Eleanor, captured by some of her husband’s scouts, was at once placed by him in strict confinement.[48] Her eldest son’s cause gained practically nothing by the adhesion of his young brothers. According to one account, both of them accompanied him to the siege of Drincourt in July.[49] The success of that siege, however, was due, not to any of the three, but to their allies the counts of Flanders and Boulogne; moreover, the death of the latter soon afterwards caused the Flemish troops to withdraw to their own country, and nothing further came of the expedition.[50] The rebel barons of Geoffrey’s duchy all submitted to his father in the autumn.[51] At a conference on September 25 at Gisors Henry made fair offers to all three of his sons; “but the 1173 king of France did not deem it advisable that the [English] king’s sons should make peace with their father.”[52] At some time before the end of the year Richard was knighted by Louis.[53] Young Henry and Geoffrey seem to have remained at the French court through the winter, but Richard characteristically went his own way; he returned to Aquitaine. Considering the extent of that country and the character of its previous relations with Henry II, it seems to have furnished a very small proportion of names to the list of avowed partizans of the young king; and the more important Aquitanian names which we do find there are those of men whose disobedience is very unlikely to have been in any way connected with that of Richard—Count William of Angoulême, Geoffrey of Rancogne, Geoffrey and Guy of Lusignan, William of Chauvigny, and Thomas of Coulonges in Poitou, Charles of Rochefort in Saintonge, Robert of Blé in the Limousin, and in Gascony Jocelyn of Maulay and Archbishop William of Bordeaux.[54] The first four of these needed no incitement from the young duke’s example, and the last two are not likely to have been influenced by it, to throw off their allegiance to his father. The Aquitanian rebels in 1173 would probably have been more numerous had not the barons of the Limousin been at that time too busy fighting among themselves to give much heed to disagreements between their rival rulers. The confusion in those parts was aggravated by a swarm of “Brabantines,” or foreign mercenaries,[55] probably brought in by Henry at an earlier time, and now roving about the land and preying on it wholly at their own will and pleasure. There was no one to control either Brabantines or barons, since Richard’s withdrawal and Eleanor’s imprisonment had left Aquitaine without any resident governor at all, till in the winter Richard went back to put himself single-handed at the head of affairs. We hear of him as far south as Bordeaux, where he was no doubt sure of a welcome from Archbishop William, and secured the support of another great churchman, the abbot of S. Cross, by confirming the 1173 privileges of the abbey.[56] He tried to win to his cause the rising town of La Rochelle; but in this he failed; the townsfolk shut their gates in his face.[57] He soon, however, had under his command a considerable force of knights which 1174 c. May 12 at Whitsuntide 1174 seized the city of Saintes. Henry was then at Poitiers; at the head of a body of loyal Poitevins he marched upon Saintes and drove out the intruders,[58] and recovered possession of several other rebel fortresses.[59] The hopes of young Henry and Louis had broken down both in Aquitaine and in Normandy. In England they broke down still more completely; and the failure of the rebellion there led to the reopening of negotiations for peace.
Some ten or fifteen years later a bitter enemy of Henry II described the characters of young Henry and of Richard both at once in the form of a comparison, or rather contrast, between them.[60] The contrast showed itself even in the ill-omened first stage of their political and military careers. Throughout the rebellion of 1173-4 the young king was a mere tool—and a very inefficient one—in the hands of Louis. At the instigation of Louis he had entered upon the war, and at the dictation of Louis he was ready to accept terms of peace. Geoffrey was apparently contented with a similar position; but not so Richard. Eleanor might have made a tool of her second son, but no one else could do so. It was not for love of either young Henry or Louis that he had sided with them, and not at their behest 1174 Sept. 8 would he give up the struggle. On his seventeenth birthday the kings met at Gisors; but “they could not come to a settlement because of the absence of Count Richard, who at that time was in Poitou, making war on the castles and men of his father.” The conference ended in a truce till 1174 Michaelmas,[61] on the understanding that meanwhile Henry should subdue Richard by force without hindrance from Louis, young Henry, or their adherents. Richard was not yet hardened enough to contemplate fighting his father in person; “when King Henry was come into Poitou, his son Richard dared not await him, but fled from every place at his approach, abandoning all the fortresses that he had taken, not daring to hold them against his father.” When he learned the terms of the truce, his indignation at being thus deserted by his supposed allies made him suddenly determine on a better course. “He came weeping, and fell with his face on the ground at the feet of the king his Sept. 23 father, beseeching his forgiveness.” It was granted instantly and completely.