Henry the Second 2

Henry the Second 2

In 1142 Henry, then nine years old, was brought to England with a chosen

band of Norman and Angevin knights; and while Matilda held her rough

court at Gloucester as acknowledged sovereign of the West, he lived at

Bristol in the house of his uncle, Robert of Gloucester, the illegitimate

son of Henry I., who was still in these troubled days loyal to the

cultured traditions of his father's court, and a zealous patron of

learning. Amid all the confusion of a war of pillage and slaughter,

surrounded by half-wild Welsh mercenaries, by the lawless Norman-Welsh

knights, by savage Brabançons, he learned his lessons for four years with

his cousin, the son of Robert, from Master Matthew, afterwards his

chancellor and bishop of Angers. As Matilda's prospects grew darker in

England, Geoffrey recalled Henry in 1147 to Anjou; and the next year he

joined his mother in Normandy, where she had retired after the death of

Earl Robert. There was a pause of five years in the civil war; but

Stephen's efforts to assert his authority and restore the reign of law

were almost unavailing. All the country north of the Tyne had fallen into

the hands of the Scot king; the Earl of Chester ruled at his own will in

the northwest; the Earl of Aumale was king beyond the Humber.

 

With the failure of Matilda's effort the whole burden of securing his

future prospects fell upon Henry himself, then a boy of fifteen. Nor was

he slow to accept the charge. A year later, in 1149, he placed himself in

open opposition to Stephen as claimant to the English throne, by visiting

the court of his great-uncle, David of Scotland, at Carlisle; he was

knighted by the Scot king, and made a compact to yield up to David the

land beyond the Tyne when he should himself have won the English throne.

But he found England cold, indifferent, without courage; his most

powerful friends were dead, and he returned to Normandy to wait for

better days. Geoffrey was still carrying on the defence of the duchy

against Stephen's son Eustace, and his ally, the King of France; and

Henry joined his father's army till peace was made in 1151. In that year

he was invested with his mother's heritage and became at eighteen Duke of

Normandy; at nineteen his father's death made him Count of Anjou,

Lorraine, and Maine.

 

The young Count had visited the court of Paris to do homage for Normandy

and Anjou, and there he first saw the French queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Her marriage with Louis VII. had been the crowning success of the astute

and far-sighted policy of Louis VI.; for the dowry Eleanor had brought to

the French crown, the great province of the South, had doubled the

territories and the wealth of the struggling little kingdom of France.

In the Crusade of 1147 she had accompanied king and nobles to the Holy

Land as feudal head of the forces of Aquitaine; and had there baffled

the temper and sagacity of Louis by her political intrigues. Sprung of

a house which represented to the full the licentious temper of the South,

she scornfully rejected a husband indifferent to love, and ineffective in

war as in politics. She had "married a monk and not a king," she said,

wearied with a superstition that showed itself in long fasts of more

than monkish austerity, and in the humiliating reverence with which

the king would wait for the meanest clerk to pass before him. In the

square-shouldered ruddy youth who came to receive his fiefs, with

his "countenance of fire," his vivacious talk and overwhelming energy

and scant ceremoniousness at mass, she saw a man destined by fate and

character to be in truth a "king." Her decision was as swift and

practical as that of the keen Angevin, who was doubtless looking to the

southern lands so long coveted by his race. A divorce from her husband

was procured in March 1152; and two months after she was hastily, for

fear of any hindrance, married to the young Count of Anjou, "without the

pomp or ceremony which befitted their rank." At nineteen, therefore,

Henry found himself the husband of a wife about twenty-seven years of

age, and the lord, besides his own hereditary lands and his Norman

duchy, of Poitou, Saintonge, Perigord, Limousin, Angoumois, and Gascony,

with claims of suzerainty over Auvergne and Toulouse. In a moment the

whole balance of forces in France had changed; the French dominions were

shorn to half their size; the most brilliant prospects that had ever

opened before the monarchy were ruined; and the Count of Anjou at one

bound became ruler of lands which in extent and wealth were more than

double those of his suzerain lord.

 

The rise of this great power to the west was necessarily the absorbing

political question of the day. It menaced every potentate in France; and

before a month was out a ring of foes had gathered round the upstart

Angevin ruler. The outraged King of France; Stephen, King of England, and

Henry's rival in the Norman duchy; Stephen's nephew, the Count of

Champagne, brother of the Count of Blois; the Count of Perche; and

Henry's own brother, Geoffrey, were at once united by a common alarm; and

their joint attack on Normandy a month after the marriage was but the

first step in a comprehensive design of depriving the common enemy of the

whole of his possessions. Henry met the danger with all the qualities

which mark a great general and a great statesman. Cool, untroubled,

impetuous, dashing from point to point of danger, so that horses sank and

died on the road in his desperate marches, he was ready wherever a foe

threatened, or a friend prayed help. Foreign armies were driven back,

rebel nobles crushed, robber castles broken down; Normandy was secured

and Anjou mastered before the year was out. The strife, however, had

forced him for the first time into open war with Stephen, and at twenty

Henry turned to add the English crown to his dominions.

