HENRY II., KING OF ENGLAND
Henry ascended the throne of England in singularly favourable
circumstances. Still young, his character had been formed and his
reputation had been established on the battle-fields of England and
Normandy. Far inferior to his predecessor in personal character, he was
as far his superior in kingcraft, possessing just those talents
necessary for his position which the chivalrous, kindly, and erratic
Stephen lacked. Something of this, which was to be demonstrated by the
history of his reign, was already obvious, and the bulk of his English
subjects were strongly prepossessed in his favour. The Church was on his
side; the greater barons cared little who was king so long as their
titles and their revenues were assured to them; the lesser lords and the
peasantry, exhausted and impoverished by the twenty years of anarchy,
welcomed a ruler strong enough to curb the lawless feuds of
semi-independent chieftains, while, above all, there was no other
claimant to the throne, the only possible rival, Stephen’s son, William,
Earl of Warenne and Surrey, being, fortunately for himself, quite
unambitious of regal honours. Possessing great powers of physical
endurance, Henry was as active
[Illustration: GREAT SEAL OF HENRY AS KING
(Reverse 1/1)]
in mind as in body, a well-read scholar and an accomplished linguist;
short, sturdy, with coarse hands and freckled face, unkempt and careless
in his dress, he overcame the disadvantages of an unattractive
appearance by his courtesy and the charm of his manner, which made him
formidable in diplomacy or love. Although inheriting the volcanic temper
of his Angevin forefathers and liable to outbursts of diabolic rage, he
ruled his hot blood with a cool head, practically never allowing his
feelings to dictate his policy and but rarely indulging in acts of
cruelty or revenge. He was non-religious rather than irreligious,
non-moral rather than immoral; though he made no attempt to bridle his
lust, there is no reason to suppose that any of his numerous mistresses
were unwilling victims; and though his irreverence and contempt of the
Church’s sacraments shocked his contemporaries, he admired and chose for
his friends such men as St. Hugh of Lincoln. Clear-sighted and
self-centred, Henry was emphatically a strong man; and it is the irony
of fate that the weak spot which was to prove his ruin lay in his most
unselfish and amiable trait, his affection for his family.
Not the least of Henry’s qualifications for the kingship was his ability
to select the right men for his ministers. It is possible that
Archbishop Theobald may have had some influence in the appointment of
the brilliant young Archdeacon of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, to the high
office of Chancellor, but the king may be given the credit for choosing
Robert, Earl of Leicester, and Richard of Lucy as Justiciars. All three
appointments proved to have been well made, and the first two were
probably made before the coronation.[5] At this ceremony, on 19th
December, besides the Archbishop of Canterbury, to whose see belonged
the privilege of crowning the king, there were present the Archbishops
of York and of Rouen, fourteen English bishops and the bishops of
Bayeux, Lisieux, and Avranches, numbers of foreign noblemen, including
Dietrich, Count of Flanders, and a multitude of English and Norman
lords. There were the king’s two brothers--Geoffrey, with whom he was
shortly to be at war for the second time, and William, for whose benefit
he was no doubt already planning the conquest of Ireland; there were the
royal officers Henry of Essex, Constable of England, Richard de Humet,
Constable of Normandy, Warin Fitz-Gerald, the Chamberlain, and Hugh,
Earl of Norfolk, hereditary High Steward; and there amongst the
brilliant crowd would be such great lords as Reynold, Earl of Cornwall,
son of King Henry I., and William, Earl of Arundel, the confirmation of
whose privileges and estates was one of the new king’s first acts.
Abbots, royal chaplains, clerks of the Chancery and Exchequer, wealthy
merchants and burgesses, and the ladies of the court with their
attendants, whose gay robes formed but the highest tone in an assembly
blazing with colour, complete the picture. Yet of all those in whose
presence Henry swore to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, to
maintain the good laws of the realm and to abate the bad, very few were
English and few even spoke the English tongue. The governing classes in
Church and State were Norman by lineage, language, and sympathy, and at
a time when an Englishman sat in St. Peter’s chair[6] scarce any of his
compatriots held offices of trust in their native country. The fusion of
English and Norman, which had already spread so far in the lower ranks
of society, only began to affect the higher ranks in the course of the
reign of Henry, who, by the ultimate failure of his life-long policy,
was to give the English nation its individuality.
