The execution of this project required the consent of two persons: Richard and the King of France. Richard’s consent proved harder to win than Henry seems to have expected. There was a fundamental though unexpressed difference between the views taken by the father and the son of the place actually held by the son in Aquitaine. Henry’s intention apparently had been from the outset, and was still, that Aquitaine should during his own lifetime be governed by his son—whether Richard or John—as his representative, and after his death should become an underfief of the Angevin dominion—as Britanny already was—in the hands of that same son and his heirs. Unluckily he had allowed one part of this intention to be obscured, and in practice well-nigh defeated, by his anxiety to secure the fulfilment of the other part. From Henry’s point of view, Richard in 1183 was simply his homager for the county of Poitou, his lieutenant over the rest of the duchy, heir to the whole of it when he himself should die, and, after young Henry’s death, heir also to the headship of the royal house of England, Normandy and Anjou. But Richard could, and did in effect, claim to be already duke of Aquitaine in his own right, by virtue of his homage to France and his investiture at Limoges. Moreover, Eleanor’s duchy held a different place in the estimation of her son—the son who from his infancy had been her recognized heir—from that which it held in the estimation of her husband. Henry looked upon it as a mere appendage to his ancestral territories; Richard looked upon it as his own especial possession, and a possession which ought to rank in the future, as it always had ranked in the past, on a footing of equality with them. The same feeling which made Henry shrink from reducing the heritage of Geoffrey Plantagenet or that of Maud of Normandy to the position of an underfief would make Richard shrink from contemplating a like alteration in the status of the heritage of his mother. The tragedy of the last summer and the sudden change in his own prospects had so far chastened his impetuous temper that he did not at once refuse his father’s demand, but asked for two or three days delay that he might consult with friends before giving a reply. Then he withdrew from the court; at nightfall he mounted his horse, and rode southward with all speed, sending word to his father that “he would never grant Poitou to be held by anyone but himself.”[218]