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BOOK I
. RICHARD OF AQUITAINE
, 1157-1189
CHAPTER II
FATHER AND SONS
1179-1183
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 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,
above the average height, 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.” 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”; and the
seemliness of his appearance was enhanced by that of his manners and dress. 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 he was, 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.”
In this sentence of Gerald’s we have perhaps
the earliest foreshadowing of the epithet which was to become attached
exclusively to Richard’s name. The king of beasts has in all ages been a common
simile for a king of men, whether the kingship be material or metaphorical. But
Gerald’s words seem, from their context, meant to carry a special significance
which is more distinctly implied in the special form of Richard’s traditional
surname. Richard is not the only hero whom poets and romancers, in the golden
age of old French poetry and romance, credited with the possession of “ a
lion’s heart,” but he is the only one who became known to the world for all
time as pre-eminently and absolutely “The Lion-Heart.” We cannot tell precisely
when the epithet came into general use; one writer used it within eight years
after Richard’s death. It had evidently fixed itself in popular
tradition before a less high-souled generation of romancers sought to explain a
surname, whose true meaning they were too far removed from the old epic spirit
to appreciate or understand, by devising an origin for it in an impossible tale
of their own clumsy invention. Its true origin need be sought no further than
the character of him who bore it.
“Among the virtues in which he excels, three
especially distinguish him beyond compare: supereminent valour and daring; unbounded liberality and bountifulness; stedfast constancy in holding to his purpose and to his word”—thus Gerald of Wales wrote
of Richard some eight or nine years after the campaign of Taillebourg.
The young duke’s energy and daring had been proved before that expedition; and
his lavish readiness to reward those who served him had contributed in no small
degree to his military successes, by means of the crowd of highly trained
soldiers whom it attracted to his standard. What medieval writers call
“constancy” was one of the qualities most universally admired in the medieval
world. Richard’s “constancy” had, as yet, shown itself chiefly in a form which
compelled the admiration and respect of all his Aquitanian subjects, but was
not likely to win him the love of the Aquitanian baronage. From the hour when
his father laid on him, a lad of scarce sixteen years and a half, the task of
restoring the ducal authority in Aquitaine, his aim was to rule and govern what
Gerald truly calls “that hitherto untamed country” in such wise “that not only
might he establish within its borders a far more complete and unbroken peace
than was wont to reign there, but also, recovering what in time past had been
lopped off and separated from it, restore all things to their pristine
condition.” The barons of the duchy were for the most part far from regarding
“peace within its borders” as a thing to be desired; and Richard’s ideal of a
well-ordered state, while thus differing from theirs, was not made more
attractive in their eyes by the methods which he employed to realize it. Unlike
his elder brother, he did not court popularity; he was indeed absolutely
indifferent to it, if not contemptuous of it. “Strictness and firmness, gravity
and constancy,” were the characteristics in him which men contrasted with the
young king’s easy good-nature, indulgent temper, and pleasantness towards all
who approached him. Richard’s generosity and graciousness were of a higher type
than young Henry’s; they were displayed only where they were deserved. With him
everything was earnest. Even martial sports had no charm for a lad who, while
other young knights of his day—his brothers among them—were acquiring the use
of arms in an endless round of tournaments, was serving his military
apprenticeship in real warfare; a warfare which he waged with tireless
persistence and relentless severity for nearly ten years, “that he might quell
the insubordination of an unruly people, and make innocence secure amid evildoers.”
His zeal for public order and justice, his
ruthless appliction of the utmost rigor of law to
those who in his eyes deserved punishment, naturally provoked the hatred of his
opponents, and laid him open to the charge of cruelty. No instances,
however, are recorded; the Aquitanian chroniclers say nothing on the subject,
and there is no real ground for supposing that his sternness towards the barons
who withstood his will was other than what Gerald represents it to have
been—part of a wholesome and necessary discipline. In 1183 they are said to
have accused him of crimes of another kind; but this accusation rests only upon
an English writer’s report of the pleas by which they sought to justify their
own treason. That some at least of the worst details of the charge were a
product of that “ recklessness of tongue ” for which the men of the south were
notorious, may with much probability be inferred from the silence of the
Aquitanian chroniclers on this point also. The only comment made by a
contemporary local writer on Richard’s character and conduct during these early
years of storm and stress is a tribute of praise even more impressive,
considering the period and the circumstances in which it was written, than the
panegyrics that were lavished from all quarters upon his later achievements.
