Henry the Second 5

Henry the Second 5

Henry's first care was to secure his ill-defined and ill-defended

frontier, and to recover those border fortresses which had been wrested

from Geoffrey by his enemies. In Normandy the Vexin, which was the true

military frontier between him and France, and commanded the road to

Paris, had been lost. In Anjou he had to win back the castles which had

fallen to the House of Blois. His brother Geoffrey, Earl of Nantes, was

dead, and he must secure his own succession to the earldom. Two rival

claimants were disputing the lordship of Britanny, but Britanny must at

all costs be brought into obedience to Henry. There were hostile forces

in Angoumois, La Marche, Saintonge, and the Limousin, which had to be

finally destroyed. And besides all this, it was necessary to enforce

Eleanor's rights over Berri, and her disputed claims to supremacy over

Toulouse and Auvergne. Every one of these projects was at once taken in

hand. Henry's chancellor, Thomas Becket, was sent from England in 1158

at the head of a splendid embassy to the French court, and when Henry

landed in France the success of this mission was declared. A marriage

was arranged between his little son Henry, now three years old, and

Louis' daughter Margaret, aged six months; and the Vexin was to be

restored to Normandy as Margaret's dowry. The English king obtained from

Louis the right to judge as lord of Anjou and seneschal of France

between the claimants to Britanny; his first entry into that province

was with full authority as the officer of France, and the whole army of

Normandy was summoned to Avranches to enforce his judgment. Conan was

made Duke of Britanny under Henry's lordship, and Nantes was given up

into his hands. He secured by treaty with the House of Blois the

fortresses which had fallen into their hands, and before the year was

out he thus saw his inheritance in Anjou and Normandy, as he had before

seen his inheritance in England, completely restored. In November he

conducted the King of France on a magnificent progress through Normandy

and Britanny, not now as a vassal requiring his help, but with all the

pomp of an equal king.

 

Meanwhile Henry had been preparing an army to assert his sovereignty

over Toulouse--a sovereignty which would have carried his dominions to

the Mediterranean and the Rhone. The Count of St. Gilles, to whom it had

been pledged by a former Duke of Aquitaine, and who had eighteen years

before refused to surrender it on Eleanor's first marriage, now resisted

the claims of her second husband also, and he was joined by Louis, who

under the altered circumstances took a different view of the legal

rights of Eleanor's husband to suzerainty. To France, indeed, the

question was a matter of life and death. The success of Henry would have

left her hemmed in on three sides by the Angevin dominions, cut off from

the Mediterranean as from the Channel, with the lower Rhone in the hands

of the powerful rival that already held the Seine, the Loire, and the

Garonne. When, therefore, Henry's forces occupied the passes of the

province, and in September 1159 closed round Toulouse itself, Louis

threw himself into the city. Henry, profoundly influenced by the feudal

code of honour of his day, inheriting the traditional loyalty of his

house to the French monarchy, too sagacious lightly to incur war with

France, too politic to weaken in the eyes of his own vassals the

authority of feudal law, and possibly mindful of the succession to the

French throne which might yet pass through Margaret to his son Henry,

refused to carry on war against the person of his suzerain. He broke up

the siege in spite of the urgent advice of his chancellor Thomas; and

for nearly forty years the quarrel lingered on with the French monarchy,

till the question was settled in 1196 by the marriage of Henry's

daughter Joanna to Count Raymond VI. Thomas, who had proved himself a

mighty warrior, was left in charge of the newly-conquered Cahors, while

Henry returned to Normandy, and concluded in May a temporary peace with

Louis. His enemies, however, were drawn together by a common fear, and

France became the battle-ground of the rival ambitions of the Houses of

Blois and Anjou. Louis allied himself with the three brothers of the

House of Blois--the Counts of Champagne, of Sancerre, and of Blois--by a

marriage with their sister only a month after the death of his own queen

in September; and a joint attack was planned upon Henry. His answer was

rapid and decisive. Margaret was in his keeping, and he at once married

her to his son, took the Vexin into his own hands and fortified it with

castles. His position in fact was so strong that the forced his enemies

to a truce in June 1161.

 

The political complications with which Henry was surrounded were still

further confused by a new question which now arose, and which was to

threaten the peace of Europe for eighteen years. On the death of the

English Pope, Hadrian IV., on the 1st of September 1159, two rivals,

Alexander III. and Victor IV., disputed the see of Rome, and the strife

between the Empire and the Papacy, now nearly one hundred years old,

broke out afresh on a far greater scale than in the time of Gregory.

