Henry the Second 4

Henry the Second 4

and even from his youth he was "a prudent son of the world." It was

Theobald who had first brought the Canon law to England, and Thomas at

once received his due training in it, being sent to Bologna to study

under Gratian, and then to Auxerre. He was very quickly employed in

important negotiations. When in 1152 Stephen sought to have his son

Eustace anointed king, Thomas was sent to Rome, and by his skilful plea

that the papal claims had not been duly recognized in Stephen's scheme

he induced the Pope to forbid the coronation. In his first political act

therefore he definitely took his place not only as an adherent of the

Angevin claim, but as a resolute asserter of papal and ecclesiastical

rights. At his return favours were poured out upon him. While in the

lowest grade of orders, not yet a deacon, various livings and prebends

fell to his lot. A fortnight before Stephen's death Theobald ordained

him deacon, and gave him the archdeaconry of Canterbury, the first place

in the English Church after the bishops and abbots; and he must have

taken part under the Primate in the work of governing the kingdom until

Henry's arrival. The archbishop was above all anxious to secure in the

councils of the new king the due influence not only of the Church, but

of the new school of the canon lawyers who were so profoundly modifying

the Church. He saw in Thomas the fittest instrument to carryout his

plans; and by his influence the archdeacon of Canterbury found himself,

a week after the coronation of Henry, the king's chancellor.

 

Thomas was now thirty-eight; Theobald, Nigel, and Leicester were all old

men, and the young king of twenty-two must have seemed a mere boy to his

new counsellors. The Empress had been left in Normandy to avoid the

revival of old quarrels. Hated in England for her proud contempt of the

burgher, her scorn of the churchman, her insolence to her adherents, she

won in Normandy a fairer fame, as "a woman of excellent disposition,

kind to all, bountiful in almsgiving, the friend of religion, of honest

life." The political activity of Queen Eleanor was brought to an abrupt

close by her marriage. In Henry she found a master very different from

Louis of France, and her enforced withdrawal from public affairs during

her husband's life contrasts strangely, not only with her former career,

but with the energy which, when the heavy yoke was taken off her neck,

she displayed as an old woman of nearly seventy during the reign of her

son. Henry, in fact, stood alone among his new people. No debt of

gratitude, no ties of friendship, bound the king to the lords whose aims

he had first learned to know at Wallingford. The great barons who

thronged round him in his court had all been rebels; the younger among

them had never known what order, government, or loyalty meant. The Church

was hesitating and timorous. To the people he was an utter stranger,

unable even to speak their tongue. But from the first Henry took his

place as absolute master and leader. "A strict regard to justice was

apparent in him, and at the very outset he bore the appearance of a

great prince."

 

The king at once put in force the scheme of reform which had been drawn

up the year before at Wallingford, and of which the provisions have

comedown to us in phrases drawn from the two sources which were most

familiar to the learned and the vulgar of that day,--the Bible, and the

prophecies of Merlin, the seer of King Arthur. The nobles were to give

up all illegal rights and estates which they had usurped. The castles

built by the warring barons were to be destroyed. The king was to bring

back husbandmen to the desolate fields, and to stock pastures and

forests and hillsides with cattle and deer and sheep. The clergy were

henceforth to live in quiet, not vexed by unaccustomed burdens. Sheriffs

were to be restored to the counties, who should do justice without

corruption, nor persecute any for malice; thieves and robbers were to be

hanged; the armed forces were to be disbanded; the knights were to beat

their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; the

hired Flemish soldiers were to turn from the camp to the plough, from

tents to workshops, there to render as servants the obedience they had

once demanded as masters. The work which Stephen had failed to do was

now swiftly accomplished. The Flemish mercenaries vanished "like

phantoms," or "like wax before the fire," and their leader, William of

Ypres, the lord of Kent, turned with weeping to a monastery in his own

land. The feudal lords were forced to give up such castles and lands as

they had wrongfully usurped; and the newly-created earls were deprived

of titles which they had wrung from King or Empress in the civil wars.

 

The great nobles of both parties made a last effort at resistance. In

the north the Count of Aumale ruled almost as king. He was of the House

of Champagne, son of that Count Stephen who had once been set up as

claimant to the English throne, and near kinsman both of Henry and of

Stephen. He now refused to give up Scarborough Castle; behind him lay

the armies of the Scot king, and if Aumale's rebellion were successful

the whole north must be lost. A rising on the Welsh border marked the

revival of the old danger of which Henry himself had had experience in

the castle of his uncle, Robert of Gloucester, when the Empress and

Robert, with his Welsh connections and alliances, had dominated the

whole of the south-west. Hugh Mortimer, lord of Wigmore, Cleobury, and

Bridgenorth, the most powerful lord on the Welsh border, and Roger, Earl

of Hereford and lord of Gloucester, and connected by his mother with the

royal house of Wales, prepared for war. Immediately after his crowning

Henry hurried to the north, accompanied by Theobald, and forced Aumale

to submission. The fear of him fell on the barons. Roger of Hereford

submitted, and the earldom of Hereford and city of Gloucester were placed

in Henry's hands. The whole force of the kingdom was called out against

Hugh Mortimer, and Bridgenorth, fortified fifty years before by Robert

of Belesme, was reduced in July. The next year William of Warenne, the

son of Stephen, gave up all his castles in England and Normandy, and the

power of the House of Blois in the realm was finally extinguished. Hugh

Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, was deprived of his fortresses, and the eastern

counties were thus secured as those of the north and west had been.

