HENRY PLANTAGENET
CHAPTER II
THE ANGEVIN EMPIRE
CHAPTER III
THE GOVERNMENT OF ENGLAND
CHAPTER IV
THE FIRST REFORMS
CHAPTER V
THE CONSTITUTIONS OF CLARENDON
CHAPTER VI
THE ASSIZE OF CLARENDON
CHAPTER VII
THE STRIFE WITH THE CHURCH
CHAPTER VIII
THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND
CHAPTER IX
REVOLT OF THE BARONAGE
CHAPTER X
THE COURT OF HENRY
CHAPTER XI
THE DEATH OF HENRY
CHAPTER I
HENRY PLANTAGENET
The history of the English people would have been a great and a noble
history whatever king had ruled over the land seven hundred years ago.
But the history as we know it, and the mode of government which has
actually grown up among us is in fact due to the genius of the great king
by whose will England was guided from 1154 to 1189. He was a foreign king
who never spoke the English tongue, who lived and moved for the most part
in a foreign camp, surrounded with a motley host of Brabançons and
hirelings; and who in intervals snatched from foreign wars hurried for a
few months to his island-kingdom to carry out a policy which took little
heed of the great moral forces that were at work among the people. It was
under the rule of a foreigner such as this, however, that the races of
conquerors and conquered in England first learnt to feel that they were
one. It was by his power that England, Scotland, and Ireland were
brought to some vague acknowledgment of a common suzerain lord, and the
foundations laid of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It
was he who abolished feudalism as a system of government, and left it
little more than a system of land-tenure. It was he who defined the
relations established between Church and State, and decreed that in
England churchman as well as baron was to be held under the Common law. It
was he who preserved the traditions of self-government which had been
handed down in borough and shire-moot from the earliest times of English
history. His reforms established the judicial system whose main outlines
have been preserved to our own day. It was through his "Constitutions"
and his "Assizes" that it came to pass that over all the world the
English-speaking races are governed by English and not by Roman law. It
was by his genius for government that the servants of the royal household
became transformed into Ministers of State. It was he who gave England a
foreign policy which decided our continental relations for seven hundred
years. The impress which the personality of Henry II. left upon his time
meets us wherever we turn. The more clearly we understand his work, the
more enduring does his influence display itself even upon the political
conflicts and political action of our own days.
For seventy years three Norman kings had held England in subjection
William the Conqueror, using his double position as conqueror and king,
had established a royal authority unknown in any other feudal country
William Rufus, poorer than his father when the hoard captured at
Winchester and the plunder of the Conquest were spent, and urged alike
by his necessities and his greed, laid the foundation of an organized
system of finance. Henry I., after his overthrow of the baronage, found
his absolute power only limited by the fact that there was no machinery
sufficient to put in exercise his boundless personal power; and for its
support he built up his wonderful administrative system. There no longer
existed any constitutional check on the royal authority. The Great
Council still survived as the relic and heir both of the English
Witenagemot and the Norman Feudal Court. But in matters of State its
"counsel" was scarcely asked or given; its "consent" was yielded as a
mere matter of form; no discussion or hesitation interrupted the formal
and pompous display of final submission to the royal will. The Church
under its Norman bishops, foreign officials trained in the King's
chapel, was no longer a united national force, as it had been in the
time of the Saxon kings. The mass of the people was of no account in
politics. The trading class scarcely as yet existed. The villeins tied
to the soil of the manor on which they had been born, and shut out from
all courts save those of their lord; inhabitants of the little hamlets
that lay along the river-courses in clearings among dense woods,
suspicious of strangers, isolated by an intense jealousy of all that lay
beyond their own boundaries or by traditional feuds, had no part in the
political life of the nation.
But the central government had proved in the long run too weak to
check the growth of feudal tendencies. The land was studded with
fortresses--the homes of lords who exercised criminal jurisdiction
without appeal, and who had their private prisons and private gallows.
