engage in another campaign against these rebels at a moment when all the available forces of the Angevin house and the presence of Richard himself seemed likely to be needed in another quarter.

The richest baron of Aquitanian Berry, Ralf of D?ols, the lord of Ch?teauroux, whose lands were said to be worth as much as the whole ducal domains of Normandy, had died at the close of 1176 leaving as his sole heir a daughter three years old. The wardship of this child and of her heritage belonged of right to her suzerain, the Duke of Aquitaine; but her relations were resolved to keep, if possible, both herself and her lands in their own power, so they carried her off to La Ch?tre, and prepared her castles and their own for defence and defiance. When these tidings reached King Henry in England, he sent urgent orders to his eldest son to assemble the Norman host without delay and take forcible possession of the lands of D?ols. Henry's action in this matter is noticeable as showing that he regarded Richard's tenure of the dukedom of Aquitaine at this period as merely nominal or delegated; he claimed Denise of D?ols as his own vassal, not as Richard's. It is, however, not at once apparent why, since he had intrusted to Richard the task of subduing the other Aquitanian rebels, he did not leave the affair of D?ols to the same hands. The reason may have been mainly a geographical one. These things may have taken place at a moment when Henry knew Richard to be busily engaged at the very opposite end of the duchy, at any rate somewhere in Gascony, perhaps at its extreme southern border. The young king, on the other hand, was in Normandy, whence it would be easy for him to lead a force through Maine and Touraine into Berry. On receiving his father's instructions he did so, and laid siege to Ch?teauroux, which surrendered to him at once. He did not, however, gain possession of the little heiress or of the rest of her lands; for the matter now became complicated by the intervention of the supreme lord of Berry and of Aquitaine, King Louis.

For more than eight years, ever since January 1169, Aloysia of France had been in Henry's guardianship as the destined bride of Richard. According to one of the best informed English writers of the time, Louis, when this engagement was made, had promised that on the marriage of the young couple he would make over to Richard, as Aloysia's dowry, the city of Bourges with all its appurtenances; that is, the portion of Berry the ownership of which was in dispute between France and Aquitaine. Ten years before--in the year of Aloysia's birth--he had promised to King Henry a like cession of the Vexin, the disputed border-land of France and Normandy, as the dowry of Aloysia's sister Margaret on her intended marriage with Henry's eldest son, and Henry had taken advantage of the ambiguous wording of a clause in the treaty to have the two children--contrary to Louis's intention--at once formally married in church; whereby he gained immediate possession, not indeed of the whole Vexin, but of that portion of it which had once been Norman and which contained its most valuable fortresses, these being surrendered to him by the Templars, who were by the treaty to have them in custody till the marriage should take place. That marriage, nevertheless, had brought more advantage to Louis than to Henry, by bringing Margaret's husband, as soon as he reached manhood, under the influence of his father-in-law in opposition to his own father. There was but too much reason to fear a like result in the case of Richard; and the dangers of such a result were even greater in this case than in the former one, owing to special circumstances connected with the betrothal of Richard and Aloysia. That betrothal was the price, or part of the price, paid by Henry at Montmirail in 1169 for Louis's sanction, as overlord, to the scheme devised by Henry for securing a certain distribution of his dominions among his sons. Henry's own renewal of homage to Louis on that occasion for all his continental territories was a token that he did not intend to renounce his personal rights over any of his lands, but merely to secure for himself the power of sharing those rights with his sons whenever he might choose to do so, and for the boys an unquestionable right of succession at his death to their respective shares of the Angevin heritage. But, somewhat like Louis nine years before, Henry made a mistake which rendered it possible for his adversary to put another construction upon the matter. He secured young Henry's claims to the future possession of the heritage of Geoffrey of Anjou and Maud of Normandy, and Richard's claim to the heritage of Eleanor, by making them do homage to Louis for Anjou and Aquitaine respectively; but he omitted to secure the subordination of their claims to his own during his lifetime by making them do homage to himself. Owing to this omission, it was open to Louis to assert, if he chose, that the Angevin counties and the Norman duchy legally belonged to young Henry and the duchy of Aquitaine to Richard, in virtue of the homage rendered by them for those lands direct to himself as overlord; Henry II--so he might argue--having by his consent to that homage tacitly renounced all claim to the lands for which it was rendered, and being thenceforth merely in temporary charge of them as guardian of the boys. The promise of the cession of Bourges was a very small price to pay for a weapon so tremendous as that which Henry had thus, it seems, unconsciously placed in the hands of an enemy whose mean jealousy and unscrupulous astuteness he appears never to have fully realized. He unintentionally made this possible construction of the treaty of Montmirail still more plausible through the crowning of his eldest son in 1170 and the solemn installation of the second as duke of Aquitaine in 1172. Louis acted upon it in 1173, although he does not seem ever to have put it into formal words; and his action, coupled with that of the ungrateful sons urged on by their mother, must have opened Henry's eyes to the peril in which he had involved himself through his misplaced confidence in the loyalty both of his overlord and of his own family. It showed that as soon as Richard and Aloysia were married, Louis might and in all probability would demand the recognition of his new son-in-law as sole ruler of Aquitaine, independent of any superior save Louis himself.

