VII. THE ENGLISH CHURCH…

VII. THE ENGLISH CHURCH

1136–1149.

The departure of the Empress was followed by a time of comparative quiet; but it was the quiet of exhaustion, not of rest. In the twelve years which had passed away since King Henry’s death all his work seemed to have been utterly undone. Every vestige of law and authority, order and peace, had been swept away by the torrent of destruction which in those twelve years had overwhelmed the whole country. When at last the waves began to subside, one ark of refuge was found to have escaped the general desolation; one vessel alone had been able to outride the storm. The state was a wreck; the Church remained.

The pilot of the sacred bark, during the first seven years of Stephen’s reign, had been the king’s brother Henry, bishop of Winchester. The youngest child of Stephen-Henry and Adela of Blois, devoted by his mother to the religious life, had been brought up in the famous abbey of Cluny; thence, in 1126, he was summoned by his uncle the king of England to become abbot of one of the most ancient and illustrious monasteries in Britain, that of Glastonbury; and three years later the young abbot--he cannot have been more than twenty-eight--was raised to the bishopric of Winchester.[1007] His rapid advancement was no doubt owing to the personal favour of his uncle; but none the less did it place in the important see of Winchester a prelate as different in temper as in origin from the crowd of low-born secular clerks who then filled the ranks of the English episcopate. Steeped in ecclesiastical and monastic traditions from his very cradle, Henry was before all things a churchman and a monk. It was to him and to men like him that the religious revival which sprang up in his uncle’s later years naturally looked for the guidance which it could not find either in the secular bishops or in the shy, irresolute primate; and the consequences appeared as soon as the king was dead, when the helm of the state and that of the Church--the one dropped by Roger of Salisbury, the other never firmly grasped by William of Canterbury--were both at once taken by the young bishop of Winchester. His personal influence sufficed to ensure his brother’s election to the throne; the legatine commission sent to him in 1139, overriding the claims of the new primate, made him the acknowledged leader of the English Church, and, coinciding as it did with the complete break-down of all secular government at Bishop Roger’s fall, practically vested in him and in the clerical synods which he convened the sole remnant of deliberative and legislative authority throughout the kingdom. Clergy and people followed him like a flock of sheep; yet he was never really trusted by either of the two political parties, because he never really belonged to either. His own political ideal was independent of all party considerations. It was the ideal of the ecclesiastical statesman in the strictest sense: to insure the well-being of the state by securing the rights and privileges and enforcing the discipline of the Church. In his eyes the whole machinery of secular government, including the sovereign, existed solely for that one end, and he carried out his theory to its logical result in the synods which deposed Stephen and Matilda each in turn, as each in turn broke the compact with the Church which had raised them to the throne. Of the use to be made in later days of the precedent thus created he and his brother-clergy never dreamed; they are, however, entitled to the credit of having been the only branch of the body-politic which made an organized effort to rescue England from the chaos into which she had fallen. The failure of their efforts hitherto was due partly to the overwhelming force of circumstances, partly to the character of Henry himself. His temper was like that of the uncle whose name he bore--the calm, imperturbable Norman temper which neither interest nor passion could throw off its balance or off its guard; and with the Norman coolness he had also the Norman tenacity, fearlessness and strength of will. But although the main elements of his nature were thus derived from his mother’s ancestors, he had not altogether escaped the doom of his father’s house. He was free from the worst defect of his race, their fatal unsteadiness of purpose; but he had his full share of their rashness, their self-will, and their peculiar mental short-sightedness. His policy really had a definite and a noble end, but his endeavours to compass that end were little more than a series of bold experiments. Moreover, his conception of the end itself was out of harmony with the requirements of the time. Churchman as he was to the core, his churchmanship was almost as unlike that of the rising generation, trained up under the influence of the new religious orders, as the downright worldliness of the Salisbury school with which some of them were, though most unjustly, half inclined to confound him. He belonged to a type of ecclesiastical statesmen, or rather political churchmen, who did not shrink from arraying the Church militant in the spoils of earthly triumph, and would fain elevate her above the world in outward pomp and majesty no less than in inward purity and holiness. This was the school of which Cluny had been, ever since the days of Gregory VII., the citadel and stronghold; and Henry was thus attached to it by all the associations of his youth as well as by his own natural disposition. But in the second quarter of the twelfth century this Cluniac school was losing its hold upon the finer and loftier spirits of the time, and the influence of Cluny was beginning to pale before the purer radiance diffused from S. Bernard’s “bright valley,” Clairvaux.

[1007] Joh. Glaston. (Hearne), pp. 165, 166.

Henry’s legatine commission, too, which was a chief source of his strength, was really a source of moral and spiritual weakness to the English Church; for it set him over the head of the man who ought to have been her representative and leader, and placed in the hands of a mere diocesan bishop all, and more than all, the power and authority which belonged of right to the primate of all Britain.[1008] Until very recent times the English Church had been, by an unwritten but perfectly well-established privilege of immemorial antiquity, exempt from all legatine control; papal envoys were admitted only for special purposes, and exercised no authority within the province of the “transmarine Pope”--the primate of all Britain. In technical language, the archbishop of Canterbury, as successor of S. Augustine, was by virtue of his office legatus natus of the Holy See, and therefore not subject to the jurisdiction of a legatus a latere. During the reign of Henry I. three attempts had been made to break through this venerable tradition; on the third occasion, in 1125, the outrageous behaviour of the legate John of Crema roused Archbishop William to go and protest at Rome, whence he returned clothed in his own person with the functions of legatus a latere.[1009] This commission, granted by Honorius II., was renewed by Innocent,[1010] and William thus retained it until his death. When that event occurred Henry of Winchester must have felt himself, and must have been generally felt throughout the country, to be almost naturally marked out for William’s successor. It seems, indeed, that he was actually elected to the vacant primacy. There was however a difficulty which proved to be insuperable. The translation of a bishop from one see to another could only be effected by a special license from the Pope; and in this case the license was apparently refused.[1011] Driven thus to seek elsewhere for a primate, Stephen, or it may be Stephen’s wiser queen, sought him in the home of Lanfranc and Anselm, and brought over a third abbot of Bec to walk in the steps and sit on the throne of his sainted predecessors at Canterbury.[1012] Theobald came of a good Norman family, and was well reported of for learning, virtue and piety;[1013] further than that, the world as yet knew nothing of him; it was therefore not unnatural, though it was distinctly unfortunate, that when Pope Innocent II. determined to appoint a resident legate in England he appointed Henry instead of Theobald.

[1008] See on this Ann. Winton. a. 1143 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. ii. p. 53); Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 384; and Will. Newb. l. i. c. 10 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 43).

[1009] Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 84; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 381, 382.

[1010] In 1132, it seems. See Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 7 (Hardy, p. 699).

[1011] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 908.

[1012] Queen Matilda’s share in the appointment seems distinctly implied in Vita Theobaldi (Giles, Lanfranc, vol. i.), p. 337; Chron. Becc. a. 1137 (ib. p. 207).

[1013] See Vita Theobaldi (as above), pp. 337–339; Chron. Becc. (ibid.), p. 207.

For several years the archbishop bore his supersession quietly. His political sympathies appear to have always inclined to the side of the Empress, but his conduct shewed no trace of party spirit; no personal jealousy on his part ever thwarted Henry’s attempts at pacification. He doubtless felt that he could afford to wait; for his metropolitical rights, though kept in abeyance for a time, were inalienable and independent of all outward accidents, while the legatine authority was drawn solely from the commission of an individual Pope, and a change either of persons or of policy at Rome might at any moment reduce Henry of Winchester to the rank of a mere suffragan bishop. Henry himself was so conscious of this danger that he began to urge upon his patron Innocent a project for raising the see of Winchester to metropolitical rank and furnishing it with two (or, according to another account, seven) suffragan sees, to be carved out of the southern part of the province of Canterbury. This wild scheme was so far endorsed by Innocent that he actually sent Henry a pall, the emblem of archiepiscopal dignity, in 1142; so, at least, the story ran.[1014] As yet, however, the matter rested wholly between legate and Pope; if the archbishop knew anything of their plots against him, he was wise enough to let them plot undisturbed. Instead of trying to fish in the troubled waters of the present, he was looking to the open sea of the future and meditating how best to prepare himself, his Church and his adopted country for the voyage which lay before them. While the legate was making and unmaking sovereigns and plotting a revolution in the Anglican hierarchy, the primate was quietly gathering into his own household the choicest spirits of the time, drawing around him a group of earnest, deep-thinking students, of highly-cultured, large-minded, dispassionate politicians; in a word, making his palace the seminary and the training-college, the refuge and the home, of a new generation of English scholars and English statesmen.

[1014] Ann. Winton. a. 1143 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. ii. p. 53); R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 255.

Foremost among them stood Thomas the son of Gilbert Becket, ex-port-reeve of London. Troubles had fallen heavy upon Gilbert and his wife since the days when from their comfortable home in Cheapside their boy rode forth to his school at Merton or to his hawking excursions with Richer de l’Aigle. A series of disastrous fires had brought them down from affluence almost to poverty[1015] and compelled them to take their son away from school at an earlier age than the mother, at least, would have desired. She watched over his studies with the deepest interest and care,[1016] and it was probably her influence and good management which, after an interval of idleness at home, sent him off again to study for a short time in Paris.[1017] The boy learned quickly and easily, as he did everything to which he chose to put his hand and give his mind; but his heart was set upon riding and hawking and the sports and occupations of active life, far more than upon the book-learning to which he devoted himself chiefly for the sake of pleasing his mother; and when she died, in his twenty-second year,[1018] his studies came to an end. Her death broke up the home; Gilbert, worn out with age and grief, was powerless to guide or help his son; and Thomas soon found it impossible to make their scanty means sufficient to maintain them both.[1019] Irksome as the work must have been to such a temper as his, he took a situation as clerk in the counting-house of a kinsman, Osbern Huitdeniers, or “Eightpenny” as we might perhaps call him now.[1020] Osbern was a wealthy man, enjoying great consideration both in the city and at court;[1021] at this time--just after the outbreak of the civil war--he seems to have been one of the sheriffs of London, for we are told that Thomas himself held a subordinate civic post as clerk and accountant to those functionaries.[1022] For two or three years, the years of the personal struggle between Stephen and Matilda, Thomas endured the drudgery of the office as best he might,[1023] till at length a more congenial position was offered him, first in the household of his old friend Richer de l’Aigle[1024] and then in that of Archbishop Theobald. When the war-storm had partly subsided and the primate was beginning to organize his plans, some of his clerks who had been guests at the little house in Cheapside in its prosperous days remembered the bright boy whom they had often noticed there, and determined to enlist him in their own ranks. One of them, known to us only by his nickname of “Baille-hache” or the “Hatchet,” undertook to persuade the young man himself;[1025] two others, Baldwin the archdeacon and Eustace his brother, commended him and his father to the primate. It chanced that Gilbert, though he had been domiciled at Rouen before his emigration to England, was a native of Thierceville, close to the Bec-Herlouin. A chat with Thomas’s father over old times and old names around Bec made its former abbot all the more disposed to welcome Thomas himself, when he rode out to Harrow and let his friend Baille-hache present him to the archbishop.[1026] Before many months had passed he was admitted to the innermost circle of Theobald’s confidential counsellors. That circle consisted of three young men--John of Canterbury, Roger of Pont-l’Evêque and Thomas of London. Without consulting one or other of these three the archbishop rarely did anything;[1027] and in matters of special difficulty or delicacy he relied mainly upon Thomas.[1028]

[1015] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 8, 9; E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 359; Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 3.

[1016] Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 8.

[1017] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 14. The Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 21–25, has a curious and pretty legend of his stay in Paris.

[1018] Will. Cant. and Anon. I. as above. This brings Rohesia’s death to a date between December 21, 1138, and December 21, 1139; for although Mr. Magnusson (Preface to Thomas Saga, vol. ii. pp. c, ci) declares that Thomas was born “not as stated [T.,” i.e. Thomas Saga, “i. 12] in 1117, but in 1118,” his own chronological argument infallibly leads to just the opposite conclusion.

[1019] E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 359.

[1020] “Tandem civi vice tabellionis adhæsit,” Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 3. “Ad quendam Lundrensem, cognatum suum,” Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 8. “Osbernus Octo-nummi cognomine,” E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 361. “Osbern Witdeniers,” Garnier (Hippeau), p. 9. In the Pipe Roll 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), p. 146, among the London accounts, one of the sureties for the debts of Hugh Cordele is “Osbertus viii denarii”--clearly the same man.

[1021] E. Grim, Anon. I. and Garnier, as above.

[1022] “Reversus” [sc. Thomas a Parisiis], “receptus est in partem sollicitudinis reipublicæ Londoniensis, et vicecomitum clericus et rationalis effectus.” Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 14.

[1023] E. Grim, Anon. I. and Garnier, as above.

[1024] Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 31. It is not very clear whether Thomas’s stay with Richer should come after or before his stay with Osbern, which the Saga omits altogether.

[1025] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 10; E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 361; Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 9. None of them name the man; but he is clearly the one who ultimately introduced Thomas to the primate; and we know his nickname from the sneer of Roger of Pont-l’Evêque; Garnier (as above); E. Grim (as above), p. 362; Anon. I. (as above), p. 10.

[1026] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 15. “Thierrici-villa” is interpreted by M. Hippeau (Garnier, Vie de S. Thomas, introd. p. xxiv) “Probablement Thierceville, canton de Montfort, département de l’Eure.”

[1027] Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 4.

[1028] There is a curious and amusing account of their mutual relations in Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 37.

He had secured his services at the right moment; for the long impending crisis between himself and the legate was now fast drawing near. In purely secular politics Theobald had hitherto been content to follow Henry’s lead; on a question of ecclesiastical politics they had now come to a distinct severance. Archbishop Thurstan of York had died in February 1140;[1029] in January 1141 William, treasurer of the see, was appointed in his stead, and received the investiture of the temporalities from Stephen in the camp before Lincoln.[1030] The appointment had somewhat the look of a court job; for William was a nephew of the king and the legate;[1031] he had been brought up in wealth, luxury and idleness, and although of amiable and blameless character, was obviously not the man for such a post as the northern primacy. A minority of the York chapter therefore, supported by many of the most respected clergy of the province, chief among whom was Abbot Richard of Fountains, protested against the election as having been procured by undue influence, in the form of bribery on William’s own part and intimidation on that of William of Aumale, earl of York, acting on behalf of the king and the legate; and this view was shared by the southern primate. The legate, apparently shrinking from the responsibility of consecrating his nephew by his own sole authority (for Theobald absolutely refused to assist him), let the matter rest during the remainder of that troubled year and then sent the elect of York to plead his own cause at Rome. In Lent 1143 the Pope gave his decision: “If Dean William of York can swear that the chapter did not receive through the earl of Aumale a command from the king to elect his nephew: and if the archbishop-elect himself can swear that he did not seek his election by bribery:--then let him be consecrated.” A council met at Winchester in September to receive the two oaths and witness the consecration. The dean of York, however, was unable to attend; he had been elected to the bishopric of Durham, and was absorbed in struggling for the possession of his see with an intruder named William Cumin, who had been placed there by the king of Scots. The partizans of the archbishop-elect, foreseeing some obstacle of this kind, had procured the addition to the Pope’s decree of a saving clause whereby they were permitted to substitute “some other approved person” for the dean: such, at least, was their account of the matter. Ralf, bishop of Orkney, and two abbots therefore took the required oath in the place of William of Durham, and William of York was consecrated by his uncle the legate, three days before Michaelmas 1143.[1032] Theobald still refused his assent to the whole proceeding.[1033]

[1029] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 130.

[1030] Ib. pp. 133, 134.

[1031] Apparently a son of their sister Emma by her marriage with a certain Count Herbert. See Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 149 and note v.

[1032] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 139, 142–146. See also Thos. Stubbs (Twysden, X. Scriptt.), col. 1721, and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 123.

[1033] Gerv. Cant. as above.

Henry was triumphant; but it was his last triumph. On that very day a new Pope, Celestine II., was chosen in place of Innocent, who had died two days before. The legatine commission expired with the Pope who had granted it; the bishop of Winchester became again a mere suffragan of Canterbury, and Theobald suddenly found himself primate in fact as well as in name. Everything now depended on the dispositions of the new Pope. Accordingly, early in November both Theobald and Henry set out for Rome.[1034] The latter soon learned that his journey was useless; Celestine was “a favourer of the Angevins”;[1035] and when Theobald and his confidant Thomas arrived at Rome they found no difficulty in persuading the Pope to transfer the legatine commission from the bishop of Winchester to the primate.[1036] Henry consoled himself by turning aside to Cluny and spending a quiet winter in the home of his boyhood. Next spring came another change; Celestine died on March 9, 1144, and was succeeded by Lucius II. To Lucius Henry went, and in his eyes he found at least so much favour that he was acquitted of sundry charges brought against him by emissaries from Anjou. But the legation was apparently left altogether in abeyance; if it was not renewed to Theobald--a point which is not quite clear--it was at any rate not restored to Henry.[1037]

[1034] Will. Newb., l. i. c. 10 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 43). Cf. Ann. Waverl. a. 1143 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. ii. p. 229).

[1035] “Alumpnus Andegavensium.” Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 146.

[1036] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 384.

[1037] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 146, 147.

The tide which had borne both Henry and Stephen to their triumph was in truth now rising far above their heads. The religious movement of which Henry had once seemed destined to become a leader had gone sweeping on till it left him far behind. It was the one element of national life whose growth, instead of being checked, seems to have been actually fostered by the anarchy. The only bright pages in the story of those “nineteen winters” are the pages in the Monasticon Anglicanum which tell of the progress and the work of the new religious orders, and shew us how, while knights and barons, king and Empress, were turning the fairest regions of England into a wilderness, Templars and Hospitaliers were setting up their priories, Austin canons were directing schools and serving hospitals, and the sons of S. Bernard were making the very desert to rejoice and blossom as the rose. The vigour of the movement shewed itself in the diversity of forms which it assumed. Most of them were offshoots of the Order of S. Augustine. The Augustinian schools were the best in England; the “Black Canons” excelled as teachers; they excelled yet more as nurses and guardians of the poor. One of the most attractive features of the time is the great number of hospices, hospitals, or almshouses as we should call them now, established for the reception and maintenance of the aged, the needy and the infirm. Such were the two famous houses of S. Giles, Cripplegate, and S. Bartholomew, Smithfield; such was the Hospital of S. Katharine near the Tower, founded in 1148 by Stephen’s queen Matilda, and served by the canons of Holy Trinity at Aldgate, to whom the younger “good Queen Maude” was almost as devoted a friend as her aunt and namesake had been. Such, too, was another foundation whose white church, nestling amid a clump of trees in the meadows through which the little blue Itchen goes winding down to the sea, is the only unmutilated remnant that Winchester still retains of the handiwork of her legate-bishop Henry. There, before he built his own fortified house, Henry founded for thirteen poor old men the Hospital of the Holy Cross; and there, while the dwelling which he made so strong for himself has perished, the “Almshouse of noble Poverty” still stands--the hospital indeed rebuilt by a later bishop to whom it owes its poetical name, but the church unaltered since its founder’s days--a lasting memorial of that better, spiritual side of his character which the world least saw and least believed in. Another class of hospitals was destined for the reception of poor travellers, especially pilgrims. Such had been, in far-off Palestine, the original purpose of two societies of pious laymen which had now made their way back into Europe and even into England in the shape of two great military orders, the Hospitaliers or Knights of S. John and the Templars. They, too, lived by the rule of S. Austin. Another offshoot of the Augustinian order consisted of the White Canons or Premonstratensians (so called from their first establishment at Prémontré in the diocese of Laon), for whom, in the midst of the civil war, Peter de Gousla endowed a priory at Newhouse in Lincolnshire, while his wife founded a house at Brodholm in Nottinghamshire for sisters of the same order.[1038] “What shall we think,” exclaims an inmate of one of the great Augustinian houses of Yorkshire, William of Newburgh,--“what shall we think of all these religious places which in King Stephen’s time began more abundantly to arise and to flourish, but that they are God’s castles, wherein the servants of the true Anointed King do keep watch, and His young soldiers are exercised in warfare against spiritual evil? For indeed at that time, when the royal authority had lost all vigour, the mighty men of the realm, and whosoever was able, were all building castles either for their own protection or for their neighbours’ hurt; and thus while through King Stephen’s weakness, or rather through the malice of the Devil, who is ever a nourisher of strife, evils were swarming and abundant, there did yet more abound and more gloriously shine forth the wise and salutary providence of the Almighty King, Who at that very time did the more mightily confound the king of pride by raising up for Himself such fortresses as beseemed the King of Peace. For in the short while that Stephen reigned, or rather bore the title of king, there arose in England many more dwellings of the servants and handmaids of God than had arisen there in the course of the whole previous century.”[1039]

[1038] The Augustinian houses are in Dugdale’s Monast. Angl., vol. vi. pt. 1; the hospitals, the military orders and the Premonstratensians in vol. vi. pt. 2.

[1039] Will. Newb., l. i. c. 15 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 53).

It is significant that this enthusiastic outburst of the historian-canon of Newburgh is called forth by the contemplation not of his own order, but of three great Cistercian houses, Byland, Rievaux and Fountains. Buried in their lonely wildernesses, the Cistercians seem at first glance to have been intent only on saving their own souls, taking no part in the regeneration of society at large. But the truth is far otherwise. While the other orders were--if we may venture to take up the suggestive figure employed by William of Newburgh--the working, fighting rank and file of the spiritual army, the White Monks were at once its sentinels, its guides and its commanding officers; they kept watch and ward over its organization and its safety, they pointed the way wherein it should go, they directed its energies and inspired its action. For the never-ending crusade of the Church against the world had at this time found its leader in a simple Cistercian monk, who never was Pope, nor legate, nor archbishop, nor even official head of his own order--who was simply abbot of Clairvaux--yet who, by the irresistible, unconscious influence of a pure mind and a single aim, had brought all Christendom to his feet. It was to the “Bright Valley,” to Clairvaux, that men looked from the most distant lands for light amid the darkness; it was to S. Bernard that all instinctively turned for counsel and for guidance. The story of S. Gilbert of Sempringham may serve for an example. The father of Gilbert was a Norman holding property in Lincolnshire in the time of Henry I.; his mother was a woman of Old-English descent. The boy ran away from school and made his escape to France; there he repented of his idleness, threw himself zealously into the pursuit of letters, and after some years came home to set up in his native place a school for boys and girls. He taught them a great deal more than mere book-learning; his purity, sweetness and fervour won the very hearts and souls of all who came under his influence; and there was something in his lofty yet tender nature which made him seem peculiarly fitted for a spiritual director of women. Seven maidens first devoted themselves to the religious life under his guidance; others soon followed their example; several men did the like. A double monastery thus grew up at Sempringham, under the protection of Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, in the earliest years of Stephen’s reign. For some time it continued subject to no other rule than its founder’s own will. He saw, however, the necessity for a more lasting basis of organization; instead of trying to devise one himself, he applied to the general chapter of Cîteaux and besought them to take charge of his little flock. They, however, refused; since Gilbert had been inspired to found a new religious society, they would not presume to interfere with his mission; he must draw up a rule for his own spiritual children. He ended by working out his scheme into a composite institution which aimed at combining the excellencies of all earlier rules, but in which the Cistercian element strongly predominated. The Gilbertine priories, when fully constituted, consisted of four orders of persons: canons, who followed the rule of S. Austin; lay-brethren, nuns and lay-sisters, all bound by the rule of Cîteaux; while the whole community was held together by certain additional regulations specially devised by the founder. The new order spread rapidly through eastern England; and before S. Gilbert’s own life reached its close, he had the satisfaction of seeing his spiritual children take a highly honourable part in the great ecclesiastical struggle of which the foremost champion and victim was S. Thomas of Canterbury.[1040]

[1040] On the Gilbertines and their founder see Dugdale, Monast. Angl., vol. vi. pt. 2, pp. iii*–lix*; and Will. Newb., l. i. c. 16 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 54, 55).

