The death of Richard placed John at last in the position for which he had toiled and intrigued so long; not, it is true, without a competitor, and that one whose claims were destined, after his own death, to be fatal to John’s retention of half his possessions. But the competitor was for the moment in the background, and in England at least never gained a footing or gathered the semblance of a party. Arthur was now twelve years old; his mother, Constance of Brittany, who was left a widow before he was born, had been married in the year of his birth to Earl Ranulf of Chester, whom she disliked, and who, after having been married to her for some years, found himself unable to manage her, and, following the example of Henry II., imprisoned her. She was an imprudent, probably a bad woman, as her later conduct tends to show; but it may be questioned whether, in her management of her hereditary state of Brittany, she went farther than any good patriot might go in opposition to the centralizing policy by which Richard carried out the schemes of his father. Anyhow she had made herself the champion of the independence of Brittany, and so had imperilled the chances of her son’s succession to the right of the inheritance. She seems to have been in constant opposition to Richard, and likewise to Eleanor, who alone after Richard’s death could have maintained Arthur’s rights. It is probably for this reason that, after Richard returned from the Crusade, we never again hear of Arthur as heir; that John therefore, although personally disliked, was accepted as an inevitable necessity; and that Arthur, when he was old enough to act for himself, ruined his own cause by his wanton attack upon his grandmother. [Sidenote: John secures Normandy. ] John seems to have known that England was safely his own. He had bound the baronage by oath to agree to his succession as early as 1191; he had a faithful friend in the Archbishop of Canterbury, who transferred to him the devotion which he had always shown to Richard, and had consented to become his chancellor. He was willing to make any sort of promises to secure those of the magnates who were not already pledged to him. He spent, therefore, the first six weeks of his reign in France, making good his hold on Normandy, and providing for the maintenance of peace with Philip. Meanwhile he sent the archbishop to England, to smooth his way there and prepare for the coronation. [Sidenote: Parties in England. ]