Their manor courts, whether they were feudal courts established by the
new nobility of the Conquest, or whether they represented ancient
franchises in which Norman lords succeeded to the jurisdiction of
earlier English rulers, were more and more turned into mere feudal
courts. In the Shire courts themselves the English sheriff who used to
preside over the court was replaced by a Norman "_vicecomes_," who
practically did as he chose, or as he was used to do in Normandy, in
questions of procedure, proof, and judgment. The old English hundred
courts, where the peasants' petty crimes had once been judged by the
freemen of the district, had now in most cases become part of the fief
of the lord, whose newly-built castle towered over the wretched hovels
of his tenants, and the peasants came for justice to the baron's court,
and paid their fees to the baron's treasury. The right of private
coinage added to his wealth, as the multitude of retainers bound to
follow them in war added to his power. The barons were naturally roused
to a passion of revolt when the new administrative system threatened to
cut them off from all share in the rights of government, which in other
feudal countries were held to go along with the possession of land. They
hated the "new men" who were taking their places at the council-board;
and they revolted against the new order which cut them off from useful
sources of revenue, from unchecked plunder, from fines at will in their
courts of hundred and manor, from the possibility of returning fancy
accounts, and of profitable "farming" of the shires; they were jealous
of the clergy, who played so great a part in the administration, and
who threatened to surpass them in the greatness of their wealth, their
towns and their castles; and they only waited for a favourable moment to
declare open war on the government of the court.
In this uncertain balance of forces in the State order rested ultimately
on the personal character of the king; no sooner did a ruler appear who
was without the sense of government than the whole administration was at
once shattered to pieces. The only son of Henry I. had perished in the
wreck of the _White Ship_; and his daughter Matilda had been sent to
Germany as a child of eight years old, to become the wife of the Emperor
Henry V. On his death in 1125 her father summoned her back to receive
the homage of the English people as heiress of the kingdom. The homage
was given with as little warmth as it was received. Matilda was a mere
stranger and a foreigner in England, and the rule of a woman was
resented by the baronage. Two years later, in 1128, Henry sought by
means of a marriage between the Empress Matilda and Geoffrey, the son of
Count Fulk of Anjou, to secure the peace of Normandy, and provide an
heir for the English throne; and Matilda unwillingly bent once more to
her father's will. A year after the marriage Count Fulk left his
European dominions for the throne of Jerusalem; and Geoffrey entered on
the great inheritance which had been slowly built up in three hundred
years, since the days of the legendary Tortulf the Forester. Anjou,
Maine, and Touraine already formed a state whose power equaled that of
the French kingdom; to north and south successive counts had made
advances towards winning fragments of Britanny and Poitou; the Norman
marriage was the triumphant close of a long struggle with Normandy; but
to Fulk was reserved the greatest triumph of all, when he saw his son
heir, not only of the Norman duchy, but of the great realm which
Normandy had won.
But, for all this glory, the match was an ill-assorted one, and from
first to last circumstances dealt hardly with the poor young Count.
Matilda was twenty-six, a proud ambitious woman "with the nature of a
man in the frame of a woman." Her husband was a boy of fifteen. Geoffrey
the Handsome, called Plantagenet from his love of hunting over heath and
broom, inherited few of the great qualities which had made his race
powerful. Like his son Henry II. he was always on horseback; he had his
son's wonderful memory, his son's love of disputations and law-suits; we
catch a glimpse of him studying beneath the walls of a beleaguered town
the art of siege in Vegetius. But the darker sides of Henry's character
might also be discerned in his father; genial and seductive as he was,
he won neither confidence nor love; wife and barons alike feared the
silence with which he listened unmoved to the bitterest taunts, but kept
them treasured and unforgotten for some sure hour of revenge; the fierce
Angevin temper turned in him to restlessness and petulance in the long
series of revolts which filled his reign with wearisome monotony from
the moment when he first rode out to claim his duchy of Normandy, and
along its southern frontier peasant and churl turned out at the sound of
the tocsin, and with fork and flail drove the hated "Guirribecs" back
over the border. Five years after his marriage, in 1133, his first child
was born at Le Mans. Englishmen saw in the grandson of "good Queen Maud"
the direct descendant of the old English line of kings of Alfred and of
Cerdic. The name Henry which the boy bore after his grandfather marked
him as lawful inheritor of the broad dominions of Henry I., "the
greatest of all kings in the memory of ourselves and our fathers." From
his father he received, with the surname of Plantagenet by which he was
known in later times, the inheritance of the Counts of Anjou. Through
his mother Matilda he claimed all rights and honours that pertained to
the Norman dukes.
