It was to ask the hand of Margaret for the prince
that Becket took his celebrated journey to Paris, and the young pair,
Henry and Margaret, were committed to his care for education; but the
disputes with the King prevented their being sufficiently long in his
hands for the correction of the evil spirit of the Angevin princes.
By threats of war, Henry obtained for Geoffrey, his third son,
Constance, the only child of Conan, Duke of Brittany; though the
Bretons, who hated Normans, Angevins, and English with equal bitterness,
were extremely angry at finding themselves thus connected with all
three. On Conan's death, Geoffrey, then ten years old, was called Duke
of Brittany, but his father took the whole government into his hands,
and made it a heavy yoke.
John, Count of Mortagne, for whom no heiress had been obtained, was
gayly called by his father Lackland--a name which his after-life fitted
to him but too well. Richard was intended to be the inheritor of his
mother's beautiful duchy of Aquitaine, where he spent most of his early
years. It was a strange country, where the ordinary events of life
partook so much of romance that we can hardly believe them real.
It had never been so peopled by the Franks as to lose either the
language or the cultivation left by the Romans. The _langue d'oc_ had
much resemblance to the Latin, and was beautifully soft and adapted to
poetry; and when the nobles adopted chivalry, they ornamented it with
all the graces of their superior education.
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