youngest and best-loved son, John. "Now," he said, as he turned his face to the wall, "let things go as they will-I care no more for myself or for the world." He was borne to Chinon by the silvery waters of Vienne, and muttering, Shame, shame on a conquered King," passed sullenly away.

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Section IX.-The Fall of the Angevins, 1189-1204.*

We need not follow Richard in the Crusade which occupied the beginning of his reign, and which left England for four years without a ruler-in his quarrels in Sicily, his conquest of Cyprus, his victory at Jaffa, his fruitless march upon Jerusalem, the truce he concluded with Saladin, his shipwreck as he returned, or his two imprisonments in Germany. Freed at last from his captivity, he returned to face new perils. During his absence, the kingdom had been entrusted to William of Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, head of Church and State, as at once Justiciar and Papal Legate. Longchamp was loyal to the King, but his exactions and scorn of Englishmen roused a fierce hatred among the baronage, and this hatred found a head in John, traitor to his brother as to his father. John's intrigues with the baronage and the French king ended at last in open revolt, which was, however, checked by the ability of the new Primate, Hubert Walter; and Richard's landing in 1194 was followed by his brother's complete submission. But if Hubert Walter had secured order in England, over sea Richard found himself face to face with dangers which he was too clear-sighted to undervalue. Destitute of his father's administrative genius, less ingenious in his political conceptions than John, Richard was far from being a mere soldier. A love of adventure, a pride in sheer physical strength, here and there a romantic generosity, jostled roughly with the craft, the unscrupulousness, the violence of his race; but he was at heart a statesman, cool and patient in the execution of his plans as he was bold in their conception. "The devil is loose; take care of yourself," Philip had written to John at the news

*Authorities.-In addition to those mentioned in the last Section, the Chronicle of Richard of Devizes, and the "Itinerarium_Regis Ricardi," edited by Dr. Stubbs, are useful for Richard's reign. Rigord's "Gesta Philippi," and the "Philippis Willelmi Britonis," the chief authorities on the French side, are given in Duchesne, "Hist. Franc. Scriptores," vol. v.

of the King's release. In the French king's case a restless ambition was spurred to action by insults which he had borne during the Crusade, and he had availed himself of Richard's imprisonment to invade Normandy, while the lords of Aquitaine rose in revolt under the troubadour Bertrand de Born. Jealousy of the rule of strangers, weariness of the turbulence of the mercenary soldiers of the Angevins or of the greed and oppression of their financial administration, combined with an impatience of their firm government and vigorous justice to alienate the nobles of their provinces on the Continent. Loyalty among the people there was none; even Anjou, the home of their race, drifted towards Philip as steadily as Poitou. But in warlike ability Richard was more than Philip's peer. He held him in check on the Norman frontier and surprised his treasure at Fréteval, while he reduced to submission the rebels of Aquitaine. England, drained by the tax for Richard's ransom, groaned under its burdens as Hubert Walter raised vast sums to support the army of mercenaries which Richard led against his foes.

Crushing taxation had wrung from England wealth which again filled the royal treasury, and during a short truce Richard's bribes detached Flanders from the French alliance, and united the Counts of Chartres, Champagne, and Boulogne with the Bretons in a revolt against Philip. He won a valuable aid by the election of his nephew Otto to the German throne, and his envoy, William Longchamp, knitted an alliance which would bring the German lances to bear on the King of Paris. But the security of Normandy was requisite to the success of these wider plans, and Richard saw that its defence could no longer rest on the loyalty of the Norman people. His father might trace his descent through Matilda from the line of Hrolf, but the Angevin ruler was in fact a stranger to the Norman. It was impossible for a Norman to recognize his Duke with any real sympathy in the Angevin prince whom he saw moving along the border at the head of Brabançon mercenaries, in whose camp the old names of the Norman baronage were missing, and Merchadé, a Provençal ruffian, held supreme command. The purely military site which Richard selected for the new fortress with which he guarded the border showed his realization of the fact that Normandy could now only be held by force of arms. As a monument of warlike skill his

