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THE
CABINET PORTRAIT GALLERY
OF
BRITISH WORTHIES.
VOLUME I.
LONDON: CHARLES KNIGHT & CO., LUDGATE STREET.
1845.
LONDON: WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET.
Transcriber's Note: Footnotes and Errata are placed at the end of this
file.
CONTENTS.
Page
HENRY II. 5
ROGER BACON 38
EDWARD III. 58
WICLIFFE 94
CHAUCER 120
WILLIAM OF WYKEHAM 145
CABINET PORTRAIT GALLERY
OF
BRITISH WORTHIES.
HENRY II.
Among the histories of eminent kings, that of our Henry II. is one of
the most remarkable both in its beginning and its end, both in the
character of the man and in his fortunes; and, mostly tragic as the
annals of human ambition are, there are few such histories that
exemplify more impressively the instability and vanity of all earthly
greatness.
Nature and fortune joined to make him great. The son of Matilda,
daughter of the English king Henry I., he was through that descent,
after the death of his grandfather, the undoubted male representative of
William the Conqueror, the founder of the reigning English dynasty, and
as such the legitimate heir, at least after his mother, both of the
crown of England and of the dukedom of Normandy, the older acquisition
of his heroic race. His grandmother, the wife of Henry I., was Matilda,
daughter of Queen Margaret of Scotland, herself the daughter of Edward
the Outlaw, in the veins of whose descendants now flowed the main stream
of the blood of Egbert and Alfred and the old Saxon royal line. His
father, whom his mother had married in 1127, two years after the death
of her first husband, the Emperor Henry V., by whom she had no issue,
was Geoffrey Earl of Anjou, surnamed Plantagenet, from his assuming as
his ensign, and wearing on the crest of his helmet, a sprig of broom (in
French _plante genet_); whose father, Earl Fulk, had immediately before
this marriage resigned to him all his French possessions and honours,
upon being himself elected to the throne of Jerusalem, in which he was
succeeded, on his death in 1143, by Baldwin III., his son by a second
marriage. Henry was the eldest son of Geoffrey and the empress, and was
born at Le Mans, the capital of his father's county of Maine, in March
1133, about two years and nine months before the death of his
grandfather King Henry.
Yet it is remarkable that each of these several advantages of descent
which were thus united in his person was accompanied by some defect or
drawback, as if in order that there might remain as much for him to do
for himself as had been done for him by the accident of his birth. His
Saxon lineage gave him no claim to call himself the heir of the old race
of English kings while there existed male descendants of his
great-grandmother, Queen Margaret of Scotland, whose son David the First
was now seated on the throne of that country, and was undoubtedly the
true representative of King Edmund Ironside and the Saxon royal line.
Even between him and his legal right by inheritance to the English
sceptre of the Conqueror there stood his mother, to whom and not to her
son it was that Henry I. had made his barons swear fealty as his
successor. Nor did he on the death of his father obtain more than a
qualified right to the earldom of Anjou, Geoffrey having directed in his
will that he should resign it to his next brother Geoffrey if he should
ever come into the possession of the English crown, and having also made
his bishops and barons take an oath that they would not suffer his body
to be buried till Henry should have sworn to perform whatever the will
might be found to enjoin; which, accordingly, though with much
reluctance, he did. Geoffrey died on the 10th of September, 1151, in his
forty-first year, being younger than his wife the empress, who had long
ceased to be an object of his affections, by seven or eight years.
