A few months later Richard entered actively on public life; and he made a bad beginning. Towards the end of March the younger King Henry fled from his father’s court in Normandy to that of Louis.[42] The elder Henry had been warned at Limoges by Raymond of Toulouse that “his wife and his sons had formed a conspiracy against him”;[43] but he had disregarded the warning, and left Richard and Geoffrey in Aquitaine under the guardianship of their mother. Early in the summer both the lads joined their elder brother in France,[44] and all three pledged themselves by a solemn oath, at a great council in Paris, “not to forsake the king of France, nor to make any peace with their father save through him (Louis) and the French barons”; Louis in return swearing, and causing his barons to swear, “that he would help the young king and his brothers, to the utmost of his power, to maintain their war against their father and to gain possession of the kingdom of England” for young Henry.[45] The “young king” was eighteen years old; he was as shallow-minded and selfish as he was handsome and superficially attractive; and he had fallen under the influence of Louis, to whose daughter he was married. Crowned in 1170 as his father’s heir, he chose to consider himself aggrieved by being given no share in the government of England or of the Angevin home-lands. He may have persuaded his brothers to consider themselves as victims of a similar grievance with regard to their duchies of Aquitaine and Britanny. He and Louis were naturally anxious to secure the forces of those two duchies in support of their scheme of ousting the elder King Henry from his dominions, continental and insular; and they hoped that the example of the boy-dukes might help to detach their respective vassals from their father’s cause.[46] But the lads had a nearer counsellor than young Henry or Louis, and one to whose counsels it was only natural, and in a measure right, that they should listen with reverence and submission. Eleanor unquestionably sided with her elder son against her husband, for she was caught in the act of trying to make her way from Aquitaine to the French court disguised in the dress of a man.[47] Certainly nothing can justify, or even excuse, the duplicity of this “eagle of the broken covenant” towards the husband and sovereign who, even when his eyes were fully opened to the treason of their eldest son, still put such confidence in her loyalty as to leave the younger eaglets in her charge. But there is a very considerable excuse for Richard and Geoffrey. On the ground of that feudal loyalty which was a principle of such importance in the life of those days, there was, indeed, something to be said for all three of the brothers, and more especially for Richard. None of them were homagers of Henry II; all of them were homagers of Louis and of Louis alone. For Richard it might further be urged that if he was under