Kings and Queens of England
EDITED BY
ROBERT S. RAIT M.A. AND WILLIAM PAGE F.S.A.
HENRY II
[Illustration: GREAT SEAL OF HENRY AS KING
(Obverse 1/1)]
HENRY II
BY
L. F. SALZMANN B.A. F.S.A.
ILLUSTRATED
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
1914
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. HENRY FITZ-EMPRESS 1
II. HENRY II., KING OF ENGLAND 14
III. THE WELSH WARS 26
IV. FOREIGN AFFAIRS 40
V. THE STRUGGLE WITH BECKET 50
VI. IRISH AFFAIRS 101
VII. THE REBELLION OF THE YOUNG KING 122
VIII. HENRY AND HIS SONS--HIS DOWNFALL AND
DEATH 145
IX. LEGAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY OF
THE REIGN 175
X. FINANCE 194
XI. THE ENGLISH NATION UNDER HENRY II 212
BIBLIOGRAPHY 236
APPENDIX
ITINERARY OF HENRY II 241
INDEX 253
ILLUSTRATIONS
GREAT SEAL OF HENRY AS KING (_Obverse_) _frontispiece_
PAGE
SEALS OF HENRY AS DUKE OF NORMANDY _facing_ 6
GREAT SEAL OF HENRY AS KING (_Reverse_) " 14
MAP ILLUSTRATING THE CAMPAIGNS OF
HENRY II. IN FRANCE " 40
SEAL OF LOUIS VII. " 44
SEAL OF ROGER, ARCHBISHOP OF YORK " 56
HENRY II. DISPUTING WITH BECKET " 64
SEAL OF THE “YOUNG KING” HENRY " 90
THE MURDER OF BECKET " 98
IRISHWOMAN PLAYING A ZITHER } " 104
IRISHMEN ROWING IN A CORACLE }
IRISH AXEMEN " 110
SEAL OF WILLIAM THE LION " 140
SEALS OF GEOFFREY, SON OF HENRY II., AND
CONSTANCE OF BRITTANY, HIS WIFE " 144
SEAL OF JOAN, DAUGHTER OF HENRY II. " 150
SEAL OF THOMAS BECKET, ARCHBISHOP OF }
CANTERBURY } " 156
}
SEAL OF HUGH, BISHOP OF LINCOLN }
SEAL OF GEOFFREY THE BASTARD, AS }
BISHOP-ELECT OF LINCOLN } " 170
}
SEAL OF JOHN AS COUNT OF MORTAIN }
TOMB OF HENRY II. AT FONTEVRAULT " 174
SILVER PENNIES " 208
HENRY II
CHAPTER I
HENRY FITZ-EMPRESS
When the _White Ship_ went down on 25th November 1120, carrying with her
the only legitimate son of Henry I., the succession to the English
throne became a question of great moment. Henry’s daughter, Maud, had
been married to Henry V., Emperor of Germany, in 1114; it was clearly
impossible for England and Normandy to be ruled in conjunction with the
Empire, and Maud had no children to whom her father’s crown might pass.
The king’s unruly brother, Robert of Normandy, was still alive, but a
prisoner in England; and his son William, the most formidable candidate
for the throne, was destined to die in Flanders in 1128. But before
death had removed this dangerous and unpopular competitor, a fresh
solution of the difficulty had become possible. Maud’s husband, the
emperor, had died in 1125,[1] and on 1st January 1127, King Henry
declared Maud his heir, and caused the peers to swear to accept her as
his successor in England and in Normandy. There was no precedent for
female sovereignty in either country, and it was probably not
anticipated that she should reign alone, but rather that she should by
marriage bestow the crown upon some fitting partner. The important
matter of this marriage Henry had virtually undertaken to submit to the
decision of his barons, but at the end of May 1127 he betrothed her,
with an absence of preparation that amounted almost to secrecy, to
Geoffrey, son of Count Fulk of Anjou, a boy of fourteen, eleven years
the junior of his bride. The marriage, as Henry had foreseen, was
unpopular, though the addition of the neighbouring provinces of Anjou
and Maine to Normandy made the King of England the most powerful of all
the feudatories of France.