Heir of three ruling houses, Henry was brought up wherever the chances of
war or rebellion gave opportunity. He was to know neither home nor
country. His infancy was spent at Rouen "in the home," as Henry I. said,
"of his forefather Rollo." In 1135 his grandfather died, and left him,
before he was yet three years old, the succession to the English throne.
But Geoffrey and Matilda were at the moment hard pressed by one of their
ceaseless wars. The Church was openly opposed to the rule of the House of
Anjou; the Norman baronage on either side of the water inherited a long
tradition of hatred to the Angevin. Stephen of Blois, a son of the
Conqueror's daughter Adela, seized the English throne, and claimed the
dukedom of Normandy. Henry was driven from Rouen to take refuge in
Angers, in the great palace of the counts, overlooking the river
and the vine-covered hills beyond. There he lived in one of the most
ecclesiastical cities of the day, already famous for its shrines, its
colleges, the saints whose tombs lay within its walls, and the ring of
priories and churches and abbeys that circled it about.
The policy of the Norman kings was rudely interrupted by the reign of
Stephen of Blois. Trembling for the safety of his throne, he at first
rested on the support of the Church and the ministers who represented
Henry's system. But sides were quickly changed. The great churchmen and
the ministers were soon cast off by the new ruler. "By my Lady St.
Mary," said Roger of Salisbury, when he was summoned to one of Stephen's
councils, "my heart is unwilling for this journey; for I shall be of as
much use in court as is a foal in battle." The revolution was completed
in 1139, when the king in a mad panic seized and imprisoned Roger, the
representative alike of Church and ministers. With the ruin of Roger who
for thirty years had been head of the government, of his son Roger the
chancellor, and his nephew Nigel the treasurer, the ministerial system
was utterly destroyed, and the whole Church was alienated. Stephen sank
into the mere puppet of the nobles. The work of the Exchequer and the
Curia Regis almost came to an end. A little money was still gathered
into the royal treasury; some judicial business seems to have been still
carried on, but it was only amid overwhelming difficulties, and over
limited districts. Sheriffs were no longer appointed over the shires,
and the local administration broke down as the central government had
done. Civil war was added to the confusion of anarchy, as Matilda again
and again sought to recover her right. In 1139 she crossed to England,
wherein siege, in battle, in council, in hair-breadth escapes from
pursuing hosts, from famine, from perils of the sea, she showed the
masterful authority, the impetuous daring, the pertinacity which she had
inherited from her Norman ancestors. Stephen fell back on his last
source--a body of mercenary troops from Flanders,--but the Brabançon
troops were hated in England as foreigners and as riotous robbers, and
there was no payment for them in the royal treasury. The barons were all
alike ready to change sides as often as the shifting of parties gave
opportunity to make a gain of dishonour; an oath to Stephen was as easy
to break as an oath to Matilda or to her son. Great districts, especially
in the south and middle of England, and on the Welsh marches, suffered
terribly from war and pillage; all trade was stopped; great tracts of
land went out of cultivation; there was universal famine.
In 1142 Henry, then nine years old, was brought to England with a chosen
band of Norman and Angevin knights; and while Matilda held her rough
court at Gloucester as acknowledged sovereign of the West, he lived at
Bristol in the house of his uncle, Robert of Gloucester, the illegitimate
son of Henry I., who was still in these troubled days loyal to the
cultured traditions of his father's court, and a zealous patron of
learning. Amid all the confusion of a war of pillage and slaughter,
surrounded by half-wild Welsh mercenaries, by the lawless Norman-Welsh
knights, by savage Brabançons, he learned his lessons for four years with
his cousin, the son of Robert, from Master Matthew, afterwards his
chancellor and bishop of Angers. As Matilda's prospects grew darker in
England, Geoffrey recalled Henry in 1147 to Anjou; and the next year he
joined his mother in Normandy, where she had retired after the death of
Earl Robert. There was a pause of five years in the civil war; but
Stephen's efforts to assert his authority and restore the reign of law
were almost unavailing. All the country north of the Tyne had fallen into
the hands of the Scot king; the Earl of Chester ruled at his own will in
the northwest; the Earl of Aumale was king beyond the Humber.
