THE EARLY YEARS OF HENRY II.
Terms of Henry’s accession--His character--His early reforms--His
relations with France--War of Toulouse--Summary of nine years’ work.
[Sidenote:
Importance
attached by
contemporaries
to Henry’s
accession.
]
Very few epochs of history are more clearly marked than the accession
of Henry II. Most great eras are determined, and their real importance
ascertained, long after the event; the famous Parliament of Simon de
Montfort, in 1265, for instance, is scarcely named by the contemporary
historians, and only rises into importance as later history unfolds its
real bearings. But the succession of Henry is hailed by the writers
of his time as a dawn of hope, a certain omen of restoration and
refreshing. Often and often, it is true, such omens are discerned on
the accession of a new king; men hasten to salute the rising sun; good
wishes to the new sovereign take the form of prophecy, and, where they
are fulfilled, partly help on their own fulfilment. Here, however, we
have omens that were amply fulfilled, and an epoch which those who
lived in it were the first to recognise. The fact proves how weary
England was of Stephen’s incompetency, how thoroughly she had learned
the miserable consequences of a feudal system of society unchecked by
strong government, how readily she welcomed the young and inexperienced
but strong and, in the main, honest rule of Henry.
[Illustration:
ENGLAND
and
FRANCE
1152-1327
]
[Sidenote:
Youth and
education of
Henry.
]
Henry II. was born in 1133; and if we may believe the testimony of
Roger Hoveden, who was one of his chaplains, and a very conscientious
compiler of histories, he was recognized by Henry I. as his successor
directly after his birth. When his grandfather died he was two years
old. His father and mother made, as we have seen, a very ill-concerted
effort to secure the succession, and it was not until the boy was eight
years old that the struggle for the crown really began. In 1141 he
was brought to England; then no doubt he learned a dutiful hatred of
Stephen, and was trained in the use of arms; but whether he received
his training under his father in France or under his uncle, Robert of
Gloucester, in England, or under his great uncle, David of Scotland, we
are not told. Only we know that, when he was sixteen, he was knighted
at Carlisle by King David; that, like a wise boy, he determined to
secure his French dominions before he attempted the recovery of
England; that he succeeded to Normandy and Anjou in 1151, when he
was eighteen; married his wife, the Duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine who
had been divorced from Lewis VII., and secured her inheritance, when
he was nineteen; that he came again to England and forced Stephen to
submit to terms when he was twenty; and that at the age of twenty-one
he succeeded him on the throne in pursuance of those terms. These
dates are sufficient to prove that, although Henry might have got
considerable experience in arms as a boy and young man, he could
scarcely have had yet the education of a lawgiver. Somewhat of politics
he might have learnt, but he had not had time or opportunity to learn
a regular theory of policy, or to create a method of government which,
when the time for action came, he might put into execution. The
extraordinary power which he showed when the time for action really
arrived was in part a gift of genius; partly too it arose from his
wisdom in choosing experienced advisers, and partly it was an effect
of his following the broad lines of his grandfather’s administrative
reforms.
[Sidenote:
Character of
Henry II.
]
[Sidenote:
His family
policy.
]
[Sidenote:
His great position
in Christendom.
]
Henry II. was a very great sovereign in many ways: he was an admirable
soldier, most careful in forming plans, wonderfully rapid in the
execution of them; he was at once cautious and adventurous, sparing
of human life and moderate in the use of victory. Yet he was far from
being a mild or gentle enemy; and he was economical of human life
rather because of its cost in money than from any pitifulness. If he
spared an enemy it was only when he had entirely disabled him from
doing harm, or when he was fully assured of his power to turn him into
a friend. His foes accused him of being treacherous, but his treachery
mainly consisted in letting them deceive themselves. Thus he was no
hero of probity, and his craft may have gone farther in the direction
of cunning than was approved by the rough diplomacy of his time. He
is said to have had a maxim, that it is easier to repent of words
than of deeds, and therefore wiser to break your word than to fulfil
an inconvenient obligation; but it cannot be said that the facts of
history show him to have acted upon this shameless avowal, captious
and unscrupulous as his policy more than once appears. He had no
doubt a difficult part to play. His dominions brought him into close
contact with all the great sovereigns of Europe. He had considerable
ambitions--for himself, to hold fast all that he had acquired by
inheritance and marriage; for his sons to obtain by marriage or other
settlement provinces which, united to their hereditary provision,
might make them either a family of allied sovereigns or an imperial
federation under himself, and in each form the mightiest house in
Christendom. Such a network of design was spread before him from the
first. As the head of the house of Anjou the kings and princes of
Palestine regarded him as their family representative, the grandson
of King Fulk, and the man created for the re-conquest of the East. To
him in their utmost need they sent the offer of their crown, the keys
of the Holy Sepulchre and of the Tower of David. As the head of the
Normans he was looked up to by the Sicilian king as the presumptive
successor, and had the strange fortune and self-restraint to decline
the offer of a second crown. The Italians thought him a likely
competitor for the empire when they saw him negotiating for his son
John a marriage with the heiress of Savoy, which would give him the
command of the passes of the Alps; Spain saw in him the leader of a new
crusade against the Moors when he sought for his son Richard a bribe
in the Princess of Aragon, whose portion would give him the passes of
the Pyrenees. Frederick Barbarossa might well feel suspicious when he
heard that English gold was given to build the walls of Milan, and
when he remembered that Henry the Lion, the great Duke of Saxony and
Bavaria, the head of the Welfic house, his cousin and friend, whom with
heavy heart he had sacrificed to the necessities of state, was also
son-in-law of the king of the English. So wide a system of foreign
alliances and designs helped to make Henry both cautious and crafty.
