breast of his brother Richard. Though he was evidently weak in character, and though various traits will show that he was vain and haughty; yet he was remarkably handsome in person, powerful in body, skilful and renowned in all martial exercises, and wonderfully popular in his manners. Perhaps no prince was ever more generally loved than the young King by the great body of his inferiors; and it is only from some small traits, which those who praise him most have conveyed to us, together with the weak and criminal acts by which he signalized his rebellion against his father, that we are taught to believe he would have been, had he lived, one of the worst monarchs that ever sat on the English throne.

No sooner had Henry provided, as far as possible, for the security of his Norman frontier, than, as we have before said, he sent faithful ambassadors to the court of France, both to discover the intentions of his revolted children and of the monarch who supported them, and to labour for the purpose of arranging some terms by which the storm of war might be averted. His envoys were two venerable and respectable prelates, the old Archbishop of Rouen and the Bishop of Lisieux. Neither their sacred character, however, nor the justice of the cause they came to advocate, nor a sense of piety, could induce the King of France to treat the ambassadors of Henry with decent respect; and his reply to their greeting on being admitted to

his court, was—if we may trust William of Newbury-equally unworthy of a monarch, a father, a christian, or a man of sense. He first demanded who sent them with such messages as those which they delivered? They replied, with some astonishment, that it was the King of England.

That is false," replied Louis, pointing to the younger Henry; "here is the King of England,he never sent you to me;" and he then went on to contend that Henry the Second had resigned the throne to his son, when he caused him to be crowned, although he himself well knew how little that act conferred any real sovereignty, by the customs of the very people over which he reigned.

The bishops, however, still pursued their object. They exhorted Louis to avoid the horrors of warfare, they magnified the benefits of peace,-they represented to him the evil of encouraging dissensions between a father and his sons, and they used all those arguments which, as christian prelates, they might well employ in addition to the reasons of policy and human expediency, which they brought forward on behalf of the king.

Louis, however, was deaf to their exhortations. He avowed, openly, that he was determined to go to war; he accused Henry of subtlety and continual violation of faith towards him; he declared that he had resolved upon hostilities before he was joined by Prince Henry; and he talked vaguely of Henry having excited his subjects to enmity against

him from the mountains of Auvergne* to the banks of the Rhone. At the same time, he assigned as special causes for adhering to his warlike resolution, that Henry had not sent the Princess Margaret of France to her husband, that he retained her dower, and that he had received the Count of St. Giles and Toulouse to liege homage, in contempt of the rights of the crown of France; and the monarch ended by swearing, that he would never make peace with Henry without the consent of that king's wife and sons.

The only one of the charges urged against the English sovereign which would appear to have been justified by fact, was that which related to the homage of the Count of Toulouse, and even in this instance the offence seems to have been a mere informality. The Count's homage was certainly due to Richard, as Duke of Aquitaine, and to him the act was performed; for we are assured that the ceremony was postponed at the congress of Clermont, because the young prince was not present. But it would appear that the Count afterwards, as Richard was not in

*This is a curious expression. There might have been some question whether Auvergne was under the domination of Henry, as Suzerain, or under that of Louis; but the territory between Auvergne and the Rhone is, I believe, only found mentioned as a matter of dispute between the monarchs on that one occasion. The words used on this subject, in the letter written by the two bishops, are as follows :-" Quod subditos suæ ditioni populos à montibus Alverniæ usque ad Rhodanum in ipsius odium concitastis."

full and real possession of Aquitaine and Poitou, did homage as well to Henry as to his son, a concession which the King of England was very willing, undoubtedly, to grasp at, but which can scarcely be considered a legitimate cause for warfare, when it is recollected that the act should have been performed to Henry himself by the Count of Toulouse very many years before, and in the oath of homage was distinctly inserted the words-"saving the faith due to Louis, King of France."

The real causes, however, of Louis's hostile determination, were, his jealousy of the power and reputation of his neighbour, the ancient enmity which had subsisted between them ever since the flight of Becket, and the restless spirit of military adventure which has at all times animated the nobles of France. The letter of Henry's ambassadors shows us that the whole court of Louis was eager and impatient for hostilities; and, amidst the warnings to prepare for a more fierce and pertinacious war than he had ever yet waged, which they give to their sovereign, they insert a caution against darker and more criminal proofs of enmity. Their words clearly point at murder; and though it is scarcely possible to believe, that either Louis or the King of England's own sons did countenance such a purpose, yet we cannot doubt that men of so high a reputation as the Archbishop of Rouen and the Bishop of Lisieux would have refrained from the insinuation, had

they not been well assured by all they saw and heard, that the life of their sovereign was really in danger from the knife of the assassin.*

Giving up all hope of effecting the object for which they had been sent, the ambassadors left the court of France and returned to Rouen; while Henry, still anxious to terminate peacefully the unnatural contention which had arisen between himself and his sons, dispatched messengers to the Pope, beseeching him to interfere as the common father of the Christian world. In the mean time, however, all things combined to hurry on the commencement of warfare. The seeds of conspiracy which had been sown by Eleanor, produced more bitter fruit, and gave its harvest more rapidly than even the King of France and the monarch's sons could have anticipated. Every province of Henry's continental dominions, every county in England, had received the germs of insurrection; and negociations of the most extensive kind were rapidly carried on with all the monarch's neighbours, to detach them from his alliance, and to engage them to cooperate in the impious warfare which was about to commence.

The younger Henry had been accompanied, or closely followed, by three of his father's principal

* Amongst other expressions which leave no doubt of what they meant, is the following:-"Nec satis est ei exterminare terræ faciem igne gladio; sed in vestram personam (quod absit) scelus execrabile machinatur."