Then Richard, face to face with death, came to his better self once more, and prepared calmly and bravely for his end. Until then he had suffered no one to enter the chamber where he lay save four barons whom he specially trusted, lest the report of his sickness should be bruited about,[1927] to discourage his friends or to rejoice his foes. Now, he summoned all of his followers who were within reach to witness his solemn bequest of all his dominions to his brother John, and made them swear fealty to John as his successor.[1928] He wrote to his mother, who was at Fontevraud, requesting her to come to him;[1929] he bequeathed his jewels to his nephew King Otto, and a fourth part of his treasures to be distributed among his servants and the poor.[1930] By this time Châlus was taken and its garrison hung, according to his earlier orders—all save the man who had shot him, and who had apparently been reserved for his special judgement. Richard ordered the man to be brought before him. “What have I done to thee,” he asked him, “that thou shouldest slay me?” “Thou hast slain my father and two of my brothers with thine own hand, and thou wouldst fain have killed me too. Avenge thyself upon me as thou wilt; I will gladly endure the greatest torments which thou canst devise, since I have seen thee upon thy death-bed.” “I forgive thee,” answered Richard, and he bade the guards loose him and let him go free with a gift of a hundred shillings.[1931] The story went that Richard had not communicated for nearly seven years, because he could not put himself in charity with Philip.[1932] Now, on the eleventh day after his wound—April 6, the Tuesday in Passion-week[1933]—he made his confession to one of his chaplains, and received the Holy Communion. His soul being thus at peace, he gave directions for the disposal of his body. It was to be embalmed; the brain and some of the internal organs were to be buried in the ancient Poitevin abbey of Charroux; the heart was to be deposited in the Norman capital, where it had always found a loyal response; the corpse itself was to be laid, in token of penitence, at his father’s feet in the abbey-church of Fontevraud.[1934] Lastly, he received extreme unction; and then, “as the day drew to its close, his day of life also came to its end.”[1935] His friends buried him as he had wished. S. Hugh of Lincoln, now at Angers on his way to protest against a fresh spoliation of his episcopal property, came to seal his forgiveness by performing the last rites of the Church over this second grave at Fontevraud,[1936] where another Angevin king was thus “shrouded among the shrouded women”—his own mother, doubtless, in their midst.[1937] He was laid to sleep in the robes which he had worn on his last crowning-day in England, five years before.[1938] His heart was enclosed in a gold and silver casket, carried to Rouen, and solemnly deposited by the clergy among the holy relics in their cathedral church;[1939] and men saw in its unusual size[1940] a fit token of the mighty spirit of him whom Normandy never ceased to venerate as Richard Cœur-de-Lion.

CHAPTER IX.
THE FALL OF THE ANGEVINS.
1199–1206.