[Sidenote: Lewis VII.]
Nearer home his ability was tasked by Lewis VII., whose whole policy
consisted in a habit of pious falsehood, who really acted upon the
principle which Henry ironically formulated, and who by either
cowardice or faithlessness made himself far more dangerous than by his
strength.
[Sidenote:
Henry’s mismanagement
of his
children.
]
Henry was a kind and loving father, but his political game led him to
sacrifice the real interest of his children to the design for their
advancement. They soon found out that he used them like chess-men, and
could not see the love which prompted his design. To his people he
was a politic ruler, a great reformer and discipliner; not a hero or
patriot, but a far-seeing king who recognized that the well-being of
the nation was the surest foundation of his own power. As a lawgiver or
financier, or supreme judge, he made his hand felt everywhere; and at
the beginning of his reign, when the need of the reforms was forcibly
impressed on the minds of his subjects by their recent misery, his
reforms were welcomed; he was popular and beloved. By and by, when
he had educated a new generation, and when the dark cloud of sin and
sorrow and ingratitude settled down upon him, they forgot what he had
done in his early days; but they never forgot how great a king he was.
We may not say that he was a good man; but his temptations were very
great, and he was sinned against very much by his wife and children.
It is only in a secondary sense that he was a good king, for he loved
his power first and his people only second; but he was good so far
as selfish wisdom and deep insight into what is good for them could
make him. In his early years he gave promise of something more than
this, and some share of the blame that attends his later short-comings
must rest with those who scrupled at nothing that might humiliate and
disappoint him.
In appearance, we are told, Henry was a tall, stout man, with a short
neck, and projecting but very expressive eyes; he was a careless
dresser, a great hunter, a man of business rather than a model of
chivalry; capable of great exertion, moderate in meat and drink,
and anything but extravagant in personal as opposed to official
expenditure. He was a builder of halls and castles, not very much of
churches; but that may easily be accounted for. We are glad to have
him pictured for us even with this scanty amount of detail, for he is
well worth the trouble of an attempt at least to realize his outward
presentment. Every one knows Henry VIII. by sight; it might be as well
if we had as definite an impression of Henry II.
[Sidenote:
Plan of
reform.
]
We have observed, in sketching the close of the last reign, the
existence of certain terms by which Henry and Stephen, after or in
preparation for the peace of November 1153, agreed that the country
should be governed. Those terms are not preserved in any formal
document, but they occur in two or three of the historians of the time,
in a somewhat poetical garb, disguised in language adapted partly from
the prophecies of Merlin, king Arthur’s seer, which were in vogue at
the time, and partly from the words of Holy Scripture; and yet, from
the clue they furnish to the reforms actually carried out by Henry,
they seem to be based upon certain real articles of agreement.
[Sidenote:
Term of
pacification.
]
By these terms the administration of justice was to be restored,
sheriffs to be appointed to the counties, and a careful examination
into their honesty and justice to be instituted; the castles which
had been built since the death of Henry I. were to be destroyed; the
coinage was to be renewed, a uniform silver currency of lawful weight;
the mercenaries who had flooded the kingdom under Stephen were to be
sent back to their own countries; the estates which had been usurped
were to go to their lawful owners; all property alienated from the
crown was to be resumed, especially the pensions on the Exchequer with
which Stephen endowed his newly-created earls; the royal demesnes were
to be re-stocked, the flocks to return to the hills, the husbandman to
the plough, the merchant to his wares; the swords were to be turned
into ploughshares and the spears into pruning-hooks.
[Sidenote:
Meaning of
these terms.