Geoffrey of Breuil seems to have been a member of a
junior branch of the knightly family of Breuil in
Poitou; his father’s house was at Ste. Marie de Clairmont, near Excideuil in Perigord. He made
his profession as a monk at S. Martial’s abbey at
Limoges in 1160, was ordained priest in 1167, and ten years later was made
Prior of Vigeois in the Limousin.
His sketch of Aquitanian history ends abruptly at the year 1185. In that year
he, as he says, decided to insert in his work “ the names of the kings who are
ruling the world in this our age.” After mentioning by name Prester John, the
two Emperors, the kings of Jerusalem, France, England, Scotland, Denmark, Sicily,
Morocco, Spain, and Hungary, he continues : “In the list of the kings let there
be written down the duke of Aquitaine and Gascony, Richard, who has never been
slack in deeds of prowess, and whose youth is distinguished by great
strenuousness of life.”
A cessation of war between duke and barons in
Aquitaine was usually followed by trouble with the mercenary troops who were
always employed by one party or the other, sometimes by both parties, and who
when such employment was lacking fell to raiding on their own account. This
occurred in the summer of 1179 during Richard’s absence in England after the
fall of' Taillebourg. Bordeaux was ravaged and burnt
by some “Basques, Navarrese, or Brabantines,”
evidently soldiers of this class. With the barons Richard seems to
have had no particular trouble for the next two years or more. On July 7, 1179,
old Count William of Angouleme and his stepson Aimar of Limoges, “with many others,” set out on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. William
died a month later at Messina; Vulgrin, who had
surrendered the city to Richard, thus became head of the family, but the
dignity and authority of count of Angouleme seems to have been shared between
him and his brothers.
The recent humiliation of Vulgrin and the absence of Aimar of Limoges and his fellow
pilgrims may help to account for the fact that the year 1180 is almost a blank
in the chronicles of Aquitaine. King Henry’s presence in Normandy from April
1180 to July 1181 may also have had a pacific effect throughout all his
continental dominions. It is, moreover, probable that some of the pilgrims had
come to an agreement with Richard before they started; it seems almost certain
that Aimar had done so, for when he returned, in
December 1180, he was solemnly welcomed at Limoges on Christmas Day in a manner
which implies that he had been reinstated in his former position of authority
there, and we hear of no further hostilities between him and 1180 Richard for
more than six months. We hear indeed of no further military movements in
Aquitaine till after King Henry’s return to England at the end of July 1181.
Then Richard marched into Gascony and took possession of Lectoure,
the chief town of the viscounty of Lomagne. He was
seemingly on his way thence to Dax when Vezian of Lomagne, in the middle of August, came and submitted
himself to him at S. Sever. Vezian was probably a
very young man, for he was not yet a knight. His submission was not only
accepted as frankly as it was offered, but it was rewarded by the bestowal of
knighthood from Richard’s hand. In November Richard joined his brothers in
punishing the count of Sancerre for his rebellion against the young King Philip
of France, whom Henry had charged his sons to protect and support during his
own absence oversea.
It was probably in the interval between these
two expeditions, to Gascony and to Sancerre, that a new strife arose in the
Angoumois. Count Vulgrin Taillefer III had died on June 29 leaving an only child, a girl “who,” says Geoffrey of Vigeois, “was the cause of great calamity to her country.”
Richard, as duke, took her into his wardship as heiress of Angouleme and
claimed also the wardship of her land; but her uncles, William and Aimar, tried to seize their dead brother's heritage.
Richard drove them out of Augouleme, whereupon they found
a refuge at Limoges with their half-brother, viscount Aimar.
It was plain that Richard would soon be involved in a new war with them and
with Aimar of Limoges; and meanwhile other influences
were tending to develope that war into a general one.