[62] Father and son re-entered Poitiers together.[63] At Henry’s suggestion Richard went in person to assure his elder brother and Louis that he was no longer an obstacle to the conclusion of peace; and on September 30 the peace was made at Montlouis in Touraine. Henry’s three sons placed themselves at his mercy and “returned to him and to his service as their lord.” He promised to each of them a specified provision; and they all pledged themselves to accept these provisions as final and nevermore to require anything further from him save at his own pleasure, nor to withdraw themselves or their service from him. Richard and Geoffrey also did homage to him “for what he granted and gave them.” Young Henry would have done likewise, but his father would not permit it “because he was a king.”[64] This treaty seems to have been afterwards put into writing and formally executed at Falaise, probably on October 11.[65] 1175 Early in 1175 Richard and Geoffrey did homage to their father again at Le Mans,[66] and on April 1 their elder brother did the same at Bures.[67]
The new provision for Richard did not include his reinstatement as duke of Aquitaine or count of Poitou. It consisted 1175 merely of “two fitting dwelling-places, whence no damage could come to the king, in Poitou,” and half the revenues of that county in money.[68] The strict letter of the treaty of Montlouis (or of Falaise) in fact reinstated Henry II as sole ruler of all the Angevin dominions, and reduced all his sons to the position of dependents on his bounty. Henry, however, soon showed that he had no intention of enforcing this punishment to the uttermost on Richard and Geoffrey. The treaty ordained that all lands and castles belonging to the king and his loyal barons were to be restored to their owners and to the condition in which they had been fifteen days before “the king’s sons departed from him”; so, too, were the lands of the rebels, but in their case no mention was made of their castles.[69] With these castles, therefore, Henry was left free to deal at his pleasure. Accordingly, when early in 1175 he set himself to carry out this clause of the treaty in Anjou and Maine, he not only revictualled and repaired whatever fortresses of his own had suffered damage, and destroyed whatever new fortifications had been added to the castles whose owners had defied or resisted him, but also ordered that some of these latter should be razed. Geoffrey was sent to carry out this process in Britanny, and Richard in Aquitaine, while the two Henrys returned to England together on May 9.[70]
Besides the avowed partizans of young Henry in Aquitaine, there were others who had seized the opportunity afforded them by the war to fortify their castles and set the ducal authority at defiance. The men of the South for the most part would at any moment gladly have flung off that authority altogether, no matter whether it was wielded by the heiress of the old ducal house, her husband, or her son. The Aquitanian barons whose castles had in the time of the war been fortified or held against Henry II made it clear that they were not disposed to give them up to Richard. He therefore, in pursuance of his father’s orders, set out 1775 “to reduce the said castles to nothing.” He began after midsummer by marching into the county of Agen, where Arnald of Bonville had fortified Castillon against him, “and would not give it up.” This place, “fortified by both nature and art,” held out against the duke and his engines of war for nearly two months; “at last he took it, and in it thirty knights whom he kept in his own hands.”[71] We have no certain knowledge of his further movements 1176 till the following spring, when he and Geoffrey of Britanny went to England together. They landed on Good Friday, April 7.[72] Richard’s purpose seems to have been to seek counsel and help in the difficult task which his father had assigned to him, for when the Easter festivities were over it was arranged by the elder Henry that the younger one should go with Richard into Poitou “to subdue his enemies.” Young Henry went to Normandy on April 20;[73] Richard probably returned about the same time, though the brothers did not cross the Channel together.[74] During his absence Vulgrin of Angoulême, a son of the reigning count William Taillefer, had “presumed” to march into Poitou at the head of a troop of Brabantines. The bishop of Poitiers had at once resolved, with Theobald Chabot, who was “the leader of Duke Richard’s soldiery,” to “deliver the people committed to him out of the hand of their enemies,” and the invaders, although they far outnumbered the forces of the bishop and the constable, had been completely routed near Barbezieux.