The whole assembly wept with the Patriarch; and the king himself was deeply moved.[1143] How many of his earlier projects of going on crusade—now to Spain, now to Holy Land, now alone, now with the king of France—had been mere political expedients, we cannot tell; there may have been more sincerity in them than one is at first disposed to imagine. Little as Henry cared for either war or adventure merely for its own sake, still there flowed in his veins, no less than in those of his young cousin Baldwin, the blood of Angevin pilgrims and crusaders. The lifelong dream of Fulk Nerra and Fulk V. may have been also the dream of Henry, although none of the three was a man to let his dreams influence his conduct until he saw a clear possibility of realizing them. Whether there was such a possibility now, however, was a question whose decision did not rest with Henry alone. If he was to head a crusade, he must head it not merely as count of Anjou but as king of England, with all England’s powers and resources, material and moral, at his back; and this could only be if England sanctioned his undertaking. The “faithful men of the land”—the bishops and barons, the constitutional representatives of the nation—were therefore gathered together in council at Clerkenwell on March 18; Henry bade them advise him as they thought best for his soul’s health, and promised to abide by their decision. After deliberation, they gave it as their unanimous judgement that he must remain at home and not venture to abandon, for the sake of giving his personal assistance in the east, the work to which he was pledged by his coronation-oath, of keeping his own realms in peace and order and securing them from external foes.[1144] Whether or not the decision thus arrived at was wise for the interests of Christendom at large—whether or not it redounds altogether to the honour of England—it was surely the highest tribute she could pay to her Angevin king. A ruler from whom his people were so unwilling to part had clearly some better hold over them than that of mere force. That they shrank with such dread from any interruption of his kingly labours is the best proof how greatly they had benefited by those labours during the past thirty years.

The Patriarch was bitterly disappointed, and vented his disappointment upon Henry in unmeasured terms. In vain did he intreat that at least John, the only one of the king’s sons then in England, might be sent to infuse some new life into the rapidly-dying stock of the Angevin house in Palestine. John himself, it is said, was eager to go,[1145] but the king refused his consent, and six weeks later, as we have seen, despatched him as governor to Ireland. This mission failed completely, through John’s own fault. He was received with every demonstration of loyalty both by the native princes and by the English settlers; but in a very few months he contrived to set them all against him. He treated the English leaders with the most overbearing insolence; he insulted the Irish chieftains who came to bring him their loyal greetings at Waterford more brutally still, mocking at their dress and manners, and even pulling their beards;[1146] he sent the mercenaries who had accompanied him from England to make a raid upon North Munster, in which they were repulsed with great loss,[1147] and then exasperated them to mutiny by keeping them penniless while he spent their wages upon his own pleasure.[1148] By September he had brought matters to such a pass that his father was obliged to recall him and bid John de Courcy undertake the government of Ireland in his place.[1149] Henry however was far from abandoning his cherished scheme. Blinded by his fatal partiality for his youngest child, he was willing to attribute John’s failure to any cause except the true one; he determined that the lad should return to his post, but clothed with fuller powers and loftier dignity. Taking advantage of a change in the Papacy, he at once applied to the new Pope, Urban III., for leave to have his son anointed and crowned as king of Ireland. Urban not only gave his consent, but accompanied it with a gift of a crown made of peacock’s feathers set in gold.[1150] Next summer there came to England news that “a certain Irishman had cut off the head of Hugh de Lacy”;[1151] Henry, seeing in this event an opportunity of recovering for the Crown Hugh’s vast estates in Ireland, hurried John off thither at once[1152] without waiting to have him crowned, or possibly intending that the coronation should take place in Dublin. But before John had sailed, he was recalled by tidings of another death which touched his father more nearly.

Geoffrey of Britanny had gone to visit the French king in Paris; there, on August 19, he died.[1153] No one regretted him, unless it was his father, and Philip of France, who caused him to be buried with regal honours in the cathedral church of our Lady in Paris, and followed him to the grave with every demonstration of mourning.[1154] If report spoke true, Philip’s grief was as sincere as it was selfish; for Geoffrey had been cut off in the midst of a plot whereby he proposed, out of spite against his father and elder brother, to withdraw from them his homage for Britanny and become Philip’s liegeman, receiving in return the title of grand seneschal which in the year of his own birth had been conferred upon his father as a warrant for intervention in the affairs of the Breton duchy.[1155] Faithful servants of the English king were inclined to see in Geoffrey’s sudden end a divine judgement upon this undutiful scheme.[1156] Philip however saw a means of making his own profit out of Geoffrey’s death, quite as readily as out of his life. He at once claimed, as overlord, the wardship of the infant heiress-presumptive of Britanny—Eleanor, the only child of Geoffrey and Constance[1157]—and with it the administration of her duchy till she should be old enough to be married. Henry tried to temporize,[1158] but the longer the negotiations lasted the more complicated they became, as Philip kept increasing his demands. First Aquitaine was dragged into the dispute. Its northern portion was just now in a state of unwonted tranquillity, for at the close of the year we find Bertrand de Born complaining that he had witnessed neither siege nor battle for more than twelve months.[1159] Richard was in fact busy in the south, at war with the count of Toulouse.[1160] Against this Philip remonstrated, as an unjust aggression upon a loyal vassal of the French Crown;[1161] he added to his remonstrance a demand for Richard’s homage to himself for Aquitaine, and also—all prospect of Adela’s marriage being now apparently at an end—for the definite restitution of Gisors.[1162] While the two kings were negotiating, actual hostilities broke out between some of their constables on the border; the warlike zeal of both parties, however, died down at the approach of Christmas;[1163] Henry lingered in England to receive two papal legates who were coming to crown John as king of Ireland,[1164] but the crowning never took place; and at last, on February 17, 1187, king and legates sailed together for Normandy.[1165]

