After much secret plotting and open rebellion, Henry succeeded in imprisoning Eleanor, who had encouraged her sons to defy their father, but with Richard supported by Philip Augustus and the strength of southern France he was forced to come to terms towards the end of his reign. Though only fifty-six, he was already failing in health, and the news that his own province of Maine was fast falling to his enemies had broken his courage. Cursing the son who had betrayed him, he sullenly renewed the oath of homage he owed to Philip, and promised to Richard the wealth and independence he had demanded. The compact signed he rode away, heavy with fever, to his castle of Chinon, and there, indifferent to life, sank into a state of stupor. News was brought him that his youngest son John, for whom he had carved out a principality in Ireland, had been a secret member of the League that had just brought him to his knees. ‘Is it true,’ he asked, roused for the minute, ‘that John, my heart ... has deserted me?’ Reading the answer in the downcast faces of his attendants, he turned his face to the wall. ‘Now let things go as they will ... I care no more for myself or the world.’ Thus the old king died. [Sidenote: Richard I of England] In 1189 Richard the False succeeded his father, and by his prowess in Palestine became Richard ‘Cœur-de-Lion’. How he quarrelled with Philip II we have seen in the last chapter, and that Philip, after the siege of Acre, returned home in disgust at the other’s overbearing personality. Philip Augustus does not cut the same heroic figure on the battle-field as his rival: indeed there was no match in Europe for the ‘Devil of Aquitaine’, who knew not the word fear, and the glamour of whose feats of arms has outlasted seven centuries. It is in kingship that Philip stands pre-eminent in his own age, ready to do battle at the right moment, but still more ready to serve France by patient statecraft. While Richard remained in Palestine, Philip plotted with the ever-treacherous John for their mutual advantage at the absent king’s expense; but their enmity remained secret until the joyful news arrived that the royal crusader had been captured in disguise on his way home by the very Leopold of Austria whose banner he had once contemptuously cast into a ditch. Now the Duke of Austria’s overlord was the Emperor Henry VI, whose claims to Sicily Richard had often derided; and the Lion-Heart, passing from the dungeon of the vassal to that of the overlord, did not escape until his subjects had paid a huge ransom and he himself had promised to hold England as a fief of the Empire. ‘Beware, the Devil is loose’, wrote Philip to John, when he heard that their united efforts to bribe Henry VI into keeping his prisoner permanently had failed.