At the close of 1175 or early in 1176 Louis, it seems, reminded Henry that, Richard being now in his nineteenth year and Aloysia in her sixteenth, it was full time for the contract of marriage between them to be carried into effect; but the answer which he received was so unsatisfactory that he referred the matter to the Pope. We have no actual record of any communication between the kings on the subject at this time, but something of the kind must have taken place to cause the Pope's action. In May 1176 Alexander bade Cardinal Peter, then legate in France, lay the whole of Henry's lands on both sides of the sea under Interdict "unless he would permit Richard and Aloysia to be married without delay." The legate, however, seems to have done nothing in the matter for more than a year. Probably the two kings were negotiating; but we hear nothing of their negotiations till June 1177, when Henry sent an embassy to France to "convene" Louis about the dowries which he had promised to give with his two daughters to the young king and to Richard--to wit, the Vexin and the viscounty of Bourges. It seems that Henry, having found Margaret's marriage fail to give him the control over her promised lands, demanded to be put in possession of those of Aloysia before he would allow her to marry Richard. But meanwhile the Pope had in May renewed the injunctions which he had issued to Cardinal Peter eleven months before; and on July 12 the English envoys returned with the news that Peter was instructed to lay the whole of their sovereign's dominions, insular and continental, under Interdict, unless Richard were at once permitted to take for his wife the maiden whom Henry "had so long already, and longer than had been agreed, had in his custody for the said Richard." Henry at once made the English bishops appeal to the Pope. Illness detained him in England for nearly five weeks; then he went to Normandy , and on September 21 met Louis and the legate at Nonancourt. In the legate's presence he promised that Richard should wed Aloysia, if Louis gave Bourges to Richard and the Vexin to the young king as previously agreed. Whether the wedding or the cession was to take place first, however, seems to have been left an open question; and four days later the whole matter was again postponed indefinitely by a treaty whereby the two elder kings pledged themselves to take the Cross and go to the Holy Land together, and meanwhile, as brother Crusaders, to lay aside all mutual strife and make no claims or demands upon each other's possessions as they held them at that moment, except with regard to Auvergne and to any encroachments which the men of either party might have made upon those of the other in the territory of Ch?teauroux or of the lesser fiefs on the border of their respective lands in Berry. If on these excepted matters they could not agree between themselves, twelve arbitrators were to decide according to the sworn evidence of the men of the lands in question.

All immediate danger of interference from either Louis or the Legate being thus removed, Henry summoned the Norman host to meet at Argentan on October 9 for an expedition against the rebels in Berry. Young Henry and Richard had, by his desire, joined him on his arrival in Normandy; the former was now despatched in advance into Berry, and when the king's host reached the Norman border at Alen?on Richard was detached from it and once more sent into Poitou "to subdue the enemies" there, while the king himself marched upon Ch?teauroux. After receiving its formal surrender he proceeded to La Ch?tre; this place, and the little Lady of D?ols, were also given up to him at once. Thence he proceeded into the Limousin and called upon those of its nobles and knights who had taken part in the rebellion of 1173 to give an account of their conduct; one of the most important of them, the viscount of Turenne, surrendered his chief castle, "strongly fortified by both art and nature"; with the others Henry dealt "according as each of them deserved." He then hurried back to Gra?ay in Berry, to meet Louis and the commissioners who were to report to the two kings the result of their investigations about Auvergne. What that result was we are nowhere directly told; we only hear that both the rivals declared themselves content to abide by it. The next reference to the overlordship of Auvergne, however, some twelve years later, seems to indicate that the commissioners gave their award in favour of the duke of Aquitaine.