[75] Richard made straight for Poitou and 1176 called out its feudal levies, “and a great multitude of knights from the regions round about flocked to him, for the wages that he gave them.” He began by punishing some of the rebels in Poitou; next, after Whitsuntide (May 23), he marched against Vulgrin’s Brabantines and defeated them in a pitched battle between St. Maigrin and Bouteville, near the western border of the Angoumois. Thence he led his host into the Limousin, to punish Count Aimar of Limoges, who also had taken advantage of the duke’s absence to commit some breaches of the peace. First, Richard besieged and took Aimar’s castle of Aixe with its garrison of forty knights. Then he attacked Limoges, and in a few days was master of the city and all its fortifications. All this was the work of a month. Shortly after midsummer he returned to Poitiers; there he was at last joined by the young king. After taking counsel with the Poitevin barons it was decided that the next step should be the punishment of Vulgrin of Angoulême. The brothers led their united forces to Châteauneuf on the Charente, south-west of Angoulême, and won the place after a fortnight’s siege. Thereupon young Henry “would stay with his brother no longer, but following evil counsel departed from him.” Richard, thus suddenly deserted, moved cautiously further away from Angoulême to Moulineuf, another castle belonging to Vulgrin; this he captured in ten days. Then he turned back again and laid siege to Angoulême itself. Within its walls were not only Vulgrin and his father, Count William, but also Aimar of Limoges and two other rebel leaders, the viscounts of Ventadour and of Chabanais. In six days Count William was forced to surrender into Richard’s hands himself, his city, and all its contents, his castles of Bouteville, Archiac, Montignac, Jarnac, La Chaise, and Merpins, and to give hostages for his submission to the mercy of Richard and of King Henry, to whom Richard immediately sent him and the other nobles who had surrendered with him.[76] They presented themselves 1176 before Henry at Winchester on September 21, fell at his feet, and “obtained mercy from him”; that is to say, he, it seems, sent them back again with instructions that they should be temporarily reinstated in their possessions, pending a fuller consideration which he purposed to give to their case when he should return to Normandy.[77]
Having for the moment reduced northern Aquitaine to subjection, Richard set himself to a like task in Gascony. After keeping Christmas at Bordeaux he marched upon Dax, which had been fortified against him by its viscount Jan. 1177 with the help of the count of Bigorre. Its recovery by Richard was quickly followed by that of Bayonne, held against him by its viscount Ernald Bertram. Thence he marched up to the very “Gate of Spain”—St. Pierre de Cize, on the Navarrese border at the foot of the Pyrenees—took the castle of St. Pierre in one day, razed it, compelled the Basques and Navarrese to swear that they would keep the peace, “destroyed the evil customs which had been introduced at Sorde and Lespéron” (two towns in the Landes) “where it was customary to rob pilgrims on their way to or from S. James,” and by Candlemas was back at Poitiers, having—for the moment—“restored all the provinces to peace.”[78] The count of Bigorre in the south and a few barons of Saintonge and of the Limousin had not yet submitted; Richard, however, made no further movement against any of them for many months. His inaction may have been due to instructions from his father, who was probably unwilling to let him engage in another campaign against these rebels at a moment when all the available forces of the Angevin house and the presence of Richard himself seemed likely to be needed in another quarter.
The richest baron of Aquitanian Berry, Ralf of Déols, the lord of Châteauroux, whose lands were said to be worth as much as the whole ducal domains of Normandy,[79] had died at the close of 1176 leaving as his sole heir a daughter three 1176 years old. The wardship of this child and of her heritage belonged of right to her suzerain, the Duke of Aquitaine; but her relations were resolved to keep, if possible, both herself and her lands in their own power,[80] so they carried her off to La Châtre,[81] and prepared her castles and their 1176 own for defence and defiance. When these tidings reached King Henry in England, he sent urgent orders to his eldest son to assemble the Norman host without delay and take forcible possession of the lands of Déols.[82] Henry’s action in this matter is noticeable as showing that he regarded Richard’s tenure of the dukedom of Aquitaine at this period as merely nominal or delegated; he claimed Denise of Déols as his own vassal, not as Richard’s. It is, however, not at once apparent why, since he had intrusted to Richard the task of subduing the other Aquitanian rebels, he did not leave the affair of Déols to the same hands. The reason may have been mainly a geographical one. These things 1176-7 may have taken place at a moment when Henry knew Richard to be busily engaged at the very opposite end of the duchy, at any rate somewhere in Gascony, perhaps at its extreme southern border. The young king, on the other hand, was in Normandy, whence it would be easy for him to lead a force through Maine and Touraine into Berry. On receiving his father’s instructions he did so, and laid siege to Châteauroux, which surrendered to him at once.[83] He did not, however, gain possession of the little heiress or of the rest of her lands; for the matter now became complicated by the intervention of the supreme lord of Berry and of Aquitaine, King Louis.
