A crisis seemed imminent, but Henry managed to avoid it. From the Emperor’s solicitations, from the Pope’s remonstrances, from all the pleadings of friends and all the intrigues of foes, he suddenly made his escape by flying back to England and plunging into a Welsh war which kept him all the summer safe out of their reach,[223] and furnished him with an excuse for postponing indefinitely the completion of his alliance with the schismatic party. Such an alliance would in fact have cost far more than it was worth. Alexander was once more safely seated upon S. Peter’s chair, and was urging Thomas to throw himself wholly on the protection of the king of France; Louis was in the highest state of triumph, rejoicing over the birth of his long-desired son; while the whole Angevin dominions, which Eleanor was governing in her husband’s absence, were full of suppressed disaffection and surrounded with threatening or intriguing foes.[224] In Lent 1166 therefore Henry hurried back to Normandy to hold a conference with Louis, and, if possible, to free his own hands for the work which lay before him.

The work was in truth a vast and complex one. At the age of thirty-three Henry was already planning out an elaborate scheme for the future of his children and the distribution of his territories, in which the election of his eldest son as joint-king in England was but the first and least difficult step. Normandy and Anjou, as well as England, had to be secured for little Henry; Aquitaine was if possible to be settled upon Richard as his mother’s heir; for Geoffrey Henry was bent upon acquiring the Breton duchy.[225] Conan IV., whom Henry had in 1158 established as duke of Britanny, had but one child, a daughter, whose hand, together with the reversion of her father’s territories, the king was anxious to secure for his son. This however required the assent not only of Conan but of Louis of France, and also of the Breton barons, who bitterly resented the Norman interference which had set Conan as ruler over them, and were inclined to resist to the uttermost an arrangement which would bring them still more directly under the Norman yoke; while Louis was but too ready to encourage them in their resistance. A campaign in the summer of 1166, however, another in August 1167, and a third in the following spring so far broke their opposition[226] that in May 1169 Geoffrey was sent into Britanny to receive their homage as heir to the dukedom; three months later his father joined him,[227] and at Christmas they held their court together at Nantes,[228] whence they made a sort of triumphal progress through the duchy, receiving homage and fealty wherever they went.[229]

It had proved easier to subdue Britanny than to hold Aquitaine. The half independent princes of the south, so scornful of a king beyond the Loire, were at least equally scornful of a king from beyond the sea; in November 1166 Henry was obliged to summon them to a conference at Chinon,[230] and to relieve Eleanor of her task of government by sending her to keep Christmas in England,[231] while he himself took her place at Poitiers.[232] His foes seized their opportunity to revive the vexed question of Toulouse; a meeting with Raymond at Grandmont and an attempt to assert Henry’s ducal authority over the count of Auvergne led to a fresh rupture with Louis;[233] and in the spring of 1168 the discontented barons of Aquitaine, secure of the French king’s goodwill, broke into open revolt. In the midst of a negotiation with Louis, Henry hurried away to subdue them.[234] Scarcely had he turned northward again when Earl Patrick of Salisbury, whom he had appointed to assist Eleanor in the government of the duchy, was murdered by one of the rebel leaders;[235] and Eleanor was once more left to stand her ground alone in Poitou, while her husband was fighting the Bretons, staving off the ecclesiastical censures which threatened him, and vainly endeavouring to pacify Louis, who now openly shewed himself as the champion of all Henry’s disaffected vassals, Breton, Poitevin, Scottish and Welsh,[236] as well as of the exiled archbishop.

Henry meanwhile was endeavouring to strengthen his political position by alliances in more remote quarters; the marriage of his eldest daughter with the duke of Saxony had taken place early in 1168;[237] two years before, the hand of one of her sisters had been half promised to the marquis of Montferrat for his son, in return for his good offices with the Pope;[238] and a project was now on foot for the marriage of Henry’s second daughter, Eleanor, with the king of Castille—a marriage which took place in 1169;[239] while the infant Jane, who was scarcely four years old, was betrothed to the boy-king William of Sicily.[240] For Richard his father was now endeavouring to gain the hand of Adela of France, the younger daughter of Louis and Constance, as a sort of security for the investiture of Aquitaine; while at the same time Henry was on the one hand making interest with the Emperor’s Italian foes, the rising commonwealths of Lombardy and the jurisconsults of Bologna;[241] and on the other, Frederic was endeavouring to regain his alliance by an embassy headed by his own cousin, Henry’s new-made son-in-law, the duke of Saxony.[242]

All this political, ecclesiastical and diplomatic coil Henry had to unravel almost single-handed. Of the group of counsellors who had stood around him in his early years, Arnulf of Lisieux on one side of the sea and Richard de Lucy on the other were almost the sole survivors. He had lost the services of his constable Henry of Essex under very painful circumstances a few months before that council at Woodstock which saw the beginning of his quarrel with Thomas. The constable was accused by Robert de Montfort of having committed high treason six years before by purposely letting fall the standard and falsely proclaiming the king’s death at the battle of Consilt. Henry of Essex declared that he had dropped the standard in the paralysis of despair, really believing the king to be dead; and it is evident from the high commands which he held in the war of Toulouse and elsewhere that the king continued to treat him with undiminished confidence, and to regard him as one of his most valuable ministers and friends. The charge once made, however, could only be met by ordeal of battle. The encounter took place at Reading; Henry of Essex went down before his accuser’s lance; and all that his sovereign could do for him was to save his life by letting the monks of the neighbouring abbey carry his body off the field as if for burial, and when he proved to be still alive, suffering him to remain as a brother of the house, while his property was confiscated to the Crown and his services were lost to the state.[243] The king’s mother died in the autumn of 1167;[244] his old friend and adviser Earl Robert of Leicester passed away in 1168.[245] A desperate attempt was even made to part him from his wife, in order to get rid of his rights over Aquitaine;[246] while the man who had once been his most successful diplomatic agent and his unfailing helper against the wiles of all his enemies was now the most formidable tool in their hands.