In all these proceedings of Henry in Aquitaine there is no reference to Richard. They clearly indicate that the elder holder of the ducal title still claimed the ducal power and authority as his own, not his son’s. He seems, however, to have left to Richard the punishment of one important Limousin rebel whose case he had a year before expressly reserved for his own judgement; for it was Richard who now “took away the castle”—that is, the fortified town—“at Limoges where S. Martial rests in his minster” from the viscount; “and it served the viscount right,” adds a Norman chronicler, “for helping the count of Angoulême against the duke.”[99] This seems to have been about the time when Henry was in Aquitaine, and it is the only act of Richard’s mentioned by any chronicler between Henry’s arrival in Normandy in August 1177 and his return to England in July 1178.[100] We may infer, almost with certainty, that it was done by Henry’s order; and, with considerable probability, that the unusual state of quiescence in which Richard seems to have passed these eleven months was due in part at least to the restraint placed on him by Henry’s presence on the continent. So long as Richard remained in the dependent position to which he had been reduced by the agreement at Montlouis, it would be impossible for him to take any considerable military or political action, unless by his father’s order, while his father was within reach. 1178 But in the autumn of 1178, when Henry was once more in England, Richard’s activity re-commenced. “With a great host” he again proceeded into Gascony[101] as far as Dax. There, to his delight, he found that the count of 1178 Bigorre, who two winters before had helped the viscount of Dax to hold the city against the duke, had somehow incurred the displeasure of the citizens and was fast in their prison. They seem to have handed him over to Richard; “but 1177 King Alfonso of Aragon, grieving that his friend the count of Bigorre was held in chains, came to the said duke, and entreating that his friend might be liberated, stood surety for him that he would do the will of the duke and of his father the king of England; and the count of Bigorre, that he might be set free, gave up to the duke Clermont and the castle of Montbron.” Richard then went northward again, and after keeping Christmas at Saintes gathered another “great host” for the subjugation of Saintonge and the Angoumois.[102] These two districts had been for years, and indeed for generations, a seed-plot of rebellion. Richard seems to have been bent upon reducing them to order once 1178 for all. The moving spirits of defiance there were Vulgrin of Angoulême and Geoffrey of Rancogne. Count William of Angoulême, after being reinstated by Henry in his capital city, seems to have made over the government of his county to his eldest son, Vulgrin, who had headed the resistance to Richard in 1176. Geoffrey of Rancogne took his name from a place in the same county, and was also owner of two lordships of far greater importance in Saintonge, one of which, Pons, lay close to the border of the Angoumois, and the other, Taillebourg, was a fortress of great strength, about half way between Saintes and St. Jean d’Angély. It was to Pons that Richard now laid siege. After some weeks, finding that he made no progress, he left his constables 1179 there with a part of his forces, and led the rest, in Easter week (April 1-8), into the Angoumois. A three days’ siege won the castle of Richemont; four other castles—Genzac, Marcillac, Gourville, Auville—were taken in the last fortnight of April and levelled with the ground. Then he turned westward again, re-crossed the border, and marched upon Taillebourg.[103]
By Richard’s contemporaries the siege of Taillebourg was looked upon as “a most desperate enterprize, which none of 1179 his predecessors had ever ventured to attempt. Never before had a hostile force so much as looked upon the castle.” It seems indeed to have been not merely a castle but a strongly fortified, though small, town, the castle proper—perched on the summit of a rock of which three sides were inaccessible by nature and the fourth was defended by art—forming the citadel. “Girt with a triple ditch; defying from behind a triple wall every external authority; amply secured with weapons, bolts, and bars; crowned with towers placed at regular intervals; furnished with a handy stone laid ready for casting from every loop-hole; well stocked with victuals; filled with a thousand men ready for fight,” this virgin fortress “was in no wise affrighted” at the duke’s approach. Richard, however, had made up his mind to “subdue the pride of Geoffrey of Rancogne once for all.” He had collected auxiliaries from every quarter; and he set them all to work as soon as the host reached Geoffrey’s border. “He carried off the wealth of the farms; he cut down the vines; he fired the villages; whatever was left he pulled down and laid waste; and then he pitched his tents on the outskirts of the castle close to the walls, to the great alarm of the townsfolk, who had expected nothing of the kind.” At the end of a week (May 1-8), “deeming it a disgrace that so many high-spirited and well-proved knights should tamely submit to be shut up within the walls, they agreed to sally forth and fall upon the duke’s host at unawares. But the duke bade his men fly to arms, and forced the townsmen to retire. The mettle of horses, the worth of spears, swords, helmets, bows, arbalests, shields, mailcoats, stakes, clubs, were all put to proof in the stubborn fight that raged at the gates, till the townsmen could no longer withstand the fierce onslaught of the duke’s van headed by the duke himself. As they retired helter-skelter within the walls, he by a sudden dash made his way with them into the town. The citadel now became their only refuge from their assailants, who rushed about the streets plundering and burning at their will.” Two days later—on Ascension Day, May 10—the castle was surrendered, seemingly by Geoffrey 1179 in person; and in a few days more the whole of its walls were levelled with the ground.[104]
