THE LATTER YEARS OF HENRY II.
Continued reforms--Revolt of 1173-1174--Renewed industry of Henry--His
later years--Quarrel with Richard--Fall and death.
[Sidenote:
Henry’s perseverance
in reform.
]
[Sidenote:
The political
object of it.
]
[Sidenote:
Itinerant
justices.
]
[Sidenote: Fiscal work.]
[Sidenote:
Circuits of
judges.
]
It is one of the most distinct marks of Henry’s mind, that whatever
pressure his most engrossing employments put upon him, he never for
a moment gave up the task of developing the great legal reforms with
which he began his reign. Even at the siege of Bridgenorth, in 1155,
he had lent an ear to the suit of the monks of Battle; in the very
thick of the Becket struggle he was busily employed in reforming the
criminal law and introducing or expanding the system of presentment by
grand jury. The same purpose is constantly maintained, and every great
and famous exploit of his adventurous life may be matched with some
measure of practical reform, some step in the progress of a policy by
which his people were to be made safer and his own power consequently
to be made stronger. Throughout the whole reign there may be traced a
constant and progressive policy of taking power out of the hands of
the great vassals of the crown, of entrusting power to the great body
of the freemen of the nation, and of consolidating the royal authority
by employing the people in the maintenance of law. The blow struck at
the military power of feudalism by the institution of scutage, the
commutation of personal service in the field for a money payment, was
one of the first of his distinctive measures. The judicial power of
the same body he limited, quite as much, by the mission of itinerant
judges throughout the country to hear the suits of the people and to
punish criminals. These visitations had been practised under Henry
I.; they were restored by Henry II., at the beginning of the reign.
These officers were employed not only for the trial of prisoners and
determination of lawsuits, but for the assessment and collection of
revenue. When the national council had decreed a tax, the itinerant
judges, as Barons of the Exchequer, travelled through the land, fixing
the payments to be made by the towns or by individuals. It was not a
very difficult business, for as all the revenue was raised from the
land and the land remained divided in much the same proportions as
it was in the Domesday Book, that famous record became, as it were,
the rate-book of the country; every land-owner could refer to it, to
see what was the valuation of his property, and be taxed accordingly.
Only the towns, therefore, which had grown in wealth and number since
the time of the Conqueror’s survey, would have occasion for debating
with the judges how much they would have to pay. Almost every year of
Henry’s reign we find these officers making their circuits, which are
the historical origin of the circuits of the Judges of Assize in the
present day. Sometimes, in the earlier part of the reign, one or two go
over the whole country; sometimes six circuits are made, each managed
by three judges; sometimes four circuits of four, or two circuits of
five or more. The chief epochs of this development are these: the year
1166, when the Assize of Clarendon was published; the year 1176, when
six circuits of three justices did the work under a revised form of
the Assize of Clarendon, issued at Northampton; and the year 1179, when
Henry reformed the central as well as the provincial tribunals.
[Sidenote:
Training of the
people in self-government.
]
Of the effects of this system one, the abatement of the power of the
feudal courts of justice by forcing them under royal jurisdiction,
has been noticed already. A second was the training of the people
generally, through the use of juries which were employed both for legal
and fiscal business; they thus learned to manage their own affairs
and to keep up an intelligent interest in legislation and political
business. A third was, to limit the power of the sheriffs, who being
the sole royal representatives in the shires, judicial, military, and
fiscal, had great chances of exercising irresponsible tyranny, of which
the books of the time contain many complaints. Besides the visitations
of the judges Henry from time to time used still stronger measures
of remedy or precaution against the oppressions of the sheriffs. In
1170 he turned them all out of office, and held a very strict inquiry
into the amount of money they had received, filling up their places
with servants and officers of his own court, by whose action the local
government would be placed in more direct relation to the central.
[Sidenote:
Central
judicature.
]
Nor were these labors solely directed to the reform of provincial
jurisdiction. Henry II. reformed also the supreme court of justice,
which was supposed to emanate from his own person and household, and
established a distinct staff of well-instructed lawyers to hear the
suits that were sent up for his royal decision. These men he found
it hard work to manage, and once in 1178 he swept them all away as
summarily as he had done the sheriffs in 1170. Sometimes he employed
clerks, sometimes knights, sometimes prelates, in the office of judge,
with unequal success, but with a never-faltering purpose of securing
easy justice.
[Sidenote:
Variety in
taxation.
]
In the same way he varied the taxes, from year to year, not allowing
the same interest to be oppressed with continual imposts, but taking
now a tallage from the towns, now a scutage or an aid from the
land-owners or knightly body; and on the occasion of the Crusade, in
1184 and 1188, calling for a contribution from personal property, a
fixed proportion or a tithe of goods for the war against Saladin.
[Sidenote:
Military
system.