Ere this, however, his son, styled by the French, Henry Fitz-Empress
(that is, son of the empress), had passed through other changes of
position and fortune. On the death of his grandfather, in December 1135,
the English throne had been usurped by Stephen of Blois, whose mother
Adela was a daughter of the Conqueror: she had been married to the Earl
of Blois, by whom she had four sons, of whom Stephen was the third. In
the course of the contest that ensued between Stephen and Matilda, young
Henry was in the latter part of the year 1142 entrusted by his father to
Robert, Earl of Glocester, his mother's illegitimate brother and
faithful partisan, and was by him brought over to England. They landed,
the boy and his uncle, about the middle of November, at Wareham in
Dorsetshire, a town and castle belonging to the earl, but now held by
the king's troops. The garrison, however, agreed to surrender to
Glocester, who had brought with him from the continent a force of three
or four hundred knights, if they should not be relieved within three
weeks; and soon after, upon being informed from Stephen that he had no
intention of relieving them, they gave up the place. Matilda had never,
since she landed in England three years before, been in such peril as
she was in at this moment--not even when, in the summer of the preceding
year, she was surprised in London by Stephen's queen, and only saved
herself by springing into her saddle from the table at which she was
dining--nor a few weeks after when flying from Winchester, early on a
Sunday morning, she and her escort were overtaken by the enemy at
Stourbridge, and, while the Earl of Glocester and all the rest were
either taken prisoners or slain, she made her way, attended by a single
follower, to Luggershall, and thence, after a rest of a few hours, by
getting again upon horseback and continuing her rapid flight, to the
castle of Devizes. She was now shut up in the castle of Oxford, which
Stephen besieged with his whole army, disregarding in the meantime every
other object, and determined to effect its reduction either by force or
famine. All hope seemed to be gone; but, after she had endured the
greatest privations, on the night of the 20th of December, she left the
castle by a postern gate, with four knights, crossed the Thames, which
was frozen over, and reached Abingdon on foot, having walked all the way
through a deep snow, and having been enabled to escape the notice of the
enemy, some accounts say, in part by herself and her attendants having
clothed themselves in white linen. At Abingdon she took horse, and rode
to Wallingford Castle. Hither a few days after the Earl of Glocester,
having started as soon as he heard the news, brought her her son. The
sight of the boy, says an old chronicler, made her forget all her toils
and dangers, and think all she had suffered nothing. Matilda, with all
her haughtiness of temper, was not without other good qualities, besides
her share in the intrepidity and tough invincible spirit of her race; if
prosperity made her insolent and tyrannical, she bore adversity
admirably; and to her son she was from the first to the last the best of
mothers, not only in the affection she bore him, but in all other
respects. Henry was soon after this carried to Bristol, and "continued
there four years," says Lord Lyttelton, "under the care of his uncle,
who trained him up in such exercises as were most proper to form his
body for war, and in those studies which might embellish and strengthen
his mind. The Earl of Glocester himself had no inconsiderable tincture
of learning, and was the patron of all who excelled in it; qualities
rare at all times in a nobleman of his high rank, but particularly in an
age when knowledge and valour were thought incompatible, and not to be
able to read was a mark of nobility. This truly great man broke through
that cloud of barbarous ignorance, and, after the example of his father
King Henry, enlarged his understanding and humanized his mind by a
commerce with the muses, which he assiduously cultivated, even in courts
and camps, showing by his conduct how useful it was both to the
statesman and general. The same love of science and literature he
likewise infused into his nephew, who under his influence began to
acquire what he never afterwards lost, an ardour for study and a
knowledge of books not to be found in any other prince of those times.
Indeed the four years he now passed in England laid the foundation of
all that was afterwards most excellent in him; for his earliest
impressions were taken from his uncle, who, not only in learning but in
all other perfections--in magnanimity, valour, prudence, and all moral
virtues,--was the best example that could be proposed to his
imitation."[1] Henry's father, who after a long contest had now acquired
complete possession of Normandy, recalled his son from England in the
latter part of the year 1146; and in the beginning of November of that
year, very soon after he had parted with his nephew, the Earl of
Glocester was carried off by a fever. This was to his sister the empress
the loss of her right hand. "Courage and resentment," we quote again
Lord Lyttelton's account, "still combated in her heart with despair; nor
was it without the greatest and most painful reluctance that she gave
way to the necessity of leaving a country over which she had so long
expected to reign. But, in less than four months after the death of her
brother, seeing no possibility of supporting her party, and fearing to
fall into the hands of her enemy, she was constrained to abandon England
and go into Normandy, to live with a husband whom she never had loved,
and who did not love her, but was generous or prudent enough to receive
her with kindness in this decline of her fortune, when her pride was
humbled by her sorrow. Nevertheless, he retained to himself the dominion
of that duchy, as he had held it in her absence; that is, without any
dependence upon her. Instead of submitting to this, she would perhaps
have stayed in England, and buried herself under the ruins of her own
greatness, if the anguish of her mind had not been soothed by the hope
that Prince Henry, her son, might, when he should attain to an age of
maturity, be able to revenge her on Stephen, and recover the crown which
she had lost. Her whole care was therefore employed upon his education.
