EARLY PLANTAGENETS.

IV.

THE LATTER YEARS OF HENRY II.

 

 

 

It is one of the most distinct marks of Henry’s mind, that whatever pressure his most engrossing employments put upon him, he never for a moment gave up the task of developing the great legal reforms with which he began his reign. Even at the siege of Bridgenorth, in 1155, he had lent an ear to the suit of the monks of Battle; in the very thick of the Becket struggle he was busily employed in reforming the criminal law and introducing or expanding the system of presentment by grand jury. The same purpose is constantly maintained, and every great and famous exploit of his adventurous life may be matched with some measure of practical reform, some step in the progress of a policy by which his people were to be made safer and his own power consequently to be made stronger. Throughout the whole reign there may be traced a constant and progressive policy of taking power out of the hands of the great vassals of the crown, of entrusting power to the great body of the freemen of the nation, and of consolidating the royal authority by employing the people in the maintenance of law. The blow struck at the military power of feudalism by the institution of scutage, the commutation of personal service in the field for a money payment, was one of the first of his distinctive measures. The judicial power of the same body he limited, quite as much, by the mission of itinerant judges throughout the country to hear the suits of the people and to punish criminals. These visitations had been practised under Henry I; they were restored by Henry II, at the beginning of the reign. These officers were employed not only for the trial of prisoners and determination of lawsuits, but for the assessment and collection of revenue. When the national council had decreed a tax, the itinerant judges, as Barons of the Exchequer, travelled through the land, fixing the payments to be made by the towns or by individuals. It was not a very difficult business, for as all the revenue was raised from the land and the land remained divided in much the same proportions as it was in the Domesday Book, that famous record became, as it were, the rate-book of the country; every land-owner could refer to it, to see what was the valuation of his property, and be taxed accordingly. Only the towns, therefore, which had grown in wealth and number since the time of the Conqueror’s survey, would have occasion for debating with the judges how much they would have to pay. Almost every year of Henry’s reign we find these officers making their circuits, which are the historical origin of the circuits of the Judges of Assize in the present day. Sometimes, in the earlier part of the reign, one or two go over the whole country; sometimes six circuits are made, each managed by three judges; sometimes four circuits of four, or two circuits of five or more. The chief epochs of this development are these: the year 1166, when the Assize of Clarendon was published; the year 1176, when six circuits of three justices did the work under a revised form of the Assize of Clarendon, issued at Northampton; and the year 1179, when Henry re­formed the central as well as the provincial tribunals.

 

Of the effects of this system one, the abatement of the power of the feudal courts of justice by forcing them under royal jurisdiction, has been noticed already. A second was the training of the people in seif people generally, through the use of juries which were employed both for legal and fiscal business; they thus learned to manage their own affairs and to keep up an intelligent interest in legislation and political business. A third was, to limit the power of the sheriffs, who being the sole royal representatives in the shires, judicial, military, and fiscal, had great chances of exercising irresponsible tyranny, of which the books of the time contain many complaints. Besides the visitations of the judges Henry from time to time used still stronger measures of remedy or precaution against the oppressions of the sheriffs. In 1170 he turned them all out of office, and held a very strict inquiry into the amount of money they had received, filling up their places with servants and officers of his own court, by whose action the local government would be placed in more direct relation to the central.

Nor were these labors solely directed to the reform of provincial jurisdiction. Henry II reformed also the supreme court of justice, which was supposed to emanate from his own person and household, and established a distinct staff of well-instructed lawyers to hear the suits that were sent up for his royal decision. These men he found it hard work to manage, and once in 1178 he swept them all away as summarily as he had done the sheriffs in 1170. Sometimes he employed clerks, sometimes knights, sometimes prelates, in the office of judge, with unequal success, but with a never-faltering purpose of securing easy justice.

 

In the same way he varied the taxes, from year to year, not allowing the same interest to be oppressed with continual imposts, but taking now a tallage from the towns, now a scutage or an aid from the land-owners or knightly body; and on the occasion of the Crusade, in 1184 and 1188, calling for a contribution from personal property, a fixed proportion or a tithe of goods for the war against Saladin.

