The unexpected death of the young king was a catastrophe almost equally overwhelming to both parties in the war. Henry himself, when the news was brought to him by the prior of Grandmont, whither the body had been taken to be prepared for burial,[1087] went almost out of his mind with grief.[1088] For a moment indeed friends and foes alike seemed incapable of anything but mourning. Hero or saint could scarcely have won a more universal tribute of affection and regret than was showered upon this young king who, so far as we can see, had done so little to deserve it. Stern voices like that of Bertrand de Born, accustomed only to the bitterest tones of sarcasm, insult and angry strife, melted suddenly into accents of the deepest tenderness and lamentation.[1089] Sober-minded churchmen and worldly-wise courtiers, though they could not deny or excuse the dead man’s sins, yet betrayed with equal frankness their unreasoning attachment to his memory.[1090] As his body, arrayed in the linen robe which he had worn at his coronation—its white folds, hallowed by the consecrating oil, made to serve for a winding-sheet—was borne on an open bier upon the shoulders of his comrades-in-arms from Grandmont northward through Anjou, the people streamed forth from every castle and town and village along the road to meet it with demonstrations of mourning and tears;[1091] and at Le Mans, where it was deposited for a night in the cathedral church, the bishops and citizens forcibly took possession of it, refused to give it up, and buried their beloved young king then and there by the side of his grandfather Geoffrey Plantagenet.[1092].
The political tide, however, turned as soon as he was gone. The Aquitanian league suddenly found itself without a head; for Geoffrey of Britanny, although the wiliest and most plausible of all the king’s sons, was also the most generally distrusted and disliked.[1093] The league broke up at once; on Midsummer-day Ademar of Limoges surrendered his citadel and made his peace;[1094] and most of the other rebels soon followed his example. By the end of the month Henry, having razed the walls of Limoges and garrisoned with his own troops the castles which had submitted to him, could venture to set out for Normandy;[1095] while King Alfonso of Aragon, who had come to the help of his father’s old ally, found nothing left for him to do but to join Richard in an expedition against the one baron who still persisted in his rebellion—Bertrand de Born.[1096] If Bertrand’s story may be believed, it was Alfonso’s treachery which, after a week’s siege, compelled him to surrender Hautefort.[1097] What followed shewed plainly that the Aquitanian revolt was at an end. Richard made over Hautefort to Constantine de Born, the troubadour’s brother and lifelong rival;[1098] Bertrand, instead of calling his fellow-barons to avenge him as of old, threw himself upon the generosity of his conqueror, and addressed Richard in a sirvente entreating that his castle might be restored to him. Richard referred him to his father; Bertrand then hastened to the king, who greeted him sarcastically with an allusion to one of his own earlier sirventes: “You were wont to boast of possessing more wits than you ever needed to use—what has become of them now?” “Sire, I lost them on the day that you lost your son.” Henry burst into tears; Bertrand was forgiven, indemnified for the losses which he had sustained during the siege, and dismissed with a charter securing to him from that time forth the sole possession of Hautefort.[1099] As a natural consequence, his lyre and his sword were thenceforth both alike at the service of the ducal house to whom he had hitherto been such a troublesome and dangerous foe.
On his northward march Henry met with no opposition. The young king had drawn to himself followers from all parts of the Angevin dominions, as well as from those of the French Crown;[1100] but they had all been drawn by a purely personal attraction, or by the hope of gain; their action had no political significance; and the greater barons, warned by their experience of ten years before, had remained entirely aloof from the whole movement. On reaching Le Mans, indeed, Henry found the old jealousy between Normandy and Maine on the point of breaking out over his son’s dead body; the clergy and people of Rouen, indignant at being defrauded of their young king’s dying bequest, were threatening to come and destroy the city of Le Mans and carry off his body by force. Henry was obliged to cause it to be disinterred and conveyed to Rouen for re-burial,[1101] while he himself returned to Angers to meet Richard and to receive Geoffrey’s submission.[1102] The quarrel between the Cenomannians and the citizens of Rouen was however only the smallest part of the troubles which arose from the young king’s death. As Margaret’s only child had died in infancy, her brother Philip of France at once demanded the restoration of her dowry, and especially the fortress of Gisors. Henry refused to give it up; conference after conference was held without result;[1103] at last, in December, a compromise was made, Henry consenting to do homage to Philip for all his transmarine dominions and to pay a money-compensation for Gisors, which was to be left in his hands henceforth as the dowry not of Margaret, but of her sister Adela, Richard’s affianced bride.[1104]
