HENRY II.
1154-1189.
When Henry of Anjou, now a young man of twenty-one years, succeeded to
Stephen's crown, he found the country in a most deplorable condition.
The regular administration of justice had ceased, many of the counties
had no sheriffs or other royal officers, the revenue had fallen off
by a half, and the barons were exercising all the prerogatives of the
king, even to the extent of coining money in their own names. A weak
man would have found the position hopeless; a strong man, like Henry,
saw that it required instant and unflinching energy, but that it was
not beyond repair.
[Sidenote: =Undisputed accession of Henry.--His continental dominions.=]
Henry started with the advantage of an undisputed title; his mother,
Matilda, had ceded all her rights to him, and Stephen's surviving son,
William of Boulogne, never attempted to lay any claim to the crown.
Moreover, the king had enormous resources from abroad to aid him.
His father was long dead, so that he was himself Count of Anjou and
Touraine. He had his mother's lands of Normandy and Maine already in
his hands. But he had become the ruler of a still larger realm by his
marriage. He had taken to wife Eleanor, the Duchess of Aquitaine, whose
enormous inheritance stretched from the Loire to the Pyrenees. This was
a marriage of pure policy; Eleanor was an ill-conditioned, unprincipled
woman, the divorced wife of King Lewis VII. of France, and she gave her
second husband almost as much trouble as she had given her first. But
by aid of her possessions Henry dominated the whole of France; indeed,
he held much more French territory under him than did King Lewis VII.
himself, and for the political gain he was prepared to endure the
domestic trouble.
[Illustration: FRANCE,
SHOWING HENRY II'{S}.
CONTINENTAL DOMINIONS.]
The continental dominions of Henry were, indeed, so large that they
quite outweighed England in his estimation. He was himself Angevin born
and bred, and looked upon his position more as that of a French prince
who owned a great dependency beyond sea, than as that of an English
king who had possessions in France. He spent the greater part of his
time on the continent, so that England was generally governed by the
successive _Justiciars_, or prime ministers, who acted as regents while
he was abroad. Henry's absence and his absorption in foreign politics
were perhaps not a very grave misfortune for England; he was such a
strong and able ruler, that when he had once put the realm to rights
in the early part of his reign, the danger to be feared was no longer
feudal anarchy, but royal despotism.
[Sidenote: =Feudal anarchy put down.--Northumberland and Cumberland
recovered.=]
Henry's first measures, on succeeding to the throne, were very drastic.
He began by ordering the barons to dismantle all the castles which
had been built in the troublous times of Stephen, and enforced his
command by appearing at the head of a large army. It is said that he
levelled to the ground as many as 375 of these "adulterine castles,"
as they were called, because they had been erected without the king's
leave. Very few of the barons ventured to resist; those who did were
crushed without difficulty. Henry also resumed all the royal estates
and revenues which Stephen and Matilda had lavished on their partisans
during the civil war, annulling all his mother's unwise grants as
well as those of her enemy. He filled up the vacant sheriffdoms, and
commenced the despatch of itinerant justices round the country, to
sit and decide cases in the shire courts; this custom, which became
permanent, was the origin of our modern Assizes. After he had set
England in order, Henry demanded the restoration of Northumberland and
Cumberland from Malcolm of Scotland, the heir of King David. They were
given back, after being seventeen years in Scottish hands. At the same
time, Malcolm did homage to Henry for his remaining earldom in England,
that of Huntingdon, which had descended to him from Waltheof. Owen,
Prince of North Wales, submitted himself to the king in the same year,
but not without some fighting, in which Henry met with checks at first.
Thus England was pacified, brought under firm and regular rule, and
restored to her ancient frontiers. Henry even thought at this time
of invading Ireland, and got a Bull from Pope Adrian IV., the only
Englishman who ever sat upon the papal throne, to authorize him to
subdue that country. The pretexts alleged were, that the Irish church
was schismatic, inasmuch as it refused to acknowledge the papal
authority, and also that Ireland was infamous for its slave-trading
in Christian men. But no attempt was made to enforce the Bull
_Laudabiliter_ for many years to come.