With the failure of Matilda's effort the whole burden of securing his
future prospects fell upon Henry himself, then a boy of fifteen. Nor was
he slow to accept the charge. A year later, in 1149, he placed himself in
open opposition to Stephen as claimant to the English throne, by visiting
the court of his great-uncle, David of Scotland, at Carlisle; he was
knighted by the Scot king, and made a compact to yield up to David the
land beyond the Tyne when he should himself have won the English throne.
But he found England cold, indifferent, without courage; his most
powerful friends were dead, and he returned to Normandy to wait for
better days. Geoffrey was still carrying on the defence of the duchy
against Stephen's son Eustace, and his ally, the King of France; and
Henry joined his father's army till peace was made in 1151. In that year
he was invested with his mother's heritage and became at eighteen Duke of
Normandy; at nineteen his father's death made him Count of Anjou,
Lorraine, and Maine.
The young Count had visited the court of Paris to do homage for Normandy
and Anjou, and there he first saw the French queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Her marriage with Louis VII. had been the crowning success of the astute
and far-sighted policy of Louis VI.; for the dowry Eleanor had brought to
the French crown, the great province of the South, had doubled the
territories and the wealth of the struggling little kingdom of France.
In the Crusade of 1147 she had accompanied king and nobles to the Holy
Land as feudal head of the forces of Aquitaine; and had there baffled
the temper and sagacity of Louis by her political intrigues. Sprung of
a house which represented to the full the licentious temper of the South,
she scornfully rejected a husband indifferent to love, and ineffective in
war as in politics. She had "married a monk and not a king," she said,
wearied with a superstition that showed itself in long fasts of more
than monkish austerity, and in the humiliating reverence with which
the king would wait for the meanest clerk to pass before him. In the
square-shouldered ruddy youth who came to receive his fiefs, with
his "countenance of fire," his vivacious talk and overwhelming energy
and scant ceremoniousness at mass, she saw a man destined by fate and
character to be in truth a "king." Her decision was as swift and
practical as that of the keen Angevin, who was doubtless looking to the
southern lands so long coveted by his race. A divorce from her husband
was procured in March 1152; and two months after she was hastily, for
fear of any hindrance, married to the young Count of Anjou, "without the
pomp or ceremony which befitted their rank." At nineteen, therefore,
Henry found himself the husband of a wife about twenty-seven years of
age, and the lord, besides his own hereditary lands and his Norman
duchy, of Poitou, Saintonge, Perigord, Limousin, Angoumois, and Gascony,
with claims of suzerainty over Auvergne and Toulouse. In a moment the
whole balance of forces in France had changed; the French dominions were
shorn to half their size; the most brilliant prospects that had ever
opened before the monarchy were ruined; and the Count of Anjou at one
bound became ruler of lands which in extent and wealth were more than
double those of his suzerain lord.
The rise of this great power to the west was necessarily the absorbing
political question of the day. It menaced every potentate in France; and
before a month was out a ring of foes had gathered round the upstart
Angevin ruler. The outraged King of France; Stephen, King of England, and
Henry's rival in the Norman duchy; Stephen's nephew, the Count of
Champagne, brother of the Count of Blois; the Count of Perche; and
Henry's own brother, Geoffrey, were at once united by a common alarm; and
their joint attack on Normandy a month after the marriage was but the
first step in a comprehensive design of depriving the common enemy of the
whole of his possessions. Henry met the danger with all the qualities
which mark a great general and a great statesman. Cool, untroubled,
impetuous, dashing from point to point of danger, so that horses sank and
died on the road in his desperate marches, he was ready wherever a foe
threatened, or a friend prayed help. Foreign armies were driven back,
rebel nobles crushed, robber castles broken down; Normandy was secured
and Anjou mastered before the year was out. The strife, however, had
forced him for the first time into open war with Stephen, and at twenty
Henry turned to add the English crown to his dominions.