One sees in this story how instinctively the religious reformers of the day went to Cîteaux for a model and a guide; and one sees, too, how little the Cistercians were as yet inclined to abuse their influence by reaping where they had not sown. The extraordinary position of Bernard himself was not of his own seeking; the “care of all the churches” came upon him whether he would or not; as one of his biographers expresses it, all Christendom looked upon him as a divinely-appointed Moses of whom the ordained hierarchy and even the supreme pontiff himself were but subordinate mouthpieces and representatives.[1041] Like their prototype in the Old Testament, the Aarons of the time did not always understand the policy or appreciate the aims of their inspired brother, and the spiritual party in the Church sometimes found its worst stumbling-block within the walls of the Lateran. Year by year, however, its influence grew and spread, till on the death of Pope Lucius II. in February 1145 a Cistercian, Bernard abbot of S. Anastasius at Rome, was raised to the chair of S. Peter by the name of Eugene III. With him the anti-Bernardine party had no chance of a moment’s hearing; threats, flatteries or bribes were all alike thrown away upon a pontiff whose glory and whose strength lay in having no will of his own, in being simply the voice which proclaimed and the hand which executed the thoughts of his greater namesake at Clairvaux. “They say I am Pope, not you!” wrote S. Bernard to him,[1042] half playfully, half in gentle reproach, and Eugene gloried in the saying. A new departure in the policy of the Roman see was marked by the fulfilment of one of Bernard’s most cherished schemes, the preaching of a new crusade for the deliverance of the Holy Land, whence an imploring cry for help came from the widowed Queen Melisenda--for King Fulk of Anjou had been cut off suddenly in the midst of his labours, and his realm, left to the rule of a woman and a child, was rapidly falling a prey to the Infidels.[1043] At Vézelay, on Easter-day 1146, the young King Louis of France took the cross from S. Bernard’s own hands amid a scene of the wildest enthusiasm. The Emperor Conrad soon followed his example, and at Pentecost 1147 the expedition set out.

[1041] Ern. Bonneval, Vita S. Bernardi, l. ii. c. 4 (S. Bern. Opp., ed. Mabillon, vol. ii. col. 1102).

[1042] S. Bernard. Ep. ccxxxix (Opp., Mabillon, vol. 1. col. 235).

[1043] On Fulk’s reign in Palestine see Will. Tyr., ll. xiv. and xv. The exact date of his death is doubtful; Will. Tyr., l. xv. c. 27, and l. xvi. c. 2, gives it as November 13, 1142, and says that Baldwin II. was crowned on the following Christmas-day. But in l. xvi. c. 4 he says that Edessa was lost in the interval between Fulk’s death and his son’s coronation, and it is known from other sources that Edessa was taken by the Infidels on Christmas-night 1144. Moreover there is in Paoli’s Codice Dipl. del S. Mil. Ord. Gerosol., vol. i. p. 29, a charter of Melisenda dated “1149, Indictione xii.,” which she calls the fifth year of her son’s reign. The Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 35, 146), Chron. Turon. Magn. (Salmon, Chron. Touraine, p. 134), Chron. Namnet. (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 558) and Ric. Poitiers (ib. p. 415) all date Fulk’s death 1143; the Chron. S. Flor. Salm. (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 191) places it in 1141, but couples it with the death of Pope Innocent, which certainly occurred in 1143. Fulk’s end was characteristic, being caused by his own impetuosity. He was thrown from his horse in dashing too hastily after a hare started by some children, as he was riding with Melisenda outside the walls of Acre (Will. Tyr., l. xv. c. 27). See the peculiar philosophizing of the Tours chronicler thereon (Salmon, as above).

As far as its direct object was concerned, this second crusade failed completely; yet it had not been projected in vain. As said a friend and biographer of S. Bernard: “If it was God’s will thereby to deliver, not the bodies of many eastern folk from the bondage of the heathen, but the souls of many western folk from the bondage of sin, who shall dare to ask why He has thus done?”[1044] If the movement did nothing for Palestine, it did something for England. Torn and exhausted with her internal divisions, she could take no part in it as a state; but nowhere was it more readily joined by individual volunteers. The preaching of the Crusade was a spark which kindled into flame, in the heart of more than one of the troublers of the land, the smouldering embers of a capacity for better things; it was a trumpet-call which roused more than one brave knight to forsake the miserable party-strife with which perhaps in his secret soul he had long been growing disgusted, and fling into a better cause the energies which he had been wasting upon his country’s ruin.[1045] But the movement did more for England than this. It brought to light among the English people a spirit whose existence at such a time could otherwise hardly have been suspected. The one success of the Crusade was achieved by a little independent squadron of one hundred and sixty-four ships which sailed from Dartmouth on May 23, six days before the feast of the Ascension, 1147. The expedition consisted of Germans, Flemings and Englishmen, the latter being the most numerous. Nearly all were men of low degree; they had no commander-in-chief; each nationality chose its own leader. The “men of the Empire”--a body of Low-Germans who, for some unknown reason, chose to be independent of the great Imperial host--followed Count Arnold of Aerschot, who seems to have been the only person of rank in the whole assemblage; the Flemings and the men of Queen Matilda’s county of Boulogne were led by Christian of Gistelles. The English grouped themselves according to the districts of their birth under the guidance of four marshals; Hervey of Glanville led the men of Norfolk and Suffolk; Simon of Dover[1046] commanded the ships of Kent; a man named Andrew was chief of the Londoners; and a miscellaneous contingent from other parts of the country was headed by Saher de Arcelles. The whole company bound themselves by vows almost as stringent as those of a religious order; they were pledged to eschew all fine clothes and personal indulgences, and to help and avenge one another in all things as sworn brethren; each ship had its own chaplain and its regular services, as if it were a parish; every man confessed and communicated once a week; and for the enforcement of all these rules two men were elected out of every thousand to form a body of sworn judges[1047] who should administer the common funds and assist the marshals in maintaining order. These warrior-pilgrims, sailing down the western coast of the Spanish peninsula on their way to the Mediterranean Sea, touched at Oporto; at the entreaty of the Portuguese King Alfonso and his people they exchanged their intended crusade in Holy Land for one which was perhaps more useful--a campaign for the deliverance of Christian Portugal from its Moorish oppressors. The Moors who occupied Lisbon were starved into surrender by a four months’ blockade; the crusaders entered the city in triumph; in the hour of temptation English discipline proved strong enough to control German greed,[1048] and renouncing all share in the fruit of their victory these single-hearted soldiers of the Cross made over the future capital of Portugal to its Christian sovereign and went home rejoicing that they, a few poor men of lowly birth and no reputation, had been counted worthy to strike a successful blow for the Faith, while its royal and imperial champions at the head of their countless hosts met with nothing but disaster and disgrace.[1049]

[1044] Geoff. Clairvaux, Vita S. Bern., l. iii. c. 4 (S. Bern. Opp., Mabillon, vol. ii. col. 1120).

[1045] See, in particular, the cases of William of Cricklade and Philip of Gloucester, Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 111, 119, 120.

[1046] “Dorobernensis,” Osbern. De Expugn. Lyxbon. (prefixed to Itinerarium Regis Ricardi, Stubbs), p. cxliv. This ought to mean Canterbury; but is not Dover more likely in this case?

[1047] “Qui judices et conjurati dicerentur.” Osbern (Stubbs, Itin. Reg. Ric.), p. cxliv.

[1048] The characteristic way in which the Germans and the English acted when they got into the city should be noticed in Osbern (Stubbs, Itin. Reg. Ric.), pp. clxviii.–clxxx.

[1049] Osbern (Stubbs, Itin. Reg. Ric.), pp. clxxxi, clxxxii. See also a letter in Martène and Durand, Ampliss. Coll., vol. i. cols. 800–802; another in Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist., vol. xvii. p. 27; and Hen. Hunt. l. viii. c. 27 (Arnold, p. 281).

There was no need to despair of a country whose middle and lower classes could still produce men capable of an exploit such as this. When a spontaneous gathering of poor yeomen, common sailors and obscure citizens could reveal such a spirit, it was plain that all England wanted to rescue her from her misery was a competent leader. S. Bernard, watching over the fortunes of the English Church through the eyes of his brethren at Fountains and Rievaux, had seen this already; and he saw, too, that it was vain to look for such a leader in either the king or the king-maker, Henry of Winchester. Before the Church of England could rescue the state, she must be freed from the political entanglements into which she had been dragged by Henry’s impetuosity, and enabled to resume a position of spiritual independence under her rightful leader, the archbishop of Canterbury. With this view the whole Cistercian order in England, supported and directed by S. Bernard, had set their faces against William Fitz-Herbert’s appointment to the see of York, as an attempt of king and legate to override the constitutional rights of the southern primate and of the Church as a whole. “The bishop of Winchester and the archbishop of York do not walk in the same spirit with the archbishop of Canterbury, but go their own way in opposition to him; and this comes from the old quarrel about the legation”--thus Bernard summed up the case.[1050] Moreover the saving clause whereby William of Durham was allowed to swear by proxy in behalf of his namesake appears to have been interpolated by the latter’s friends into the Papal decree; for “One William has not sworn, yet the other is archbishop”[1051] was the burthen of S. Bernard’s cry to the Pope; and when in 1144 a cardinal-legate, Hicmar, came to England with a pall for William of York, he promised Bernard not to give it till he should have received the oath from the bishop of Durham in person.[1052]

[1050] In a letter to Eugene III., S. Bern. Ep. ccxxxviii. (Opp. Mabillon, vol. i. col. 234).

[1051] S. Bern. Epp. ccxxxv.–ccxxxvi., both to Celestine II. (as above, cols. 229–231).

[1052] S. Bern. Ep. ccclx. (as above, cols. 324, 325)--to Abbot William of Rievaux. See also Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 149, and, for date, note u, ibid.

Neither prelate took any notice of Hicmar’s presence; but when he was recalled by the death of Pope Lucius and the accession of Eugene, the archbishop of York suddenly perceived what a blunder he had made, and hurried to Rome in quest of the pall about which he had hitherto been so indifferent. Instead of giving it, Eugene suspended him from all episcopal functions till such time as William of Durham should have taken the oath required by the sentence of Pope Innocent. The archbishop hereupon retired to Sicily and took up his abode there with his fellow-countryman the chancellor, Robert of Selby or Salisbury,[1053] under the protection of King Roger. As Roger was then at bitter feud with the Church, this step was not likely to mend William’s ecclesiastical reputation. His cause, bad from the first and made worse by his own carelessness, was presently ruined by his friends. The leaders of the opposition to him in England were the abbots of Rievaux and Fountains; the latter, Henry Murdac, was a native of Yorkshire who in Archbishop Thurstan’s time had given up houses and lands, home and kindred, to go out to Clairvaux at the call of S. Bernard. In 1135 he was sent thence to found the abbey of Vauclair;[1054] in 1143 he was appointed to succeed Abbot Richard II. of Fountains, who had died at Clairvaux while on his way to attend the general chapter of his order at Cîteaux.[1055] Henry Murdac went back to his native land charged with an implied commission to make Fountains an English Clairvaux and himself an English representative of S. Bernard, and he fulfilled his charge with true Cistercian zeal and fidelity.[1056] As soon as William’s suspension became known, his friends attributed it to the influence of Murdac, whom they sought to punish by making an armed raid upon his abbey. Plunder, of course, they got little or none in a freshly-reformed Cistercian house;[1057] so, after a hurried and unsuccessful search for Murdac himself, they set the place on fire. Every stone of it perished except the church, which escaped as by miracle; and the abbot escaped with it, for he had been lying all the while, unnoticed by the passion-blinded eyes of his foes, prostrate in prayer before the high altar. The energy of the monks and the sympathy of their neighbours soon enabled Fountains to rise from its ashes more glorious than before;[1058] but William’s day of grace was at once brought to a close by this outrage. At a council held in Paris in the spring of 1147, the abbot of Fountains and a deputation from the chapter of York once more formally presented to the Pope their charges against their primate, and Eugene deposed William from his episcopal office.[1059] On the eve of S. James the chapter of York, with the two suffragan bishops of the province--Durham and Carlisle--met in obedience to a papal mandate for the election of a new archbishop. The choice of the majority fell upon Henry Murdac. From Clairvaux, whither he had gone after the council, the abbot of Fountains was summoned to the papal court at Trier, and there, on the octave of S. Andrew, he received his consecration and his pall both at once from Pope Eugene’s own hand.[1060]

[1053] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 150–152. Robert was “oriundus in Angliâ, scilicet in Salesbiâ.” Mr. Raine renders this Selby; Twysden made it Salisbury; Bishop Stubbs (Lect. on Mediev. and Mod. Hist., p. 133), leaves the question undecided.

[1054] On the earlier life of Henry Murdac see Dixon and Raine, Fasti Ebor., pp. 210–213; and Walbran, Memor. of Fountains, vol. i. p. 84, note 3.

[1055] Walbran, Memor. of Fountains, vol. i. pp. 78, 81–83. S. Bern. Epp. cccxx, cccxxi (Opp. Mabillon, vol. i. cols. 297, 298).

[1056] Walbran, Memor. of Fountains, vol. i. pp. 84, 85.

[1057] “Ferentes secum spolia, parum quidem pecuniæ, sed plurimum dampnationis.” Walbran, Memor. of Fountains, vol. i. p. 102.

[1058] Ib. pp. 101, 102.

[1059] On the council of Paris see Labbe, Concilia (Cossart), vol. xxi., cols. 709, 710. As to the date, it appears from Jaffé (Regesta Pontif. Rom., pp. 626, 627) that Eugene reached Paris before Easter (April 20) and was there till June 11; so the council must fall in the interval. On William’s deposition see Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 134. “Hoc concilio” ought, by all logical and grammatical rules, to mean the council of Reims, held in March 1148, and of which Gervase has just been speaking. Accordingly most of his commentators (including the editors of the Fountains and Hexham books, and the compilers of the Fasti Eboracenses) say that William was deposed at the council of Reims; and then, as his successor was undoubtedly consecrated in December 1147, they are obliged to antedate the council of Reims by a year. But Gervase himself says, almost in the same breath, that the deposition took place in Paris. He has confused the two councils; see Pagi’s note to Baronius, Annales, vol. xix. pp. 7, 8; and cf. Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 154.

[1060] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 154, 155. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 135. Walbran, Memor. of Fountains, vol. i. p. 103. Will. Newb., l. i. c. 17 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 56). The Hist. Pontif. (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist., vol. xx. p. 518) says Henry was consecrated at Auxerre, but this is incompatible with dates.

The subsequent conduct of Stephen and Henry of Winchester proved that their aim in securing the occupation of the northern primacy had been rightly understood by Eugene and Bernard. They had staked everything upon the success of their scheme, and when it failed not only the king but even the once cool and sagacious bishop completely lost his head. Upon William himself the papal sentence had the very opposite effect; it woke him from his dreams of easy dignity and worldly pride; from that moment the idle, showy, self-indulgent young ecclesiastic changed into an humble saint, and when he came home next year it was not to renew the strife but to turn away from the world and possess his soul in patience.[1061] But his uncles would not hear of submission; Henry took him to live in his own house, and there persisted in ostentatiously treating him with all the honours due to the archbishop of York;[1062] and when in the summer of 1148 the new archbishop also came back to England, Stephen demanded sworn security for his fidelity before he would let him set foot in the country.[1063] The citizens of York, instigated by the treasurer of the see, Hugh of Puiset, who like William was a nephew of the king, shut their gates in their primate’s face; he withdrew to Ripon, laid his diocese under interdict and excommunicated Hugh; but Hugh, strong in the support of his uncles, defied the interdict and was even impudent enough to return the excommunication.[1064]

[1061] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 154.

[1062] Ibid. Will. Newb. as above.

[1063] Ibid. Oddly enough, this York affair is almost the only one in which William rather inclines to take the part of the king.

[1064] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 158.

In the southern province matters had come to a still more dangerous crisis. Early in 1148 all the English bishops were summoned by the Pope to a council which was to meet at Reims on Mid-Lent Sunday. Three of them--Hereford, Chichester and Norwich--were sent by Stephen himself; but when the archbishop of Canterbury made the usual application for leave to quit the country, the king refused, set a watch at every port to stop his egress, and at his brother Henry’s instigation swore that if Theobald did go he should be banished on his return. Theobald however had made up his mind to go at any cost; he slipped away in an old broken boat with only two companions--Roger of Pont-l’Evêque and Thomas of London, the latter of whom had now been for several years the most trusted medium of intercommunication between the primate and the court of Rome. The daring voyagers reached their journey’s end in safety, and Theobald was triumphantly presented to the council by the Pope as one who had swum rather than sailed across the Channel for the sake of his duty to the Church.[1065] The bishops who had failed to attend were all suspended, Henry of Winchester being specially mentioned by name. His brother, however,--the good count of Blois who seems to have been at once the scapegoat and the peacemaker for all the sins of his family, and who was held in the deepest esteem by both Eugene and Bernard--made intercession on his behalf, and obtained a relaxation of the sentence against him on condition of his coming to Rome within six months.[1066] As for the king, Eugene would have excommunicated him at once; but for him the other Theobald stepped forward as mediator, like Anselm in a somewhat similar case, and procured him a respite of three months.[1067] The intercessor’s reward was the threatened sentence of banishment, issued as soon as he returned to Canterbury. He withdrew into France and appealed to the Pope, while Stephen seized the temporalities of the see and began playing the part of the Red King on a small scale. Eugene wrote to all the English bishops, severally and in a body, bidding them summon the king to restore the primate at once, lay all his dominions under interdict if he refused, and tell him that he should certainly be excommunicated by the Pope on Michaelmas day. The bishops however were all on the court-side; the interdict, duly published by Theobald, was unheeded save in his own diocese; and the king remained obstinate.[1068] But his wiser queen, aided by William of Ypres, who, however he may have sinned against others, was unquestionably Stephen’s truest friend, made an effort to restore peace; and at their request Theobald removed to St. Omer, as being a more accessible place for negotiation than his French retreat.[1069]

[1065] Hist. Pontif. (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist., vol. xx.), p. 519; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 134. Both accounts seem to be derived from a letter of S. Thomas (Ep. ccl., Robertson, Becket, vol. vi. pp. 57, 58). Thomas’s presence at the council is distinctly stated in Hist. Pontif. (as above), p. 522, and so is that of Roger of Pont-l’Evêque.

[1066] Hist. Pontif. (as above), p. 520. Cf. Gilb. Foliot, Ep. lxxvi. (Giles, vol. i. p. 92).

[1067] Hist. Pontif. (as above), p. 519.

[1068] Hist. Pontif. (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist., vol. xx.), pp. 530, 532.

[1069] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 135.

Matilda of Boulogne doubtless saw what Theobald must have known full well, that the quarrel involved a great deal more than strictly ecclesiastical questions. The issue which the ordeal of battle had failed to decide was on its trial now in a different form and before another tribunal. The most curious symptom of this feeling, perhaps, was the action of Brian Fitz-Count, who, after having been for years Matilda’s most devoted and most successful champion in the field, suddenly exchanged the sword for the pen and brought out a defence of his Lady’s rights in the shape of a little treatise which gained the approval of one of the cleverest men and greatest scholars of the time, Gilbert Foliot, abbot of Gloucester.[1070] Geoffrey Plantagenet, with his Angevin quickness, was the first openly to proclaim the true position of affairs by sending to Stephen, through Bishop Miles of Térouanne, a formal challenge to give up his ill-gotten realm and submit to an investigation of his claims before the papal court. Stephen retorted by a counter-challenge, calling upon Geoffrey to give up his equally ill-gotten duchy before he would agree to any further proceeding in the matter.[1071] Geoffrey took him at his word, but in a way which he was far from desiring. He did give up the duchy of Normandy, by making it over to his own son, Henry Fitz-Empress.[1072]

[1070] Gilb. Foliot, Ep. lxxix. (Giles, vol. i. pp. 94–102).

[1071] Hist. Pontif. (as above), p. 531.

[1072] Chron. S. Albin. a. 1149 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 36). But the story of Gilbert Foliot’s consecration shews that the cession must really have taken place in 1148.

The crisis was now close at hand; Stephen was at last face to face with his true rival. He appears to have consented, as if in desperation, to the proposed trial at Rome. It seems at first glance as if the envoys whom he sent to represent him there must indeed have been driven to their wits’ end for an argument in his behalf when they raked up again a scandal which S. Anselm had laid to rest half a century ago, as to the validity of the marriage between Matilda’s father and mother.[1073] Yet such was the argument publicly put forth by many voices against the legality of her claims to the crown; and though one account of the proceedings states that her adversaries were triumphantly confuted by Bishop Ulger of Angers,[1074] another, written by an eye-witness whose own opinions were wholly in her favour, declares that her advocates answered never a word.[1075] The trial seems to have ended without any decision;[1076] it was however quickly followed by a very significant event. The witness just referred to was Gilbert Foliot, a Cluniac monk who since 1139 had been abbot of Gloucester, and whose reputation for learning, wisdom and holiness had secured to him the confidence of the primate and the consideration of all parties alike in Church and state. He had reluctantly and after some delay obeyed Theobald’s summons to join him at the papal court; once there, he seems to have flung all his energies into the organization of the new policy of which Theobald was to be the leader.[1077] During the session of the council at Reims the bishop of Hereford died.[1078] The Pope at once appointed Gilbert Foliot vicar of the diocese;[1079] in September he was consecrated by Theobald at St. Omer, with the consent and approval of the young duke of the Normans, given on the express condition that he should do homage for the temporalities of his see to the duke and not to the king.

