The league seemed to have failed; but its ultimate failure was by no means assured yet. Two at least of its members were by this time contemplating, if indeed they had not already taken, steps to win support for it outside the duchy. Aimar Taillefer offered his homage for Angoulême to the lord paramount, King Philip of France; Philip accepted the homage, and thus pledged himself to uphold Aimar in his struggle for the county against Richard, who was still determined to reclaim it for its late count’s daughter, 1182 Maud.[159] There was another young king in whom, although his kingship was merely nominal, Bertrand saw a yet more desirable tool for the purposes of the league. Before young Henry joined his father and brother at the siege of Puy-St.-Front, he had been “joyfully received” by the monks of S. Martial’s at Limoges[160]—perhaps not by the monks only. The careless, easy, shallow disposition of Eleanor’s eldest son was far more in accord than the energetic temper of Richard with the ideas of the Aquitanian nobles as to what their duke should be. The policy of setting him up as Richard’s rival was obvious; and a characteristic action on Richard’s part helped, most opportunely from Bertrand’s point of view, to stir up the elder brother’s latent jealousy of the greater independence granted to the younger one by their father. About half way between Châtelleraut and Poitiers, on the borders of Anjou and Poitou, there rose out of the champaign land a certain hill which seems to have struck Richard as being a good site for a castle. He built a castle on it accordingly, just as the first “great builder” of the Angevin family, Fulk the Black, had built so many of the fortresses in the Loire valley, and just as 1182 he himself in later days built the last and greatest of all the fortresses reared by Fulk’s descendants—without regard to the fact that the site did not belong to him. It really belonged to his father; but, being in Anjou, it formed part of the territory destined to fall at his father’s death to the share of the young king.[161] Bertrand seized his opportunity. “At Clairvaux”—such was the name given, somewhat inappropriately as it seems, to the new fortress—“a fair castle has been, without hindrance, built and set in the midst of the fields. I would not that the young king knew of it or saw it,” ran the troubadour’s sarcastic verse, “for he would not be pleased therewith; but I fear, so white it is, he will see it from Matefélon.”[162] The young king seems to have remonstrated with Richard,[163] but without effect. It is doubtful whether these things took place before or after his visit to Limoges; the sequence of events in Aquitaine during the years 1181-2, like that of Bertrand’s sirventes on which we are largely dependent for our knowledge of those events, is obscure; but one thing is clear: before Christmas 1182 young Henry was secretly pledged to the league against his brother.
Outwardly, that league was for a time broken up by the submission of Aimar of Limoges and Elias of Périgord, and for some months the Taillefer brothers and their adherents in the Angoumois seem to have been the only enemies whom Richard had to fight. At the beginning of November he took from them the castle of Blanzac;[164] and about the same time Chalais was fortified against him 1182 by its lord, Oliver of Castillon.[165] Before Christmas Richard rejoined his father and brothers in Normandy. He seems to have taken Bertrand de Born with him; at any rate he and Bertrand were for a while both at once with the court at Argenton, and to all appearance on very friendly terms.[166] Most likely, however, their friendliness was on both sides only external. Bertrand soon afterwards unceremoniously expressed his opinion that the Norman court, “where there was no gab and laughter and no giving of presents,” was not worthy to be called a court, and declared that the dulness and rusticity (“l’enois e la vilania”) of Argenton would have been the death of him, but for the “good company” of the duchess of Saxony,[167] Richard’s sister, to whom the troubadour had (according to his own account) been introduced in a highly complimentary manner by Richard himself.[168] Bertrand’s own military resources were small,[169] and he is not likely to have taken any active part in the recent war; but the earlier sirventes by which he had striven to foment it seem to have already brought upon him a warning from the duke,[170] and it may have been a measure of policy on Richard’s part, when he quitted his duchy, to command or invite the poet to accompany him, and even to be at some pains to furnish him with a new subject for his verse.