Another of Henry's vassals in Berry, Odo of Issoudun, had lately died leaving an infant heir, and this child had been stolen by his kinsman the duke of Burgundy. The custody of his fief was offered to the king by the barons who had it in their keeping, but he refused to receive it without the child, whom he made no attempt to reclaim. It was not worth while to risk an embroilment with Burgundy about a petty lordship in Berry at the moment when an opportunity was just presenting itself for annexing to the Poitevin domains a valuable fief of the duchy of Aquitaine, the county of La Marche, which lay between Berry and the Limousin. Count Adalbert V of La Marche had separated from his wife, lost his only son, and seemingly disinherited his only daughter with her own consent; the kinship between him and his only other surviving relatives was so remote that he deemed himself free to dispose of his county without regard to them; and he now offered to sell it to its overlord, King Henry, for a sum of money wherewith he himself might go to end his lonely days in the Holy Land. In December Henry went to meet him at Grandmont; the bargain was quickly struck, the conveyance executed, and the purchase money--less than a third of what Henry is said to have estimated the county as worth--paid down, and the barons and knights of La Marche did homage to Henry as their immediate liege lord.

In all these proceedings of Henry in Aquitaine there is no reference to Richard. They clearly indicate that the elder holder of the ducal title still claimed the ducal power and authority as his own, not his son's. He seems, however, to have left to Richard the punishment of one important Limousin rebel whose case he had a year before expressly reserved for his own judgement; for it was Richard who now "took away the castle"--that is, the fortified town--"at Limoges where S. Martial rests in his minster" from the viscount; "and it served the viscount right," adds a Norman chronicler, "for helping the count of Angoul?me against the duke." This seems to have been about the time when Henry was in Aquitaine, and it is the only act of Richard's mentioned by any chronicler between Henry's arrival in Normandy in August 1177 and his return to England in July 1178. We may infer, almost with certainty, that it was done by Henry's order; and, with considerable probability, that the unusual state of quiescence in which Richard seems to have passed these eleven months was due in part at least to the restraint placed on him by Henry's presence on the continent. So long as Richard remained in the dependent position to which he had been reduced by the agreement at Montlouis, it would be impossible for him to take any considerable military or political action, unless by his father's order, while his father was within reach. But in the autumn of 1178, when Henry was once more in England, Richard's activity re-commenced. "With a great host" he again proceeded into Gascony as far as Dax. There, to his delight, he found that the count of Bigorre, who two winters before had helped the viscount of Dax to hold the city against the duke, had somehow incurred the displeasure of the citizens and was fast in their prison. They seem to have handed him over to Richard; "but King Alfonso of Aragon, grieving that his friend the count of Bigorre was held in chains, came to the said duke, and entreating that his friend might be liberated, stood surety for him that he would do the will of the duke and of his father the king of England; and the count of Bigorre, that he might be set free, gave up to the duke Clermont and the castle of Montbron." Richard then went northward again, and after keeping Christmas at Saintes gathered another "great host" for the subjugation of Saintonge and the Angoumois. These two districts had been for years, and indeed for generations, a seed-plot of rebellion. Richard seems to have been bent upon reducing them to order once for all. The moving spirits of defiance there were Vulgrin of Angoul?me and Geoffrey of Rancogne. Count William of Angoul?me, after being reinstated by Henry in his capital city, seems to have made over the government of his county to his eldest son, Vulgrin, who had headed the resistance to Richard in 1176. Geoffrey of Rancogne took his name from a place in the same county, and was also owner of two lordships of far greater importance in Saintonge, one of which, Pons, lay close to the border of the Angoumois, and the other, Taillebourg, was a fortress of great strength, about half way between Saintes and St. Jean d'Ang?ly. It was to Pons that Richard now laid siege. After some weeks, finding that he made no progress, he left his constables there with a part of his forces, and led the rest, in Easter week , into the Angoumois. A three days' siege won the castle of Richemont; four other castles--Genzac, Marcillac, Gourville, Auville--were taken in the last fortnight of April and levelled with the ground. Then he turned westward again, re-crossed the border, and marched upon Taillebourg.

