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READING HALLTHE DOORS OF WISDOM |
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RICHARD THE LION HEART
BY
KATE NORGATE BOOK INTRODUCTORY: EARLY PLANTAGENETS 1. STEPHEN AND MATILDA. 1135.2. THE EARLY YEARS OF HENRY II.3.HENRY II AND THOMAS BECKET4. THE LATTER YEARS OF HENRY II.
BOOK I
CHAPTER I. CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
BOOK II
CHAPTER I
THE YEAR OF PREPARATION; 1189-1190
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
THE
ADVANCE ON JERUSALEM, 1191-192
CHAPTER VI
BOOK III
CHAPTER I
RICHARD AND THE EMPIRE, 1192-1194
CHAPTER II
PREFACE
The geographical area of that history
which alone deserves the name has more than once changed. The early home of
human society was in Asia. Greece and Italy successively became the theatres of
the world’s drama, and in modern times the real progress of society has moved
within the limits of Western Christendom. So, too, with the material history.
At one period the growth of the life of the world is in its literature, at another
in its wars, at another in its institutions. Sometimes everything circles round
one great man; at other times the key to the interest is found in some complex
political idea such as the balance of power, or the realization of national
identity. The successive stages of growth in the more
advanced nations are not contemporaneous and may not follow in the same order.
The quickened energy of one race finds its expression in commerce and
colonization, that of another in internal organization and elaborate training,
that of a third in arms, that of a fourth in art and literature. In some the
literary growth precedes the political growth, in others it follows it; in some
it is forced into premature luxuriance by national struggles, in others the
national struggles themselves engross the strength that would ordinarily find
expression in literature. Art has flourished greatly both where political
freedom has encouraged the exercise of every natural gift and where political
oppression has forced the genius of the people into a channel which seemed
least dangerous to the oppressor. Still, on the whole, the European nations in
modern history emerge from somewhat similar circumstances. Under somewhat
similar discipline, and by somewhat similar expedients, they feel their way to
that national consciousness in which they ultimately diverge so widely. We may
hope, then, to find, in the illustration of a definite section or well
ascertained epoch of that history, sufficient unity of plot and interest, a
sufficient number of contrasts and analogies, to save it from being a dry
analysis of facts or a mere statement of general laws.
Such a period is that upon which we
now enter; an epoch which in the history of England extends from the accession
of Stephen to the death of Edward II;
that is, from the beginning of the constitutional growth of a consolidated
English people to the opening of the long struggle with France under Edward
III. It is scarcely less well defined in French and German history. In France
it witnesses the process through which
the modern kingdom of France was constituted; the aggregation of the several
provinces which had hitherto recognized only a nominal feudal supremacy, under
the direct personal rule of the king, and their incorporation into a national
system of administration. In Germany it comprises a more varied series of great
incidents. The process of disruption in the German kingdom, never well
consolidated, had begun with the great schism between North and South under
Henry IV, and furnished one chief element in the quarrel between pope and
emperor. During the first half of the twelfth century it worked more deeply, if
not more widely, in the rivalry between Saxon and Swabian. Under Frederick I it
necessitated the remodelling of the internal arrangement of Germany, the
breaking up of the national or dynastic dukedoms. Under Frederick II it broke
up the empire itself, to be reconstituted in a widely different form and with
altered aims and pretensions under Rudolf of Hapsburg. This is by itself a most
eventful history, in which the varieties of combinations and alternations of
public feeling abound with new results and illustrations of the permanence of
ancient causes.
In
the relations of the Empire and the Papacy the same epoch contains one cycle of
the great rivalry, the series of struggles which take a new form under
Frederick I and Alexander III, and come to an end in the contest between Lewis
of Bavaria and John XXII. It comprises the whole drama of the Hohenstaufen, and
the failure of the great hopes of the world under Henry VII, which resulted in
the constituting of a new theory of relations under the Luxemburg and Hapsburg
emperors.
Whilst these greater actors are thus preparing for the struggle which forms the later history of European politics, Spain and Italy are passing through a different discipline. In the midst of all runs the history of the Church and the Crusades, which supplies one continuous clue to the reading of the period, a common ground on which all the actors for a time and from time to time meet.
