own blood against him; and he carried on the war with such vigour,
that Louis soon proposed a conference to treat for peace.
The conference was held beneath an old wide-spreading green elmtree,
upon a plain in France. It led to nothing. The war
recommenced. Prince Richard began his fighting career, by leading
an army against his father; but his father beat him and his army
back; and thousands of his men would have rued the day in which
they fought in such a wicked cause, had not the King received news
of an invasion of England by the Scots, and promptly come home
through a great storm to repress it. And whether he really began
to fear that he suffered these troubles because a Becket had been
murdered; or whether he wished to rise in the favour of the Pope,
who had now declared a Becket to be a saint, or in the favour of
his own people, of whom many believed that even a Becket’s
senseless tomb could work miracles, I don’t know: but the King no
sooner landed in England than he went straight to Canterbury; and
when he came within sight of the distant Cathedral, he dismounted
from his horse, took off his shoes, and walked with bare and
bleeding feet to a Becket’s grave. There, he lay down on the
ground, lamenting, in the presence of many people; and by-and-by he
went into the Chapter House, and, removing his clothes from his
back and shoulders, submitted himself to be beaten with knotted
cords (not beaten very hard, I dare say though) by eighty Priests,
one after another. It chanced that on the very day when the King
made this curious exhibition of himself, a complete victory was
obtained over the Scots; which very much delighted the Priests, who
said that it was won because of his great example of repentance.
For the Priests in general had found out, since a Becket’s death,
that they admired him of all things – though they had hated him
very cordially when he was alive.
The Earl of Flanders, who was at the head of the base conspiracy of
the King’s undutiful sons and their foreign friends, took the
opportunity of the King being thus employed at home, to lay siege
to Rouen, the capital of Normandy. But the King, who was
extraordinarily quick and active in all his movements, was at
Rouen, too, before it was supposed possible that he could have left
England; and there he so defeated the said Earl of Flanders, that
the conspirators proposed peace, and his bad sons Henry and
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Dickens, Charles – A Child’s History of England
Geoffrey submitted. Richard resisted for six weeks; but, being
beaten out of castle after castle, he at last submitted too, and
his father forgave him.
To forgive these unworthy princes was only to afford them
breathing-time for new faithlessness. They were so false,
disloyal, and dishonourable, that they were no more to be trusted
than common thieves. In the very next year, Prince Henry rebelled
again, and was again forgiven. In eight years more, Prince Richard
rebelled against his elder brother; and Prince Geoffrey infamously
said that the brothers could never agree well together, unless they
were united against their father. In the very next year after
their reconciliation by the King, Prince Henry again rebelled
against his father; and again submitted, swearing to be true; and
was again forgiven; and again rebelled with Geoffrey.
But the end of this perfidious Prince was come. He fell sick at a
French town; and his conscience terribly reproaching him with his
baseness, he sent messengers to the King his father, imploring him
to come and see him, and to forgive him for the last time on his
bed of death. The generous King, who had a royal and forgiving
mind towards his children always, would have gone; but this Prince
had been so unnatural, that the noblemen about the King suspected
treachery, and represented to him that he could not safely trust
his life with such a traitor, though his own eldest son. Therefore
the King sent him a ring from off his finger as a token of