Henry meanwhile had come to an agreement with the king of France which was likely to have an important influence on the future of Richard and of his duchy. On December 6, 1183 1183, the two kings held a conference, and Henry did a thing which he had never before consented to do: he did homage to Philip for “all his territories on the French side of the sea.”[225] Philip’s acceptance of this homage constituted a legal recognition on his part, as lord paramount, of Henry as—among other things—duke of Aquitaine. The kings then proceeded to make a new settlement about the dowry of young Henry’s widow. As she was childless, that portion of it which was in the hands of her father-in-law—Gisors and the rest of the Norman Vexin—legally reverted to France on her husband’s death. Philip, however, in consideration of an annuity to be paid by Henry to Margaret, “quit-claimed Gisors to the English king, so that he might give it to whichever of his sons he should choose, with the French 1183 king’s other sister,” Aloysia.[226] Henry evidently hoped to keep Aloysia and her dowry by substituting John for Richard as her bridegroom, and thus to facilitate the winning of Philip’s assent to the further substitution of John for Richard as heir of Aquitaine. Richard was probably quite 1183-4 willing to relinquish his personal claim upon Aloysia; there is no indication that he had ever cared for her; and on the other hand there are indications that about this time he formed an attachment to another maiden of royal birth, Berengaria of Navarre.[227] On the subject of Aquitaine, however, he was immoveable. In vain Henry alternately besought and commanded him to grant “if not the whole of Aquitaine, at least a part of it,” to John. Richard’s answer was always the same: never, so long as he lived, would he give any part of the duchy 1184 to anyone. At last, in a burst of anger, Henry gave John leave to “lead an army into Richard’s land and get what he wanted from his brother by fighting him.”[228] The words were probably uttered without thought of their consequences, in a fit of ungovernable impatience at Richard’s obduracy; but John was quite ready to take them literally, and knew that his next brother, Geoffrey—who had been formally reconciled to his father and to Richard in July 1183[229]—both could and would supply him with means for his purpose. No sooner had the king returned to England in June 1184 than Geoffrey and John collected “a great host” and marched plundering and burning into Richard’s land. Henry, when he learned what was going on, peremptorily summoned all the three to England, brought them to a public reconciliation in November, and then sought to dispose for a while of Geoffrey where he could make no further mischief between the two others, by sending him, 1184 not back to Britanny, but to Normandy, as a nominal assistant to the officers who were in charge of that duchy.[230] It 1185 was not till after Christmas that Richard received permission to return to Poitou. He crossed from Dover to Wissant;[231] whether on his way through Normandy and Anjou he met Geoffrey—who was certainly the evil genius of the family—and what may have passed between them if he did, we know not; we only know that on April 16 Henry himself went back to Normandy, and straightway “gathered a great host to subdue his son Richard, who had fortified Poitou against him and attacked his brother Geoffrey, contrary to the king’s prohibition.”[232]
Henry’s military preparations were in reality only a part of a new scheme which he had devised for making Richard 1184 surrender Poitou. In the preceding June (1184) Queen Eleanor, after eleven years of captivity, had been released by her husband’s order and permitted to join their eldest daughter and her husband the duke of Saxony, now for the 1185 second time driven into exile.[233] At the end of April (1185) Henry sent for her, and also for their daughter and son-in-law, to join him in Normandy; “and when they arrived, he sent instructions to his son Richard that he should without delay surrender the whole of Poitou with its appurtenances to his mother Queen Eleanor, because it was her heritage; and he added that if Richard in any way delayed to fulfil this command, he was to know for certain that the queen his mother would make it her own business to ravage the land with a great host. And Richard, when he had heard his father’s command, yielded to the wholesome advice of his friends; and laying down the arms of iniquity, returned with all meekness to his father, and surrendered all Poitou, with his castles and fortresses, to his mother.”[234]
