Henry the Second 3

Henry the Second 3

We see in descriptions of the time the strange rough figure of the new

king, "Henry Curtmantel," as he was nicknamed from the short Angevin

cape which hung on his shoulders, and marked him out oddly as a foreigner

amid the English and Norman knights, with their long fur-lined cloaks

hanging to the ground. The square stout form, the bull-neck and broad

shoulders, the powerful arms and coarse rough hands, the legs bowed

from incessant riding, showed a frame fashioned to an extraordinary

strength. His head was large and round; his hair red, close-cut for

fear of baldness; his fiery face much freckled; his voice harsh and

cracked. Those about him saw something "lion-like" in his face; his gray

eyes, clear and soft in his peaceful moments, shone like fire when he was

moved, and few men were brave enough to confront him when his face was

lighted up by rising wrath, and when his eyes rolled and became bloodshot

in a paroxysm of passion. His overpowering energy found an outlet in

violent physical exertion. "With an immoderate love of hunting he led

unquiet days," following the chase over waste and wood and mountain;

and when he came home at night he was never seen to sit down save for

supper, but wore out his court with walking or standing till after

nightfall, even when his own feet and legs were covered with sores

from incessant exertion. Bitter were the complaints of his courtiers

that there was never any moment of rest for himself or his servants;

in war time indeed, they grumbled, excessive toil was natural, but time

of peace was ill-consumed in continual vigils and labours and in

incessant travel--one day following another in merciless and intolerable

journeyings. Henry had inherited the qualities of the Angevin race--its

tenacity, its courage, its endurance, the sagacity that was without

impatience, and the craft that was never at fault. With the ruddy face

and unwieldy frame of the Normans other gifts had come to him; he had

their sense of strong government and their wisdom; he was laborious,

patient, industrious, politic. He never forgot a face he had once seen,

nor anything that he heard which he deemed worthy of remembering; where

he once loved he never turned to hate, and where he once hated he was

never brought to love. Sparing in diet, wasting little care on his

dress--perhaps the plainest in his court,--frugal, "so much as was lawful

to a prince," he was lavish in matters of State or in public affairs. A

great soldier and general, he was yet an earnest striver after peace,

hating to refer to the doubtful decision of battle that which might be

settled by any other means, and stirred always by a great pity, strange

in such an age and in such a man, for lives poured out in war. "He was

more tender to dead soldiers than to the living," says a chronicler

querulously; "and found far more sorrow in the loss of those who were

slain than comfort in the love of those who remained." His pitiful temper

was early shown in his determination to put down the barbarous treatment

of shipwrecked sailors. He abolished the traditions of the civil war

by forbidding plunder, and by a resolute fidelity to his plighted word. In

political craft he was matchless; in great perils none was gentler than

he, but when the danger was past none was harsher; and common talk hinted

that he was a willing breaker of his word, deeming that in the pressure

of difficulty it was easier to repent of word than deed, and to render

vain a saying than a fact. "His mother's teaching, as we have heard, was

this: That he should delay all the business of all men; that whatever

fell into his hands he should retain along while and enjoy the fruit of

it, and keep suspended in hope those who aspired to it; confirming her

sentences with this cruel parable, 'Glut a hawk with his quarry and he

will hunt no more; show it him and then draw it back and you will ever

keep him tractable and obedient.' She taught him also that he should be

frequently in his chamber, rarely in public; that he should give nothing

to any one upon any testimony but what he had seen and known; and many

other evil things of the same kind. We, indeed," adds this good hater of

Matilda, "confidently attributed to her teaching everything in which he

displeased us."

 

A king of those days, indeed, was not shielded from criticism. He lived

altogether in public, with scarcely a trace of etiquette or ceremony.

When a bishop of Lincoln kept Henry waiting for dinner while he performed

a service, the king's only remedy was to send messenger after messenger

to urge him to hurry in pity to the royal hunger. The first-comer seems

to have been able to go straight to his presence at any hour, whether in

hall or chapel or sleeping-chamber; and the king was soundly rated by

every one who had seen a vision, or desired a favour, or felt himself

aggrieved in any way, with a rude plainness of speech which made sorely

necessary his proverbial patience under such harangues. "Our king," says

Walter Map, "whose power all the world fears, ... does not presume to be

haughty, nor speak with a proud tongue, nor exalt himself over any man."