The affairs of the kingdom could not be neglected for coronation
festivities, and at his Christmas court, held at Bermondsey, Henry took
the first step for ensuring peace by the expulsion of the lawless
Flemish mercenaries. Their leader, William of Ipres, was allowed to
retain the large revenues from lands in Kent granted to him by Stephen
and well earned by his loyalty and skill, and some few of his followers
were sent to join the colony of Flemings established on the borders of
Wales, but the bulk of the “Flemish wolves” were packed off to satisfy
their appetite for war and plunder on the Continent. Having thus
disposed of these alien robbers, the king had next to deal with those
of his own subjects who had abused their own powers and the weakness of
the central government during the anarchy to extend their possessions at
the expense of the royal demesnes and to strengthen their position by
the erection of castles. The destruction of the “adulterine” castles,
erected without royal licence, had been promised, and to some extent
performed, by Stephen in the last months of his reign,[7] but Henry now
determined to complete the work and at the same time to revoke the
grants of royal demesne whether made by King Stephen or by the empress.
In thus recovering the Crown lands the king was no doubt partly
influenced by the desire to increase the very scanty royal revenues, and
partly by his deliberate anti-feudal policy. It did not require the
acute intelligence which Henry possessed to learn from the events of the
last twenty years that it would be wise to clip the wings of the great
barons, who threatened to overshadow the throne itself, and to play for
popular support. It was clearly to his interest that the people should
be prosperous, contented, and loyal, and he was not slow to adopt
measures which would render the nobles less able alike to oppose the
Crown and to oppress the people. Throughout his reign he acted on these
anti-feudal principles. Although Henry had a distinct appreciation of
justice, it may be doubted if the legal reforms, which were in many
ways the most important features of his reign, would ever have seen the
light had they not tended towards the elevation of the smaller men and
the consequent depression of the greater. With a few exceptions it will
be found that when Henry required, as he usually did, to increase his
revenues by means of doubtful legality, he preferred to extort large
sums from the wealthy rather than an equivalent multitude of small
amounts from the poorer classes. So also the frequent substitution of
money payments for military service helped to discourage the maintenance
of large bands of armed retainers, kept nominally for the king’s service
but liable to be used for the furthering of their lord’s ambition. Yet
in all cases Henry acted with a wise moderation, which, leaving the
great lords in possession of their titles and estates, left them in the
position of having more to lose than gain by rebellion.
The king’s orders were as a whole acquiesced in with little resistance,
the estates wrested from the Crown were restored, the castles
demolished, life and property were once more secure, commerce revived,
the merchants came forth to find customers and the Jews to seek their
debtors. But William of Aumâle, Earl of Yorkshire, who, under Stephen,
had enjoyed a semi-regal independence, hesitated to conform to the new
state of affairs, and prepared to offer armed resistance to the king’s
demands. Henry left Oxford, whither he had gone at the beginning of the
new year, 1155, and moved slowly northwards, halting apparently at
Northampton to re-create Hugh Bigot, Earl of Norfolk, his charter taking
the form of a re-creation rather than a confirmation, possibly as a hint
to the shifty earl that his dignities were not secure beyond all risk.
By the time that the king reached York Earl William, finding himself
unsupported, had reconsidered his position and wisely submitted to the
royal demands, surrendering his fortress of Scarborough. A precipitous
bluff projecting into the sea, whose waves washed it on three sides,
joined to the mainland only on the west by a narrow neck, the rock of
Scarborough presented an ideal spot for the rearing of a castle, and
here accordingly the earl had set his great stronghold, surrounding the
spacious plateau on the top of the cliff with a wall, digging a well,
and building a keep four-square upon the narrow neck by which alone
access was possible. Nestling against the western base of the rock lay
the little town of Scarborough, itself surrounded with a wall and thus
forming an outwork of the castle. The position was too formidable to be
left in the hands of a subject, and King Henry took care to retain it
for the remainder of his reign; and when in the course of a few years
the earl’s keep fell into decay, it was rebuilt and enlarged at a cost
equivalent to some £10,000 of modern money, the work beginning in 1159
and spreading over the next three years.[8]
On his way either to or from York Henry appears to have visited Lincoln,
the priory of Spalding, and the great abbeys of Peterborough, Thorney,
and Ramsey. The news of the king’s approach to Nottingham so stirred the
guilty conscience of William Peverel, burdened with the murder of the
Earl of Chester, that he sought to save body and soul at the expense of
his possessions by becoming a monk in a priory of which he was himself
patron at Lenton. It was no doubt while in the neighbourhood of
Nottingham that the king received information of the birth of his second
son, Henry, on 28th February, and shortly afterwards he returned to
London, where he held a council at the end of March. During the previous
three months Roger, Earl of Hereford, had been contemplating resistance
to the king’s demands for the surrender of his castles, but the
arguments of his kinsman, Gilbert Foliot, Bishop of Hereford, supported
by the success of Henry’s expedition into Yorkshire, brought him to a
wiser mind, and he placed the castles of Hereford and Gloucester in the
king’s hands. Hugh de Mortimer, however, the great lord of the Welsh
Marches, who had been the chief instigator of Earl Roger’s disaffection,
maintained his attitude of opposition and fortified his castles of
Cleobury, Wigmore, and Bridgnorth. Henry accordingly moved west,
halting at Wallingford, where on 10th April he held a council at which
the nobles swore allegiance to his elder son William, or in the event of
his death, which occurred the following year, to the infant Henry.
