If ever a father set at nought the precept “Provoke not your children to wrath,” Henry had done so by his conduct towards Richard, not merely on one or two isolated occasions, but persistently through a course of years. And if any circumstances are conceivable in which a son might be, not indeed justified, but in some degree excused for taking forcible measures against his father, in such a case Richard stood now. Neither he nor Philip could possibly acquiesce in the scheme which Henry had just proposed; and it was clear that Henry would not be induced to renounce that scheme by any persuasion, nor even by intimidation unless it were something more than verbal. Both parties had come to the conference “with horses and arms,”[340] and the main body of Henry’s available forces was quartered in and around Le Mans. While he rode slowly back towards that city, Philip attacked the castle of La Ferté; its constable made a brave defence, but was obliged to surrender. Philip then advanced to Ballon, which he reached just after Henry had quitted it, and at once “took it, no man gainsaying him.”[341] In a few days most of the castles around Le Mans on the north and east—Bonnétable, Beaumont, Montfort—were likewise occupied by his troops. But it was not to him that they had surrendered. Richard was with him; and the castellans “all round about” showed their disapproval of Henry’s scheme for altering the Angevin succession by voluntarily delivering up their castles to the count of Poitou.[342]