The marriage of Geoffrey, now Count of Anjou, and Maud took place in
June 1129, but within a few weeks the quick-tempered count and his
haughty bride had quarrelled and separated, and it was not until the
autumn of 1131 that they came together again. Their reunion was made by
Henry the occasion for causing his barons to renew their oath of
allegiance to Maud as his successor, thereby quashing any objection that
might have been made to the previous oath as invalidated by her
marriage. The king was now more than sixty years old, and his anxiety
for the future of his country and his dynasty must have been greatly
relieved by the birth of a son to Geoffrey and Maud on the 25th March
1133. The boy was called Henry, after his grandfather, and it is
significant of the predominance attaching to his mother, as heiress of
England and Normandy, that the title by which he was most commonly known
to his contemporaries was that of Henry Fitz-Empress.
The death of Henry I., on 1st December 1135, seems to have taken the
empress and her partisans by surprise. She went almost at once into
Normandy to press her claims, half-heartedly and with little success;
but in the meanwhile her cousin, Stephen of Blois, nephew of the late
king, had crossed into England, and, with the assistance of his brother,
Henry, Bishop of Winchester, had caused himself to be crowned king on
22nd December. The Norman barons accepted Stephen, and the final blow
was given to Maud’s cause by the Pope’s declaration in favour of her
rival. Her half-brother, however, Earl Robert of Gloucester, was not
long in forming a party to support the claims of Maud and her son in
England, and in 1139 Maud herself crossed the Channel with a small body
of troops. With the varying fortunes of the long-continued war between
the empress and Stephen we are not concerned, but it was when Maud’s
cause was almost at its worst, in the winter of 1142, that her young son
Henry, then in his tenth year, came over in charge of his uncle, Earl
Robert, and was settled at Bristol. There he remained for four years
under the tuition of a certain Master Matthew, who cultivated in him
that love for learning which made him in later days the most literary
prince of his time and a worthy successor of his scholarly grandfather.
During those four years Henry’s father, Geoffrey of Anjou, had been
strengthening his position on the Continent, though apparently making no
effort to assist his wife in her struggle with Stephen. By the end of
1143 he had secured control of the greater part of Normandy, and early
in 1144 Rouen surrendered and Geoffrey was recognised as Duke of
Normandy. Having established himself securely he now sent for his son to
join him, and accordingly, late in 1146, or at the beginning of the next
year, Earl Robert of Gloucester escorted young Henry to Wareham and
there bade farewell to him. Uncle and nephew were destined to meet no
more, for on 31st October 1147 Earl Robert died. Immediately the earl’s
death was known, Earl Gilbert of Pembroke, whose castle of Pevensey was
then undergoing a siege, urged Henry’s return. He considered that the
only hope for the empress’s cause, now that its mainstay had departed,
lay in the presence of Henry in England. The boy--he was only
fourteen--hurriedly crossed with a few companions, landed at one of the
western ports, and made feeble attacks on Cricklade and Bourton, in
Gloucestershire, from which he was easily driven off. His forces
dwindled rather than increased, and his scanty supply of money soon came
to an end. An application to his mother for further funds proved
ineffectual, as she was in the same straits herself. He then turned to
the Earl of Gloucester for assistance; but Earl William was very
different from his father; he cared little for war, had no enthusiasm
for the cause of his cousin, and saw no reason why he should waste his
treasure on a desperate and hopeless enterprise. Unable for lack of
funds either to continue his injudicious venture or to leave the
country, the humiliated prince had to apply for help to the rival whom
he had so rashly attacked. Stephen, always chivalrous and good-natured
even to weakness, in spite of the opposition and remonstrances of his
advisers, at once supplied Henry with the necessary means of returning
to his father’s court, where, in the early spring of 1148, he was joined
by his mother, the empress.[2]
Geoffrey, now that he was firmly established in Normandy, seems to have
begun to plan the aggrandisement of his son, in whose right he had
obtained the duchy. And so, in April 1149, Henry was sent to England to
receive the honour of knighthood from King David of Scotland, his
mother’s uncle. Landing, probably, at Wareham, he made a brief stay at
Devizes, where we find in his company Roger, Earl of Hereford, Patrick,
Earl of Salisbury, William Beauchamp, John St. John, Roger Berkeley,
Hubert de Vaux, Henry Hussey, Manser Bisset and others.[3] Thence he
passed peacefully northwards, the whole of western England being in the
hands of magnates, such as the Earls of Leicester and Warwick, who were
friendly to his cause or at least hostile to that of Stephen. To
Carlisle he was brought by Earl Ralph of Chester, and there he was
received by King David and his son Henry, Earl of Northumberland, and on
Whitsunday, 22nd May, was duly invested with the insignia of knighthood.