[Sidenote: =The War of Toulouse.--Scutage.=]
Ireland might rest secure, because the king had turned aside into
schemes for the augmentation of his continental dominions. Long and
fruitless bickerings and negotiations with Lewis VII., the shifty King
of France, ended in 1159 in the _War of Toulouse_. Henry laid claim
to the great south-French county of Toulouse, as owing fealty to his
wife's duchy of Aquitaine. He led against it the greatest army that
had been seen for many years, in which the King of Scotland and the
Prince of Wales served as his chief vassals. But when Lewis of France
threw himself into Toulouse, Henry turned aside, moved, it is said,
by the curious feudal scruple that it did not befit him as Duke of
Normandy and Count of Anjou to make a personal attack on his suzerain,
the King of France. He ravaged the county, but did not proceed with
the siege of Toulouse itself. Next year he patched up a peace with
his feudal superior, which was to be confirmed by the marriage of his
five-year-old son and heir, Prince Henry, with Margaret, the French
king's daughter (1160). The chief interest of the very fruitless war of
Toulouse was that Henry employed in it a new scheme of taxation, which
was an indirect blow at the feudal system. As Toulouse was so very far
from England, he allowed those of the English knighthood who preferred
to stay at home, to pay him instead of personal service a composition
called _scutage_ (shield-money). The money thus received was used to
hire a great body of mercenary men-at-arms, whom the king knew to be
both more obedient and more efficient soldiers than the unruly feudal
levies.
[Sidenote: =Quarrel with the Church.--Thomas Becket.=]
The interest of Henry's reign now shifts round to another point--the
question of the relations between State and Church, which we have
already seen cropping up in the reigns of Rufus and Henry I. In 1162
he appointed Thomas Becket Archbishop of Canterbury, and rued the
choice ever after, for now his troubles began. Thomas, the son of a
wealthy merchant of London, had been the king's chief secretary or
_Chancellor_ for the last eight years. He was a clever, versatile, not
very scrupulous man, with a devouring ambition: hitherto he had been
a devoted servant, and a genial companion to the king, and had lived
much more like a layman than a cleric. In spite of his priesthood, he
had borne arms in the war of Toulouse, and even distinguished himself
in a single combat with a French champion. Henry thought that Thomas
would be no less obliging and useful as archbishop than he had been as
Chancellor. He was woefully deceived. No sooner was Thomas consecrated,
than his whole conduct and manner of life suddenly changed. His
ambition--now that he had become a great prelate--was to win the
reputation of a saint. Casting away all his old habits, he began to
practise the most rigid austerity, wearing a hair shirt next his skin,
stinting himself in food and drink, and washing the feet of lepers and
mendicants; from a supple courtier he had become the most angular and
impracticable of saints. But it was not merely to mortify his own body
that Becket had accepted the archbishopric; his real object was to
claim for the head of the Church in England what the Popes of his day
were claiming for themselves in Western Christendom--complete freedom
from the control of the State. His dream was to make the English Church
_imperium in imperio_, and to rule it himself as an absolute master.
Without the reputation of a saint, he could not dare to compass this
monstrous end, so a saint he had to become. The moment that he was
consecrated, he opened his campaign against the king; he threw up the
Chancellorship, which Henry had asked him to retain, and commenced
at once to "vindicate the rights of the see of Canterbury," that is,
to lay claim to a number of estates now in the hands of various lay
owners, as being Church land. When his demands were withstood, he
in some cases went to law with the owners, but in others used the
arbitrary clerical punishment of excommunicating his adversaries. But
this was only the beginning of troubles; in 1163 he began to oppose
the king in the Great Council, taking up the ever-popular cry that the
taxes were over-heavy. Henry, surprised at meeting opposition from such
an unexpected quarter, withdrew his proposals, which seem indeed to
have been intended rather to limit the profits of the sheriffs than to
raise more money.
