His other sons were already at their posts. Richard, designated since infancy to be duke of Aquitaine, was formally enthroned at Poitiers on Trinity Sunday 1172, and after the rebellion was charged with full authority over the duchy. He was barely seventeen, with his mother’s temperament rather than his father’s. Tall, strong, fair, blue-eyed, violent and ruthless, Richard set himself to “bring the shapeless into shape, the irregular to rule, the mighty down, the rugged level.” He took Castillonnes in August 1175, Périgueux in winter, all the fortresses of Poitou before midsummer 1176; by Candlemas 1177 he could report that he had pacified the whole duchy. The peace did not last. The Angevin settlement of the déols heiress in Berry dragged Henry southward in autumn 1177; at Nonancourt on September 25 father and French king agreed to bury their quarrels under the cross; at Graçay another useless attempt was made to settle Auvergne. By Christmas the three elder sons held a great court at Angers.
In 1178 Henry knighted Geoffrey of Woodstock, and Richard, having spent the summer in further reductions of Limousin and the Angoumois, took Pons after a three months’ siege and Taillebourg by assault. In May 1179 he reported to his father in person. A new element was entering French politics: Philip Augustus, the only son of Louis VII, was crowned at Reims on All Saints’ day 1179; dominated by Philip of Flanders, he soon persecuted his own mother and quarrelled with his uncles of Blois. Henry assumed the traditional Angevin role of protector of the French Crown with a fidelity rarely equalled by his predecessors. In spring 1182, by his mediation, the count of Flanders was brought to submission.
In the same year the young king was straining against his father’s patience once more, and Richard was stirring up bitter hatred by his rigid rule. The troubadour Bertrand de Born, lord of Hautefort, had been seeking to make mischief between the brothers; now his sirventes stung the young king into action. Henry refused him a real share of authority; he fled to the French court; a reconciliation was patched up. At Caen, just after Christmas 1182, young Henry confessed in shame his secret dealings with the Aquitanian rebels, and surrendered to his father the fortress of Clairvaux, built by Richard in disputed territory. At Angers Henry made his three sons take oaths of obedience and peace with each other and called upon the two younger to do homage to the eldest. Geoffrey obeyed; Richard refused, declaring it absurd that there should be precedence between children of the same parents, and that if Henry had his father’s heritage, the mother’s was as much his own. He hurried back into Poitou to prepare for war.
Henry bade the elder brothers subdue Richard by force; then summoned all parties to a conference at Mirebeau. But the young king had already advanced into Poitou, was welcomed at Limoges, joined his brother Geoffrey in the citadel, and began to raise the country. Henry marched to relieve Richard; for six weeks he besieged the citadel of Limoges, narrowly escaping death twice by arrows of the garrison. The young king twice came in with feigned submissions; meanwhile he was stripping the treasury of Saint-Martial and the famous shrine of Rocamadour—carrying off, it was said, the sword of Roland—and arming Brabantines with the spoils. Returning through Martel, sickening for death, remorse awoke. He sent a message begging for one last meeting; Henry would have gone but his friends prevented him. On Tuesday in Whitsun-week the young king made public confession before the assembled clergy, sent his ring to Richard, charged William the Marshal to bear his crusader’s cross to the Holy Sepulchre, was stripped of rich apparel and laid upon ashes in a hair-shirt with a rope about his neck, received the last sacraments, and an hour after nones on St Barnabas’s day—June 11, 1183—died kissing his father’s ring. He was buried, as he had desired, in Rouen cathedral, in the presence of his broken-hearted father and his assembled brothers.
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