Henry and his ally of Scotland now persuaded the powerful Earl of
Chester to join forces with them against Stephen, but before this scheme
could be carried out King Stephen had outbid his rivals and bought the
support of the earl by a bestowal of fiefs so lavish as to render him
almost king of northern England.
Returning to his father in January 1150, Henry was invested with the
dukedom of Normandy. But a little more than a year later Stephen’s son,
Eustace, persuaded King Louis of France, with whom Geoffrey
[Illustration: (1)]
[Illustration: (2)
SEALS OF HENRY AS DUKE OF NORMANDY (3/4)]
had quarrelled, to assist him in regaining Normandy. The allies advanced
as far as Arques, where they were opposed by the forces under the young
duke. Henry here exhibited that scrupulous respect for his feudal
overlord, the King of France, which he displayed so conspicuously in
later years, and acted on the defensive, refusing to attack his
suzerain. Eustace was a man of warlike spirit, but King Louis, who,
though not averse to war, seems to have had a profound distaste for
fighting, did not care to risk a battle and retired for the time. Later
in the year he despatched another force to operate against Mantes, but
Geoffrey now came to terms and agreed to surrender the Vexin, the
borderland between France and Normandy, on condition that Louis should
confirm Henry in the possession of the rest of the Norman duchy, and
these terms the French king gladly accepted.
Henry had now established his claim to half of his grandfather’s
dominions, and began to plan the recovery of the remainder by an
invasion of England. His plans, however, were interfered with by the
sudden death of his father on 7th September 1151. The recovery of
England was postponed, but a great accession of territory was obtained
by Henry in the following spring. Louis VII. had married Eleanor, the
heiress of Aquitaine, in 1137, but relations between the able and
energetic queen and her feeble husband had gradually become strained to
breaking, and at last, early in 1152, they discovered that they ought
never to have married, being related to one another, distantly but
within the degrees theoretically prohibited by the Church.[4] A divorce
was granted on 18th March, and Eleanor, avoiding the too pressing
attentions of Count Theobald of Blois and Geoffrey of Anjou, Henry’s
younger brother, intimated her willingness to bestow her hand and great
possessions upon the Duke of Normandy. Henry, now nineteen, but with a
reputation that many an older man might have envied, hastened at once to
meet Eleanor at Poitiers, and they were married in May. By this marriage
Henry became master of Aquitaine and Poitou, in addition to Anjou,
Maine, and Normandy, and his rule reached from the Channel to the
Pyrenees.
He now once more prepared for the invasion of England, and was
assembling his forces at Barfleur in June when he found himself called
upon to face the combined forces of Eleanor’s late husband, King Louis,
and her disappointed suitors, Count Theobald and Geoffrey of Anjou.
Henry displayed the energy and rapidity of movement which in later years
made the French king declare that he must be able to fly, dashed down to
Pacey and prepared to attack the French forces, but Louis, with his
usual discretion, retired at once. Henry promptly turned north to crush
the rebellious Richer of L’Aigle and destroy his robbers’ castle of
Bonmoulins. The Norman frontier had been secured before the end of
August, and the duke was free to turn his hand against his brother
Geoffrey, which he did very effectually, reducing Montsoreau and
compelling Geoffrey to sue for peace. A truce patched up between Henry
and Louis was speedily renounced by the latter, but Henry, estimating
his adversary’s military abilities at a low rate, continued his
preparations for the invasion of England, and eventually crossed about
the second week in January 1153, with a fleet of thirty-six ships.