But the interest of the
time is not confined to political history. It abounds with character. It is an
age in which there are very many great men, and in which the great men not only occupy but deserve the first place in the historian’s eye. It is their
history rather than the history of their peoples that furnishes the
contribution of the period to the world’s progress. This is the heroic period
of the middle ages,—the only period during which, on a great scale and on a
great stage, were exemplified the true virtues which were later idealized and
debased in the name of chivalry, —the age of John of Brienne and Simon de
Montfort, of the two great Fredericks, of St. Bernard and Innocent III, and of
St. Lewis and Edward I. It is free for the most part from the repulsive
features of the ages that precede, and from the vindictive cruelty and
political immorality of the age that follows. Manners are more refined than in the earlier age and yet simpler and sincerer than those of the next; religion is more distinctly operative for good and less marked
by the evils which seem inseparable from its participation in the political
action of the world. Yet not even the thirteenth century was an age of gold,
much less those portions of the twelfth and fourteenth which come within our
present view. It was not an age of prosperity, although it was an age of growth; its gains were gained in great measure by suffering. If Lewis IX and
Edward I taught the world that kings might be both good men and strong sovereigns,
Henry III and Lewis VII taught it that religious habits and even firm
convictions are too often insufficient to keep the weak from falsehood and
wrong. The history of Frederick II showed that the race is not always to the
swift or the battle to the strong, that of Conrad and Conradin that the right is
not always to triumph, and that the vengeance which evil deeds must bring in
the end comes in some cases very slowly and with no remedy to those who have
suffered.
It
is but a small section of this great period that we propose to sketch in the
present volume; the history of our own country during this epoch of great men
and great causes; but it comprises the history of what is one at least of
England’s greatest contributions to the world’s progress. The history of
England under the early kings of the house of Plantagenet unfolds and traces
the growth of that constitution which, far more than any other that the world
has ever seen, has kept alive the forms and spirit of free government; which
has been the discipline that formed the great free republic of the present day; which was for ages the beacon of true social freedom that terrified the
despots abroad and served as a model for the aspirations of hopeful patriots.
It is scarcely too much to say that English history, during these ages, is the
history of the birth of true political liberty. For, not to forget the services
of the Italian republics, or of the German confederations of the middle ages,
we cannot fail to see that in their actual results they fell as dead before the
great monarchies of the sixteenth century, as the ancient liberties of Athens
had fallen; or where the spirit survived, as in Switzerland, it took a form in
which no great nationality could work. It was in England alone that the problem
of national self-government was practically solved; and although under the
Tudor and Stewart sovereigns Englishmen themselves ran the risk of forgetting
the lesson they had learned and being robbed of the fruits for which their
fathers had labored,
Eastern
Europe, from the coasts of the Adriatic to the limits of Mahometan conquest
eastward, was subject to the emperor who reigned at Constantinople, and may,
except for its incidental connection with the Crusades, be left out of the
present view. The northern portions were in the hands of half-civilized,
half-Christianized races, which formed a barrier dangerous but efficacious
between the Byzantine emperor and Western Christendom. The kingdom of Hungary,
and the acquisitions of Venice on the east of the Adriatic fenced medieval
Europe from the same enemies. Italy was divided
between the Normans, who governed Apulia and Sicily, and the sway of the
Empire, which under Lothar II—the Emperor who was on the throne when our period
begins—had become little more than nominal south of the Alps; the independence
of the imperial cities and small principalities reaching from the Alps to Rome itself
was maintained chiefly by the inability of the Germans to keep either by
administrative organization or by dynastic alliances a permanent hold upon it.
With both the Republican north and the Normanized south, the political history
of the Plantagenet kings came in constant connection; and even more close and
continuous was the relation through the agency of the Church with Rome itself.
At the opening of the period, Englishmen were not only studying in the
universities of Italy, at Salerno, at Bologna, and at Pavia, but were repaying
to Italy, in the services of prelates and statesmen, the debt which England had
incurred through Lanfranc and Anselm. An Englishman was soon to be pope. The
Norman kings chose ministers and prelates of English birth; and the same
Norman power of organization which worked in England under Henry I and Roger
of Salisbury, worked in similar line in Sicily under King Roger and his
posterity.