]
In order finally to secure the defence of the country, and to have
a force on which he could depend for the maintenance of peace and
order, he armed the whole free population, or ordered them to provide
arms, according to a fixed scale, proportioned to their substance.
Thus he restored the ancient Anglo-Saxon militia system, and supplied
the requisite counterbalance to the military power of the great
feudatories, which, notwithstanding the temptation to avoid service by
payment of scutage, they were still able and too willing to maintain.
In all these measures we may trace one main object, the strengthening
of the royal power, and one main means or directing principle,
the doing so by increasing the safety and security of the people.
Whatever was done to help the people served to reduce the power of
the great feudal baronage; to disarm their forces, to abolish their
jurisdictions, to diminish their chances of tyranny. Now all this could
not but make Henry very much disliked by the great nobles. The people
of course were slow to see the benefit of the reforms, but the barons
were quick enough at detecting the measures taken to humiliate and
reduce them; so, before Henry gained the affection of the people, he
had to encounter the hostility of the barons.
[Sidenote:
Coronation
of the heir,
1170.
]
[Sidenote:
Foreign
custom of
designating
the successor
to the
crown.
]
This hostility had been growing for a long time, awaiting the
opportunity of breaking out into open revolt. Such an opportunity
the shock which followed the death of Becket gave it; and the very
same measure taken by Henry, which in its results caused the death
of Becket, gave a head and a direction, nominally at least, to the
outbreak. This measure was the coronation of the boy Henry in 1170.
The idea of having the heir-apparent crowned in his father’s life-time
was not familiar to the English or Normans; the royal succession still
retained so much of the elective character that it would perhaps
have been regarded as an unconstitutional measure, thus violently
and without option to determine the succession irrevocably before
the vacancy occurred. Much of the interest of the reigns of William
Rufus and Henry I. turns upon this question. William the Conqueror
and William Rufus both left the succession undetermined; hence arose
the rebellions of the reign of the Red King and the early struggles
of Henry I. The measures by which he had done everything in his power
to secure and settle it had ended in the anarchy under Stephen. But
in France and Germany this experiment, now tried for securing the
hereditary succession, was familiar; almost every one of the kings who
followed Hugh Capet had had his son crowned in his life-time; and in
Germany since the very beginning of the Karolingian empire such cases
had been frequent. Frederick Barbarossa at this very moment was working
for the succession of his own son; and the introduction of a second or
inchoate partner in sovereignty, under the name of King of the Romans,
became later on a part of the ordinary machinery of the empire. It is
possible that Henry II. had this object solely and simply in view; but
another theory is conceivable.
[Sidenote:
Henry’s
political
object in
this.
]
Henry well knew by what very discordant nationalities his states were
peopled; and he entertained the idea of dividing his dominions among
his sons at his death. To Richard, the second son, as his mother’s
heir, Aquitaine and Poictou were already given; for Geoffrey he had
obtained the succession to the duchy of Brittany, and he was thinking
of Ireland to be conquered for a kingdom for John. Henry, the eldest
son, would of course have his father’s inheritance, England, Normandy,
and Anjou. Such a division the king actually made, when in the autumn
of 1170 he believed himself to be at the point of death; and he brought
up his sons among the people they were to rule, Henry among the
Normans, Richard among the Poictevins. It would be still a question
whether the elder brother should govern the family estates, as had
been the case in the early Karolingian empire, his brethren owning his
feudal superiority; or whether each should possess his provinces in
sovereignty; subject only to the already existing feudal claims.
However, when Henry began, as early as 1160, to broach the subject of
his son’s coronation he was only twenty-seven years old, and probably
thought more of securing the allegiance and attachment of the English
for the child, than of the chances which might follow his own death;
and later on we find him anxious to abridge the tedious parts of
the royal duties to sharing them with the heir, although he never
could part with one iota of the substance of power. Hence, then, the
coronation of Henry the younger in 1170, the anger of Lewis VII.
because his daughter was not also crowned, and the quarrel among the
bishops which caused Becket’s death.
[Sidenote:
Henry
applies to
the Pope on
Becket’s
death.
]
[Sidenote:
Expedition
to Ireland,
1171.
]
Henry--for we must now return to the direct string of our story--was
momentarily paralyzed at the news of the martyrdom. He saw how the
blame was sure to fall upon him, and how all his enemies would sooner
or later take the opportunity to overwhelm him. Immediately, therefore,
he sent envoys to Rome to promise any terms whatever for acquittal
or absolution. Whilst this negotiation was pending, knowing that the
legates, for whom Lewis, before the death of Becket, had applied, were
on their way to Normandy, and would not scruple to exert the utmost of
their power against him, he organized an expedition to Ireland, which
for the last sixteen years had been his by papal grant, and for the
last four had been undergoing the process of conquest in the hands of
Richard de Clare, surnamed Strongbow. In Ireland he stayed from the
autumn of 1171 to the Easter of 1172, receiving the submission of kings
and bishops, and really keeping out of the way of the hostile legates:
awaiting the arrival of the friendly legates who were coming to absolve
him.
