THE ANGEVIN EMPIRE
The new kingdom which Henry had added to his dominions in France might
well seem to a man of less inexhaustible energy to make the task of
government impossible. The imperial system of his dreams was as recklessly
defiant of physical difficulties as it was heedless of all the sentiments
of national tradition. In the two halves of his empire no common political
interest and no common peril could arise; the histories of north and south
were carried on apart, as completely as the histories of America and
England when they were apparently united under one king, and were in fact
utterly severed by the ocean which defined the limits of two worlds.
England had little part or lot in the history of Europe. Foreign policy
it had none; when its kings passed to Normandy, English chroniclers
knew nothing of their doings or their wars. Some little trade was
carried on with the nearest lands across the sea,--with Normandy, with
Flanders, or with Scandinavia,--but the country was almost wholly
agricultural. Feudal in its social structure, governed by tradition, with
little movement of inner life or contact with the world about it, its
people had remained jealous of strangers, and as yet distinguished from
the nations of Europe by a strange immobility and want of sympathy with
the intellectual and moral movements around them. Sometimes strangers
visited its kings; sometimes English pilgrims made their way to Rome by a
dangerous and troublesome journey. But even the connection with the
Papacy was slight. A foreign legate had scarcely ever landed on its
shores; hardly any appeals were carried to the Roman Curia; the Church
managed its own business after a customary fashion which was in harmony
with English traditions, which had grown up during centuries of undisturbed
and separate life.
On the other side of the Channel Henry ruled over a straggling line of
loosely compacted states equal in extent to almost half of the present
France. His long line of ill-defended frontier brought him in contact
with the lands of the Count of Flanders, one of the chief military
powers of the day; with the kingdom of France, which, after two hundred
years of insignificance, was beginning to assert its sway over the great
feudal vassals, and preparing to build up a powerful monarchy; and with
the Spanish kingdoms which were emerging from the first successful
effort of the Christian states to throw back the power of the Moors.
Normandy and Auvergne were separated only by a narrow belt of country
from the Empire, which, under the greatest ruler and warrior of the age,
Frederick Barbarossa, was extending its power over Burgundy, Provence,
and Italy. His claims to the over-lordship of Toulouse gave Henry an
interest in the affairs of the great Mediterranean power--the kingdom of
Sicily; and his later attempts on the territories of the Count of
Maurienne brought him into close connection with Italian politics. No
ruler of his time was forced more directly than Henry into the range of
such international politics as were possible in the then dim and
inchoate state of European affairs. England, which in the mind of the
Norman kings had taken the first place, fell into the second rank of
interests with her Angevin rulers. Henry's thoughts and hopes and
ambitions centred in his continental domains. Lord of Rouen, of Angers,
of Bordeaux, master of the sea-coast from Flanders to the Pyrenees, he
seemed to hold in his hand the feeble King of Paris and of Orleans, who
was still without a son to inherit his dignities and lands. The balance
of power, as of ability and military skill, lay on his side; and, long
as the House of Anjou had been the bulwark of the French throne, it even
seemed as if the time might come peaceably to mount it themselves.
Looking from our own island at the work which Henry did, and seeing more
clearly by the light of later events, we may almost forget the European
ruler in the English king. But this was far from being the view of his
own day. In the thirty-five years of his reign little more than thirteen
years were spent in England and over twenty-one in France. Thrice only
did he remain in the kingdom as much as two years at a time; for the
most part his visits were but for a few months torn from the incessant
tumult and toil of government abroad; and it was only after long years
of battling against invincible forces that he at last recognized England
as the main factor of his policy, and in great crises chose rather to
act as an English king than as the creator of an empire.
The first year after Henry's coronation as King of England was spent in
securing his newly-won possession. On Christmas Day, 1154, he called
together the solemn assembly of prelates, barons, and wise men which had
not met for fifteen years. The royal state of the court was restored;
the great officers of the household returned to their posts. The Primate
was again set in the place he held from early English times as the chief
adviser of the crown. The nephew of Roger of Salisbury, Nigel, Bishop of
Ely, was restored to the post of treasurer from which Stephen had driven
him fifteen years before. Richard de Lucy and the Earl of Leicester were
made justiciars. One new man was appointed among these older officers.