[1073] Gilb. Foliot, Ep. lxxix. (Giles, vol. i. p. 101). Hist. Pontif. (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist., vol. xx.), p. 543.

[1074] Hist. Pontif. (as above), p. 544.

[1075] Gilb. Foliot, Ep. lxxix. (as above).

[1076] From the way in which this trial is brought into the Hist. Pontif., it would at first glance seem to have taken place in 1151. But the presence of Bishops Ulger of Angers and Roger of Chester, both of whom died in 1149, and the account of the proceedings written by Gilbert Foliot to Brian Fitz-Count clearly prove the true date to be 1148.

[1077] Gilb. Foliot, Epp. vi., vii., lxxvi. (Giles, vol. i. pp. 13, 14, 92).

[1078] Hist. Monast. S. Petr. Glocestr. (Hart), vol. i. p. 18.

[1079] “G. gratiâ Dei abbas, et Herefordiensis ecclesiæ mandato Domini Papæ vicarius,” runs the salutation of his Ep. lxxviii. (Giles, vol. i. p. 93).

The very first thing Gilbert did was to break this promise;[1080] but that Theobald should have consecrated such a man on such terms was a sign of the times which Stephen could hardly fail to understand. Theobald himself soon afterwards ventured back to England; crossing from Gravelines, he landed at Gosford in the territories of Hugh Bigod, by whom he was hospitably received; the bishops of London, Chichester and Norwich, with several barons, came to meet him at Hugh’s castle of Framlingham; the king was reconciled, the primate restored, the interdict raised, and the suspended prelates, all save one, allowed to resume their functions.[1081] The exception was Henry of Winchester, who by neglecting to go to Rome within the prescribed six months had necessarily fallen under the sentence pronounced against him by Eugene at the council of Reims. Even to him, however, Theobald was willing at Stephen’s request to hold out the hand of fellowship and forgiveness.[1082] But Henry of Winchester’s days of king-making were over. It was time for another Henry to appear upon the political scene, to take his cause into his own hands and stand forth as the champion of his own claims against the man who had supplanted him on his grandfather’s throne.

[1080] Hist. Pontif. (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist., vol. xx.), pp. 532, 533.

[1081] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 136, 137.

[1082] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 152.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

VIII. HENRY DUKE OF THE NORMANS

1149–1154.

No loving hands have done for the early life of Henry Fitz-Empress what they did for that of his contemporary, his friend, his opponent Thomas of London; we have no stories of his boyhood, no picture of his home. Home indeed, in the full sense of the word, he never had and never could have. That instinctive attachment to one particular spot, or at the least to one particular country, which is innate in most men, was to a child of Geoffrey and Matilda simply impossible. Geoffrey was the son of an Angevin count and a Cenomannian countess; Matilda was the daughter of a king born in England of a Norman father and a Flemish mother, and of a queen whose parents were the one a Scottish Celt, the other a West-Saxon with a touch of High-German blood. In the temper of the Empress the Norman element was undoubtedly the strongest; no trace can be seen in her of the gentle spirit of her mother; and it is clear that no lingering regrets for the land of her birth[1083] haunted the girl-bride of the Emperor in her palace at Aachen as they haunted the monk Orderic, from boyhood to old age, in his cell at Saint-Evroul. Yet when she came to Normandy in her twenty-third year, she came there unwillingly and as a complete stranger. If Henry was to inherit any national or patriotic feeling at all, it could not be from his mother; what she transmitted to him instead was a sort of cosmopolitanism which saved the future duke of Normandy and king of England from the too exclusive influence of the demon-blood of Anjou, not by making him a Norman, still less an Englishman, but by rendering his nationality a yet more insoluble problem than her own. Even in his father, too, there are signs of a divided national sentiment. The son of Aremburg of Maine, the grandson and heir of Elias, could not cling to the black rock of Angers with the exclusive attachment of its earlier counts; a share of his patriotic affection and pride must have been given to that other, red rock above the Sarthe which had held out so long and so bravely against both Normandy and Anjou, to that Cenomannian land of heroes which Norman and Angevin alike had counted it their highest glory to overcome and win. It may have been by chance, or it may have been of set purpose, that Geoffrey and Matilda were at Le Mans when their first child was born; no other spot could have been half so appropriate. The land which Normans and Angevins and even Englishmen[1084] had done their utmost to wipe out of the list of states, the land whose claim to a separate existence, ignored or denied by them all, had yet proved the insurmountable stumbling-block which forced them into union:--that land was the most fitting birth-place for the child who was to be neither Norman, nor Angevin, nor English, and yet was to be all three at once. The vengeance of Maine upon her conquerors formed a characteristic close to her national career. They had swallowed her up at last; but they had no sooner done it than she gave a master to them all.

[1083] She was born in London: Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 13.

[1084] Eng. Chron. a. 1073.

If, then, Normandy, England and Anjou had each a part in Henry, Le Mans had two parts, as being at once the home of his father’s mother and the scene of his own birth. His earliest recollections, however, must rather have been associated with Normandy. His first journey thither was made when he was about twelve months old, when he accompanied his mother on a visit to King Henry in the spring 1134. His brother Geoffrey was born at Argentan on June 1, and the two children narrowly escaped being left motherless under their grandfather’s care.[1085] Possibly this made them all the dearer to him; he certainly found in them his last earthly pleasure, of which he was finally deprived by a quarrel with their mother, who seems to have sent them back to Angers shortly before her own return thither in the autumn of 1135.[1086] For the next seven years little Henry can have seen nothing of his future duchy; and we have no means of knowing whether its stately capital, its people, its dialect, had left any impression upon him, or whether any dim personal remembrance was associated in his mind with that name of “my grandfather King Henry” to which he appealed so constantly in later life. His training, after his return to Angers as before, must have devolved chiefly upon Matilda; for Geoffrey during the next three years was too busy with unsuccessful fighting abroad in the interest of his wife and son to have much leisure for devoting himself to their society at home. It was not till the close of 1138 that his influence can have been seriously brought to bear upon his children, of whom there were now three, another son, named William, having been born in August 1136.[1087] After the disaster of Toucques the count appears to have spent his time until the beginning of 1141 for the most part quietly at home, where his wife’s departure over sea left him in his turn sole guardian of his boys. In one respect at least he did not neglect his paternal duty. “Unlettered king, crowned ass,” was a reproach which would have fallen with double disgrace upon the son of Geoffrey Plantagenet and the grandson of Henry I.; and Geoffrey took care that his firstborn should never be exposed to it. It may even be that in those two years when war and politics left him at leisure for the quieter enjoyments of his books, his hunting and his home, the young father himself took up the task, of which he was certainly quite capable, of instilling into his child the first rudiments of that book-learning which he loved so well. At any rate, it was he who chose the first teacher to whom Henry’s education was intrusted. As if on purpose to add one more to the varied influences already working in that young mind, the teacher was neither Angevin, nor Cenomannian, nor Norman. He was one Master Peter of Saintes, “learned above all his contemporaries in the science of verse.”[1088]

[1085] Chron. S. Albin. a. 1134 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 33); Rob. Torigni, a. 1134. Cf. Will. Jumièges Contin., l. viii. cc. 27, 28 (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., pp. 305, 306).

[1086] Will. Jumièges Contin., l. viii. c. 34 (as above, p. 310).

[1087] Rob. Torigni, ad ann.

[1088] “Hic [sc. Gaufridus] filium suum Enricum natu majorem ad erudiendum tradidit cuidam magistro Petro scilicet Xantonensi, qui in metris instructus est super omnes coætaneos suos.” Anon. Chron., Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 120.

Under Peter’s care the boy remained till the close of 1142, when, as we have seen, he was sent to England in company with his uncle Robert of Gloucester. Henry now entered upon a third phase of education. For the next four years his uncle took charge of him and kept him in his own household at Bristol under the care of one Master Matthew, by whom he was to be “imbued with letters and instructed in good manners, as beseemed a youth of his rank.”[1089] This arrangement may have been due to the Empress, or it may have originated with Geoffrey when he sent the boy over sea in the earl’s company; for much as they differed in other matters, on the subject of a boy’s training the two brothers-in-law could hardly fail to be of the same mind. A well-balanced compound of soldier, statesman and scholar was Earl Robert’s ideal no less than Count Geoffrey’s; an ideal so realized in his own person that he might safely be trusted to watch over its developement in the person of his little nephew. As far as the military element was concerned, the earl of Gloucester, with his matured experience and oft-proved valour, was no less capable than the count of Anjou of furnishing a model of all knightly prowess, skill and courtesy; and if Henry’s chivalry was to be tempered with discretion--if it was to be regulated by a wise and wary policy--if he was to acquire any insight into the principles of sound and prudent state-craft--Robert was certainly, among the group of adventurers who surrounded the Empress, the only man from whom he could learn anything of the kind. The boy was indeed scarce ten years old, and even for the heir of Anjou and England it was perhaps somewhat too early to begin such studies as these. For the literary side of his education, later years proved that Robert’s choice of a teacher was as good as Geoffrey’s had been; the seed sowed by Peter of Saintes was well watered by Matthew, and it seems to have brought forth in his young pupil’s mind a harvest of gratitude as well as of learning, for among the chancellors of King Henry II. there appears a certain “Master Matthew” who can hardly be any other than his old teacher.[1090]

[1089] “Puer autem Henricus sub tutelâ Comitis Roberti apud Bristoviam degens, per quatuor annos traditus est magisterio cujusdam Mathæi, litteris imbuendus et moribus honestis ut talem decebat puerum instituendus.” Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs.), vol. i. p. 125.

[1090] “The person meant was no doubt that Matthew who is called Henry’s chancellor in Foliot’s letters.” Stubbs, Gerv. Cant., vol. i. p. 125, note 2. (“Master Matthew, the chancellor,” is named in Gilb. Foliot, Ep. cli., Giles, vol. i. pp. 201, 202). In his Lect. on Med. and Mod. Hist., p. 120, Bishop Stubbs speaks of Matthew as the king’s “tutor, who was some time his chancellor, and who probably was identical with the Bishop of Angers, Matthew of London.” Bishop Matthew of Angers is described by the editors of Gall. Christ. (vol. xiv. col. 570) as a native of Loudun--“Losduni natus.” He was consecrated in 1155, which seems hardly to leave time for his chancellorship.

To teach the boy “good manners”--in the true sense of those words--must have been a somewhat difficult task amid his present surroundings. Bristol, during the years of Henry’s residence there, fully kept up its character as the “stepmother of all England”; he must have been continually seeing or hearing of bands of soldiers issuing from the castle to ravage and plunder, burn and slay, or troops of captives dragged in to linger in its dungeons till they had given up their uttermost farthing or were set free by a miserable death. It seems likely, however, that the worst of these horrors occurred during Robert’s absence and without his sanction, for even the special panegyrist of Stephen gives the earl credit for doing his utmost to maintain order and justice in the shires over which he ruled.[1091] It was not his fault if matters had drifted into such a state that his efforts were worse than useless; and his good intentions were at any rate not more ineffectual than those of the king. Within the domestic circle itself it is not unlikely that the child was better placed under the influence of Robert and Mabel than either in the household of his violent-tempered mother or in that of his refined but selfish father, whom he rejoined in the spring of 1147, a year before the return of the Empress. He was in his sixteenth year when Geoffrey ceded to him the duchy of Normandy. A boy of that age, especially in the house of Anjou, was counted a man, and expected to act as such. The cession was in fact intended and understood as a solemn proclamation both to friends and foes that henceforth they would have to deal with King Henry’s chosen heir no longer indirectly, but in his own person; that his rights were to be vindicated in future not by his parents but by himself.

[1091] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 94.

He lost no time in beginning his work. In the middle of May 1149 Stephen, while endeavouring to put down a fresh revolt of the earls of Chester and Pembroke,[1092] was startled by news of Henry’s arrival in England. The young duke of the Normans landed we know not where, and made his way northward, recruiting a few of his mother’s old adherents as he went: his great-uncle King David welcomed him at Carlisle, and there knighted him on Whit-Sunday.[1093] Stephen evidently took this act as a challenge, for he immediately retorted by knighting his eldest son Eustace, thus pointedly setting up his own heir as a rival to his young kinsman.[1094] He then hastened with all his forces to York, but no hostilities took place.[1095] The intended campaign of David and Henry was frustrated by Ralf of Chester’s failure to keep his engagement with them;[1096] the two kings sat awhile, one at York and the other at Carlisle, each waiting for the other to strike, till David grew weary and retired to his own kingdom,[1097] taking his nephew with him; and in January Henry again withdrew beyond the sea.[1098] He saw that the political scales were as yet too evenly balanced to be turned by the mere weight of his maiden sword; and his work was being done for him, better than he could do it himself, by clerk and primate, abbot and Pope--most surely of all, by the blundering king himself.

[1092] Gesta Steph. (Sewell), pp. 124–127, gives the details of this rising.

[1093] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 140, 141. Cf. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 29 (Arnold, p. 282). Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 159. Rob. Torigni, a. 1149. The writer of Gesta Steph. (pp. 128, 129) has a most romantic account of Henry’s adventures. Henry, he says, came over with a very small force, and nothing to pay them with except promises. He made an attempt upon Bourton and Cricklade, and was repulsed; whereupon his troops all fell away and left him so helpless that he was obliged to ask his mother for some money. She had none to give him; he then asked his uncle Gloucester, but the latter, “suis sacculis avide incumbens,” refused. Then Henry in desperation appealed to the king, beseeching his compassion for the sake of their kindred blood; and Stephen at once sent him the needful sum. The trait is just what might be expected in Stephen; but it is hard to conceive Henry ever getting into such a plight; and the mention of Robert of Gloucester as still alive shews there must be something wrong in the story.

[1094] Hen. Hunt. as above. Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 160. Gesta Steph. (Sewell), p. 130.

[1095] Hen. Hunt. as above.

[1096] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 159, 160. Ralf had agreed to give up his claims on Carlisle and accept instead the honour of Lancaster for himself and the hand of one of David’s granddaughters for his son; he promised on these conditions to join David and Henry in an attack upon Lancaster, but was, as usual, false to the tryst.

[1097] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 29 (Arnold, p. 282).

[1098] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 142.

A double chain connected English politics with those of the Roman court. The links of the one chain were S. Bernard and Henry Murdac; those of the other were Theobald of Canterbury and Thomas of London. What was the exact nature of those communications between the primate and the Pope of which Thomas was the medium--how much of the credit of Theobald’s policy is due to himself and how much to his confidential instrument and adviser--we have no means of determining precisely. The aim of that policy was to consolidate the forces of the English Church by deepening her intercourse and strengthening her connexion with the sister-Churches of the West, and thus bring the highest religious and political influences of Latin Christendom to bear upon the troubles of the English state. The way had been paved by Henry of Winchester in his legatine days. He and the councils which he convened had first suggested the possibility of finding a remedy for the lack of secular administration in an appeal to the authority of the canon law, now formulated as a definite code by the labours of a Bolognese lawyer, Gratian. The very strifes and jealousies which arose from Henry’s over-vigorous assertion of his authority tended to a like result; they led to more frequent appeals to Rome, to elaborate legal pleadings, to the drawing of subtle legal distinctions unknown to the old customary procedure of the land; as a contemporary writer expresses it, “Then were laws and lawyers first brought into England.”[1099] On the Continent the study of the civil jurisprudence of the Roman Empire had been revived together with that of the canon law; some members of Archbishop Theobald’s household resolved to introduce it into England, hoping thereby, as it seems, to sow amid the general confusion some seeds of a more orderly and law-abiding spirit. During the time of comparative quiet which intervened between his first journey to Rome in 1143 and his expedition with Theobald to the council of Reims in 1148, Thomas of London had spent a year at Bologna and Auxerre to perfect himself in the literary culture which he had somewhat neglected in his youth.[1100] The university of Bologna was the chief seat of the new legal learning; it may therefore have been through Thomas that a Lombard teacher, Vacarius, was induced to visit England in 1149 and open lectures at Oxford on the Roman law.[1101] Rich and poor flocked to hear him, and at the request of his poorer scholars he made an abridgement of the Code and Digests, sufficient for practical use, and more within reach of their scanty means than the heavy folios of Justinian.[1102] His lectures however were summarily brought to an end by order of the king; Stephen, scared by young Duke Henry’s presence in the north, jealous of the primate, jealous of the Church, jealous of everything in which he saw or thought he saw the least token of an influence which might be used against himself, at once silenced the teacher and ordered the students to give up their books. He gained as little as is usually gained by such a mode of proceeding in such cases. The study of the civil law only spread and prospered the more for his efforts to hinder it;[1103] and the law-school of the future university of Oxford may have sprung from a germ left in the cloisters of Oseney or S. Frideswide’s by the brief visit of the Lombard master, just as the divinity-school may have sprung from a germ left there sixteen years before by the lectures of Robert Pulein.

[1099] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 384.

[1100] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 17.

[1101] Gerv. Cant. as above. Rob. Torigni, a. 1149. Joh. Salisb., Polycraticus, l. viii. c. 22 (Giles, vol. iv. p. 357), says that “domus venerabilis patris Theobaldi” brought the Roman law into England.

[1102] Rob. Torigni, a. 1149.

[1103] Joh. Salisb. as above.

Stephen had struck at the southern primate indirectly this time; with the northern one he was still at open feud. One use which he made of his stay in Yorkshire was to exact a heavy fine from the inhabitants of Beverley, as a punishment for having given shelter to Henry Murdac. After the king’s departure the archbishop at last succeeded in enforcing his interdict at York; Eustace hurried thither, insisted upon the restoration of the services, and drove out all who refused to take part in them; there was a great tumult, in which the senior archdeacon was killed by the followers of the king’s son.[1104] About the same time a cardinal-legate, John Paparo, on his way to Ireland, asked for a safe-conduct through the dominions of the English king; Stephen refused to give it unless he would promise to do nothing on his journey to the prejudice of the English realm. John went home highly indignant at such an insinuation against his honour and that of the Apostolic See.[1105] Meanwhile Archbishop Murdac was writing bitter complaints both to S. Bernard and to the Pope. They apparently determined to give Stephen a warning which even he could not fail to understand; and they did it by sending a commission as resident legate a latere for all Britain to the archbishop of Canterbury.[1106]

[1104] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 160. Will. Newb., l. i. c. 17 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 56, 57).

[1105] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 164. In the Hist. Pontif. (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist., vol. xx. pp. 518, 519) this first legation of John Paparo seems to be dated some years earlier. But the Hist. Pontif. is very erratic in its chronology; and John of Hexham seems quite clear and consistent in his account of the matter.

[1106] The date of Theobald’s legatine commission seems to be nowhere stated. He had certainly received it before Lent 1151; it was therefore in all probability granted some time in 1150, under the circumstances related above.

The warning took effect; Stephen changed his policy at once. He was weary of all his fruitless labour; his chief anxiety now was to secure the crown to his son; and he suddenly awoke to the necessity of setting himself right with the one power which alone could enable him to carry out his desire. Eustace himself was sent to act as mediator between his father and Henry Murdac; a reconciliation took place, and the archbishop was enthroned at York on S. Paul’s day 1151. Thence he went to keep Easter with the Pope, having undertaken, at Stephen’s request, to intercede for him with Eugene concerning the state of politics in England, and especially to obtain, if possible, the papal sanction to a formal acknowledgement of Eustace as heir to the crown.[1107] The southern primate meanwhile was beginning his legatine career with a Mid-Lenten council in London, at which Stephen, Eustace, and the principal barons of England were present. The main feature of this council was a crowd of appeals to Rome, whereof three were made by the bishop of Winchester.[1108] One of these appeals must have been against the suspension to which he had been sentenced at the council of Reims, and by which the Pope, less placable than the primate, still held him bound. Moreover, complaints against him were pouring into Rome from all quarters; so he carried his appeals in person, and went to clear himself before the supreme pontiff. He succeeded in obtaining absolution;[1109] his friends, of whom there were still many at the papal court, tried hard to win for him something more--either a renewal of the legation, or the accomplishment of his old scheme of a primacy over Wessex, or at least the exemption of his own see from the jurisdiction of Canterbury; but Eugene was inexorable. He believed that Stephen’s misconduct towards the Church was instigated by his brother; a very natural view, but somewhat unjust to the bishop.[1110] The truth seems rather to be that Henry, after vainly trying to rule the storm, had for awhile been swept away by its violence. Now he had emerged into the calm once more; and there henceforth he was content to remain. He consoled himself for the failure of his political hopes with a choice collection of antique statues purchased in Rome for the adornment of his palace at Winchester, and sailed quietly home with these treasures, stopping on his way to pay his devotions at the shrine of S. James at Compostella.[1111] At his request the Pope ordered Archbishop Murdac to absolve Hugh of Puiset, who was making himself useful at Winchester, not on clerical duty, but in taking charge of the bishop’s castles during his absence.[1112] With Hugh’s absolution the schism in the northern province came to an end, and the English Church was once again reunited.

[1107] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 162.

[1108] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 31 (Arnold, p. 282): “Totum illud concilium novis appellationibus infrenduit.” It is, however, rather too hard upon Henry of Winchester when he adds that appeals to Rome had not been used in England till that prelate in his legatine days “malo suo crudeliter intrusit.”

[1109] Ann. Winton. a. 1151 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. ii. pp. 54, 55).

[1110] As the author of the Hist. Pontif. (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist., vol. xx. p. 542) truly says: “Credebatur fratrem suum regem contra ecclesiam instigare; sed rex, quod manifesta declarant opera, nec illius nec sapientis alterius consilio agebatur.”

[1111] Hist. Pontif. (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist., vol. xx.), p. 542.

[1112] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 158, 162. He places Hugh’s absolution in 1150, but on his own shewing it cannot have occurred before 1151.