[Sidenote: =Claims of the Ecclesiastical Courts.=]
But the growing estrangement between the king and the archbishop did
not come to a full head till the end of 1163, when they engaged in
a desperate quarrel on the question of the rights and immunities of
the clergy. We have mentioned in an earlier chapter how William the
Conqueror had established separate courts for the trial of clerical
offences, and had put them under the control of the bishops. Since his
day, these courts had been steadily growing in importance, and putting
forth wider and wider claims of jurisdiction. The anarchical reign
of Stephen, when all lay courts of justice came to a standstill, had
been especially favourable to their growth. The last development of
their demands had been the extraordinary assertion that they ought to
try, not only all ecclesiastical offences, but all offences in which
ecclesiastics were concerned. That is, not only were such crimes as
bigamy or heresy or perjury to come before them, but if a member of the
clerical body committed theft or assault or murder, or, again, if a
layman robbed or assaulted or murdered a cleric, the cases were to be
taken out of the king's court, and to be brought before the bishop's.
The most monstrous absurdity of this claim was that the ecclesiastical
tribunal had no power to impose any but ecclesiastical punishments,
that is to say, penance, excommunication, or deprivation of orders.
So if a clergyman committed the most grievous crimes, he could not
receive any greater penalty than suspension from his clerical duties,
or penances which he might or might not perform. It had come to be a
regular trick with habitual criminals to claim that they were in holy
orders--which included not only the priesthood, but sacristans and
sub-deacons and other minor church officers--and so to exchange death
or blinding for the milder ecclesiastical punishments.
[Sidenote: =The Constitutions of Clarendon.=]
A very bad case of murder by a priest, which Becket punished merely
by ordering the murderer to abstain from celebrating the Sacraments
for two years, called King Henry's attention to the usurpation of the
Church courts. When he found that their claims were quite modern, and
had been unknown to the old English law, he resolved at once to take
in hand the settlement of the whole question of the ecclesiastical
courts. At a Great Council held at Westminster, he proposed to appoint
a committee to investigate the matter, and to draw up a statement of
the true law of the land with regard, not only to "criminous clerks,"
but to all the disputes between lay and clerical personages which could
arise. Becket opposed the proposal as an invasion of the rights of the
Church, and by his advice the other bishops, when asked if they would
undertake to abide by the decision of the committee, replied that they
would do so in so far as it did not impugn their rights--which meant
not at all.
The statement of the laws of England was prepared by the committee,
drawn up by the Justiciar, Richard de Lucy, and laid before the Great
Council at Clarendon[14] early in the next year (1164), whence the
document is known as the _Constitutions of Clarendon_. The king in
it proposed a compromise--that the Church court should try whether a
"criminous clerk" was guilty or innocent, and, if it pronounced him
guilty, should hand him over to the king's officers to suffer the same
punishment that a layman who had committed a similar offence would
suffer. In other matters, where a layman and a cleric went to law on
secular matters, the case was to be tried in the king's court. No
layman was to be punished for spiritual offences, or excommunicated,
without the king's leave, and the clergy were strictly prohibited from
making appeals to Rome, or going thither, unless they had the royal
authorization.
[Sidenote: =Opposition of Becket.=]
Becket declared that the Constitutions of Clarendon violated the
immunities of the Church, but for a moment he yielded and consented to
sign them. Next day, however, to the surprise of all men, he asserted
that his consent had been a deadly sin, that he withdrew it, and that
nothing should induce him to sign the constitutions. Henry vehemently
urged him to do so, and pointed out that the Archbishop of York and the
rest of the bishops were ready to accept the arrangement as just and
fair. But Thomas took the attitude of a martyr, refused to move, and
even sent to the Pope to get absolution for his so-called sin in giving
a momentary consent to the king's proposals.
[Sidenote: =He leaves England.=]
Seriously angry at the archbishop for binding up his cause with that
of the criminous clerks and the usurpation of the Church courts, Henry
took the rather unworthy step of endeavouring to bend Thomas to his
will by allowing several of his courtiers to bring lawsuits against
him, and by threatening to rake up and go through the accounts of all
the public monies that had passed through his hands during the eight
years that he had been Chancellor. But Becket was not a man to be
bullied; he made himself yet more stiff-necked, and assumed the pose
of a martyr for the rights of the Church. It was in vain that the
other bishops urged him to yield; he attended the Great Council at
Northampton in October, 1164, faced the king, refused to submit, and
then, pretending that his life was in danger, fled by night and sailed
over to Flanders. For the next six years Becket was on the continent,
generally under the protection of Henry's suzerain and enemy, the King
of France. He was regarded by the continental clergy as the champion
of the rights of their order, and treated with the highest respect
wherever he went. He did his best to stir up the King of France and
his vassals against Henry II., and to induce the Pope Alexander III.
