ter cases.--Accomplices ill
rewarded.

Richard was called to the throne when he was about thirty-two years of
age by the sudden and unexpected death of his father. The death of his
father took place under the most mournful circumstances imaginable. In
the war which Richard and Philip, king of France, had waged against
him, he had been unsuccessful. He had been defeated in the battles and
outgeneraled in the manoeuvres, and his barons, one after another,
had abandoned him and taken part with the rebels. King Henry was an
extremely passionate man, and the success of his enemies against him
filled him with rage. This rage was rendered all the more violent by
the thought that it was through the unnatural ingratitude of his own
son, Richard, that all these calamities came upon him. In the anguish
of his despair, he cursed the day of his birth, and uttered dreadful
maledictions against his children.

At length he was reduced to such an extremity that he was obliged to
submit to negotiations for peace, on just such terms as his enemies
thought fit to impose. They made very hard conditions. The first
attempt at negotiating the peace was made in an open field, where
Philip and Henry met for the purpose, on horseback, attended by their
retainers. Richard had the grace to keep away from this meeting, so as
not to be an actual witness of the humiliation of his father, and so
Philip and Henry were to conduct the conference by themselves.

The meeting was interrupted by a thunder-storm. At first the two kings
did not intend to pay any heed to the storm, but to go on with their
discussions without regarding it. Henry was a very great horseman, and
spent almost his whole life in riding. One of his historians says that
he never sat down except upon a saddle, unless it was when he was
taking his meals. At any rate, he was almost always on horseback. He
hunted on horseback, he fought on horseback, he traveled on horseback,
and now he was holding a conference with his enemies on horseback, in
the midst of a storm of lightning and rain. But his health had now
become impaired, and his nerves, though they had always seemed to be
of iron, were beginning to give way under the dreadful shocks to which
they had been exposed, so that he was now far less able to endure such
exposures than he had been. At length a clap of thunder broke rattling
immediately over his head, and the bolt seemed to descend directly
between him and Philip as they sat