In all Henry’s plans for the future of his dynasty there was assumed a fundamental principle, implied rather than expressed, because (to him at least) too self-evident to need expression: that the territories which he had inherited from his parents, Anjou, Normandy, and England, must remain united under the direct control of the head of the family. Any deviation from this principle would, he saw, endanger the stability of the Angevin dominion, for it would be a breaking-up of the foundation on which that dominion was based. The devolution of Aquitaine and of Britanny to junior branches of the Angevin house, under the overlordship of its head, would not involve the same danger; and thus after his agreement with Conan of Britanny in 1166 Henry had ready to his hand the means of making a fair and substantial provision for two younger sons; but when a fourth son was born, he saw so little chance of being able to provide for the child on anything like the same scale that he at once called him “John Lackland,” and, it seems, placed him when little more than a twelvemonth old as an oblate in the abbey of Fontevraud.[217] At the age of six years, however, if not sooner, John was brought back to his father’s court, and in the next ten years scheme after scheme for his future was planned by Henry, but without success. Now at last, just when John had reached an age at which he must have begun to feel keenly the difference between his prospects and those of Richard and Geoffrey, the death of the eldest brother opened a possible way—possible at least in Henry’s eyes—for redressing this inequality. We cannot tell what was the precise form of the proposition made by Henry to Richard; but if the report of it given by a contemporary English chronicler be correct, it clearly involved a tacit, if not an explicit, recognition of Richard as heir to the headship of the royal house of England and Anjou, and, as such, to the overlordship of the whole of the Angevin dominions, including Aquitaine. The chronicler’s words do not, on the other hand, necessarily or even probably imply that Henry contemplated an immediate transfer of the fief which he desired Richard to “grant” to John. John was not yet seventeen; he seems to have been brought up partly in England, partly in Normandy; it would have been sheer madness to think of setting him to take the command of affairs in a country which the united energies of Richard and of Henry himself scarcely sufficed to keep under control. In all likelihood the settlement which the king desired to make had reference, like that of 1169, wholly to the future, and was designed to confirm the earlier settlement, only with a change of persons; as Richard must take the place of the dead Henry, John was to take the place of Richard.