to excommunicate him. But Alexander, deep in a quarrel with the great
emperor Frederic Barbarossa, did not wish to make an enemy of the
strongest king in Western Europe, and refused to do Becket's behest. On
his own account, however, the exiled archbishop laid the sentence of
excommunication on most of Henry's chief counsellors. As the great body
of the bishops sided with the king, Becket's fulminations from over sea
had little effect. In England he was treated as non-existent.
[Sidenote: =An interdict threatened.--Return of Becket.=]
But in 1170 a new complication brought about a change in affairs. King
Henry's eldest son and namesake, Henry the younger, was now a lad of
fifteen, and his father wished to crown him and take him as colleague
in his kingdom. The right to crown an English king was undoubtedly
one of the prerogatives of the Archbishop of Canterbury. But Henry
left Becket out of account, and caused the ceremony to be performed by
Roger of York. This invasion of his privileges wrought Thomas to such
fury that he sought out the Pope, and won him over by his vehemence
to threaten to lay all England under interdict--to cut it off from
Christendom, and forbid the celebration of the Sacraments within its
bounds.
King Henry, who was engaged in a troublesome war with the French king,
was afraid of the consequences of the papal interdict; its enforcement,
he thought, would make him too unpopular. So he humbled himself to
patching up a truce with Becket, though they could not even yet come to
any agreement on the question of the Constitutions of Clarendon. In the
autumn of 1170 the king allowed him to return to England, on a tacit
agreement that bygones were to be bygones.
But Becket had hidden his true purpose from the king. He returned
to England bent, not on peace, but on war. Either because his anger
carried him away, or because he was deliberately aiming at martyrdom
and wished to provoke his enemies to violence, he proceeded to the most
unheard-of measures. He first excommunicated the Archbishop of York and
the Bishops of London and Lincoln, who had taken part in the crowning
of the younger Henry. Then he laid a similar sentence on those of the
king's courtiers whom he accused of encroaching on the estates of the
see of Canterbury.
[Sidenote: =Murder of Becket.=]
The king was still over-sea in Normandy when the news of Becket's
declaration of war was brought him. Henry was a man of violent
passions, and the tale moved him to a sudden outbreak of fury. "Of all
the idle servants that I maintain," he cried, "is there not one that
will avenge me on this pestilent priest?" The words were wrung from
him by the excitement of the moment, and soon forgotten, but they had
a disastrous result. Among those who heard them were four reckless
knights, some of whom had personal grudges against Becket, and all of
whom were ready to win the king's favour by any means, fair or foul.
Their names were Reginald Fitzurse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy,
and Richard the Breton. These four took counsel with each other,
secretly stole away from the court, and crossed the stormy December
seas to England. They rode straight to Canterbury, sought audience
with the archbishop, and bade him remove the excommunication of Roger
of York and the rest, or face the king's wrath. Thomas met their words
with a fierce refusal; thereupon they withdrew after defying him and
warning him that his blood was on his own head. While they were girding
on their coats of mail in the cathedral close, the monks of Canterbury
besought the archbishop to fly. He had plenty of time to do so, but
flight was not his purpose. Far from hiding himself, he called for his
robes and his attendants, and went to join in the Vesper service at the
cathedral. The knights were soon heard thundering at the door; Becket
threw it open with his own hands, and asked their purpose. "Absolve the
bishops or die," cried Fitzurse. "Never till they have done penance for
their sin," was the reply. Tracy cast his arms about the archbishop
and tried to drag him outside the cathedral; but Thomas cast him down.
Then Fitzurse drew his sword and cut at Becket's head, and the others
felled him with repeated strokes, while he kept crying that he died for
the cause of God and the Church. So ended the great archbishop, slain
by lawless violence on the consecrated stones of his own cathedral.
