At first sight it would seem as though Henry II of England entered the lists against his overlord the Champion of France with overwhelming odds in his favour. Ruler of a territory stretching from Scotland, his dependency, to the Pyrenees, he added to his lands and wealth the brain of a statesman and the experience of long years of war and intrigue. What could a mere boy, fenced round even in his capital of Paris by turbulent barons, hope to achieve against such strength? Yet the weapons of destruction lay ready to his hand, in the very household of the Angevin ruler himself. Legend records that the blood of some Demon ancestress ran in the veins of the Dukes of Aquitaine, endowing them with a ferocity and falseness strange even to mediaeval minds; and the sons whom Eleanor bore to her second husband were true to this bad strain if to nothing else. ‘Dost thou not know’, wrote one of them to his father who had reproached him for plotting against his authority, ‘that it is our proper nature that none of us should love the other, but that ever brother should strive with brother and son against father? I would not that thou shouldst deprive us of our hereditary right and seek to rob us of our nature.’ Louis VII, in order to weaken Henry II, had encouraged this spirit of treachery, and even provided a refuge for Becket during his exile: his policy was continued by Philip Augustus, who kept open house at Paris for the rebellious family of his tenant-in-chief whenever misfortune drove them to fly before their father’s wrath or ambition brought them to hatch some new conspiracy. Could Henry have once established the same firm grip he had obtained in England over his French possessions, he might have triumphed in the struggle with both sons and overlord; but in Poitou and Aquitaine he was merely regarded as Eleanor’s consort, and the people looked to his heirs as rulers, especially to Richard his mother’s favourite. Yet never had they suffered a reign of greater licence and oppression than under the reckless and selfish Lion-Heart.