Frederick Barbarossa asserted the imperial right of judging between the

rivals, and declared Victor pope, supported by the princes of the Empire

and by the kings of Hungary, Bohemia, and Denmark. Alexander claimed the

aid of the French king--the traditional defender of the Church and

protector of the Popes; and after the strife had raged for nearly three

years, he fled in 1162 to France. In the great schism Henry joined the

side of Louis in support of Alexander and of the orthodox cause; the two

kings met at Chouzy, near Blois, to do honour to the Pope; they walked

on either side of his horse and held his reins. The meeting marked a

great triumph for Alexander; the union of the Teutonic nations against

the policy of Rome was to be delayed for three centuries and a half. It

marked, too, the highest point of Henry's success. He had checked the

Emperor's schemes; he had won the gratitude of both Louis and the Pope;

he had defeated the plots of the House of Blois, and shown how easily

any alliance between France and Champagne might be broken to pieces by

his military power and his astute diplomacy. He had rounded off his

dominions; he had conquered the county of Cahors; he had recovered the

Vexin and the border castles of Fréteval and Amboise; the fiefs of

William of Boulogne had passed into his hands on William's death; he was

master of Nantes and Dol, and lord of Britanny; he had been appointed

Protector of Flanders.

 

At this moment, indeed, Henry stood only second to the Emperor among the

princes of Christendom, and his aim seems to have been to rival in

some sort the Empire of the West, and to reign as an over-king, with

sub-kings of his various provinces, and England as one of them, around

him. He was connected with all the great ruling houses. His eldest son

was married to the daughter of the King of France; the baby Richard,

eighteen months old, was betrothed during the war of Toulouse to a

daughter of the King of Aragon. He was himself a distant kinsman of the

Emperor. He was head of the house of the Norman kings in Sicily. He was

nearest heir of the kings of Jerusalem. Through his wife he was head of

the house of Antioch, and claimed to be head of the house of Tripoli.

Already in these first years of his reign the glory of the English king

had been acknowledged by ambassadors from the Emperor, from the King of

Jerusalem, from Norway, from Sweden, from the Moorish kings of Valencia

and Murcia, bearing the gifts of an Eastern world--gold, silk, horses,

and camels. England was forced out of her old isolation; her interest in

the world without was suddenly awakened. English scholars thronged the

foreign universities; English chroniclers questioned travellers,

scholars, ambassadors, as to what was passing abroad. The influence of

English learning and English statecraft made itself felt all over

Europe. Never, perhaps, in all the history of England was there a time

when Englishmen played so great apart abroad. English statesmen and

bishops were set over the conduct of affairs in Provence, in Sicily, in

Gascony, in Britanny, in Normandy. English archbishops and bishops and

abbots held some of the highest posts in France, in Anjou, in Flanders,

in Portugal, in Italy, in Sicily. Henry himself welcomed trained men

from Normandy or Sicily or wherever he could find them, to help in his

work of administration; but in England foreigners were not greatly

welcomed in any place of power, and his court was, with but one or two

exceptions, made up of men who, of whatever descent they might be,

looked on themselves as Englishmen, and bore the impress of English

training. The mass of Englishmen meanwhile looked after their own

affairs and cared nothing about foreign wars fought by Brabançon

mercenaries, and paid for by foreign gold. But if they had nothing to

win from all these wars, they were none the less at last drawn into the

political alliances and sympathies of their master. Shut out as she was

by her narrow strip of sea from any real concern in the military

movements of the continental peoples, England was still dragged by the

policy of her Angevin rulers into all the complications of European

politics. The friendships and the hatreds of her king settled who were

to be the allies and who the foes of England, and practically fixed the

course of her foreign policy for seven hundred years. A traditional

sympathy lingered on from Henry's days with Germany, Italy, Sicily, and

Spain; but the connection with Anjou forced England into a hostility

with France which had no real ground in English feeling or English

interests; the national hatred took a deeper character when the feudal

nobles clung to the support of the French king against the English

sovereign and the English people, and "generation handed on to generation

an enmity whose origin had long been forgotten." From the disastrous

Crusade of 1191, "from the siege of Acre," to use the words of Dr.

Stubbs, "and the battle of Arsouf to the siege of Sebastopol and the

battles of the Crimea, English and French armies never met again except

as enemies."

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER III

 

 

THE GOVERNMENT OF ENGLAND

 

The building up of his mighty empire was not the only task which filled

the first years of Henry's reign. Side by side with this went on another

work of peaceful internal administration which we can but dimly trace in

the dearth of all written records, but which was ultimately to prove of

far greater significance than the imperial schemes that in the eyes of his

contemporaries took so much larger proportions and shone with so much

brighter lustre.

 

The restoration of outward order had not been difficult, for the anarchy

of Stephen's reign, terrible as it was, had only passed over the surface

of the national life and had been vanquished by a single effort. But the

new ruler of England had to begin his work of administration not only

amid the temporary difficulties of a general disorganization, but amid

the more permanent difficulties of a time of transition, when society was

seeking to order itself anew in its passage from the medieval to the

modern world; and his victory over the most obvious and aggressive forms

of disorder was the least part of his task. Through all the time of

anarchy powerful forces had been steadily at work with which the king had

now to reckon. A new temper and new aspirations had been kindled by the

troubles of the last years. The deposition of Stephen, the elections of

Matilda and of Henry, had been so many formal declarations that the king

ruled by virtue of a bargain made between him and his people, and that if