The darkest secrets connected with the league did not come out till after Christmas. The festival week was spent 1182 by the two Henrys, Richard, and Geoffrey, at Caen.[171] On 1183 January 1, 1183, the young king, “of his own accord, no one compelling him,” publicly took an oath on the Gospels that he would serve his father loyally and faithfully from that time forth; “and because—as he asserted—he desired to retain in his mind no malice or rancour whereby his father might afterwards be offended, he made known to him that he (young Henry) was bound by an agreement with the barons of Aquitaine against his brother Richard; having been moved thereto because the castle of Clairvaux had been built against his will, in the patrimony which was his rightful inheritance, by his said brother; wherefore he besought his father to take that castle from Richard and retain it in his own keeping.” Richard, when admonished by his father on the subject, at first refused to give up the castle, but afterwards at his father’s desire “freely made it over to him to dispose of it according to his good pleasure.”[172]
The question of Clairvaux was thus settled for the lifetime of the elder king; the settlement was that which the younger one had himself proposed, and it ought to have led to his immediate withdrawal from his engagements with Richard’s enemies. But the incident had a further significance which filled Henry II with dismay. It showed him that on his death not only might this particular dispute between young Henry and Richard be reopened, but a crowd of other disputes might arise among all his sons about their feudal relations with each other, and that unless these relations were fixed beforehand, all his schemes for preserving the integrity of the Angevin dominions would probably come to nought. As soon as the festival season was over he set out with his sons for Anjou. When they reached Le Mans, he expressed his desire that young Henry, as the future head of the family, should receive the homage of Richard and Geoffrey for their respective duchies.[173] It seems that the proposition was made privately to the young king, and was at least tacitly accepted by him. Accordingly, on arriving at Angers, Henry II took measures for confirming once for all “a bond of perpetual peace” between the three 1183 brothers. First, each of them swore to keep his fealty to his father always and against all men, and always to render to him due honour and service. Next, they all swore that they would “always keep peace among themselves according to the disposition made by their father.”[174] Whatever may have been the case with regard to Geoffrey and Britanny, it appears that Richard, at least, was thus far wholly unaware that the “disposition” which he was thus pledged to respect implied any arrangements beyond those which already existed concerning his tenure of Poitou or of Aquitaine. The elder king now publicly called upon the younger one to receive Geoffrey’s liege homage for Britanny. To this neither of the brothers objected, and the homage was duly rendered and received.[175] Next, the father “used his utmost endeavours that the young king should grant the duchy of Aquitaine to his brother Richard, to be held by Richard and his heirs by an undisputable right.”[176] Richard at first declared he would do no homage to his brother, who was no more than his equal either in personal distinction or in nobility of birth; but afterwards, yielding to his father’s counsel,[177] he consented. Thereupon, however, the young king drew back.[178] He seems to have explained more fully the nature and extent of his entanglement with the malcontent barons of Aquitaine, and to have urged that he could not thus desert their cause without a guarantee that his father would make a settled peace between them and Richard. The final settlement between the brothers was therefore postponed till the Aquitanian barons could meet the king and his sons at Mirebeau. Henry promised that he would then confirm peace on the terms settled in the preceding summer, or, if this did not satisfy the barons, he would judge their cause in his own court. Geoffrey of Britanny was sent to invite or summon the barons to the meeting.[179] With these arrangements 1183 young Henry professed himself content, and he promised that he would, at Mirebeau, accept Richard’s homage, but on one further condition: that Richard should, after performing the homage, swear fealty to him on some holy relics. This last requirement, being a plain insinuation of lack of confidence in Richard’s honour, was an insult to which Richard could not submit. He “broke out in a white heat of passion,” and not only again refused to perform the homage at all, but—so it was said—declared that it was unmeet for him to acknowledge, by any kind of subjection, a superior in a brother born of the same parents, and that as their father’s property was the due heritage of the first-born, so he himself claimed to be, with equal justice, the lawful successor of their mother.[180] “Leaving nought but insults and threats behind him” he quitted the court, hurried into his own duchy, and prepared for defence.[181] His vehemence kindled the wrath of his father, who hastily bade the young king “rise up and subdue Richard’s pride,” and sent orders to Geoffrey to “stand faithfully by his eldest brother and liege lord.”[182]
Neither young Henry nor Geoffrey needed a second bidding. Geoffrey, sent into Aquitaine as a messenger of peace, had carried thither, as a contemporary writer says, not peace but a sword. He and his eldest brother were already in collusion, and instead of executing his father’s commission to the malcontent barons, he had secretly used the opportunity which that commission gave him to renew the alliance between them and the young king, whom they were now eager to set up as duke in Richard’s 1183 stead.[183] At the beginning of February[184] the young king set out for Limoges; it seems to have been arranged that his father, with a small force, should travel by another route and join him there later.[185] Geoffrey was there already; the viscount, Aimar, at once joined them, and endeavoured to terrify the burghers of the castle into doing likewise. His threats were emphasized by the neighbourhood of a host of Routiers who seem to have been secretly engaged to be in readiness for a call from Geoffrey.