She laboured to inspire him with thoughts as high as her own; to give
him an ardour for glory, an ambition for empire, and a spirit of
conquest. His genius was very suitable for such instructions; but the
fire he drew from her was happily tempered with the lessons of prudence
and humanity which he had been taught in England by his uncle; and which
his father, a prince of great discretion and judgment, continued to fix
in his mind."[2]
Henry remained in Normandy till the year 1149. Meanwhile his friends in
England had been gradually recovering heart and strength; and it was
arranged that the young prince, whom, although as yet only sixteen, they
now looked to as their head, should show himself among them. From this
time his mother may be regarded as having withdrawn her pretensions in
his favour; no express act of resignation ever took place, but both she
and her husband (for Geoffrey also gave up something in abandoning the
hope of a crown for his wife) were too much attached to their son, and
too sensible, besides, of the present state of circumstances, and of
what the exigency demanded, to stand in his way. He landed early in the
year at the head of a considerable force, probably at Wareham, marched
through the western counties, where he was joined by the Earl of
Chester, the Earl of Hereford, and other barons; and made his way to his
great-uncle King David of Scotland, who had been for some time in
possession of the three northern counties of Northumberland, Cumberland,
and Westmoreland, and whom he found at the head of an army in the town
of Carlisle. During the festivities of Whitsuntide, which were
distinguished on this occasion by extraordinary magnificence, Henry
received the honour of knighthood from his uncle; but he had no
opportunity of gaining his spurs, a disappointment which vexed him the
more that Stephen's son Eustace, who had been knighted about the same
time, had been already put by his father in command of a military force,
with which he was ravaging the lands of some of the very barons who were
now lying in idleness with their retainers at Carlisle.
It must apparently have been during this visit that Henry met with his
first mistress, so famous in song and story, the beautiful Rosamund de
Clifford. Of the two sons which she bore to him it is known that the
younger, Geoffrey, was older than Henry, his first-born by his queen,
and also that he was nearly twenty when he was made Bishop of Lincoln in
1173; he was therefore probably born in 1153; and his elder brother
William, surnamed Long-sword, who, having married the daughter and
heiress of the Earl of Salisbury, succeeded to the estates and title of
his father-in-law, may have been born in 1150. Both of them were
educated along with Henry's legitimate sons: William survived till 1226;
and Geoffrey, who resigned his bishopric in 1182, and was then made Lord
Chancellor by his father, to whom he steadily adhered in all fortunes,
became in the next reign Archbishop of York, but resigned that see also
in 1207, after holding it for about six years, and died in 1212. As for
their mother, who was daughter of Walter de Clifford, a baron of
Herefordshire, it is hardly necessary to say that there is no foundation
for the story of the labyrinth in which she was concealed by her royal
lover at Woodstock, and of her being discovered and forced to drink
poison by Queen Eleanor, which has made her so renowned in popular
romance. It is known that she spent her last years in the nunnery of
Godstow, near Oxford, which she was probably induced to select for her
retreat from her father having been a benefactor to that house: there
she is said to have lived a life of devotion and penitence; but all that
is known as to the time of her death is, that it took place before that
of her father, and he was still alive in 1165.
Henry, finding that nothing could be done at present in England,
returned, in the beginning of the year 1150, to Normandy; and soon after
that duchy was resigned to him by his father, the French king Louis VII.
