In 1171[634] Henry’s diplomatic relations with the Alpine princes bore fruit in a proposal from Humbert of Maurienne for the marriage of his eldest daughter with the king’s youngest son. Humbert himself had no son, and by the terms of the marriage-contract his territories, Alpine and Pyrenean, were to be settled upon his daughter and her future husband,[635] in return for five thousand marks of English silver.[636] The contract was signed and ratified before Christmas 1172,[637] and soon afterwards Henry summoned his eldest son to join him in a journey into Auvergne for a personal meeting with Humbert. They reached Montferrand before Candlemas, and were there met not only by Humbert and his daughter but also by the count of Vienne,[638] the count of Toulouse and the king of Aragon.[639] How high the English king’s influence had now risen in these southern lands may be judged by the fact that not only King Alfonso of Aragon, a son of his old ally Raymond-Berengar, but also his former enemy Raymond of Toulouse, could agree to choose him as arbiter in a quarrel between themselves.[640] Raymond in truth saw in Henry’s alliances with Aragon and Maurienne a death-blow to his own hopes of maintaining the independence of Toulouse. Hemmed in alike to south and east by close allies of the English king whose own duchy of Aquitaine surrounded almost the whole of its north-western border, the house of St.-Gilles felt that it was no longer possible to resist his claim to overlordship over its territories. Henry carried his guests back with him to Limoges; there he settled the dispute between Raymond and Alfonso; and there Raymond did homage to the two Henrys for Toulouse,[641] promising to do the like at Whitsuntide to Richard as duke of Aquitaine, and pledging himself to military service and yearly tribute.[642]

The infant heiress of Maurienne was now placed under the care of her intended father-in-law;[643] Henry’s political schemes seemed to have all but reached their fulfilment, when suddenly Count Humbert asked what provision Henry intended to make for the little landless bridegroom to whom he himself was giving such a well-dowered bride.[644] That question stirred up a trouble which was never again to be laid wholly to rest till the child who was its as yet innocent cause had broken his father’s heart. Henry proposed to endow John with the castles and territories of Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau.[645] But the Angevin lands, with which the younger Henry had been formally invested, could not be dismembered without his consent; and this he angrily refused.[646] The mere request, however, kindled his smouldering discontent into a flame[647] which seems to have been fanned rather than quenched by the suggestions of Eleanor; yet so blind was the indulgent father that, if we may venture to believe the tale, nothing but a warning from Raymond of Toulouse opened his eyes to the danger which threatened him from the plots of his own wife and children. Then, by Raymond’s advice, he started off at once with a small escort, under pretence of a hunting-party,[648] and carried his son back towards Normandy with the utmost possible speed. They reached Chinon about Mid-Lent; thence young Henry slipped away secretly by night to Alençon; his father flew after him, but when he reached Alençon on the next evening the son was already at Argentan; and thence before cock-crow he fled again over the French border, to the court of his father-in-law King Louis.[649] Henry in vain sent messengers to recall him: “Your master is king no longer—here stands the king of the English!” was the reply of Louis to the envoys.[650]

Henry at once made a circuit of his Norman fortresses, especially those which lay along the French border, put them in a state of defence, and issued orders to all his castellans in Anjou, Britanny, Aquitaine and England, to do the like.[651] Before Lent had closed the old prophecy which Henry’s enemies were never weary of casting in his teeth was fulfilled: his own “lion-cubs” were all openly seeking to make him their prey.[652] Whether sent by their mother, with whom they had been left behind in Aquitaine, or secretly fetched by their eldest brother in person,[653] both Richard and Geoffrey now joined him at the French court.[654] Eleanor herself was caught trying to follow them disguised as a man, and was by her husband’s order placed in strict confinement.[655] Louis meanwhile openly espoused the cause of the rebels; in a great council at Paris he and his nobles publicly swore to help the young king and his brothers against their father to the utmost of their power, while the three brothers on their part pledged themselves to be faithful to Louis, and to make no terms with their father save through his mediation and with his consent.[656] Young Henry at once began to purchase allies among the French feudataries and supporters among the English and Norman barons, by making grants of pensions and territories on both sides of the sea: grants for which the recipients did him homage and fealty,[657] and which he caused to be put in writing and sealed with a new seal made for him by order of Louis[658]—his own chancellor, Richard Barre, having loyally carried back the original one to the elder king who had first intrusted it to his keeping.[659]