Already the glory of success hung about him; his footsteps were guided by
prophecies of Merlin; portents and wonders marked his way. When he landed
on the English shores in January 1153, he turned into a church "to pray
for a space, after the manner of soldiers," at the moment when the priest
opened the office of the mass for that day with the words, "Behold there
cometh the Lord, the Ruler, and the kingdom is in his hand." In his first
battle at Malmesbury the wintry storm and driving rain which beat in the
face of Stephen's troops showed on which side Heaven fought. As the king
rode out to the next great fight at Wallingford, men noted fearfully that
he fell three times from his horse. Terror spread among the barons, whose
interests lay altogether in anarchy, as they saw the rapid increase of
Henry's strength; and they sought by a mock compromise to paralyse the
power of both Stephen and his rival. "Then arose the barons, or rather
the betrayers of England, treating of concord, although they loved
nothing better than discord; but they would not join battle, for they
desired to exalt neither of the two, lest if the one were overcome the
other should be free to govern them; they knew that so long as one was in
awe of the other he could exercise no royal authority over them." Henry
subdued his wrath to his political sagacity. He agreed to meet Stephen
face to face at Wallingford; and there, with a branch of the Thames
between them, they fixed upon terms of peace. Stephen's son Eustace,
however, refused to lay down arms, and the war lingered on, Stephen being
driven back to the eastern counties, while Henry held mid-England. In
August, however, Eustace died suddenly, "by the favour of God," said
lovers of peace; and Stephen, utterly broken in spirit, soon after
yielded.
The strife died out, in fact, through sheer exhaustion, for years of
anarchy and war had broken the strength of both sides; and at last "that
happened which would least be believed, that the division of the kingdom
was not settled by the sword." The only body of men who still possessed
any public feeling, any political sagacity, or unity of purpose, found
its opportunity in the general confusion. The English Church, "to whose
right it principally belongs to elect the king," as Theobald had once
said in words which Gregory VII. would have approved, beat down all
opposition of the angry nobles; and in November 1153 Theobald, Archbishop
of Canterbury, and Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester and brother of
Stephen, brought about a final compromise. The treaty which had been
drawn up at Wallingford was confirmed at Westminster. Henry was made
the adopted son of Stephen, a sharer of his kingdom while he lived,
its heir when he should die. "In the business of the kingdom," the king
promised, "I will work by the counsel of the duke; but in the whole
realm of England, as well in the duke's part as my own, I will exercise
royal justice." Henry did homage and swore fealty to Stephen, while, as
they embraced, "the bystanders burst into tears of joy," and the nobles,
who had stood sullenly aloof from counsel and consent, took oaths of
allegiance to both princes. For a few months Henry remained in England,
months marked by suspicions and treacheries on all sides. Stephen was
helpless, the nobles defiant, their strongholds were untouched, and the
treaty remained practically a dead letter. After the discovery of a
conspiracy against his life supported by Stephen's second son and the
Flemish troops, Henry gave up for the moment the hopeless task, and left
England. But before long Stephen's death gave the full lordship into his
hands. On the 19th of December 1154 he was crowned at Winchester King of
England, amid the acclamations of crowds who had already learned "to
bear him great love and fear."
King of England, Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine,
Count of Poitou, Duke of Aquitaine, suzerain lord of Britanny, Henry
found himself at twenty-one ruler of dominions such as no king before him
had ever dreamed of uniting. He was master of both sides of the English
Channel, and by his alliance with his uncle, the Count of Flanders, he had
command of the French coast from the Scheldt to the Pyrenees, while his
claims on Toulouse would carry him to the shores of the Mediterranean.
