BIOGRAPHYCAL UNIVERSAL LIBRARY

RICHARD THE LION HEART

EARLY PLANTAGENETS.

II

THE EARLY YEARS OF HENRY II.

Very few epochs of history are more clearly marked than the accession of Henry II. Most great eras are determined, and their real importance ascertained, long after the event; the famous Parliament of Simon de Montfort, in 1265, for instance, is scarcely named by the con­temporary historians, and only rises into importance as later history unfolds its real bearings. But the succes­sion of Henry is hailed by the writers of his time as a dawn of hope, a certain omen of restoration and re­freshing. Often and often, it is true, such omens are discerned on the accession of a new king; men hasten to salute the rising sun; good wishes to the new sovereign take the form of prophecy, and, where they are fulfilled, partly help on their own fulfilment. Here, however, we have omens that were amply fulfilled, and an epoch which those who lived in it were the first to recognise. The fact proves how weary England was of Stephen’s incompetency, how thoroughly she had learned the miserable consequences of a feudal system of society unchecked by strong government, how readily she welcomed the young and inexperienced but strong and, in the main, honest rule of Henry.

Henry I was born in 1133; and if we may believe the testimony of Roger Hoveden, who was one of his chaplains, and a very conscientious compiler of histories, he was recognized by Henry . as his successor directly after his birth. When his grandfather died he was two years old. His father and mother made, as we have seen, a very ill-concerted effort to secure the succession, and it was not until the boy was eight years old that the struggle for the crown really began. In 1141 he was brought to England; then no doubt he learned a dutiful hatred of Stephen, and was trained in the use of arms; but whether he received his training under his father in France or under his uncle, Robert of Gloucester, in England, or under his great uncle, David of Scotland, we are not told. Only we know that, when he was sixteen, he was knighted at Carlisle by King David; that, like a wise boy, he determined to secure his French dominions before he attempted the recovery of England; that he suc­ceeded to Normandy and Anjou in 1151, when he was eighteen; married his wife, the Duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine who had been divorced from Lewis VII, and secured her inheritance, when he was nineteen; that he came again to England and forced Stephen to submit to terms when he was twenty; and that at the age of twenty-one he succeeded him on the throne in pursuance of those terms. These dates are sufficient to prove that, although Henry might have got considerable experience in arms as a boy and young man, he could scarcely have had yet the education of a lawgiver. Somewhat of politics he might have learnt, but he had not had time or opportunity to learn a regular theory of policy, or to create a method of government which, when the time for action came, he might put into execution. The extraordinary power which he showed when the time for action really arrived was in part a gift of genius; partly too it arose from his wisdom in choosing experienced advisers, and partly it was an effect of his following the broad lines of his grandfather’s administrative reforms.

Henry II was a very great sovereign in many ways: he was an admirable soldier, most careful in forming plans, wonderfully rapid in the execution of  them; he was at once cautious  and adventurous, sparing of human life and moderate in the use of victory. Yet he was far from being a mild or gentle enemy; and he was economical of human life rather because of its cost in money than from any pitifulness. If he spared an enemy it was only when he had entirely disabled him from doing harm, or when he was fully assured of his power to turn him into a friend. His foes accused him of being treacherous, but his treachery mainly consisted in letting them deceive themselves. Thus he was no hero of probity, and his craft may have gone farther in the direction of cunning than was approved by the rough diplomacy of his time. He is said to have had a maxim, that it is easier to repent of words than of deeds, and therefore wiser to break your word than to fulfil an inconvenient obligation; but it cannot be said that the facts of history show him to have acted upon this shameless avowal, captious and unscrupulous as his policy more than once appears. He had no doubt a difficult part to play. His dominions brought him into close contact with all the great sovereigns of Europe. He had considerable ambitions—for himself, to hold fast all that he had acquired by inheritance and marriage; for his sons to obtain by marriage or other settlement provinces which, united to their hereditary provision, might make them either a family of allied sovereigns oi an imperial federation under himself, and in each form the mightiest house in Christendom. Such a network oi design was spread before him from the first. As the head of the house of Anjou the kings and princes of Palestine regarded him as their family representative, the grandson of King Fulk, and the man created for the reconquest of the East. To him in their utmost need they sent the offer of their crown, the keys of the Holy Sepulchre and of the Tower of David. As the head of the Normans he was looked up to by the Sicilian king as the presumptive successor, and had the strange fortune and self-restraint to decline the offer of a second crown. The Italians thought him a likely competitor for the empire when they saw him negotiating for his son John a marriage with the heiress of Savoy, which would give him the command of the passes of the Alps; Spain saw in him the leader of a new crusade against the Moors when he sought for his son Richard a bribe in the Princess of Aragon, whose portion would give him the passes of the Pyrenees. Frederick Barbarossa might well feel suspicious when he heard that English gold was given to build the walls of Milan, and when he remembered that Henry the Lion, the great Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, the head of the Welfic house, his cousin and friend, whom with heavy heart he had sacrificed to the necessities of state, was also son-in-law of the king of the English. So wide a system of foreign alliances and designs helped to make Henry both cautious and crafty.