]
These sentences give us a clue to Henry’s reforms; that is, they show
us clearly the evils that first called for his attention. The kingdom,
divided in two under Stephen, had been in constant war; the barons on
one side had entered on the lands of the barons on the other; Stephen
had confiscated the estates of Matilda’s friends in the East of
England, Matilda had retaliated or authorized reprisals in the West.
All this must be set right. The crown had been the greatest loser, and
the impoverishment of the crown involved the oppression of the people.
Henry gained the crown by a national act; he must then resume not only
the wasteful grants of Stephen but those of his mother also, and, in
his character of king, know neither friends nor foes amongst his own
people. So the Exchequer, the board which managed the royal revenue,
must be placed on its old footing, and under its old managers. With the
Exchequer would revive the ancient office of the sheriffs, to whom both
the collection of revenue, the administration of justice in the shires,
and the maintenance of the military force was entrusted. Thus local
security would restore and revive trade and commerce. And when the
local administration of the sheriff was revived, no doubt the feudal
usurpations of the lords of castles and manors must end. The fortified
houses must be pulled down; no more should the petty tyrants tax and
judge their men, fight their battles like independent princes, and coin
their money as so many kings. The great PEACE should be restored, of
which the king was guardian and keeper. In fact, the golden age was
to return. Nor was it to be delayed until Henry came to the crown; it
was to be Stephen’s last and expiatory task to bring about these happy
results. Stephen, as we saw, wanted either the will or the power to
accomplish it.
[Sidenote:
Arrival of
Henry as
successor
to Stephen,
1154.
]
[Sidenote:
Henry’s
advisers.
]
[Sidenote:
Bishop
of Winchester.
]
[Sidenote:
The
Empress.
]
[Sidenote:
Theobald
and Becket.
]
Stephen died on October 25, 1154. Henry was in France at the time, and
was not able, owing to the weather, to reach England before December
8. During this time the management of affairs rested with Archbishop
Theobald of Canterbury, and in some measure perhaps with his secretary,
Thomas Becket, who had been so busy negotiating the succession of
Henry. Although it was the theory that during the vacancy of the
throne all law and police were suspended, and no one could be punished
for offences committed in a general abeyance of justice, the country
remained quiet during these six weeks. Perhaps the rogues were cowed
by the apprehension of a strong king coming, perhaps the religious
obedience inculcated by the archbishop was really maintained; perhaps
the same bad weather that kept Henry in Normandy kept thieves and
robbers within doors. Nor was there any political rising during the
interregnum. Stephen’s children were not thought of, at least on this
side of the Channel, as rivals to Henry. The Bishop of Winchester had
learnt moderation, that might in him well pass for wisdom; he might
well feel that his position was a hazardous one, to be maintained only
by caution; and he had no reason, nor excuse for seeking a reason,
for evading the compact which he had had a chief hand in making. It
shows, however, his importance that as soon as Henry landed, which he
did near Southampton, he hastened to Winchester, and there visited
his powerful kinsman, who, as we learn, was now busily employed in
collecting statues and sculpture from southern Europe, and with whom he
made a friendship which, although once or twice seriously endangered,
was never actually broken. Amongst the other leaders who likewise had
learned wisdom we must count the Empress Matilda, who, strange to say,
appears to us no more as the arrogant, self-willed virago, but as a
sage politician and a wise, modest, pious old lady, living at Rouen,
and ruling Normandy in the name of her son with prudent counsel. Not a
word is said now of her succeeding to the throne or even resigning her
rights to Henry; all that was regarded as arranged by the settlement
made with Stephen. Henry succeeded without a competitor. Stephen’s
minister, Richard de Lucy, became his minister. Theobald continued
to be, as his office made him, the great constitutional adviser; and
to reconcile personal convenience with constitutional precedent, he
presented his secretary to the king as his future Chancellor. Thomas
Becket thus entered on his high and fatal office.
[Sidenote: Coronation.]
[Sidenote:
Banishment
of mercenaries.
]
All this done, Henry appeared at Westminster on the 19th of December,
and was there crowned with the ceremonies observed at his grandfather’s
coronation, now more than half a century past, and bound himself by the
same ancient and solemn promises which Ethelred had made to Dunstan,
and which the Conqueror, Henry I., and Stephen had renewed. Nor,
when crowned, did he lose a moment: he issued a charter, as Stephen
had done, at his coronation, confirming his grandfather’s laws. The
same week he held a great court and council at Bermondsey. At once he
re-established the Exchequer, recalling to the head of it Bishop Nigel
of Ely, whom Stephen had displaced in 1140, and setting at work at
once with the business of the revenue. From this court at Bermondsey
went forth the decree that the Flemish and other foreign mercenaries
should leave the kingdom at once, and that the castles built under
Stephen should be thrown down. The mercenaries fled forthwith. Their
presence was perhaps the most offensive of all insults to the national
pride, and the late reign had taught Normans and Englishmen that they
had now a common nationality in suffering, if not in conquest. By this
article of the agreement Henry faithfully stood. Although he fought all
his foreign wars with mercenaries, he never but once--and that in the
greatest emergency, and to repel foreign mercenaries brought against
him by the rebellious earls in 1174--introduced any such force into
England. Even Richard employed in the kingdom no more foreigners than
formed his ordinary surroundings, and it is not until John’s reign
that we find the country again oppressed and insulted by hired foreign
soldiery.
