[Sidenote: =Conspiracy of Princes Henry and Richard.=] In less than a year after the penance at Avranches, Henry was plunged into a new sea of troubles, in which the Church party saw the vengeance of Heaven for the fate of Becket. All these troubles sprang from the undutiful conduct of Henry's sons, four graceless youths who had been brought up in the worst of schools by their able but unprincipled mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Henry, the eldest son, was now in his nineteenth year; Richard, the second son, in his seventeenth. But, in spite of their youth, the two boys, encouraged and supported by their mother, conspired against their father and king. In 1173 Henry fled to the court of Lewis of France, alleging as his grievance the fact that the king would not grant him a great appanage--England or Normandy--to rule in his own right. With the aid of Louis VII, the young Henry stirred up all the discontented elements in his father's dominions. He arranged for a simultaneous rising of the discontented barons of Brittany, Anjou, and Poitou, for a rebellion in England to be headed by the earls of Leicester, Derby, and Norfolk, and for an invasion of Northumbria by William, the King of the Scots. [Sidenote: =Suppression of the rebels.--Moderation of Henry.=] This widespread conspiracy actually came to a head; but its outbreak only served to show King Henry's strength and activity. He was himself in France when the storm burst: taking in hand the work that lay nearest to him, he put down the Bretons and Angevins, and forced the King of France to conclude a truce. Then in the winter of 1173-4 he turned upon his son Richard's partisans in Poitou, and, after much fighting, pacified the land. Meanwhile the king's representative in England, the Justiciar Richard de Lucy, had called out the levies of the shires against the revolted barons. The campaign was settled by a battle at Fornham, in Suffolk, where the rebels were scattered and the Earl of Leicester taken prisoner. One after another the castles of the disloyal barons fell, and when England was pacified, Ralf de Glanville led a force against the Scots, surprised them at Alnwick, and took their king William the Lion prisoner (1174). Thus Henry had triumphed over all his foes. In the moment of victory he showed extraordinary moderation. He neither executed any of the rebels nor confiscated their lands, but only insisted that all their castles should be demolished. He gave his sons a full pardon, and restored them to his favour; with their mother he was far more wroth, and never would live with her again. The King of the Scots was only released on doing homage to the English crown, not merely for his earldoms of Huntingdon and Lothian, which had always been reckoned English fiefs, but for his whole kingdom of Scotland (1175).