But a far worse difficulty remained. All Henry’s schemes for the distribution of his territories were upset by the death of his heir, and it was necessary to devise some new arrangement. It really seems as if Henry’s first thought about the matter was that now at last he could provide as he chose for his darling “Lackland”; for he at once bade the English justiciar Ralf de Glanville bring John over to meet him in Normandy. As soon as they arrived he sent for Richard and unfolded his plan. Richard was now the eldest son; if he lived, he must in due time succeed his father as head of the Angevin house. Henry had clearly no mind to venture a second time upon the dangerous experiment of crowning his heir during his own life. But, although we have no actual statement of his intentions, it seems plain that he did intend to place Richard, in every respect short of the coronation, in the same position which had been held by the young king. Under these circumstances, if the continental dominions of the Angevin house were to be redistributed among the three surviving brothers, there was only one possible mode of redistribution. Geoffrey could not give up Britanny, for he was now actually married to its duchess;[1105] but Richard, in consideration of his prospects as future king of England, duke of Normandy and count of Anjou, might fairly be asked to surrender to his youngest brother the duchy of Aquitaine. So at least it seemed from Henry’s point of view. Richard however saw the matter in another light. Not because he loved Aquitaine, but because he hated it—because for eight years he had fought unceasingly to crush it beneath his feet—now that it lay there prostrate, he could not let it escape him. Richard was generous; but to give up to other hands the reaping of a harvest which he had sown with such unsparing labour and watered with such streams of blood, was a sacrifice too great for his generosity in his six-and-twentieth year. He met his father’s demand with a request for time to think it over; that evening he mounted his horse and rode straight for Poitou; and thence he sent back a message that so long as he lived, no one but himself should ever hold the duchy of Aquitaine.[1106]
After threatening and beseeching him by turns all through the winter, Henry so far lost patience that he gave permission to John—now fifteen years old—to lead an army into his brother’s territories and win an heritage for himself if he could.[1107] It does not appear, however, that any such attempt was actually made till after Henry himself had gone back to England in June 1184.[1108] As soon as his back was turned, his two younger sons joined to harry the lands of the eldest; Richard retaliated by pushing across the Angevin border and making a raid upon Britanny; and in November Henry found it necessary to check the lawless doings of all three by summoning them to rejoin him in England.[1109] On S. Andrew’s day a sort of public reconciliation of the whole family took place in a great council at Westminster; Eleanor was suffered to resume her place as queen, and the three sons were compelled formally at least to make peace among themselves.[1110] Geoffrey was at once sent back to Normandy;[1111] Richard and John stayed to keep the Christmas feast with their father and mother amid a brilliant gathering of the court at Windsor.[1112] Soon afterwards Richard also returned to his troublesome duchy;[1113] for Henry had now abandoned all idea of transferring it to John. Falling back upon his earlier plans for his youngest child, on Mid-Lent Sunday 1185 he knighted John at Windsor, and thence despatched him as governor to Ireland.[1114]
Meanwhile the king himself was again called over sea by fresh troubles in Gaul. The king of France and the count of Flanders had been quarrelling for the last two years over the territories of the latter’s deceased wife, the counties of Amiens and Vermandois;[1115] Henry’s last act before he left Normandy had been to arrange a truce between them.[1116] Two months later—in August 1184—while Philip of Flanders was away in England on a pilgrimage to the martyr’s tomb at Canterbury, Philip of France broke the truce by stirring up his father-in-law the count of Hainaut to attack Flanders in his behalf: Philip of Flanders appealed for help to his other overlord the Emperor Frederic; the archbishop of Cöln, who had been his fellow-pilgrim, at once joined him in a counter-invasion of Hainaut;[1117] and the incalculable dangers of a war between France and Germany were only averted by Frederic’s wise reluctance to interfere, strengthened, we may perhaps suspect, by the influence of the English king. It seemed indeed as if nothing but Henry’s presence could avail to keep order in Gaul. When he returned thither, in April 1185,[1118] his first task was to pacify another quarrel between his own sons. This time the elder one seems to have been the aggressor; and Henry grew so angry that he once more summoned Richard to give up Aquitaine altogether, not, however, to either of his brothers, but to its own lawful lady, his mother, Queen Eleanor. Despite all her faults, Eleanor was reverenced by her sons; Richard especially treated her throughout his life with the utmost respect and affection; and the demand thus made in her behalf met with immediate submission.