Feeling that he grew rapidly worse, Henry caused himself to be conveyed to Chinon, where he arrived in a dying state. In his last moments he was heard to utter maledictions on himself as a conquered king, and to curse also the sons he was leaving behind him. The bishops and lords who surrounded him exerted themselves in vain to induce him to retract these words, and he continued repeating them until death laid its finger on his lips (July 6, 1189). No sooner had this great king breathed his last, than his servants and attendants, one and all, deserted his corpse, as had happened a century before to his ancestor, William the Conqueror. It is related that these hirelings stripped the body of their royal master of the very clothes which covered him, and carried off everything of value from the chamber. King Henry had desired to be buried at the abbey of Fontevrault, a few leagues to the south of Chinon; but it was not until after considerable delay that people could be found to wrap the body in a shroud, and convey it thither with horses. The corpse was lying in the great church of the abbey, waiting the time of sepulture, when Richard, who had received the news of his father's death, arrived at Fontevrault. Entering the church, he commanded the face of the dead king to be uncovered, that he might look upon it for the last time. The features were still contracted, and bore upon them the impress of prolonged agony. The son gazed upon the sight in silence, and with a sudden impulse, he knelt down for a few moments before the altar; then, rising up, he quitted the church, not to return. An old superstition of the North, which had descended alike to Normans and Saxons, was to the effect that the body of a murdered man would bleed in the presence of the murderer; and some of the chronicles relate that from the moment when Richard entered the church, until he had again passed the threshold, blood flowed without ceasing from the nostrils of the dead king. Thus it is evident that contemporary writers regarded the conduct of the sons as having accelerated, if indeed it did not cause, the death of their father.