For England and for Stephen alike the prospect seemed to be brightening. Stephen however was clearly beginning to feel that for him as well as for his Angevin rivals it was time to give place to a younger generation. It must have been chiefly for Eustace’s sake that he valued his crown; and in Eustace’s case, as in that of Henry Fitz-Empress, there were many circumstances which might make the pretensions of the child more generally acceptable than those of the parent. Eustace seems to have been about the same age as Henry, or probably a few years older; he was free from the personal obloquy and suspicion attaching to Stephen from the errors of the past; on the other hand, as the son of Matilda of Boulogne, he might reap the benefit of his mother’s well-earned personal popularity, as well as of her descent from the royal house of Wessex. Henceforth, therefore, Stephen showed a disposition to treat Henry Fitz-Empress as the rival less of himself than of his son, and to follow up every movement in Henry’s public life by a parallel step in the career of Eustace. And as Henry’s first independent act had been a sort of reconnoitring expedition to England, so the first retaliation was a visit made by Eustace to the king of France, with a view to ascertain his chances of support in an attempt to regain Normandy.

The existing phase of the rivalry between the houses of Anjou and Blois--their struggle for the dominion of Normandy and England--was a matter which concerned the interests of the French Crown almost as deeply as the earlier phase in which Fulk the Black and Odo of Champagne strove with each other for political mastery over their common lord paramount. Neither the accumulation of England, Normandy, Maine, Anjou and Touraine in a single hand, nor the acquisition of Normandy and England by a branch of the mighty and troublesome house which already held Blois, Chartres and Champagne, could be viewed by the French king without grave uneasiness. Either alternative had its dangers; to Louis VII., however, the danger would appear much less threatening than to his father. Shortly before the dying Louis VI. granted the investiture of Normandy to Stephen’s little son in 1137, the last of the old line of the dukes of Aquitaine--William IX., son of the gay crusader and troubadour whom the Red King had hoped to succeed--died on a pilgrimage at Compostella.[1113] His only son was already dead, and before setting out for his pilgrimage he did what a greater personage had done ten years before: with the consent of his barons, he left the whole of his dominions to his daughter. Moreover, he bequeathed the girl herself as wife to the young King Louis of France.[1114] This marriage more than doubled the strength of the French Crown. It gave to Louis absolute possession of all western Aquitaine, or Guyenne as it was now beginning to be called; that is, the counties of Poitou and Gascony, with the immediate overlordship of the whole district lying between the Loire and the Pyrenees, the Rhône and the ocean:--a territory five or six times as large as his own royal domain, and over which his predecessors had never been able to assert more than the merest shadow of a nominal superiority.[1115] To a man who was at once king of France and duke of Aquitaine it was comparatively no great matter whether the dominions of Henry I. were to be annexed to those of Geoffrey of Anjou or allied to those of Theobald of Blois. The truest interest of France, however, obviously was that England and Normandy should be divided, one of them being held by each of the two competitors; and it was doubtless with this view that Louis, while sanctioning and aiding Geoffrey’s conquest of the Norman duchy, still kept on peaceful terms with the English king, and held to a promise of marriage made some years before between his own sister and Stephen’s son Eustace.[1116]

[1113] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 909. Hist. Franc. (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii.), p. 116. Anon. Chron. (ibid.) p. 119. Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Maxent. a. 1137 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 34, 432).

[1114] Suger, Vita Ludov. (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii.) p. 62. Chron. Mauriniac. (ibid.) p. 83. Hist. Franc. (ibid.), p. 116. Ord. Vit. as above. See also Besly, Comtes de Poitou, p. 137.

[1115] Perhaps the most striking indication of the importance of the duke of Aquitaine is the ceremony of the ducal crowning, which Louis, as husband of the duchess, underwent at Poitiers immediately after his marriage; Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 911. There was a special “Ordo ad benedicendum ducem Aquitaniæ” (printed in Besly, Comtes de Poitou, preuves, pp. 183 et seq., and Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. pp. 451–453), nearly as solemn as the office for the crowning of a king.

[1116] Rob. Torigni, a. 1139. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 112. Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 125.

At the time of Geoffrey’s final success Louis was at deadly strife with the count of Blois; a strife in which the king was wholly in the wrong, and for whose disastrous consequences he afterwards grieved so deeply that his penitence was the chief motive which induced him to go on crusade.[1117] Since then, Geoffrey in his turn had incurred the royal displeasure. There was a certain Gerald, lord of a castle called Montreuil-Bellay, near the southern border of Anjou--one of the fortresses raised by the great castle-builder Fulk Nerra in the earliest days of his warfare with Odo of Blois--whom an Angevin chronicler describes as an absolute monster of wickedness,[1118] but who had so won the favour of the king that he made him seneschal of Poitou. In 1147 this Gerald was the ring-leader of a fresh revolt of the Angevin barons against their count. The revolt was as usual soon put down: but it was not so easy to punish Gerald; for Montreuil was an almost impregnable fortress, with a keep of great strength and height, “lifting itself up to the stars,” surrounded by a double wall and rampart, and further protected by an encircling chasm, very deep and precipitous, which was called the “Valley of Judas,” and prevented any engines of war from coming within range of the castle.[1119] Some time in 1148 Geoffrey built three towers of stone in the neighbourhood of Montreuil, as a base for future operations against it.[1120] In the summer of 1150 an outrage committed by Gerald upon the abbot and monks of S. Aubin at Angers brought matters to a crisis;[1121] Geoffrey made the monks’ quarrel his own and at once set his engineers to level the ground all around Montreuil, in preparation for bringing up his machines to the assault. After nearly twelve months’ labour,[1122] however, the “Judas-Valley” still yawned between himself and his foes, till he ordered the annual fair usually held at Saumur to be transferred to Montreuil. In a fortnight the energies of the crowd who flocked to the fair, joined to those of his own soldiers, filled up the valley and made it into level ground.[1123] Geoffrey could now bring his engines within range, and he used them with such effect that at the first assault the outworks were destroyed and the garrison driven to take refuge in the keep. A summons to surrender was, however, scornfully rejected by Gerald, trusting in the strength of his tower and the expected help of the king.[1124]

[1117] See Arbois de Jubainville, Comtes de Champagne, vol. ii. pp. 344 et seq.

[1118] Chron. Mairom. (Marchegay, Eglises), p. 84.

[1119] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), pp. 282–284. See also Chron. S. Serg. a. 1151 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 147).

[1120] Rob. Torigni, a. 1149. As he himself, as well as the chronicles, makes the siege last altogether three years and end in 1151, he must mean 1148.

[1121] See the whole curious story in Cartæ et Chronn. de Obedientiâ Mairomni (Marchegay, Eglises), pp. 65 et seq.

[1122] Chron. Mairom. (as above), p. 87. Chron. S. Serg. a. 1151 (ib. p. 147).

[1123] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (as above), p. 284.

[1124] Ib. p. 285.

For Louis had now returned from Palestine;[1125] and so great was his wrath at Geoffrey’s treatment of his favourite that he consented to join Eustace in an attack upon the Norman duchy. Its defence was left to its young duke, then busy with the siege of Torigni on the Vire, held against him by his cousin Richard Fitz-Count--a son of Earl Robert of Gloucester.[1126] Louis and Eustace marched upon Arques; Henry led a force of Normans, Angevins and Bretons to meet them; but his “older and wiser” barons averted a battle,[1127] and nothing more came of the expedition. Geoffrey had never stirred from his camp before Montreuil. Despite a formidable array of engines,[1128] he made little progress; every breach made in the walls by day was mended by night with oaken beams, of which the besieged seemed to have a never-ending supply. Geoffrey was characteristically taking counsel with his books as to the best method of overcoming this difficulty when some monks of Marmoutier came to him on an errand for their convent. One of them took up the book which the count laid down--the treatise of Vegetius Renatus De Re Militari, then, and long after, the standard work on military engineering. It may have been some memory of bygone days when he, too, had worn helm and hauberk instead of cowl and scapulary that brought into the monk’s eyes a gleam which made Geoffrey exclaim, “Stay with me till to-morrow, good brother, and what you are now reading shall be put in action before you.” Next day a large red-hot iron vessel filled with boiling oil was launched from the beam of a mangonel against one of the timber insertions in the wall, and its bursting set the whole place on fire.[1129] Gerald, his spirit broken at last, came forth with his family and his garrison “like serpents crawling out of a cave,” as a hostile chronicler says,[1130] and surrendered to the mercy of the count, who sent him to prison at Angers. The keep was razed at once, save one fragment of wall, left by Geoffrey, and still standing at this hour, as a memorial of his victory and of the skill and perseverance by which it had been won.[1131]

[1125] He returned in the autumn of 1149. See Rob. Torigni, ad ann., and M. Delisle’s note thereon, vol. i. p. 252, note 1.

[1126] Rob. Torigni, a. 1151 and 1154.

[1127] Rob. Torigni, a. 1151. See also Chronn. S. Albin. a. 1150 and S. Serg. a. 1151 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 36, 148).

[1128] “Petroritas, fundibularias, mangonellos et arietes,” Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 285, and “sex tormenta quæ vulgo perreriæ vocantur.” Chron. S. Serg. (as above), p. 147.

[1129] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (as above), pp. 286, 287. The monk is called “frater G.” M. Marchegay suggests that he may have been the “Gauterius Compendiensis,” monk of Marmoutier, whom the writer names among his authorities in the Proœmium to his Hist. Abbrev. (ib. p. 353). If so, this detailed account of the last scene at the siege of Montreuil is due to an eye-witness.

[1130] Chron. Mairom. (Marchegay, Eglises), p. 87.

[1131] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 287.

The count of Anjou now moved northward to help his son against the king. By the help of a brother of his old ally William Talvas he gained possession of La Nue, a castle belonging to the king’s brother Count Robert of Dreux.[1132] Louis and Robert avenged themselves by burning the town of Séez. Presently after, in August, Louis gathered together all his forces and brought them down the Seine to a spot between Meulan and Mantes. Geoffrey and Henry collected an opposing army on their side of the Norman border; but an attack of fever detained the king in Paris, and a truce was made until he should recover.[1133] The ostensible ground of the dispute was Geoffrey’s treatment of Gerald of Montreuil, which certainly seems to have been unjustly cruel. Not content with receiving his unconditional surrender, razing his castle, and forcing him to make full atonement to the injured monks of S. Aubin, Geoffrey still persisted in keeping in prison not only Gerald himself but also his whole family. The Pope anathematized him for his unchristianlike severity;[1134] but anathemas usually fell powerless upon an Angevin count. Geoffrey was in truth visiting upon Gerald his wrath at the double-dealing of Gerald’s royal master; for he was well aware that King Louis’s interference was prompted by far other motives than disinterested sympathy for his seneschal. Louis was, according to his wont, playing fast and loose with the rival claimants of Normandy, in such shameless fashion that his own chief minister, Suger, had been the first to reprove him in strong terms for his unwarrantable attack upon the Angevins, had stood firmly by Geoffrey all through the struggle, and was now endeavouring, through the mediation of the count of Vermandois and the bishop of Lisieux, to baffle the schemes of Eustace and his party and bring the king back to his old alliance with Anjou.[1135]

[1132] Rob. Torigni, a. 1151 (Delisle, vol. i. p. 254; see the editor’s note 3, ib.)

[1133] Rob. Torigni, a. 1151.

[1134] Geoff. Clairv., Vita S. Bern., l. iv. c. 3 (S. Bern. Opp., Mabillon, vol. ii. col. 1135).

[1135] Suger, Epp. cl., cliii., clxvii., clxviii., clxxv. (Migne, Patrologia, vol. 186, cols. 1418, 1419–1420, 1427–1429, 1432).

As soon as Louis was sufficiently recovered a meeting was held in Paris to discuss the possibility of a settlement, and the cause of peace was pleaded by no less an advocate than S. Bernard in person. But, almost for the first time, Bernard pleaded in vain; Geoffrey started up in the midst of the colloquy, and without a word of salutation to any one, sprang upon his horse and rode away. The assembly broke up in despair, and Gerald, who had been brought to hear its result, threw himself at the feet of S. Bernard to implore a last benediction before returning, as he thought, to lifelong captivity. “Fear not,” replied the saint, “deliverance is nearer than you think.” Scarcely had the prisoner turned away when his jailer reappeared.[1136] Geoffrey during his solitary ride had revolved the political situation in his mind and perceived that for his son’s sake he must make peace with the king. Matters in England had reached such a crisis that it was absolutely necessary to secure Henry’s tenure of Normandy, as he might at any moment be required to go beyond sea. To that end Geoffrey did more than give up his personal vengeance upon Gerald of Montreuil; he persuaded Henry to give up the Norman Vexin--the land between the Epte and the Andelle, so long the battle-ground of France and Normandy--to the king of France, in exchange for the investiture of the rest of the duchy. If we may believe the French chroniclers, the young duke made a yet further sacrifice and became the “liegeman” of the king--a form of homage to which none of his predecessors had ever stooped.[1137] Of the homage in some shape or other there is however no doubt;[1138] and it appears that the same opportunity was taken to secure for Henry, without waiting for his father’s death, the investiture of his father’s own dominions.[1139]

[1136] Geoff. Clairv., Vita S. Bern., l. iv. c. 3 (S. Bern. Opp., Mabillon, vol. i. col. 1135).

[1137] Hist. Ludov., Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 127; Chron. Reg. Franc. (ibid.), p. 213. Both these writers, however, tell an apocryphal story of Louis, at Geoffrey’s and Henry’s request, reconquering the duchy for them and receiving these concessions in return for his help.

[1138] Rob. Torigni, a. 1151.

[1139] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 291 (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 336).

Geoffrey was but just entering his thirty-ninth year, and one can hardly help speculating for a moment as to his plans for his own future. For him, now that his work in the west was done, there was no such brilliant opening in the east as there had been for Fulk V. when he, too, in the prime of manhood, had chosen to make way for a younger generation. But Geoffrey had begun public life at an earlier age than either his father or his son; and he seems to have had neither the moral nor the physical strength which had enabled one Angevin count to carry on for half a century, without break and without slackening, the work upon which he had entered before he was fifteen, and to die in harness at the very crowning-point of his activity and his success. Geoffrey Plantagenet was no Fulk Nerra; he was not even a Fulk of Jerusalem; and he may well have been weary of a political career which must always have been embittered by a feeling that he was the mere representative of others, labouring not for himself, hardly even for his country or his race, but only that the one might be swallowed up in the vast dominions and the other merged in the royal line of his ancestors’ Norman foe. He may have seriously intended to pass the rest of his days among his books; or he may have felt an inner warning that those days were to be very few. With a perversity which may after all have been partly the effect of secretly failing health, although he had now set Gerald at liberty he still refused to acknowledge that he had treated him with unjust severity, or to seek absolution from the Pope’s censure; and he even answered with blasphemous words to the gentle remonstrances of S. Bernard. “With what measure thou hast meted it shall be meted to thee again” said the saint at last as he turned away; one of his followers, more impetuous, boldly prophesied that Geoffrey would die within a year. He did die within a fortnight.[1140] On his way home from the king’s court,[1141] overcome with the heat, he plunged into a river to cool himself;[1142] a fever was the consequence; he was borne to Château-du-Loir, and there on September 7 he passed away.[1143] His last legacy to his son was a piece of good advice, given almost with his dying breath:--not to change the old customs of the lands over which he was called to rule, whether by bringing those of Normandy and England into Anjou, or by seeking to transfer those of the Angevin dominions into the territories which he inherited from his mother.[1144] Dying in the little border-fortress whence his grandfather Elias had gone forth to liberate Maine, Geoffrey was buried, by his own desire, not among his Angevin forefathers at Tours or at Angers, but in his mother’s home at Le Mans.[1145] A splendid tomb, bearing his effigy adorned with gold and gems, was raised over his remains in the cathedral church,[1146] whence it has disappeared to become a mere antiquarian curiosity in a museum. Geoffrey’s sole surviving monument is the one which he made for himself--the ruined, blackened fragment of his great ancestor’s keep at Montreuil.

[1140] Geoff. Clairv., Vita S. Bern., l. iv. c. 3 (S. Bern. Opp., Mabillon, vol. ii. col. 1135).

[1141] At Paris, says Rob. Torigni, a. 1151; on the frontier of Normandy and France, say the Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 156. But if it was the assembly at which Henry received his investiture, that was certainly in Paris; and there does not seem time enough for another.

[1142] Gesta Cons. as above.

[1143] Ibid. Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (ibid.), p. 292. Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. a. 1151 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 36, 37, 147). Rob. Torigni, a. 1151; etc.

[1144] “Ne Normanniæ vel Angliæ consuetudines in consulatûs sui terram, vel e converso, variæ vicissitudinis altercatione permutaret.” Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (as above), pp. 292, 293.

[1145] Chron. S. Serg. a. 1151 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 147); Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (as above), p. 292. “Inque solo materno sibi locum eligens sepulturæ.” R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 16 (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 341).

[1146] Hist. Gaufr. Ducis (as above), p. 293. “Hic solus omnium mortalium intra muros civitatis Cinomannicæ sepultus est,” says Rob. Torigni, a. 1151.

Stephen could not do what Geoffrey had done. His kingdom was no mere fief to be passed from hand to hand by a formal ceremony of surrender and investiture; the crowned and anointed king of England could not so easily abdicate in favour of his son. He might however do something to counterbalance Henry’s advancement by obtaining a public recognition of Eustace as his heir. In Lent 1152, therefore, he summoned a great council in London, at which all the earls and barons swore fealty to Eustace.[1147] Still the king felt that his object was far from being secured. He himself was a living proof how slight was the worth of such an oath when the sovereign who had exacted it was gone. There was, however, one further step possible, a step without precedent in England, but one which the kings of France had taken with complete success for several generations past: the solemn coronation and unction of the heir to the throne during his father’s lifetime. It was at this that Stephen had aimed when he sent Archbishop Henry of York to Rome. He took an unusually wise as well as a characteristically generous measure in intrusting his cause to a reconciled enemy; nevertheless the attempt failed. Pope Eugene by his letters absolutely forbade the primate to make Eustace king; therefore, when Stephen called upon Theobald and the other bishops to anoint and crown the youth, they one and all refused. Father and son were both equally vexed and angry. They shut up all the bishops in one house and tried to tease them into submission. A few, remembering that “King Stephen never had loved clerks,” and that it was not the first time he had cast bishops into prison,[1148] were so frightened that they gave way; the majority stood firm, and the primate himself escaped down the Thames in a fishing-boat, made his way to Dover, and thence retreated beyond sea.[1149] Without him there was nothing to be done, and of his yielding there was no chance whatever; for close at his side stood the real fount and source of the papal opposition--Thomas of London.[1150]

[1147] Ann. Waverl. a. 1152 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. ii. p. 234). Ann. Winton. Contin. a. 1152 (Liebermann, Geschichtsquellen, p. 82).

[1148] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 32 (Arnold, p. 284).

[1149] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 151. Vita Theobald. (Giles, Lanfranc, vol. i.), p. 338.

[1150] Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 150.

Some of Henry’s partizans in England now thought it time for him to interfere, and despatched his uncle Reginald earl of Cornwall to urge him to come over at once.[1151] Soon after Easter a meeting of the Norman barons--already summoned by Henry in the previous autumn,[1152] but delayed by the unexpected catastrophe of his father’s death--was held at Lisieux to consider the matter.[1153] But whatever the result of their deliberations may have been, Henry found something else to do before he could cross the sea. King Louis VII. had been meditating a divorce from his wife, the Aquitanian duchess Eleanor, ever since their return from the crusade. The great obstacle to his scheme was his father’s and his own old friend and minister Suger, who saw the grave political danger of such a measure and opposed it with all the influence he possessed.[1154] But Suger was dying; and the king had made up his mind. He took the first step at Christmas 1151 by going with Eleanor into Aquitaine and withdrawing all his own garrisons from her territories.[1155] Suger’s death on January 13 recalled him to Paris,[1156] and at the same time set him free to accomplish his desire unopposed. A Church council was held under the presidency of Archbishop Hugh of Sens at Beaugency on the Tuesday before Palm Sunday;[1157] the king and queen were made out to be akin, and their union was dissolved.[1158] Eleanor set out for her own dominions; she had however some trouble in reaching them. She was young and beautiful; her personal charms were more than equalled by those of her two great duchies of Aquitaine and Gascony; and more than one ambitious feudatary was eager to seize the prize which his sovereign had thrown away. At her first halting-place, Blois, the young count Theobald--son and successor of Theobald the Great who had died two months before[1159]--sought to take her by force and make her his wife. She fled by night to Tours, and there narrowly escaped being captured with the same intention by a still more youthful admirer, Geoffrey of Anjou, Henry’s brother. The audacious boy laid a plot to catch her at Port-de-Piles, on the frontier of Touraine and Poitou; but she was warned in time and made her escape by another road safe into her own territory.[1160] Thence she at once wrote to offer herself and her lands to the husband of her own choice--Henry duke of the Normans. He set out to join her immediately, and at Whitsuntide they were married at Poitiers.[1161]

[1151] Rob. Torigni, a. 1152.

[1152] Ibid. a. 1151.

[1153] Rob. Torigni, a. 1152.

[1154] Vita Suger., l. i. c. 5 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 104).

[1155] Chron. Turon. Magn. a. 1152 (Salmon, Chron. Touraine, p. 135). Cf. Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 53 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 307; Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 437).

[1156] Vita Suger., l. iii. cc. 11, 13 (as above, pp. 111, 113).

[1157] Gesta Ludov., c. 29 (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. iv. p. 411). The Hist. Ludov. (ib. p. 415) makes it Friday (March 21) instead of Tuesday.

[1158] Gesta Ludov. and Hist. Ludov. as above. Chron. Turon. Magn. as above, etc.

[1159] In January 1152. See Arbois de Jubainville, Comtes de Champagne, vol. ii. p. 398, note 12.

[1160] Chron. Turon. Magn. a. 1152 (Salmon, Chron. Touraine, p. 135).

[1161] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 149. See also Will. Newb., l. i. c. 31 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 93); Chron. Turon. Magn. a. 1152 (as above); Hist. Ludov. (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. iv. p. 413, and Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 127); Fragm. Chron. Com. Pictav. (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 410). This last gives the place; Rob. Torigni, a. 1152, gives the season. Whit-Sunday was May 18; and a charter referred to by M. Delisle in a note to Rob. Torigni ad ann. (vol. i. p. 260), proves that they were married before May 27. Gervase’s story is the fullest; according to him, they married for love, and Eleanor had herself procured the divorce for that object--such, at least, was the story which she wrote to her young lover. As to the question of consanguinity, that of Louis and Eleanor is not very clear; it was at any rate more remote than that of Eleanor and Henry, who certainly were within the forbidden degrees. One would like to know what S. Bernard, who had put a stop to a proposal of marriage between Henry and Eleanor’s daughter (S. Bern. Ep. ccclxxi., Opp., Mabillon, vol. i. col. 333), thought of the matter; a saint of the next generation, Hugh of Lincoln, thought and said plainly that it was the fatal sin which was visited upon the children of the guilty couple in the downfall of the Angevin empire. Magna Vita S. Hugonis, l. v. c. 16 (Dimock, p. 332). In his eyes, however, the sin lay in the fact not of the kindred between the parties, but of Eleanor’s divorce; and it is noteworthy that William of Newburgh, who did not live to see the final catastrophe or to know the worst crimes of Eleanor’s youngest son, took exactly the same view; l. iii. c. 26 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 281).