Thomas, the son of Gilbert Becket, was born in Cheapside in 1117. His
father, a Norman merchant who had settled by the Thames, had prospered
in the world; he had been portreeve of London, the predecessor of the
modern mayor, and visitors of all kinds gathered at his house,--London
merchants and Norman nobles and learned clerks of Italy and Gaul His son
was first taught by the Augustinian canons of Merton Priory, afterwards
he attended schools in London, and at twenty was sent to Paris for a
year's study. After his return he served in a London office, and as
clerk to the sheriffs he was directly concerned during the time of the
civil war with the government of the city. It was during these years
that the Archbishop of Canterbury began to form his household into the
most famous school of learning in England, and some of his chaplains in
their visits to Cheapside had been struck by the brilliant talents of
the young clerk. At Theobald's request Thomas, then twenty-four years
old, entered the Primate's household, somewhat reluctantly it would
seem, for he had as yet shown little zeal either for religion or for
study. He was at once brought into the most brilliant circle of that
day. The chancellor and secretary was John of Salisbury, the pupil of
Abelard, the friend of St. Bernard and of Pope Adrian IV., the first
among English men of letters, in whom all the learning of the day was
summed up. With him were Roger of Pont l'Evêque, afterwards archbishop
of York; John of Canterbury, later archbishop of Lyons; Ralph of Sarr,
later dean of Reims; and a distinguished group of lesser men; but from
the time when Thomas entered the household "there was none dearer to the
archbishop than he." "Slight and pale, with dark hair, long nose, and
straightly-featured face, blithe of countenance, keen of thought,
winning and lovable in conversation, frank of speech, but slightly
stuttering in his talk," he had a singular gift of winning affection;
and even from his youth he was "a prudent son of the world." It was
Theobald who had first brought the Canon law to England, and Thomas at
once received his due training in it, being sent to Bologna to study
under Gratian, and then to Auxerre. He was very quickly employed in
important negotiations. When in 1152 Stephen sought to have his son
Eustace anointed king, Thomas was sent to Rome, and by his skilful plea
that the papal claims had not been duly recognized in Stephen's scheme
he induced the Pope to forbid the coronation. In his first political act
therefore he definitely took his place not only as an adherent of the
Angevin claim, but as a resolute asserter of papal and ecclesiastical
rights. At his return favours were poured out upon him. While in the
lowest grade of orders, not yet a deacon, various livings and prebends
fell to his lot. A fortnight before Stephen's death Theobald ordained
him deacon, and gave him the archdeaconry of Canterbury, the first place
in the English Church after the bishops and abbots; and he must have
taken part under the Primate in the work of governing the kingdom until
Henry's arrival. The archbishop was above all anxious to secure in the
councils of the new king the due influence not only of the Church, but
of the new school of the canon lawyers who were so profoundly modifying
the Church. He saw in Thomas the fittest instrument to carryout his
plans; and by his influence the archdeacon of Canterbury found himself,
a week after the coronation of Henry, the king's chancellor.
Thomas was now thirty-eight; Theobald, Nigel, and Leicester were all old
men, and the young king of twenty-two must have seemed a mere boy to his
new counsellors. The Empress had been left in Normandy to avoid the
revival of old quarrels. Hated in England for her proud contempt of the
burgher, her scorn of the churchman, her insolence to her adherents, she
won in Normandy a fairer fame, as "a woman of excellent disposition,
kind to all, bountiful in almsgiving, the friend of religion, of honest
life." The political activity of Queen Eleanor was brought to an abrupt
close by her marriage. In Henry she found a master very different from
Louis of France, and her enforced withdrawal from public affairs during
her husband's life contrasts strangely, not only with her former career,
but with the energy which, when the heavy yoke was taken off her neck,
she displayed as an old woman of nearly seventy during the reign of her
son. Henry, in fact, stood alone among his new people. No debt of
gratitude, no ties of friendship, bound the king to the lords whose aims
he had first learned to know at Wallingford. The great barons who
thronged round him in his court had all been rebels; the younger among
them had never known what order, government, or loyalty meant. The Church
was hesitating and timorous. To the people he was an utter stranger,
unable even to speak their tongue. But from the first Henry took his
place as absolute master and leader. "A strict regard to justice was
apparent in him, and at the very outset he bore the appearance of a
great prince."
