luced many of his knights. Even at this extremity the good people of Normandy were faithful to him, and, wishing to secure that duchy for his favourite son, of whose love and faith he had never doubted, he was careful to procure an oath from the seneschal of Normandy, that he would deliver the fortresses of that province to John in case of his death. The church was on this occasion zealously engaged on the side of Henry; Richard and the French king were menaced with excommunication, and though elated by unusual success, Philip was obliged to consent to another conference. The meeting took place in the month of June in the following year (A.D. 1189), at La Ferté-Bernard; and Richard, John of Anagni, cardinal and legate, the Archbishops of Canterbury, Rouen, Rheims, and Bourges, were present. Philip proposed the same conditions as at the conference of Bonsmoulins seven months before; Henry, who had been hurt in every feeling by Richard, in the interval, rejected them, and proposed that Adelais should be united to his dutiful son John-an overture that tends to shake the credibility of the existing scandal even more than does the circumstance of Henry's advanced age. Should Philip agree to this arrangement, he declared his readiness to name Prince John heir to his continental dominions—a distribution which he seems to have long contemplated. Bat Philip would not enter into the new plan, or abandon Richard, who was present, and who joined the French king in violent abuse of his father. John of Anagni, the cardinal-legate, then threatened to put the kingdom of France under an interdict; but these menaces depended much for their effect on circumstances and the character of the princes to whom they were addressed. Philip had boldness enough to despise them: he even accused the legate of partial and venal motives; telling him it was easy to perceive he had already scented the pounds sterling of the English king. Richard, who was never exemplary for command of temper, went still further: he drew his sword against the cardinal, and would have cut him down but for the timely interposition of some more moderate members of the party. Henry again rode away from the conference, and this time with a desponding heart. The people of Aquitaine, Poictou, and Brittany were induced to rise in mass against their now falling master; and, under the command of Richard, they fell upon him on the west and south, Thile the French king attacked him in Anjou, on the north. He had, on former occasions, made head against almost equally formidable confederacies; but the strength of frame, the eagle-glance, and Jam sterlingos regis Angliæ olfecerat.-Rog. Hoved.; Matt. Par. the buoyancy of spirits which had then carried him through a victor, were now crippled and dimmed by sickness and sorrow. His barons continued their open desertions or secret treachery; and at last he was induced to solicit peace, with the offer of resigning himself to whatever terms Philip and Richard should propose. The two monarchs met on a plain between Tours and Azay-sur-Cher. It appears that Richard did not attend to witness the humiliation of his father, but expected the issue of the negotiations at a short distance. While the kings were conversing together in the open field and on horseback, a loud peal of thunder was heard, though the sky appeared cloudless, and the lightning fell between them, but without hurting them. They separated in great alarm, but after a brief space met again. Then a second peal of thunder, more awful than the first, rolled over their heads. The state of Henry's health rendered him more nervous than his young and then triumphant rival; he dropped the reins, and, reeling in his saddle, would have fallen from his horse had not his attendants supported him. He recovered his self-possession, but he was too ill to renew the conference, and the humiliating conditions of peace, reduced to writing, were sent to his quarters for his signature. It was stipulated that Henry should pay an indemnity of 20,000 marks to Philip, renounce all his rights of sovereignty over the town of Berry, and submit in all things to his decisions;' that he should permit all his vassals, both English and continental, to do homage to Richard; that all such barons as had espoused Richard's party should be considered the liege men and vassals of the son, unless they voluntarily chose to return to the father; that he should deliver Adelais to one out of five persons named by Richard, who, at the return of Philip and Richard from the crusade, on which they proposed to depart immediately (there was no longer any talk of Henry's going), would restore her in all honour, either to her brother or her affianced; and, finally, that he should give the kiss of peace to Richard, and banish from his heart all sentiments of anger and animosity against him." The envoys of the French king read the treaty, article by article, to Henry as he lay suffering on his bed. When they came to the article which regarded the vassals who had deserted him to join Richard, he asked for a list of their names. The list was given him, and the very first name upon it which struck his eye was that of his darling son John, of whose base treachery he had hitherto been kept happily | behind me!" Some priests exhorted the disorignorant. The broken-hearted king started up from his bed and gazed wildly around. "Is it true," he cried, "that John, the child of my heart dered, raving man to retract these curses, but he would not. He was sensible, however, to the affection and unwearying attentions of his na CASTLE OF CHINON.