Suger’s worst fears were now realized. Aquitaine was lost to the king of France; it had gone to swell the forces of the prince who was already the mightiest feudatary of the realm, and who would probably be king of England ere long; and as Louis and Eleanor had no son, there was very little hope that even in the next generation it would revert to the French Crown. In feudal law, an heiress had no right to marry without the consent of her overlord. It seems that Louis accordingly summoned Henry to appear before the royal court and answer for his conduct in thus hastily accepting Eleanor’s hand. But Henry Fitz-Empress, duke of Normandy, count of Anjou, Touraine and Maine, and duke of Aquitaine--for, rightly or wrongly, he was married, and in full possession of his wife’s territories--master of more than half Gaul, from the Flemish to the Spanish March and from the Rhône to the ocean--could venture to defy a mere king of the French. He therefore refused to appear before the court or to acknowledge its jurisdiction in any way.[1162] Eustace seized the favourable moment to regain the French alliance; he came over to visit King Louis; his long-standing betrothal with Constance of France ended at last in marriage;[1163] and Henry, on the point of sailing from Barfleur, just after midsummer, was stopped by the discovery that Louis, Eustace, Robert of Dreux, Henry of Champagne,[1164] and his own brother Geoffrey had made a league to drive him out of all his possessions and divide them among themselves.[1165]

[1162] “Qui citatus ad Curiam, venire noluit ad jus faciendum, vel capiendum in Regis præsentiâ Palatii judicium omnino respuit et contempsit.” Gesta Ludov., c. 28 (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. iv. p. 411). “Ante dominum suum Regem Ludovicum defecit a justitiâ.” Hist. Ludov. (ib. p. 414). This is related as a piece of shameful ingratitude for Louis’s supposed help towards the conquest of Normandy. The story then proceeds to relate that Louis in wrath besieged and took Vernon and Neufmarché, whereupon Henry humbly promised to be more obedient for the future, and Louis, accepting his assurances, restored the two castles. We are not told on what charge Henry had been cited to the court, and no hint is given that the quarrel was in any way connected with his marriage, which indeed is not mentioned till some time after. Yet I can find no indication of any ground for such a citation, except the marriage; and that, indeed, would be a most obvious pretext.

[1163] Eng. Chron. a. 1140.

[1164] Second son of Theobald the Great of Blois, and betrothed husband of the infant princess Mary, eldest child of Louis and Eleanor.

[1165] Rob. Torigni, a. 1152. See also Chron. S. Albin. a. 1152 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 37).

Geoffrey by his father’s will had inherited Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau;[1166] with this vantage-ground he began operations against his brother’s authority in Anjou, while the other four princes crossed the Norman border and laid siege to Neufmarché. Henry set out from Barfleur on July 16 to relieve Neufmarché, but arrived too late to save it from surrender;[1167] Louis handed it over to Eustace,[1168] and proceeded to muster his forces near Chaumont in the French Vexin. Henry did the like on the banks of the Andelle, and began ravaging the country between that river and the Epte--the old Norman Vexin, so lately ceded to Louis as the price of his alliance. In August Louis brought his host across the Seine at Meulan; Henry crossed lower down, by the bridge of Vernon, and thinking that the king intended to attack Verneuil, was hurrying to reach it before him when a message from the lord of Pacy told him that this last place was the one really threatened. He turned and proceeded thither at such a pace that several of his horses fell dead on the road; Louis, finding himself outwitted, gave up the expedition and returned to Meulan. Henry next invaded the county of Dreux, burned Brézolles and Marcouville, took hostages from Richer de l’Aigle--Thomas Becket’s old friend--whose fidelity was doubtful, and burned his castle of Bonmoulins, which was said to be “a den of thieves”; he then planted a line of garrisons all along the Norman frontier, and at the end of August went down into Anjou. There he blockaded the rebel leaders congregated in the castle of Montsoreau on the Loire till most of them fell into his hands, and his brother gave up the useless struggle.[1169] Louis meanwhile profited by his absence to burn part of the town of Tillières and a village near Verneuil, and to make an attempt upon Nonancourt, in which however he failed.[1170] Immediately afterwards he fell sick of a fever; his army dissolved, and he was obliged to retire into his own domains[1171] and make proposals for a truce.[1172] Henry was ready enough to accept them; for he had just received another urgent summons from England, and he felt that this time it must be answered in person.

[1166] Chron. Turon. Magn. a. 1152 (Salmon, Chron. Touraine, p. 136).

[1167] Rob. Torigni, a. 1152.

[1168] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 31 (Arnold, p. 283).

[1169] Rob. Torigni, a. 1152. See also a shorter account in Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 149, 150, and a general summing-up of the result in Chron. S. Albin. a. 1152 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 37).

[1170] Rob. Torigni, a. 1152.

[1171] Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 150.

[1172] Rob. Torigni, a. 1152.

Since the Empress’s departure, Stephen had made but little progress in reducing the castles of those barons who still, either in her name or in their own, chose to defy his authority. A revolt of Ralf of Chester and Gilbert of Pembroke in 1149 and two unsuccessful attempts made by the king to recover Worcester from Waleran of Meulan, to whom he had himself intrusted it in the days when Waleran was one of his best supporters,[1173] make up almost the whole military history of the last four years. Ralf of Chester’s obstinate claim upon Lincoln was at last disposed of by a compromise.[1174] There was however one fortress which throughout the whole course of the war had been, almost more than any other, a special object of Stephen’s jealousy. This was Wallingford, a castle of great strength seated on the right bank of the Thames some twelve miles south of Oxford, and held as a perpetual thorn in the king’s side by a Breton adventurer, Brian Fitz-Count, one of the most able and energetic as well as most faithful and persevering members of the Angevin party in England. Hitherto all Stephen’s attempts against Wallingford--even the erection of a rival fortress, Crowmarsh, directly over against it--had produced no effect at all. At last, in the winter of 1152, he built a strong wooden tower at the foot of the bridge over the Thames whereby alone the garrison of Wallingford obtained their supplies. Brian and his men saw their convoys hopelessly shut out; they knew that none of their friends in England were strong enough to relieve them; they therefore sent to their lord the young duke of the Normans, and begged that he would either give them leave to surrender with honour, or send help to deliver them out of their strait.[1175]

[1173] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 30 (Arnold, p. 282).

[1174] See the terms in Dugdale, Baronage, vol. i. p. 39.

[1175] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 32 (Arnold, p. 284). Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 153.

Henry did not send; he came. Landing with a small force on the morning of the Epiphany,[1176] he entered a church to honour the festival with such brief devotion as a soldier could spare time for, and the first words that fell on his ear sounded like an omen of success: “Behold, the Lord the ruler cometh, and the kingdom is in his hand.”[1177] Before the week was out he had taken the town of Malmesbury and the outworks of the castle, and was blockading Bishop Roger’s impregnable keep. Stephen, warned by its commandant, hastened to its relief. On a bitter January morning king and duke, each at the head of his troops, met for the first time face to face, divided only by the river Avon--here at Malmesbury a mere streamlet in itself, but so swollen by the winter’s rains that neither party dared venture to cross it. A torrent of rain, sleet and hail was pouring down, drifting before a violent west wind, striking the Angevins in their backs, but beating hard in the faces of the king and his host; drenched, blinded, scarce able to hold their weapons, they stood shivering with cold and terror, feeling as if Heaven itself had taken up arms against them, till Stephen turned away in despair and led his dispirited forces back to London. Malmesbury surrendered as soon as he was gone.[1178] The young duke marched straight upon Wallingford, demolished Stephen’s wooden tower at the first assault, and revictualled the castle. He then laid siege to Crowmarsh. Stephen advanced to relieve it; again the two armies fronted each other in battle array, but again no battle took place. The barons, who were only anxious to maintain both the rival sovereigns as a check upon each other, and dreaded nothing so much as the complete triumph of either, took advantage of a supposed bad omen which befell the king[1179] to insist upon a parley, and proposed that Stephen and Henry in person should arrange terms with each other, subject to ratification by their respective followers.[1180] Yielding to necessity, and both fully aware of their advisers’ disloyal motives, the two leaders held a colloquy across a narrow reach of the Thames.[1181] For the moment a truce was arranged, on condition that Stephen should raze Crowmarsh at the end of five days.[1182] As the barons doubtless expected, however, no solution was reached on the main question at issue between the rivals, and with mutual complaints of the treason of their followers they separated once again.[1183]

[1176] Rob. Torigni, a. 1153, says he came with thirty-six ships. Will. Newb., l. i. c. 29 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 88), gives the force as one hundred and forty horse and three thousand foot. From the sequel it seems that he landed on the Hampshire or Dorset coast.

[1177] “Ecce advenit dominator Dominus, et regnum in manu ejus:”--first words of the introit for Epiphany. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 151, 152.

[1178] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 34 (Arnold, pp. 285–287). See also Rob. Torigni, a. 1153.

[1179] His horse reared and nearly threw him three times while he was marshalling his troops. Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 154.

[1180] Ibid. Hen. Hunt. as above (p. 287).

[1181] Gerv. Cant. as above. Cf. Hen. Hunt. as above (p. 288).

[1182] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 34 (Arnold, p. 288). Rob. Torigni, a. 1153.

[1183] Hen. Hunt. as above.

But there were others who, in all sincerity, were labouring hard for peace. Archbishop Theobald was in constant communication with the king in person and with the duke through trusty envoys, endeavouring to establish a basis for negotiations between them. He found an ally in Henry of Winchester, now eager to help in putting an end to troubles which he at last perceived had been partly fostered by his own errors.[1184] The once rival prelates, thus united in their best work, saw their chief obstacle in Eustace.[1185] Not only was it the hope of his son’s succession which made Stephen cling so obstinately to every jot and tittle of his regal claims; but Eustace’s character was such that the mere possibility of his rule could not be contemplated without dread; and to look for any self-renunciation on his part was far more hopeless than to expect it from Stephen. Eustace was in fact a most degenerate son, unworthy not only of his high-souled mother but even of his weak, amiable father. He had one merit--he was an excellent soldier;[1186] for the rest, his character was that of the house of Blois in its most vicious phase, unredeemed by a spark of the generous warmth and winning graciousness for which so much had been forgiven to Stephen.[1187] Even with his own party and his own father he could not keep at peace. The issue of the Crowmarsh expedition threw him into a fury; after loading his father with reproaches, he deserted him altogether and rode away to Canterbury, vowing to ravage the whole country from end to end, sparing neither the property of the churches nor the holy places themselves. He began with S. Edmund’s abbey. He was hospitably received there, but his demand for money was refused, and he ordered the crops to be destroyed. A century and a half before, the heathen Danish conqueror Swein had in like manner insulted East Anglia’s patron saint, and had been stricken down by a sudden and mysterious death. So too it was with Eustace. As he sat at table in the abbey, the first morsel of food choked him, and in the convulsions of raging madness he expired.[1188]

[1184] Ib. c. 37 (p. 289).

[1185] Will. Newb., l. i. c. 30 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 90).

[1186] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 35 (Arnold, p. 288).

[1187] Ibid. Eng. Chron. a. 1140, and all the contemporary writers are unanimous in their accounts of him--except the Gesta Steph. (Sewell, p. 130).

[1188] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 155. Rob. Torigni, a. 1153, says the sacrilege was committed on S. Laurence’s day, and the punishment followed “circa octavas.” Cf. Joh. Salisb., Polycrat., l. viii. c. 21 (Giles, vol. iv. pp. 354, 355).

Eustace’s death was only one of a striking series. The roll had opened with Geoffrey of Anjou in September 1151. Suger and Theobald of Blois both died in January 1152. Politically as well as personally, the death of the good and wise brother who had stood by him so faithfully and so unselfishly through all his difficulties in Normandy and at Rome must have been a heavy blow to Stephen; but heavier still was the blow that fell upon him three months later, when on May 3 he lost the wisest, probably, of his counsellors as well as the truest and bravest of all his partizans in England--his queen, Matilda of Boulogne.[1189] She was followed in little more than a month by her cousin Henry of Scotland.[1190] Next year the list of remarkable deaths was longer still. On this side of the sea it included, besides Eustace, Ralf earl of Chester,[1191] Walter Lespec,[1192] and David king of Scots.[1193] Another person who had made some figure in the history of northern England, William bishop of Durham, had died in the previous November.[1194] The appointment of Hugh of Puiset to his vacant chair,[1195] being strongly opposed by Archbishop Murdac, nearly caused another schism in the province; the southern primate, however, doubtless feeling that it was no time now for ecclesiastical squabbles, took the case into his own hands and sent the elect of Durham to be consecrated at Rome by the Pope.[1196] But the Pope was no longer Eugene III. Rome lost her Cistercian bishop on July 9, 1153. Six weeks later Clairvaux itself became a valley of the shadow of death, as its light passed away with S. Bernard;[1197] and two months later still the metropolitan chair of York was again vacated, and the three great Cistercian fellow-workers were reunited in their rest, by the death of Henry Murdac.[1198] The generation which had been young with Stephen seemed to be rapidly passing away; the primate, the bishop of Winchester and the king himself were left almost alone, like survivors of a past age, in presence of the younger race represented by Henry of Anjou.

[1189] Rob. Torigni, a. 1152. Chron. S. Crucis Edinb. a. 1152. Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 151.

[1190] Chron. S. Cruc. Edinb. a. 1152.

[1191] Ibid. a. 1153. Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 171. Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 155.

[1192] Dugdale, Monast. Angl., vol. v. p. 280.

[1193] Chron. S. Cruc. Edinb. as above. Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 168.

[1194] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 166.

[1195] On January 22, 1153; ib. p. 167.

[1196] See details in Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 167, and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 157, where the date is wrong.

[1197] Rob. Torigni, a. 1153.

[1198] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 171. Walbran, Memor. of Fountains, vol. i. p. 109.

With the life of Eustace ended the resistance of Stephen. He had other sons, but they were mere boys; it was hopeless to think of setting up even the eldest of them as a rival to Henry. The young duke was carrying all before him; Stamford, Nottingham,[1199] Reading, Barkwell, had yielded to him already, when Countess Gundrada of Warwick surrendered Warwick castle,[1200] and the adhesion of Earl Robert of Leicester placed more than thirty fortresses all at once at the young conqueror’s disposal.[1201] Henry was, however, fully alive to the wisdom of securing his kingdom by a legal settlement rather than by the mere power of the sword. At last a treaty was made, on November 6, in the place where it had been first projected--Wallingford.[1202] It was agreed that Stephen and Henry should adopt each other as father and son; that Stephen should keep his regal dignity for the rest of his life, Henry acting as justiciar and practical ruler of the kingdom under him; and that after his death Henry should be king.[1203] The details of the settlement have come down to us only in a poetical shape which expresses not so much what the contracting parties actually undertook to do as what needed to be done--what was the ideal at which the peace-makers aimed, and how far removed from it was the actual condition of the country. The rights of the Crown, which the nobles had everywhere usurped, were to be resumed; the “adulterine castles”--castles built during the anarchy and without the king’s leave, to the number of eleven hundred and fifteen--were to be destroyed; all property was to be restored to the lawful owners who had held it in King Henry’s time. The farms were again to be supplied with husbandmen; the houses which had been burnt down were to be rebuilt and filled with inhabitants; the woods were to be provided with foresters, the coverts replenished with game, the hill-sides covered with flocks of sheep and the meadows with herds of cattle. The clergy were to enjoy tranquillity and peace, and to be relieved from all extraordinary and exorbitant demands. The sheriffs were to be regularly appointed in accustomed places, and held strictly to their duties; they were not to indulge their greed, nor to prosecute any one out of malice, nor shew undue favour to their own friends, nor condone crimes, but to render to every man his due; some they were to influence by the threat of punishment, others by the promise of reward. Thieves and robbers were to be punished with death. Soldiers were to beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks; the Flemings were to quit the camp for the farm, the tent for the workshop, and render to their own masters the service which they had so long forced upon the English people; the country-folk were to dwell in undisturbed security, the merchants to grow rich through the revival of trade. Finally, one standard of money was to be current throughout the realm.[1204]

[1199] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 36 (Arnold, p. 288).

[1200] Rob. Torigni, a. 1153.

[1201] Gerv. Cant. (as above), pp. 152, 153.

[1202] The date is given by Rob. Torigni and Chron. S. Cruc. Edinb. a. 1153; the place by Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. ii. p. 255.

[1203] “ ... Ferden te ærceb. and te wise men betwux heom and makede th. sahte th. te king sculde ben lauerd and king wile he liuede, and æfter his dæi ware Henri king; and he helde him for fader and he him for sune; and sib and sæhte sculde ben betwyx heom and on al Engleland. This and te othre forwuuardes thet hi makeden suoren to halden the king and te eorl and te b. and te eorles and rice men alle.” Eng. Chron., a. 1140. The accounts of Will. Newb., l. i. c. 30 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 90, 91), R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 296, and Chron. Mailros, a. 1153, are to much the same effect. Rog. Howden (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 212) adds: “Rex vero constituit ducem justitiarium Angliæ sub ipso, et omnia regni negotia per ipsum terminabantur.” Stephen’s proclamation of the treaty is in Rymer’s Fœdera, vol. i. p. 18. Its date is Westminster, 1153, and it is in form of a writ addressed to the archbishops, bishops, barons, and all faithful subjects, proclaiming and notifying to them the treaty just made. The primary article, concerning the adoption of Henry as heir, is stated exactly as by the chroniclers. The remainder of the document relates entirely to details of homage done by prelates and barons to Henry, stipulations in behalf of Stephen’s son William, and arrangements for surrender of royal castles to Henry on Stephen’s death. Finally: “In negotiis autem regni ego consilio ducis operabor. Ego vero in toto regno Angliæ, tam in parte ducis quam in meâ, regalem justiciam exercebo.” By “the duke’s part” and “my part” Stephen probably meant simply the parts which each held at the moment; the whole clause seems to mean that the regal justice was to be exercised in his name and for his profit, but by Henry’s wisdom--which agrees very well with Rog. Howden’s statement.

[1204] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 297. Concerning the coinage, Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 211, says: “Fecit [Henricus] monetam novam, quam vocabant monetam ducis; et non tantum ipse, sed omnes potentes, tam episcopi quam comites et barones, suam faciebant monetam. Sed ex quo dux ille venit, plurimorum monetam cassavit.” This however is placed under the year 1149.

The treaty was ratified in an assembly of bishops, earls and barons, held at Winchester at the end of the month.[1205] Stephen afterwards accompanied his adoptive son to London, where he was joyfully welcomed by the citizens.[1206] King and duke seem to have kept Christmas apart; Henry indeed set himself to his task of reform in such earnest that he could have little time to spare for mere festivities. On the octave of Epiphany another assembly was held at Oxford, where the nobles of England swore homage and fealty to the duke as to their lord, reserving only the faith due to Stephen as long as he lived. The next meeting, at Dunstable, was not quite so satisfactory. Henry, doing his share of the public work with true Angevin thoroughness, was irritated at finding that some of the builders of unlicensed castles had gained the king’s ear and persuaded him to exempt their fortresses from the sentence of universal destruction. Against this breach of faith the duke earnestly remonstrated; but he found it impossible to enforce his wishes without a quarrel which he was too prudent to risk.[1207] He therefore let the matter rest, and in Lent he accompanied Stephen to Canterbury and thence to a meeting with the count and countess of Flanders at Dover.[1208] There it was discovered that some of the Flemish mercenaries, to whom Henry and his good peace were equally hateful,[1209] were conspiring to kill him on his return to Canterbury. The shock of this discovery, added to that of an accident which befell Stephen’s eldest surviving son William, who is said to have been aware of the plot,[1210] was too much for the king’s overwrought nerves, and with a last benediction he hurried his adoptive son out of the country at once.[1211] Henry passed through Canterbury before the conspirators were ready for him, made his way to Rochester and London, and thence safe over sea to Normandy,[1212] where he landed soon after Easter.[1213]

[1205] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 156. See also Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 37 (Arnold, p. 289).

[1206] Hen. Hunt. as above. Eng. Chron. a. 1140.

[1207] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 38 (Arnold, pp. 289, 290).

[1208] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 158. The countess was Henry’s aunt, Sibyl of Anjou, once the bride of William the Clito, now the wife of his rival Theodoric.

[1209] “Qui duci simul ac paci invidebant.” Ibid.

[1210] Ibid.

[1211] Will. Newb., l. i. c. 30 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 91, 92).

[1212] Gerv. Cant. as above.

[1213] Rob. Torigni, a. 1154.

Only fifteen months had passed since his arrival in England; only five had passed since the treaty of Wallingford; yet in that short time Henry had made, as the contemporary English chronicler says, “such good peace as never was here”[1214]--never, that is, since peace and order were buried with his grandfather, eighteen years before. So well was the work begun that even when he was thus obliged to leave it for a while in the weak hands of Stephen, it did not fall to pieces again. Stephen indeed, as was remarked by the writers of the day, seemed now at length for the first time to be really king.[1215] For eighteen years he had been king only in name; his regal dignity had never been truly respected, his regal authority had never been fully obeyed, till the last twelve months of his life, when he was avowedly only holding them in trust for the future sovereign whom “all folk loved,” because he did what Stephen had failed to do--“he did good justice and made peace.”[1216] After Henry was gone Stephen gathered up his failing strength for a campaign against some of the rebellious castles in the north. Sick and weary as he was, his youthful valour and prowess were even yet not altogether departed; castle after castle fell into his hands, the last and most important being that of Drax in Yorkshire.[1217] He then went southward again to hold another meeting with the count of Flanders at Dover.[1218] There his health finally gave way; and eight days before the feast of All Saints his nineteen years’ reign, with all its troubles and disappointments, its blunders and failures, its useless labours and hopeless cares, was ended by a quiet death.[1219]

[1214] “And hit ward sone suythe god pais, sua th. neure was here.” Eng. Chron. a. 1140.

[1215] Will. Newb. as above (p. 91). Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 39 (Arnold, p. 290). R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 297.

[1216] Eng. Chron. a. 1140.

[1217] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 39 (Arnold, p. 291). Will. Newb., l. i. c. 32 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 94). Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 213.

[1218] Hen. Hunt. as above. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 159.