 

In order finally to secure the defence of the country, and to have a force on which he could depend for the maintenance of peace and order, he armed the whole free population, or ordered them to provide arms, according to a fixed scale, proportioned to their substance. Thus he restored the ancient Anglo-Saxon militia system, and supplied the requisite counter-balance to the military power of the great feudatories, which, notwithstanding the temptation to avoid service by payment of scutage, they were still able and too willing to maintain. In all these measures we may trace one main object, the strengthening of the royal power, and one main means or directing principle, the doing so by increasing the safety and security of the people. Whatever was done to help the people served to reduce the power of the great feudal baronage; to disarm their forces, to abolish their jurisdictions, to di­minish their chances of tyranny. Now all this could not but make Henry very much disliked by the great nobles. The people of course were slow to see the benefit of the reforms, but the barons were quick enough at de­tecting the measures taken to humiliate and reduce them; so, before Henry gained the affection of the peo­ple, he had to encounter the hostility of the barons.

 

This hostility had been growing for a long time, awaiting the opportunity of breaking out into open revolt. Such an opportunity the shock which followed the death of Becket gave it; and the very same measure taken by Henry, which in its results caused the death of Becket, gave a head and a direction, nominally at least, to the outbreak. This measure was the coronation of the boy Henry in 1170. The idea of having the heir-apparent crowned in his father’s life-time was not familiar to the English or Normans; the royal succession still retained so much of the elective character that it would perhaps have been regarded as an unconstitutional measure, thus violently and without option to determine the succession irrevocably before the vacancy occurred. Much of the interest of the reigns of William Rufus and Henry I turns upon this question. William the Conqueror and William Rufus both left the succession undetermined; hence arose the rebellions of the reign of the Red King and the early struggles of Henry I. The measures by which he had done everything in his power to. secure and settle it had ended in the anarchy under Stephen. But in France and Germany this experiment, now tried for securing the hereditary succession, was familiar; almost every one of the kings who followed Hugh Capet had had his son crowned in his life-time; and in Germany since the very beginning of the Carolingian empire such cases had been frequent. Frederick Barbarossa at this very moment was working for the succession of his own son; and the introduction of a second or inchoate partner in sovereignty, under the name of King of the Romans, became later on a part of the ordinary machinery of the empire. It is possible that Henry II. had this object solely and simply in view; but another theory is conceivable.

 

Henry well knew by what very discordant nationalities his states were peopled; and he entertained the idea of dividing his dominions among his sons at his death. To Richard, the second son, as his mother’s heir, Aquitaine and Poictou were already given; for Geoffrey he had obtained the succession to the duchy of Brittany, and he was thinking of Ireland to be conquered for a kingdom for John. Henry, the eldest son, would of course have his father’s inheritance, England, Normandy, and Anjou. Such a division the king actually made, when in the autumn of 1170 he believed himself to be at the point of death; and he brought up his sons among the people they were to rule, Henry among the Normans, Richard among the Poictevins. It would be still a question whether the elder brother should govern the family es­tates, as had been the case in the early Carolingian empire, his brethren owning his feudal superiority; or whether each should possess his provinces in sove­reignty; subject only to the already existing feudal claims.

 

However, when Henry began, as early as 1160, to broach the subject of his son’s coronation he was only twenty-seven years old, and probably thought more of securing the allegiance and attachment of the English for the child, than of the chances which might follow his own death; and later on we find him anxious to abridge the tedious parts of the royal duties to sharing them with the heir, although he never could part with one iota of the substance of power. Hence, then, the coronation of Henry the younger in 1170, the anger of Lewis VII because his daughter was not also crowned, and the quarrel among the bishops which caused Becket’s death.

 

Henry—for we must now return to the direct string of our story—was momentarily paralyzed at the news of the martyrdom. He saw how the blame was sure to fall upon him, and how all his enemies would sooner or later take the opportunity to overwhelm him. Immediately, therefore, he sent envoys to Rome to promise any terms whatever for acquittal or absolution. Whilst this negotiation was pending, knowing that the legates, for whom Lewis, before the death of Becket, had applied, were on their way to Normandy, and would not scruple to exert the utmost of their power against him, he organized an expedition to Ireland, which for the last sixteen years had been his by papal grant, and for the last four had been undergoing the process of conquest in the hands of Richard de Clare, surnamed Strongbow. In Ireland he stayed from the autumn of 1171 to the Easter of 1172, receiving the submission of kings and bishops, and really keeping out of the way of the hostile legates : awaiting the arrival of the friendly legates who were coming to absolve him.