The feudal barons of medieval times had, indeed, few of the qualities

that made the courtiers of later days, and Henry, violent as he was,

could bear much rough counsel and plain reproof. No flatterer found favour

at his court. His special friends were men of learning or of saintly

life. Eager and eloquent in talk, his curiosity was boundless. He is said

to have known all languages from Gaul to the Jordan, though he only spoke

French and Latin. Very discreet in all business of the kingdom, and a

subtle finder out of legal puzzles, he had "knowledge of almost all

histories, and experience of all things ready to his hand." Henry was,

in fact, learned far beyond the learning of his day. "The king," wrote

Peter of Blois to the Archbishop of Palermo, "has always in his hands

bows and arrows, swords and hunting-spears, save when he is busy in

council or over his books. For as often as he can get breathing-time

amid his business cares, he occupies himself with private reading, or

takes pains in working out some knotty question among his clerks. Your

king is a good scholar, but ours is far better. I know the abilities and

accomplishments of both. You know that the King of Sicily was my pupil

for a year; you yourself taught him the element of verse-making and

literary composition; from me he had further and deeper lessons, but as

soon as I left the kingdom he threw away his books, and took to the

easy-going ways of the court. But with the King of England there is

school every day, constant conversation of the best scholars and

discussion of questions."

 

Behind all this amazing activity, however, lay the dark and terrible

side of Henry's character. All the violent contrasts and contradictions

of the age, which make it so hard to grasp, were gathered up in his

varied heritage; the half-savage nature which at that time we meet with

again and again united with first-class intellectual gifts; the fierce

defiance born of a time when every man had to look solely to his own

right hand for security of life and limb and earthly regard--a defiance

caught now and again in the grip of an overwhelming awe before the

portents of the invisible world; the sudden mad outbreaks of irresponsible

passion which still mark certain classes in our own day, but which then

swept over a violent and undisciplined society. Even to his own time, used

as it was to such strange contrasts, Henry was a puzzle. Men saw him

diligently attend mass every day, and restlessly busy himself during the

most solemn moments in scribbling, in drawing pictures, in talking to his

courtiers, in settling the affairs of State; or heard how he refused

confession till forced to it by terror in the last extremity of

sickness, and then turned it into a surprising ceremony of apology and

self-justification. At one time they saw him, conscience-smitten at the

warning of some seer of visions, sitting up through the night amid a

tumultuous crowd to avert the wrath of Heaven by hastily restoring rights

and dues which he was said to have unjustly taken, and when the dawning

light of day brought cooler counsel, swift to send the rest of his

murmuring suitors empty away; at another bowing panic-stricken in his

chapel before some sudden word of ominous prophecy; or as a pilgrim,

barefoot, with staff in hand; or kneeling through the night before a

shrine, with scourgings and fastings and tears. His steady sense of order,

justice, and government, broken as it was by fits of violent passion,

resumed its sway as soon as the storm was over; but the awful wrath which

would suddenly break forth, when the king's face changed, and he rolled on

the ground in a paroxysm of madness, seemed to have something of diabolic

origin. A story was told of a demon ancestress of the Angevin princes:

"From the devil they came, and to the devil they will go," said the grim

fatalism of the day.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER II

 

 

THE ANGEVIN EMPIRE

 

The new kingdom which Henry had added to his dominions in France might

well seem to a man of less inexhaustible energy to make the task of

government impossible. The imperial system of his dreams was as recklessly

defiant of physical difficulties as it was heedless of all the sentiments

of national tradition. In the two halves of his empire no common political

interest and no common peril could arise; the histories of north and south

were carried on apart, as completely as the histories of America and

England when they were apparently united under one king, and were in fact

utterly severed by the ocean which defined the limits of two worlds.

England had little part or lot in the history of Europe. Foreign policy

it had none; when its kings passed to Normandy, English chroniclers

knew nothing of their doings or their wars. Some little trade was

carried on with the nearest lands across the sea,--with Normandy, with

Flanders, or with Scandinavia,--but the country was almost wholly

agricultural. Feudal in its social structure, governed by tradition, with

little movement of inner life or contact with the world about it, its

people had remained jealous of strangers, and as yet distinguished from

the nations of Europe by a strange immobility and want of sympathy with

the intellectual and moral movements around them. Sometimes strangers

visited its kings; sometimes English pilgrims made their way to Rome by a

dangerous and troublesome journey. But even the connection with the

Papacy was slight. A foreign legate had scarcely ever landed on its

shores; hardly any appeals were carried to the Roman Curia; the Church

managed its own business after a customary fashion which was in harmony

with English traditions, which had grown up during centuries of undisturbed

and separate life.

 

On the other side of the Channel Henry ruled over a straggling line of

loosely compacted states equal in extent to almost half of the present

France. His long line of ill-defended frontier brought him in contact

with the lands of the Count of Flanders, one of the chief military

powers of the day; with the kingdom of France, which, after two hundred

years of insignificance, was beginning to assert its sway over the great

feudal vassals, and preparing to build up a powerful monarchy; and with

the Spanish kingdoms which were emerging from the first successful

effort of the Christian states to throw back the power of the Moors.

Normandy and Auvergne were separated only by a narrow belt of country

from the Empire, which, under the greatest ruler and warrior of the age,

Frederick Barbarossa, was extending its power over Burgundy, Provence,

and Italy. His claims to the over-lordship of Toulouse gave Henry an

interest in the affairs of the great Mediterranean power--the kingdom of

Sicily; and his later attempts on the territories of the Count of