Richard I. (Cœur de Lion) may be said to have been badly born (September 8, 1157). His father, Henry II., though astute in kingcraft, was among the most disreputable of monarchs in personal character. St. Bernard said of Henry, “He comes of the devil, and to the devil he shall return.” His remorse for the murder of Becket, which seems to have been genuine, did not restrain him from spending his later years as a notorious libertine, polluting every innocent thing about him with his lecherous touch. Even childhood was not safe from his lust. It is typical of the man and the times that Geoffrey, for whom the king secured the bishopric of Lincoln, was his own natural son by Rosamond, his concubine. Richard’s mother, Eleanor, was perhaps of as unwholesome a sort as his father. She never blushed except at the failure of some intrigue which in our later age is regarded as shameful to her sex. Her first royal husband, Louis VII. of France, though fascinated by her beauty, could not abide her infidelities, and put her away. If the chronicle be true, she avenged the marital sins of Henry II. by slaying with her own hand his mistress, Rosamond. Richard thus inherited much of the disposition which marred his many nobler traits. Guizot’s portrait of him is fair: “Beyond comparison the boldest, the most unreflecting, the most passionate, the most ruffianly, the most heroic adventurer of the middle ages.” The first suggestion of his title, “Lion-hearted,” is perhaps in the pages of Roger de Wendover (died 1237), who, describing the ravages Richard committed in France, says: “He invaded the territory with more than a lion’s fury, carried off the produce, cut down the vines, burned the villages, and demolished everything.” His first act upon coming to power was to release his mother, Eleanor, from the twelve years’ imprisonment she suffered at the hands of her husband, Henry II. Then was remembered, and applied to her and to Richard, a prediction of Merlin, the “Wizard of the North,” in the fifth century: “The eagle of the broken treaty shall rejoice in her third nestling.” Roger de Wendover thus interpreted the hitherto enigmatic words: “The queen [Eleanor] is meant by the eagle, because she stretches out her two wings over two kingdoms, France and England. She was separated from the king of the French by divorce on account of consanguinity, and from the king of the English by suspicion and imprisonment; and so she was on both sides the eagle of a broken treaty. ‘She shall rejoice in her third nestling’ may be understood in this way: the queen’s first-born son, named William, died when he was a boy; Henry, her second son, was raised to the rank of king, and paid the debt of nature after he had engaged in hostilities with his father; and Richard, her third son, who is denoted by the ‘third nestling,’ was a source of joy to his mother.”