[Sidenote:
Destruction of
castles.
]
The demolition of the castles, which one contemporary writer reckons
at three hundred and seventy-five, another a little later at eleven
hundred and fifteen, was a still greater boon; for these, had they been
suffered to stand, would not only have fitted England to be a constant
scene of civil war, but have continued to afford to their owners
a shadow of claim for the exercise of those feudal jurisdictions
which on the Continent made every baron a petty despot. Castles
were unfortunately not entirely destroyed at this time; the older
strongholds, which had been built under Henry, were untouched, and gave
trouble enough in the one civil war that marks the reign; but the legal
misuse of them was abolished, and they ceased to be centres of feudal
lawlessness.
[Sidenote:
Fate of the
new earls.
]
Another measure which must have been taken at the coronation, when
all the recognised earls did their homage and paid their ceremonial
services, seems to have been the degrading or cashiering of the
supposititious earls created by Stephen and Matilda. Some of these may
have obtained recognition by getting new grants; but those who lost
endowment and dignity at once, like William of Ypres, the leader of the
Flemish mercenaries, could make no terms. They sank to the rank from
which they had been so incautiously raised.
[Sidenote:
Resumption of
lands.
]
[Sidenote:
Resistance
of William
of Aumâle.
]
[Sidenote:
Surrender
of
the malcontents.
]
The resumption of royal estates, and the restoration of the
dispossessed on each side, was probably a much more difficult business
than the humiliation of the earls. Doubtless the enemies of Henry’s
mother would bear their reverses silently, to avoid entire ruin; or
only those would think of continuing in opposition who had no hope
but in terms which might be granted to pertinacious resistance; but
Matilda’s supporters might well think it hard that they should be
called upon to resign their hard-won gains. Still, Henry was a national
king; the resumption of domain was not an Angevin conquest; it was a
national restoration of the state of affairs as it stood before the
beginning of the national quarrel. As a matter of fact only two or
three of the nobles made any resistance. William of Aumâle, the Lord
of Holderness, who had commanded at the Battle of the Standard, and who
played the part of a petty king in Yorkshire, objected to surrender
his great castle at Scarborough. He, of course, had been on Stephen’s
side, and was, indeed, a member of the House of Champagne--the son
of that Count Stephen who had been brought forward by the Norman
earls as competitor with William Rufus. Of Matilda’s old friends,
Hugh Mortimer, the lord of Wigmore, and Roger of Hereford, the son
of Miles the Constable, declined to submit. The King of Scots too,
Malcolm IV., grandson of King David and half-cousin of Henry, although
the Northern counties had been held in trust for Henry, wished to
retain them for himself. In January, 1155, however, Henry marched
northwards and brought the Count of Aumâle to his feet. In March he
was at London holding council for the restoration of peace and the
confirmation of the ancient laws. He declared that neither friend nor
foe should be spared. Roger of Hereford immediately surrendered. Hugh
of Mortimer still held out, and did not submit until Henry had called
out the national force for the capture of Bridgenorth. On exactly the
same ground it was that Henry I., had won his victory over Robert of
Belesme, when in 1102 he laid the axe to the tree of feudal misrule,
and his subjects, rejoicing at the overthrow of the oppressor, hailed
him as now for the first time a king. This was accomplished in July.
And this was a permanent pacification; it was nearly twenty years
before anything like rebellion reared its head.
[Sidenote:
Restoration
of judicature.
]
[Sidenote:
Frequent
councils.
]
[Sidenote:
Proposal to
conquer Ireland.