(Le Jeune) having come thither in the autumn of this year, according to
an agreement among all the parties concerned, and as feudal sovereign
formally delivered it up to the young prince, reserving to himself, as
the price of his compliance, the border district called the Vexin, which
had always been a subject of contention between the dukes of Normandy
and the kings of France. Some months afterwards, indeed, Louis,
repenting of what he had thus done, made an attempt to wrest the fief
again out of the hands of the Angevin prince, with the view of
transferring it to Stephen's son, Eustace; but upon Henry showing a bold
front, and a determination to defend his own, he soon desisted, and the
quarrel was settled by his abandoning Eustace, and by Henry coming to
Paris and renewing his homage there. This then was Henry's first
acquisition. His next was that of the three earldoms of Anjou, Touraine,
and Maine, into which he came into possession by the death of his father
about a year after. This was not long in being followed by another, for
which he was still more directly or materially indebted to King Louis
than he had been for his duchy of Normandy. That well-meaning but
somewhat weak monarch had long been dissatisfied with his queen,
Eleanor, or, as she is more commonly called in the chronicles of the
time, Alienor or Aanor, daughter and heiress of William, Duke of Guienne
or Aquitaine and Earl of Poitou, countries extending along the whole of
the western coast of France, from the Loire to the Pyrenees, which her
marriage, celebrated immediately after her father's death, in the year
1137, when she was only sixteen, had annexed to the French crown. It
seems amazing that any considerations should have blinded Louis to the
impolicy of allowing possessions of such extent and importance,
constituting more than a third of his kingdom, to pass out of his hands
after he had once got hold of them; yet so it was; he had been tormented
by feelings of jealousy ever since Eleanor had been with him, in the
year 1148, in the Holy Land, where he imagined she had had a variety of
intrigues both with Christian and infidel lovers; she on her part had
come to look with contempt upon her husband, the character of whose mind
seemed in her eyes to make him fitter for being a monk than a king; and
the end was that in the beginning of the year 1152 she submitted to a
divorce, or rather their marriage was dissolved by mutual consent; for,
although at the council of bishops which assembled at
Beaujency-sur-Loire to take the matter into consideration, and before
which Eleanor made her appearance, Louis asked for a divorce on the plea
of his suspicions of her fidelity, the council pronounced no opinion
upon that point, but simply declared the marriage to have been null from
the beginning, on the common and convenient ground of the consanguinity
of the parties, who were fourth cousins, the canons of the Church
forbidding marriage, without a previous dispensation from the pope, even
between persons related within the seventh degree. The scandalous
chronicles of the time affirm that Eleanor had already, before her
separation from her husband, given way to a passion for young Henry
Plantagenet, whom indeed she had seen at the French court on two recent
occasions; first when he came, as just related, to renew his homage for
the duchy of Normandy, and again when he returned soon after to receive
investiture of the earldoms he inherited from his father. They at least
were not long in finding out one another after she was at liberty to
dispose of herself. The nullification of Eleanor's marriage with Louis
immediately produced two consequences; it bastardized two daughters that
she had borne to him, and, as we have already intimated, it severed from
the French crown the extensive dominions forming her inheritance. It was
natural that she should now return to her own country, and accordingly
she set out for Poitou as soon as the council had pronounced its
sentence. But there were several aspirants to the rich prize which Louis
had resigned or cast away, notwithstanding that he is said to have
assured himself that she would never get another husband, declaring that
her behaviour had made her too infamous for the poorest gentleman in his
dominions to be willing to marry her. When she reached Blois, she
received proposals from the young Thibaud, Earl of Blois, who had just
succeeded to that fief on the death of his father, the elder brother of
King Stephen; and, when she declined his suit, it is affirmed that he
formed a design of detaining her, and compelling her to marry him by
force, which she only escaped by being warned of it and taking her
departure in the middle of the night for Tours. Here another danger of
the same kind met her. Henry Plantagenet's younger brother Geoffrey had
been left by his father only the castles of Chinon and Loudon in