[1219] Hen. Hunt. and Gerv. Cant. as above. The Ann. Winton. Contin. a. 1154 (Liebermann, Geschichtsquellen, p. 82) dates it a day later.

The primate and the nobles, while they laid him in Feversham abbey beside his wife and son,[1220] sent the news to the king-elect, begging him to come and take his crown without delay.[1221] The message reached Henry just as he was completing the suppression of a disturbance in Normandy. A series of desultory attacks made by the French king upon the duchy during Henry’s absence in 1153 had led to no direct result, but they probably helped to foster the turbulence of the Norman barons, who were fast getting into their old condition of lawless independence when at Easter 1154 the duke re-appeared in their midst. He began to assert his authority by resuming--not all at once, but gradually and cautiously--the demesne lands of the duchy, which his father had been compelled to alienate for a time in order to purchase the support of the nobles. A hurried visit to Aquitaine was followed in August by peace with the king of France; for Louis had at last come to see that his opposition was as vain as Stephen’s. Immediately afterwards the young duke was struck down by a severe illness. In October he was sufficiently recovered to join Louis in a campaign for the settlement of some disturbances in the Vexin; thence he went once more to besiege his rebellious cousin and vassal Richard Fitz-Count at Torigni. The place had apparently just surrendered when the tidings of Stephen’s death arrived. Henry took counsel first of all with his mother; then he summoned his brothers and the barons of Normandy to meet him at Barfleur; but when he arrived there with Eleanor the wind was so unfavourable that a whole month elapsed before they could venture to cross.[1222] Henry, however, could afford to wait; and England could wait for him. Three weeks without a king had been enough to throw the whole country into disorder when Henry I. had died leaving only a woman and an infant as his heirs; six weeks passed away without any disturbance now while Archbishop Theobald was guarding the rights of the Crown[1223] for one who had already proved himself King Henry’s worthy grandson. “No man durst do other than good, for the mickle awe of him.”[1224] At last, on December 8,[1225] he landed in Hampshire;[1226] first at Winchester, then in London, he received a rapturous welcome;[1227] and on the Sunday before Christmas Henry Fitz-Empress, duke of the Normans, count of Anjou and duke of Aquitaine, was crowned king of England in Westminster abbey.[1228]

[1220] Hen. Hunt. as above. Eng. Chron. a. 1154. Will. Newb., l. i. c. 32 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 95).

[1221] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 40 (Arnold, p. 291).

[1222] Rob. Torigni, a. 1154.

[1223] “Nutu divino et cooperante Theodbaldo Cantuariensi archiepiscopo.” Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 159.

[1224] Eng. Chron. a. 1154. Cf. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 40 (Arnold, p. 291).

[1225] Gerv. Cant. as above. Rob. Torigni, a. 1154, gives the date as December 7. Most likely the crossing was made, as seems to have been the usual practice with Henry at least, in the night.

[1226] “Hostreham,” Gerv. Cant. as above. “Apud Noveforest,” Hen. Hunt. as above; which Mr. Arnold glosses in the margin “Lymington.”

[1227] Hen. Hunt. and Gerv. Cant. as above.

[1228] The Chron. S. Albin. a. 1154 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 38) says: “xiv kalendas januarii apud Wintoniam rex consecratur, et Natale Domini celebrans Londoniæ, cum uxore coronatur.” But the English writers mention only one crowning, at Westminster. The Eng. Chron. a. 1154, says Henry was “to king blessed in London on the Sunday before Midwinter-day.” Rob. Torigni ad ann., R. Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 299), Chron. de Bello (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 72), Ann. S. Aug. Cant. ad ann. (Liebermann, Geschichtsquellen, p. 82), all give the same date; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 159) makes it December 17, but as he also calls it the Sunday before Christmas, he evidently means 19. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 40 (Arnold, pp. 291, 292), greets the new king with some hexameter verses, and then adds: “Et jam regi novo novus liber donandus est.” But the book, if it was ever written, is lost.

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IX. HENRY AND ENGLAND

1154–1157.

The Christmas-tide of the year 1154 was an epoch in English history almost as marked as that of 1066. The crowning of Henry Fitz-Empress was, scarcely less than that of William the Conqueror, the beginning of a new era; and--unlike many historical events whose importance is only realized long after they are past--it was distinctly recognized as such by the men of the period. For the first time since the Norman conquest, the new king succeeded to his throne without a competitor, and with the unanimous goodwill of all ranks and all races throughout his kingdom. Normans and English, high and low, cleric and lay, welcomed the young Angevin king as the herald of a bright new day which was to dispel the darkness that had settled down upon the land during the nineteen winters of anarchy, and to bring back all, or more than all, the peace and prosperity of England’s happiest ages. But if Henry’s subjects looked forward to the year which was just beginning with a hope such as no new year had brought them since his grandfather’s death, Henry himself may well have contemplated with an anxiety little short of despair the task which lay before him. It was nothing less than the resuscitation of the body politic from a state of utter decay. The legal, constitutional and administrative machinery of the state was at a deadlock; the national resources, material and moral, were exhausted. To bring under subjection, once for all, the remnant of the disturbing forces which had caused the catastrophe, and render them powerless for future harm:--to disinter from the mass of ruin the fragments of the old foundations of social and political organization, and build up on them a secure and lasting fabric of administration and law;--to bring order out of chaos, life out of decay:--this was the work which a youth who had not yet completed his twenty-second year now found himself called to undertake, and to undertake almost single-handed.

The call did not indeed take him by surprise. The last year which he had spent in England must have given him some knowledge of the state of things with which as king he would have to deal; and the prospect of having so to deal with it sooner or later had been constantly before his eyes from his very infancy. His qualifications for the work must however have been chiefly innate. The first nine years of his life spent under the care of mother and father alternately in Anjou; the next four, under his uncle Earl Robert at Bristol; then two years in Anjou again, followed by a year with King David of Scotland, three more spent in securing his continental heritage and that of his bride, a year occupied in securing England, and another busied with self-defence in Normandy:--such a training was too desultory to have furnished Henry with the knowledge or the experience necessary for the formation of anything like a matured theory of government; and he could have had no time to think out one for himself in a life so busy and so short. Yet in his very youth and inexperience there was an element of strength. He came trammelled by no preconceived political theories, no party-pledges, no local and personal ties; he came simply with his own young intellect unwarped by prejudice, unruffled by passion, unclouded by care; fresh with the untried vigour and elasticity of youth, and ready, whatever his hand should find to do, fearlessly to do it with his might.

Thus much, at least, those who crowded to welcome the new sovereign might read in his very face and figure. Henry of Anjou had no claim to the personal epithet universally bestowed upon his father; and yet, as one of his courtiers expressively said, his was a form which a soldier, having once seen, would hasten to look upon again.[1229] He was of moderate height,[1230] appearing neither gigantic among small men nor insignificant among tall ones;[1231] in later days it was remarked that he had hit the golden mean of stature which his sons had all either overshot or failed to attain.[1232] His frame was made for strength, endurance and activity;[1233] thick-set, square-shouldered, broad-chested:--with arms muscular as those of a gladiator;[1234] highly-arched feet which looked made for the stirrup;[1235]--a large, but not disproportionate head, round and well-shaped, and covered with close-cropped hair of the tawny hue which Fulk the Red seems to have transmitted to so many of his descendants:[1236] a face which one of his courtiers describes as “lion-like”[1237] and another as “a countenance of fire”[1238]--a face, as we can see even in its sculptured effigy on his tomb, full of animation, energy and vigour;--a freckled skin;[1239] somewhat prominent grey eyes, clear and soft when he was in a peaceable mood, but bloodshot and flashing like balls of fire when the demon-spirit of his race was aroused within him:--[1240] Henry, his people might guess almost at a glance, was no mirror of courtly chivalry and elegance, but a man of practical, vigorous and rapid action. He inherited as little of Geoffrey’s personal refinement as of his physical grace. When the young duke of the Normans had first appeared in England, his shoulders covered with a little short cape such as was then usually worn in Anjou, the English knights, who since his grandfather’s time had been accustomed to wear long cloaks hanging down to the ground, were struck by the novelty of his attire and nicknamed him “Henry Curtmantel.”[1241] When once the Angevin fashion was transferred to the English court, however, there was nothing in Henry’s dress to distinguish him from his servants, unless it were its very lack of display and elegance; his clothing and headgear were of the plainest kind; and how little care he took of his person was shewn by his rough coarse hands, never gloved except when he went hawking.[1242] In his later years he was accused of extreme parsimony;[1243] even as a young man, he clearly had no pleasure in pomp or luxury of any kind. He was very temperate in meat and drink;[1244] over-indulgence in that respect seems indeed never to have been one of the habitual sins of the house of Anjou; and whatever complex elements may have had a part in his innermost moral constitution, in temper and tastes Henry was an Angevin of the Angevins. His restlessness seems to have outdone that of Fulk Nerra himself. He was always up and doing; if a dream of ease crossed him even in sleep, he spurned it angrily from him;[1245] he gave himself no peace, and as a natural consequence, he gave none to those around him. When not at war, he was constantly practising its mimicry with hawk and hound; his passion for the chase--a double inheritance, from his father and from his mother’s Norman ancestors--was so great as to be an acknowledged scandal in all eyes.[1246] He would mount his horse at the first streak of dawn, come back in the evening after a day’s hard riding across hill, moor and forest, and then tire out his companions by keeping them on their feet until nightfall.[1247] His own feet were always swollen and bruised from his violent riding; yet except at meals and on horseback, he was never known to be seated.[1248] In public or in private, in council or in church, he stood or walked from morning till night.[1249] At church, indeed, he was especially restless; unmindful of the sacred unction which had made him king, he evidently grudged the time taken from secular occupations for attendance upon religious duties, and would either discuss affairs of state in a whisper[1250] or relieve his impatience by drawing little pictures all through the most solemn of holy rites.[1251] His English or Norman courtiers, unaccustomed to deal with the demon-blood of Anjou, vainly endeavoured to account for an activity which remained undiminished when they were all half dead with exhaustion, and attributed it to his dread of becoming disabled by corpulence, to which he had a strong natural tendency.[1252] A good deal of it, however, was probably due to sheer physical restlessness and superabundant physical energy; and a good deal more to the irrepressible outward working of an extraordinarily active mind.

[1229] “Vir ... quem miles diligenter inspectum accurrebant [accurrebat?] inspicere.” W. Map, De Nugis Curialium, dist. v. c. 6 (Wright, p. 227).

[1230] Ibid. Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. ii. c. 29 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 71). Peter of Blois, Ep. lxvi. (Giles, vol. i. p. 193).

[1231] Pet. Blois as above.

[1232] Gir. Cambr. as above.

[1233] W. Map as above.

[1234] Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 70). Pet. Blois as above.

[1235] Pet. Blois as above.

[1236] Ibid. Gir. Cambr. as above.

[1237] Pet. Blois as above.

[1238] Gir. Cambr. as above.

[1239] See how Merlin’s prophecy about “fortem lentiginosum” was applied to him, Gir. Cambr. Itin. Kambr., l. i. c. 6 (Dimock, vol. vi. p. 62).

[1240] Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. ii. c. 29 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 70). Pet. Blois as above.

[1241] Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 28 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 157).

[1242] Pet. Blois, Ep. lxvi. (Giles, vol. i. pp. 193, 194).

[1243] See Ralf Niger (Anstruther), p. 169. Ralf, however, was a bitter enemy. Gerald on the other hand seems to draw, and to imply that Henry drew, a distinction between official and personal expenditure: “Parcimoniæ, quoad principi licuit, per omnia datus.” De Instr. Princ., dist. ii. c. 29 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 70). “Largus in publico, parcus in privato” (ib. p. 71).

[1244] Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 70). Pet. Blois as above (p. 195). W. Map, De Nug. Cur., dist. v. c. 6 (Wright, p. 231).

[1245] W. Map as above (p. 227).

[1246] Ibid. Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 71). Pet. Blois as above (p. 194).

[1247] Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. ii. c. 29 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 71).

[1248] Ibid. Pet. Blois, Ep. lxvi. (Giles, vol. i. p. 194).

[1249] Pet. Blois as above.

[1250] Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 72).

[1251] “Oratorium ingressus, picturæ et susurro vacabat.” R. Niger (Anstruther), p. 169. It is only fair to add that some of the highest clergy of the day were just as unscrupulous as the king about talking business during mass. See, e.g., Chron. de Bello (Angl. Christ. Soc.), pp. 73, 74; and there are plenty of other examples.

[1252] W. Map, De Nug. Cur., dist. v. c. 6 (Wright, p. 227).

It was no light matter to be in attendance upon such a king. His clerks, some playfully, some in all seriousness, compared his court to the infernal regions.[1253] His habit of constantly moving about from one place to another--a habit which he retained to the very end of his life--was in itself sufficiently trying to those who had to transact business with him, and was made positively exasperating by his frequent and sudden changes of plan. “He shunned regular hours like poison.”[1254] “Solomon saith,” wrote his secretary Peter of Blois to him once, after vainly striving to track him across land and sea, “Solomon saith there be three things difficult to be found out, and a fourth which may hardly be discovered: the way of an eagle in the air; the way of a ship in the sea; the way of a serpent on the ground; and the way of a man in his youth. I can add a fifth: the way of a king in England.”[1255] In a letter to his old comrades of the court Peter gives a detailed account of the discomforts brought upon them by Henry’s erratic movements. “If the king has promised to spend the day in a place--more especially, if his intention so to do has been publicly proclaimed by a herald--you may be quite sure he will upset everybody’s arrangements by starting off early in the morning. Then you may see men rushing about as if they were mad, beating their packhorses, driving their chariots one into another--in short, such a turmoil as to present you with a lively image of the infernal regions. If, on the other hand, the king announces that he will set out early in the morning for a certain place, he is sure to change his mind; you may take it for granted that he will sleep till noon. Then you shall see the packhorses waiting with their burthens, the chariots standing ready, the couriers dozing, the purveyors worrying, and all grumbling one at another. Folk run to the women and the tent-keepers to inquire of them whither the king is really going; for this sort of courtiers often know the secrets of the palace. Many a time when the king was asleep and all was silent around, there has come a message from his lodging, not authoritative, but rousing us all up, and naming the city or town whither he was about to proceed. After waiting so long in dreary uncertainty, we were comforted by a prospect of being quartered in a place where there was a fair chance of accommodation. Thereupon arose such a clatter of horse and foot that hell seemed to have broken loose. But when our couriers had gone the whole day’s ride, or nearly so, the king would turn aside to some other place where he had perhaps one single house, and just enough provision for himself and none else. I hardly dare say it,” adds the sorely-tried secretary, “but I verily believe he took a delight in seeing the straits to which he put us! After wandering a distance of three or four miles in an unknown wood, and often in the dark, we thought ourselves lucky if we stumbled upon some dirty little hovel; there was often grievous and bitter strife about a mere hut; and swords were drawn for the possession of a lodging which pigs would not have deemed worth fighting for. I used to get separated from my people, and could hardly collect them again in three days. O Lord God Almighty! wilt Thou not turn the heart of this king, that he may know himself to be but man, and may learn to shew some grace of regal consideration, some human fellow-feeling, for those whom not ambition, but necessity, compels to run after him thus?”[1256]

[1253] Ibid., dist. i. c. 2 (pp. 5, 6); dist. v. c. 7 (p. 238). Pet. Blois, Ep. xiv. (Giles, vol. i. p. 50).

[1254] R. Niger (Anstruther), p. 169.

[1255] Pet. Blois, Ep. xli. (Giles, vol. i. p. 125). Arnulf of Lisieux makes a like complaint in a more serious tone: Arn. Lis., Ep. 92 (Giles, p. 247). See also the remark of Louis of France on Henry’s expedition to Ireland in 1172: R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 351.

[1256] Pet. Blois, Ep. xiv. (Giles, vol. i. pp. 50, 51).

This bustling, scrambling, roving Pandemonium was very unlike the orderly, well-disciplined court of the first King Henry, where everything was done according to rule;--where the royal itinerary was planned out every month, and its stages duly announced and strictly adhered to, so that every man knew exactly when and where to find his sovereign, and his coming brought people together as to a fair:--where all the earls and barons of the realm were set down in a written list, according to which every one on his arrival at court was furnished with a certain allowance of bread, wine and candles for the term of his sojourn;[1257]--where the king’s own daily life was passed in a steady routine, holding council with his wise men and giving audiences until dinner-time, devoting the rest of the day to the society of the young gallants whom he drew from every country on this side of the Alps to increase the splendour of his household:--a court which was “a school of virtue and wisdom all the morning, of courtesy and decorous mirth all the afternoon.”[1258] Yet this hasty, impetuous young sovereign, in whose rough aspect and reckless ways one can at first glance discern so little either of regal dignity or of steady application to regal duty, was in truth, no less than his grandfather, an indefatigable worker and a born ruler of men. His way of doing business, apparently by fits and starts, bewildered men of less versatile intellect and less rapid decision; but they saw that the business was done, and done thoroughly, though they hardly understood when or how. They resigned themselves to be swept along in the whirl of Henry’s unaccountable movements, for they learned to perceive that those movements did not spring from mere caprice and perversity, but had always a motive and an object, inscrutable perhaps to all eyes save his own, but none the less definite and practical. When he dragged them in one day over a distance which should have occupied four or five, they knew that it was to forestall the machinations of some threatening foe. When he ran over the country from end to end without a word of notice, it was to overtake his officials at unawares and ascertain for himself how they were or were not attending to their duty.[1259] If he was never still, he was also never idle. He seemed to be specially haunted by that dread of the mischief attendant upon idle hands which an Angevin writer quaintly puts forth as an apology for the ceaseless warfare in which his race passed their lives.[1260] Henry’s hands were never idle; in the intervals of state business, when not laden with bow and arrows, they almost invariably held a book; for Henry was, to the very close of his life, the most learned crowned head in Christendom.[1261] He was a match for the best among his subjects in all knightly exercises and accomplishments; he was no less a match for the best, among laymen at least, in scholarship and mental culture. If we may believe one of his chaplains, Walter Map, he knew something of every language “from the bay of Biscay to the Jordan,” though he only spoke two, Latin and his native French;[1262] he evidently never learned to speak, and it is doubtful how far he understood, the natural tongue of the people of his island realm. He loved reading; he enjoyed the society of learned men; his delight was to stand amid a little group of clerks, arguing out some knotty point with them; not a day passed in his court without some interesting literary discussion.[1263] His habit of shutting himself up in his own apartments with a few chosen companions was a grievance to those who remembered his grandfather’s practice of coming forth in public at stated hours every day;[1264] yet Henry II. was never difficult of access; once, when the prior of Witham made a witty retort to the marshals who refused him admittance to the royal chamber, the king himself, overhearing the jest, opened the door with a peal of laughter;[1265] and a courier charged with important news from the north made his way to the sovereign’s bedside and woke him in the middle of the night without hesitation.[1266] When he did shew himself to the people, they thronged him without ceremony; they caught hold of him right and left, they pulled him this way and that, yet he never rebuked them, never gave them an angry look, but listened patiently to what each man had to say, and when their importunity became intolerable he simply made his escape without a word.[1267] Though not gifted with a good voice,[1268] he was a ready and pleasant speaker;[1269] and he had two other natural qualifications specially useful for a king. Unlike his grandfather Fulk V., who never could remember a face and constantly had to ask the names of his own familiar attendants,[1270] Henry never failed to recognize a man whom he had once looked at; and a thing once heard, if worth remembering, never slipped from his memory, which was consequently stored with a fund of historical and experimental knowledge ready for use at any moment.[1271]

[1257] W. Map, De Nug. Cur., dist. v. c. 6 (Wright, pp. 224, 225).

[1258] W. Map, De Nug. Cur., dist. v. c. 5 (Wright, p. 210).

[1259] Pet. Blois, Ep. lxvi. (Giles, vol. i. p. 194).

[1260] See above, p. 343, note 6{1002}.

[1261] Pet. Blois as above.

[1262] W. Map, De Nug. Cur., dist. v. c. 6 (Wright, p. 227).

[1263] Pet. Blois, Ep. lxvi. (Giles, vol. i. p. 194).

[1264] W. Map as above (p. 230).

[1265] Ib. dist. i. c. 6 (p. 7).

[1266] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 25 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 189).

[1267] W. Map, as above, dist. v. c. 6 (Wright, p. 231).

[1268] “Voce quassâ.” Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. ii. c. 29 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 70). This however refers to his later years.

[1269] Ib. p. 71. Pet. Blois as above (p. 195).

[1270] Will. Tyr., l. xiv. c. i.

[1271] Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. ii. c. 29 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 73).

His worst private vices only reached their full developement in later years; it is plain, however, that he was much less careful than his grandfather had been of the outward decorum of his household; and unluckily his consort was not a woman to control it by her influence or improve it by her example like the “good Queen Maude.” His wrath was even more terrific than the wrath of kings is proverbially wont to be.[1272] His passions were strong, and they were lasting; when once he had taken a dislike to a man, he could rarely be induced to grant him his favour; on the other hand, when his friendship and confidence were once given, he withdrew them with the utmost difficulty and reluctance;[1273] and he had the gift of inspiring in all who came in contact with him a love or a hatred as intense and abiding as his own. His temper was a mystery to those who had not the key to it; it was the temper of Fulk Nerra. He had the Black Count’s strange power of fascination, his unaccountable variations of mood, and his cool, clear head. Like Fulk, he was at one moment mocking and blaspheming all that is holiest in earth and heaven, and at another grovelling in an agony of remorse as wild as the blasphemy itself. Like Fulk, he was an indefatigable builder, constantly superintending the erection of a wall, the fortification of a castle, the making of a dyke, the enclosing of a deer-park or a fish-pond, or the planning of a palace;[1274] and all the while his material buildings were but types of a great edifice of statecraft which, all unseen, was rising day by day beneath the hands of the royal architect;--his ever-varying pursuits, each of which seemed to absorb him for the moment, were but parts of an all-absorbing whole;--and his seeming self-contradictions were unaccountable only because the most useful of all his Angevin characteristics, his capacity for instinctively and unerringly adapting means to ends, enabled him to detect opportunities and recognize combinations invisible to less penetrating eyes. This was the moral constitution which in Fulk III. and Fulk V. had made the greatness of the house of Anjou; its workings were now to be displayed on a grander scale and in a more important sphere.

[1272] Pet. Blois, Ep. lxxv. (Giles, vol. i. p. 223).

[1273] Pet. Blois, Ep. lxvi. (ib. p. 194). Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 71).

[1274] Pet. Blois as above (p. 195).