The splendid courage with which he met his death, and the brutality
of his assailants, persuaded most men that he must have been in the
right. The clergy looked upon him as their knight and champion, and
were only too ready to make capital out of his troubles and heroic end.
The poor remembered his indiscriminate almsgiving, his austerities, his
opposition to the Danegelt. Every class of men felt some respect for
one who had suffered exile and death for loyal adhesion to a cause, and
few, except the king, thoroughly realized that the cause had really
been that of ill government and clerical tyranny. Hence it came that
a man whose main characteristics were his ambition and his obstinacy,
and whose saintliness was artificial and deliberately assumed, took his
place in the English calendar as the favourite hero of the Church. The
Pope made him a saint in 1174, a magnificent shrine was erected over
his remains, and for 350 years pilgrims thronged in thousands to do
homage to his bones. To relate how many hysterical persons or impostors
gave out that they had been healed of their diseases by a visit to his
sanctuary would be tedious. The thing which would have given Becket
most pleasure, could he have lived again to view it, was the sight of
Henry II. doing penance at his tomb in 1174, and baring his back to be
scourged by the monks of Canterbury, as a slight reparation for the
hasty words that had brought about his servants' deed of murder.
There is no doubt that Henry was sincerely shocked and horrified by the
news of the archbishop's death. He sent instant messages to the Pope
to clear himself of the accusation of having been privy to the crime,
and offered any satisfaction that Alexander might demand. Meanwhile he
undertook what might be considered a kind of crusade to Ireland, with
the avowed purpose of reducing it to obedience to the papacy as well as
to subjection to himself.
[Sidenote: =Henry in possession of Brittany.=]
For during the times of Becket's exile (1164-70) two important series
of events had been occurring, one of which put Henry in possession of
Brittany, while the other had led to his interference in Ireland. The
Dukes of Normandy had always claimed a feudal supremacy over Brittany.
This claim Henry found an opportunity for asserting and turning to
account, by forcing Conan, the Breton duke, to marry his infant heiress
Constance to his own third son Geoffrey, a boy of seven years old
(1166). When Conan died five years later, Henry ruled the whole duchy
as guardian of his young son and daughter-in-law. Thus his power was
extended over the whole western shore of France from the Somme to the
Pyrenees.
[Sidenote: =Ireland.--Expedition of Strongbow.=]
Henry's interference in Ireland sprang from more complicated causes.
Ireland in the twelfth century was--as it had been since the first dawn
of history--a group of Celtic principalities, always engaged in weary
tribal wars with each other. Sometimes one king gained a momentary
superiority over the rest, but his power ceased with his life. In the
ninth century the island had been overrun by the Danes; they had not
succeeded in occupying a broad _Danelagh_ such as they won in England,
but had built up a number of small kingdoms on the coast, round their
fortified strongholds of Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, and Limerick.
These principalities still existed in Henry's time, while the interior
was held by the five kings of Ulster, Munster, Connaught, Meath, and
Leinster. At this moment Roderic O'Connor of Connaught claimed and
occasionally exercised authority as suzerain over the other kings. But
he had no real power over the land, which lay half desolate, had become
altogether barbarous, and teemed with cruel and squalid tribal wars.
The introduction of this distressful country into English politics
may be laid at the door of Dermot McMorrough, King of Leinster. This
prince had been driven out of his realm by his suzerain, Roderic,
King of Connaught, because he had carried off the wife of Roderic's
vassal, O'Rourke, Lord of Breffny. Dermot came to England, and asked
aid of Henry II., who, as we have already seen, had long possessed a
papal Bull, authorizing the conquest of Ireland.[15] Henry would not
stir himself, being in the midst of troubles with the King of France,
but gave the exiled king leave to obtain what help he could from the
English barons. Dermot placed himself in the hands of Richard de Clare,
nicknamed Strongbow, Earl of Pembroke, a warlike but impecunious peer
who had great influence in South Wales. Richard raised a small army
of Anglo-Norman knights and Welsh archers--less than 2000 men in
all--and landed in Ireland to restore Dermot to his throne. He met with
quite unexpected success, sweeping Dermot's enemies out of Leinster,
and conquering the Danish princes of Wexford and Dublin. He married
Dermot's heiress Eva, and on the king's death in 1171 succeeded him
as ruler in his kingdom. Other barons and knights from South Wales
came over to join him, and they obtained a complete mastery over the
native Irish, whose light-armed bands could not resist the charge of
the mail-clad knights or stand before the archers, even when they were
in overwhelming numerical superiority. In a battle before the gates of
Dublin, a few hundred followers of Strongbow routed the whole host of
Roderic of Connaught, though he was supported by a considerable body of
Danish Vikings.