]
The history of the first year of Henry’s reign is not, however,
filled up thus. He restored the administration of justice, and sent
itinerant members of his judicial court to enforce the law which
had been so long in abeyance. He himself learned the law as an apt
scholar. Even at Bridgenorth he found time to hear suits brought
before him as supreme judge; at Nottingham, whilst he was on his way
from Scarborough, he threatened William Peverell with a charge of
having poisoned the Earl of Chester. The very threat caused Peverell
to take refuge in a monastery. He held council after council, taking
advice from his elders, and making friends everywhere. In one assembly
held at Wallingford after Easter he obtained the recognition of his
little son William, who afterwards died, as his successor. In another,
held at Winchester, at Michaelmas, he proposed that the conquest of
Ireland should be attempted and a kingdom founded there for his brother
William. The empress objected to this, and it was given up, at least
during her life, although the English Pope, Adrian IV., by his famous
Bull _Laudabiliter_, issued about this time, was already anxious to
give the papal authorization to a scheme that would complete the
symmetrical conformation of Western Christendom. A national expedition,
Henry may have thought, would do more than anything else to consolidate
the national unity which was growing rapidly into more than a name.
But clearly the time was not come for England, shorn of her Northern
provinces, and with the Welsh unsubdued, to attempt foreign conquest;
and Henry had other states besides England to take thought for.
[Sidenote:
Hugh Bigot
humbled, 1157.
]
[Sidenote:
Second
coronation.
]
The whole of the next year he had to spend in Normandy and Anjou,
and, when he returned in 1157, he found abundant work ready for his
hands in his still undetermined relations with Wales and Scotland.
His first visit was to the Eastern counties, and there he combined
business with pleasure. William of Warenne, Count of Boulogne and Earl
of Surrey, the son of Stephen, had received a considerable estate in
Norfolk, including the castle of Norwich; and Hugh Bigot, the earl
of the county of Norfolk, the same Hugh who had sworn that Henry I.,
disinherited the empress, was very reluctant to accept the strong rule
of the new king. Whether Hugh was now acting on behalf of Stephen’s
family or in opposition to them is not clear. It was his attitude that
drew the king into that country. He was made to surrender his castles;
and William of Warenne likewise surrendered his special provision, on
the understanding that he was to receive his hereditary estates. Henry
added solemnity to this visit by holding a solemn court and wearing his
crown in state on Whit-Sunday, at St. Edmund’s, the second recorded
coronation-day of the reign. This ceremony was a revival of the great
courts held by the Conqueror and his sons on the great festivals,
Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide, at Gloucester, Westminster, and
Winchester, the three chief cities of the South. At such gatherings
all the great men attended, both witan and warriors, clerk and lay.
The king heard the complaints of his subjects, and decided their
suits with the advice of his wise men; the feudal services, by which
the great estates were held, were solemnly rendered; a special peace
was set, the breakers of which within the purlieus of the court were
liable to special penalties; and during the gathering, whilst the
people were amused and humored by the show, the king and his really
trusted advisers contrived the despatch of business. The ceremony
of coronation, which gave the name to these courts, was not, as is
sometimes supposed, a repetition of the formal rite of initiation by
which the king at his accession received the authorization of God
through the hands of the bishops; the character so impressed was
regarded as indelible, and hence the only way of disposing of a bad
king was to kill him. That rite, the solemn consecration and unction,
was incapable of being repeated. The crown was, however, on these
occasions placed on the king’s head in his chamber by the archbishop
of Canterbury, with special prayers, and the court went in procession
to mass, where the king made his offering, and afterwards the barons
did their services, as at the real coronation. These courts had been
given up by Stephen, as the historian Henry of Huntingdon notes with
an expressive lamentation, in the year 1140, when the clergy ceased
to attend them; and he had made only one unlucky attempt, the Lincoln
coronation, in 1147, to revive them. Henry, however, renewed the
custom on this occasion, and twice after this we find it observed. At
the Christmas of this year he was crowned at Lincoln, but not, like
Stephen, in the cathedral, for he feared the omen; and at Easter 1158
he was crowned at Worcester. After that he never actually wore the
crown again, although he did occasionally hold these formal courts,
in order to receive the honorary services by which his courtiers held
their estates. This coronation, then, at St. Edmund’s was, as usual,
turned to purposes of business. The king was ready for a Welsh war;
measures were taken for providing men and money.
[Sidenote:
First Welsh
war.
]
At another council, held in July, at Northampton, the expedition
started. This was Henry’s first Welsh war, and it was no great success.
The army advanced into North Wales; at Consilt, near Flint, an awkward
pass, they were resisted by the Welsh. There Henry of Essex, the
Constable, let fall the royal standard, as he declared, by accident.
The army, thinking that the king was killed or the battle lost, fell
into confusion, and the day was claimed by the Welsh as a victory. That
it was merely a misfortune of little importance is proved by the fact
that Henry continued his march to Rhuddlan. The ostensible pretext of
the expedition being to arrange a quarrel between Owen Gwynneth and
his brother Cadwalader, there was no overt attempt at conquest. The
king returned from Wales into Nottinghamshire to meet the young Malcolm
IV., who seems at this time to have finally surrendered his hold on the
Northern counties. At Christmas Henry was at Lincoln.