Henry’s scheme seemed to be on the verge of success. Richard had at last been induced to surrender, nominally to his mother, but practically to his father—for Eleanor was clearly a mere cipher in the matter—the fief for which he was his father’s homager, and which was the material basis 1185 of the ducal power over all Aquitaine; he had set his father free to make a new grant of that fief to whomsoever he would. If a grant of it were made to John, with the sanction of the lord paramount, Richard would soon be unable to stand his ground in the duchy, should he even attempt to do so. For the time being Richard was utterly passive. It was his nature to do nothing by halves, and his submission seems to have been as whole-hearted as his defiance had been; “he remained,” says an English chronicler with evident admiration, “with his father as an obedient son.”[235] Henry kept 1186 him in suspense for eleven months. Then, on March 10, 1186, the two kings held another conference, and the treaty made in December 1183 was confirmed, but with a modification of one article. In 1184 Henry had either made overtures, or readily accepted overtures made to him, for a marriage between Richard and a daughter of the Emperor;[236] but the maiden had died before the end of the year.[237] This project had been succeeded by another whose originator is most likely to have been Richard himself; it can hardly have been at any other time than during his brief period of freedom from his engagement to Aloysia that he received a promise of Berengaria’s hand from her father, King Sancho.[238] His 1186 inclination, however, was overridden by his father’s imperious will and by the exigencies of the family policy. If Philip knew or suspected anything of Henry’s projects for John, he was probably keen-witted enough to perceive their futility and to prefer running no risk of a family alliance with a Lackland. On the other hand, the retention of Aloysia’s dower-lands was a matter of interest to Henry’s heir as well as to Henry himself. The sequel was to show that Henry had no real intention of marrying Aloysia to either of his sons; he may therefore have privately intimated to Richard that the sacrifice now required of him was only temporary. At any rate, in the treaty with Philip as ratified 1186 on March 10, 1186, it was distinctly stated that Aloysia and her dowry, the Vexin, were to be given to the bridegroom for whom she had been originally destined, Richard.[239]
An agreement with France was at that moment especially important for Henry because he was anxious to return to England. He began his preparations for departure over sea by making some changes in the custody of his various demesne lands and castles;[240] in particular, he appointed new castellans of his own choosing to the charge of the principal fortresses of Aquitaine. It was hardly possible for Richard not to feel hurt by this measure, “yet his father met with no complaint from him.”[241] Suddenly the king again changed his mind, or at least his policy. We cannot tell whether he was moved by Richard’s unwonted meekness, or whether some unrecorded occurrence opened his eyes to a fact which in all likelihood Richard’s southern counsellors, when they advised the young duke to accede to his father’s demand, foresaw would be made manifest ere long: the fact that Richard was the only person who could preserve anything like administrative order and political security in Aquitaine when Henry himself was out of reach. We only know that at the end of April the king “entrusted to his son Richard an infinite sum of money, bidding him go and subdue his enemies under him,” and then himself sailed for England, taking the queen with him.[242]
Richard’s surrender of Poitou was thus practically annulled. It may have been merely verbal, so that no formal act was necessary to reinstate him as count. The particular enemies whom he was to subdue are not named, but it seems plain that the chief of them was Raymond of Toulouse; for Richard “straightway departing (from Normandy) collected a great multitude of knights and foot-soldiers, with which he invaded the lands of the count of S. Gilles and not only ravaged, but conquered, the greater part of them.”[243] Geography suggests that the part of Raymond’s lands which Richard “conquered” at this time was probably the northern part, that is, the Quercy, where Richard as suzerain had already had to chastise more than one of Raymond’s subfeudataries; and this inference is strengthened by later indications. Raymond, helpless before the sudden violence of the duke’s onset, fled from place to place and despatched messenger after messenger to their common overlord, King Philip, imploring succour from France. Philip, however, was just then in no mind to quarrel openly with the king of England or his son; it suited him better to plot secretly with one of the younger sons against the father and the eldest son, and this was what he was actually doing with Geoffrey when in August their plotting was cut short by Geoffrey’s death.