The young king saw at once that for his work of reconstruction and reform in England the counsellors who surrounded him in Normandy were of no avail; that he must trust solely to English help, and select his chief ministers partly from among those who had been in office under his predecessor, partly from such of his own English partizans as were best fitted for the task. First among the former class stood Richard de Lucy, who held the post of justiciar at the close of Stephen’s reign,[1275] who retained it under Henry for five-and-twenty years, and whose character is summed up in the epithet said to have been bestowed on him by his grateful sovereign--“Richard de Lucy the Loyal.”[1276] For thirteen years he shared the dignity and the duties of chief justiciar with Earl Robert of Leicester,[1277] who, after having been a faithful supporter of Stephen in his earlier and better days, had transferred his allegiance to Henry, and continued through life one of his most trusty servants and friends. The weight of Robert’s character was increased by that of his rank and descent; as head of the great house of Leicester, he was the most influential baron of the midland shires; while as son of Count Robert of Meulan, the friend of Henry I., he was a living link with that hallowed past which Henry II. was expected to restore, and a natural representative of its traditions of honour and of peace. Of the great ministers who had actually served under the first King Henry only one survived: the old treasurer, Nigel, bishop of Ely. We know not who took his place on his fall in 1139; but the treasurer in Stephen’s latter years can have had little more than an empty title; and when Nigel reappears in office, immediately after Henry’s accession, it is not as treasurer, but as chancellor.[1278] This, however, was a merely provisional arrangement; in a few weeks the bishop of Ely was reinstated in his most appropriate place, on the right side of the chequered table, gathering up the broken threads of the financial system which he had learned under his uncle of Salisbury;[1279] while the more miscellaneous work of the chancellor was undertaken by younger hands.

[1275] At the peace he held the Tower of London and the castle of Windsor; Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. p. 18: these were peculiarly in the custody of the justiciar; Stubbs, Const. Hist., vol. i. p. 449, note 1.

[1276] Jordan Fantosme, vv. 1540–1541 (Michel, p. 70).

[1277] Robert appears as capitalis justicia in a charter of, apparently, 1155 (Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 3). In 1159–1160, John of Salisbury describes him as “illustris comes Legrecestriæ Robertus, modeste proconsulatum gerens apud Britannias” (Joh. Salisb. Polycrat., l. vi. c. 25; Giles, vol. iv. p. 65), and at his death in 1168 he is named in the Chron. Mailros (ad ann.) as “comes justus Leicestrie, et qui summa justitia vocatur.”

[1278] A charter issued at Westminster, evidently soon after the coronation, is witnessed by “N. Epọ de Ely et Canc.” Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 2, note 2.

[1279] Dial. de Scacc., l. i. c. 8 (Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 199).

Under the old English constitutional system, alike in its native purity and in the modified form which it assumed under the Conqueror and his sons, the archbishop of Canterbury was the official keeper of the royal conscience and the first adviser of the sovereign. Theobald had contributed more than any other one man to secure Henry’s succession; he saw in it the crowning of his own life’s work for England; while Henry saw in Theobald his most weighty and valuable supporter. It was therefore a matter of course that the primate should resume the constitutional position which he had inherited from Anselm and Lanfranc and their old-English predecessors. Theobald, however, was now in advanced age and feeble health; and when he fully perceived what manner of man it was to whom he was bound to act as spiritual father and political guide, he felt that to regulate these strong passions, to direct these youthful impulses, to follow these restless movements, was a task too hard for his failing strength. He feared the evil influences of the courtiers upon the young king, who seemed so willing to be led aright, and might for that very reason be so easily led astray;[1280] he feared for the English Church, through which there was already running a whisper of ill-omen concerning the Angevins’ known hostility to the rights of religion;[1281] he feared for his own soul, lest Henry should wander out of the right path for lack of guidance, and the sin should lie at the door of the incompetent guide.[1282] There was one man who, if he could but be placed at the young king’s side, might be trusted to manage the arduous and delicate task. So to place him could be no very difficult matter; for his own past services to Henry’s cause were far too great to be left unrewarded. Neither the recommendations of the bishops of Winchester,[1283] Bayeux and Lisieux,[1284] nor even those of the primate, could have as much weight as the known qualifications of the candidate himself in obtaining the office of chancellor for Thomas Becket.[1285]

[1280] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 160.

[1281] Vita S. Thomæ, Anon. I. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 11.

[1282] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 160.

[1283] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 18.

[1284] “Quorum consiliis rex in primordiis suis innitebatur.” Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 12.

[1285] “Facile regi inspiratum est commendatum habere quem propria satis merita commendabant.” E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 363. I cannot attach any importance to the version of Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 45–47.

The chancellor’s duties were still much the same as they had been when first organized by Roger of Salisbury. He was charged with the keeping of the royal seal, the drawing-up of royal writs and charters, the conduct of the royal correspondence, the preservation of legal records, the custody of vacant fiefs and benefices, and the superintendence of the king’s chaplains and clerks;[1286]--in a word, the management of the whole clerical and secretarial work of the royal household and of the government. Officially, he seems to have been ranked below the chief ministers of state--the justiciar, or even the treasurer;[1287] personally, however, he was brought more than either of them into close and constant relations with his sovereign. The actual importance and dignity of the chancellorship depended in fact upon the capacity of individual chancellors for magnifying their office. Thomas magnified it as no man ever did before or since. In a very few months he became what the justiciar had formerly been, the second man in the kingdom;[1288] and not in the kingdom alone, but in all the lands, on both sides of the sea, which owned Henry Fitz-Empress for their sovereign.[1289] Theobald’s scheme far more than succeeded; his favourite became not so much the king’s chief minister as his friend, his director, his master.[1290] The two young men, drawn together by a strong personal attraction, seemed to have but one heart and one soul.[1291] Thomas was the elder by fifteen years; but the disparity of age was lost in the perfect community of their feelings, interests and pursuits. Thomas was now in deacon’s orders, having been ordained by Archbishop Theobald at the close of the previous year on his appointment to the archdeaconry of Canterbury,[1292] an office which was accounted the highest ecclesiastical dignity in England after those of the bishops and abbots.[1293] He felt, however, no vocation and no taste for the duties of sacred ministry, and was only too glad to “put off the deacon” and fling all his energies into the more congenial sphere of court life.[1294] Alike in its business and in its pleasures he was thoroughly at home. His refined sensibilities, his romantic imagination, revelled in the elegance and splendour which to Henry’s matter-of-fact disposition were simply irksome; he gladly took all the burthen of state ceremonial as well as of state business upon his own shoulders; and he bore it with an easy grace which men never wearied of admiring. One day he would be riding in coat of mail at the head of the royal troops, the next he would be dispensing justice in the king’s name;[1295] and his will was law throughout the land, for all men knew that his will and Henry’s were one.[1296]

[1286] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above. On the chancellor’s office see Stubbs, Const. Hist., vol. i. pp. 352, 353.

[1287] Will. Fitz-Steph., as above, does indeed say “Cancellarii Angliæ dignitas est ut secundus a rege in regno habeatur”; but he had in his mind one particular chancellor. He also says “Cancellaria emenda non est”; but it seems that Thomas himself paid for his appointment (Gilb. Foliot, Ep. cxciv., Giles, vol. i. p. 268; Robertson, Becket, vol. v. Ep. ccxxv. pp. 523, 524), like the chancellors before and after him, and like the other great ministers of state.

[1288] “In regno secundus,” Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 169. “Secundus a rege,” Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 18. “Nullus par ei erat in regno, excepto solo rege,” Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 216. E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 363, and the Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 49, liken his position to that of Joseph.

[1289] “Secundum post regem in quatuor regnis quis te ignorat?” writes Peter of Celle to Thomas (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. Ep. ii. p. 4).

[1290] “Regis amicus,” Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 169. “Regis rector et quasi magister,” ib. pp. 160 and 169.

[1291] Joh. Salisb., Ep. lxxviii. (Giles, vol. i. p. 109; Robertson, Becket, vol. v. Ep. ix. p. 13).

[1292] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 159, 160. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 213. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 4. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 17. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 168. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 11.

[1293] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above. He says it was worth a hundred pounds of silver.

[1294] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 173.

[1295] Anon. I. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 12.

[1296] Ibid. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 364.

In outward aspect Thomas must have been far more regal than the king himself. He was very tall and elegantly formed,[1297] with an oval face,[1298] handsome aquiline features,[1299] a lofty brow,[1300] large, lustrous and penetrating eyes;[1301] there was an habitual look of placid dignity in his countenance,[1302] a natural grace in his every gesture, an ingrained refinement in his every word and action;[1303] the slender, tapering, white fingers[1304] and dainty attire of the burgher’s son contrasted curiously with the rough brown hands and careless appearance of Henry Fitz-Empress; the order, elegance and liberality of the chancellor’s household contrasted no less with the confusion and discomfort of the king’s. The riches that passed through Thomas’s hands were enormous; revenues and honours were heaped on him by the king; costly gifts poured in upon him daily from clergy and laity, high and low. But what he received with one hand he gave away with the other; his splendour and his wealth were shared with all who chose to come and take a share of them. His door was always open, his table always spread, for all men, of whatever race or rank, who stood in need of hospitality.[1305] Besides fifty-two clerks regularly attached to his household--some to act as his secretaries, some to take charge of the vacant benefices in his custody, some to serve his own numerous livings and prebends[1306]--he had almost every day a company of invited guests to dinner; every day the hall was freshly strewn with green leaves or rushes in summer and clean hay or straw in winter, amid which those for whom there was no room on the benches sat and dined on the floor. The tables shone with gold and silver vessels, and were laden with costly viands; Thomas stuck at no expense in such matters; but it was less for his own enjoyment than for that of his guests;[1307] and these always included a crowd of poor folk, who were as sumptuously and carefully served as the rich;[1308] the meanest in his house never had to complain of a dinner such as the noblest were often obliged to endure in King Henry’s court, where half-baked bread, sour wine, stale fish and bad meat were the ordinary fare.[1309] The chancellor’s hospitality was as gracious as it was lavish. He was the most perfect of hosts; he saw to the smallest details of domestic service; he noted the position of each guest, missed and inquired for the absent, perceived and righted in a moment the least mistake in precedence; if any man out of modesty tried to take a lower place than was his due, it was in vain; no matter in what obscure corner he might hide, Thomas was sure to find him out; he seemed to pierce through curtains and walls with those wonderful eyes whose glance brightened and cheered the whole table.[1310] No wonder that barons and knights sent their sons to be educated under his roof,[1311] and that his personal followers were far more numerous than those of the king.[1312]

[1297] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 17. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 327. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 3. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 29.

[1298] Herb. Bosh. as above.

[1299] Will. Fitz-Steph., Herb. Bosh., and Thomas Saga, as above.

[1300] Herb. Bosh. as above.

[1301] Ib. p. 229.

[1302] Will. Cant., Will. Fitz-Steph., and Thomas Saga, as above.

[1303] Anon. II. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 84.

[1304] Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 327.

[1305] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 20, 21. Joh. Salisb., Entheticus in Polycraticum (Giles, vol. iii.) p. 3.

[1306] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above, p. 29.

[1307] Ib. pp. 20, 21.

[1308] Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 13.

[1309] Pet. Blois, Ep. xiv. (Giles, vol. i. p. 49).

[1310] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 229.

[1311] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 22.

[1312] E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 363. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 13.

Henry might have been jealous of his minister; but there was no thought of jealousy in his mind. He was constantly in and out at the chancellor’s house; half in sheer fun, half to see for himself the truth of the wonderful stories which he heard about it, he would come uninvited to dinner, riding up suddenly--often bow in hand, on his way to or from the chase--when Thomas was seated at table; sometimes he would take a stirrup-cup, nod to his friend and ride away; sometimes he would leap over the table, sit down and eat. When their work was over, king and chancellor played together like a couple of schoolboys, and whether it was in their private apartments, in the public streets, in the palace, or in church, made no difference at all. It was a favourite tale among their associates how as they rode together through the streets of London one winter’s day, the king, seeing a ragged shivering beggar, snatched at the chancellor’s handsome new mantle of scarlet cloth lined with vair, crying--“You shall have the merit of clothing the naked this time!” and after a struggle in which both combatants nearly fell off their horses, sent the poor man away rejoicing in his new and strangely acquired garment, while with shouts of applause and laughter the bystanders crowded round Thomas, playfully offering him their cloaks and capes in compensation for his loss.[1313]

[1313] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 24, 25.

It is hardly possible to deny that such enormous wealth as passed through Thomas’s hands during his tenure of the chancellorship must have been acquired, in part at least, by means which in the case of a minister of the Crown in our own day would be accounted little less than scandalous. But in the twelfth century there was no scandal about the matter. Costly gifts of all kinds were showered at the feet of kings and great men openly and as matter of course, and kings and great men received them as openly, often without any idea of bribery on either side. Moreover it is to be remembered that Thomas’s position as chancellor gave him command over a considerable portion of the royal revenues, and that he was left free to draw upon them at his own discretion to meet an expenditure of which part was incurred directly in the king’s behalf, while the whole of it might be regarded as indirectly tending to the king’s glorification and benefit. The two friends in fact seem to have had but one purse as well as “one mind and one heart,” and not till many years later was there any thought of disentangling their accounts. Amid all the chancellor’s wild magnificence, there is no evidence of corruption; and there was certainly no arrogance. Thomas had nothing of the upstart in him; he never ignored his burgher-origin, he never dropped the friends of his boyhood; his filial submission to the primate remained unchanged;[1314] his gratitude to his early teachers at Merton was proved by his choice of a confessor from among them,[1315] and by his successful efforts to bring their house under the special patronage of the king.[1316] His tastes were those of the most refined aristocrat, but his sympathies were with the people from whose ranks he had sprung; his boundless almsgiving was doubled in value by the gracious considerateness with which it was bestowed; his tenderness for the poor was as genuine and as delicate as that of his mother the good dame Rohese, and he was quick alike to supply their needs and to vindicate their cause.[1317]

[1314] Anon. I. (Robertson, Beckett, vol. iv.) p. 11.

[1315] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 21. This confessor, Robert by name, was with him all through his exile; see Garnier (Hippeau), p. 137.

[1316] Will. Fitz-Steph. (as above), p. 23.

[1317] Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 13. Cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 49, 55–57.

Like the king himself, Thomas was a standing marvel to his contemporaries; the strict stood aghast at his unclerical mode of life; the simple were half inclined to take him for a wizard.[1318] But his witchery was universal and irresistible; and after all it was only the magic of a winning personality, a vivid imagination, a dauntless spirit and a guileless heart. For the chancellor’s frivolity was all on the surface of his life; its inner depths were pure. Amid the countless temptations of a corrupt court, no stain ever rested upon his personal honour. He shared in all the king’s pursuits, except the evil ones; into them Henry tried to entrap him night and day, but in vain.[1319] The one thing he would not do, the one thing he would not tolerate, was evil; the one species of human being to whom his doors were inexorably closed was a man of known bad character.[1320] Coarseness, immorality, dishonesty, in word or deed, met with summary and condign punishment at his hands.[1321] Above all things, “lying lips and a deceitful tongue were an abomination unto him.”[1322] When in after-days a biographer of the martyred archbishop copied from the Epistle to the Ephesians the description of the spiritual armour in which his hero was supposed to have clothed himself at his consecration, he significantly omitted the first piece of the panoply;[1323] Thomas had no need then to put on the girdle of truth, for he had worn it all his life.

[1318] Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 5.

[1319] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 21. Cf. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.) p. 166; Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 303; Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 5, 6; Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 12, 13; Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 53–55.

[1320] “Nota domus cunctis, vitio non cognita soli.” “Huic, quæ sola placet, solâ virtute placebis.”

Joh. Salisb., Enthet. in Polycrat. (Giles, vol. iii.) pp. 2, 3.

[1321] Anon. I. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 8. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 21.

[1322] Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 166.

[1323] Ib. p. 198.

His position at court was no easy one; for a while envy, hatred and malice assailed him from all sides, and their attacks, added to an immense load of work, so overwhelmed him that he more than once declared to his friends and to the primate that he was weary of his life and would be thankful to end it, or at any rate to break away from the bondage of the court, if only he could do so with honour. But he was not the man to forsake a task which he had once undertaken;[1324] his nature was rather to do it, like the king himself, with all his might. In the after-years, when friends and foes alike could hardly look back upon any period of Thomas’s career save in the light of the martyr’s aureole, more than half the credit of Henry’s early reforms was bestowed upon the chancellor.[1325] Even at the time, he was described by no mean authority as the champion of all liberty,[1326] the defender of all rights, the redresser of all wrongs, the restorer of peace,[1327] the mediator who stood between king and people to soften the inflexibility of law and prevent justice from degenerating into legal wrong.[1328] It is certain that the brightest and happiest years of Henry’s reign were those during which Thomas held the foremost rank and took the foremost part in the administration of government. For the successful execution of Henry’s policy, therefore, Thomas is entitled to a large share of credit. But that he in any serious degree influenced and moulded the general scope of that policy is a theory opposed both to the evidence of actual events and to the inferences which must be drawn from the characters of the two men, as developed in their after-careers. Thomas may have suggested individual measures--we shall see that he did suggest one of very great importance;--he may have contrived modifications in detail; but Henry’s policy, as a whole, bears the clear stamp of one mind--his own. The chancellor’s true merit lies in this, that he was Henry’s best and most thorough fellow-worker--not so much his counsellor or minister as his second self. It is not hard to see why they were friends; nor to see, too, why they were to quarrel so fatally. The same characteristics which drew them together were fated to part them in the end. The king found in the burgher’s son a temper as energetic, a spirit as versatile and impetuous, a tongue as quick and sharp,[1329] a determination as resolute, dauntless and thorough as his own, with a much less subtle brain, a much more excitable imagination, and much more sensitive feelings. While they moved side by side in the same sphere, they had “but one heart and one soul”; when once their spheres became opposed, the friends could only change into bitter antagonists.

[1324] Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 305. Cf. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 12; and Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 59.

[1325] See Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 19.

[1326] Joh. Salisb., Entheticus, v. 1357 (Giles, vol. v. p. 282).

[1327] Joh. Salisb. Enthet. in Polycrat. (Giles, vol. iii.) p. 3.

[1328] “Hic est qui regni leges cancellat iniquas, Et mandata pii principis æqua facit.”

Joh. Salisb., Enthet. in Polycrat. (Giles, vol. iii.) p. 2. This seems to be the earliest version of the jest about law and equity, and sums up, in a playful shape, the chancellor’s relation to both.

[1329] Although Thomas was “slightly stuttering in his talk.” Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 29. The statement occurs in none of the extant Latin lives, but from its very strangeness can hardly be anything but a touch of genuine tradition. The impediment however can only have been a very slight one, and was most likely nothing more than the effect of his extreme impetuosity. It certainly did not hinder him speaking his mind fully and forcibly upon any important occasion when his feelings were deeply stirred.

Henry’s first manifesto was published before Thomas entered his service. Immediately after his coronation he issued a charter setting forth the broad principles of his intended policy:--the restoration and confirmation of all liberties and customs in Church and state as settled by his grandfather.[1330] The actual wording of the charter was hardly more explicit than that of Stephen’s; but the marked omission of all reference to Stephen was in itself a significant indication that the return to an earlier and better order of things was intended to be something more than a phrase. On Christmas-day the king held his court at Bermondsey, and with the counsel of the assembled barons set himself to enforce at once the provisions of the treaty of Wallingford which Stephen had proved incapable of executing. Peremptory orders were issued for the expulsion of the Flemish mercenaries and the demolition of the unlicensed castles.[1331] The effect was magical. The Flemings saw at once that their day was over, and vanished like an army of spectres, so suddenly that folk marvelled whither they could have gone.[1332] The razing of the castles was necessarily a less rapid process, but it was accomplished without delay and without disturbance.[1333] These preliminary obstacles being cleared out of the way, the next step was to re-assert the rights of the Crown by abolishing the fiscal earldoms[1334] and reclaiming the demesne lands and fortresses which had passed into private hands during the anarchy. Henry proclaimed his determination clearly and firmly; all alienations of royal revenue and royal property made during the late reign were declared null and void; all occupiers of crown lands and castles were summoned to surrender them at once, and the charters of donation from Stephen whereby they attempted to justify their occupation were treated simply as waste paper.[1335] There was one at least of the usurping barons to whom Henry knew that he must carry his summons in person if he meant it to be obeyed: William of Aumale, the lord of Holderness, whose father had once aspired to the crown, whom Stephen had made earl of York, and who ruled like an almost independent chieftain in Yorkshire, where he held the royal castle of Scarborough and was in no mind to give it up. As soon as the festival season was over Henry began to move northward; by the end of January he was at York, and William of Aumale was at his feet, making complete surrender of Scarborough and of all his other castles.[1336] Another great northern baron, William Peverel of the Peak, had been scared into a monastery by the mere rumour of the king’s approach;[1337] he had been concerned two years before in an attempt to poison Henry’s earliest English ally, Earl Ralf of Chester; he knew that he was a doomed man,[1338] and when the king turned southward again after receiving the surrender of Scarborough, he dared not trust even his monastic tonsure to save him from his doom, but fled the country and left all his fiefs to his sovereign’s mercy.[1339]

[1330] Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 135.

[1331] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 160.

[1332] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 1 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 101, 102).

[1333] Ib. p. 102. Gerv. Cant. as above.

[1334] Rob. Torigni, a. 1155.

[1335] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 2 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 103).

[1336] Ib. cc. 2 and 3 (pp. 103, 104).

[1337] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 161.

[1338] See a charter of Henry, duke of the Normans, promising Peverel’s fief to Ralf on proof of the former’s guilt; Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. p. 16. Ralf of Chester died in 1153; Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 171. Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 155. See above, p. 399.

[1339] Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 161.