"Saucy Castle," Château-Gaillard stands first among the fortresses of the middle ages. Richard fixed its site where the Seine bends suddenly at Gaillon in a great semicircle to the north, and where the valley of Les Andelys breaks the line of the chalk cliffs along its banks. Blue masses of woodland crown the distant hills; within the river curve lies a dull reach of flat meadow, round which the Seine, broken with green islets, and dappled with the gray and blue of the sky, flashes like a silver bow on its way to Rouen. The castle formed a part of an entrenched camp which Richard designed to cover his Norman capital. Approach by the river was blocked by a stockade and a bridge of boats, by a fort on the islet in midstream, and by the fortified town which the King built in the valley of the Gambon, then an impassable marsh. In the angle between this valley and the Seine, on a spur of the chalk hills which only a narrow neck of land connects with the general plateau, rose at the height of 300 feet above the river the crowning fortress of the whole. Its outworks and the walls which connected it with the town and stockade have for the most part gone, but time and the hand of man have done little to destroy the fortifications themselves—the fosse, hewn deep into the solid rock, with casemates hollowed out along its sides, the fluted walls of the citadel, the huge donjon looking down on the brown roofs and huddled gables of Les Andelys. Even now in its ruin we can understand the triumphant outburst of its royal builder as he saw it rising against the sky: "How pretty a child is mine, this child of but one year old!" The easy reduction of Normandy on the fall of ChâteauGaillard at a later time proved Richard's foresight; but foresight and sagacity were mingled in him with a brutal violence and a callous indifference to honor. "I would take it, were its walls of iron," Philip exclaimed in wrath as he saw the fortress rise. "I would hold it, were its walls of butter," was the defiant answer of his foe. It was Church land, and the Archbishop of Rouen laid Normandy under interdict at its seizure, but the King met the interdict with mockery, and intrigued with Rome till the censure was withdrawn. was just as defiant of a rain of blood," whose fall scared his courtiers. "Had an angel from heaven bid him abandon his work," says a cool observer, "he would have answered with a curse." The twelvemonth's hard work, in fact, by securing

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the Norman frontier, set Richard free to deal his long-planned blow at Philip. Money only was wanting, and the King listened with more than the greed of his race to the rumor that a treasure had been found in the fields of the Limousin. Twelve knights of gold seated round a golden table were the find, it was said, of the Lord of Châlus. Treasure-trove at any rate there was, and Richard prowled around the walls, but the castle held stubbornly out till the King's greed passed into savage menace; he would hang all, he swore―man, woman, the very child at the breast. In the midst of his threats an arrow from the walls struck him down. He died as he had lived, owning the wild passion which for seven years past had kept him from confession lest he should be forced. to pardon Philip, forgiving with kingly generosity the archer who had shot him.

The Angevin dominion broke to pieces at his death. John was acknowledged as king in England and Normandy, Aquitaine was secured for him by its Duchess, his mother; but Anjou, Maine, and Touraine did homage to Arthur, the son of his elder brother Geoffry, the late Duke of Britanny. The ambition of Philip, who protected his cause, turned the day against Arthur; the Angevins rose against the French garrisons with which the French king practically annexed the country, and John was at last owned as master of the whole dominion of his house. A fresh outbreak of war in Poitou was fatal to his rival; surprised at the siege of Mirebeau by a rapid march of the King, Arthur was taken prisoner to Rouen, and murdered there, as men believed, by his uncle's hand. The brutal outrage at once roused the French provinces in revolt, while the French king marched straight on Normandy. The ease with which its conquest was effected can only be explained by the utter absence of any popular resistance on the part of the Normans themselves. Half a century before the sight of a Frenchman in the land would have roused every peasant to arms from Avranches to Dieppe, but town after town surrendered at the mere summons of Philip, and the conquest was hardly over before Normandy settled down into the most loyal of the provinces of France. Much of this was due to the wise liberality with which Philip met the claims of the towns to independence and self-government, as well as to the overpowering force and military ability with which

the conquest was effected. But the utter absence of all opposition sprang from a deeper cause. To the Norman his transfer from John to Philip was a mere passing from one foreign master to another, and foreigner for foreigner Philip was the less alien of the two. Between France and Normandy there had been as many years of friendship as of strife; between Norman and Angevin lay a century of bitterest hate. Moreover, the subjection to France was the realization in fact of a dependence which had always existed in theory; Philip entered Rouen as the over-lord of its Dukes; while the submission to the house of Anjou had been the most humiliating of all submissions, the submission to an equal.

It was the consciousness of this temper in the Norman people that forced John to abandon all hope of resistance on the failure of his attempt to relieve Château-Gaillard, by the siege of which Philip commenced his invasion. The skill with which the combined movements for its relief were planned proved the King's military ability. The besiegers were parted into two masses by the Seine; the bulk of their forces were camped in the level space within the bend of the river, while one division was thrown across it to occupy the valley of the Gambon, and sweep the country around of its provisions. John proposed to cut the French army in two by destroying the bridge of boats which formed the only communication between the two bodies, while the whole of his own forces flung themselves on the rear of the French division encamped in the cul-de-sac formed by the river-bend, and without any exit save the bridge. Had the attack been carried out as ably as it was planned, it must have ended in Philip's ruin; but the two assaults were not made simultaneously, and were successively repulsed. The repulse was followed by the utter collapse of the military system by which the Angevins had held Normandy; John's treasury was exhausted, and his mercenaries passed over to the foe. The King's despairing appeal to the Duchy itself came too late; its nobles were already treating with Philip, and the towns were incapable of resisting the siege train of the French. It was despair of any aid from Normandy that drove John over sea to seek it as fruitlessly from England, but with the fall of Château-Gaillard, after a gallant struggle, the province passed without a struggle into the French king's hands. In 1204 Philip turned on the south