The death of the Young King left as Henry’s eldest heir Richard, known to the modern world as the Lion-Hearted. With much of his father’s energy, Richard seems to have inherited more than any of his brothers the tastes and temperament of his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Adventurous and high-spirited, fond of pomp and splendor, a lover of poetry and music, be it the songs of Provençal minstrels or the solemn chants of the church, he belonged on this side of his nature to the dukes of Aquitaine and the country of the troubadours. He loved war and danger, in which he showed great personal courage, and in the conduct of military enterprises gave evidence of marked ability as a strategist; but his gifts as a ruler stopped there. The glamour of his personal exploits and the romance of his crusading adventures might dazzle the imagination of contemporaries more than the prosaic achievements of his father, and his gifts to religious houses might even predispose monastic historians in his favor, but for all this splendor his subjects paid the bills. In spite of his great income, he was always in need of money for his extravagances; and for his fiscal exactions there was never the excuse of large measures of public policy. Indeed, so far as we can see, Richard had no public policy. “His ambition,” says Stubbs, “was that of a mere warrior: he would fight for anything whatever, but he would sell everything that was worth fighting for.”[42] Self-willed and self-centred, he followed wherever his desires led, with no sense of loyalty to his obligations or of responsibility as a ruler. Made duke of Aquitaine at seventeen, he sought to ride down every obstacle and bring immediate order and unity into a region which had never enjoyed either of these benefits; and he quickly had by the ears the land which he should have best understood. He was soon in revolt against his father and also at war with the Young King; for his own purposes he later went over to the king of France, and jested with his boon companions over his father’s discomfiture and downfall. Even as king at the age of thirty-two, Richard remained an impetuous youth; he never really grew up. Haughty and overbearing, he alienated friends and allies; inheriting the rule of the vast Plantagenet empire, he showed no realization of imperial duty or opportunity. Thus he visited England but twice in the course of his reign of ten years and valued it solely as a land from which revenue might be wrung by his ministers, nor did his continental dominions derive advantage from his presence. Impetuous and short-sighted, Richard Yea-and-Nay had to meet the greatest statesman of his day in deadly rivalry; and though panegyrists placed him above Alexander, Charlemagne, and King Arthur, he went down ignominiously before Philip Augustus.