The king at once put in force the scheme of reform which had been drawn
up the year before at Wallingford, and of which the provisions have
comedown to us in phrases drawn from the two sources which were most
familiar to the learned and the vulgar of that day,--the Bible, and the
prophecies of Merlin, the seer of King Arthur. The nobles were to give
up all illegal rights and estates which they had usurped. The castles
built by the warring barons were to be destroyed. The king was to bring
back husbandmen to the desolate fields, and to stock pastures and
forests and hillsides with cattle and deer and sheep. The clergy were
henceforth to live in quiet, not vexed by unaccustomed burdens. Sheriffs
were to be restored to the counties, who should do justice without
corruption, nor persecute any for malice; thieves and robbers were to be
hanged; the armed forces were to be disbanded; the knights were to beat
their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; the
hired Flemish soldiers were to turn from the camp to the plough, from
tents to workshops, there to render as servants the obedience they had
once demanded as masters. The work which Stephen had failed to do was
now swiftly accomplished. The Flemish mercenaries vanished "like
phantoms," or "like wax before the fire," and their leader, William of
Ypres, the lord of Kent, turned with weeping to a monastery in his own
land. The feudal lords were forced to give up such castles and lands as
they had wrongfully usurped; and the newly-created earls were deprived
of titles which they had wrung from King or Empress in the civil wars.
The great nobles of both parties made a last effort at resistance. In
the north the Count of Aumale ruled almost as king. He was of the House
of Champagne, son of that Count Stephen who had once been set up as
claimant to the English throne, and near kinsman both of Henry and of
Stephen. He now refused to give up Scarborough Castle; behind him lay
the armies of the Scot king, and if Aumale's rebellion were successful
the whole north must be lost. A rising on the Welsh border marked the
revival of the old danger of which Henry himself had had experience in
the castle of his uncle, Robert of Gloucester, when the Empress and
Robert, with his Welsh connections and alliances, had dominated the
whole of the south-west. Hugh Mortimer, lord of Wigmore, Cleobury, and
Bridgenorth, the most powerful lord on the Welsh border, and Roger, Earl
of Hereford and lord of Gloucester, and connected by his mother with the
royal house of Wales, prepared for war. Immediately after his crowning
Henry hurried to the north, accompanied by Theobald, and forced Aumale
to submission. The fear of him fell on the barons. Roger of Hereford
submitted, and the earldom of Hereford and city of Gloucester were placed
in Henry's hands. The whole force of the kingdom was called out against
Hugh Mortimer, and Bridgenorth, fortified fifty years before by Robert
of Belesme, was reduced in July. The next year William of Warenne, the
son of Stephen, gave up all his castles in England and Normandy, and the
power of the House of Blois in the realm was finally extinguished. Hugh
Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, was deprived of his fortresses, and the eastern
counties were thus secured as those of the north and west had been.
The borders of the kingdom were now safe; its worst elements of disorder
were suppressed; and the bishops and barons had taken an oath of
allegiance to his son William, and in case of William's death to the
infant Henry, born in February 1155. When Henry was called abroad in
January 1156, he could safely leave the kingdom for a year in the charge
of Queen Eleanor and of the justiciars. His return was marked by a new
triumph. The death of David and the succession of his grandson Malcolm, a
boy of twelve years old, gave opportunity for asserting his suzerainty
over Scotland, and freeing himself from his oath made in 1149 at Carlisle
to grant the land beyond the Tyne to David and his heirs for ever.
Malcolm was brought to do homage to him at Chester in June 1157, and
Northumberland and Cumberland passed into Henry's hands. Malcolm and his
successor William followed him in his wars and attended at his courts,
and whatever Henry's actual authority might be, in the eyes of his
English subjects at least he ruled to the farthest borders of Scotland.
