But Arthur had been accepted by the Bretons at his birth as a liberator and avenger. Old Eleanor, alone, held out against her grandson, for her son John, and for the unity of the English realm, which the accession of Arthur would have divided. Arthur, in fact, held that unity very cheap. He offered the king of France to cede Normandy to him, provided he might have Brittany, Maine, Touraine, Anjou, Poitou, and Aquitaine. John would have been reduced to the possession of England alone. Philip willingly assented to this, put his own garrisons in Arthur’s best fortresses, and demolished them when he had no hope of maintaining his position in them. John’s nephew, thus betrayed by his ally, turned once more to his uncle; then he came back to the party of France, invaded Poitou, and besieged his grandmother, Eleanor, in Mirebeau. It was nothing new in that family to see the sons armed against their parents. Meanwhile, John came to the rescue, delivered his mother, defeated Arthur, and took him prisoner with most of the great lords of his party. What became of the captive? This has never been clearly ascertained. Matthew Paris[j] alleges that John treated him well at first, but was afterwards alarmed by the threats and the obstinacy of the young Breton. “Arthur disappeared,” he says, “and God grant that it may not have been as malicious rumour reports.” But Arthur had excited too many hopes to allow of the popular imagination resigning itself to this uncertainty. It was confidently affirmed that John had caused him to be put to death, and it was soon added that he had killed him with his own hand. The chaplain of Philip Augustus relates, as if he had seen it with his own eyes, that John took Arthur in a boat, stabbed him twice with a dagger, and threw him into the river three miles from the castle of Rouen. The Bretons placed the scene of the tragedy in their own country near Cherbourg, at the foot of those ill-omened cliffs that present a line of precipices all along the ocean. Thus the tradition went on enlarging in details, and in dramatic interest, and at last Shakespeare makes Arthur a helpless young child, whose gentle and innocent words disarmed the most brutal assassin.[d]