The comparative peace of the last, eighteen months was almost ominous; it
certainly did not imply contentment on the part of the barons of Aquitaine.
They were all this while writhing under the iron rule of their young duke; many
of them were plotting schemes for doing their utmost to drive him out of the
duchy of Aquitaine and the county of Poitou altogether. Strangely enough, the
impulse which at length brought their plottings to a
head seems to have sprung from a private quarrel between two brothers who did
not rank among the great vassals of the duchy.
The castle of Hautefort,
on the border of the Limousin and Perigord,
was the joint patrimony of Constantine and Bertrand de Born. They lived in it
together, but in continual discord, till Constantine drove Bertrand out,
seemingly in the latter part of 1181 or early in 1182. Bertrand, however, soon
made his way back, and expelled Constantine in his turn. Constantine appealed
for help to their immediate feudal superior, the viscount of Limoges, and
also, it seems, to the duke. Both took up his cause; but at the moment they
were at enmity with each other—probably about the Angouleme succession—so
“Richard made war against Aimar, and Richard and Aimar made war against Bertrand and ravaged and burned his
land”. Constantine was “a good knight as regards fighting”; Bertrand was
something more—“a good knight, and a good fighter, and a good squire of dames,
and a good troubadour, and wise and well-spoken, knowing how to deal with bad
and good —and all his time he was at war with all his neighbours.”
The condition of things described in these last words was to Bertrand an ideal
condition : “I would that the great men should be always quarrelling among
themselves,” he said. It was the ideal of a typical Aquitanian baron; and that
ideal had become much less easy of realization now that the young duke was
master of the land than it had been while the ducal interests were represented
only by a woman or left in charge of mere seneschals. Bertrand seems to have
conceived a project of so working on the minds of the other malcontents as to
band them together with himself in a conspiracy whose primary and ostensible
object was to be the overthrow of the duke, but which by uniting all its
members in a sworn alliance with each other and therefore with its originator,
Bertrand, should enable him to maintain his position as master of Hautefort. If Aimar of Limoges
could be bound to Bertrand in a sworn league against Richard, Bertrand would be
at once rid of one of his present antagonists, and another and a greater one
would—so at least the allies might hope—soon have his hands too full of other
work to trouble himself further about Hautefort.
Aimar and his three half-brothers, being already banded
together against the duke for the preservation of Angouleme to the male line of Taillefer, were naturally quite ready to embrace
Bertrand’s project—if indeed the project had originated with Bertrand. It seems
to have first taken shape in a meeting at Limoges : “ in an ancient minster of
S. Martial,” says Bertrand, “ many rich men swore to me on a missal.” They seem to have sworn that no individual among
them should make terms with Richard for himself independently of his allies.
Among the earliest members of the league thus formed were, besides the brothers
of Angouleme and their half-brother of Limoges, the three other viscounts of
the Limousin—Ventadour, Comborn, and Turenne—the count of Perigord,
and William of Gourdon in Quercy.
To these were soon added other barons of Perigord and
of the Limousin and Quercy whom Richard was disinheriting. In one of his most vigorous sirventes Bertrand
made a stirring appeal to the great nobles of Gascony, Gaston of Bearn, Vezian of Lomagne, Bernard of
Armagnac, Peter of Dax, Centol of Bigorre : “if they will it, the count [of Poitou] will have enough to do in those
parts; and then, since he is so valiant, let him come with his great host this
way and measure himself with us!”. The effect of Richard’s repressive measures
in Saintonge and in Poitou are indirectly acknowledged in the poet’s next words
: “ If Taillebourg and Pons and Lusignan and Mauleon and Tonnay were fit for
action, and if there were a stirring and stalwart viscount at Sivray, I will never believe that they would not help us.
