other territories held by Henry of the French king, except Normandy, which was to remain united to England as the heritage of the eldest son. Philip sent the letter to Richard, who, when he had mastered its contents, was naturally moved to deep indignation on learning that his father was thus scheming to deprive him of the larger part of his heritage at a time when they were actually in camp together and he was loyally fulfilling his duties as vassal and son. Caring no longer to fight for his father against Philip, he seized an opportunity which presented itself at the moment to bring about a truce.[253] Neither of these two accounts seems to imply that Richard at Châteauroux acted otherwise than loyally and in good faith towards his father. In one of them, however, the father is distinctly charged with plotting behind his son’s back to deprive him of half his inheritance. The proposal which Henry is said to have made to Philip is indeed utterly at variance with the policy implied in all his previous arrangements for the future of his dynasty; it is a proposal to disintegrate the foundations of the edifice which he had been building up all his life, by putting asunder what the marriage of his parents had joined together, Anjou and Normandy. We are not told whether it provided that John should hold his share of the Angevin territories under his brother’s overlordship, or not. If it did, its fulfilment would have reduced the original Angevin patrimony to the rank of a mere underfief; if not, the scheme would seem to imply nothing short of a deliberate intention on Henry’s part of rending in twain with his own hands the dominion which he had been for thirty years labouring to weld together into a solid whole. Yet that Henry would, if he could, willingly have gone as far as this or even farther, in his infatuated partiality for John, seems to be the only possible explanation of his attitude, or rather of his endless shifts and changes of attitude, towards both Richard and Philip through the six years which followed the death of the young king. When the end came, he himself summed up the tragic story of those years in one significant sentence: “For the sake of John’s advancement I have brought upon me all these ills.”[254] His paternal affection had been concentrated mainly upon two of his sons, the eldest and the youngest; after young Henry’s death it was concentrated upon John alone; Richard, though of all the four he was certainly the least unworthy, seems never to have enjoyed more than a comparatively small share of it. The story of the letter may have been a fiction, or the letter may have been a forgery; but whether the falsehood—if there be one—were Gerald’s or Philip’s, it was a lie which was half a truth.