When the two kings met at the Gué-St.-Rémy on April 5,[1166] little Eleanor was no longer heiress of Britanny. On Easter-day Constance had become the mother of a son, whom the Bretons, in defiance of his grandfather’s wish to bestow upon him his own name, insisted upon calling after the legendary hero of their race, Arthur[1167]—thus at once claiming him as the representative of their national existence and rights. The child’s birth made little difference in the political situation; Philip claimed the wardship of the heir of Britanny just as he had claimed that of its heiress; the conference broke up, and both parties prepared for war. Henry distributed his forces in four divisions; one of these was commanded by his eldest son, Geoffrey the chancellor, who as bishop-elect of Lincoln had given good proof of his military capacities in the revolt of 1174;—another was intrusted to the king’s faithful friend Earl William de Mandeville; the other two were commanded respectively by Richard and John, and it seems that both of these were at once sent down into Berry, where Philip was expected to begin his attack. Soon after Whitsuntide Philip advanced upon Berry,[1168] took Issoudun and Graçay, and laid siege to Châteauroux.[1169] Henry now followed his sons; the three together marched to the relief of Châteauroux, and Richard apparently succeeded in making his way into the place, where John afterwards rejoined him.[1170] For nearly a fortnight the two kings remained encamped on opposite sides of the Indre, drawing up their forces every morning for battle;[1171] but each day the battle was averted by some means or other. Now it was the mediation of the French bishops in Philip’s camp, or of the Roman legates in that of Henry;[1172] now it was a miraculous judgement upon a sacrilegious Brabantine in the French host, which scared Philip into dismissing his mercenaries;[1173] now it was the count of Flanders who, as soon as his peace with France was made, turned against the peace-maker and sought to stir Richard up to play over again the part of the young king; now it was Henry himself who opened negotiations for a truce.[1174] Finally, on Midsummer-eve,[1175] a truce was made for two years.[1176] According to Bertrand de Born, it was wrung from Philip by the discovery that the troops of Champagne, which formed a considerable part of his army, had been bought over by the English king.[1177] Its actual negotiator was Richard;[1178] and when Richard, instead of returning to his father, rode away in the closest companionship with the king of France, Henry naturally grew suspicious of the terms on which it had been won. His suspicions were confirmed when Richard, under pretence of obeying his summons to return, made his way to Chinon and there seized the contents of the Angevin treasury, which he immediately applied to the fortification of his own castles in Poitou.[1179] A partizan of Richard tells us that Philip had communicated to him a letter in which Henry proposed to make peace by marrying Adela to John and constituting the latter heir to all his dominions except England and Normandy.[1180] If this scheme really existed, it was foiled by Philip’s own act; and when Henry and his elder son met soon afterwards at Angers, their differences were apparently settled for the moment by Richard’s reinstatement in the dukedom of Aquitaine; for we are told that he not only returned to his duty, but publicly renewed his homage to the king.[1181]

All these western quarrels again sank into the background before the tidings which came from Holy Land as the year drew to a close. Heraclius had gone home from his unsuccessful mission to find Baldwin IV. delivered out of all his troubles, and his throne occupied by his infant nephew, the child of his sister Sibyl. The little king soon followed his uncle to the grave; and Sibyl, on whom the representation of the royal house thus devolved, at once bestowed her crown upon the man who had already been for six years the bravest and most successful defender of the distracted realm—her husband, Guy of Lusignan.[1182] Guy sprang from a faithless race whom the Angevins had little cause to love or trust in their western home; but in Palestine he was hated simply because he had deservedly won the affection and the confidence of both Baldwin and Sibyl. Thwarted, baffled, deserted, betrayed by envious rivals, left almost alone to face the Infidel foes whose advance grew more threatening day by day, Guy fought on till in a great battle at Tiberias, in July 1187, he was made prisoner by the Turks; the Christians were totally defeated, and the relic of the Cross, which they had carried with them to the fight, fell with the king into the hands of the unbelievers.[1183] The tidings of this disaster, when they reached Europe in October, gave the death-blow to Pope Urban III.[1184] His successor, Gregory VIII., opened his pontificate with an impassioned appeal to all Western Christendom for the rescue of the Holy Land.[1185] The first response came from the young duke of Aquitaine; without waiting to consult his father, at the earliest tidings of the catastrophe Richard took the cross at the hands of the archbishop of Tours.[1186] Henry himself was so thunderstruck at the news that for four days he suspended all state business and refused to see any one.[1187] He was in Normandy, and with him was Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, who had taken the cross two years before with the archbishop of Rouen, the veteran warrior-bishop Hugh of Durham, the justiciar Ralf de Glanville, and a crowd of other dignitaries of both Church and state, none of whom, however, had as yet actually started on their crusade. It was not King Henry who hindered them; he had given every facility for the preaching of the crusade throughout his dominions;[1188] and even in Richard’s case, although reproving the hastiness of the vow, he made no attempt to thwart its fulfilment, but on the contrary promised his son every assistance in his power.[1189] Richard’s project, however, roused up the king of France to insist once more upon his immediate marriage with Adela, or, failing this, the restitution of Gisors; and Henry, on his way to England in January 1188, was recalled by tidings that Philip had gathered his host and was threatening to invade Normandy unless his demands were granted at once. The kings met at the old trysting-place between Gisors and Trie;[1190] but their conference had scarcely begun when it was interrupted by another messenger from Palestine, charged with news of a catastrophe more awful than even that of Tiberias. Three months after Guy’s capture, in October 1187, Jerusalem itself had fallen into the hands of the Infidels;[1191] and the archbishop of Tyre now came to tell with his own lips the sad and shameful story.