Henry the Second 1

Henry the Second 1

Henry the Second

 

Author: Mrs. J. R. Green

 

CHAPTER I

 

 

HENRY PLANTAGENET

 

The history of the English people would have been a great and a noble

history whatever king had ruled over the land seven hundred years ago.

But the history as we know it, and the mode of government which has

actually grown up among us is in fact due to the genius of the great king

by whose will England was guided from 1154 to 1189. He was a foreign king

who never spoke the English tongue, who lived and moved for the most part

in a foreign camp, surrounded with a motley host of Brabançons and

hirelings; and who in intervals snatched from foreign wars hurried for a

few months to his island-kingdom to carry out a policy which took little

heed of the great moral forces that were at work among the people. It was

under the rule of a foreigner such as this, however, that the races of

conquerors and conquered in England first learnt to feel that they were

one. It was by his power that England, Scotland, and Ireland were

brought to some vague acknowledgment of a common suzerain lord, and the

foundations laid of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It

was he who abolished feudalism as a system of government, and left it

little more than a system of land-tenure. It was he who defined the

relations established between Church and State, and decreed that in

England churchman as well as baron was to be held under the Common law. It

was he who preserved the traditions of self-government which had been

handed down in borough and shire-moot from the earliest times of English

history. His reforms established the judicial system whose main outlines

have been preserved to our own day. It was through his "Constitutions"

and his "Assizes" that it came to pass that over all the world the

English-speaking races are governed by English and not by Roman law. It

was by his genius for government that the servants of the royal household

became transformed into Ministers of State. It was he who gave England a

foreign policy which decided our continental relations for seven hundred

years. The impress which the personality of Henry II. left upon his time

meets us wherever we turn. The more clearly we understand his work, the

more enduring does his influence display itself even upon the political

conflicts and political action of our own days.

 

For seventy years three Norman kings had held England in subjection

William the Conqueror, using his double position as conqueror and king,

had established a royal authority unknown in any other feudal country

William Rufus, poorer than his father when the hoard captured at

Winchester and the plunder of the Conquest were spent, and urged alike

by his necessities and his greed, laid the foundation of an organized

system of finance. Henry I., after his overthrow of the baronage, found

his absolute power only limited by the fact that there was no machinery

sufficient to put in exercise his boundless personal power; and for its

support he built up his wonderful administrative system. There no longer

existed any constitutional check on the royal authority. The Great

Council still survived as the relic and heir both of the English

Witenagemot and the Norman Feudal Court. But in matters of State its

"counsel" was scarcely asked or given; its "consent" was yielded as a

mere matter of form; no discussion or hesitation interrupted the formal

and pompous display of final submission to the royal will. The Church

under its Norman bishops, foreign officials trained in the King's

chapel, was no longer a united national force, as it had been in the

time of the Saxon kings. The mass of the people was of no account in

politics. The trading class scarcely as yet existed. The villeins tied

to the soil of the manor on which they had been born, and shut out from

all courts save those of their lord; inhabitants of the little hamlets

that lay along the river-courses in clearings among dense woods,

suspicious of strangers, isolated by an intense jealousy of all that lay

beyond their own boundaries or by traditional feuds, had no part in the

political life of the nation.

 

But the central government had proved in the long run too weak to

check the growth of feudal tendencies. The land was studded with

fortresses--the homes of lords who exercised criminal jurisdiction

without appeal, and who had their private prisons and private gallows.

Their manor courts, whether they were feudal courts established by the

new nobility of the Conquest, or whether they represented ancient

franchises in which Norman lords succeeded to the jurisdiction of

earlier English rulers, were more and more turned into mere feudal

courts. In the Shire courts themselves the English sheriff who used to

preside over the court was replaced by a Norman "_vicecomes_," who

practically did as he chose, or as he was used to do in Normandy, in

questions of procedure, proof, and judgment. The old English hundred

courts, where the peasants' petty crimes had once been judged by the

freemen of the district, had now in most cases become part of the fief

of the lord, whose newly-built castle towered over the wretched hovels

of his tenants, and the peasants came for justice to the baron's court,

and paid their fees to the baron's treasury. The right of private

coinage added to his wealth, as the multitude of retainers bound to

follow them in war added to his power. The barons were naturally roused

to a passion of revolt when the new administrative system threatened to

cut them off from all share in the rights of government, which in other

feudal countries were held to go along with the possession of land. They

hated the "new men" who were taking their places at the council-board;

and they revolted against the new order which cut them off from useful

sources of revenue, from unchecked plunder, from fines at will in their

courts of hundred and manor, from the possibility of returning fancy

accounts, and of profitable "farming" of the shires; they were jealous

of the clergy, who played so great a part in the administration, and

who threatened to surpass them in the greatness of their wealth, their

towns and their castles; and they only waited for a favourable moment to

declare open war on the government of the court.