-Toucharu Lafosse, La Loire Historique, Pittoresque, &c. -he whom I have cherished more than all the Shortly after, he caused himself to be transported to the pleasant town of Chinon; but those favourite scenes made no impression on his profound melancholy and hopelessness of heart, and in a few days he laid himself down to die. In his last moments, as his intellects wandered, he wa heard uttering unconnected exclamations. "O shame!" he cried, "a conquered king! I, a conquered king! tural son, Geoffrey, who had been faithful to him through life, and who received his last sigh. As soon as the breath was out of his body, all the ministers, priests, bishops, and barons, that had waited so long, took a hurried departure, and his personal attendants followed the example of their betters, but not before they had stripped his dead body, and seized everything. of any value in the apartment where he died. The disrespect and utter abandonment which had followed the demise of the great Conqueror 102 years before, were repeated towards the corpse of his great-grandson. It was not without delay and difficulty that people were found to wrap the body in a winding-sheet, and a hearse and horses to convey it to the abbey of Fontevraud.' While it was on its way to receive the last rites of se ABBEY OF FONTEVRAUD.-Mrs. Stothaid's Normandy. Cursed be the day on which I was born, and cursed of God the children I leave 1 Script. Rer. Franc. "Iterum se lecto reddens, et faciem suam ad parietem vertens," &c. 2 Chinon, beautifully situated on the river Loire, was the French Windsor of our Norman kings; and Fontevraud, at the distance of about seven miles, their favourite place of burial. 3 Script. Rer. Franc.; Girald.; Ang. Sac.; Rog. Hoved. Fontevraud, or Fontrevauld (anciently Fons Ebraldi), a town of France, in the department of the Maine and Loire. The abbey, to which it owes its origin, was most richly endowed, and was the head of an order in which the men of the pulture, Richard, who had learned the news of his father's death, met the procession and accomestablishment were subservient to the women. It was founded in 1099, by Robert d'Arbrissel, a celebrated preacher in Brittany, charged by Pope Urban II. to preach in favour of the second crusade. His popularity induced so many of all classes to follow him, that he resolved to choose a spot where he might establish them in regular order. The wild forest of Fontrevaud, watered by a pure fountain that issued from a rock, was selected as a suitable retreat, and a lady named Aramburge gave them the valley in which the great church was afterwards erected.Mrs. Stothard's Tour in France. panied it to the church. Here, as the dead king | almost without a blemish, is a manifest defying lay stretched on the bier, his face was uncovered, of the testimony and authority of contemporary that his son might look upon it for the last time. history; but yet, when every fair deduction is Marked as it was with the awful expression of made, he will remain indisputably an illustrious a long agony, he gazed on it in silence and shud- prince, and a man possessed of many endearing dered. He then knelt and prayed before the qualities. altar, but only for "a modicum of time, or about as long as it takes to say the Lord's Prayer;" and when the funeral was over he quitted the church, and entered it not again until that hour when, cut off in the full strength and pride of manhood, he was carried thither a corpse to be laid at the feet of his father.' It was a popular superstition which both Normans and Anglo-Saxons had derived from their common ancestors, the Scandinavians, that the body of the dead would bleed in presence of its murderer; and more than one chronicler of the time avers that this miracle was seen at the church of Fontevraud, where (say they), from the moment that Richard entered until that in which he departed, the king never ceased to bleed at both nostrils. On the day of Henry's death (July 6, 1189), he was in the fiftyseventh year of his age, and he had reigned over England thirty-four years, seven lunar months, and five days, counting from the day of his coronation. This long reign had been highly beneficial to the country. With a few brief exceptions, peace had been maintained in the interior, and there is good evidence to show that the condition of the people generally had been elevated and improved. The king's personal character has been differently represented, some dwelling only on its bright qualities, and others laying all their emphasis on his vices, which, in truth, were neither few in number nor moderate in their nature, although, for the most part, common attributes to the princes of those ages, few of whom had his redeeming virtues and splendid abilities. To say, with Hume, that his character, in private as well as in public life, was Script. Rer. Franc. * Benedict. Abbas; Script. Rer. Franc.; Hoved.; Speed, Chron. Diceto; Hoved.; Sir Harris Nicolas' Chronology of History. "If we seek the character of the founder of the Common Law in the pages of the justiciar (Glanville), we shall view him as greater and more powerful than any king who had hitherto borne sway in England. Just, discreet, and merciful-a lover of peace, but whose humanity did not degenerate into indolence or supineness-mighty, but who never allowed his strength to tempt him into tyranny. By the force of his right hand he crushed the violence of the proud and intractable, while he extended his sceptre to the indigent and lowly. None of the judges of his court could dare to deviate, however slightly, from the path of righteousness, nor to utter a sentence contrary to the dictates of truth. In his supreme tribunal, the power of the adversary oppressed not the poor