Nearer home his ability was tasked by Lewis VII, whose whole policy consisted in a habit of pious falsehood, who really acted upon the principle which Henry ironically formulated, and who by either cowardice or faithlessness made himself far more dangerous than by his strength.

Henry was a kind and loving father, but his political game led him to sacrifice the real interest of his children to the design for their advancement. They soon found out that he used them like chess-men, and could not see the love which prompted his design. To his people he was a politic ruler, a great reformer and discipliner; not a hero or patriot, but a far-seeing king who recognized that the well-being of the nation was the surest founda­tion of his own power. As a lawgiver or financier, or supreme judge, he made his hand felt everywhere; and at the beginning of his reign, when the need of the reforms was forcibly impressed on the minds of his subjects by their recent misery, his reforms were welcomed ; he was popular and beloved. By and by, when he had educated a new generation, and when the dark cloud of sin and sorrow and ingratitude settled down upon him, they forgot what he had done in his early days; but they never forgot how great a king he was. We may not say that he was a good man; but his temptations were very great, and he was sinned against very much by his wife and children. It is only in a secondary sense that he was a good king, for he loved his power first and his people only second; but he was good so far as selfish wisdom and deep insight into what is good for them could make him. In his early years he gave promise of something more than this, and some share of the blame that attends his later shortcomings must rest with those who scrupled at nothing that might humiliate and disappoint him.

In appearance, we are told, Henry was a tall, stout man with a short neck, and projecting but very expressive eyes; he was a careless dresser, a great hunter, a man of business rather than a model of chivalry; capable of great exertion, moderate in meat and drink, and anything but extravagant in personal as opposed to official expenditure. He was a builder of halls and castles, not very much of churches; but that may easily be accounted for. We are glad to have him pictured for us even with this scanty amount of detail, for he is well worth the trouble of an attempt at least to realize his outward presentment. Everyone knows Henry VIII by sight; it might be as well if we had as definite an impression of Henry II.

We have observed, in sketching the close of the last reign, the existence of certain terms by which Henry and Stephen, after or in preparation for the peace of November 1153, agreed that the country should be governed. Those terms are not preserved in any formal document, but they occur in two or three of the historians of the time, in a somewhat poetical garb, disguised in language adapted partly from the prophecies of Merlin, king Arthur’s seer, which were in vogue at the time, and partly from the words of Holy Scripture; and yet, from the clue they furnish to the reforms actually carried out by Henry, they seem to be based upon certain real articles of agreement.

By these terms the administration of justice was to be restored, sheriffs to be appointed to the counties, and a careful examination into their honesty and justice to be instituted; the castles which had been built since the death of Henry I were to be destroyed; the coinage was to be renewed, a uniform silver currency of lawful weight; the mercenaries who had flooded the kingdom under Stephen were to be sent back to their own countries ; the estates which had been usurped were to go to their lawful owners; all property alienated from the crown was to be resumed, especially the pensions on the Exchequer with which Stephen endowed his newly-created earls; the royal demesnes were to be re-stocked, the flocks to return to the hills, the husbandman to the plough, the merchant to his wares; the swords were to be turned into ploughshares and the spears into pruning-hooks.