[1119] For nine months Henry’s dominions were quiet, and his hands were free to deal with the quarrels of France and Flanders. But before he had succeeded in pacifying them, a further complication was added. King Bela of Hungary made suit to Philip of France for the hand of his sister the widowed Queen Margaret,[1120] and this at once re-opened the question about her dower; for the agreement made two years before had been conditional upon Richard’s marriage with Adela, and as this event seemed as far off as ever, Philip again laid claim to the whole dowry, including Gisors. He was however too much in need of Henry’s assistance in his dispute with Flanders over the dower-lands of Isabel of Vermandois to risk a quarrel with him about those of the young queen; and by Henry’s tact and diplomacy both questions were settled in a conference at Gisors itself early in 1186.[1121] The count of Flanders gave up Vermandois to Philip Augustus,[1122] while Philip and Margaret again consented, in return for a money-compensation from Henry, to make Gisors over to him on the old condition—that Richard should marry Adela without further delay.[1123] The condition however remained unfulfilled. Richard was again despatched into Aquitaine, not indeed as its duke—for Henry had placed all its fortresses under officers of his own appointment[1124]—but still as his father’s representative, charged in his name with the maintenance of obedience and order.[1125] As for Eleanor, Henry had clearly never intended again to intrust her with any real authority; and in April he carried her back with him to England.[1126]
England was now his only refuge. In these closing years of his reign, when the whole interest of the story centres round the person of the king, the character of those few incidents which take place on English ground is in striking contrast with the state of affairs which occupied him in Gaul. While the Angevin dominions on the continent were threatening disruption under their owner’s very eyes, each of his visits to England was marked by some fresh indication of the firm hold which he had gained upon his island realm and its dependencies, or of the lofty position which England under him had acquired among the powers of the world. Of the internal affairs of England itself, indeed, we hear absolutely nothing save a few ecclesiastical details, and of Wales and Scotland scarcely more. Henry’s first business after his landing in 1184 had been to lead an army against South Wales;[1127] but at the mere tidings of his approach Rees hurried to make submission at Worcester.[1128] William of Scotland was in still greater haste to meet the English king with a suit for the hand of his granddaughter Matilda of Saxony,[1129] who was now in England with her parents. The project was foiled by the Pope’s refusal to grant a dispensation,[1130] without which such a marriage was impossible, owing to the descent of both parties from Malcolm III. and Margaret. Henry, however, on his next visit to England in 1186, proposed that William should wed in Matilda’s place her kinswoman Hermengard of Beaumont.[1131] Hermengard stood even nearer than Matilda in descent from Henry I., but there was no obstacle to her marriage with the king of Scots; he therefore willingly embraced the offer; and before the year closed the alliance between the two kings was doubly cemented, first at Carlisle by the final submission of Galloway to Henry, William himself standing surety for its obedience;[1132] and afterwards, at Woodstock on September 5, by the marriage of Hermengard and William, to whom Henry restored Edinburgh castle as his contribution to the dowry of the bride.[1133]
Henry is said to have received in the course of the same year another proposal, from a more distant quarter, for his granddaughter’s hand. According to one writer, Bela of Hungary had at first desired the young Saxon princess for his queen, and it was only Henry’s long delay in answering his suit which provoked him to transfer it to Margaret.[1134] Both Matilda’s suitors must have been attracted solely by the ambition of forming a family connexion with her grandfather King Henry; and that attraction must have been a very strong one, for at the time of William’s suit, if not at the time of Bela’s, it had to counterbalance the fact that Matilda herself, her parents, and all their other children, were landless and penniless exiles. To Henry’s load of family cares there had been added since 1180 that of the troubles of his eldest daughter and her husband, Duke Henry the Lion of Saxony. During the retreat of the Imperial forces from Italy in 1179 the duke fell under the displeasure of his cousin the Emperor; next year he was deprived of all his estates and placed under the ban of the Empire. In the summer of 1182 he and his family made their way to the sole refuge left them, the court of his father-in-law; and there for the most part they remained during the next two years. Towards the close of 1184 the English king’s influence in Germany prevailed to obtain the duke’s restoration to his patrimonial duchy of Brunswick;[1135] and another token of the eagerness with which Henry’s alliance was sought may be seen in the fact that among the conditions demanded by Frederic was the betrothal of one of his own daughters to Richard of Poitou.[1136] This condition, which might have added considerably to Henry’s difficulties in France, was annulled by the speedy death of the intended bride.[1137] On the other hand, the restoration of the exiled duke was far from complete; Brunswick was only a small part of the vast territories which he had formerly possessed; although he returned to Germany in 1185,[1138] it was as a suspected and ruined man; and before Henry’s reign closed another sentence of banishment drove him and his wife again to seek the shelter of her father’s court.