He next turned to the settlement of Wales. The civil war had violently
interrupted the peaceful processes by which Henry I. sought to bring the
Welsh under English law. The princes of Wales had practically regained
their independence, while the Norman lords who had carved out estates for
themselves along its borders, indignant at Stephen's desertion of them,
and driven to provide for their own safety, had formed alliances by
marriage with the native rulers. Henry had, in fact, to reconquer the
country, and to provide safeguards against any military union between the
feudal lords of the border and its hostile princes, Owen Gwynneth of the
North, and Rhys ap-Gryffyth of the South. In 1157 he undertook the first
of his three expeditions against Wales. His troops, however, unused to
mountain warfare, had but ill success; and it was only when Henry had
secured the castles of Flintshire, and gathered a fleet along the coast
to stop the importation of corn that Owen was driven in August to do
homage for his land. The next year he penetrated into the mountains of
South Wales and took hostages from its ruler, Rhys-ap-Gryffyth; "the
honour and glory and beauty and invincible strength of the knights; Rhys,
the pillar and saviour of his country, the harbour and defender of the
weak, the admiration and terror of his enemies, the sole pillar and hope
of South Wales."
The triumph of the Angevin conqueror was now complete. The baronage lay
crushed at his feet. The Church was silent. The royal authority had been
pushed, at least in name, to the utmost limits of the island. The close
of this first work of settlement was marked by a royal progress between
September 1157 and January 1158 through the whole length of England from
Malmesbury to Carlisle. It was the king's first visit to the northern
shires which he had restored to the English crown; he visited and
fortified the most important border castles, and then through the bitter
winter months he journeyed to Yorkshire, the fastnesses of the Peak,
Nottingham, and the midland and southern counties. The progress ended at
Worcester on Easter Day, 1158. There the king and queen for the last
time wore their crowns in solemn state before the people. A strange
ceremony followed. In Worcester Cathedral stood the shrine of St.
Wulfstan, the last of the English bishops, the saint who had preserved
the glory of the old English Church in the days of the Confessor, and
carried it on through the troubled time of the Conquest, to whose
supernatural resources the Conqueror himself had been forced to yield,
and who had since by ever-ready miracle defended his city of Worcester
from danger. On this shrine the king and Queen now laid their crowns,
with a solemn vow never again to wear them. To the people of the West
such an act may perhaps have seemed a token that Henry came among them
as heir of the English line of kings, and as defender of the English
Church and people.
From England Henry was called away in August 1158, by the troubles of
his dominions across the sea. The power of Anjou had been built up by
centuries of tyranny, treason, and greed. Nantes had been robbed from
Britanny, Tours had been wrested from Blois, the southern borderland
from Poitou. A hundred years of feud with Maine could not lightly be
forgotten. Normandy still cherished the ancient hatred of pirate and
Frenchman. To the Breton, as to the Norman and the Gascon, the rule of
Anjou was a foreign rule; and if they must have a foreign ruler, better
the King of France than these upstart Counts. Henry held his various
states too by wholly different titles, and to every one of them his
right was more or less disputed. To add to the confusion, his barons in
every province held under him according to different customs and laws of
feudal tenure; and many of them, moreover, owed a double allegiance, and
did homage for part of their estates to Henry and for part to the King
of France. In the general uncertainty as to every question of succession,
or title, or law, or constitution, or feudal relations, the authority
which had been won by the sword could be kept only by sheer military
force. The rebellious array of the feudal nobles, eager to spring to arms
against the new imperial system, could count on the help of the great
French vassals along the border, jealous of their own independence, and
ever watching the Angevin policy with vigilant hostility. And behind
these princes of France stood the French king, Henry's suzerain lord and
his most determined and restless foe, from whom the Angevin count had
already taken away his wife and half his dominions, a foe to whom,
however, through all the perplexed and intermittent wars of thirty years,
he was bound by the indissoluble tie of the feudal relation, which
remained the dominant and authoritative fact of the political morality of
that day. For twenty years to come the two kings, both of them hampered
by overwhelming difficulties, strove to avoid war each after his own
fashion: Henry by money lavishly spent, and by wary diplomacy; Louis
more economically by a restless cunning, by incessant watching of his
adversary's weak points, by dexterously using the arms of Henry's
rebellious subjects rather than those of Frenchmen.