[Sidenote:
Long visit
to France,
1158-1163.
]
In 1158 he wore his crown, as we have seen, at Easter, at Worcester;
in the summer he went into Cumberland, no doubt to set the machinery
of government at work there in due order after the change of rulers;
and at Carlisle on Midsummer-day he conferred knighthood on William
of Warenne. In August he went to France, whence he did not return
until January, 1163. This brings us to the point of time at which
the struggle with Becket begins, to which, with its attendant
circumstances, we may devote another chapter.
[Sidenote:
Foreign
possessions
of Henry.
]
[Sidenote:
His relations
with his
vassals.
]
We may, therefore, now take up the thread of the foreign transactions
at the beginning of the reign and bring it down to the same point. The
geographical extent of Henry’s dominions furnishes the leading clue to
this part of his history. They embraced, speaking roughly and roundly,
Normandy, Maine, Touraine, Anjou, Guienne, Poictou, and Gascony. But
this statement has to be accepted with some very important limitations.
In the first place, each of these states, and each bundle of them,
had come to him in a different way--some from his father, some from
his mother, some by his wife--and each bundle had been got together by
those from whom he received it in similar ways. The result of that was
that in each state or bundle of states there was a distant relation
between the lord and his vassals--a constitution, we might call it,
by which various rights and privileges and a varying legal system
or customs subsisted. What was law in Normandy was not customary in
Anjou; and the barons of Poictou had, or claimed, customs which must,
if they could have enforced them, have produced utter anarchy. Here
was a constant and abundant source of administrative difficulties, the
adjustment of which was one of the causes of Henry’s long absence from
England. But a second incidental result was, that, as many of these
estates came into the common inheritance on very deficient title,
conquest in one case, chicanery in another, there were a number of
claimants in each, claimants who by prescriptive right might have lost
all chance of recovering their lands, but whose very existence gave
trouble. In Anjou, for instance, Henry had to contend against his own
brother Geoffrey, to whom their father had left certain cities, and
who might have a claim to the whole county. In Normandy the heirs of
Stephen claimed the county of Mortain; in Maine, Saintonge, and other
Southern provinces, there were the remnants of older dynasties, always
ready to give trouble.
[Sidenote:
His relation
to the King
of France.
]
But further than this, the feudal law, as it was then recognized in
France, gave the king, in his manifold capacities as king, duke, and
count, certain rights and certain obligations that are puzzling now,
and must have been actually bewildering then. Henry, as Duke of
Normandy, inherited the relation, entered into by his ancestor Duke
Richard the Fearless, of vassal to the Duke of the Franks; but the Duke
of the Franks had now become King of France. It was a serious question
how the duties of vassalage were to be defined. As Duke of Normandy
also he had a right to the feudal superiority of Brittany. Yet it was
no easy thing to say how Brittany could be made to act in case of a
quarrel between king and duke. The tie which bound him as Count of
Anjou was different from that which bound him as Duke of Normandy to
the same King of France. As Count of Poictiers he was feudally bound
to the Duke of Aquitaine, but he was himself duke of Aquitaine, unless
he chose to regard his wife as duchess and himself as count, in which
case he would be liable to do feudal service to his wife only, and she
would be responsible for the service to the King of France; a very
curious relation for a lady who had been married to both. We do not,
however, find, that this contrivance was employed by Henry himself,
although it was used by John. And this same point of difficulty arose
everywhere. The feudal rights of Aquitaine--the right, that is, to
demand homage and service--extended far beyond the limits of the
sovereign authority of the dukes, and it was always an object to turn a
claim of overlordship into an actual exercise of sovereign authority.
The tie between the great county of Toulouse and the duchy of Aquitaine
was complicated both by legal difficulty and by questions of descent.
The rights over Auvergne, claimed by both the king and the duke, were
so complex as to be the matter of continual arbitration, and at last
were left to settle themselves.
[Sidenote:
Questions of
boundary.
]
[Sidenote:
Personal
questions.
]
And to these must be added, in the third place, local and personal
questions; local, such as arose from uncertain boundaries, the line
which separated Normandy from France, the Norman from the French Vexin,
being perhaps the chief; personal, arising from the enmity between
Eleanor and her first husband, from the attitude of the house of
Champagne, from which Louis VII. had selected his third wife, and which
had the wrongs of Stephen to avenge. The Count of Flanders also was a
pertinacious enemy of Henry.
[Sidenote:
Henry’s
true policy.
]
[Sidenote:
His French
wars.
