Where and how the future duke of Aquitaine was being brought up there is nothing to show. All that we know about him, till he was well advanced in his thirteenth year, 1160 is that the sheriffs of London paid ten pounds six and eightpence for his travelling expenses on some occasion—probably 1163 his elder brother’s birthday feast—in 1163,[18] and that in May 1165 he went with his mother and eldest sister 1165-6 to join the king in Normandy.[19] Henry’s quarrel with S. Thomas of Canterbury was then at its height; and Henry’s discontented subjects in Aquitaine were quick to take advantage of the opportunity for mischief given them by the difficulties with France in which that quarrel involved him. On the pretext of “certain liberties whereof he had deprived them” some of them became so troublesome—chiefly, it seems, by their intrigues with King Louis[20]—that 1166 in November 1166 he summoned them to a conference at Chinon. It took place on Sunday, November 19,[21] with so little result that he sent Eleanor, who had apparently been trying to maintain order in the duchy during his absence, back to England and himself went to keep Christmas at Poitiers.[22] Whether Richard went with his mother or stayed with his father does not appear.
1167
In March Henry had a conference with Raymond of Toulouse at Grandmont. Shortly afterwards he tried to assert his ducal authority over the count of Auvergne. The only result was a fresh rupture with Louis,[23] which was temporarily patched up by a truce made in August to last till Easter next, March 31, 1168.[24] Before that date a formidable rebellion broke out in Aquitaine. The counts 1167-8 of Angoulême and La Marche,[25] the viscount of Thouars,[26] 1167-8 Robert of Seilhac in the Limousin and his brother Hugh,[27] Aimeric of Lusignan in Poitou, Geoffrey of Rancogne in the 1168 county of Angoulême,[28] “with many others,” sought to rebel against the king, and went about ravaging with fire and sword. When the king heard of this he hurried to the place, took the strong castle of Lusignan and made it stronger still, and destroyed the villages and fortresses of the rebels. He then revictualled his own castles, and left the duchy under the charge of Eleanor (who had rejoined him after Christmas) and of Earl Patrick of Salisbury, while he himself went to meet Louis on the Norman border on April 7.[29] The truce between the kings was now expired, and Henry desired a treaty of peace; but meanwhile the southern rebels were urging Louis to insist that Henry should indemnify them for the loss and damage which he had inflicted upon them, and which they represented as a breach of his truce with France, the French king being supreme lord of Aquitaine.[30] They even placed in the hands of Louis the hostages which they had promised to Henry.[31] Louis did not go to the conference in person, but sent some nobles to represent him.[32] To them Henry proposed a new scheme for the future of Aquitaine: that its young duke-designate should marry the youngest daughter of Louis. The French envoys refused to bind their sovereign 1168 to this unexpected condition; it was, however, agreed “that if Richard should ask for his rights over the Count of St. Gilles”—that is, of Toulouse—“the king of France should try the cause in his court.” Thus the settlement of Aquitaine on Richard was, by implication at least, recognized by France, although Richard himself was not yet eleven years old. As to the aggrieved nobles, Henry promised them restitution;[33] but Louis would not give up the hostages; and the conference ended in another truce to last till the octave of midsummer.[34]
Scarcely had the parties separated when tidings came that Earl Patrick had been slain in a fight with some of the malcontents.[35] Henry was too much overburdened with other cares to attempt during the rest of that year any personal intervention in Aquitaine. Eleanor seems to have urged him to make it formally over to Richard.[36] She probably saw that there was no likelihood of a good understanding between her people and her Angevin husband, and hoped to be more successful in governing them herself in the name of her son. Her suggestion, and that which Henry had made nine months before to the representatives 1169 of Louis, were both carried into effect on January 6, 1169, when the two kings made peace at Montmirail. The two elder sons of Henry and Eleanor were both present at the meeting. Henry himself first did homage to Louis for his continental possessions; young Henry did the like for Britanny, Anjou and Maine; then Richard was betrothed to the French king’s daughter Aloysia, and likewise performed the homage due to Louis for the county of Poitou and the duchy of Aquitaine.[37]
The feudal situation created by these transactions was a strange one. It was capable of at least two different 1169 interpretations, and its practical result, so far as Aquitaine was concerned, was that for the next twenty years there were two dukes of that country. Henry’s purpose in thus making his sons do homage to Louis was to guard against the possibility of dispute, after his own death, as to the portion of his dominions to which each of them was entitled. In his eyes the homage was anticipatory of a future and perhaps—for he was not yet thirty-six—still very remote event, and its effect was merely prospective. But, so far as can be seen, no such limitation of its scope was expressed in the act of homage; and the legal effect of that act therefore was not merely prospective, but immediate; it at once made the younger Henry and Richard respectively count of Anjou and duke of Aquitaine, not under the suzerainty of their father, but under the direct overlordship of the French king. Such at least would be its legal effect as soon as the boys were old enough to govern for themselves; and this age young Henry had almost reached, for he was in his fourteenth year. Their father, on the other hand, as the sequel shows, never intended to give during his own lifetime any real authority at all to young Henry, nor did he intend to give any to Richard otherwise than with a tacit but perfectly well understood reservation of his own right of intervention and control whenever he might choose to exercise it; and he still remained legally both count and duke, for he had just repeated, in both capacities, his own homage to Louis. There can be no doubt that Louis was fully alive (although it seems that Henry was not) to the advantages which the French Crown might derive from this complicated state of affairs. But he was, of course, not desirous of pointing them out to his rival; and during the next four years he carefully refrained from all interference with the affairs of the Angevin dominions. The new duke of Aquitaine was, however, not yet twelve years old, and it was clearly with the French king’s sanction that his father, in the spring, marched into the duchy and forcibly brought the counts of Angoulême and La Marche and most of the other rebels to submission.[38]
Our only certain notice of Richard between January 1169 and June 1172 shows him to have been, at some time in 1170 1170, at Limoges with his mother, laying the foundation-stone of the abbey of S. Augustine.[39] On the Octave of 1172 Whit-Sunday, June 11, 1172, his formal installation as duke took place at Poitiers. In the abbey church of S. Hilary he was placed, according to custom, in the abbot’s chair, and the sacred lance and banner which were the insignia of the ducal office were given to him by the Archbishop of Bordeaux and the Bishop of Poitiers. He afterwards proceeded to Limoges, where he was received with a solemn procession; the ring of S. Valeria, the protomartyr of Aquitaine, was placed on his finger, and he was then proclaimed as “the new Duke”[40]—for it was in virtue of this double investiture, given not by the king of France, but by the local prelates and clergy as representatives of the local saints of the land, that the dukes of Aquitaine claimed to hold their dukedom.