Henry's first care was to secure his ill-defined and ill-defended
frontier, and to recover those border fortresses which had been wrested
from Geoffrey by his enemies. In Normandy the Vexin, which was the true
military frontier between him and France, and commanded the road to
Paris, had been lost. In Anjou he had to win back the castles which had
fallen to the House of Blois. His brother Geoffrey, Earl of Nantes, was
dead, and he must secure his own succession to the earldom. Two rival
claimants were disputing the lordship of Britanny, but Britanny must at
all costs be brought into obedience to Henry. There were hostile forces
in Angoumois, La Marche, Saintonge, and the Limousin, which had to be
finally destroyed. And besides all this, it was necessary to enforce
Eleanor's rights over Berri, and her disputed claims to supremacy over
Toulouse and Auvergne. Every one of these projects was at once taken in
hand. Henry's chancellor, Thomas Becket, was sent from England in 1158
at the head of a splendid embassy to the French court, and when Henry
landed in France the success of this mission was declared. A marriage
was arranged between his little son Henry, now three years old, and
Louis' daughter Margaret, aged six months; and the Vexin was to be
restored to Normandy as Margaret's dowry. The English king obtained from
Louis the right to judge as lord of Anjou and seneschal of France
between the claimants to Britanny; his first entry into that province
was with full authority as the officer of France, and the whole army of
Normandy was summoned to Avranches to enforce his judgment. Conan was
made Duke of Britanny under Henry's lordship, and Nantes was given up
into his hands. He secured by treaty with the House of Blois the
fortresses which had fallen into their hands, and before the year was
out he thus saw his inheritance in Anjou and Normandy, as he had before
seen his inheritance in England, completely restored. In November he
conducted the King of France on a magnificent progress through Normandy
and Britanny, not now as a vassal requiring his help, but with all the
pomp of an equal king.
Meanwhile Henry had been preparing an army to assert his sovereignty
over Toulouse--a sovereignty which would have carried his dominions to
the Mediterranean and the Rhone. The Count of St. Gilles, to whom it had
been pledged by a former Duke of Aquitaine, and who had eighteen years
before refused to surrender it on Eleanor's first marriage, now resisted
the claims of her second husband also, and he was joined by Louis, who
under the altered circumstances took a different view of the legal
rights of Eleanor's husband to suzerainty. To France, indeed, the
question was a matter of life and death. The success of Henry would have
left her hemmed in on three sides by the Angevin dominions, cut off from
the Mediterranean as from the Channel, with the lower Rhone in the hands
of the powerful rival that already held the Seine, the Loire, and the
Garonne. When, therefore, Henry's forces occupied the passes of the
province, and in September 1159 closed round Toulouse itself, Louis
threw himself into the city. Henry, profoundly influenced by the feudal
code of honour of his day, inheriting the traditional loyalty of his
house to the French monarchy, too sagacious lightly to incur war with
France, too politic to weaken in the eyes of his own vassals the
authority of feudal law, and possibly mindful of the succession to the
French throne which might yet pass through Margaret to his son Henry,
refused to carry on war against the person of his suzerain. He broke up
the siege in spite of the urgent advice of his chancellor Thomas; and
for nearly forty years the quarrel lingered on with the French monarchy,
till the question was settled in 1196 by the marriage of Henry's
daughter Joanna to Count Raymond VI. Thomas, who had proved himself a
mighty warrior, was left in charge of the newly-conquered Cahors, while
Henry returned to Normandy, and concluded in May a temporary peace with
Louis. His enemies, however, were drawn together by a common fear, and
France became the battle-ground of the rival ambitions of the Houses of
Blois and Anjou. Louis allied himself with the three brothers of the
House of Blois--the Counts of Champagne, of Sancerre, and of Blois--by a
marriage with their sister only a month after the death of his own queen
in September; and a joint attack was planned upon Henry. His answer was
rapid and decisive. Margaret was in his keeping, and he at once married
her to his son, took the Vexin into his own hands and fortified it with
castles. His position in fact was so strong that the forced his enemies
to a truce in June 1161.
The political complications with which Henry was surrounded were still
further confused by a new question which now arose, and which was to
threaten the peace of Europe for eighteen years. On the death of the
English Pope, Hadrian IV., on the 1st of September 1159, two rivals,
Alexander III. and Victor IV., disputed the see of Rome, and the strife
between the Empire and the Papacy, now nearly one hundred years old,
broke out afresh on a far greater scale than in the time of Gregory.