Looking northwards, we see Germany, in the middle of the twelfth
century, still administered, although uneasily, under the ancient system of
the four nations, Saxony, Franconia, Swabia, and Bavaria; four distinct
nationalities which refused permanent combination. This system was, however,
in its last decay. Its completeness was everywhere broken in upon by the great
ecclesiastical principalities which the piety and policy of the emperors had
interposed among the great secular states, to break the impulse of aggressive
warfare, to serve as models of good order, and to maintain a direct hold in the
imperial hands on territories which could not become hereditary in a
succession of priests. Not only so; the debatable lands which lay between the
great nations were breaking up into minor states: landgraves, margraves, and
counts palatine were assuming the functions of dukes; the dukes, where they
could not maintain the independence of kings, were seeing their powers limited
and their territories divided. Thus Bavaria was soon to be dismembered to form
a duchy of Austria; Saxony was falling to pieces between the archbishops of
Cologne and the margraves of Brandenburg : Franconia between the Emperor and
the Count Palatine; Swabia was the portion of the reigning imperial house, the
treasury therefore out of which the Emperor had to carve rewards for his
servants. Between the great house of the Welf in Saxony, Bavaria, and Lombardy,
and the Hohenstaufen on the imperial throne and in Franconia and Swabia,
subsisted the jealousy which was sooner or later to reach the heart of the Empire
itself, to supply the force which threw the dislocated provinces into absolute
division.
Westward was France under Lewis VII, divided from by the long
narrow range of the Lotharingian provinces, over which the imperial rule was
recognized as nominal only. These provinces formed a debatable boundary line, which had for one of its chief functions the maintenance
of peace between the descendants of Hugh Capet and the representatives of the
majesty of Charles and Otto; and which served its turn, for between France and
the Hohenstaufen empire there was peace and alliance. But many of the provinces
which now form part of France were then imperial, and beyond the Rhone and Meuse
tile king of Paris had no vassals and but uncertain allies. Within his feudal
territory, the count of Flanders to the
north, the duke of Aquitaine to the south, the duke of Normandy with his claims
over Maine and Brittany, cut him off from the sea; and even the little strip of
coast between Flanders and Normandy was held by the count of Boulogne, who at
the moment was likewise king of England. Yet the kingdom of France was by no
means at its deepest degradation. Lewis VI had kept alive the idea of central
power, and had obtained for his son the hand of the heiress of Aquitaine; the
schemes were already in operation by which the kings were to offer to the
provinces a better and firmer rule than they enjoyed under their petty lords, by
which fraud and policy were to split up the principalities and attract them
fragment by fragment to the central power, and by which even Normandy itself
was in little more than fifty years to be recovered ; by which a real central
government was to be instituted, and the semblance of national unity to be
completed by the formation of a distinct national character.
North
of France the imperial provinces of Lower Lorraine, and the debatable lands
between Lorraine and Saxony, had much the same indefinite character as belonged
to the southern parts Countries, of the intermediate kingdom. They seldom took
part in the work of the Empire, although they were nominally part of it, and
the stronger emperors enforced their right. But as a rule they were too distant
from the centre of government to fear much interference, and, enjoying such
freedom as they could, they gladly recognized the emperor’s sway when they
required his help. We shall see the princes of Lorraine taking no small part in
the negotiations between England and Germany under
Richard and John, but they generally played a game with Flanders, France, and
the Empire which has but an indirect bearing on European politics; and we
chiefly hear of these lands as furnishing the hordes of mercenary soldiers for
the crusades and internal wars of Europe, until almost suddenly the Flemish
cities break upon our eye as centres of commerce and political life.
Southward lie Spain and Portugal; divided into several small kingdoms
between closely allied and kindred kings, all employed in the long crusade of
seven centuries against the Moor; a crusade which is now beginning to have
hopes of successful issue. Central Spain, on the line of the Tagus, is still in
dispute, although Toledo had been taken in 1085, and Saragossa in 1118. Lisbon
was taken with the help of the Crusaders in 1147. In each of the Christian
states of Spain, free institutions of government, national' assemblies and
local self-government, preserved distinct traces of the Teutonic or Gothic
origin of the ruling races; and even before the English parliament grew to
completeness, the Cortes of Castile and Aragon were theoretically complete
assemblies of the three estates. The growth of Spain is one of the distinct
features of our epoch; but it is a growth apart. There are as yet scarcely
more than one or two points at which it comes in contact with the general
action of Europe.
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