 

Now, no doubt it appears strange that the Court of Rome should at this same moment be pouring out both sweet water and bitter; that the supreme judge on earth should send forth a legation to put Henry’s dominions under interdict for one act and directly after send another to absolve him for what seems a more heinous one. It must, however, be remembered that in this the papal court was rather acting as a great tribunal of international arbitration than as the council of a Christian bishop. The Court of Rome was a great legal machine, the disadvantages of which are manifest at first sight, but the benefit of which in a war­like age can scarcely be overrated, although less obvious at a glance. A very severe judgment may perhaps be allowable, as to the assumptions and arrogance and unrighteousness of the papacy in taking the office of international arbitration ; but judged by its results it was for the time a great public benefit, for it stopped and hindered the constant appeals to war. Thus viewed the Court of Rome was as open for suitors as any simple court of justice: an applicant who wanted legal redress applied for a commission of inquiry or a legation. In so doing he brought the usual means to bear on the papal officials, who no doubt found it to their interest to keep their minds always open to hear both sides, and to keep their purses also open to receive the contribu­tions of all sides in each suit, and thus maintain the wealth and power of the court itself. It is not to be denied that, however arrived at, the decisions ultimately given were in most cases fair and just.

 

Henry, then, on this occasion eluded one legation and welcomed another. In 1172 he met the friendly cardinals at Avranches, took all the oaths they proposed, renounced the Constitutions of Clarendon, purged himself of the guilt of Becket’s death, declared his adherence to Alexan der III as Catholic Pope, in refutation of the statement that he had acknowledged the anti-Pope, and received full absolution. He then, by way of general pacification, had his son recrowned and his wife crowned with him, and went down to the South of France to make a lasting peace with the Count of Toulouse, and to bargain for the marriage of John with the heiress of the county of Maurienne and Savoy.

 

The storm seemed to have blown over; unfortunately the lull preceded the great outbreak. Strange to say, the immediate occasion for the strife was the little boy John, the five-year-old bridegroom. All his great enemies Henry had silenced; Lewis had got his daughter crowned, the Pope was pacified, the barons were secured by the strength of the home government, the Scots were humble and obliging, all the sons were friends. The little child who in the end broke his heart was already a stumbling-block. The Count of Maurienne naturally asked what provision was to be made by Henry for his son’s marriage. Henry found himself obliged to ask his elder sons to give up for their brother some few castles out of their promised shares of his dominions. The eldest son refused; he would give up nothing; he had got nothing by being crowned, he was not trusted to go about alone; let the king give him some real power, England or Normandy, then he might have something that he could give up. The ill-conditioned lad nursed his grievance, and, early in the spring of 1173, fled from his father’s court and threw himself into the arms of Lewis. Queen Eleanor too, whose influence with her husband was lessened by her misguidance of her children, and by the evil habits which Henry himself had contracted during the Becket quarrel, used all her influence to increase the breach in her family. She intrigued with her first husband against her second, and brought even Richard into the list of his father’s enemies.

 

Thus, then, early in 1173 a head was provided for a great confederation of French lords and English barons, actively aided by Lewis of France, Philip of Flanders, the Counts of Champagne and the King of Scots, William the Lion, who had succeeded Malcolm IV in 1165. The younger Henry, liberal in promises, proposed to reward with vast English estates the men who were to help in renewing the glories of the Conquest. And the great English earls, Chester, Leicester, and Norfolk, were bent on reviving the feudal influence which Henry’s reforms had so weakened. These earls were mighty men on both sides of the Channel: the Norman quarrel could be fought in England as well as in Normandy, Anjou, and Poictou. Measures were contrived at Paris for a universal rising. And the success of the design seemed at first almost certain. Henry had a large force of Brabançon mercenaries about him, but scarcely any other force on which he could depend at all.

 

The war began by a Flemish invasion of Normandy ; then the Earl of Chester raised Brittany against the king; then the Poictevins rose in arms. From France the torch was handed to England. William the Lion, with a half-barbarian army, began a devastating march southward; the Earl of Leicester landed a great force of Flemings in Norfolk ; the Earl Ferrers of Derby fortified his castles in the midland counties; old Hugh Bigot of Norfolk, who had sworn the disinheritance of Matilda in 1135, garrisoned his castles—all England was in an uproar. The old justiciar, the king’s lieutenant, Richard de Lucy, was bewildered; and the great Bishop of Durham, Hugh de Puiset, King Stephen’s nephew, began to play a double game, negotiating with the Scots, and allowing the landing of Flemish mercenaries, to be used at discretion.