[Sidenote:
Character of
the Court of
Rome.
]
Now, no doubt it appears strange that the Court of Rome should at
this same moment be pouring out both sweet water and bitter; that the
supreme judge on earth should send forth a legation to put Henry’s
dominions under interdict for one act and directly after send another
to absolve him for what seems a more heinous one. It must, however,
be remembered that in this the papal court was rather acting as a
great tribunal of international arbitration than as the council of a
Christian bishop. The Court of Rome was a great legal machine, the
disadvantages of which are manifest at first sight, but the benefit of
which in a warlike age can scarcely be overrated, although less obvious
at a glance. A very severe judgment may perhaps be allowable, as to the
assumptions and arrogance and unrighteousness of the papacy in taking
the office of international arbitration; but judged by its results it
was for the time a great public benefit, for it stopped and hindered
the constant appeals to war. Thus viewed the Court of Rome was as open
for suitors as any simple court of justice: an applicant who wanted
legal redress applied for a commission of inquiry or a legation. In so
doing he brought the usual means to bear on the papal officials, who
no doubt found it to their interest to keep their minds always open
to hear both sides, and to keep their purses also open to receive the
contributions of all sides in each suit, and thus maintain the wealth
and power of the court itself. It is not to be denied that, however
arrived at, the decisions ultimately given were in most cases fair and
just.
[Sidenote:
Henry’s
penitence
and absolution,
1172.
]
[Sidenote:
Second
coronation
of the heir.
]
Henry, then, on this occasion eluded one legation and welcomed another.
In 1172 he met the friendly cardinals at Avranches, took all the oaths
they proposed, renounced the Constitutions of Clarendon, purged himself
of the guilt of Becket’s death, declared his adherence to Alexander
III., as Catholic Pope, in refutation of the statement that he had
acknowledged the anti-Pope, and received full absolution. He then,
by way of general pacification, had his son re-crowned and his wife
crowned with him and went down to the South of France to make a lasting
peace with the Count of Toulouse, and to bargain for the marriage of
John with the heiress of the county of Maurienne and Savoy.
[Sidenote:
Quarrel of
the two
Henrys.
]
The storm seemed to have blown over; unfortunately the lull preceded
the great outbreak. Strange to say, the immediate occasion for the
strife was the little boy John, the five-year-old bridegroom. All his
great enemies Henry had silenced; Lewis had got his daughter crowned,
the Pope was pacified, the barons were secured by the strength of the
home government, the Scots were humble and obliging, all the sons were
friends. The little child who in the end broke his heart was already a
stumbling-block. The Count of Maurienne naturally asked what provision
was to be made by Henry for his son’s marriage. Henry found himself
obliged to ask his elder sons to give up for their brother some few
castles out of their promised shares of his dominions. The eldest son
refused; he would give up nothing; he had got nothing by being crowned,
he was not trusted to go about alone; let the king give him some real
power, England or Normandy, then he might have something that he could
give up. The ill-conditioned lad nursed his grievance, and, early in
the spring of 1173, fled from his father’s court and threw himself into
the arms of Lewis. Queen Eleanor too, whose influence with her husband
was lessened by her misguidance of her children, and by the evil habits
which Henry himself had contracted during the Becket quarrel, used all
her influence to increase the breach in her family. She intrigued with
her first husband against her second, and brought even Richard into the
list of his father’s enemies.
[Sidenote:
Great league
against
Henry, 1173.
]
Thus, then, early in 1173 a head was provided for a great confederation
of French lords and English barons, actively aided by Lewis of France,
Philip of Flanders, the Counts of Champagne and the King of Scots,
William the Lion, who had succeeded Malcolm IV. in 1165. The younger
Henry, liberal in promises, proposed to reward with vast English
estates the men who were to help in renewing the glories of the
Conquest. And the great English earls, Chester, Leicester, and Norfolk,
were bent on reviving the feudal influence which Henry’s reforms had
so weakened. These earls were mighty men on both sides of the Channel:
the Norman quarrel could be fought in England as well as in Normandy,
Anjou, and Poictou. Measures were contrived at Paris for a universal
rising. And the success of the design seemed at first almost certain.
Henry had a large force of Brabançon mercenaries about him, but
scarcely any other force on which he could depend at all.
[Sidenote: War begins.]