His subjects told with pride how "his empire reached from the Arctic
Ocean to the Pyrenees;" there was no monarch save the Emperor himself who
ruled over such vast domains. But even the Emperor did not gather under
his sway a grouping of peoples so strangely divided in race, in tongue,
in aims, in history. No common tie of custom or of sympathy united the
unwieldy bundle of states bound together in a common subjection; the
men of Aquitaine hated Anjou with as intense a bitterness as they hated
France; Angevin and Norman had been parted for generations by traditional
feuds; the Breton was at war with both; to all England was "another
world"--strange in speech, in law, and in custom. And to all the
subjects of his heterogeneous empire Henry himself was a mere foreigner.
To Gascon or to Breton he was a man of hated race and alien speech, just
as much as he was to Scot or Welshman; he seemed a stranger alike to
Angevin and Norman, and to Englishmen he came as a ruler with foreign
tastes and foreign aims as well as a foreign tongue.
We see in descriptions of the time the strange rough figure of the new
king, "Henry Curtmantel," as he was nicknamed from the short Angevin
cape which hung on his shoulders, and marked him out oddly as a foreigner
amid the English and Norman knights, with their long fur-lined cloaks
hanging to the ground. The square stout form, the bull-neck and broad
shoulders, the powerful arms and coarse rough hands, the legs bowed
from incessant riding, showed a frame fashioned to an extraordinary
strength. His head was large and round; his hair red, close-cut for
fear of baldness; his fiery face much freckled; his voice harsh and
cracked. Those about him saw something "lion-like" in his face; his gray
eyes, clear and soft in his peaceful moments, shone like fire when he was
moved, and few men were brave enough to confront him when his face was
lighted up by rising wrath, and when his eyes rolled and became bloodshot
in a paroxysm of passion. His overpowering energy found an outlet in
violent physical exertion. "With an immoderate love of hunting he led
unquiet days," following the chase over waste and wood and mountain;
and when he came home at night he was never seen to sit down save for
supper, but wore out his court with walking or standing till after
nightfall, even when his own feet and legs were covered with sores
from incessant exertion. Bitter were the complaints of his courtiers
that there was never any moment of rest for himself or his servants;
in war time indeed, they grumbled, excessive toil was natural, but time
of peace was ill-consumed in continual vigils and labours and in
incessant travel--one day following another in merciless and intolerable
journeyings. Henry had inherited the qualities of the Angevin race--its
tenacity, its courage, its endurance, the sagacity that was without
impatience, and the craft that was never at fault. With the ruddy face
and unwieldy frame of the Normans other gifts had come to him; he had
their sense of strong government and their wisdom; he was laborious,
patient, industrious, politic. He never forgot a face he had once seen,
nor anything that he heard which he deemed worthy of remembering; where
he once loved he never turned to hate, and where he once hated he was
never brought to love. Sparing in diet, wasting little care on his
dress--perhaps the plainest in his court,--frugal, "so much as was lawful
to a prince," he was lavish in matters of State or in public affairs. A
great soldier and general, he was yet an earnest striver after peace,
hating to refer to the doubtful decision of battle that which might be
settled by any other means, and stirred always by a great pity, strange
in such an age and in such a man, for lives poured out in war. "He was
more tender to dead soldiers than to the living," says a chronicler
querulously; "and found far more sorrow in the loss of those who were
slain than comfort in the love of those who remained." His pitiful temper
was early shown in his determination to put down the barbarous treatment
of shipwrecked sailors. He abolished the traditions of the civil war
by forbidding plunder, and by a resolute fidelity to his plighted word. In
political craft he was matchless; in great perils none was gentler than
he, but when the danger was past none was harsher; and common talk hinted
that he was a willing breaker of his word, deeming that in the pressure
of difficulty it was easier to repent of word than deed, and to render
vain a saying than a fact. "His mother's teaching, as we have heard, was
this: That he should delay all the business of all men; that whatever
fell into his hands he should retain along while and enjoy the fruit of
it, and keep suspended in hope those who aspired to it; confirming her
sentences with this cruel parable, 'Glut a hawk with his quarry and he
will hunt no more; show it him and then draw it back and you will ever
keep him tractable and obedient.' She taught him also that he should be
frequently in his chamber, rarely in public; that he should give nothing
to any one upon any testimony but what he had seen and known; and many
other evil things of the same kind. We, indeed," adds this good hater of
Matilda, "confidently attributed to her teaching everything in which he
displeased us."