]
Under these circumstances it is not difficult to see that Henry’s
policy, however ambitious he might be, was peace; at all events, peace
long enough to consolidate his dominions and crush antagonism in
detail. And this must account for the fact that, with the exception of
the war of Toulouse, in which Louis VII. took part, not as a principal
but as an ally of the count, there was no overt war between Eleanor’s
two husbands until it was produced by an entirely new quarrel. It could
not be expected that there should be any love or friendship, but there
was peace. Henry’s policy was peace; Lewis was averse to war, having
neither skill nor resources. All Henry’s French campaigns, then, during
this period were occasioned by the circumstances which have been thus
stated. The object of the war of 1156 was, sad to say, the subjugation
of Geoffrey of Nantes, the king’s own brother, who submitted to him,
after he had taken his castles one by one, in the July of that year,
and who died two years after. The business of 1158 was to secure the
territories that Geoffrey had left without heirs, and, that done, to
prepare for the enforcement of Eleanor’s claims on Toulouse.
[Sidenote:
War of
Toulouse,
1159.
]
The war of Toulouse, with its preparations and results, occupied
the greater part of 1159, although the campaign itself was short.
Henry had assembled his full court of vassals. William of Warenne,
the son of Stephen, and Malcolm, King of Scots, followed him as his
liegemen rather than as allies. Becket, as his Chancellor, came with
an equipment not inferior to that of any of his earls and counts.
Altogether it was a very splendid and expensive affair. The king
marched to Toulouse; but at Toulouse was his enemy, his friend, his
lord, his wife’s first husband. Henry could not proceed to extremes
against the man whom in his youthful sincerity he still recognized as
his feudal lord, and whose personal humiliation would have degraded the
idea of royalty, of which he was himself so proud. So he left Becket to
continue the siege and returned westward. The French were attempting a
diversion on the Norman frontier. Toulouse, therefore, was not taken.
Towards the end of the year a truce was made with Lewis, and early in
1160 the truce was turned into an alliance. But the alliance brought
with it the seeds of new and more fatal divisions.
[Sidenote:
Henry’s
sons and
daughters.
]
We have noted the way in which Henry used his children as his tools or
as the counters of his game. He began with them very young. His eldest
child, William, to whom we have seen homage done immediately after the
coronation, died very soon after, and Henry, who was born in February,
1155, and had received conditional homage when he was two months old,
now became the heir apparent. The next child was a daughter, Matilda,
born in 1156; in 1157 Richard was born, at either Oxford or Woodstock;
Geoffrey, the next brother, came in 1158; then Eleanor, in 1162;
Johanna, in 1165; and last of all John, in 1167. On Henry’s attempts
to provide for these children hangs nearly all the interest of his
foreign wars; and the marriages of the daughters form a key to the
history of the foreign policy of England and her alliances for many
ages.
[Sidenote:
His projects
of marriage
for them.
]
[Sidenote:
Marriage of
Henry and
Margaret.
]
The game may be considered to begin with Richard, who at the age of a
year was betrothed to the daughter of Raymond of Barcelona and Queen
Petronilla of Aragon. This was done, it appears, to bind the count
and queen either to help or to stand neutral in the war of Toulouse.
The betrothal came to nothing. Henry, the elder brother, was the
next victim. The peace of 1160 assigned him, at the age of five, as
husband to the little lady Margaret of France, Lewis’s daughter by
his second wife, Constance of Castile. This marriage was not only to
seal the peace but to secure to Henry a good frontier between Normandy
and France. The castles of Gisors and Neafle, and the county of the
Vexin, which lay between Normandy and Paris, were to be Margaret’s
portion, not to be surrendered until the marriage could be formally
celebrated, and until then to remain in the custody of the Templars.
Henry, however, did not stick at trifles. The little Margaret had been
put into his hands to learn English or Norman ways. He had the marriage
celebrated between the two children, and then prevailed on the Templars
to surrender the castles. Lewis never forgave that, and the Vexin
quarrel remained an open sore during the rest of the reign; for after
the death of the younger Henry his rights were transferred to Richard
by another unhappy marriage contract with another of Lewis’s daughters.
Practically the question was settled by the betrayal of Gisors to
Philip, by Gilbert of Vacœuil, whilst Richard was in Palestine; but
the struggle continued until John finally lost not only the Vexin but
Normandy itself and all else that he had to lose. For the present,
however, the outbreak of war, to which Henry’s sharp practice led, was
only a brief one. Henry was successful, and peace was concluded in
August, 1161. The year 1162 he spent in Normandy, holding councils and
organizing the administration of the duchy, as he had done that of the
kingdom in his first year.
[Sidenote:
England
during the
king’s
absence.