 

The borders of the kingdom were now safe; its worst elements of disorder

were suppressed; and the bishops and barons had taken an oath of

allegiance to his son William, and in case of William's death to the

infant Henry, born in February 1155. When Henry was called abroad in

January 1156, he could safely leave the kingdom for a year in the charge

of Queen Eleanor and of the justiciars. His return was marked by a new

triumph. The death of David and the succession of his grandson Malcolm, a

boy of twelve years old, gave opportunity for asserting his suzerainty

over Scotland, and freeing himself from his oath made in 1149 at Carlisle

to grant the land beyond the Tyne to David and his heirs for ever.

Malcolm was brought to do homage to him at Chester in June 1157, and

Northumberland and Cumberland passed into Henry's hands. Malcolm and his

successor William followed him in his wars and attended at his courts,

and whatever Henry's actual authority might be, in the eyes of his

English subjects at least he ruled to the farthest borders of Scotland.

He next turned to the settlement of Wales. The civil war had violently

interrupted the peaceful processes by which Henry I. sought to bring the

Welsh under English law. The princes of Wales had practically regained

their independence, while the Norman lords who had carved out estates for

themselves along its borders, indignant at Stephen's desertion of them,

and driven to provide for their own safety, had formed alliances by

marriage with the native rulers. Henry had, in fact, to reconquer the

country, and to provide safeguards against any military union between the

feudal lords of the border and its hostile princes, Owen Gwynneth of the

North, and Rhys ap-Gryffyth of the South. In 1157 he undertook the first

of his three expeditions against Wales. His troops, however, unused to

mountain warfare, had but ill success; and it was only when Henry had

secured the castles of Flintshire, and gathered a fleet along the coast

to stop the importation of corn that Owen was driven in August to do

homage for his land. The next year he penetrated into the mountains of

South Wales and took hostages from its ruler, Rhys-ap-Gryffyth; "the

honour and glory and beauty and invincible strength of the knights; Rhys,

the pillar and saviour of his country, the harbour and defender of the

weak, the admiration and terror of his enemies, the sole pillar and hope

of South Wales."

 

The triumph of the Angevin conqueror was now complete. The baronage lay

crushed at his feet. The Church was silent. The royal authority had been

pushed, at least in name, to the utmost limits of the island. The close

of this first work of settlement was marked by a royal progress between

September 1157 and January 1158 through the whole length of England from

Malmesbury to Carlisle. It was the king's first visit to the northern

shires which he had restored to the English crown; he visited and

fortified the most important border castles, and then through the bitter

winter months he journeyed to Yorkshire, the fastnesses of the Peak,

Nottingham, and the midland and southern counties. The progress ended at

Worcester on Easter Day, 1158. There the king and queen for the last

time wore their crowns in solemn state before the people. A strange

ceremony followed. In Worcester Cathedral stood the shrine of St.

Wulfstan, the last of the English bishops, the saint who had preserved

the glory of the old English Church in the days of the Confessor, and

carried it on through the troubled time of the Conquest, to whose

supernatural resources the Conqueror himself had been forced to yield,

and who had since by ever-ready miracle defended his city of Worcester

from danger. On this shrine the king and Queen now laid their crowns,

with a solemn vow never again to wear them. To the people of the West

such an act may perhaps have seemed a token that Henry came among them

as heir of the English line of kings, and as defender of the English

Church and people.

 

From England Henry was called away in August 1158, by the troubles of

his dominions across the sea. The power of Anjou had been built up by

centuries of tyranny, treason, and greed. Nantes had been robbed from

Britanny, Tours had been wrested from Blois, the southern borderland

from Poitou. A hundred years of feud with Maine could not lightly be

forgotten. Normandy still cherished the ancient hatred of pirate and

Frenchman. To the Breton, as to the Norman and the Gascon, the rule of

Anjou was a foreign rule; and if they must have a foreign ruler, better

the King of France than these upstart Counts. Henry held his various

states too by wholly different titles, and to every one of them his

right was more or less disputed. To add to the confusion, his barons in

every province held under him according to different customs and laws of

feudal tenure; and many of them, moreover, owed a double allegiance, and

did homage for part of their estates to Henry and for part to the King

of France. In the general uncertainty as to every question of succession,

or title, or law, or constitution, or feudal relations, the authority

which had been won by the sword could be kept only by sheer military

force. The rebellious array of the feudal nobles, eager to spring to arms

against the new imperial system, could count on the help of the great

French vassals along the border, jealous of their own independence, and

ever watching the Angevin policy with vigilant hostility. And behind

these princes of France stood the French king, Henry's suzerain lord and

his most determined and restless foe, from whom the Angevin count had

already taken away his wife and half his dominions, a foe to whom,

however, through all the perplexed and intermittent wars of thirty year