For more than eight years, ever since January 1169, Aloysia of France had been in Henry’s guardianship as the destined bride of Richard. According to one of the best informed English writers of the time, Louis, when this engagement was made, had promised that on the marriage of the young couple he would make over to Richard, as Aloysia’s dowry, the city of Bourges with all its appurtenances;[84] that is, the portion of Berry the ownership of 1176-7 which was in dispute between France and Aquitaine. Ten years before—in the year of Aloysia’s birth—he had promised to King Henry a like cession of the Vexin, the disputed border-land of France and Normandy, as the dowry of Aloysia’s sister Margaret on her intended marriage with Henry’s eldest son, and Henry had taken advantage of the ambiguous wording of a clause in the treaty to have the two children—contrary to Louis’s intention—at once formally married in church; whereby he gained immediate possession, not indeed of the whole Vexin, but of that portion of it which had once been Norman and which contained its most valuable fortresses, these being surrendered to him by the Templars, who were by the treaty to have them in custody till the marriage should take place. That marriage, nevertheless, had brought more advantage to Louis than to Henry, by bringing Margaret’s husband, as soon as he reached manhood, under the influence of his father-in-law in opposition to his own father. There was but too much reason to fear a like result in the case of Richard; and the dangers of such a result were even greater in this case than in the former one, owing to special circumstances connected with the betrothal of Richard and Aloysia. That betrothal was the price, or part of the price, paid by Henry at Montmirail in 1169 for Louis’s sanction, as overlord, to the scheme devised by Henry for securing a certain distribution of his dominions among his sons. Henry’s own renewal of homage to Louis on that occasion for all his continental territories was a token that he did not intend to renounce his personal rights over any of his lands, but merely to secure for himself the power of sharing those rights with his sons whenever he might choose to do so, and for the boys an unquestionable right of succession at his death to their respective shares of the Angevin heritage. But, somewhat like Louis nine years before, Henry made a mistake which rendered it possible for his adversary to put another construction upon the matter. He secured young Henry’s claims to the future possession of the heritage of Geoffrey of Anjou and Maud of Normandy, and Richard’s claim to the heritage of Eleanor, by making them do homage to Louis for Anjou and Aquitaine 1176-7 respectively; but he omitted to secure the subordination of their claims to his own during his lifetime by making them do homage to himself. Owing to this omission, it was open to Louis to assert, if he chose, that the Angevin counties and the Norman duchy legally belonged to young Henry and the duchy of Aquitaine to Richard, in virtue of the homage rendered by them for those lands direct to himself as overlord; Henry II—so he might argue—having by his consent to that homage tacitly renounced all claim to the lands for which it was rendered, and being thenceforth merely in temporary charge of them as guardian of the boys. The promise of the cession of Bourges was a very small price to pay for a weapon so tremendous as that which Henry had thus, it seems, unconsciously placed in the hands of an enemy whose mean jealousy and unscrupulous astuteness he appears never to have fully realized. He unintentionally made this possible construction of the treaty of Montmirail still more plausible through the crowning of his eldest son in 1170 and the solemn installation of the second as duke of Aquitaine in 1172. Louis acted upon it in 1173, although he does not seem ever to have put it into formal words; and his action, coupled with that of the ungrateful sons urged on by their mother, must have opened Henry’s eyes to the peril in which he had involved himself through his misplaced confidence in the loyalty both of his overlord and of his own family. It showed that as soon as Richard and Aloysia were married, Louis might and in all probability would demand the recognition of his new son-in-law as sole ruler of Aquitaine, independent of any superior save Louis himself.