[Sidenote: =Henry invades Ireland in person.=]
Now, Henry did not wish to see one of his vassals building up a great
kingdom in Ireland, independent of his authority. So, taking advantage
of the papal authorization that he had so long kept by him, he crossed
himself in 1171 with a great army and fleet, landed at Waterford,
and marched to Dublin. He had no trouble in getting his authority
recognized. Not only did Strongbow do him homage for the kingdom of
Leinster, but, one after another, most of the native Irish kings came
to his court and paid allegiance to him. From henceforth the Kings of
England might call themselves "Lords of Ireland," but their power in
the island was not very easy to exercise, nor did it extend to the
remoter corners of the land. About half the soil of Ireland was seized
by English and Norman adventurers, who built themselves castles and
held down the Celts around them. The other half, mostly consisting of
the more rugged and barren districts, remained in the hands of the
native chiefs. But the settlers in the course of time intermarried
with the Irish, and adopted many of their customs, so that they
became tribal chiefs themselves. A century later the grudge between
the settlers and the natives was still bitter, but they had become so
closely assimilated that it was hard for a stranger to distinguish
them. The one were as turbulent, clannish, fierce, and barbarous as the
other. Only on the east coast round Dublin, in the district that was
afterwards known as the English 'Pale,' did the Anglo-Irish dwell in a
settled and civilized manner of life, and obey the King of England's
mandates. The larger part of the island had to be reconquered four
centuries after.
Perhaps the only permanent and immediate result of Henry's visit to
Ireland was the submission of the Irish Church to the Pope. In a synod
held at Cashel in 1172, all the bishops of the land acknowledged
the papal supremacy, and abandoned the old customs of their Church.
Thus the papal yoke was the first and most unhappy gift of England to
Ireland.
[Sidenote: =Reconciliation with the Pope.=]
It was on his return from Dublin that King Henry met the legates of
Alexander III. at Avranches, in Normandy, and, on swearing that he had
neither planned nor consented to the murder of Becket, was taken into
the Pope's favour, and received complete absolution. In return, he
promised to go on a crusade, and swore that he would support Alexander
against his enemy the Emperor Frederic I. He also consented to annul
the Constitutions of Clarendon, but did not make any formal surrender
of the principles on which they rested--the right of the State to deal
with ecclesiastical persons guilty of secular offences. Thus ended the
tragedy of Becket's strife with the king; the archbishop had obtained
by his death what he could never win in his life, and the question
between Church and State was left open, instead of being settled, as
had at first seemed likely, in favour of the king.
[Sidenote: =Conspiracy of Princes Henry and Richard.=]
In less than a year after the penance at Avranches, Henry was plunged
into a new sea of troubles, in which the Church party saw the vengeance
of Heaven for the fate of Becket. All these troubles sprang from the
undutiful conduct of Henry's sons, four graceless youths who had been
brought up in the worst of schools by their able but unprincipled
mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Henry, the eldest son, was now in his
nineteenth year; Richard, the second son, in his seventeenth. But, in
spite of their youth, the two boys, encouraged and supported by their
mother, conspired against their father and king. In 1173 Henry fled to
the court of Lewis of France, alleging as his grievance the fact that
the king would not grant him a great appanage--England or Normandy--to
rule in his own right. With the aid of Louis VII, the young Henry
stirred up all the discontented elements in his father's dominions.
He arranged for a simultaneous rising of the discontented barons of
Brittany, Anjou, and Poitou, for a rebellion in England to be headed
by the earls of Leicester, Derby, and Norfolk, and for an invasion of
Northumbria by William, the King of the Scots.