Eight months later another important ceremony took place at Limoges. Henry and Eleanor, accompanied by their two elder sons, held court in the castle for a week with the kings of Aragon and Navarre, and the counts of Toulouse and Maurienne. Alfonso of Aragon, Raymond of Toulouse, and Humbert of Maurienne had met Henry at Montferrand in Auvergne, the last-named to make a treaty of marriage between his daughter and Henry’s youngest 1173 son, John, the two former to seek the king’s mediation in a quarrel between themselves. Alfonso was the son of Queen Petronilla and Raymond of Barcelona, and brother of the girl to whom Richard had been betrothed in 1159. He and Raymond of Toulouse were at strife about the homage of Cerdagne, Foix, and Carcassonne; both were anxious for the friendship of their nearest and most powerful neighbour. 1173 Henry “made peace between them,” and Raymond, whose territories were ringed in by those of Aragon and Aquitaine, paid the peacemaker his price; “he became the man of the king, and of the new king his son, and of Count Richard of Poitou, to hold Toulouse of them”—that is, to hold it immediately of Richard, who held it under his elder brother and his father—“as a hereditary fief, by military service at the summons of either king or count, and by a yearly payment of a hundred marks of silver or of ten destriers worth at least ten marks each.”[41]
A few months later Richard entered actively on public life; and he made a bad beginning. Towards the end of March the younger King Henry fled from his father’s court in Normandy to that of Louis.[42] The elder Henry had been warned at Limoges by Raymond of Toulouse that “his wife and his sons had formed a conspiracy against him”;[43] but he had disregarded the warning, and left Richard and 1173 Geoffrey in Aquitaine under the guardianship of their mother. Early in the summer both the lads joined their elder brother in France,[44] and all three pledged themselves by a solemn oath, at a great council in Paris, “not to forsake the king of France, nor to make any peace with their father save through him (Louis) and the French barons”; Louis in return swearing, and causing his barons to swear, “that he would help the young king and his brothers, to the utmost of his power, to maintain their war against their father and to gain possession of the kingdom of England” for young Henry.[45]
The “young king” was eighteen years old; he was as shallow-minded and selfish as he was handsome and superficially attractive; and he had fallen under the influence of Louis, to whose daughter he was married. Crowned in 1170 as his father’s heir, he chose to consider himself aggrieved by being given no share in the government of England or of the Angevin home-lands. He may have persuaded his brothers to consider themselves as victims of a similar grievance with regard to their duchies of Aquitaine and Britanny. He and Louis were naturally anxious to secure the forces of those two duchies in support of their scheme of ousting the elder King Henry from his dominions, continental and insular; and they hoped that the example of the boy-dukes might help to detach their respective vassals from their father’s cause.[46] But the lads had a nearer counsellor than young Henry or Louis, and one to whose counsels it was only natural, and in a measure right, that they should listen with reverence and submission. Eleanor unquestionably sided with her elder son against her husband, for she was caught in the act of trying to make her way from Aquitaine to the French court disguised in the dress of a man.[47] Certainly nothing can justify, or even excuse, the duplicity of this “eagle of the broken covenant” towards the husband and sovereign who, even when his eyes were fully opened to the treason of their eldest son, still put such confidence in her loyalty 1173 as to leave the younger eaglets in her charge. But there is a very considerable excuse for Richard and Geoffrey. On the ground of that feudal loyalty which was a principle of such importance in the life of those days, there was, indeed, something to be said for all three of the brothers, and more especially for Richard. None of them were homagers of Henry II; all of them were homagers of Louis and of Louis alone. For Richard it might further be urged that if he was under any other feudal obligation, it was more to his mother than to his father; his possession of Aquitaine was their joint gift, but it was on Eleanor’s consent that the validity of the gift really rested; Henry possessed the dukedom only in right of his wife. On the higher ground of filial duty Henry’s and Eleanor’s claims to the obedience of their children were equal; Richard and Geoffrey suddenly found that those claims were conflicting, and that a choice must be made between the two. That the choice really lay between right and wrong is much plainer to us than it could be to these lads, of whom the elder was not yet sixteen, and both of whom were under the direct personal influence of their mother. On her, rather than on them, lies the responsibility for their wrong choice.