 

Two influences, however, turned the scale against this overwhelming preponderance of treachery and force—Henry’s wonderful energy, which his contemporaries called supernatural good luck, and the faithfulness of the English people, who, now, when the crucial test was applied to them, amply repaid the many years of culture spent upon them. Henry had been taken by surprise by the general onset; and, unwilling to believe in the ingratitude of his boys, he at first was slow to move against them; but he showed extraordinary promptness when he saw the state of affairs and had made up his mind how to act. Having put Lewis VII to ignominious flight at Conches, he rushed down upon Doi, in Brittany, where he captured the Earl of Chester and the chief Breton and Angevin rebels; and during the autumn of 1173, before the worst news from England arrived, he had captured one after the other the nests of rebellion in Maine. At Christmas he concluded a three months’ truce with Lewis and undertook the pacification of Poictou, which employed him until the next summer, fretting and chafing against the detention which kept him away from England.

 

In England matters had gone on more slowly, owing to the unprepared state of the ministry and the general feeling of apprehension and mistrust. There, however, Henry had some men on whom he could depend : Richard de Lucy, the justiciar; Ranulf Glanvill, the great lawyer, who was rising into the first rank as a minister; Reginald, Earl of Cornwall, the king’s uncle; the Earl of Arundel, husband of Queen Adeliza, widow of Henry I, and others connected with the royal house. These men had insufficient forces at their disposal, and were at first unable to decide whether the Scots in the North, or the Earl of Leicester in the East, or the midland revolt under Earl Ferrers, was the most formidable. At last, having made up their minds to make a truce with the Scots, they moved upon Norfolk, and defeated the earls in October, at Fornham St. Genevieve. There they took prisoners the Earl of Leicester and his wife, the great Lady Petronilla, whose comprehensive soul embodied all the spite and arrogance and vindictiveness of the oligarchy of the Conquest. She, as heiress of Grantmesnil, had brought a great inheritance to her husband, the degenerate heir of the faithful Beaumonts; for the Leicester Beaumonts were the only house which since the Conquest had been uniformly faithful to the Conqueror and his heirs. This great success enabled Henry to remain in Poictou during the winter and spring of 1174, and allowed the ministers to concentrate their forces against the Scots. The people rose against the feudal party, and a brisk struggle was kept up in the interior of the country until the summer. William the Lion spent his time in securing the border castles, seeking his own ends, instead of pressing southwards, and so doing his part to overturn Henry’s throne. At last early in July, 1174, he was surprised and taken prisoner at Alnwick, by the host of Yorkshire men and the loyal barons.

 

Just at the same moment Henry had crossed from Normandy with his Brabançons, and made a pilgrimage to Becket’s grave. His triumph was now regarded as a token of Divine forgiveness. He marched at once into Norfolk, where he received the submission of the Bigots and the Mowbrays, the latter of whom had been overcome by the king’s natural son, Geoffrey, now bishop elect of Lincoln, and afterwards so well known as Archbishop of York. All his foes were now at his feet; the King of Scots and the two great earls were prisoners; the rest entirely humiliated. In less than a month from his landing he was able to go back to Normandy.

 

The French war came to an end on the collapse or the English rebellion, and in the month of September all Henry’s dominions were at rest, his children reconciled, even the King of France admitted to peace.

 

And now we have true evidence of Henry’s real greatness in policy and spirit, notwithstanding his provocations and the changed strain of his character and temper. He shed no blood, he took no ransoms, he condemned to destitution not one of the leaders of the rebellion; he laid his hands for a few years on their estates, but even these were shortly restored, and no man was disinherited by way of punishment. But he pulled down their castles. The nests of feudal tyranny and insubordination he not merely dismantled, but in some cases destroyed so utterly as to leave not one stone upon another, that they might be no more the beginning of the temptation to such a design. Against the Scots his hand was very heavy ; he insisted on abject submission. Before he would release the king from his captivity he insisted that he should do homage, acknowledging the supremacy of Scotland, his crown over the Scottish crown, and of the English Church over the Scottish. The Scottish barons must become his men; the Scottish bishops must declare their obedient subjection to the English Church; and the castles of the Lowlands must be retained in the hands of men whom he should place there with English garrisons. This humiliating negotiation, concluded at Falaise before William’s liberation, was confirmed at York in the following August. From this time, until Richard I sold back to William the Lion the rights that he had lost, Scotland was subject to the English king as overlord, and her king as king was our king’s vassal.