The war began by a Flemish invasion of Normandy; then the Earl of
Chester raised Brittany against the king; then the Poictevins rose in
arms. From France the torch was handed to England. William the Lion,
with a half-barbarian army, began a devastating march southward; the
Earl of Leicester landed a great force of Flemings in Norfolk; the Earl
Ferrers of Derby fortified his castles in the midland counties; old
Hugh Bigot of Norfolk, who had sworn the disinheritance of Matilda in
1135, garrisoned his castles--all England was in an uproar. The old
justiciar, the king’s lieutenant, Richard de Lucy, was bewildered; and
the great Bishop of Durham, Hugh de Puiset, King Stephen’s nephew,
began to play a double game, negotiating with the Scots, and allowing
the landing of Flemish mercenaries, to be used at discretion.
[Sidenote:
Henry’s
success.
]
[Sidenote: In France.]
Two influences, however, turned the scale against this overwhelming
preponderance of treachery and force--Henry’s wonderful energy, which
his contemporaries called supernatural good luck, and the faithfulness
of the English people, who, now, when the crucial test was applied to
them, amply repaid the many years of culture spent upon them. Henry had
been taken by surprise by the general onset; and, unwilling to believe
in the ingratitude of his boys, he at first was slow to move against
them; but he showed extraordinary promptness when he saw the state of
affairs and had made up his mind how to act. Having put Lewis VII. to
ignominious flight at Conches, he rushed down upon Dol, in Brittany,
where he captured the Earl of Chester and the chief Breton and Angevin
rebels; and during the autumn of 1173, before the worst news from
England arrived, he had captured one after the other the nests of
rebellion in Maine. At Christmas he concluded a three months’ truce
with Lewis and undertook the pacification of Poictou, which employed
him until the next summer, fretting and chafing against the detention
which kept him away from England.
[Sidenote:
War in
England.
]
[Sidenote:
Capture of
William the
Lion.
]
In England matters had gone on more slowly, owing to the unprepared
state of the ministry and the general feeling of apprehension and
mistrust. There, however, Henry had some men on whom he could depend:
Richard de Lucy, the justiciar; Ranulf Glanvill, the great lawyer,
who was rising into the first rank as a minister; Reginald, Earl of
Cornwall, the king’s uncle; the Earl of Arundel, husband of Queen
Adeliza, widow of Henry I., and others connected with the royal house.
These men had insufficient forces at their disposal, and were at
first unable to decide whether the Scots in the North, or the Earl
of Leicester in the East, or the midland revolt under Earl Ferrers,
was the most formidable. At last, having made up their minds to make
a truce with the Scots, they moved upon Norfolk, and defeated the
earls in October, at Fornham St. Geneviève. There they took prisoners
the Earl of Leicester and his wife, the great Lady Petronilla,
whose comprehensive soul embodied all the spite and arrogance and
vindictiveness of the oligarchy of the Conquest. She, as heiress of
Grantmesnil, had brought a great inheritance to her husband, the
degenerate heir of the faithful Beaumonts; for the Leicester Beaumonts
were the only house which since the Conquest had been uniformly
faithful to the Conqueror and his heirs. This great success enabled
Henry to remain in Poictou during the winter and spring of 1174, and
allowed the ministers to concentrate their forces against the Scots.
The people rose against the feudal party, and a brisk struggle was
kept up in the interior of the country until the summer. William the
Lion spent his time in securing the border castles, seeking his own
ends, instead of pressing southwards, and so doing his part to overturn
Henry’s throne. At last early in July, 1174, he was surprised and taken
prisoner at Alnwick, by the host of Yorkshire men and the loyal barons.
[Sidenote:
Henry’s
arrival in
England,
1174.
]
Just at the same moment Henry had crossed from Normandy with his
Brabançons, and made a pilgrimage to Becket’s grave. His triumph was
now regarded as a token of Divine forgiveness. He marched at once
into Norfolk, where he received the submission of the Bigots and the
Mowbrays, the latter of whom had been overcome by the king’s natural
son, Geoffrey, now bishop elect of Lincoln, and afterwards so well
known as Archbishop of York. All his foes were now at his feet; the
King of Scots and the two great earls were prisoners; the rest entirely
humiliated. In less than a month from his landing he was able to go
back to Normandy.
[Sidenote:
End of the
war.
]
The French war came to an end on the collapse of the English rebellion,
and in the month of September all Henry’s dominions were at rest, his
children reconciled, even the King of France admitted to peace.
[Sidenote:
Submission
of Scotland,
1175.
]
And now we have true evidence of Henry’s real greatness in policy and
spirit, notwithstanding his provocations and the changed strain of
his character and temper. He shed no blood, he took no ransoms, he
condemned to destitution not one of the leaders of the rebellion; he
laid his hands for a few years on their estates, but even these were
shortly restored, and no man was disinherited by way of punishment.