He of Thouars, too, whom the count has threatened,
should join us if he be not a dastard.” Of Richard’s relations at this period
with Aimeric of Thouars,
Ralf of Mauleon, and the lords of Tonnay and Sivray, we know nothing. The head of the house of
Lusignan was that same Geoffrey who had been a prominent leader in the Poitevin rising of 1167, and had also joined in the revolt
of 1173. Since then a new cause of strife had arisen between him and the
Angevin rulers of Aquitaine. At the time when Adalbert of La Marche sold his
county, according to his own statement, there was “ no one protesting and
indeed no one existing who had a right to protest ” against the sale. But on
the actual annexation of La Marche to the ducal domain Geoffrey of Lusignan
“with his brothers”—he had five—did more than protest; he resisted, saying that
La Marche belonged to him as heir—and adds Geoffrey of Vigeois,
“he got it.” How and when he got it we do not know, but it was probably not
earlier than the autumn of 1182, since Bertrand de Born shortly before that
time evidently did not regard the Lusignans as being
in a position to afford much practical help to the league, and in June of that
year Henry was still sufficiently master of the county to make a peaceful visit
to Grandmont for the third time within sixteen
months. Obviously, however, the league would have the sympathies of
the claimant of La Marche and his brothers. It seems to have also had those of
some at least of the towns; “the burghers are shutting themselves in all
round”—that is, rebuilding or strengthening their town walls—said Bertrand.4
Concerted action was, however, so difficult
to men accustomed by lifelong habit to fighting each for his own hand that
before the allies were ready for a simultaneous rising their project seems to
have become known to the duke. On Sunday, April 11, 1182, he with a few of his
people manfully captured the Puy-St.-Front, a stronghold which stood in much
the same relation to the city of Perigueux as that of
the castle of S. Martial to the city of
Limoges. The capture was evidently a surprise, characteristically planned and
executed by Richard on the spur of the moment when he discovered that Elias of Perigord, with whom he 1182 does not seem to have had any
previous trouble, was favouring his enemies. He then
marched upon Excideuil and ravaged the Limousin border from that fortress to Corgnac.
By the middle of May the rebel leaders were apparently so disheartened that
they were ready to discuss terms of peace, not indeed with Richard, but with
his father. Soon after Whitsuntide (May 16) the counts of Angouleme and Perigord and the viscount of Limoges met the king at Grandmont, but no agreement was reached. Henry then went to
support Richard in the Limousin. Richard suddenly
attacked Excideuil, and took the town, though not the
castle; Henry went to St. Yrieix, placed a garrison
there, and then laid siege to Pierre-Buffière, which
surrendered after twelve days. At midsummer he was back at Grandmont.
Richard meanwhile had gone from Excideuil back to Perigueux. It seems that in his absence Elias had recovered
Puy-St.-Front, and this time it was well prepared for defence.
Richard girded it all round about with a very great
host; in a few days he was rejoined by his father, and at the end of the month
by his elder brother. The result was that in the first week of July both Elias
of Perigord and Aimar of
Limoges submitted. The peace was sworn in S. Augustine’s abbey at Limoges; Aimar promised that his half-brothers should have no
further help from him, and placed two of his sons in Richard’s hands as
hostages; Elias surrendered Perigueux to the young
duke, who thereupon made peace with him, but took the precaution of destroying
all the towers of the city wall. Twelve months earlier, he had
ordered a more complete destruction of the defences of Limoges. There, the walls of the castle of S. Martial, which Henry had
ordered to be razed thirty years before, had been hurriedly rebuilt by the
burghers during the war of 1174, “lest when peace was restored the duke should
forbid it.” The duke seems to have let them alone for seven years; it may have
been some recent addition to the fortifications which made him issue at
midsummer 1181 an order that they should again be pulled down; and the burghers
dared not disobey him.
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 Angouleme 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, Maud. 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—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 Chatelleraut 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 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. 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 Matefelon.”
The young king seems to have remonstrated with Richard, 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 Perigord, 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; and about the same time Chalais was fortified against him by its lord, Oliver of Castillon. Before Christmas Richard 1182 rejoined his
father and brothers in Normandy. He seem 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. 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 of Argenton would have been the death of him, but for the “good
company” of the duchess of Saxony, Richard’s sister, to whom the troubadour had
(according to his own account) been introduced in a highly complimentary manner by Richard himself. Bertrand’s own military resources were small, 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, 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 by the two
Henrys, Richard, and Geoffrey, at Caen. On 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.