Frederick Barbarossa asserted the imperial right of judging between the
rivals, and declared Victor pope, supported by the princes of the Empire
and by the kings of Hungary, Bohemia, and Denmark. Alexander claimed the
aid of the French king--the traditional defender of the Church and
protector of the Popes; and after the strife had raged for nearly three
years, he fled in 1162 to France. In the great schism Henry joined the
side of Louis in support of Alexander and of the orthodox cause; the two
kings met at Chouzy, near Blois, to do honour to the Pope; they walked
on either side of his horse and held his reins. The meeting marked a
great triumph for Alexander; the union of the Teutonic nations against
the policy of Rome was to be delayed for three centuries and a half. It
marked, too, the highest point of Henry's success. He had checked the
Emperor's schemes; he had won the gratitude of both Louis and the Pope;
he had defeated the plots of the House of Blois, and shown how easily
any alliance between France and Champagne might be broken to pieces by
his military power and his astute diplomacy. He had rounded off his
dominions; he had conquered the county of Cahors; he had recovered the
Vexin and the border castles of Fréteval and Amboise; the fiefs of
William of Boulogne had passed into his hands on William's death; he was
master of Nantes and Dol, and lord of Britanny; he had been appointed
Protector of Flanders.
At this moment, indeed, Henry stood only second to the Emperor among the
princes of Christendom, and his aim seems to have been to rival in
some sort the Empire of the West, and to reign as an over-king, with
sub-kings of his various provinces, and England as one of them, around
him. He was connected with all the great ruling houses. His eldest son
was married to the daughter of the King of France; the baby Richard,
eighteen months old, was betrothed during the war of Toulouse to a
daughter of the King of Aragon. He was himself a distant kinsman of the
Emperor. He was head of the house of the Norman kings in Sicily. He was
nearest heir of the kings of Jerusalem. Through his wife he was head of
the house of Antioch, and claimed to be head of the house of Tripoli.
Already in these first years of his reign the glory of the English king
had been acknowledged by ambassadors from the Emperor, from the King of
Jerusalem, from Norway, from Sweden, from the Moorish kings of Valencia
and Murcia, bearing the gifts of an Eastern world--gold, silk, horses,
and camels. England was forced out of her old isolation; her interest in
the world without was suddenly awakened. English scholars thronged the
foreign universities; English chroniclers questioned travellers,
scholars, ambassadors, as to what was passing abroad. The influence of
English learning and English statecraft made itself felt all over
Europe. Never, perhaps, in all the history of England was there a time
when Englishmen played so great apart abroad. English statesmen and
bishops were set over the conduct of affairs in Provence, in Sicily, in
Gascony, in Britanny, in Normandy. English archbishops and bishops and
abbots held some of the highest posts in France, in Anjou, in Flanders,
in Portugal, in Italy, in Sicily. Henry himself welcomed trained men
from Normandy or Sicily or wherever he could find them, to help in his
work of administration; but in England foreigners were not greatly
welcomed in any place of power, and his court was, with but one or two
exceptions, made up of men who, of whatever descent they might be,
looked on themselves as Englishmen, and bore the impress of English
training. The mass of Englishmen meanwhile looked after their own
affairs and cared nothing about foreign wars fought by Brabançon
mercenaries, and paid for by foreign gold. But if they had nothing to
win from all these wars, they were none the less at last drawn into the
political alliances and sympathies of their master. Shut out as she was
by her narrow strip of sea from any real concern in the military
movements of the continental peoples, England was still dragged by the
policy of her Angevin rulers into all the complications of European
politics. The friendships and the hatreds of her king settled who were
to be the allies and who the foes of England, and practically fixed the
course of her foreign policy for seven hundred years. A traditional
sympathy lingered on from Henry's days with Germany, Italy, Sicily, and
Spain; but the connection with Anjou forced England into a hostility
with France which had no real ground in English feeling or English
interests; the national hatred took a deeper character when the feudal
nobles clung to the support of the French king against the English
sovereign and the English people, and "generation handed on to generation
an enmity whose origin had long been forgotten." From the disastrous
Crusade of 1191, "from the siege of Acre," to use the words of Dr.
Stubbs, "and the battle of Arsouf to the siege of Sebastopol and the
battles of the Crimea, English and French armies never met again except
as enemies."