[Sidenote: =Suppression of the rebels.--Moderation of Henry.=]
This widespread conspiracy actually came to a head; but its outbreak
only served to show King Henry's strength and activity. He was
himself in France when the storm burst: taking in hand the work that
lay nearest to him, he put down the Bretons and Angevins, and forced
the King of France to conclude a truce. Then in the winter of 1173-4
he turned upon his son Richard's partisans in Poitou, and, after much
fighting, pacified the land. Meanwhile the king's representative in
England, the Justiciar Richard de Lucy, had called out the levies of
the shires against the revolted barons. The campaign was settled by a
battle at Fornham, in Suffolk, where the rebels were scattered and the
Earl of Leicester taken prisoner. One after another the castles of the
disloyal barons fell, and when England was pacified, Ralf de Glanville
led a force against the Scots, surprised them at Alnwick, and took
their king William the Lion prisoner (1174).
Thus Henry had triumphed over all his foes. In the moment of victory he
showed extraordinary moderation. He neither executed any of the rebels
nor confiscated their lands, but only insisted that all their castles
should be demolished. He gave his sons a full pardon, and restored them
to his favour; with their mother he was far more wroth, and never would
live with her again. The King of the Scots was only released on doing
homage to the English crown, not merely for his earldoms of Huntingdon
and Lothian, which had always been reckoned English fiefs, but for his
whole kingdom of Scotland (1175).
This was Henry's greatest triumph: the danger of feudal anarchy had
once more assailed him, and he had beaten it down with such a firm
hand that England was never troubled again with a purely selfish and
anarchic baronial rising for more than two centuries. But this victory
did not win the king a quiet and glorious end to his reign. His wicked
and ungrateful sons were to be the bane of his elder years.
[Sidenote: =Prosperity and Legislation.--Itinerant justices.--The
fyrd.=]
The effect of the blow that he had dealt his disloyal subjects lasted
about eight years, a period of quiet and prosperity on both sides
of the Channel, during which Henry passed many excellent laws, and
more especially dealt with the administration of justice, arranging
permanent circuits for the itinerant justices who sat in the county
courts to hold the assizes. He also issued regulations for the uniform
arming and mustering of the shire-levies, the old English fyrd which
had served him so well against the rebels in 1173. Abroad he was
universally recognized as the greatest king of the West. He was chosen
as the fairest arbitrator in several disputes between contemporary
princes--even by the distant Kings of Spain. He married his daughters
to the Kings of Castile and Sicily and the great Duke of Saxony, the
chief vassal of the German crown. To each of his sons he promised a
great inheritance: Henry was to have England, Normandy, and Anjou;
Richard was to take his mother's portion in Aquitaine; Geoffrey was
already provided for with his wife's duchy of Brittany: John, the
youngest son, was to be King of Ireland, and the Irish chiefs were made
to do homage to him.
[Sidenote: =Second rebellion of Henry and Geoffrey.=]
All this prosperity lasted till 1183, when Henry was fifty-two, and
his four sons respectively twenty-eight, twenty-six, twenty-four, and
sixteen. Tired of waiting any longer for his inheritance, and forgetful
of the warning that he had received in 1174, Henry the younger once
more took arms against his father: his aider and abettor was the new
King of France, Philip Augustus, the son of Lewis VII., as bitter an
enemy of the Angevin house as his predecessor had been. Henry also
persuaded his brother Geoffrey to bring in the Bretons to his aid.
Richard and John, the king's second and fourth sons, were for the time
being faithful to their father; indeed, the actual _casus belli_, which
Henry the younger published as his justification, was that the king had
unfairly favoured Richard against him. This time the fighting was all
on the continent; the English baronage were too much cowed to stir.
Henry the younger had only been a few months in rebellion when he
died, stricken down by a fever (1183). But the civil war in Aquitaine
did not end with his death; it dragged on its path till Geoffrey, his
accomplice in the rebellion, was accidentally killed at a tournament
three years later (1186). Henry had no issue, but Geoffrey left an
infant heir, the unfortunate Arthur of Brittany, whose sad end was to
shock the succeeding generation.
