The feudal situation created by these transactions was a strange one. It was capable of at least two different interpretations, and its practical result, so far as Aquitaine was concerned, was that for the next twenty years there were two dukes of that country. Henry’s purpose in thus making his sons do homage to Louis was to guard against the possibility of dispute, after his own death, as to the portion of his dominions to which each of them was entitled. In his eyes the homage was anticipatory of a future and perhaps—for he was not yet thirty-six—still very remote event, and its effect was merely prospective. But, so far as can be seen, no such limitation of its scope was expressed in the act of homage; and the legal effect of that act therefore was not merely prospective, but immediate; it at once made the younger Henry and Richard respectively count of Anjou and duke of Aquitaine, not under the suzerainty of their father, but under the direct overlordship of the French king. Such at least would be its legal effect as soon as the boys were old enough to govern for themselves; and this age young Henry had almost reached, for he was in his fourteenth year. Their father, on the other hand, as the sequel shows, never intended to give during his own lifetime any real authority at all to young Henry, nor did he intend to give any to Richard otherwise than with a tacit but perfectly well understood reservation of his own right of intervention and control whenever he might choose to exercise it; and he still remained legally both count and duke, for he had just repeated, in both capacities, his own homage to Louis. There can be no doubt that Louis was fully alive (although it seems that Henry was not) to the advantages which the French Crown might derive from this complicated state of affairs. But he was, of course, not desirous of pointing them out to his rival; and during the next four years he carefully refrained from all interference with the affairs of the Angevin dominions. The new duke of Aquitaine was, however, not yet twelve years old, and it was clearly with the French king’s sanction that his father, in the spring, marched into the duchy and forcibly brought the counts of Angoulême and La Marche and most of the other rebels to submission.[38]