It was probably at Wareham that Henry landed with his hundred and forty
men-at-arms and three thousand infantry, and he would seem to have gone
straight to Bristol, where he was joined by those magnates who had
supported his cause in the past, or who considered that it would be to
their advantage to do so in the future. Operations were at once begun
against Malmesbury Castle, and the outer works were speedily carried,
but the massive keep was too strong to be stormed and could only be
reduced by starvation. Meanwhile Stephen had collected his forces and
was marching to the rescue; after halting for the night at Cirencester
he advanced to the relief of Malmesbury, but found the little Avon
swollen and impassable, while a bitter wind and blinding rain and sleet,
driving in the faces of his men, made it impossible for him to advance
or to retain his position. Abandoning his enterprise, the king marched
back to London, and the castellan Jordan had no choice but to
surrender. Enheartened by the capture of Malmesbury, Henry now directed
his energies to the particular business which had brought him over--the
relief of Wallingford. During the past five or six years, although the
country as a whole had been at peace, some of the more restless spirits
had carried on a sort of war on their own account, and of these one of
the most prominent had been Brian Fitz-Count of Wallingford. In 1152 he
had managed to destroy the castles set up at Brightwell and Reading to
keep him in check, and Stephen had been obliged to besiege Wallingford
Castle and blockade it by the erection of counter-works at Crowmarsh.
Finding themselves in difficulties, the garrison had sent over to Henry
for assistance, and he now came to the rescue and invested Crowmarsh. An
outlying portion of the royalist siege works on Wallingford Bridge had
already fallen into his hands, when Stephen once more offered fight.
Henry, for his part, was very willing to give battle and drew out his
forces, but the desire of the prelates to avoid further bloodshed, and
the fear of the barons that a decisive victory might destroy the balance
of power between the two parties and so render their own services less
marketable, resulted in secret negotiations, and compelled the rivals to
agree to a truce for five days, though suggestions for a more permanent
cessation of hostilities, made at a private interview between Henry and
Stephen, came to nothing. The terms of the truce were highly favourable
to Henry, the king being obliged to withdraw his garrison from
Crowmarsh and allow the fortifications to be dismantled.
Wallingford having been relieved, and the royalists under William
Cheyney and Richard de Lucy having been defeated in a cavalry action
near Oxford, Henry seems to have recruited his forces in the western
counties, visiting Evesham and Warwick, where the Countess Gundreda
handed over to him the castle, from which she had ejected Stephen’s
garrison. Then, turning eastwards, he besieged and captured Stamford
Castle about the same time that Stephen reduced Ipswich. The duke next
plundered Nottingham, but did not attempt to take the castle. By this
time the peace party were beginning to gain the upper hand, and the
efforts of Archbishop Theobald and Bishop Henry of Winchester gained
strength by the removal of their chief opponent, the king’s son, Eustace
of Boulogne. That bellicose ruffian, enraged at the tame conclusion of
the Wallingford affair, had gone off on a ravaging expedition in the
eastern counties. After plundering Cambridgeshire he paid a similar
attention to the lands of Bury St. Edmunds, rashly pillaging the
monastic lands on St. Laurence’s Day (10th August). The offended saints
were not slow to avenge the outrage, and within a week Eustace lay dead.
With his death died Stephen’s hopes of founding a dynasty, for his
younger son, William, had borne no part in the civil war and possessed
neither the desire nor the ability to contest the crown with Henry.
After some weeks of negotiation a compromise was at last arrived at by
which Stephen was to retain the crown for life on condition of
acknowledging Henry as his heir, and on 6th November 1153 this agreement
was ratified by the peers in council at Winchester; the rivals were
reconciled and the barons of both parties did homage to the king and his
successor. From Winchester the double court moved to London, where the
news of the termination of the long and ruinous struggle was received
with the greatest enthusiasm; and after Christmas king and duke met once
more, at Oxford, on 13th January 1154, just a year since Henry had
landed in England. A little later, when they met again, at Dunstable,
Henry reproached Stephen for not having fulfilled one of the conditions
of the treaty of peace, which was that the castles built since the death
of Henry I. should be destroyed. The task was no small one, as these
so-called adulterine castles had sprung up all over the country and were
estimated by Robert of Torigny, usually an accurate authority, to number
eleven hundred and fifteen. Stephen resented the charge of ill-faith,
but the quarrel, if it deserve the name, was soon made up, and the two
princes went down to Dover together in February to meet the Count and
Countess of Flanders. While there it is said that Stephen’s Flemish
mercenaries, without his knowledge but with the connivance of his son
William, planned to murder Henry. Whether a rumour of the plot reached
his ears or whether he considered that affairs in Normandy required his
presence, Henry soon afterwards parted from the king and returned to
Normandy, where he spent the next five months strengthening his
position. With King Louis he was now on good terms; and he was actually
engaged in a military expedition on that king’s behalf when the throne
of England fell to him by the death of Stephen on 25th October 1154.