[Sidenote: =The Third Crusade.--The Saladin tithe.=]
Henry's two rebellious sons being dead, peace was for a time restored
in his continental dominions. Men's minds were turned away for a time
from civil strife by dire news from the East. The Saracens had just
routed the Christian King of Palestine, and recaptured Jerusalem. The
work of the First Crusade was undone, and the Holy Sepulchre and
the True Cross had fallen back into the hands of the infidels. The
nations of the West were profoundly shocked; King Henry, his eldest
surviving son Richard, and his great enemy Philip of France, all swore
to take the cross and go forth to save the wrecks of the kingdom of
Jerusalem from Saladin, the victorious lord of Syria and Egypt. All
their baronage vowed to follow them, and the Great Council of England
voted for the support of the new crusade a heavy tax, the "Saladin
tithe," as it was called, which was to be a tenth of every man's goods
and chattels. This was the first impost levied on personal property,
that is, property other than land, which was ever raised in England.
Previously, the Danegelt and the other taxes that had been raised, were
calculated on landed property alone.
[Sidenote: =Third rebellion of Richard and John.--Death of Henry II.=]
It would have been well for the King of England if his son and his
French neighbour had sailed for the Holy Land in the year that they
made their vow. For another and crowning grief was about to fall upon
Henry. Richard, now his heir, revolted against him, even as Henry
the younger and Geoffrey had done four years before. Like his elder
brother, Richard alleged that his father would not give him enough;
he complained that the king did not allow him to be crowned as his
colleague, and that he made too much of John, the youngest and best
loved of his four sons. The ungrateful conduct of Richard broke Henry's
heart; though only fifty-six years of age, he began visibly to fail
in health and mind. He made little endeavour to resist his son, and
allowed him to overrun Anjou and Maine unopposed. Instead of calling
out all his energies and appealing to the loyalty of his English and
Norman subjects, he cast himself upon his couch and gave himself up to
passionate grief. Rather than take arms against Richard, he determined
to give him all that he asked. So, rising from, his bed, he dragged
himself to Colombières, where he met Richard and the King of France,
and swore to grant all they claimed. It was noticed that his bodily
weakness was so great that his servants had to hold him on his horse
while the interview was taking place. Two days later he expired; the
final death-blow that prostrated him was the discovery of the fact that
his youngest son, John, whom he had believed to the last to be faithful
to him, had secretly aided Richard and joined in the rebellion. For
when he swore to pardon all Richard's accomplices, and was given the
list of their names, he found that of John set at the head of the
catalogue of traitors. "Let things go as they will; I have nothing to
care for in the world now," he said; and, turning his face to the wall,
gave up his spirit (July 7, 1189).
[Sidenote: =Character of Henry II.=]
So died Henry of Anjou, whom after-ages styled Plantagenet.[16] He was
an Englishman neither by birth nor by breeding, and the greater part
of his reign was spent abroad--two years was the longest continuous
stay that he ever made on this side of the Channel. But, foreigner as
he was, he was the best king that England had known since Eadgar, or
that she was to know till Edward I. That he ended the awful anarchy
which had prevailed since the accession of Stephen, was a merit that
should never be forgotten. When the feudal danger was at its greatest,
he boldly faced it, ended private wars, pulled down illegal castles,
and reduced the baronage to its due obedience. And when the land was
subdued beneath his hand he ruled it justly, not as a grasping tyrant,
but as a wise and merciful master. Among the kings of his day he was
conspicuous for two rare virtues, a willingness to pardon and forget,
and a determination to stand firm by the letter of his promise. He
had his faults--a hasty temper, a far-reaching ambition, a tendency
to deal with men as if they were merely counters in the great game of
politics; nor was his private life entirely free from blame. But he
loved order and justice so well, and gave them in such good measure to
his subjects, that his virtues must always outweigh in English minds
his occasional lapses from the right path.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] A royal manor near Salisbury.
[15] See p. 99.
[16] From the sprig of broom (_planta genista_) that his father,
Geoffrey of Anjou, is said to have worn as a badge.