 

Already the glory of success hung about him; his footsteps were guided by

prophecies of Merlin; portents and wonders marked his way. When he landed

on the English shores in January 1153, he turned into a church "to pray

for a space, after the manner of soldiers," at the moment when the priest

opened the office of the mass for that day with the words, "Behold there

cometh the Lord, the Ruler, and the kingdom is in his hand." In his first

battle at Malmesbury the wintry storm and driving rain which beat in the

face of Stephen's troops showed on which side Heaven fought. As the king

rode out to the next great fight at Wallingford, men noted fearfully that

he fell three times from his horse. Terror spread among the barons, whose

interests lay altogether in anarchy, as they saw the rapid increase of

Henry's strength; and they sought by a mock compromise to paralyse the

power of both Stephen and his rival. "Then arose the barons, or rather

the betrayers of England, treating of concord, although they loved

nothing better than discord; but they would not join battle, for they

desired to exalt neither of the two, lest if the one were overcome the

other should be free to govern them; they knew that so long as one was in

awe of the other he could exercise no royal authority over them." Henry

subdued his wrath to his political sagacity. He agreed to meet Stephen

face to face at Wallingford; and there, with a branch of the Thames

between them, they fixed upon terms of peace. Stephen's son Eustace,

however, refused to lay down arms, and the war lingered on, Stephen being

driven back to the eastern counties, while Henry held mid-England. In

August, however, Eustace died suddenly, "by the favour of God," said

lovers of peace; and Stephen, utterly broken in spirit, soon after

yielded.

 

The strife died out, in fact, through sheer exhaustion, for years of

anarchy and war had broken the strength of both sides; and at last "that

happened which would least be believed, that the division of the kingdom

was not settled by the sword." The only body of men who still possessed

any public feeling, any political sagacity, or unity of purpose, found

its opportunity in the general confusion. The English Church, "to whose

right it principally belongs to elect the king," as Theobald had once

said in words which Gregory VII. would have approved, beat down all

opposition of the angry nobles; and in November 1153 Theobald, Archbishop

of Canterbury, and Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester and brother of

Stephen, brought about a final compromise. The treaty which had been

drawn up at Wallingford was confirmed at Westminster. Henry was made

the adopted son of Stephen, a sharer of his kingdom while he lived,

its heir when he should die. "In the business of the kingdom," the king

promised, "I will work by the counsel of the duke; but in the whole

realm of England, as well in the duke's part as my own, I will exercise

royal justice." Henry did homage and swore fealty to Stephen, while, as

they embraced, "the bystanders burst into tears of joy," and the nobles,

who had stood sullenly aloof from counsel and consent, took oaths of

allegiance to both princes. For a few months Henry remained in England,

months marked by suspicions and treacheries on all sides. Stephen was

helpless, the nobles defiant, their strongholds were untouched, and the

treaty remained practically a dead letter. After the discovery of a

conspiracy against his life supported by Stephen's second son and the

Flemish troops, Henry gave up for the moment the hopeless task, and left

England. But before long Stephen's death gave the full lordship into his

hands. On the 19th of December 1154 he was crowned at Winchester King of

England, amid the acclamations of crowds who had already learned "to

bear him great love and fear."

 

King of England, Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine,

Count of Poitou, Duke of Aquitaine, suzerain lord of Britanny, Henry

found himself at twenty-one ruler of dominions such as no king before him

had ever dreamed of uniting. He was master of both sides of the English

Channel, and by his alliance with his uncle, the Count of Flanders, he had

command of the French coast from the Scheldt to the Pyrenees, while his

claims on Toulouse would carry him to the shores of the Mediterranean.

His subjects told with pride how "his empire reached from the Arctic

Ocean to the Pyrenees;" there was no monarch save the Emperor himself who

ruled over such vast domains. But even the Emperor did not gather under

his sway a grouping of peoples so strangely divided in race, in tongue,

in aims, in history. No common tie of custom or of sympathy united the

unwieldy bundle of states bound together in a common subjection; the

men of Aquitaine hated Anjou with as intense a bitterness as they hated

France; Angevin and Norman had been parted for generations by traditional

feuds; the Breton was at war with both; to all England was "another

world"--strange in speech, in law, and in custom. And to all the

subjects of his heterogeneous empire Henry himself was a mere foreigner.

To Gascon or to Breton he was a man of hated race and alien speech, just

as much as he was to Scot or Welshman; he seemed a stranger alike to

Angevin and Norman, and to Englishmen he came as a ruler with foreign tastes and foreign aims as well as a foreign tongue.