Touraine, towards which province Henry was now bending his steps.

Amboise and a number of important cities fell into the hands of the allies early in June, and on the 23rd of that month the city of Tours was also captured, in consequence of the waters of the Loire having sunk so low as to enable the French army to ford it with ease. The stone bridge had been broken down on the approach of Philip, but that monarch remarking that the waters were very low, entered the stream on horseback, and sounded it with his own lance. He then caused the shallowest passage to be discovered, and marked out by two spears planted in the stream. Between these his whole forces passed over, and even before the battering engines could be brought to bear against the city, some of the troops had scaled the walls, which were low on the side of the river, so that Tours was captured with scarcely any resistance. No excesses were committed; the unresisting citizens were spared; and the military garrison, which had taken refuge in the citadel, surrendered, and were made prisoners of war.

Distressed in mind* and ill in body, Henry II. lay for some time inactive at Saumur, while Philip and Richard pursued their conquests in Main and Touraine. On the day before the fall of Tours, the Count of Flanders, the Duke of Burgundy, and the Archbishop of Rheims, visited the English monarch, in order to propose terms of pacification between him, Philip, and Richard. We are assured that they were not actually sent by the King of France, but merely had his consent to mediate; and his success against the capital of Touraine, which was known very shortly after their arrival at Saumur, induced Henry immediately to accept their proposal for a new conference between him and his adversary.

A place was appointed, and the two sovereigns, with the Duke of Aquitaine, met on the 28th of June in the neighbourhood of Tours, where a peace was concluded upon more favourable terms than the English monarch might have ex

We are assured by William of Newbury that Henry was by this time aware of the defection of John; and the words of that historian (lib. iii. cap. 25) strongly confirm the rumour mentioned by Gervaise, that it was the intention of Henry to deprive Richard of his inheritance, and bestow it upon his favourite son.

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DEATH OF HENRY THE SECOND.

pected. The principal points agreed upon were, that Adelais should return to France, and be given into the custody of one of five persons, whom Richard should choose. That she should be married to the duke immediately on his return from the Holy Land. That the king should give twenty thousand marks of silver to the King of France for the expenses of the war; and that Richard should remain in possession either of Mons, Tours, and two other strong places, or of Gisors, Passy, and Nonancourt, at the choice of the King of England, till such time as all the articles of the treaty were fulfilled. The English and Norman barons also were required to guarantee the good faith of Henry, binding themselves to go over to Richard and the King of France if their sovereign violated the conditions.

It was remarked that while the two monarchs were conferring, a tremendous clap of thunder was heard, and the lightning struck the ground between them without hurting either. The conference was in consequence broken off for a short time; but as soon as it was resumed, the thunder recommenced more violently than before, agitating the shattered nerves of the King of England so much, that he would have fallen from his horse had he not been supported by his attendants.

On signing the treaty, Henry, we are assured, demanded that a list should be given to him of such of his knights and nobles as had openly or in secret joined the party of Richard and Philip. This was accordingly done by the French king, and to Henry's horror he beheld, at the head of the list, the name of his youngest and favourite child, John.* This ter rible information proved fatal to the King of England. The illness under which he already suffered immediately assumed a fatal character, and cursing the day that he was born, he retired to Chinon, where, calling down the vengeance of God upon his sons, and refusing to retract the malediction, he died on the 6th of July, 1189, having reigned thirty-four years, seven months, and four days.t

*This incident may have received some embellishment at the hands of historians, but it is perfectly clear that John had joined in the rebellion of his brother, and that his ingratitude aggravated the illness of the king. "Johannes filius ejus qui mortis suæ occasio, immo causa præcipua fuerat," says Bromton, col. 1154.

† Hoveden, p. 654.

THE death of Henry II., which was accelerated by the base ingratitude of his youngest legitimate son, was soothed by the tender devotion of one of his illegitimate offspring. Geoffrey, the chancellor, remained with him to the last, and showed, in the hour when all men abandoned him, the same deep and heartfelt affection which every action of his life had testified. Not so the hireling creatures of the monarch's pleasures, and the ministers of his policy. They watched with eager eyes the rapid approach of death, longing for the time when his treasures should be no longer guarded by his own vigilance, and the instant that the last sigh had parted from his lips, one of those awful scenes of plunder and desertion commenced which have so frequently surrounded the death-bed of men who have been prosperous without being respected.*

The words of Hoveden do not admit a doubt that for a time even the higher personages in attendance upon him abandoned the dead body of their monarch, and gave themselves up to the same spirit of rapine as the rest. At length, however, his ministers returned, and prepared for the ceremony of his funeral. The body was carried, according to a wish he had expressed, to the church of Fontevrault to be there interred. On the way, the solemn procession was met by Richard himself, who, repenting too late of his recent rebellion, now wept bitterly over the bier of a father, whose faults, we may well suppose, were forgotten by his son in that hour of sorrow and remorse, and whose high qualities as a monarch were long remembered both by his subjects and his allies.