man; neither could favour or credit drive the lowly from the seat of judgment. Such are the sentences which preface the earliest treatise on the Law. But, in the portrait which we receive from the ecclesiastic, every virtue disappears: unchaste, greedy, avaricious, capricious, and cruel, he abolished all the old and rightful laws of the country, by the new ordinances termed 'assizes,' which he promulgated VOL. L. Besides his five legitimate sons, of whom three preceded him to the grave, Henry had three daughters by his wife Eleanor. Matilda, the eldest, was married to Henry, Duke of Saxony, Bavaria, Westphalia, &c.; and from her is descended the present royal family of Great Britain: Eleanor, the second daughter, was married to Alfonso the Good, King of Castile; and Joan, the youngest, was united to William II., King of Sicily, a prince of the Norman line of Guiscard. Two of his natural children have obtained the general notice of history on account of the celebrity of their mother, and of their own eminent qualities. The first, who was born while Stephen was yet on the throne of England, was William, surnamed "Longsword," who married the heiress of the Earl of Salisbury, and succeeded to the high titles and immense estates of that baron; the second was the still better known Geoffrey, who was born about the time when Henry became king, and who was made Bishop of Lincoln at a very early age. He had much of Henry's spirit and ability, and, if an indifferent prelate, he was a bold and successful warrior in his nonage, when (during the first insurrection promoted by his father's legitimate sons) he gained in the north some signal advantages for the king, to whom he and his brother, William Longsword, were ever faithful and affectionate. Geoffrey was subsequently made chancellor, when, like Becket in the same capacity, he constantly accompanied the king. In his dying moments, Henry expressed a hope or a wish that he might be made Archbishop of York, a promotion which, as we shall find, he afterwards obtained. every year. Severe beyond example, his jurisprudence was subversive both of natural justice and of the laudable customs of the realm. Attacking, with an even hand, the honour, the privileges, and the property of the aristocracy, and the franchises of the clergy; no individual was so exalted as to be above the reach of his arbitrary power; no one so insignificant as to be sheltered by obscurity from his searching tyranny. This strange discrepancy between the minister and the monk may be attributed in part to the difference of their respective stations. The persecutor of Becket could find little favour from the churchman; and the charge preferred against him that he kept the guilty priest in fetters, making no distinction between the clerk and the churl,' may not be considered as a proof of the impartiality of the complainant; but the fiscal extortions of Henry, together with the abuses resulting from the sale of right and justice, have been faithfully recorded. In opposition to the praises of his equity, so loudly bestowed by Glanville, we can quote the declaration of the suitor, who counts the bribes which he paid to the monarch; and the testimony afforded by the justiciar is rendered suspicious by his known perversion of the law to answer his own sinister designs."-Palgrave, Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth. 37 The history of their mother, the "Fair Rosamond," has been enveloped in romantic traditions which have scarcely any foundation in truth, but which have taken so firm a hold on the popular mind, and have been identified with so much poetry, that it is neither an easy nor a pleasant task to dissipate the fanciful illusion, and unpeople the "bower" in the sylvan shades of Woodstock. Rosamond de Clifford was the daughter of a baron of Herefordshire, the beautiful site of whose antique castle, in the valley of the Wye, is pointed out to the traveller between the town of the Welsh Hay and the city of Hereford, at a point where the most romantic of rivers, after foaming through its rocky, narrow bed in Wales, sweeps freely and tranquilly through an open English valley of surpassing loveliness. Henry became enamoured of her in his youth, before he was king, and the connection continued for many years; but long before his death, and even long before his quarrel with his wife and legitimate sons (with which, it appears, she had nothing to do), Rosamond retired, to lead a religious and penitent life, into the "little nunnery" of Godestow, in the "rich meadows of Evenlod near unto Oxford." As Henry still preserved gentle and generous feelings towards the object of his youthful passion, he made many donations to the "little nunnery," on her account; and when she died (some time, at least, before the first rebellion) the nuns, in gratitude to one who had been both a bower for this "most sightly maiden," of wonderful contrivance, and not unlike the Dædalean labyrinth; but he speaks only of a device against surprise, and intimates, in clear terms, that Rosamond died a natural death. The clue of silk, and the poison-bowl forced on her fair and gentle rival by the jealous and revengeful Eleanor, were additions of a still more modern date. The adventures of the amiable frail one's unoffending bones are better authenticated. A rigid bishop caused them to be cast out of the church, and interred in the common cemetery, observing to the nuns, that the tomb of a harlot was no fit object for a choir of virgins to contemplate, and that religion made no distinction between the mistress of a king and the mistress of any other man. But gratitude rebelled against this salutary doctrine, and