These sentences give ns a clue to Henry’s reforms; that is, they show us clearly the evils that first called for his attention. The kingdom, divided in two these under Stephen, had been in constant war; the barons on one side had entered on the lands of the barons on the other; Stephen had confiscated the estates of Matilda’s friends in the East of England, Matilda had retaliated or authorized reprisals in the West. All this must be set right. The crown had been the greatest loser, and the impoverishment of the crown involved the oppression of the people. Henry gained the crown by a national act; he must then resume not only the wasteful grants of Stephen but those of his mother also, and, in his character of king, know neither friends nor foes amongst his own people. So the Exchequer, the board which managed the royal revenue, must be placed on its old footing, and under its old managers. With the Exchequer would revive the ancient office of the sheriffs, to whom both the collection of revenue, the administration of justice in the shires, and the maintenance of the military force was entrusted. Thus local security would restore and revive trade and commerce. And when the local administration of the sheriff was revived, no doubt the feudal usurpations of the lords of castles and manors must end. The fortified houses must be pulled down; no more should the petty tyrants tax and judge their men, fight their battles like independent princes, and coin their money as so many kings. The great Peace should be restored, of which the king was guardian and keeper. In fact, the golden age was to return. Nor was it to be delayed until Henry came to the crown; it was to be Stephen’s last and expiatory task to bring about these happy results. Stephen, as we saw, wanted either the will or the power to accomplish it.

Stephen died on October 25, 1154. Henry was in France at the time, and was not able, owing to the weather, to reach England before December 8. During this time the management of affairs rested with Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury, and in some measure perhaps with his secretary, Thomas Becket, who had been so busy negotiating the succession of Henry. Although it was the theory that during the va­cancy of the throne all law and police were suspended, and no one could be punished for offences committed in a general abeyance of justice, the country remained quiet during these six weeks. Perhaps the rogues were cowed by the apprehension of a strong king coming, perhaps the religious obedience inculcated by the archbishop was really maintained; perhaps the same bad weather that kept Henry in Normandy kept thieves and robbers within doors. Nor was there any political rising during the interregnum. Stephen’s children were not thought of, at least on this side of the Channel, as rivals to Henry. The Bishop of Winchester had learnt moderation, that might in him well pass for wisdom; he might well feel that his position was a hazardous one, to be maintained only by caution; and he had no reason, nor excuse for seeking a reason, for evading the compact which he had had a chief hand in making. It shows, however, his import­ance that as soon as Henry landed, which he did neat Southampton, he hastened to Winchester, and there visited his powerful kinsman, who, as we learn, was now busily employed in collecting statues and sculpture from southern Europe, and with whom he made a friendship which, although once or twice seriously endangered, was never actually broken. Amongst the other leaders who likewise had learned wisdom we must count the Empress Matilda, who, strange to say, appears to us no more as the arrogant, self-willed virago, but as a sage politician and a wise, modest, pious old lady, living at Rouen, and ruling Normandy in the name of her son with prudent counsel. Not a word is said now of her succeeding to the throne or even resigning her rights to Henr; all that was regarded as arranged by the settlement made with Stephen. Henry succeeded without a competitor. Stephen’s minister, Richard de Lucy, became his minister. Theobald continued to be, as his office made him, the great constitutional adviser; and to reconcile personal convenience with constitutional precedent, he presented his secretary to the king as his future Chan­cellor. Thomas Becket thus entered on his high and fatal office.

All this done, Henry appeared at Westminster on the 19th of December, and was there crowned with the ceremonies observed at his grand­father’s coronation, now more than half a century past, and bound himself by the same ancient and solemn promises which Ethelred had made to Dunstan, and which the Conqueror, Henry I, and Stephen had renewed. Nor, when crowned, did he lose a moment: he issued a charter, as Stephen had done, at his coronation, confirming his grandfather’s laws. The same week he held a great court and council at Bermondsey. At once he re­established the Exchequer, recalling to the head of it Bishop Nigel of Ely, whom Stephen had displaced in 1140, and setting at work at once with the business of the revenue. From this court at Bermondsey went forth the decree that the Flemish and other foreign mercenaries should leave the kingdom at once, and that the castles built under Stephen should be thrown down. The mercenaries fled forthwith. Their presence was perhaps the most offensive of all insults to the national pride, and the late reign had taught Normans and Englishmen that they had now a common nationality in suffering, if not in conquest. By this article of the agreement Henry faithfully stood. Although he fought all his foreign wars with mercenaries, he never but once—and that in the greatest emergency, and to repel foreign mercenaries brought against him by the rebellious earls in 1174—introduced any such force into England. Even Richard employed in the kingdom no more foreigners than formed his ordinary surroundings, and it is not until John’s reign that we find the country again oppressed and insulted by hired foreign soldiery.