Touraine, and that of Mirabeau in Anjou, with their dependencies, and he
could hardly therefore, even with his dubious prospect of succeeding at
some future time to the chief possessions of his family, flatter himself
that if he should set about wooing the Duchess of Aquitaine in the
common fashion he would, in present circumstances, have much chance of
success. But either not being aware of or disregarding his brother's
pretensions, and thinking that such an opportunity of making his fortune
was not likely again to present itself, he also, like Thibaud of Blois,
resolved to try force, and posted himself at a port on the Loire, called
Le Port de Piles, by which he supposed that Eleanor would pass, for the
purpose of waylaying her and carrying her off. She received intelligence
of his scheme, however, and, changing her route, got safe to her own
town of Poitiers. From this she sent to Henry, then in Normandy, to tell
him of her arrival, and of the perils through which she had made her
way. He instantly set out to join her, taking with him only a few
attendants, and travelling so as to attract as little observation as
possible; and they were married on Whitsunday (May the 18th), not quite
six weeks after Eleanor's separation from Louis. Henry was not yet
twenty years of age, and his bride was full thirty; "but with a good
share of beauty," observes Lord Lyttelton, "and more of vivacity, she
had still youth enough to gain the heart of a young man, though not to
preserve it very long." His lordship nevertheless declines affirming
that Henry was really in love,--that his acceptance of Eleanor's offer
of her hand was prompted by any other passion than his ambition. There
were certainly some strong considerations to be got over, apart
altogether from their difference in age.
Thus was Henry already lord of nearly the half of France. From the
situation of his previous possessions, he was of all the vassals of the
French crown the one whom a union with Eleanor was fitted the most to
aggrandize. As the duchy of Normandy, which he derived from or through
his mother, was conterminous on the south with his three paternal
earldoms of Anjou, Touraine, and Maine, so his wife's states of Poitou
and Guienne lay immediately to the south of these last, the whole
forming an unbroken continuation of territory extending from the English
Channel to the Pyrenees. To these acquisitions, maternal, paternal, and
matrimonial, he soon added another much more splendid than any or all of
them, which he may be said to have mainly won for himself by his own
right hand. For a brief space he was detained on the continent by having
to take arms against a formidable confederacy organized by King Louis,
who had now at length opened his eyes, and turned them with amazement
and consternation upon his youthful vassal, suddenly become his rival
and almost his equal, and had got his own brother the Earl of Dreux,
Henry's brother Geoffrey, Eleanor's other disappointed suitor the Earl
of Blois, and King Stephen's son Eustace, to join him in an invasion of
Normandy. But this attack was repulsed in a campaign of less than six
weeks' duration; not only were the invaders driven out of the country to
the last man, and an insurrection which they had excited of some of the
Anjevin barons effectually crushed, but Henry, pursuing his enemies into
France, laid waste a part of that country without Louis daring to turn
round and give him battle. This work done, and a peace arranged with the
French king, he lost no time in setting about the great enterprise to
which all things now seemed to concur in calling him. He landed in
England on the 6th of January, 1153, at the head of a force of three
thousand foot and a hundred and forty knights. There was some fighting,
but no considerable action; and, after the principal impediment in the
way of an accommodation had been removed by the death of Stephen's son
Eustace by a fever, the effect in all probability of the agitation and
rage into which he was thrown by the pending negotiation in which he was
about to be sacrificed, an agreement was made on the 7th of November, by
which Stephen adopted Henry for his son and successor, giving the
kingdom of England, as it was expressed, after his own death, to him and
his heirs for ever. Stephen did not survive this treaty quite a year; he
died at Canterbury on the 25th of October, 1154; and Henry became king.
He was in Normandy when Stephen's death occurred; and he was detained at
Barfleur for some weeks by adverse weather; but he set sail at last
while the storm still raged with little abatement, and after a dangerous
passage he landed in the New Forest, not far from Hurst Castle, on the
7th of December. He was crowned, with his queen, at Westminster, on
Sunday the 19th; and the commencement of his reign, according to what
was then the custom, is reckoned from that day.