 

The Church, however, escaped subjection, because the archbishops of Canterbury and York could not agree which should rule her, and before their quarrel was ended the Pope stepped in and declared the Scottish Church the immediate care and peculiar daughter of the Roman see. Besides this, the half-independent prince of Galloway was compelled to acknowledge himself a vassal of both the kings.

 

So completely was the authority of Henry II, re­established by the peace of 1174, that we are almost tempted to underrate the importance of the elements that had been arrayed against him. It was not, however, in the want of strength and spirit that the confederation against him failed; the kings of France and Scotland, the counts of Champagne, Boulogne, and Flanders, the earls of Chester, Leicester, Norfolk, and Derby, his own sons and his own wife, were united in their hostility. The religious feeling of the nation, which since the death of Becket had to a remarkable degree realized or rather exaggerated his merits as a statesman and a churchman, was used as a weapon against him. Every interest that he had injured, or that had suffered in the process of his reforms, was made to take its part. Yet all failed. They failed partly, no doubt, because they had really no common cry, no common cause. They had many grievances and a good opportunity; but all their several aims were selfish; their plan, so far as they had one, destructive not constructive ; their leaders unwilling to sacrifice or risk anything of their own, greedy to grasp what belonged of right to the king, the nation, or even to their own fellows. They fought one by one against a prompt, clear-headed, accomplished warrior, and they were beaten one by one; not, however, without a very considerable intermingling of what is ordinarily called good fortune on the king’s side. Thus Henry in the twentieth year of his reign was more powerful by far than when, at the beginning of it, .the desire and darling of the whole people, he brought back peace and light and liberty after the evil days.

 

The general line of policy which Henry had hitherto pursued he took up almost at the identical point at which it had been interrupted by the rebellion; but instead of seeking for John a provision on the Continent, he determined to find him a wife and an endowment in England, and, when he should be old enough, to make him king of Ireland.

 

With this idea he arranged for him, in 1176, a marriage with Hawisia, the daughter of William, Earl of Gloucester, his cousin; and the next year, in a great assembly at Oxford, he divided the still unconquered provinces of Ireland into great fiefs, the receivers of which took the oath of fealty, not only to himself, but to John as their future king. The Pope also was canvassed as to the erection of Ireland into a kingdom and the coronation of John. The same year Johanna, the king’s youngest daughter, was married with very great pomp to the young king William the Good, as he is called, of Sicily, a prince who had an unbounded ad­miration for his father-in-law, and would have settled the reversion of his kingdoms upon him if Henry had accepted the offer. Eleanor, the second daughter, was already married to Alfonso, King of Castile, who in 1177 referred to the judgment of Henry a great lawsuit between himself and his kinsman the King of Navarre. This arbitration not only illustrates the estimation in which Henry after his great victory was held on the Continent, but shows us also how he deliberated with his councillors. He held a very great court of bishops and superior clergy, of barons and other tenants-in-chief, on the occasion ; the arguments of the parties were laid before them, and, in conformity with their advice asked and given, the judgment was delivered.

 

The two or three years that followed the rebellion were the period of Henry’s longest stay in England. He came in April 1175, and stayed until August 1177; after a year spent in Normandy and Anjou he returned in 1178, and stayed until the end of June 1180; after which, although he paid several long visits to England, his absences were much longer. These years were periods of great activity in political matters. The number of councils that he held, the variety of public business that he despatched in them, the series of changes intended to promote the speedy attainment of justice, the unfailing purpose which he showed of fulfilling the pledge which in his early days he had given to his people, all these come out in the simple details of the historian with remarkable fulness. Henry was not at this time, or ever after, a happy man ; his son Henry, nominally reconciled, was constantly intriguing against him with his father-in-law, Lewis, and the discontented lords of the foreign dominion. He took up the part of an advocate of local rights and privileges, and headed confederations against his father, and against his brother Richard as the oppressor of the barons of Poictou. He complained that his father treated him meanly, not giving enough money, and jealously refusing him his share of power. The father treated him generously and patiently, but he could not trust him, and did not pretend to do so.