The demolition of the castles, which one contemporary writer reckons at three hundred and seventy-five, another a little later at eleven hundred and fifteen, was a still greater boon; for these, had they been suffered to stand, would not only have fitted England to be a constant scene of civil war, but have continued to afford to their owners a shadow of claim for the exercise of those feudal jurisdictions which on the Continent made every baron a petty despot. Castles were unfortunately hot entirely destroyed at this time; the older strongholds, which had been built under Henry, were untouched, and gave trouble enough in the one civil war that marks the reign; but the legal misuse of them was abolished, and they ceased to be centres of feudal lawlessness.

Another measure which must have been taken at the coronation, when all the recognised earls did their homage and paid their ceremonial services, seems to have been the degrading or cashiering of the supposititious earls created by Stephen and Matilda. Some of these may have obtained recognition by getting new grants; but those who lost endowment and dignity at once, like William of Ypres, the leader of the Flemish mercenaries, could make no terms. They sank to the rank from which they had been so incautiously raised.

The resumption of royal estates, and the restoration of the dispossessed on each side, was probably a much more difficult business than the humiliation of the earls. Doubtless the enemies of Henry’s mother would bear their reverses silently, to avoid entire ruin; or only those would think of continuing in opposition who had no hope but in terms which might be granted to pertinacious resistance; but Matilda’s supporters might well think it hard that they should be called upon to resign their hard-won gains. Still, Henry was a national king  the resumption of domain was not an Angevin conquest; it was a national restora­tion of the state of affairs as it stood before the beginning of the national quarrel. As a matter of fact only two or three of the nobles made any resistance. William of Aumale, the Lord of Holderness, who of William had commanded at the Battle of the Stand­ard, and who played the part of a petty king in York­shire, objected to surrender his great castle at Scarborough. He, of course, had been on Stephen’s side, and was, indeed, a member of the House of Champagne—the son of that Count Stephen who had been brought forward by the Norman earls as competitor with William Rufus. Of Matilda’s old friends, Hugh Mortimer, the lord of Wigmore, and Roger of Hereford, the son of Miles the Constable, declined to submit. The King of Scots too, Malcolm IV, grandson of King David and half-cousin of Henry, although the Northern counties had been held in trust for Henry, wished to retain them for himself. In January, 1155, however, Henry marched northwards and brought the Count of Aumale to his feet. In March he was at London holding council for the restoration of peace and the confirmation of the ancient laws. He declared that neither friend nor foe should be spared. Roger of Hereford immediately surrendered. Hugh of Mortimer still held out, and did not submit until Henry had called out the national force for the capture of Bridgenorth. On exactly the same ground it was that Henry I, had won his victory over Robert of Belesme, when in 1102 he laid the axe to the tree of feudal misrule, and his subjects, rejoicing at the overthrow of the oppres­sor, hailed him as now for the first time a king. This was accomplished in July. And this was a permanent pacification; it was nearly twenty years before anything like rebellion reared its head.

The history of the first year of Henry’s reign is not, however, filled up thus. He restored the administration of justice, and sent itinerant members of his judicial court to enforce the law which had been so long in abeyance. He himself learned the law as an apt scholar. Even at Bridgenorth he found time to hear suits brought before him as supreme judge; at Nottingham, whilst he was on his way from Scarborough, he threatened William Peverell with a charge of having poisoned the Earl of Chester. The very threat caused Peverell to take refuge in a monastery. He held council after council, taking advice from his elders, and making friends everywhere. In one assembly held at Wallingford after Easter he obtained the recognition of his little son William, who afterwards died, as his suc­cessor. In another, held at Winchester, at Michaelmas, he proposed that the conquest of Ireland should be at­tempted and a kingdom founded there for his brother William. The empress objected to this, and it was given up, at least during her life, although the English Pope, Adrian IV, by his famous Bull Laudabiliter, issued about this time, was already anxious to give the papal authorization to a scheme that would complete the symmetrical conforma­tion of Western Christendom. A national expedition, Henry may have thought, would do more than anything else to consolidate the national unity which was growing rapidly into more than a name. But clearly the time was not come for England, shorn of her Northern provinces, and with the Welsh unsubdued, to attempt foreign conquest; and Henry had other states besides England to take thought for.