But he pulled down their castles. The nests of feudal tyranny and
insubordination he not merely dismantled, but in some cases destroyed
so utterly as to leave not one stone upon another, that they might be
no more the beginning of the temptation to such a design. Against the
Scots his hand was very heavy; he insisted on abject submission. Before
he would release the king from his captivity he insisted that he should
do homage, acknowledging the supremacy of his crown over the Scottish
crown, and of the English Church over the Scottish. The Scottish barons
must become his men; the Scottish bishops must declare their obedient
subjection to the English Church; and the castles of the Lowlands
must be retained in the hands of men whom he should place there with
English garrisons. This humiliating negotiation, concluded at Falaise
before William’s liberation, was confirmed at York in the following
August. From this time, until Richard I. sold back to William the Lion
the rights that he had lost, Scotland was subject to the English king
as overlord, and her king as king was our king’s vassal. The Church,
however, escaped subjection, because the archbishops of Canterbury and
York could not agree which should rule her, and before their quarrel
was ended the Pope stepped in and declared the Scottish Church the
immediate care and peculiar daughter of the Roman see. Besides this,
the half-independent prince of Galloway was compelled to acknowledge
himself a vassal of both the kings.
[Sidenote:
Importance of
this struggle.
]
So completely was the authority of Henry II., re-established by the
peace of 1174, that we are almost tempted to underrate the importance
of the elements that had been arrayed against him. It was not, however,
in the want of strength and spirit that the confederation against him
failed; the kings of France and Scotland, the counts of Champagne,
Boulogne, and Flanders, the earls of Chester, Leicester, Norfolk, and
Derby, his own sons and his own wife, were united in their hostility.
The religious feeling of the nation, which since the death of Becket
had to a remarkable degree realized or rather exaggerated his merits as
a statesman and a churchman, was used as a weapon against him. Every
interest that he had injured, or that had suffered in the process of
his reforms, was made to take its part. Yet all failed. They failed
partly, no doubt, because they had really no common cry, no common
cause. They had many grievances and a good opportunity; but all
their several aims were selfish; their plan, so far as they had one,
destructive not constructive; their leaders unwilling to sacrifice or
risk anything of their own, greedy to grasp what belonged of right to
the king, the nation, or even to their own fellows. They fought one
by one against a prompt, clear-headed, accomplished warrior, and they
were beaten one by one; not, however, without a very considerable
intermingling of what is ordinarily called good fortune on the king’s
side. Thus Henry in the twentieth year of his reign was more powerful
by far than when, at the beginning of it, the desire and darling of the
whole people, he brought back peace and light and liberty after the
evil days.
[Sidenote:
Henry resumes
his
schemes.
]
[Sidenote:
Provisions
made for John.
]
[Sidenote:
Marriages of
the king’s
daughters.
]
The general line of policy which Henry had hitherto pursued he took
up almost at the identical point at which it had been interrupted
by the rebellion; but instead of seeking for John a provision on
the Continent, he determined to find him a wife and an endowment
in England, and, when he should be old enough, to make him king of
Ireland. With this idea he arranged for him, in 1176, a marriage with
Hawisia, the daughter of William, Earl of Gloucester, his cousin; and
the next year, in a great assembly at Oxford, he divided the still
unconquered provinces of Ireland into great fiefs, the receivers of
which took the oath of fealty, not only to himself, but to John as
their future king. The Pope also was canvassed as to the erection
of Ireland into a kingdom and the coronation of John. The same year
Johanna, the king’s youngest daughter, was married with very great
pomp to the young king William the Good, as he is called, of Sicily,
a prince who had an unbounded admiration for his father-in-law, and
would have settled the reversion of his kingdoms upon him if Henry
had accepted the offer. Eleanor, the second daughter, was already
married to Alfonso, King of Castile, who in 1177 referred to the
judgment of Henry a great lawsuit between himself and his kinsman the
King of Navarre. This arbitration not only illustrates the estimation
in which Henry after his great victory was held on the Continent,
but shows us also how he deliberated with his councillors. He held a
very great court of bishops and superior clergy, of barons and other
tenants-in-chief, on the occasion; the arguments of the parties were
laid before them, and, in conformity with their advice asked and given,
the judgment was delivered.
[Sidenote:
Visits to
England.
]
[Sidenote:
Intrigues of
the younger
Henry.
]
The two or three years that followed the rebellion were the period of
Henry’s longest stay in England. He came in April 1175, and stayed
until August 1177 after a year spent in Normandy and Anjou he returned
in 1178, and stayed until the end of June 1180; after which, although
he paid several long visits to England, his absences were much longer.
These years were periods of great activity in political matters. The
number of councils that he held, the variety of public business that
he despatched in them, the series of changes intended to promote the
speedy attainment of justice, the unfailing purpose which he showed
of fulfilling the pledge which in his early days he had given to his
people, all these come out in the simple details of the historian with
remarkable fulness. Henry was not at this time, or ever after, a happy
man; his son Henry, nominally reconciled, was constantly intriguing
against him with his father-in-law, Lewis, and the discontented lords
of the foreign dominion. He took up the part of an advocate of local
rights and privileges, and headed confederations against his father,
and against his brother Richard as the oppressor of the barons of
Poictou. He complained that his father treated him meanly, not giving
enough money, and jealously refusing him his share of power. The father
treated him generously and patiently, but he could not trust him, and
did not pretend to do so.