After such an exhibition of Henry’s powers of coercion on the two chief nobles of the north, lesser men were not likely to venture upon defiance; the occupiers of crown lands passed from rage to terror and dismay, and began sullenly to make restitution.[1340] The grantees of Stephen, however, soon proved to be the least part of the difficulty. Several of the royal fortresses were held by partizans of the Empress, who had won them either while warring against Stephen in her behalf, or by a grant from their imperial mistress in her brief day of power; and they not unnaturally resented the king’s attempt to deprive them of what they looked upon as the well-earned rewards of their service to his mother and himself. Henry, however, had made up his mind that there must be no distinction of parties or of persons; all irregularities, no matter whence they proceeded, must be suppressed; every root of rebellion must be cut off, and every ground of suspicion removed.[1341] Early in March he called another council in London,[1342] confirmed the peace and renewed the old customs of the realm,[1343] and again summoned all holders of royal castles to give an account of their usurpations.[1344] The two mightiest barons of the west revolted at once; Roger of Hereford, the son of Matilda’s faithful Miles, hurried away from court to fortify his castles of Hereford and Gloucester against the king, and made common cause with Hugh of Mortemer, the lord of Cleobury and Wigmore, who held the royal fortress of Bridgenorth. Roger was brought to reason in little more than a week by the persuasions of his kinsman Bishop Gilbert of Hereford;[1345] Hugh was suffered to complete his preparations for defiance while Henry kept the Easter feast and held a great council at Wallingford to settle the succession to the throne, first upon his eldest child William, and, in case of William’s death, upon the infant Henry, who was scarcely six weeks old.[1346] That done, the king marched with all his forces against Hugh of Mortemer. He divided his host into three parts; one division laid siege to Cleobury, another to Wigmore,[1347] and the third, commanded by Henry himself, sat down before Bridgenorth.[1348] On the spot where the spirit of feudal insubordination, incarnate in Robert of Bellême, had fought its last fight against Henry I., the same spirit, represented by Hugh of Mortemer, now fought against Henry II. The fight had been useless fifty years ago; it was equally useless now. One after another the three castles were taken, and on July 7 a great council met beneath the walls of Bridgenorth to witness Hugh’s surrender.[1349]

[1340] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 2 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 103).

[1341] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 161.

[1342] Ibid. Chron. de Bello (Angl. Christ. Soc.), p. 72.

[1343] Chron. de Bello as above.

[1344] Gerv. Cant. as above.

[1345] Ib. p. 162.

[1346] Ibid. Rob. Torigni, a. 1155, giving the date--Sunday after Easter, i.e. April 10.

[1347] Gerv. Cant. as above.

[1348] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 4 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 105).

[1349] Rob. Torigni, a. 1155. Chron. de Bello (Angl. Christ. Soc.), p. 75.

At the opposite side of the kingdom two great barons still remained to be dealt with. One was Hugh Bigod, the veteran turncoat who had been seneschal to Henry I., and who had (as the Angevin party believed) perjured himself to oust Matilda from her rights, yet whose hereditary and territorial influence had, it seems, been great enough to win from the young king a confirmation of his earldom of Norfolk,[1350] as well as to procure him a long day of grace before he was called upon to give up his many unlawfully-acquired castles. The other was William of Blois, Stephen’s eldest surviving son, by marriage earl of Warren and Surrey, to whom the treaty of Wallingford had assigned two royal castles, Pevensey and Norwich. The danger of leaving these important fortresses in William’s hands was increased by the position of Norwich, in the very midst of Hugh Bigod’s earldom; and after a year’s delay Henry determined to put an end to this state of things in East Anglia. Contrary to all precedent, he summoned the Whitsuntide council of 1157 to meet at Bury S. Edmund’s.[1351] This peaceful invasion of their territories sufficed to bring both earls to submission. William contentedly gave up his castles in exchange for the private estates which his father had held before he became king; Hugh surrendered in like manner,[1352] and was likewise taken back into favour, to have another opportunity of proving his ingratitude sixteen years later. This settlement of East Anglia completed the pacification of the realm. Even before this, however, as early as the autumn of 1155, peace and order were so far secured that Henry could venture to think of leaving the country. At Michaelmas in that year he laid before his barons a scheme for conquering Ireland as a provision for his brother William.[1353] The Pope, who was traditionally held to be the natural owner of all islands which had no other sovereign, had granted a bull authorizing the expedition;[1354] but the Empress, whose counsel was always deferentially sought by her royal son, disapproved of his project;[1355] and when he went over sea in January 1156 it was not to win a kingdom for his youngest brother in Ireland, but to put down a rebellion of the second in Anjou.[1356]

[1350] Granted by Stephen before 1153; Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. p. 18. In the Pipe Roll of 1157 there is a charge “in tercio denario comitatûs comiti Hugoni l. libras de anno et dimidio,” among the accounts “de veteri firmâ” of Norfolk, rendered by Hugh himself as ex-sheriff (Pipe Roll 3 Hen. II., Hunter, p. 75). As his successor in the sheriffdom renders an account “de firmâ dimidii anni” (ib. p. 76), the year and half above mentioned takes us back to the autumn of 1155. In the Pipe Roll of 1156, however, Hugh does not appear at all.

[1351] Chron. de Bello (Angl. Christ. Soc.), p. 85. In the Winchester accounts for the year (Pipe Roll 3 Hen. II., Hunter, p. 107) is a charge of 22s. “pro portandis coronis regis ad S. Ædmundum.” “Coronis” looks as if Eleanor wore her crown also.

[1352] Rob. Torigni, a. 1157.

[1353] Rob. Torigni, a. 1155.

[1354] Joh. Salisb. Metalog., l. iv. c. 42 (Giles, vol. v. pp. 205, 206).

[1355] Rob. Torigni, a. 1155.

[1356] Ib. a. 1156.

In England the year of his absence was a year without a history. Not a single event of any consequence is recorded by the chroniclers save the death of Henry’s eldest son, shortly before Christmas;[1357] and even this was a matter of no political moment; for, as we have seen, there was another infant to take his place as heir-apparent. The blank in the chronicles has to be filled up from the Pipe Roll which once again makes its appearance at Michaelmas 1156, and which has a special value and interest as being the most authoritative witness to the character of the young king’s efforts for the reorganization of the government, and to the results which they had already produced. The record itself is a mere skeleton, and a very imperfect one; the carefulness of arrangement, the fulness of detail, the innumerable touches of local and personal colour which make the one surviving Pipe Roll of Henry I. so precious and so interesting, are sadly wanting in this roll of the second year of Henry II.; yet between its meagre lines may be read a suggestive, almost a pathetic story. Its very imperfections, its lack of order and symmetry, its scantiness of information, its brief, irregular, confused entries, help us to realize as perhaps nothing else could how disastrous had been the break-down of the administrative machinery which we saw working so methodically five-and-twenty years ago, and how laborious must have been the task of restoration. Three whole shires, Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmoreland, send in no account at all, for they were still in the hands of the king of Scots; in almost every shire there are significant notices of “waste,” and a scarcely less significant charge for repair of the royal manors. The old items reappear--the Danegeld, the aids from the towns, the proceeds of justice, the feudal incidents; but the total product amounts to little more than a third part of the sum raised in 1130; and even this diminished revenue was only made up with the help of sundry “aids” and “gifts” (as they were technically called), and of a new impost specially levied upon some of the ecclesiastical estates under the name of scutage.

[1357] Mat. Paris, Hist. Angl. (Madden), vol. i. p. 307.

The origin of this tax is implied in its title; it was derived from the “service of the shield” (scutum)--one of the distinguishing marks of feudal tenure--whereby the holder of a certain quantity of land was bound to furnish to his lord the services of a fully-armed horseman for forty days in the year. The portion of land charged with this service constituted a “knight’s fee,” and was usually reckoned at the extent of five hides, or the value of twenty pounds annually. The gradual establishment of this military tenure throughout the kingdom was a process which had been going on ever since the Norman conquest; the use of the word “scutage,” implying an assessment of taxation based on the knight’s fee instead of the old rating division of the hide, indicates that it was now very generally completed. The scutage of 1156 was levied, as we learn from another source,[1358] specially to meet the expenses of a war which Henry was carrying on with his rebel brother in Anjou. For such a purpose the feudal host itself was obviously not a desirable instrument. Ralf Flambard’s famous device of 1093, when he took a money compensation from the English levies and sent it over sea to pay the wages of the Red King’s foreign mercenaries, suggested a precedent which might be applied to the feudal knighthood as well as to the national host. Its universal application might be hindered at present by a clause in the charter of Henry I., which exempted the tenants by knight-service from all pecuniary charges on their demesne lands. It was, however, possible to make a beginning with the Church lands. These habitually claimed, with more or less success, immunity from military service except in the actual defence of the country; on the other hand, now that the bishops and abbots had been made to accept their temporalities on the same tenure as the lay baronies, there was a fair shew of reason for compelling them to compromise their claim by a money contribution assessed on the same basis as the personal service for which it was a substitute.[1359]

[1358] Joh. Salisb. Ep. cxxviii. (Giles, vol. i. p. 178).

[1359] On scutage and knight’s fees see Stubbs, Const. Hist., vol. i. pp. 431–433, 581, 582, 590.

Such, it seems, was the origin of the great institution of scutage. Its full developement, which it only attained three years later, was avowedly the work of Thomas the chancellor; whether or not its first suggestion came from him is not so clear. At the moment no resentment seems to have been provoked by the measure; its ultimate tendency was not foreseen, the sum actually demanded was not great, and the innovation was condoned on the ground of the king’s lawful need and in the belief that it was only an isolated demand.[1360] A greater matter might well have been condoned in consideration of Henry’s loyal redemption of his coronation-pledges, to which the Pipe Roll bears testimony. If the king had been prompt in resuming his kingly rights, he had been no less prompt in striving to fulfil his kingly duties. The work of necessary destruction was no sooner accomplished than the work of reconstruction began in all departments of state administration. The machinery of justice was set in motion once again; the provincial visitations of the judges of the king’s court were revived; thirteen shires were visited by some one or more of them between Michaelmas 1155 and Michaelmas 1156. The person most extensively employed in this capacity was the constable, Henry of Essex:[1361] the chancellor also appears in the like character, twice in Henry’s company[1362] and once in that of the earl of Leicester.[1363] Nay, the supreme “fount of justice” itself was always open to any suitor who could be at the trouble and expense of tracking its ever-shifting whereabouts; not only was the chancellor, as the king’s special representative, constantly employed in hearing causes, but Henry himself was always ready to fulfil the duty in person; at the most inconvenient moments--in the middle of the siege of Bridgenorth, at the crisis of his struggle with the Angevin rebels--he found time and patience to give attentive hearing to a wearisome suit which had been going on at intervals for nearly six years between Bishop Hilary of Chichester and Walter de Lucy the abbot of Battle.[1364] Hand in hand with the revival of order and law went the revival of material prosperity. In the dry, laconic prose of the financial record we can find enough to bear out, almost to the letter, the historians’ poetical version of the work of Henry’s first two years. The wolves had fled or become changed into peaceable sheep; the swords had been beaten into ploughshares and the spears into pruning-hooks;[1365] and the merchants again went forth to pursue their business, the Jews to seek their creditors, in peace and safety as of old.[1366]

[1360] Such was apparently the state of mind of John of Salisbury: “Interim scutagium remittere non potest [rex], et a quibusdam exactionibus abstinere, quoniam fratris gratia male sarta nequicquam coiit.” Joh. Salisb. Ep. cxxviii. (Giles, vol. i. p. 178).

[1361] Pipe Roll 2 Hen. II. (Hunter), pp. 17, 31, 32, 47, 54, 57, 60, 65.

[1362] Ibid. pp. 17, 65.

[1363] Ibid. p. 26.

[1364] Chron. de Bello (Angl. Christ. Soc.), pp. 75, 76.

[1365] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.) p. 19. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 1 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 102).

[1366] “Exeunt securi ab urbibus et castris ad nundinas negotiatores, ad creditores repetendos Judæi.” Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

Henry returned to England soon after Easter 1157.[1367] His first step, as we have seen, was to secure the obedience of East-Anglia. Having thus fully established his authority throughout his immediate realm, his next aim was to assert the rights of his crown over its Scottish and Welsh dependencies. The princes of Wales, who had long been acknowledged vassals of England, must be made to do homage to its new sovereign; the king of Scots owed homage no less, if not for his crown, at any rate for his English fiefs; moreover, his title to these was in itself a disputed question. Three English shires, Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmoreland, had been conquered by David, nominally in behalf of his niece the Empress Matilda, in the early years of Stephen’s reign; Stephen, making a virtue of necessity, had formally granted their investiture to David’s son Henry;[1368] and they were now in the hands of Henry’s son, the young king Malcolm IV. The story went that old King David, before he knighted his grand-nephew Henry Fitz-Empress in 1149, had made him swear that if ever he came to the English throne he would suffer the king of Scots to keep these shires in peace for ever.[1369] Henry does not seem to have denied his oath; he simply refused to keep it, on the ground that it ran counter to his duty as king. Acting on what his enemies declared to be his habitual principle, of choosing to do penance for a word rather than for a deed,[1370] he declared that the crown of England must not suffer such mutilation, and summoned his Scottish cousin to give back to him the territory which had been acquired in his name.[1371]

[1367] Rob. Torigni, a. 1157. Cf. Chron. de Bello (Angl. Christ. Soc.), p. 84.

[1368] Cumberland was granted to Henry of Scotland by Stephen in 1136 and Northumberland in 1139; see above, pp. 282, 300. Westmoreland seems to have counted as a dependency of Cumberland.

[1369] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 211. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 4 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 105).

[1370] “Quoties res in arctum devenerat, de dicto malens quam de facto pœnitere, verbumque facilius quam factum irritum habere.” Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ. dist. ii. c. 24 (Angl. Christ. Soc. p. 72).

[1371] Will. Newb. as above.

Meanwhile, without waiting for Malcolm’s answer, Henry prepared for his first Welsh war. The domestic quarrels of the Welsh princes furnished him with an excellent pretext. Owen, prince of North-Wales, had confiscated the estates of his brother Cadwallader and banished him from the country; Cadwallader appealed to King Henry, and of course found a gracious reception.[1372] A council was held at Northampton on July 17,[1373] and thence orders were issued for an expedition into North-Wales. The force employed was the feudal levy, but in a new form; instead of calling out the whole body of knights to serve their legal term of forty days, Henry required every two knights throughout England to join in equipping a third[1374]--no doubt for a threefold term of service. By this expedient he obtained a force quite sufficient for his purpose, guarded against the risk of its breaking up before its task was accomplished--a frequent drawback in medieval warfare--and made the first innovation upon the strict rule of feudal custom in such a manner as to avoid all offence.

[1372] Caradoc of Llancarvan (Llwyd), p. 159. Some grants of land in Shropshire to Cadwallader appear in the Pipe Rolls of 1156 and 1157 (Hunter, pp. 43 and 88).

[1373] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 163.

[1374] Rob. Torigni, a. 1157. See Stubbs, Const. Hist., vol. i. pp. 455, 589.

The invasion was to be twofold, by land and sea.[1375] The host assembled near Chester,[1376] on Saltney marsh,[1377] and was joined by Madoc Ap Meredith, prince of Powys. Owen of North-Wales, with his three sons and all his forces, entrenched himself at Basingwerk.[1378] The king, with his youthful daring,[1379] set off at once by way of the sea-coast, hoping to fall upon the Welsh at unawares; Owen’s sons however were on the watch,[1380] and in the narrow pass of Consilt[1381] the English suddenly found themselves face to face with the foe. Entangled in the woody, marshy ground, they were easily routed by the nimble light-armed Welsh;[1382] and a cry that the king himself had fallen caused the constable, Henry of Essex, to drop the royal standard and fly in despair. Henry of Anjou soon shewed himself alive, rallied his troops, and almost, like his ancestor Fulk at Conquereux, turned the defeat into a victory;[1383] for he cut his way through the Welsh ambushes with such vigour that Owen judged it prudent to withdraw from Basingwerk and seek a more inaccessible retreat.[1384] Cutting down the woods and clearing the roads before him, Henry pushed on to Rhuddlan, and there fortified the castle.[1385] Meanwhile the fleet had sailed[1386] under the command of Madoc Ap Meredith.[1387] It touched at Anglesey and there landed a few troops whose sacrilegious behaviour brought upon them such vengeance from the outraged islanders[1388] that their terrified comrades sailed back at once to Chester, where they learned that the war was ended.[1389] Owen, in terror of being hemmed in between the royal army and the fleet, sent proposals for peace, reinstated his banished brother,[1390] performed his own homage to King Henry,[1391] and gave hostages for his loyalty in the future.[1392] As the South-Welsh princes were all vassals of North-Wales, Owen’s submission was equivalent to a formal acknowledgement of Henry’s rights as lord paramount over the whole country, and the young king was technically justified in boasting that he had subdued all the Welsh to his will.[1393]

[1375] Rob. Torigni, a. 1157. A charge in the year’s Pipe Roll--“In locandâ unâ nave ad portandum corredium regis usque Pembroc” (Winchester accounts, Pipe Roll 3 Hen. II., Hunter, p. 108)--looks as if Henry had meditated an attempt upon South as well as North Wales. But it also seems to imply that the attempt was not actually made.

[1376] Ann. Cambr. a. 1158. Brut y Tywysogion, a. 1156. (The chronology of these Welsh chronicles is hopelessly wrong).

[1377] Caradoc (Llwyd), p. 159.

[1378] Ann. Cambr., Brut y Tywys., and Caradoc as above.

[1379] Gir. Cambr. Itin. Kambr., l. ii. c. 10 (Opera, Dimock, vol. vi. p. 137), and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 165, make no scruple of calling it rashness.

[1380] Ann. Cambr. and Caradoc as above.

[1381] “In arcto silvestri apud Coleshulle, id est, Carbonis collem” (Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 7, p. 130)--that is, Consilt, near Flint. Cf. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 5 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 107).

[1382] Will. Newb. as above (pp. 107, 108). Brut y Tywys. a. 1156. Caradoc (Llwyd), p. 160. Gir. Cambr. Itin. Kambr., l. ii. c. 7 (Dimock, vol. vi. p. 130) and c. 10 (p. 137).

[1383] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 5 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 108). Cf. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 165. Caradoc (Llwyd, p. 160) has a totally different version of the battle, but it is incompatible with the undoubted facts about Henry of Essex.

[1384] Ann. Cambr. a. 1158. Caradoc (Llwyd), p. 160. Brut y Tywys. a. 1156.

[1385] Ibid.

[1386] Ann. Cambr. and Brut y Tywys. as above.

[1387] So says Caradoc (as above); but is it possible that Madoc, a Welsh prince and one whose territory lay wholly inland, should have been put in command of the English fleet?

[1388] Ann. Cambr. a. 1158. Brut y Tywys. a. 1158. Caradoc (Llwyd), p. 160. Gir. Cambr. Itin. Kambr., l. ii. c. 7 (Dimock, vol. vi. p. 130).

[1389] Caradoc as above.

[1390] Ann. Cambr., Brut y Tywys., and Caradoc, as above.

[1391] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 166. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 5 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 108, 109). Mat. Paris (Hist. Angl., Luard, vol. i. p. 308) says the homage was done at Snowdon; how could this be?

[1392] See reference to the hostages in Pipe Roll 4 Hen. II. (Hunter), p. 114.

[1393] “Subjectis ad libitum Walensibus,” Rob. Torigni, a. 1157. The only entries in this year’s Pipe Roll visibly relating to the Welsh war are: “Pro thesauro conducendo ad Waliam xxxi s. et viii d.” (Oxfordshire, Pipe Roll 3 Hen. II., Hunter, p. 82), and a payment of two marks of silver by the abbot of Abbotsbury “de Exercitu Wal.” (Dorset, ib. p. 99). In the next year’s roll there are several references to the matter; Pipe Roll 4 Hen. II. (Hunter) pp. 114, 170, 175. The first relates to the hostages, the second to payments made to Henry’s Welsh allies, and the last is a payment made to Ralf “vitulus” (cf. Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. iii. c. 73, Hardy, p. 767) of Winchester “de Itinere de Waliâ”--i.e. for the fleet.

It was doubtless on his triumphant return that the king of Scots came to meet him at Chester.[1394] Whichever of the royal kinsmen might have the better cause, Malcolm now clearly perceived that the power to maintain it was all on Henry’s side. He therefore surrendered the three disputed shires,[1395] with the fortresses of Newcastle, Bamborough and Carlisle,[1396] and acknowledged himself the vassal of the English king “in the same manner as his grandfather had been the man of King Henry the Elder.”[1397] The precise import of this formula is uncertain, and was probably not much less so at the time; the exact nature and grounds of the Scottish homage to England formed a question which both parties usually found it convenient to leave undetermined.[1398] For Henry’s present purpose it sufficed that, on some ground or other, the homage was done.

[1394] Chron. Mailros, a. 1157.

[1395] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 4 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 105, 106).

[1396] Rob. Torigni, a. 1157.

[1397] Chron. Mailros, a. 1157.

[1398] The Scottish theory seems to be that Malcolm did homage for the earldom of Huntingdon, which had lapsed on his father’s death, and which Will. Newb. (as above, p. 106) and Rob. Torigni (a. 1157) say was now granted afresh to him. But, on the one hand, the treatise “De Judithâ uxore Waldevi comitis” in Chroniques Anglo-Normandes (Francisque Michel, vol. ii. p. 128) says that Huntingdon was not granted to Malcolm till 1159; and on the other, the terms of homage as stated by the Chron. Mailros exclude Huntingdon, which was granted to Henry of Scotland not by Henry I. but by Stephen. The truth probably lurks in another phrase of Rob. Torigni (a. 1157), which says that Malcolm surrendered, besides the three fortresses above-named, Edinburgh “et comitatum Lodonensem.” This can only mean that he made a surrender of Lothian, to receive its investiture again on the same terms as his forefathers--i.e. as a fief of the English Crown. Huntingdon appears in the Pipe Rolls of 1156, 1157 and 1158, but without mention of its third penny.

The closing feast of the year was celebrated with a brilliant gathering of the court at Lincoln. More cautious than his predecessor, Henry did not venture to defy local tradition by appearing in his regal insignia within the city itself; he wore his crown on Christmas day, not in the great minster on the hill-top, but in the lesser church of S. Mary in the suburb of Wigford beyond the river.[1399] Next Easter the king and queen went through this ancient solemnity of the “crown-wearing” together, and for the last time, in Worcester cathedral. When the moment came for making their oblations, they laid their crowns upon the altar and vowed never to wear them again.[1400] The motive for this renunciation was probably nothing more than Henry’s impatience of court pageantry; but the practice thus solemnly forsaken was not revived, save once under very exceptional circumstances in the middle of the next reign, till the connexion between England and Anjou was on the eve of dissolution; and as it happens, the abandonment of this custom of Old-English royalty marks off one of the lesser epochs in Henry’s career. He was about to plunge into a sea of continental politics and wars which kept him altogether away from his island-realm for six years, and from which he never again thoroughly emerged. This last crown-wearing at Worcester serves as a fitting point at which we may leave our own country for a while and glance once more at the history of the lands united with her beneath the sceptre of the Angevin king.

[1399] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 9 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 117, 118). Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 216; it is he who gives the name of the suburb, “Wikeford.” Will. Newb. has a wrong date; the Pipe Roll 4 Hen. II. (Hunter), p. 136, settles that point.

[1400] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 216; more briefly, R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 302; both with very confused dates, but again they are set right by the Pipe Roll 4 Hen. II. (Hunter), p. 175.

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