The whole of the next year he had to spend in Normandy and Anjou, and, when he returned in 1157, he found abundant work ready for his hands in his still undetermined relations with Wales and Scotland. His first visit was to the Eastern counties, and there he combined business with pleasure. William of Warenne, Count of Boulogne and Earl of Surrey, the son of Stephen, had received a considerable estate in Norfolk, including the castle of Norwich; and Hugh Bigot, the earl of the county of Norfolk, the same Hugh who had sworn that Henry I, disinherited the empress, was very reluctant to strong rule of the new king. Whether Hugh was now acting on behalf of Stephen’s family or in opposition to them is not clear. It was his attitude that drew the king into that country. He was made to surrender his castles; and William of Warenne likewise surrendered his special provision, on the understanding that he was to receive his hereditary estates. Henry added solemnity to this visit by holding a solemn court and wearing his crown in state on Whit-Sunday, at St. Edmund’s, the second recorded coronation-day of the reign. This ceremony was a revival of the great courts held by the Conqueror and his sons on the great festivals, Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide, at Gloucester, Westminster, and Winchester, the three chief cities of the South. At such gatherings all the great men attended, both witan and warriors, clerk and lay. The king heard the complaints of his subjects, and decided their suits with the advice of his wise men; the feudal services, by which the great estates were held, were solemnly rendered ; a special peace was set, the breakers of which within the purlieus of the court were liable to special penalties; and during the gathering, whilst the people were amused and humored by the show, the king and his really trusted advisers contrived the despatch of business. The ceremony of corona­tion, which gave the name to these courts, was not, as is sometimes supposed, a repetition of the formal rite of initiation by which the king at his accession received the authorization of God through the hands of the bishops; the character so impressed was regarded as indelible, and hence the only way of disposing of a bad king was to kill him. That rite, the solemn consecration and unction, was incapable of being repeated. The crown was, however, on these occasions placed on the king’s head in his chamber by the archbishop of Canterbury, with special prayers, and the court went in procession to mass, where the king made his offering, and afterwards the barons did their services, as at the real coronation. These courts had been given up by Stephen, as the historian Henry of Huntingdon notes with an expressive lamentation, in the year 1140, when the clergy ceased to attend them; and he had made only one unlucky attempt, the Lincoln coronation, in 1147, to revive them. Henry, however, renewed the custom on this occasion, and twice after this we find it observed. At the Christmas of this year he was crowned at Lincoln, but not, like Stephen, in the cathedral, for he feared the omen ; and at Easter 1158 he was crowned at Worcester. After that he never actually wore the crown again, although he did occasionally hold these formal courts, in order to receive the honorary services by which his courtiers held their estates. This coronation, then, at St. Edmund’s was, as usual, turned to purposes of business. The king was ready for a Welsh war ; measures were taken for providing men and money.

At another council, held in July, at Northampton, the expedition started. This was Henry’s first Welsh war, and it was no great success. The army advanced into North Wales; at Consilt, near Flint, an awkward pass, they were resisted by the Welsh. There Henry of Essex, the Constable, let fall the royal standard, as he declared, by accident. The army, thinking that the king was killed or the battle lost, fell into confusion, and the day was claimed by the Welsh as a victory. That it was merely a misfortune of little importance is proved by the fact that Henry continued his march to Rhuddlan. The ostensible pretext of the expedition being to arrange a quarrel between Owen Gwynneth and his brother Cadwalader, there was no overt attempt at conquest. The king returned from Wales into Nottinghamshire to meet the young Malcolm IV, who seems at this time to have finally surrendered his hold on the Northern counties. At Christmas Henry was at Lincoln.