Of course, in the circumstances, Henry did not now think of resigning
Anjou to his brother Geoffrey, whose late confederacy with the French
king and attack upon Normandy, an act amounting to rebellion in him,
could not but be considered as depriving him of any claim he might have
under his father's will and Henry's forced engagement to fulfil its
provisions. To obviate all objections, however, Henry obtained from the
pope a dispensation releasing him from that compulsory oath. A few years
after this he recovered the ceded district of the Vexin for Normandy by
the arrangement of marriage between his eldest son and a daughter of
King Louis; and he subsequently acquired what amounted to the actual
possession of Bretagne by the negotiation of another marriage between
his third son, Geoffrey, and the Lady Constantia, or Constance, daughter
and heiress of Conan, prince of that country. The extent of territory
subject to the English king even in France was now greater than that
which acknowledged the sway of Louis. If a line had been drawn from
north to south only a few miles to the west of Paris, or nearly about
the meridian of Boulogne, all to west of it would have been found to
belong to Henry, from the English sea to the Spanish mountains; while
the dominion of Louis on the other side of Gaul scarcely extended
farther south than to the Loire, all the region beyond that river being
in possession of the Earls of Toulouse. Henry, besides, almost as soon
as he came to the throne, had recovered the three northern counties of
England from the Scottish king, and even compelled him to do homage for
the whole of Scotland to the south of the Forth; he soon after reduced
Wales; and finally, in 1172, he effected the conquest of Ireland. The
details of the valour and policy by which all this was done, of the
patience, the foresight, the vigilance, the incessant exertion, the
utter disregard of toil and danger, by which so many additions to his
original inheritance were won and preserved, and by which all his
states, old and new, were governed, and the authority of law and order
maintained in them, must be sought for in the records of history. Those
were the days in which a king of England, to hold his place, really
required to be, in all senses, about the ablest man in his dominions; if
he was not of such heroic mould, he was almost sure to be thrown down,
in that convulsive and stormy condition of things which had not yet
subsided since the breaking up of the Roman empire had thrown Europe
into a state of social chaos. Nothing, in fact, was fixed and stable;
nowhere was the ground firm beneath men's feet; hardly any political
arrangement or part of the mechanism of government was brought to such
working order as to go on in any degree of itself or as a matter of
course; all rights and claims were disputed and in conflict with one
another; the boundaries of states, public and private inheritances, the
provinces of the civil and ecclesiastical powers, the positions and
privileges of the different classes of the community, all remained as
yet in many respects unsettled and the subject of fierce contention both
by argument and occasionally by force. Of all this confusion the king
had to be, as far as possible, the ruler or moderator; and to hold his
own besides, often in harness and the battle-field, and when nothing
would stand him in much stead if he had not a strong arm and a stout
heart. Let us now see how Henry was furnished in body and mind, in
capacity and moral disposition, for this post in the front and at the
head of the community, according to the testimony of those who knew him
best and were the best qualified to understand and describe him.
He has been drawn at full length, and with much elaboration, by the
famous letter-writer of the twelfth century, Peter of Blois (so styled
from the place of his birth), who appears to have come over to England
about 1169 or 1170, and was afterwards for many years in habits of daily
and intimate intercourse with the king as his private secretary. The
account occurs in a letter from Peter to his friend Walter, Archbishop
of Palermo, who had requested from him a complete and exact picture of
the great English king, both in his outer and inner man, a theme which
his correspondent declares would, in his opinion, overtask the powers of
the Mantuan (that is, Virgil) himself, or, as he afterwards still more
strongly puts it, would be too much for either Maro or Tully. So far,
however, he adds, as the subject is within his capacity, he will speak
without envy or detraction. The letter has no date, but appears to have
been written about the year 1180. He begins by remarking that, as it is
related to the commendation of David that he was ruddy, so it might
still be seen that King Henry had in earlier life been in a moderate
degree of that complexion, although his colour was now somewhat gone,
and his hair also touched with grey, from his advanced years.[3] His
head was compact and round-shaped--"spherical" is the rhetorical
secretary's term--of fitting form and dimensions, according to the
craniological philosophy of that day, "to be the seat of great wisdom,
