In the conversation thus reported by the Marshal’s confidential squire there are several noticeable points. The divergent views enunciated by the two speakers as to the respective legal claims of Arthur and of John illustrate the still uncertain condition of the rules of hereditary succession. It is, however, plain that the legal aspect of the case was but a minor matter in the eyes of both primate and Marshal. For them the important question was not which of Richard’s two possible heirs had the best legal right to his heritage, but which of the two was likely to make the least unsatisfactory sovereign. The outlook was in any case a gloomy one; the only choice was a choice of evils. Of the two evils, it was natural that Walter should regard John as the worst, if he thought of personal character alone. Every one knew by this time what John was; the most impartial of contemporary historians had already summed up his character in two words--“Nature’s enemy,” a monster.[239] What Arthur might become was as yet uncertain; the duke of Britanny was but twelve years old. Yet even at that age, the “haughtiness and pride” ascribed to him by the Marshal are by no means unlikely to have shown themselves in a child whose father, Geoffrey, had been the evil genius of John’s early life, and whose mother had for years set her second husband Earl Ralf of Chester, her brother-in-law King Richard, and her supreme overlord King Philip, all alike at defiance. Not so much in Arthur’s character, however, as in his circumstances, lay the main ground of the Marshal’s objection to him as a sovereign. From his cradle Arthur had been trained in hostility to the political system at the head of which the Norman primate now proposed to place him. His very name had been given him by his mother and her people in defiance of his grandfather King Henry, as a badge of Breton independence and insubordination to the rule of the Angevin and Norman house. From the hour of Henry’s death in 1189, if not even from that of her son’s birth in 1187, Constance of Britanny had governed her duchy and trained its infant heir as seemed good to herself and her people, till in 1196 she was at last entrapped and imprisoned in Normandy; and then the result of her capture was that her boy fell into the keeping of another guardian not a whit less “traitorous,” from the Norman or Angevin point of view, than the patriotic Bretons who had surrounded him hitherto--the king of the French, at whose court he was kept for some time, sharing the education of Philip’s own son. To confer the sovereignty of the Angevin dominions upon the boy Arthur would thus have been practically to lay it at the feet of Philip Augustus. The only chance of preserving the integrity of the Angevin empire was to put a man at its head, and a man to whom the maintenance of that integrity would be a matter of personal interest as well as of family pride. It was the consciousness of this that had made