A king of those days, indeed, was not shielded from criticism. He lived
altogether in public, with scarcely a trace of etiquette or ceremony.
When a bishop of Lincoln kept Henry waiting for dinner while he performed
a service, the king's only remedy was to send messenger after messenger
to urge him to hurry in pity to the royal hunger. The first-comer seems
to have been able to go straight to his presence at any hour, whether in
hall or chapel or sleeping-chamber; and the king was soundly rated by
every one who had seen a vision, or desired a favour, or felt himself
aggrieved in any way, with a rude plainness of speech which made sorely
necessary his proverbial patience under such harangues. "Our king," says
Walter Map, "whose power all the world fears, ... does not presume to be
haughty, nor speak with a proud tongue, nor exalt himself over any man."
The feudal barons of medieval times had, indeed, few of the qualities
that made the courtiers of later days, and Henry, violent as he was,
could bear much rough counsel and plain reproof. No flatterer found favour
at his court. His special friends were men of learning or of saintly
life. Eager and eloquent in talk, his curiosity was boundless. He is said
to have known all languages from Gaul to the Jordan, though he only spoke
French and Latin. Very discreet in all business of the kingdom, and a
subtle finder out of legal puzzles, he had "knowledge of almost all
histories, and experience of all things ready to his hand." Henry was,
in fact, learned far beyond the learning of his day. "The king," wrote
Peter of Blois to the Archbishop of Palermo, "has always in his hands
bows and arrows, swords and hunting-spears, save when he is busy in
council or over his books. For as often as he can get breathing-time
amid his business cares, he occupies himself with private reading, or
takes pains in working out some knotty question among his clerks. Your
king is a good scholar, but ours is far better. I know the abilities and
accomplishments of both. You know that the King of Sicily was my pupil
for a year; you yourself taught him the element of verse-making and
literary composition; from me he had further and deeper lessons, but as
soon as I left the kingdom he threw away his books, and took to the
easy-going ways of the court. But with the King of England there is
school every day, constant conversation of the best scholars and
discussion of questions."
Behind all this amazing activity, however, lay the dark and terrible
side of Henry's character. All the violent contrasts and contradictions
of the age, which make it so hard to grasp, were gathered up in his
varied heritage; the half-savage nature which at that time we meet with
again and again united with first-class intellectual gifts; the fierce
defiance born of a time when every man had to look solely to his own
right hand for security of life and limb and earthly regard--a defiance
caught now and again in the grip of an overwhelming awe before the
portents of the invisible world; the sudden mad outbreaks of irresponsible
passion which still mark certain classes in our own day, but which then
swept over a violent and undisciplined society. Even to his own time, used
as it was to such strange contrasts, Henry was a puzzle. Men saw him
diligently attend mass every day, and restlessly busy himself during the
most solemn moments in scribbling, in drawing pictures, in talking to his
courtiers, in settling the affairs of State; or heard how he refused
confession till forced to it by terror in the last extremity of
sickness, and then turned it into a surprising ceremony of apology and
self-justification. At one time they saw him, conscience-smitten at the
warning of some seer of visions, sitting up through the night amid a
tumultuous crowd to avert the wrath of Heaven by hastily restoring rights
and dues which he was said to have unjustly taken, and when the dawning
light of day brought cooler counsel, swift to send the rest of his
murmuring suitors empty away; at another bowing panic-stricken in his
chapel before some sudden word of ominous prophecy; or as a pilgrim,
barefoot, with staff in hand; or kneeling through the night before a
shrine, with scourgings and fastings and tears. His steady sense of order,
justice, and government, broken as it was by fits of violent passion,
resumed its sway as soon as the storm was over; but the awful wrath which
would suddenly break forth, when the king's face changed, and he rolled on
the ground in a paroxysm of madness, seemed to have something of diabolic
origin. A story was told of a demon ancestress of the Angevin princes:
"From the devil they came, and to the devil they will go," said the grim
fatalism of the day.