and the special sanctuary of deep counsel." Yet its size was perfectly
proportioned to that of the sustaining neck and the general frame. The
eyes also were round, and of soft expression--"dove-like and simple, or
single" (in the Scriptural sense), are the terms employed--while he was
unexcited; but under the emotion of anger or any other disturbing
passion they flashed fire, and, as it were, lightened. His hair as yet
showed no signs of becoming bald, but he prevented it from growing long
by clipping. The general form of the face was quadrangular, like that of
a lion. His nose was handsome and of suitable size, his chest broad, his
arms muscular, his legs of the proper shape for a good rider,[4] his
instep arched and high. Some deformity, however, had been produced in
one of his feet by the nail of a toe having grown into the flesh; and
his hands also, upon which he never wore a glove, except when he carried
a falcon, gave token of his neglect of them by a certain clumsiness or
grossness of appearance. He discarded all ornament alike in boots and
bonnet, and all his clothes were disencumbered of everything
superfluous.[5] A characteristic of his mother's race that he inherited
was a strong tendency to corpulency; but he appears to have succeeded in
keeping it down much more than his great-grandfather, the Conqueror,
both by frequent fastings and by a life of movement and activity almost
without example. His habit was scarcely ever to sit down, except while
he was upon horseback or at his meals. Whether at mass or at council, or
in whatever business he had to transact, he kept upon his feet from
morning to night. When engaged in war, he would, if necessary, get over
as much ground in one day as would take an ordinary commander four or
five; and in this way he often got the better of his enemies by coming
upon them when they did not look for him. Both in mounting his horse and
in riding he had still preserved to this, the latter part of his life,
all the alacrity of youth. During peace his favourite recreation was
hunting or hawking; and bows, swords, arrows, and hunting tackle were
almost constantly in his hands, except when he was reading and when he
was at council, or occupied with affairs of state. But both business and
books had their full share of his time. "For he does not," says his
secretary, "lie still, like other kings, in his palace, but, journeying
rapidly from province to province, inquires into the conduct of all his
officers, especially judging those whom he has constituted the judges of
others. No man is more sagacious in counsel, gifted with a greater flow
and rush of elocution, more firm in dangers, less confident in
prosperity, in adversity more constant.... As often as he can obtain a
breathing time from the cares and anxieties of state, he spends it
either in reading by himself, or in labouring to untie the knot of some
difficult question in converse with a circle of learned clerks." Such
literary assemblages and discussions, it is added, were held in the
palace every day. In the rest of the letter Henry is warmly praised,
though in general terms, for his moderation both in eating and drinking,
his liberality and charity, his magnificence in the construction, on the
one hand, of warlike defences and strongholds, on the other of palaces,
lakes for fish, and enclosures for wild animals, his kindness to the
afflicted and affability to the poor, although he bore himself with a
more lordly mien, it is subjoined, to the high and proud--always, with a
certain resemblance to the divinity, endeavouring to depress the haughty
and to raise up the depressed. A remarkable sentence follows, to the
effect that, although in conformity with the custom of his kingdom,
Henry exercised the most potent and effectual influence in elections
(_in electionibus faciendis potissimas et potentissimas habeat partes_),
yet he ever kept his hands pure and free from all venality. The
elections here referred to are of course elections to bishoprics and
other dignities or benefices in the church; for there were as yet no
elections to civil offices in England. The steadiness of the king both
in his likings and dislikings is also noted: if he had once loved
anyone, we are assured, he scarcely ever withdrew his regard; but he was
as rarely known to admit to his familiarity or favour anyone to whom he
had once conceived an aversion.
Peter of Blois was an ecclesiastic; he held, among other preferments
both in England and abroad, the archdeaconries both of London and Bath;
and he was, like the generality of his profession, firmly attached to
the great cause of the independence of the church, and the supremacy of
the spiritual over the temporal power. It might, and probably would,
have been different a few years before; but at the time when this letter
was written he had no quarrel with the English king even on such
questions; on the contrary, he lauds him warmly for his piety, and his
zealous maintenance of the rights of the clergy, and especially for the
reverence in which he held the memory of the blessed and glorious
martyr--the murdered and since canonized Becket, or St. Thomas--whom,
says the archdeacon, in all straits he looks up to as his chief patron.