[244] A question at once arose whether Henry, the immediate overlord of Britanny, or Philip, the lord paramount, should be guardian of Geoffrey’s child. An embassy sent from England to treat with Philip on this subject met with a very uncivil reception, and went back accompanied by two French knights charged with a message to Henry that he must expect no security from attack in Normandy unless Count Richard of Poitou ceased to molest the count of S. Gilles.[245] What Raymond had done to excite the wrath of both Henry and Richard we are not told, but it is clear that Henry did not disapprove Richard’s proceedings; he made no attempt to check them, and did not return to Normandy 1187 till February of the next year. Richard met him at Aumale, and accompanied him on Low Sunday, April 5, to a conference 1187 with Philip “from which they withdrew without hope of peace or concord, on account of the intolerable demands made by the king of France.”[246] These demands were, first, that he should receive Richard’s homage for the county of Poitou;[247] and secondly, that Aloysia and her dowry, Gisors, should be restored to France.[248]
However “intolerable” these demands might be to Henry, they were in themselves not unreasonable. Richard seems to have been personally not unwilling to comply with the first condition; he had when a boy been made to do homage to Louis VII, and probably saw no reason for not doing the same to Louis’s successor. Henry, however, was resolved that the homage should not be done, and while ostensibly leaving the matter in Richard’s hands, made him put it off from day to day.[249] The second condition was a natural consequence of the fact that although more than twelve months had passed since the explicit renewal of Richard’s engagement to Aloysia, there was still no sign of any preparations for their marriage. On this point Henry and Richard were probably at one. At a somewhat later time a horrible reason was assigned—seemingly by persons whose testimony had weight enough to carry conviction to both Richard and Philip—for Henry’s obstinate non-compliance with Philip’s demands for either Aloysia’s marriage or the restoration of her person together with her dowry. As yet, however, Richard at least evidently did not suspect his father of being actuated by any worse motives than, as regards the former alternative, consideration for Richard’s own disinclination to make Aloysia his wife; and as regards the latter alternative, a reluctance, which Richard himself could not but share, to loose the Angevin hold on Gisors.
Seeing that he could get no satisfaction by negotiation, Philip prepared for war. Marching from the French part of Berry into the Aquitanian part, he seized Issoudun and Graçay and advanced upon Châteauroux.[250] It is doubtful 1187 whether Henry and Richard set out together to check him, or whether Henry sent forward Richard and John, each at the head of a body of troops, to defend Châteauroux till he himself could join them.[251] At any rate, by midsummer the combined action of father and sons had caused Philip to raise the siege and decide upon trying his fortune against them in the open field. On the eve of S. John the two armies were drawn up facing each other in battle array, ready to engage next morning. At the last moment, however, the kings made a truce and withdrew each to his own domains. Two English authorities assign the most important part in the preliminary negotiations to Richard. According to Gervase of Canterbury the first overtures came from the French side, and were addressed to the count of Poitou; Count Philip of Flanders contrived to get speech with him and urged upon him the importance, for his own future interest, of making a friend of the king of France; after some discussion Richard followed Flanders back through the French lines to the tent of Philip Augustus, held a long private colloquy with him, and “at length returned, with his mind at rest, to his own comrades in arms.” He had gone without his father’s knowledge; Henry, when he heard of the incident, “suspected that it meant treachery, not peace,” and sent a request to some of the French nobles that they would come and confer with himself. They complied; he commissioned them to ask Philip for a truce of two years, on the plea of a vow of Crusade; Philip consented, but when his consent was announced Henry declared he had changed his mind—he would have no truce. Philip on hearing this ordered an attack at break of day. Henry grew alarmed; the midsummer daybreak was very near, for it was already past midnight, when he hurriedly called his son. “What shall we do? what counsel dost thou give me?” “What counsel can I give,” said Richard, “when thou hast refused the truce which yesterday thou desiredst? We cannot ask for it again now without great shame.” Moved, however, by his father’s evident distress, he offered to face the shame. He went; he found Philip already armed for battle; bare-headed 1187 he knelt before him, offered him his sword, and begged him for a truce, promising that if Henry should break it in any way he, Count Richard, would submit his own person in Paris to the judgement of the French king. On this condition Philip gave a reluctant consent to the truce.