 

Queen Eleanor, too, was now imprisoned, or sequestered from her husband in honorable captivity. This great lady, who deserves to be treated with more honor and respect than she has generally met with, had behaved very ill to her husband in the matter of the rebellion; and, although he occasionally indulged her with the show of royal pomp and power, he never released her from confinement or forgave her. She was a very able woman, of great tact and experience, and still greater ambition; a most important adviser whilst she continued to support her husband, a most dangerous enemy when in opposition. Her political intrigues in the East, when she accompanied her first husband on the Crusade, had made him contemptible, and that Lewis never forgave her. But her second husband was made of sterner stuff. He took and kept the upper hand; it was only after his death that Eleanor’s real powers found room for play; and had it not been for her governing skill while Richard was in Palestine, and her influence on the Continent during the early years of John, England would have been a prey to anarchy, and Normandy lost to the house of Anjou long before it was.

 

The quarrel with his wife and the mistrust of his children threw the king under very evil influences, although as a king he tried hard to do his duty; and they sowed the seed of later difficulties which at last overwhelmed him. The internal history of these years is occupied with the judicial and financial doings which have been sketched fin the early pages of this chapter; outside there was peace, except in Poictou, where Richard was learning the art of war, winning his first laurels and making his worst and most obstinate enemies.

In 1180 the long strife and jealousy between Henry II, and Lewis VII, came to an end. The weak and unprincipled King of France, after resigning his crown to his son Philip, a boy of sixteen, retired into a convent and died.

 

Philip inherited all his hatred of Henry, although he was better able to appreciate his wisdom, and showed in his early years a desire to have him as a political adviser and instructor. He inherited, too, all his father’s falseness, craft, and dishonesty, but not his morbid conscience nor his irresoluteness. Without being so great a coward as his father, Philip was yet a long way from being a brave man, and loses much by his juxtaposition with Richard and even with John in that respect. But he was very unscrupulous, very pertinacious, and in result very successful, outliving all his rivals, and leaving his kingdom immensely stronger than it was when he succeeded to it. In the domestic quarrels of his early years, with his stepmother and the counts of Champagne, he availed himself of the advice of Henry, which was given honestly and effectually; but, after Henry’s quarrels with his sons began again, Philip saw his way clearly enough to the humiliation of the rival house; and he took too sure and too fatal advantage of his opportunity.

 

There is no need to dwell on the events of 1181 and 1182 ; the chief mark of the former year is that assize of arms which has been already mentioned. In 1182 the king was a good deal in Poictou. England was governed now, and chiefly for the rest of the reign, by Ranulf Glanvill, the chief justiciar, who in 1180 or 1179 had succeeded to Richard de Lucy. The country was quiet; so quiet, that when the troubles began on the Continent not a hand or foot in England stirred against the king. English history during these and the following years is a simple record of steady growth; all interest, personal and political, centres in the king.

 

The year 1183 begins with a new phase. The young king had of late shown himself somewhat more dutiful. His father was now in his fiftieth year, and that was for the kings of those days a somewhat advanced maturity. The heir seemed to have learned that he might, as he must, bide his time. The arrangement which was to provide for the continued cohesion of the family estates was as yet uncompleted. Henry urged that the younger brothers should all do homage and swear fealty to the elder. Richard was with some difficulty prevailed on to do this; but almost as soon as it was done Henry took advantage of the discontent of the Poictevins, quarrelled with Richard about the custody of a petty castle, and headed a war party against him. Their father, who at first perhaps had intended that Henry should be allowed to enforce his superiority, soon saw that it was his bounden duty to maintain the cause of Richard. Geoffrey of Brittany joined his eldest brother. Whilst Richard and his father besieged Limoges, Henry and Geoffrey allowed their archers to shoot at their father; they ill-treated his messengers, drove him to desperation, and became desperate themselves. The younger Henry, after feigning reconciliation, and more than once cruelly and hypocritically deserting his father, tried to recruit his resources by plundering the rich shrines of the Aquitanian saints. The age saw in his fate speedy vengeance for his impiety, his own evil conscience found perhaps in his behaviour to his father a still greater burden. Before Limoges was taken, the wretched man—for at eight-and-twenty he was a boy no more—sickened anddied at Martel, and left no issue. He passed away like foam on the water, no man regretting him; lamented only as his father’s enemy, and by that father who, with all his faults and his mismanagement, loved his sons far more than they deserved.