[Sidenote:
Queen
Eleanor.
]
Queen Eleanor, too, was now imprisoned, or sequestered from her husband
in honorable captivity. This great lady, who deserves to be treated
with more honor and respect than she has generally met with, had
behaved very ill to her husband in the matter of the rebellion; and,
although he occasionally indulged her with the show of royal pomp and
power, he never released her from confinement or forgave her. She was
a very able woman, of great tact and experience, and still greater
ambition; a most important adviser whilst she continued to support
her husband, a most dangerous enemy when in opposition. Her political
intrigues in the East, when she accompanied her first husband on the
Crusade, had made him contemptible, and that Lewis never forgave her.
But her second husband was made of sterner stuff. He took and kept the
upper hand; it was only after his death that Eleanor’s real powers
found room for play; and had it not been for her governing skill while
Richard was in Palestine, and her influence on the Continent during the
early years of John, England would have been a prey to anarchy, and
Normandy lost to the house of Anjou long before it was.
The quarrel with his wife and the mistrust of his children threw the
king under very evil influences, although as a king he tried hard to do
his duty; and they sowed the seed of later difficulties which at last
overwhelmed him. The internal history of these years is occupied with
the judicial and financial doings which have been sketched in the early
pages of this chapter; outside there was peace, except in Poictou,
where Richard was learning the art of war, winning his first laurels
and making his worst and most obstinate enemies.
[Sidenote:
Accession of
Phillip II.,
1179.
]
In 1180 the long strife and jealousy between Henry II., and Lewis
VII., came to an end. The weak and unprincipled King of France, after
resigning his crown to his son Philip, a boy of sixteen, retired into
a convent and died. Philip inherited all his hatred of Henry, although
he was better able to appreciate his wisdom, and showed in his early
years a desire to have him as a political adviser and instructor. He
inherited, too, all his father’s falseness, craft, and dishonesty,
but not his morbid conscience nor his irresoluteness. Without being
so great a coward as his father, Philip was yet a long way from
being a brave man, and loses much by his juxtaposition with Richard
and even with John in that respect. But he was very unscrupulous,
very pertinacious, and in result very successful, outliving all his
rivals, and leaving his kingdom immensely stronger than it was when
he succeeded to it. In the domestic quarrels of his early years, with
his stepmother and the counts of Champagne, he availed himself of the
advice of Henry, which was given honestly and effectually; but, after
Henry’s quarrels with his sons began again, Philip saw his way clearly
enough to the humiliation of the rival house; and he took too sure and
too fatal advantage of his opportunity.
There is no need to dwell on the events of 1181 and 1182; the chief
mark of the former year is that assize of arms which has been already
mentioned. In 1182 the king was a good deal in Poictou. England
was governed now, and chiefly for the rest of the reign, by Ranulf
Glanvill, the chief justiciar, who in 1180 or 1179 had succeeded
to Richard de Lucy. The country was quiet; so quiet, that when the
troubles began on the Continent not a hand or foot in England stirred
against the king. English history during these and the following years
is a simple record of steady growth; all interest, personal and
political, centres in the king.
[Sidenote:
Second
revolt of the
young king.
]
[Sidenote:
His death,
1183.
]
The year 1183 begins with a new phase. The young king had of late shown
himself somewhat more dutiful. His father was now in his fiftieth
year, and that was for the kings of those days a somewhat advanced
maturity. The heir seemed to have learned that he might, as he must,
bide his time. The arrangement which was to provide for the continued
cohesion of the family estates was as yet uncompleted. Henry urged
that the younger brothers should all do homage and swear fealty to the
elder. Richard was with some difficulty prevailed on to do this; but
almost as soon as it was done Henry took advantage of the discontent
of the Poictevins, quarrelled with Richard about the custody of a
petty castle, and headed a war party against him. Their father, who
at first perhaps had intended that Henry should be allowed to enforce
his superiority, soon saw that it was his bounden duty to maintain
the cause of Richard. Geoffrey of Brittany joined his eldest brother.
Whilst Richard and his father besieged Limoges, Henry and Geoffrey
allowed their archers to shoot at their father; they ill-treated his
messengers, drove him to desperation, and became desperate themselves.
The younger Henry, after feigning reconciliation, and more than once
cruelly and hypocritically deserting his father, tried to recruit his
resources by plundering the rich shrines of the Aquitanian saints.