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. 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 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.” 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. 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.” 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, he consented. Thereupon, however,
the young king drew back. 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. With these arrangements 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 firstborn, so he himself claimed
to be, with equal justice, the lawful successor of their mother. “Leaving nought but insults and threats behind him” he quitted the
court, hurried into his own duchy, and prepared for defence. 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.”
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 stead.
At the beginning of February 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. 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 tfie neighbourhood of a host of Routiers who seem to have been secretly engaged to be in readiness for a call from
Geoffrey. 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.” 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.
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.” 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. The danger was evident
enough to make Richard send an urgent message to his father asking him to come
to the rescue at once. 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. 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.”
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 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 Serannes and another leader who seems to have adopted the
heathen appellation of Curbaran, appeared
at Terrasson in Perigord,
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. 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 Perigord, 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. Meanwhile King Henry had called up the
feudal forces of his other continental dominions to deal with the rebels in
Limoges. On Shrove Tuesday, March, 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 Angouleme by filling it with “a crowd of malignants,”
hired with the 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; but Aimar and
Geoffrey continued to hold the place.
Richard had accompanied his father to the
siege, 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. 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 course.” 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. Bertrand’s boast that the war
begun in the Limousin should involve France, Normandy
and Flanders before it was ended might yet have been fulfilled, but for an
unexpected catastrophe : early in June young Henry fell sick, and on the nth he
died.
Almost instantly the league fell asunder. The
object which its non-Aquitanian members had in view was to break the power of
Henry II; they had found a priceless tool for their purpose in his eldest son,
who, being like himself a crowned and anointed king, could be set up as a rival
head of the Angevin house; the Aquitanian revolt had offered a promising opportunity
for using that tool to their advantage. When young Henry was gone, their
purpose in joining the league was ruined; the internal quarrels of Aquitaine
and its rulers had no interest for them. Accordingly Hugh of Burgundy and
Raymond of Toulouse hurried away after their own affairs; and instead of the great coalition which was
to have ringed in the Angevins from the Pyrenees to the Channel, Henry and
Richard had now only to face the enfeebled remains of a local revolt. The news
came to Richard when he was besieging Aixe, which
young Henry had seized a few weeks before.6The king, when the first
shock of grief was over, resumed the siege of Limoges; Geoffrey seems to have
slipped away to Britanny; once more, on Midsummer
day, Aimar surrendered the town and renounced all
dealings with his brothers of Angouleme till they should deserve grace of the
king and the duke; and once more the new fortifications were levelled to the
ground. For what remained to be done Henry’s presence was needless.
At the end of the month he went back to his northern dominions, while Alfonso
of Aragon joined Richard in laying siege to Hautefort.
In a week (June 30-July 6) Bertrand de Born was forced to surrender it; and a
punitive harrying of Perigord by Richard brought the
revolt to an end.
Brief as the war had been, it was not without
results. A few at least of the insurgent barons had made their profit out of
the general confusion. It must have been during this time that the Lusignans gained a hold on La Marche which they never entirely
lost. Richard’s efforts to establish Maud as countess of Angouleme may have
been continued for a while longer, but they were doomed to fail sooner or later
by reason of Philip’s grant of the city to the rival claimant. Bertrand de
Born, in spite of the warning given him some months before by the duke himself,
had persisted in his defiance to the uttermost. He was captured with his
castle, brought before his conqueror, and compelled to resign his claim to its
ownership. He implored the duke’s mercy, and Richard at once granted him his
full forgiveness, but gave back Hautefort to
Constantine. This decision, however, was reversed by King Henry, probably on
an appeal from the troubadour. Richard appears to have acquiesced without
difficulty in his father’s decision on the point; and Richard, not
Henry, was destined to reap its results. Bertrand had already declared that if
the duke would be gracious and generous to him he should find him as true as
steel, and he kept his word; for he perceived that his talents for fighting,
and for setting others to fight, might after all be exercised not less
actively, and with less danger of disastrous consequences to himself, on the
side of the duke than on that of the duke’s enemies.
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