In that age, few great events took place without some accompanying portent, the fruit of the quick imagination of superstition. On the present occasion, we find it recorded, that at the approach of the prince, the dead body of his father emitted blood from the nostrils; but notwithstanding this mark of antipathy even in the inanimate clay, Richard

* Hoveden, p. 654.

+ See also Bromton, who says that for some time the body of the king was left perfectly naked.

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PUNISHMENT FOR REBELLION.

assumed the place of chief mourner, and accompanied the corpse to Fontevrault.*

The funeral of the late king having been performed, the young monarch immediately proceeded to inquire into the malpractices which had taken place at the time of his father's death; and the great weight of his indignation seems to have fallen upon Stephen of Tours,† seneschal of Anjou, who, it would appear, acted as treasurer in Henry's continental dominions during the last few months of his reign. Whether he formally refused to yield to his new sovereign the fortresses which had been placed in his custody and the treasures which had been committed to his care, or whether he was supposed to have made away with any part of the latter, I do not discover; but certain it is, that Richard threw him into prison, loaded him with chains, and did not set him at liberty till he had paid a heavy fine, surrendered the castles, and given up the effects of Henry to the rightful heir.

We have been accustomed to consider this period as a very dark and barbarous one; and we shall have hereafter to notice several events in which the sanguinary spirit of an uncivilised state of society manifested itself in a striking manner. But we must not omit to remark, in this place, the general lenity experienced by persons taken in actual resistance to the sovereign authority. In the many civil wars of this period, in the revolt of princes, nobles, and cities against their monarchs, we rarely, if ever, find the punishment of death applied to the offenders, even when captured with arms in their hands; and Richard, notwithstanding that remorseless fierceness which was undoubtedly one of the great blots on his character, in almost all instances showed himself particularly mild and placable towards those who had personally injured him. In these times we find that imprisonment, generally for a short period, together with a pecuniary fine, or a temporary sequestration of estates, was the usual punishment of rebellion. It was reserved for an after period to introduce a more sanguinary code, and from the middle of the subsequent century, the severe laws of high treason were gradually enforced and aggravated, so * Bromton, col. 1151.

This personage is called Stephanus de Marzai, by Richard of Devizes, who describes him as " Magnus et potens, singulariter ferus, et dominus domini sui."

RICHARD RECEIVES ABSOLUTION.

119

that epochs which appear in other respects civilised, when compared with those of which we speak, were daily disgraced by the dark scenes of the block and axe, till at length the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries stand forth amongst the bloodiest in our annals. The comparative moderation which we find in the reign of Richard and Henry, may perhaps be ascribed, in some degree, to certain peculiarities in the feudal code. The law recognised cases, in which the vassal was justified in resisting his sovereign even in arms, and it was not always quite easy to ascertain the limits of this right. As the services, also, of the feudatories depended in a degree upon the affection they bore their monarch, and as they could only be called upon to fight his battles during a certain period, and under fixed conditions, it would have been by no means politic in any sovereign to disgust his nobles by a very vengeful exercise of his power. But still, a great deal of the lenity with which subdued insurgents were treated must be ascribed to the habits of the day, and the character of the individuals. We find no blood spilt by Richard on his accession to the throne; and in dealing with those who had been in rebellion against him in his character of Count of Poictou and Duke of Aquitaine, it is clearly proved that his vengeance seldom went further than in rasing the walls of those places which had been fortified for the purpose of resisting his authority.*

After punishing Stephen of Tours, and forcing from his greedy hands the treasures of the late king, Richard hastened from Chinon to Seez, in Normandy, where he was met by the Archbishops of Canterbury and Rouen, from whom he solicited and received absolution for the offence he had committed, not alone in making war upon his father, but in so doing after he had taken the cross. He then proceeded to Rouen, for the ceremony of his investiture as Duke of Normandy, which was performed in the cathedral, the archbishop binding on the ducal sword in the presence of the assembled

* Diceto, col. 675.

+ Diceto lays great stress upon the fact of Richard's having taken the cross, leaving it very doubtful whether he would have looked upon his rebellion against his father as any offence at all, if it had not been committed when he was pledged to the holy war. His words are: "Sed quia post crucem susceptam arma moverat contra patrem a prædictis archiepiscopis," &c.