The capture of Taillebourg was Richard’s first great military exploit. It laid the foundation of his military fame, not so much by the intrinsic importance of the exploit itself as by the revelation, in the campaign of which it was at once the turning-point and the crown, of the character and capability of the young duke. Its immediate result was the complete submission of the rebels against whom that campaign was directed. Not only did Geoffrey of Rancogne surrender Pons,[105] but Vulgrin of Angoulême, before the end of the month, gave up his capital city and his castle of Montignac; and when Richard, after razing the walls of all these places, sailed for England, he left in Aquitaine, for the moment at least, “all things settled according to his will.”[106] He seems to have visited the tomb of S. Thomas the Martyr at Canterbury[107] before joining his father. Henry received him “with great honour”[108] and gave him his reward; when the young conqueror returned to Aquitaine shortly before Michaelmas, he returned not merely as his father’s lieutenant, but as once again, with his father’s sanction, count of Poitou.[109]
CHAPTER II
FATHER AND SONS
1179-1183
Domus divisa contra se.
1179
We are not told on what conditions, if any, the restitution of Poitou was made to Richard by his father. The matter might become important whenever Henry should again cross the sea; but so long as the king remained in England it would have scarcely any practical effect on Richard’s position in Aquitaine. Whether he commanded the feudal host and disposed of the feudal revenues of Poitou as count or as his father’s delegate, he was, in his father’s absence, equally master of both; and in Aquitaine at large the temporary degradation inflicted on him by Henry seems never to have been recognized at all. He himself had never laid aside the style and title of duke of Aquitaine, nor the princely state belonging to that dignity, nor had he hesitated to deal with the demesne lands of Poitou as his own absolute property. In his own eyes he was count and duke by virtue not of any grant from either Henry or Louis, but of his descent from the old ducal line and of the investiture which he had received at Poitiers and at Limoges from the clergy and people of the duchy. His subjects regarded him in the same light. They fought and intrigued against him not as an intruder or a usurper, nor as the lieutenant of one whom they counted as such, but precisely because he was to them the incarnation of the ducal authority in a form which was specially obnoxious to their habits of turbulent independence and lawless self-will. For seven years they had been watching with growing uneasiness and dismay the development 1179 of the “new duke,” whom as a boy of fourteen they had acclaimed at Limoges in 1172, into a man of very different character from the dukes of the last two or three generations.
None of the pictures of Richard’s outer or inner man which have come down to us date from a time quite so early as the year 1179; but the main features of his personality, outward and inward, were already marked enough to show us in those pictures a true likeness of the young conqueror of Taillebourg. In the sculptured effigies of Richard at Fontevraud and at Rouen the outlines of the face give so little indication of age as to suggest that in the living model they may have been—except for the beard and moustache—almost the same at forty-one as at twenty-one; the features are well proportioned and finely formed. In life they were crowned with a profusion of hair “of a colour midway between red and yellow”—in other words, of the rare golden or still rarer auburn hue. The young duke’s stature was lofty,[110] above the average height,[111] his frame shapely and well proportioned, with long, straight, flexible limbs; “no arm was better adapted than his for drawing sword, nor more powerful to strike with it.”[112] His whole person had such an aspect of dignity that two independent observers, at different times, described it in the same words—“a form worthy to occupy a place of high command”;[113] and the seemliness of his appearance was enhanced by that of his manners and dress.[114] The stories of his gigantic strength all relate to the time of the Crusade, when that strength was in its maturity; but a man of whom such tales were told must have been a born athlete. On the other hand, it was certainly before his Aquitanian days were over that he contracted the quartan ague which, says Gerald of Wales, “was given him to repress the over fierce workings of his mind, but by which he, like the lion, yea, more than lion that 1179 he was,[115] seemed rather to be influenced as by a goad; for while thus almost continually trembling, he remained intrepid in his determination to make the whole world tremble and fear before him.”[116]