In 1158 he wore his crown, as we have seen, at Easter, at Worcester ; in the summer he went into Cumberland, no doubt to set the machinery of government at work there in due order after the change of rulers; and at Carlisle on Midsummer-day he conferred knighthood on William of Warenne. In August he went to France, whence he did not return until January, 1163. This brings us to the point of time at which the struggle with Becket begins, to which, with its attendant circumstances, we may devote another chapter.

We may, therefore, now take up the thread of the foreign transactions at the beginning of the reign and bring it down to the same point. The geographical extent of Henry’s dominions furnishes the leading clue to this part of his history. They embraced, speaking roughly and roundly, Normandy, Maine, Touraine, Anjou, Guienne, Poictou, and Gascony. But this statement has to be accepted with some very important limitations. In the first place, each of these states, and each bundle of them, had come to him in a different way—some from his father, some from his mother, some by his wife—and each bundle had been got together by those from whom he received it in similar ways. The result of that was that in each state or bundle of states there was a distant relation be­tween the lord and his vassals—a constitution, we might call it, by which various rights and privileges and a varying legal system or customs subsisted, What was law in Normandy was not customary in Anjou; and the barons of Poictou had, or claimed, customs which must, if they could have enforced them, have produced utter anarchy. Here was a constant and abundant source of administrative diffi­culties, the adjustment of which was one of the causes of Henry’s long absence from England. But a second incidental result was, that, as many of these estates came into the common inheritance on very deficient title, conquest in one case, chicanery in another, there were a number of claimants in each, claimants who by prescriptive right might have lost all chance of recovering their lands, but whose very existence gave trouble. In Anjou, for instance, Henry had to contend against his own brother Geoffrey, to whom their father had left certain cities, and who might have a claim to the whole county. In Normandy the heirs of Stephen claimed the county of Mortain; in Maine, Saintonge, and other Southern provinces, there were the remnants of older dynasties, always ready to give trouble

But further than this, the feudal law, as it was then recognized fin France, gave the king, in his manifold capacities as king, duke, and count, certain rights and certain obligations that are puzzling now, and must have been actually bewildering then. Henry, as Duke of Normandy, inherited the relation, entered into by his ancestor Duke Richard the Fearless, of vassal to the Duke of the Franks ; but the Duke of the Franks had now become King of France. It was a serious question how the duties of vassalage were to be defined. As Duke of Normandy also he had a right to the feudal superiority of Brittany. Yet it was no easy thing to say how Brit­tany could be made to act in case of a quarrel between king and duke. The tie which bound him as Count of Anjou was different from that which bound him as Duke of Normandy to the same King of France. As Count of Poitiers he was feudally bound to the Duke of Aquitaine, but he was himself duke of Aquitaine, unless he chose to regard his wife as duchess and himself as count, in which case he would be liable to do feudal service to his wife only, and she would be responsible for the ser­vice to the King of France; a very curious relation for a lady who had been married to both. We do not, however, find, that this contrivance was employed by Henry himself, although it was used by John. And this same point of difficulty arose everywhere. The feudal rights of Aquitaine—the right, that is, to demand homage and service—extended far beyond the limits of the sovereign authority of the dukes, and it was always an object to ' turn a claim of overlordship into an actual exercise of sovereign authority. The tie between the great county of Toulouse and the duchy of Aquitaine was complicated both by legal difficulty and by questions of descent. The rights over Auvergne, claimed by both the king and the duke, were so complex as to be the matter of continual arbitration, and at last were left to settle themselves.

And to these must be added, in the third place, local and personal questions  local, such as arose from uncertain boundaries, the line which separated Normandy from France, the Norman from the French Vexin, being perhaps the chief; personal, arising from the enmity between Eleanor and her first husband, from the attitude of the house of Champagne, from which Louis VII had selected his third wife, and which had the wrongs of Stephen to avenge. The Count of Flanders also was a pertinacious enemy of Henry.