In the position he occupied at court, also, he would of course be
disposed to take a favourable view of the character of his royal master.
The picture he has drawn, indeed, may be admitted to be somewhat
sparingly shaded; some features may be softened down, and others may be
altogether concealed. But, so far at least as his evidence is positive,
it may be safely received; and, in fact, it is confirmed in all the main
particulars by other contemporary testimony, or by what Henry's history
and conduct throughout his life show him to have been. It is true that
other writers of his own age,--Giraldus Cambrensis, for instance, and
Radulphus Niger--have delineated him in much darker colours; but their
animosity is at least as evident and as strong as Peter of Blois's
partiality; and they, and others who join them in the same strain, had
individually as much reason to dislike Henry, as the archdeacon had to
feel grateful and attached to him. His chief habitual defect appears to
have been a tendency to violent explosions of rage. It is several times
alluded to in the letters of Peter of Blois, from whose notices we learn
that there were times when his majesty was not to be spoken to without
considerable risk or great caution; but some of the exhibitions of his
fury, as reported by other authorities, almost go beyond credibility.
"When his wrath is fairly kindled," says Peter in one place, "he is a
lion, or something yet more truculent." Giraldus Cambrensis tells us,
that in the paroxysms of his passion, to quote his description as
translated by Lingard, "his eyes were spotted with blood, his
countenance seemed of flame, his tongue poured a torrent of abuse and
imprecation, and his hands were employed to inflict vengeance on
whatever came within his reach." On one occasion, we are told, the
learned modern historian proceeds, referring to a letter of Thomas of
Becket's, "When Humet, a favourite minister, had ventured to offer a
plea in justification of the king of Scots, Henry, in a burst of
passion, called Humet a traitor, threw down his cap, ungirt his sword,
tore off his clothes, pulled the silk coverlet from his couch, and,
unable to do more mischief, sate down, and gnawed the straw on the
floor." Another time, it is added, on the same authority, "when a page
presented a letter, the king attempted to tear out his eyes, nor did the
boy escape without severe scars." These were doubtless demonstrations,
supposing them not exaggerated in the recital, that had better have been
avoided; but Henry had often that to contend with which was enough to
make the wisest mad; such oubhreaks do not appear to have been frequent;
and, if the storm was sufficiently terrific while it lasted, it never
lasted long. Nor were the rash and furious words usually followed by any
corresponding ferocity of action. If Henry was passionate, he was
certainly neither vindictive nor cruel. He may have put little restraint
upon his passions in other respects as well as in giving way to excesses
of rage, and he had probably his share in the general licentiousness of
his time; but he nowhere revolts us by showing either want of heart or
any thing of coarseness or baseness of nature. It is probable, from all
that history and tradition tell us of him, that there was always as much
of sentiment as of sensuality in his licentiousness. His affection for
his children, so long as they would suffer him to love them, seems to
have been only too tender and indulgent; and even after their repeated
ingratitude he was always to the last ready to forgive them and to take
them again to his heart. Ambitious he was, indisputably, and fond of
power; and as such, he was necessarily unscrupulous, and in pursuing his
great and aspiring schemes, would at times break his way in a somewhat
reckless and startling fashion through restraints that checked more
timid spirits. Having also frequently to act by policy as well as by
force, and to contend with the one as much as with the other--for it was
an age of overreaching and trickery--he may have sometimes gone farther
in the way of artifice and deception than would now be thought correct.
But a fair consideration of his conduct as recorded does not at all bear
out the charge made against him by some hostile declaimers--principally
or exclusively ecclesiastics--during his contest with the church, that
he was a shameless and systematic liar, that he never pledged his word
except with the intention of breaking it at the first opportunity. This
is the mere extravagance of party malice or passion. When Cardinal
Viviani, after conversing with Henry, declared that he had never known
his equal in lying, we can only conclude that the churchman found
himself no match in diplomatic subtlety and stratagem for the king.