the virgin sisterhood of Godestow directly and indirectly their be- REMAINS OF THE NUNNERY OF GODESTOW - From an old view in the British Museum. nefactress, buried her in their choir, hung a silken pall over her tomb, and kept tapers constantly burning around it. These few lines, we believe, comprise all that is really known of the Fair Rosamond. The legend, so familiar to the childhood of all of us, was of later and gradual growth, not being the product of one imagination. The chronicler Brompton, who wrote in the time of Edward III., or more than a century and a half after the event, gave the first description we possess of the secret bower of Rosamond. He says, that in order that she might not be " easily taken unawares by the queen," Henry constructed, near "Wodestoke," gathered up the remains, perfumed the dry bones, laid them again in their church, under a fair, large gravestone, and set up a cross hard by, with an inscription, imploring requiem or rest for Rosamond. 1 It appears that John de St. John has the best claim to be considered the founder of the monastery of Godestow. In the latter end of the reign of King Henry I., he gave some ground here to a religious matron called Editha, or Edira, who built thereon an abbey for Benedictine nuns, which was consecrated at the latter end of December, 1138, to the honour of the Virgin Mary and St. John Baptist.-Monasticon. The remains of Godestow consist of ranges of wall on the north, south, and east sides of an extensive area, and a small building at one of the angles CHAPTER VII.--CIVIL AND MILITARY HISTORY. RICHARD I., SURNAMED CŒUR DE LION.-ACCESSION, A.D. 1189-DEATH, A.D. 1199. Richard I. succeeds to the crown-Massacre of the Jews at his coronation-His expedients to raise money for the crusade-Appoints a regency and departs on the expedition-His adventures during the voyage-His quarrels and aggressions in Sicily-His misunderstandings with his ally, Philip of France-Richard's marriage to Berengaria-He is driven by a storm to Cyprus-His war with the sovereign of the island-His landing at Acre Acre taken from the Saracens-Disagreements between Richard and Philip-Philip returns to France -Massacre of the Saracen hostages at Acre-March of the crusaders towards Jerusalem-They are compelled to winter at Ascalon-Quarrels among the crusaders and failure of the crusade-Richard's victory over the Saracens at Jaffa-He embarks for England-His dangerous land journey-He is taken prisoner by the Duke of Austria-The Emperor of Germany claims and imprisons him-Troubles in England during King Richard's absence-Jewish massacres-Quarrels between the chiefs of the regency-Quarrels between Prince John and the chancellor, Longchamp-Longchamp defeated, and obliged to leave England-John assumes the government-He aims at the crown in his brother's absence-The emperor compelled to liberate Richard on ransom -Richard's return to England-His treacherous welcome from Prince John-Longbeard's rebellion in London -He is executed-War between England and France-The Bishop of Beauvais captured-Defeat of the French at the river Epte-Richard besieges Chaluz-He is mortally wounded-His behaviour in his last moments. S soon as his father was buried, new sovereign. The state of affairs, however, was loaded with chains, and thrown into a dungeon, from which he was not released until he delivered up, not only the funds of the late king, but his own money also, to the last penny he possessed. Letters were sent over to England for the immediate enlargement of the queen-dowager; and, on quitting her prison, Eleanor was invested for a short time with the office of regent, and especially charged to have an eye on the monies in England. Her misfortunes seem for awhile to have had a bene ficial effect on her imperious character; for, during her brief authority, she rclieved the people by many works of mercy; releasing those who were arbitrarily detained in prison, pardoning offences against the crown, moderating the severity of the forest laws, and reversing several attainders. She also distributed bountiful alms to the poor, that they might pray for the soul of the husband whom she, more than any one, had contrived to send with sorrow to the grave. She hastened to Winchester, where the royal treasure was deposited, and having detained Richard on the Continent for nearly two months. At last he crossed the Channel, accompanied by his brother John, and landed at Portsmouth, whence he repaired to Winchester. Henry had left in his treasury there a large sum in gold and silver, besides plate, jewels, and precious stones. All these Richard caused to be weighed and examined in his presence, and carefully inventoried. His soul was occupied by an enterprise that was likely to absorb all the money he could possibly procure; and, to find means for a most lavish expenditure, he resorted to the cares and expedients that more properly characterize avarice. It was this enterprise, however, that gave him the benefit of an undisputed succession to all his father's dominions; for John, expecting to be left in full authority by the immediate departure of his brother for Palestine, and hoping that he would never return alive from the perils of the Holy War, submitted to what he considered would be a very brief arrangement, and made no effort to dispute Richard's right. But for these circumstances it is very clear, from the character of the crafty and ambitious John, that the old story of a disputed succession would have been repeated. As it was, it was wiser for him to wait awhile for the realm, that they might recognize and receive their | chance of getting peaceful possession of the whole, |