 

In this uncertain balance of forces in the State order rested ultimately

on the personal character of the king; no sooner did a ruler appear who

was without the sense of government than the whole administration was at

once shattered to pieces. The only son of Henry I. had perished in the

wreck of the _White Ship_; and his daughter Matilda had been sent to

Germany as a child of eight years old, to become the wife of the Emperor

Henry V. On his death in 1125 her father summoned her back to receive

the homage of the English people as heiress of the kingdom. The homage

was given with as little warmth as it was received. Matilda was a mere

stranger and a foreigner in England, and the rule of a woman was

resented by the baronage. Two years later, in 1128, Henry sought by

means of a marriage between the Empress Matilda and Geoffrey, the son of

Count Fulk of Anjou, to secure the peace of Normandy, and provide an

heir for the English throne; and Matilda unwillingly bent once more to

her father's will. A year after the marriage Count Fulk left his

European dominions for the throne of Jerusalem; and Geoffrey entered on

the great inheritance which had been slowly built up in three hundred

years, since the days of the legendary Tortulf the Forester. Anjou,

Maine, and Touraine already formed a state whose power equaled that of

the French kingdom; to north and south successive counts had made

advances towards winning fragments of Britanny and Poitou; the Norman

marriage was the triumphant close of a long struggle with Normandy; but

to Fulk was reserved the greatest triumph of all, when he saw his son

heir, not only of the Norman duchy, but of the great realm which

Normandy had won.

 

But, for all this glory, the match was an ill-assorted one, and from

first to last circumstances dealt hardly with the poor young Count.

Matilda was twenty-six, a proud ambitious woman "with the nature of a

man in the frame of a woman." Her husband was a boy of fifteen. Geoffrey

the Handsome, called Plantagenet from his love of hunting over heath and

broom, inherited few of the great qualities which had made his race

powerful. Like his son Henry II. he was always on horseback; he had his

son's wonderful memory, his son's love of disputations and law-suits; we

catch a glimpse of him studying beneath the walls of a beleaguered town

the art of siege in Vegetius. But the darker sides of Henry's character

might also be discerned in his father; genial and seductive as he was,

he won neither confidence nor love; wife and barons alike feared the

silence with which he listened unmoved to the bitterest taunts, but kept

them treasured and unforgotten for some sure hour of revenge; the fierce

Angevin temper turned in him to restlessness and petulance in the long

series of revolts which filled his reign with wearisome monotony from

the moment when he first rode out to claim his duchy of Normandy, and

along its southern frontier peasant and churl turned out at the sound of

the tocsin, and with fork and flail drove the hated "Guirribecs" back

over the border. Five years after his marriage, in 1133, his first child

was born at Le Mans. Englishmen saw in the grandson of "good Queen Maud"

the direct descendant of the old English line of kings of Alfred and of

Cerdic. The name Henry which the boy bore after his grandfather marked

him as lawful inheritor of the broad dominions of Henry I., "the

greatest of all kings in the memory of ourselves and our fathers." From

his father he received, with the surname of Plantagenet by which he was

known in later times, the inheritance of the Counts of Anjou. Through

his mother Matilda he claimed all rights and honours that pertained to

the Norman dukes.

 

Heir of three ruling houses, Henry was brought up wherever the chances of

war or rebellion gave opportunity. He was to know neither home nor

country. His infancy was spent at Rouen "in the home," as Henry I. said,

"of his forefather Rollo." In 1135 his grandfather died, and left him,

before he was yet three years old, the succession to the English throne.

But Geoffrey and Matilda were at the moment hard pressed by one of their

ceaseless wars. The Church was openly opposed to the rule of the House of

Anjou; the Norman baronage on either side of the water inherited a long

tradition of hatred to the Angevin. Stephen of Blois, a son of the

Conqueror's daughter Adela, seized the English throne, and claimed the

dukedom of Normandy. Henry was driven from Rouen to take refuge in

Angers, in the great palace of the counts, overlooking the river

and the vine-covered hills beyond. There he lived in one of the most

ecclesiastical cities of the day, already famous for its shrines, its

colleges, the saints whose tombs lay within its walls, and the ring of

priories and churches and abbeys that circled it about.

 

The policy of the Norman kings was rudely interrupted by the reign of

Stephen of Blois. Trembling for the safety of his throne, he at first

rested on the support of the Church and the ministers who represented

Henry's system. But sides were quickly changed. The great churchmen and

the ministers were soon cast off by the new ruler. "By my Lady St.

Mary," said Roger of Salisbury, when he was summoned to one of Stephen's

councils, "my heart is unwilling for this journey; for I shall be of as

much use in court as is a foal in battle." The revolution was completed

in 1139, when the king in a mad panic seized and imprisoned Roger, the