The age saw in his fate speedy vengeance for his impiety, his own
evil conscience found perhaps in his behaviour to his father a still
greater burden. Before Limoges was taken, the wretched man--for at
eight-and-twenty he was a boy no more--sickened and died at Martel,
and left no issue. He passed away like foam on the water, no man
regretting him; lamented only as his father’s enemy, and by that father
who, with all his faults and his mismanagement, loved his sons far more
than they deserved.
[Sidenote:
Distrust of
Richard.
]
[Sidenote:
Death of
Geoffrey.
]
The death of the heir threw upon Richard the right, so far as it
could be regarded as a right, of succession; it reopened also the
question about the portion of Queen Margaret, the castles of the Vexin
which Henry had so craftily got into his hands in consequence of the
marriage. These castles he refused to restore to the king of France.
Richard’s claim to the fealty of the barons he could not allow to be
recognised, lest Richard should attempt to play against him the part
which his elder brother had played. He wished also that the Aquitanian
heritage should be made over to John, especially after the death of
Geoffrey of Brittany, which occurred in 1186, no right of succession
being allowed to the baby Arthur, born after his father’s death. Hence
there were constant feuds and difficulties, mainly, however, on the
French side of the Channel, Philip fomenting the family discord.
[Sidenote:
The house of
Anjou at
Jerusalem.
]
[Sidenote:
Jerusalem
taken.
]
The threatening condition of Palestine long averted open war. Henry
was the head of the house of Anjou, from which the Frank kings of
Jerusalem, descended from Fulk, his grandfather, drew their origin.
Baldwin the Leper, the son of King Amalric, the conqueror of Egyptian
Babylon, was waging a very unequal fight against Saladin, Sultan of
Egypt and Syria. It was a brilliant struggle, but against fearful
odds. A prey to a sickness which physically disabled him, weakened
by the divisions of a court speculating already on his death and the
break-up of the kingdom; at the head of an aristocratic body which
had in a single century learned all the vices and none of the virtues
of the East; with the knightly orders quarrelling with one another;
with the barons of the kingdom playing the part of traitors, the
princes of the confederation leaguing with Saladin, and the ablest
of his allies utterly unfettered by the sense of honor;--Baldwin in
despair sent the keys of the Holy Sepulchre to Henry of England, as his
kinsman, and prayed him to come to the rescue. Then he died and left
the kingdom first to his baby nephew, then to his sister Sibylla and
Guy of Lusignan her husband. The mission of the patriarch Heraclius,
in 1185, was received with little enthusiasm in the West. Some two
or three great English barons, Hugh of Beauchamp and Roger Mowbray,
went; but the English Church and baronage, assembled at the Council of
Clerkenwell, told the king that it was his first duty to stay at home
and keep the promises made in his coronation oath. He himself could do
no more than offer contributions in money. The patriarch went off in
disgust; and before anything was really done Saladin had captured the
king, the True Cross, and the holy city.
[Sidenote:
The Third
Crusade.
]
This news, which reached England in October or November, 1187, silenced
for a moment the petty quarrels of the West. But it was for a moment
only. At the first shock of the tidings Henry and Philip laid aside
their grievances. Richard was the first to take the cross. The popes
one after another in quick succession issued impassioned adjurations
that peace should be made, and that one great Catholic Crusade should
rescue imperilled Christendom. The Emperor himself, the lord of the
Western world, the great Frederick, declared that he would go to
Palestine with all the German chivalry. In England and France went
out a decree that all men who had anything should pay a tenth towards
the Crusade. The Saladin tithe was enacted by a great assembly of
all England, at Geddington, near Northampton, and it was the first
case in which Englishmen ever paid a general tax on all their goods
and chattels. This was done in February, 1188. The money was hastily
collected. It was yet uncertain whether the king would go himself or
send Richard or John or both. But the moment of peace was over, and for
Henry at least the end was coming.
[Sidenote:
Henry’s last
quarrel,
1188.
]
[Sidenote:
Richard
joins Phillip.
]
The last storm arose in the South; the quarrel between Richard and the
Count of Toulouse, beginning about a little matter, drew in both Henry
and Philip. Philip complained to Henry of the misrule of his son. Henry
disowned the measures of Richard; and Philip invaded Berry. At first
Richard acted in concert with his father, drove Philip out of Berry,
and recovered the places that he had taken. Henry was in England at the
time of the outbreak. He sent over first the Archbishop of Canterbury,
then John, and at last, in July, 1188, left his kingdom never to
return. The name of the great king was, at first, potent enough. Philip
sued for peace; the Counts of Champagne insisted that there should be
peace until the Crusade was over. Once and again the two kings met, and
failed to come to a reconciliation. In November Richard began to waver:
he did homage to Philip for all the French provinces, saving, however,
his fealty to his father. A truce was made, and the Pope sent a legate
to turn the truce into a peace. But when the time of truce expired
Richard had gone over to Philip, and actually joined in the invasion
of his father’s territories. Philip insisted that Richard should be
acknowledged heir; Henry hesitated; Richard suspected that John was to
supplant him: John was bribed to take part with his father’s enemies.
