courtiers; but he had not been long at the French court, when Paris and Chartres became crowded by fugitives from the dominions of the King of England. The discontented nobles of Britanny instantly took arms against Henry; a number of the barons of Aquitaine and Poitou followed their example; fewer of the Normans indeed, gave way; but in England the sedition was more alarming than in any other quarter, both from its extent, and from the station of the persons which it comprised. Richard de Lucy, Henry's gallant and determined friend, remained in London as grand justiciary, warned by his sovereign to watch the progress of events, and to take measures for defeating the designs of the malcontents. So sudden, however, and unexpected, was the outburst of the rebellion, that no great military power had been prepared to repress it; and de Lucy could only take gentler means to restrain the disaffected till the extent of the conspiracy was fully known, and the loyal subjects of the king could be rallied round his standard.

Such was the state of affairs in England, when Robert Earl of Leicester, and William Earl of Tankerville, came in haste to London, and applied to the grand justiciary for permission to cross the sea into France. It is probable that de Lucy had cause to suspect one at least of these noblemen, namely, the Earl of Leicester, who was known to have borrowed large sums of money on every side; and the justiciary, therefore, before he gave the permission

that they sought, compelled them both to take an oath upon the sacrament, to be faithful to the king, Henry the Second. Having done this, he suffered them to depart; and they immediately proceeded to France in order, notwithstanding their vow, to join the party of the insurgents. Their example was followed by a number of others, amongst whom were the Earl of Chester, the Earl of Mellent, Robert de Montfort, and a long list of noblemen, who, we are assured by Diceto, did not join the princes from any belief in the justice of their cause, but simply because Henry the Second had freely punished them for offences, taking from them their castles or levelling them with the ground, and repressing, with a strong hand, the crimes and misconduct of all classes of men. Besides all these, were many persons on whom the king probably counted as faithful subjects, the chief of whom was Hugh Bigot, whose castle of Framlingham now became the focus of rebellion for the northern and eastern counties of England.

In Britanny the people were soon in actual revolt; the first to raise the standard was the Viscount de Fougeres, who was almost immediately joined by Asculph de St. Hiliare, one of the earliest and most active promoters of the rebellion of Henry's sons. To them the Earl of Chester soon brought aid from England; and Eudes, the disappointed claimant of the duchy, seized the favourable

At

opportunity of recovering the hereditary estates, of which Henry had deprived him. Nor was Henry less seriously menaced on the northern side of Normandy; for there the allies, on whose faith he had the best reason to rely with confidence, abandoned him in the most shameless and disgraceful manner. Philip, Count of Flanders, whose friend, protector, and guardian he had been, and Matthew, Count of Boulogne, whom he had in fact enriched, by enabling him to marry the daughter of Stephen, both of whom were bound to him by treaties and by oaths, were now induced to violate their most solemn engagements. the solicitation of the King of France, they not only promised to join the young King Henry, but did homage to him, receiving as their reward, a grant of the county of Kent, and an annual subsidy of a thousand pounds sterling, together with another grant of detached lands in England and of the county of Mortagne, which had so long been coveted by the Count of Boulogne. Nor were these the only acts of lavish profusion by which the young king endeavoured to gain allies, and to stimulate the zeal of his supporters. On the Count of Blois he bestowed the fortress of Amboise, and vast rights in Touraine, together with an annuity; on the King of Scotland, the whole of Northumberland beyond Tyne; Cambridgeshire as well as Huntingdon, were given to David, brother of the

Scottish king; Norwich and the honour of Eye, to Hugh Bigot; and a multitude of other estates to other persons, sealing all the grants with an imitation of the great seal of England.

Thus did the weak and improvident prince divide his father's territories amongst those who promised him support in his rebellion, and hold out, as an inducement to treason and breach of faith, the plunder of his parent, and the pillage of his own heritage. He was lamentably successful; and armies were collected round Henry the Second on every side with the rapidity which the feudal system so greatly favoured. Although the flight of the young king did not take place until after Easter, the King of France was in the field with an immense force before the 1st of July, and previous to that period hostilities had commenced between the Count of Flanders and the Normans. The first effort of the war, indeed, was nothing but a brief irruption into Henry's territories, where the Flemings were encountered by the nobles of Normandy, and the bridge by which the former had crossed a river breaking, from the pressure of numbers in their flight, the greater part were drowned. The more important operations of the campaign, however, began with the siege of Verneuil, on the part of the King of France, and the siege of Aumale, then called Albemarle, on the northern frontier of Normandy, by the Counts of Flanders and Bou

logne.* We neither know the number of men in the army of Louis, nor in that of the Counts; but we are told that each was very great, and each it is proved was completely furnished with many of the enormous engines used in those days for battering the walls of a besieged city. Louis's force, 'indeed, is said to have comprised seven thousand knights, from which statement there is reason to believe that his whole force of horse and foot was the largest which had been brought into the field by any king of France for many years. His progress, however, was more slow than that of his ally the sovereign of Flanders.

In the meantime Henry did not show, on the present occasion, that alacrity in defending himself which he had heretofore displayed whenever he was attacked. He saw his territories ravaged during the greater part of the spring, without taking any vigorous measures to retaliate upon the enemy; and he even witnessed the siege of two of his strongest frontier fortresses without marching to the relief of either. Various causes have been assigned for this apparent apathy, and probably many considerations had each some share in keeping him inactive. He might well dread personally plunging into a warfare, where, in the first field of battle,

*Some authors imply that the young King Henry was with the army of the Count of Flanders; but it seems to me much more probable that he should be at this time with Louis, as other authors assert.