“In the year 1199,” says a contemporary French writer, “God visited the realm of France; for King Richard was slain.”[1941] Richard’s death was in truth the signal for the break-up of the Angevin dominions to the profit of the French Crown. John, who was at the moment in Britanny, hurried southward as soon as he heard the news. Three days after the funeral—on April 14, the Wednesday before Easter—he arrived at Chinon, the seat of the Angevin treasury; the wardens of the castle[1942] welcomed him as their lord in his brother’s stead; the household of the late king came to meet him and acknowledged him in like manner, after receiving from him a solemn oath that he would carry out Richard’s testamentary directions and maintain the customs of the lands over which he was called to rule.[1943] On this understanding the treasury was given up to him by the Angevin seneschal, Robert of Turnham.[1944] After keeping Easter at Beaufort,[1945] he proceeded into Normandy; here he was received without opposition, and on the Sunday after Easter was invested with the sword, lance and coronet of the duchy by Archbishop Walter at Rouen.[1946] As the lance was put into his hands he turned with characteristic levity to join in the laughing comments of the young courtiers behind him, and in so doing let the symbol of his ducal authority fall to the ground. His irreverent behaviour and refusal to communicate on Easter-day had already drawn upon him a solemn warning from S. Hugh; and this fresh example of his profane recklessness, and its consequence, were noted as omens which later events made but too easy of interpretation.[1947] For the moment, however, the Normans were willing to transfer to Richard’s chosen successor the loyalty which they had shewn towards Richard himself; and so, too, were the representatives of the English Church and baronage who happened to be on the spot, Archbishop Hubert and William the Marshal.[1948] But in the Angevin lands Philip’s alliance with the Bretons, fruitless so long as Richard lived, bore fruit as soon as the lion-heart had ceased to beat. While Philip himself invaded the county of Evreux and took its capital,[1949] Arthur was at once sent into Anjou with a body of troops;[1950] his mother, released or escaped from her prison, joined him at the head of the Breton forces;[1951] they marched upon Le Mans, whence John himself only escaped the night before it fell into their hands;[1952] Angers was given up to them by its governor, a nephew of the seneschal Robert of Turnham;[1953] and on Easter-day,[1954] while John was actually holding court within fifteen miles of them at Beaufort, the barons of Anjou, Touraine and Maine held a council at which Arthur was unanimously acknowledged as lawful heir to his uncle Richard according to the customs of the three counties, and their capital cities were surrendered to him at once.[1955] At Le Mans he met the French king and did homage to him for his new dominions, Constance swearing fealty with him.[1956] Shortly afterwards, at Tours, Constance formally placed her boy, who was now twelve years old, under the guardianship of Philip; and Philip at once took upon himself the custody and the administration of all the territories of his ward.[1957]

Neither in personal influence nor in political skill, however, was Constance a match for her mother-in-law. Eleanor was, as has been seen, at Fontevraud when Richard died. Feeling and policy alike inclined her to favour the cause of his chosen successor, her own only surviving son, rather than that of a grandson whom most likely she had never even seen. She therefore effected a junction with Mercadier and his Brabantines as soon as they had had time to march up from Châlus, and the whole band of mercenaries, headed by the aged queen and the ruthless but faithful Provençal captain, overran Anjou with fire and sword to punish its inhabitants for their abandonment of John.[1958] Having given this proof of her undiminished energy, Eleanor, to take away all pretext for French intermeddling in the south, went to meet Philip at Tours and herself did homage to him for Poitou.[1959] By this means Aquitaine was secured for John. John himself had made a dash into Maine and burned Le Mans in vengeance for the defection of its citizens.[1960] He could, however, venture upon no serious attempt at the reconquest of the Angevin lands till he had secured his hold upon Normandy and England; and for this his presence was now urgently needed on the English side of the Channel.

Archbishop Hubert and William the Marshal had already returned to England charged with a commission from John to assist the justiciar Geoffrey Fitz-Peter in maintaining order there until the new king should arrive.[1961] The precaution was far from being a needless one. The news of Richard’s death reached England on Easter Eve; and its consequences appeared the very next morning, when some of the nobles and knights went straight from their Easter feast to begin a course of rapine and depredation which recalls the disorders after the death of Henry I., and which was only checked by the return of the primate. Hubert at once excommunicated the evil-doers,[1962] and, in concert with the Marshal, summoned all the men of the realm to swear fealty and peaceable submission to John, as heir of Henry Fitz-Empress. The peace, however, was not so easy to keep now as it had been during the interval between Henry’s death and Richard’s coronation. Since then John himself had set an example which those whom he now claimed as his subjects were not slow to follow. All who had castles, whether bishops, earls or barons, furnished them with men, victuals and arms, and assumed an attitude of defence, if not of defiance; and this attitude they quitted only when the archbishop, the marshal and the justiciar had called all the malcontents to a conference at Northampton, and there solemnly promised that John should render to all men their rights, if they would keep faith and peace towards him. On this the barons took the oath of fealty and liege homage to John. The king of Scots refused to do the like unless his lost counties of Northumberland and Cumberland were restored to him, and despatched messengers charged with these demands to John himself; the envoys were, however, intercepted by the archbishop and his colleagues, and the Scot king was for a while appeased by a promise of satisfaction when the new sovereign should arrive in his island-realm.[1963]