[186] That call Geoffrey now gave, and one body of these ruffians, with some of his own vassals, swooped down from Britanny upon Poitou and began plundering and burning the demesnes of the count, who retaliated by making similar raids into Britanny, “and if any man of that troop fell into his clutches, that man’s head was cut off without respect of persons.”[187] Another body of Routiers had come up from Gascony under a certain Raymond “Brunus, or Brenuus” at the call of Aimar, and were with him engaged on February 12 at Gorre, some few miles south of Limoges, in besieging a church—probably fortified by the villagers for use as a place of refuge—when the duke fell suddenly upon them. From a castle somewhere beyond Poitiers he had ridden for two days almost without stopping; his force was small, but the enemies were caught at unawares; many of them were made prisoners; a nephew of their commander, Raymond, was laid low by Richard’s own hand; Aimar and the rest of the band escaped only because the horses of the Poitevins were too exhausted for pursuit.[188]
The English chronicler who records Richard’s treatment of the captured invaders may have been shocked at the indiscriminate ruthlessness which slew mercenaries and knights all alike; but the Prior of Vigeois evidently saw nothing more than just retribution in the fate of the sacrilegious “children of darkness” who were made prisoners at Gorre. Richard dragged them to Aixe and there “caused some of them to be drowned in the Vienne, some to be slain with the sword, and the rest to be blinded.”[189] It was almost a necessity to get rid of these men. The league was no longer secret; many of the conspirators were delivering up their castles to the young king.[190] The danger was evident enough to make Richard send an urgent message to his father asking him to come to the rescue at once.[191] Henry accordingly advanced towards Limoges. A watchman on the castle wall cried out that the city folk were bringing up troops to destroy their rivals of the castle; someone else spread a report that Geoffrey of Britanny was in great danger outside the walls; the townsfolk rushed out and began a fierce fight which was with difficulty stopped when the royal banners were recognized.[192] The king withdrew to Aixe. At night young Henry—still maintaining a pretence of loyalty—went to his father and tried to excuse the blunder of the townsfolk; but his excuses were rejected. “Then, at the viscount’s command, the people swore fealty to the young king in the church of S. Peter of Carfax.”[193]
All concealment was now flung aside. Walls and ramparts, turrets and battlements, rose with incredible speed all round Limoges; the material being of course mostly wood, derived, it seems, from some half dozen or more churches 1183 which castle folk and city folk alike pulled down without scruple. Another horde of Routiers, hired by the viscounts of Limoges and Turenne, and commanded by one Sancho “of Sérannes” and another leader who seems to have adopted the heathen appellation of Curbaran,[194] appeared at Terrasson in Périgord, crossed the Limousin frontier, seized Yssandon, and swept across the viscounty of Limoges as far north as Pierre-Buffière, which they wrested from King Henry’s soldiers and restored to its rebel owner and to the viscount; thence they went south again and after an unsuccessful attempt on Brive took up their quarters at Yssandon. Other “Tartarean legions” poured in from the north, sent by Philip of France to support the cause of his brother-in-law.[195] If these Routiers could have been controlled by their employers, Henry and Richard might probably have been easily surrounded and captured. Nothing of the kind was, however, attempted. Instead, “the whole assembly of malignants, gathered together from divers parts,” were left to take their own way and spread themselves over the whole of Périgord, the Angoumois and Saintonge; the country was ravished, shrines were plundered, altars desecrated, and expelled monks fled with the relics of their patron saints as in the days of the heathen Northmen.[196] Meanwhile King Henry had called up the feudal forces of his other continental dominions[197] to deal with the rebels in Limoges. On Shrove Tuesday, March 1, he entered the city, broke down the bridge behind him, and disposed his forces for a siege of the town. That siege dragged on till midsummer. Shortly before Easter (March 17) the young king went to secure Angoulême by filling it with “a crowd of malignants,” hired with the 1183 proceeds of a forcible seizure of the treasures of S. Martial’s Abbey. On account of this sacrilege the town guard of S. Martial’s castle, when he returned thither, pelted him ignominiously away;[198] but Aimar and Geoffrey continued to hold the place.[199]
Richard had accompanied his father to the siege,[200] but soon left it for more active work. He set himself to recover Saintonge and the Angoumois from the Routiers and the rebels; and he seems to have not only succeeded in this, but to have chased the marauders out of Saintonge northward across western Poitou right over the frontier of Britanny.[201] This campaign, ignored by the chroniclers, won for him a striking tribute from his most determined enemy; Bertrand de Born, composing a sirventes in behalf of the league and actually at the request of the young king, could not refrain from expressing his admiration for the courage and persistence of the count of Poitou. “When this game is played out we shall know which of the king’s sons is to have the land. The young king would have soon conquered it if the count were not so well practised at the game; but he shuts them (his enemies) in so fast and presses them so hard that he has recovered Saintonge by force, and delivered the Angoumois as far as the border of Finisterre.... Hunted and wounded wild boar saw we never more furious than he is, yet he never swerves from his 1183 course.”[202] On the other hand, two of the most powerful feudataries of the French Crown, the duke of Burgundy and the count of Toulouse, had by this time definitely pledged themselves to the league. Both of them met young Henry at Uzerche on May 24 and brought reinforcements to his cause.[203] Bertrand’s boast that the war begun in the Limousin should involve France, Normandy and Flanders before it was ended[204] might yet have been fulfilled, but for an unexpected catastrophe: early in June young Henry fell sick, and on the 11th he died.[205]