Mortimer’s strongholds were invested and, after some resistance,
reduced, he himself making his peace with the king at Bridgnorth early
in July.
With the collapse of Mortimer’s rebellion all active opposition to the
king ceased. Henry, Bishop of Winchester, brother of the late King
Stephen, having possibly displayed his sympathy with the defeated party
too prominently, deemed it prudent to retire to the Continent, leaving
his castles to share the fate of other private fortresses. Peace being
thus ensured in England, King Henry was at liberty to look abroad, and
at a council held in Winchester at Michaelmas he broached the subject of
the conquest of Ireland, proposing to subdue that turbulent and
uncivilised country and place it under the rule of his brother William.
To strengthen his position and justify his action he sent John of
Salisbury to represent to the pope the urgent need for reform,
ecclesiastical and political, in Ireland. The pope at this time, Adrian
IV., was an Englishman, his father being a poor clerk of Langley, who
entered the monastery of St. Albans shortly after his son’s birth: the
young Nicholas Brakespere, endeavouring to follow his father’s example,
was rejected by the authorities at St. Albans and went out of England to
Provence, where he rose to be abbot of St. Ruphus; his monks,
regretting their election of a foreigner, appealed to the pope to depose
him, and he again prospered by rejection, as he was at once promoted to
the bishopric of Albano and made papal legate to Scandinavia, where his
success was so great that, upon the death of Pope Eugenius III., in
December 1154, he was elected to the papacy, taking the title of Adrian
IV. Pope Adrian heartily approved of Henry’s project, and sent back John
of Salisbury with a letter commending the proposed crusade and an
emerald ring symbolic of the sovereignty of Ireland, with which he
invested Henry by virtue of the alleged supremacy of the popes over all
islands.[10] Feeling in England, however, does not seem to have been in
favour of the expedition, and the empress, doubtless foreseeing that
William would find the Irish throne an insecure position of little glory
and less profit, strongly opposed the project. Her influence with her
son was sufficient to cause him to abandon the idea, or at least to
postpone it until a more favourable opportunity.
Henry kept Christmas at Westminster, and early in January 1156 sailed
from Dover for Normandy, his last act before leaving being to re-create
Aubrey de Vere, who the previous year had paid 500 marks to be High
Chamberlain of England,[11] Earl of Oxford. At the beginning of the
next month he met Louis VII. on the borders of France and Normandy and
did homage to him for all his continental possessions, including Anjou
and Maine, which his brother Geoffrey claimed under his father’s will.
Geoffrey, persisting in his claims and refusing Henry’s offers of
compensation, garrisoned his castles of Loudun, Chinon, and Mirabeau. By
the beginning of July the two latter were in the king’s hands, and
Geoffrey had agreed to be content with retaining Loudun and a money
pension. Shortly afterwards the people of Nantes and Lower Brittany
expelled their ruler, Count Hoel, and elected Geoffrey in his place.
Henry gladly assented to the election, and upon Geoffrey’s death in 1158
successfully enforced his own claims, as heir to his brother, against
Conan, Earl of Richmond and Count of Upper Brittany.
The king’s first daughter, Maud, had been born at London early in the
summer, and towards the end of August Queen Eleanor crossed from England
and joined her husband in Anjou. The court returned to England in April
1157, and a short tour was made through the eastern counties, the king
wearing his crown in state at Bury St. Edmunds on 19th May and staying
the following week at Colchester. In continuation of his former policy
he now caused William de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, to surrender the
castles of Norwich and Pevensey, which he had hitherto retained,
apparently compensating him by further additions to his great estates
in Norfolk.[12] Earl Hugh of Norfolk was also deprived of his castles,
and in Essex one of Earl Geoffrey’s strongholds was destroyed.
Henry was now so firmly established on the throne that he could insist
upon a far more important resumption of territory, and accordingly he
demanded from the young King Malcolm of Scotland the cession of
Northumberland, Westmoreland, and Cumberland. Malcolm, unable to offer
any effective resistance to his demands, travelled south through
Yorkshire and Lincolnshire to the castle of the Peak. Meanwhile Henry,
after holding a council on 17th July at Northampton, where he left the
queen, was moving westwards. The two kings met at the Peak and passed on
together to Chester, where Malcolm formally restored the northern
counties, receiving in exchange the earldom of Huntingdon, for which he
did homage to Henry. The Scottish king then returned to his own country
to repress the rebellion raised by his nobles in indignation at his
surrender to the English demands, while Henry completed his arrangements
for the invasion of North Wales.