Under these circumstances it is not difficult to see that Henry’s policy, however ambitious he might be, was peace; at all events, peace long enough to consolidate his dominions and crush antagonism in detail. And this must account for the fact that, with the exception of the war of Toulouse, in which Louis VII took part, not as a principal but as an ally of the count, there was no overt war between Eleanor’s two husbands until it was produced by an entirely new quarrel. It could not be expected that there should be any love or friendship, but there was peace. Henry’s policy was peace; Lewis was averse to war, having neither skill nor resources. All Henry’s French campaigns, then, during this period were occasioned by the circumstances which have been thus stated. The object of the war of 1156 was, sad to say, the subjugation of Geoffrey of Nantes, the king’s own brother, who sub­mitted to him, after he had taken his castles one by one, in the July of that year, and who died two years after. The business of 1158 v/as to secure the territories that Geoffrey had left without heirs, and, that done, to prepare for the enforcement of Eleanor’s claims on Toulouse.

The war of Toulouse, with its preparations and results, occupied the greater part of 1159, although the campaign itself was short. Henry had assembled his full court of vassals. William of Warenne, the son of Stephen, and Malcolm, King of Scots, followed him as his liegemen rather than as allies. Becket, as his Chancellor, came with an equipment not inferior to that of any of his earls and counts. Alto­gether it was a very splendid and expensive affair. The king marched to Toulouse; but at Toulouse was his enemy, his friend, his lord, his wife’s first husband. Henry could not proceed to extremes against the man whom in his youthful sincerity he still recognized as his feudal lord, and whose personal humiliation would have degraded the idea of royalty, of which he was himself so proud. So he left Becket to continue the siege and returned westward. The French were attempting a diversion on the Norman frontier. Toulouse, therefore, was not taken. Towards the end of the year a truce was made with Lewis, and early in 1160 the truce was turned into an alliance. But the alliance brought with it the seeds of new and more fatal divisions.

We have noted the way in which Henry used his children as his tools or as the counters of his game. He began with them very young. His eldest child, William, to whom we have seen homage done immediately after the coronation, died very soon after, and Henry, who was born in February, 1155, and had received conditional homage when he was two months old, now became the heir apparent. The next child was a daughter, Matilda, born in 1156; in 1157 Richard was born, at either Oxford or Woodstock; Geoffrey, the next brother, came in 1158; then Eleanor, in 1162; Johanna, in 1165; and last of all John, in 1167. On Henry’s attempts to provide for these children hangs nearly all the interest of his foreign wars; and the marriages of the daughters form a key to the history of the foreign policy of England and her alliances for many ages.

The game may be considered to begin with Richard, who at the age of a year was betrothed to the daughter of Raymond of Barcelona and Queen Petronilla of Aragon. This was done, it appears, to bind the count and queen either to help or to stand neutral in the war of Toulouse. The betrothal came to nothing. Henry, the elder brother, was the next victim. The peace of 1160 assigned him, at the age of five, as husband to the little lady Margaret of France, Lewis’s daughter by his second wife, Constance of Castile. This marriage was not only to seal the peace but to secure to Henry a good frontier between Normandy and France. The castles of Gisors and Neafle, and the county of the Vexin, which lay between Normandy and Paris, were to be Margaret’s portion, not to be surrendered until the marriage could be formally celebrated, and until then to remain in the custody of the Templars. Henry, however, did not stick at trifles. The little Margaret had been put into his hands to learn English or Norman ways. He had the marriage celebrated between the two children, and then prevailed on the Templars to surrender the castles. Lewis never forgave that, and the Vexin quarrel remained an open sore during the rest of the reing; for after the death of the younger Henry his rights were transferred to Richard by another unhappy marriage contract with another of Lewis’s daughters. Practically the question was settled by the betrayal of Gisors to Philip, by Gilbert of Vacoeuil, whilst Richard, was in Palestine; but the struggle continued until John finally lost not only the Vexin but Normandy itself and all else that he had to lose. For the present, however, the outbreak of war, to which Henry’s sharp practice led, was only a brief one. Henry was successful, and peace was concluded in August, 1161. The year 1162 he spent in Normandy, holding councils and organizing the administration of the duchy, as he had done that of the kingdom in his first year.