Henry, unable to believe the monstrous conspiracy, for the first time
in his life showed want of resolution; he did not draw his forces to
a head, but deliberated and negotiated whilst Richard and Philip were
acting. His health was failing, and his spirits had failed already.
[Sidenote:
Capture of
le Mans.
]
[Sidenote:
Henry’s
flight.
]
So the spring of 1189 went on, Henry staying mostly at Saumur, in
Anjou, or at Chinon; and Philip watching for his opportunity. At length
on May 28, after a conference at la Ferté Bernard, in which Henry, as
it was said, bribed the papal legate to take his side, Philip finally
broke into war; carried almost by surprise the chief castles of Maine,
and with a good fortune which he could scarcely realize captured the
city of le Mans itself, which Henry, although at the head of a stout
force of knights, refused to defend. Wretchedly ill and broken in
spirit, he rode for his life from le Mans, to escape from the hands
of his son and of Philip. This was on June 12. Le Mans was Henry’s
birth-place; there his father was buried, and he had loved the place
very much; it was also a very strong place, and when it was taken he
knew that sooner or later Tours must go too. But even before Tours
was taken all was lost, for Henry seemed to think that he had nothing
left to live or fight for. Scarcely able to sit on horseback, he rode
all day from le Mans, and rested at night at la Frenaye, on the way to
Normandy, where the chief part of his force and all his strength lay.
Geoffrey, his natural son and chancellor, afterwards Archbishop of
York, was with him, and the poor father clung to him in his despair. To
him, through his friend Giraldus Cambrensis, we owe the story of these
sad days.
[Sidenote:
His last
days.
]
Henry was worn out with illness and fatigue--he would, he said, lie
down and die: at night he would not be undressed; Geoffrey threw his
cloak on him and watched by his side. In the morning the king declared
that he could not leave Anjou; Geoffrey was to go on to Alençon with
the troops. He would return to Chinon. Geoffrey was not allowed to
depart until the Steward of Normandy had sworn that, should the king
die, he would surrender the castles only to John; for Henry did not
yet know the treachery of his favorite child. All was done as he bade;
Geoffrey secured Alençon and then returned to look for his father;
he found him at a place called Savigny, and took him to Chinon, as
he wished. For a fortnight Philip pursued his conquests unimpeded.
Henry moved again to Saumur, and was there visited by the Counts of
Champagne; but he had neither energy, nor apparently even the will,
to strike a blow or to come to a decision that would ensure peace.
A conference was fixed for June 30, at Azai, but when the day came
Henry was too ill to attend; and Philip and Richard went off loudly
exclaiming that it was a false excuse. The same day Philip came to
Tours. Again the princes interfere; but Philip would not listen. On
July 3, he took the city. Then Henry, dying as he was, made his last
effort; he was carried from Saumur to Azai, mounted there on horseback,
and met his two foes on the plain of Colombieres.
There, after two attempts to converse, broken by a terrible
thunder-storm, Henry, held up on horseback by his servants, accepted
Philip’s terms and submitted, surrendering all that he was asked to
surrender. One thing he asked for, the list of the conspirators, to
whom he was obliged to promise forgiveness. The list was given him;
and with reluctance and muttered reproaches, perhaps curses also, he
gave Richard the kiss of peace. He went back to Azai, still transacting
some little business on the way, for the monks of Canterbury, who had
quarrelled with their archbishop, forced themselves into his presence
and provoked some sharp words of reproof even then. Then he opened
the list of rebels, and the first name that he saw was John’s. And
that broke his heart; he turned his face to the wall and said, “I have
nothing left to care for; let all things go their way.”
[Sidenote:
Death of
Henry II.
]
From that blow he never rallied. He was carried on a litter to Chinon,
chafing against the shame of defeat and the mortification of his love.
Geoffrey sat by him fanning him in the sultry air and driving away the
flies that teased him. To him Henry confided his last wishes. He told
him he was to be Archbishop of York, and gave him his ring, with the
seal of the panther, to give to the King of Castile; then he ordered
them to take him up, on his bed, and lay him before the altar of the
castle chapel; there he received the last sacraments and died, two days
after the meeting at Colombieres.
There is hardly in all English history a more striking catastrophe
or a scene in itself more simply touching. So much suffering, so
great a fall, from such grandeur to such humiliation, such bitter
sorrow, the loss of everything worth having, power and peace and his
children’s love may have stirred in him in that last moment the thought
of forgiveness. But Richard saw him alive no more; and when at the
funeral, at Fontevraud, he met the bier on which his father’s body lay,
blood flowed forthwith from the nostrils of the dead king, as if his
spirit were indignant at his coming.