At the close of 1175 or early in 1176 Louis, it seems, reminded Henry that, Richard being now in his nineteenth 1175-6 year and Aloysia in her sixteenth, it was full time for the contract of marriage between them to be carried into effect; but the answer which he received was so unsatisfactory that he referred the matter to the Pope. We have no actual record of any communication between the kings on the subject at this time, but something of the kind must have 1176 taken place to cause the Pope’s action. In May 1176 1176 Alexander bade Cardinal Peter, then legate in France, lay the whole of Henry’s lands on both sides of the sea under Interdict “unless he (Henry) would permit Richard and Aloysia to be married without delay.”[85] The legate, however, seems to have done nothing in the matter for more than a year. Probably the two kings were negotiating; 1177 but we hear nothing of their negotiations till June 1177, when Henry sent an embassy to France to “convene” Louis about the dowries which he had promised to give with his two daughters to the young king and to Richard—to wit, the Vexin (that is, its eastern or “French” part, which was still in Louis’s hands) and the viscounty of Bourges.[86] It seems that Henry, having found Margaret’s marriage fail to give him the control over her promised lands, demanded to be put in possession of those of Aloysia before he would allow her to marry Richard. But meanwhile the Pope had in May renewed the injunctions which he had issued to Cardinal Peter eleven months before; and on July 12 the English envoys returned with the news that Peter was instructed to lay the whole of their sovereign’s dominions, insular and continental, under Interdict, unless Richard were at once permitted to take for his wife the maiden whom Henry “had so long already, and longer than had been agreed, had in his custody for the said Richard.”[87] Henry at once made the English bishops appeal to the Pope. Illness detained him in England for nearly five weeks;[88] then he went to Normandy (August 18), and on September 21 met Louis and the legate at Nonancourt.[89] In the legate’s presence he promised that Richard should wed Aloysia, if Louis gave Bourges to Richard and the Vexin to the young king as previously agreed.[90] Whether the wedding or the cession was to take place first, however, seems to have been left an open question; and four days later the whole matter was again postponed indefinitely by a treaty whereby the 1177 two elder kings pledged themselves to take the Cross and go to the Holy Land together, and meanwhile, as brother Crusaders, to lay aside all mutual strife and make no claims or demands upon each other’s possessions as they held them at that moment, except with regard to Auvergne and to any encroachments which the men of either party might have made upon those of the other in the territory of Châteauroux or of the lesser fiefs on the border of their respective lands in Berry. If on these excepted matters they could not agree between themselves, twelve arbitrators were to decide according to the sworn evidence of the men of the lands in question.[91]
All immediate danger of interference from either Louis or the Legate being thus removed, Henry summoned the Norman host to meet at Argentan on October 9 for an expedition against the rebels in Berry.[92] Young Henry and Richard had, by his desire, joined him on his arrival in Normandy;[93] the former was now despatched in advance into Berry, and when the king’s host reached the Norman border at Alençon Richard was detached from it and once more sent into Poitou “to subdue the enemies” there, while the king himself marched upon Châteauroux. After receiving its formal surrender he proceeded to La Châtre; this place, and the little Lady of Déols, were also given up to him at once. Thence he proceeded into the Limousin and called upon those of its nobles and knights who had taken part in the rebellion of 1173 to give an account of their conduct; one of the most important of them, the viscount of Turenne, surrendered his chief castle, “strongly fortified by both art and nature”; with the others Henry dealt “according as each of them deserved.”[94] He then hurried back to Graçay in Berry, to meet Louis and the commissioners who were to report to the two kings the result of their investigations about Auvergne. What that result was we are nowhere directly told; we only hear that both the rivals declared themselves content to abide by it.[95] The 1177 next reference to the overlordship of Auvergne, however, some twelve years later, seems to indicate that the commissioners gave their award in favour of the duke of Aquitaine.
Another of Henry’s vassals in Berry, Odo of Issoudun, had lately died leaving an infant heir, and this child had been stolen by his kinsman the duke of Burgundy. The custody of his fief was offered to the king by the barons who had it in their keeping, but he refused to receive it without the child,[96] whom he made no attempt to reclaim. It was not worth while to risk an embroilment with Burgundy about a petty lordship in Berry at the moment when an opportunity was just presenting itself for annexing to the Poitevin domains a valuable fief of the duchy of Aquitaine, the county of La Marche, which lay between Berry and the Limousin. Count Adalbert V of La Marche had separated from his wife, lost his only son, and seemingly disinherited his only daughter with her own consent;[97] the kinship between him and his only other surviving relatives was so remote that he deemed himself free to dispose of his county without regard to them; and he now offered to sell it to its overlord, King Henry, for a sum of money wherewith he himself might go to end his lonely days in the Holy Land. In December Henry went to meet him at Grandmont; the bargain was quickly struck, the conveyance executed, and the purchase money—less than a third of what Henry is said to have estimated the county as worth—paid down, and the barons and knights of La Marche did homage to Henry as their immediate liege lord.[98]