 

The death of the heir threw upon Richard the right, so far as it could be regarded as a right, of succession; it reopened also the question about the por­tion of Queen Margaret, the castles of the Vexin which Henry had so craftily got into his hands in consequence of the marriage. These castles he refused to restore to the king of France. Richard’s claim to the fealty of the barons he could not allow to be recognised, lest Richard should attempt to play against him the part which his elder brother had played. He wished also that the Aquitanian heritage should be made over to John, especially after the death of Geoffrey of Brittany, which occurred in 1186, no right of succession being allowed to the baby Arthur, born after his father’s death. Hence there were constant feuds and difficulties, mainly, however, on the French side of the Channel, Philip fomenting the family discord.

 

The threatening condition of Palestine long averted open war. Henry was the head of the house of Anjou, from which the Frank kings of Jerusalem, descended from Fulk, his grandfather, drew their origin. Baldwin the Leper, the son of King Amalric, the conqueror of Egyptian Babylon, was waging a very unequal fight against Saladin, Sultan of Egypt and Syria. It was a brilliant struggle, but against fearful odds. A prey to a sickness which physically disabled him, weakened by the divisions of a court speculating already on his death and the break-up of the kingdom; at the head of an aristocratic body which had in a single century learned all the vices and none of the virtues of the East; with the knightly orders quarrelling with one another; with the barons of the kingdom playing the part of traitors, the princes of the confederation leaguing with Saladin, and the ablest of his allies utterly unfettered by the sense of honor;—Baldwin in despair sent the keys of the Holy Sepulchre to Henry of England, as his kinsman, and prayed him to come to the rescue. Then he died and left the kingdom first to his baby nephew, then to his syster Sibylla and Guy of Lusignan her husband. The mission of the patriarch Heraclius, in 1185, was received with little enthusiasm in the West. Some two or three great English barons, Hugh of Beauchamp and Roger Mowbray, went; but the English Church and baronage, assembled at the Council of Clerkenwell, told the king that it was his first duty to stay at home and keep the promises made in his coronation oath. He himself could do no more than offer contributions in money. The patriarch went off in disgust; and before anything was really done Saladin had captured the king, the True Cross, and the holy city.

 

This news, which reached England in October or November, 1187, silenced for a moment the petty quarrels of the West. But it was for a moment only. At the first shock of the tidings Henry and Philip laid aside their grievances. Richard was the first to take the cross. The popes one after another in quick succession issued impassioned adjurations that peace should be made, and that one great Catholic Crusade should rescue imperilled Christendom. The Emperor himself, the lord of the Western world, the great Frederick, declared that he would go to Palestine with all the German chivalry. In England and France went out a decree that all men who had anything should pay a tenth towards the Crusade. The Saladin tithe was enacted by a great assembly of all England, at Geddington, near Northampton, and it was the first case in which Englishmen ever paid a general tax on all their goods and chattels. This was done in February, 1188. The money was hastily collected. It was yet uncertain whether the king would go himself or send Richard or John or both. But the moment of peace was over, and for Henry at least the end was coming.

 

The last storm arose in the South; the quarrel between Richard and the Count of Toulouse,  beginning about a little matter, drew in both Henry and Philip. Philip complained to Henry of the misrule of his son. Henry disowned the measures of Richard; and Philip invaded Berry. At first Richard acted in concert with his father, drove Philip out of Berry, and recovered the places that he had taken. Henry was in England at the time of the outbreak. He sent over first the Archbishop of Canterbury, then John, and at last, in July, 1188, left his kingdom never to return. The name of the great king was, at first, potent enough. Philip sued for peace; the Counts of Champagne insisted that there should be peace until the Crusade was over. Once and again the two kings met, and failed to come to a reconciliation. In November Richard began to waver : he did homage to Philip for all the French provinces, saving, however, his fealty to his father. A truce was made, and the Pope sent a legate to turn the truce into a peace. But when the time of truce expired Richard had gone over to Philip, and actually joined in the invasion of his father’s territories. Philip insisted that Richard should be acknowledged heir: Henry hesitated; Richard suspected that John was to supplant him : John was bribed to take part with his father’s enemies. Henry, unable to believe the monstrous conspiracy, for the first time in his life showed want of resolution; he did not draw his forces to a head, but deliberated and negotiated whilst Richard and Philip were acting. His health was failing, and his spirits had failed already.