Nearly three months passed away before war actually broke out; but when the outburst came, the list of those who were engaged in it shews that the whole Angevin empire had become a vast hotbed of treason; though, on the other hand, it shews also that the treason was almost entirely confined to one especial class. Its local distribution, too, is significant. The restless barons of Aquitaine, still smarting under their defeat of 1169, were but too eager, at the instigation of their duchess and their newly-crowned duke, to renew their struggle against the king. Foremost among them were, as before, the count of Angoulême,[660] the nobles of Saintonge, and Geoffrey of Lusignan, beside whom there stood this time his young brother Guy, now to begin in this ignoble strife a career destined to strange vicissitudes in far-off Palestine.[661] The heart of the old Angevin lands, Anjou itself, was in the main loyal; we find there the names of only five traitors; and three of these, Hugh, William and Jocelyn of Ste.-Maure, came of a rebellious house, and were only doing over again what their predecessors had done in the days of Geoffrey Plantagenet’s youth.[662] The same may be said of Henry’s native land, Maine; this too furnished only seven barons to the traitor’s cause; and five of these again are easily accounted for. It was almost matter of course that in any rising against an Angevin count the lord of Sablé should stand side by side with the lord of Ste.-Maure. Brachard of Lavardin had a fellow-feeling with undutiful sons, for he was himself at strife with his own father, Count John of Vendôme, a faithful ally of Henry II.; the same was probably the case of Brachard’s brother Guy.[663] Bernard of La Ferté represented a family whose position in their great castle on the Huisne, close to the Norman border, was almost as independent as that of their neighbours the lords of Bellême, just across the frontier. Hugh of Sillé bore a name which in an earlier stage of Cenomannian history—in the days of the “commune,” just a hundred years before—had been almost a by-word for feudal arrogance; and whether or not he inherited anything of his ancestor’s spirit, he had a personal cause for enmity to the king if, as is probable, he was akin to a certain Robert of Sillé, whose share in the southern revolt of 1169 was punished by Henry, in defiance of treaties, with an imprisonment so strict and cruel that it was speedily ended by death.[664]

Across the western border of Maine, in Geoffrey’s duchy, Ralf of Fougères was once more at the head of a band of discontented Breton nobles, chiefly, it seems, belonging to that old seed-plot of disturbance, the county of Nantes.[665] The true centre and focus of revolt, however, was as of old the duchy of Normandy. Almost all the great names which have been conspicuous in the earlier risings of the feudal baronage against the repressive policy of William and of Henry I. re-appear among the partizans of the young king. The house of Montfort on the Rille was represented by that Robert of Montfort[666] whose challenge to Henry of Essex ten years before had deprived the king of one of his most trusty servants. The other and more famous house of Montfort—the house of Almeric and of Bertrada—was also, now as ever, in opposition in the person of its head, Count Simon of Evreux.[667] He, like his fellow-traitor the count of Eu,[668] to whom, as after-events shewed, may be added the count of Aumale, represented one of those junior branches of the Norman ducal house which always resented most bitterly the determination of the dukes to concentrate all political power in their own hands. The counts of Ponthieu[669] and of Alençon[670] inherited the spirit as well as the territories of Robert of Bellême. Count Robert of Meulan[671] was the son of Waleran who in 1123 had rebelled against Henry I., and the head of the Norman branch of the great house of Beaumont, which for more than half a century had stood in the foremost rank of the baronage on both sides of the sea. The chief of the English Beaumonts was his cousin and namesake of Leicester, soon to prove himself an unworthy son of the faithful justiciar who had died in 1168; while the countess of Leicester, a woman of a spirit quite as determined and masculine as her husband’s, was the heiress of the proud old Norman house of Grandmesnil[672]—a granddaughter of that Ivo of Grandmesnil who had been banished by Henry I. for trying to bring into England the Norman practice of private warfare. Of the other English rebels, Hugh of Chester[673] was a son of the fickle Ralf, and had at stake besides his palatine earldom in England his hereditary viscounties of Bayeux and Avranches on the other side of the Channel. Hugh Bigod, the aged earl of Norfolk, untaught by his experiences of feudal anarchy in Stephen’s day and undeterred by his humiliation in 1157, was ready to break his faith again for a paltry bribe offered him by the young king.[674] Earl Robert of Ferrers, Hamo de Massey, Richard de Morville, and the whole remnant of the great race of Mowbray—Geoffrey of Coutances, Roger de Mowbray and his two sons—were all men whose grandfathers had “come over with the Conqueror,” and determined to fight to the uttermost for their share in the spoils of the conquest. All these men were, by training and sympathy, if not actually by their own personal and territorial interests, more Norman than English; and the same may probably be said of the rebels of the second rank, among whom, beside the purely Norman lords of Anneville and Lessay in the Cotentin, of St.-Hilaire on the Breton frontier, of Falaise, Dives, La Haye and Orbec in Calvados, of Tillières, Ivry and Gaillon along the French border, we find the names of Ralf of Chesney, Gerald Talbot, Jordan Ridel, Thomas de Muschamp, Saher de Quincy the younger, Simon of Marsh, Geoffrey Fitz-Hamon, and Jocelyn Crispin, besides one which in after-days was to gain far other renown—William the Marshal.[675]