During the whole of this long absence from England the country was governed by Richard de Lucy and Earl Robert of Leicester, as the king’s chief justices or justiciars; the little Henry taking his father’s place on occasions of ceremony, when he happened to be in England. The historians of these years tell us little or nothing of what was going on. There were no wars or revolts; abbots and bishops died and their successors were appointed; notably the good Archbishop Theobald, to whom Henry owed so much, died in 1161, and Becket succeeded him.

From other sources we learn that Henry’s legal reforms were in full operation. He had restored the machinery of the Exchequer, and with it the method of raising revenue which had been arranged in his grandfather’s time. That revenue arose, firstly, from the rent of the counties; that is, the sum paid by the sheriffs as royal stewards; by way of composition for the rents of royal lands in the shire, and the ordinary proceeds of the fines and other payments made in the ancient shiremoot or county court; secondly, from the Danegeld, a tax of two shillings on the hide of land, originally levied as tribute to the Danes under Ethelred, but continued, like the Income Tax, as a convenient ordinary resource; thirdly, from the feudal revenue, arising from the profits of marriages, wardships, transfers of land, successions, and the like, and from the aids demanded by the king from the several barons or communities that owed him feudal support. To these we may add a fourth source, the proceeds of courts of justice, held by the king’s officers to determine causes for which the ancient popular courts were not thought competent; such as began with suits between the king’s immediate dependents, and by degrees extended to all the civil and criminal jurisdiction of the country. Judicature and finance were thus bound very closely together; the sheriffs were not only tax-gatherers but executors of the law, and every improvement in the law was made to increase the income of the Exchequer. To this we must attribute the means taken by Henry to administer justice in the counties, sending some of the chief members of his judicial staff, year after year, through the country, forcing their way into the estates and castles of the most despotic nobles, and spreading the feeling of security together with the sense of loyalty, and the conviction that ready justice was well worth the money that it seemed to cost. Besides the revival of the provincial judicature in this shape Henry, from the beginning of the reign, added form and organization to the proceedings of his supreme court of justice, which comes into prominence later on.

Next to these his most important measure was the institution or expansion of what is called Scutage. According to the ancient English law every freeman was bound to serve in arms for the defence of his country. That principle Henry only meddled with so far as to direct and improve it. But, according to the feudal custom, quite irrespective of this, every man who held land to the amount of twenty pounds’ worth of annual value was obliged to perform or furnish the military service of a knight to his immediate lord. This kept the barons always at the head of bodies of' trained knights, who might be regarded as ultimately a part of the king’s army, but in case of a rebellion would probably fight for their immediate lord. Henry, by allowing his vassals to commute their military service for a money payment, went a long way to disarm this very untrustworthy body; and with the money so raised he hired stipendiaries, with whom he fought his Continental wars. He began to act on this principle in the first year of his reign, when he made the bishops, notwithstanding strong objections from Archbishop Theobald, pay scutage for their lands held by knight-service. But in 1159 he extended the plan very widely, and took money instead of service from the whole of his dominions, compelling his chief lords to serve in person, but hiring, with the scutages of the inferior tenants, a splendid army of mercenaries, with which he fought the war of Toulouse.

By thus disarming the feudal potentates, and forcing his judges into their courts, he completed the process by which he intended to humiliate them. Feudalism in England, after the reign of Henry II, never reared its head so high as to be again formidable.

Other results incidentally followed from the special measures by which this great end was secured; the more thorough amalgamation of the still unfused nationalities of Norman and Englishman followed from a state of things in which both were equal before the law, and the distinctions or privileges of national blood were no longer recognized among free men. The diminution of military power in the hands of the territorial lords left the maintenance of peace and the defence of the country to be undertaken, as it had been of old, by the community of free Englishmen, locally trained, and armed according to their substance. This created or revived a strong warlike spirit for all national objects, without inspiring the passion for military exploit or glory, which is the bane of what is called a military nation. On the national character, thus in a state of formation, the idea that law is and ought to be supreme was now firmly impressed; and although the further development of the governmental system fur­nished employment for Henry’s later years, and was never neglected, even in the busiest and unhappiest period of his reign, it may be fairly said that the foundation was laid in the comparative peace and industry of these early years. At the age of thirty Henry had been nearly nine years a king, and had already done a work for which England can never cease to be grateful.

EARLY PLANTAGENETS

III.

HENRY II AND THOMAS BECKET.