The capture of Taillebourg was Richard's first great military exploit. It laid the foundation of his military fame, not so much by the intrinsic importance of the exploit itself as by the revelation, in the campaign of which it was at once the turning-point and the crown, of the character and capability of the young duke. Its immediate result was the complete submission of the rebels against whom that campaign was directed. Not only did Geoffrey of Rancogne surrender Pons, but Vulgrin of Angoul?me, before the end of the month, gave up his capital city and his castle of Montignac; and when Richard, after razing the walls of all these places, sailed for England, he left in Aquitaine, for the moment at least, "all things settled according to his will." He seems to have visited the tomb of S. Thomas the Martyr at Canterbury before joining his father. Henry received him "with great honour" and gave him his reward; when the young conqueror returned to Aquitaine shortly before Michaelmas, he returned not merely as his father's lieutenant, but as once again, with his father's sanction, count of Poitou.

FATHER AND SONS

Domus divisa contra se.

We are not told on what conditions, if any, the restitution of Poitou was made to Richard by his father. The matter might become important whenever Henry should again cross the sea; but so long as the king remained in England it would have scarcely any practical effect on Richard's position in Aquitaine. Whether he commanded the feudal host and disposed of the feudal revenues of Poitou as count or as his father's delegate, he was, in his father's absence, equally master of both; and in Aquitaine at large the temporary degradation inflicted on him by Henry seems never to have been recognized at all. He himself had never laid aside the style and title of duke of Aquitaine, nor the princely state belonging to that dignity, nor had he hesitated to deal with the demesne lands of Poitou as his own absolute property. In his own eyes he was count and duke by virtue not of any grant from either Henry or Louis, but of his descent from the old ducal line and of the investiture which he had received at Poitiers and at Limoges from the clergy and people of the duchy. His subjects regarded him in the same light. They fought and intrigued against him not as an intruder or a usurper, nor as the lieutenant of one whom they counted as such, but precisely because he was to them the incarnation of the ducal authority in a form which was specially obnoxious to their habits of turbulent independence and lawless self-will. For seven years they had been watching with growing uneasiness and dismay the development of the "new duke," whom as a boy of fourteen they had acclaimed at Limoges in 1172, into a man of very different character from the dukes of the last two or three generations.

None of the pictures of Richard's outer or inner man which have come down to us date from a time quite so early as the year 1179; but the main features of his personality, outward and inward, were already marked enough to show us in those pictures a true likeness of the young conqueror of Taillebourg. In the sculptured effigies of Richard at Fontevraud and at Rouen the outlines of the face give so little indication of age as to suggest that in the living model they may have been--except for the beard and moustache--almost the same at forty-one as at twenty-one; the features are well proportioned and finely formed. In life they were crowned with a profusion of hair "of a colour midway between red and yellow"--in other words, of the rare golden or still rarer auburn hue. The young duke's stature was lofty, above the average height, his frame shapely and well proportioned, with long, straight, flexible limbs; "no arm was better adapted than his for drawing sword, nor more powerful to strike with it." His whole person had such an aspect of dignity that two independent observers, at different times, described it in the same words--"a form worthy to occupy a place of high command"; and the seemliness of his appearance was enhanced by that of his manners and dress. The stories of his gigantic strength all relate to the time of the Crusade, when that strength was in its maturity; but a man of whom such tales were told must have been a born athlete. On the other hand, it was certainly before his Aquitanian days were over that he contracted the quartan ague which, says Gerald of Wales, "was given him to repress the over fierce workings of his mind, but by which he, like the lion, yea, more than lion that he was, seemed rather to be influenced as by a goad; for while thus almost continually trembling, he remained intrepid in his determination to make the whole world tremble and fear before him."

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