]
During the whole of this long absence from England the country was
governed by Richard de Lucy and Earl Robert of Leicester, as the king’s
chief justices or justiciars; the little Henry taking his father’s
place on occasions of ceremony, when he happened to be in England. The
historians of these years tell us little or nothing of what was going
on. There were no wars or revolts; abbots and bishops died and their
successors were appointed; notably the good Archbishop Theobald, to
whom Henry owed so much, died in 1161, and Becket succeeded him.
[Sidenote:
Progress of
reforms.
]
[Sidenote:
Nature of
the revenue.
]
[Sidenote:
Administration
of
justice.
]
From other sources we learn that Henry’s legal reforms were in full
operation. He had restored the machinery of the Exchequer, and with
it the method of raising revenue which had been arranged in his
grandfather’s time. That revenue arose, firstly, from the ferm or
rent of the counties; that is, the sum paid by the sheriffs as royal
stewards; by way of composition for the rents of royal lands in the
shire, and the ordinary proceeds of the fines and other payments made
in the ancient shiremoot or county court; secondly, from the Danegeld,
a tax of two shillings on the hide of land, originally levied as
tribute to the Danes under Ethelred, but continued, like the Income
Tax, as a convenient ordinary resource; thirdly, from the feudal
revenue, arising from the profits of marriages, wardships, transfers
of land, successions, and the like, and from the aids demanded by
the king from the several barons or communities that owed him feudal
support. To these we may add a fourth source, the proceeds of courts of
justice, held by the king’s officers to determine causes for which the
ancient popular courts were not thought competent; such as began with
suits between the king’s immediate dependents, and by degrees extended
to all the civil and criminal jurisdiction of the country. Judicature
and finance were thus bound very closely together; the sheriffs were
not only tax-gatherers but executors of the law, and every improvement
in the law was made to increase the income of the Exchequer. To this we
must attribute the means taken by Henry to administer justice in the
counties, sending some of the chief members of his judicial staff, year
after year, through the country, forcing their way into the estates
and castles of the most despotic nobles, and spreading the feeling of
security together with the sense of loyalty, and the conviction that
ready justice was well worth the money that it seemed to cost. Besides
the revival of the provincial judicature in this shape Henry, from the
beginning of the reign, added form and organization to the proceedings
of his supreme court of justice, which comes into prominence later on.
[Sidenote: Scutage.]
Next to these his most important measure was the institution or
expansion of what is called Scutage. According to the ancient English
law every freeman was bound to serve in arms for the defence of his
country. That principle Henry only meddled with so far as to direct and
improve it. But, according to the feudal custom, quite irrespective of
this, every man who held land to the amount of twenty pounds’ worth
of annual value was obliged to perform or furnish the military service
of a knight to his immediate lord. This kept the barons always at the
head of bodies of trained knights, who might be regarded as ultimately
a part of the king’s army, but in case of a rebellion would probably
fight for their immediate lord. Henry, by allowing his vassals to
commute their military service for a money payment, went a long way
to disarm this very untrustworthy body; and with the money so raised
he hired stipendiaries, with whom he fought his Continental wars. He
began to act on this principle in the first year of his reign, when he
made the bishops, notwithstanding strong objections from Archbishop
Theobald, pay scutage for their lands held by knight-service. But
in 1159 he extended the plan very widely, and took money instead of
service from the whole of his dominions, compelling his chief lords
to serve in person, but hiring, with the scutages of the inferior
tenants, a splendid army of mercenaries, with which he fought the war
of Toulouse.
By thus disarming the feudal potentates, and forcing his judges
into their courts, he completed the process by which he intended to
humiliate them. Feudalism in England, after the reign of Henry II.,
never reared its head so high as to be again formidable.
[Sidenote:
Increase of
national
unity.
]
Other results incidentally followed from the special measures by which
this great end was secured; the more thorough amalgamation of the still
unfused nationalities of Norman and Englishman followed from a state of
things in which both were equal before the law, and the distinctions
or privileges of blood were no longer recognized among free men. The
diminution of military power in the hands of the territorial lords
left the maintenance of peace and the defence of the country to be
undertaken, as it had been of old, by the community of free Englishmen,
locally trained, and armed according to their substance. This created
or revived a strong warlike spirit for all national objects, without
inspiring the passion for military exploit or glory, which is the bane
of what is called a military nation. On the national character, thus
in a state of formation, the idea that law is and ought to be supreme
was now firmly impressed; and although the further development of the
governmental system furnished employment for Henry’s later years, and
was never neglected, even in the busiest and unhappiest period of
his reign, it may be fairly said that the foundation was laid in the
comparative peace and industry of these early years. At the age of
thirty Henry had been nearly nine years a king, and had already done a
work for which England can never cease to be grateful.