[252] Gerald of Wales, on the other hand, represents the first advances as having been made by Henry in a letter to Philip proposing peace on the following terms: that Aloysia should be given in marriage to John, with the counties of Poitou and Anjou and all the other territories held by Henry of the French king, except Normandy, which was to remain united to England as the heritage of the eldest son. Philip sent the letter to Richard, who, when he had mastered its contents, was naturally moved to deep indignation on learning that his father was thus scheming to deprive him of the larger part of his heritage at a time when they were actually in camp together and he was loyally fulfilling his duties as vassal and son. Caring no longer to fight for his father against Philip, he seized an opportunity which presented itself at the moment to bring about a truce.[253]
Neither of these two accounts seems to imply that Richard at Châteauroux acted otherwise than loyally and in good faith towards his father. In one of them, however, the father is distinctly charged with plotting behind his son’s back to deprive him of half his inheritance. The proposal which Henry is said to have made to Philip is indeed utterly at variance with the policy implied in all his previous arrangements for the future of his dynasty; it is a proposal to disintegrate the foundations of the edifice which he had been building up all his life, by putting asunder what the marriage of his parents had joined together, Anjou and Normandy. We are not told whether it provided that John should hold his share of the Angevin territories under his brother’s overlordship, or not. If it did, its fulfilment would have reduced the original Angevin patrimony to the rank of a mere underfief; if not, the scheme would seem to imply 1187 nothing short of a deliberate intention on Henry’s part of rending in twain with his own hands the dominion which he had been for thirty years labouring to weld together into a solid whole. Yet that Henry would, if he could, willingly have gone as far as this or even farther, in his infatuated partiality for John, seems to be the only possible explanation of his attitude, or rather of his endless shifts and changes of attitude, towards both Richard and Philip through the six years which followed the death of the young king. When the end came, he himself summed up the tragic story of those years in one significant sentence: “For the sake of John’s advancement I have brought upon me all these ills.”[254] His paternal affection had been concentrated mainly upon two of his sons, the eldest and the youngest; after young Henry’s death it was concentrated upon John alone; Richard, though of all the four he was certainly the least unworthy, seems never to have enjoyed more than a comparatively small share of it. The story of the letter may have been a fiction, or the letter may have been a forgery; but whether the falsehood—if there be one—were Gerald’s or Philip’s, it was a lie which was half a truth.
The formal terms of the truce—which was to last for two years[255]—were arranged by the papal legate then resident in France, and some other men of religion[256] acting “on the orders of the Pope and the advice of the faithful men of both kings.”[257] When the agreement was signed, the French king, “by way of shewing to all men that concord was attained,” invited Richard to accompany him to Paris. Richard accepted the invitation;[258] and he stayed so long, and—so at least it was reported—on terms of such close and affectionate intimacy with Philip that Henry “marvelled what this might be,” and delayed his intended journey to England “till he should know what would be the outcome 1187 of this sudden friendship” between his overlord and his son.[259] He sent messenger after messenger to call Richard back, promising “to do all that might be justly required of him.” Richard answered that he was coming, but instead of doing so he went to Chinon, where the treasure of Anjou was kept; in spite of the treasurer’s opposition he carried off “all the treasure that he found there”—which indeed is not likely to have been much—proceeded with it into Poitou, and there used it to fortify or revictual his castles. His contumacy, however, as usual, did not last long. His father “ceased not to send messengers to him till they brought him back; and when he came, he submitted to his father in all things and was penitent for having consented to the evil counsels of those who strove to sow discord between them. So they came both together to Angers; and there the son became his father’s obedient man, and swore on the holy Gospels, before many witnesses, fealty to him against all men; and he swore also that he would not go against his father’s counsel.”[260]