 

So the spring of 1189 went on, Henry staying mostly at Saumur, in Anjou, or at Chinon; and Philip watching for his opportunity. At length on May 28, after a conference at la Ferté Bernard, in which Henry, as it was said, bribed the papal legate to take his side, Philip finally broke into war; carried almost by surprise the chief castles of Maine, and with a good fortune which he could scarcely realize captured the city of le Mans itself, which Henry, although at the head of a stout force of knights, refused to defend. Wretchedly ill and broken in spirit, he rode for his life from le Mans, to escape from the hands of his son and of Philip. This was on June 12. Le Mans was Henry’s birth-place; there his father was buried, and he had loved the place very much; it was also a very strong place, and when it was taken he knew that sooner or later Tours must go too. But even before Tours was taken all was lost, for Henry seemed to think that he had nothing left to live or fight for. Scarcely able to sit on horseback, he rode all day from le Mans, and rested at night at la Frenaye, on the way to Normandy, where the chief part of his force and all his strength lay. Geoffrey, his natural son and chancellor, afterwards Archbishop of York, was with him, and the poor father clung to him in his despair. To him, through his friend Giraldus Cambrensis, we owe the story of these sad days.

 

Henry was worn out with illness and fatigue—he would, he said, lie down and die: at night he would not be undressed; Geoffrey threw his cloak on him and  watched by his side. In the morning the king declared that he could not leave Anjou ; Geoffrey was to go on to Alençon with the troops. He would return to Chinon. Geoffrey was not allowed to depart until the Steward of Normandy had sworn that, should the king die, he would surrender the castles only to John; for Henry did not yet know the treachery of his favorite child. All was done as he bade; Geoffrey secured Alençon and then returned to look for his father; he found him at a place called Savigny, and took him to Chinon, as he wished. For a fortnight Philip pursued his conquests unimpeded. Henry moved again to Saumur, and was there visited by the Counts of Champagne; but he had neither energy, nor apparently even the will, to strike a blow or to come to a decision that would ensure peace. A conference was fixed for June 30, at Azai, but when the day came Henry was too ill to attend; and Philip and Richard went off loudly exclaiming that it was a false excuse. The same day Philip came to Tours. Again the princes interfere; but Philip would not listen. On July 3, he took the city. Then Henry, dying as he was, made his last effort; he was carried from Saumur to Azai, mounted there on horseback, and met his two foes on the plain of Colombières.

 

There, after two attempts to converse, broken by a terrible thunderstorm, Henry, held up on horseback by his servants, accepted Philip’s terms and submitted, surrendering all that he was asked to surrender. One thing he asked for, the list of the conspirators, to whom he was obliged to promise forgiveness. The list was given him; and with reluctance and muttered reproaches, perhaps curses also, he gave Richard the kiss of peace. He went back to Azai, still transacting some little business on the way, for the monks of Canterbury, who had quarrelled with their archbishop, forced themselves into his presence and provoked some sharp words of reproof even then. Then he opened the list of rebels, and the first name that he saw was John’s. And that broke his heart; he turned his face to the wall and said, “I have nothing left to care for; let all things go their way.

 

From that blow he never rallied. He was carried on a litter to Chinon, chafing against the shame of defeat and the mortification of his love. Geoffrey sat by him fanning him in the sultry air and driving away the flies that teased him. To him Henry confided his last wishes. He told him he was to be Archbishop of York, and gave him his ring, with the seal of the panther, to give to the King of Castile; then he ordered them to take him up, on his bed, and lay him before the altar of the castle chapel; there he received the last sacraments and died, two days after the meeting at Colombières.

 

There is hardly in all English history a more striking catastrophe or a scene in itself more simply touching. So much suffering, so great a fall, from such grandeur to such humiliation, such bitter sorrow, the loss of everything worth having, power and peace and his children’s love may have stirred in him in that last moment the thought of forgiveness. But Richard saw him alive no more; and when at the funeral, at Font Evraud, he met the bier on which his father’s body lay, blood flowed forthwith from the nostrils of the dead king, as if his spirit were indignant at his coming.

 

 

 

BOOK I. RICHARD OF AQUITAINE, 1157-1189

CHAPTER I

THE BOY DUKE

1157-1179