CHAPTER II

HENRY II., KING OF ENGLAND

Henry ascended the throne of England in singularly favourable circumstances. Still young, his character had been formed and his reputation had been established on the battle-fields of England and Normandy. Far inferior to his predecessor in personal character, he was as far his superior in kingcraft, possessing just those talents necessary for his position which the chivalrous, kindly, and erratic Stephen lacked. Something of this, which was to be demonstrated by the history of his reign, was already obvious, and the bulk of his English subjects were strongly prepossessed in his favour. The Church was on his side; the greater barons cared little who was king so long as their titles and their revenues were assured to them; the lesser lords and the peasantry, exhausted and impoverished by the twenty years of anarchy, welcomed a ruler strong enough to curb the lawless feuds of semi-independent chieftains, while, above all, there was no other claimant to the throne, the only possible rival, Stephen’s son, William, Earl of Warenne and Surrey, being, fortunately for himself, quite unambitious of regal honours. Possessing great powers of physical endurance, Henry was as active

[Illustration: GREAT SEAL OF HENRY AS KING

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in mind as in body, a well-read scholar and an accomplished linguist; short, sturdy, with coarse hands and freckled face, unkempt and careless in his dress, he overcame the disadvantages of an unattractive appearance by his courtesy and the charm of his manner, which made him formidable in diplomacy or love. Although inheriting the volcanic temper of his Angevin forefathers and liable to outbursts of diabolic rage, he ruled his hot blood with a cool head, practically never allowing his feelings to dictate his policy and but rarely indulging in acts of cruelty or revenge. He was non-religious rather than irreligious, non-moral rather than immoral; though he made no attempt to bridle his lust, there is no reason to suppose that any of his numerous mistresses were unwilling victims; and though his irreverence and contempt of the Church’s sacraments shocked his contemporaries, he admired and chose for his friends such men as St. Hugh of Lincoln. Clear-sighted and self-centred, Henry was emphatically a strong man; and it is the irony of fate that the weak spot which was to prove his ruin lay in his most unselfish and amiable trait, his affection for his family.

Not the least of Henry’s qualifications for the kingship was his ability to select the right men for his ministers. It is possible that Archbishop Theobald may have had some influence in the appointment of the brilliant young Archdeacon of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, to the high office of Chancellor, but the king may be given the credit for choosing Robert, Earl of Leicester, and Richard of Lucy as Justiciars. All three appointments proved to have been well made, and the first two were probably made before the coronation.[5] At this ceremony, on 19th December, besides the Archbishop of Canterbury, to whose see belonged the privilege of crowning the king, there were present the Archbishops of York and of Rouen, fourteen English bishops and the bishops of Bayeux, Lisieux, and Avranches, numbers of foreign noblemen, including Dietrich, Count of Flanders, and a multitude of English and Norman lords. There were the king’s two brothers--Geoffrey, with whom he was shortly to be at war for the second time, and William, for whose benefit he was no doubt already planning the conquest of Ireland; there were the royal officers Henry of Essex, Constable of England, Richard de Humet, Constable of Normandy, Warin Fitz-Gerald, the Chamberlain, and Hugh, Earl of Norfolk, hereditary High Steward; and there amongst the brilliant crowd would be such great lords as Reynold, Earl of Cornwall, son of King Henry I., and William, Earl of Arundel, the confirmation of whose privileges and estates was one of the new king’s first acts. Abbots, royal chaplains, clerks of the Chancery and Exchequer, wealthy merchants and burgesses, and the ladies of the court with their attendants, whose gay robes formed but the highest tone in an assembly blazing with colour, complete the picture. Yet of all those in whose presence Henry swore to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, to maintain the good laws of the realm and to abate the bad, very few were English and few even spoke the English tongue. The governing classes in Church and State were Norman by lineage, language, and sympathy, and at a time when an Englishman sat in St. Peter’s chair[6] scarce any of his compatriots held offices of trust in their native country. The fusion of English and Norman, which had already spread so far in the lower ranks of society, only began to affect the higher ranks in the course of the reign of Henry, who, by the ultimate failure of his life-long policy, was to give the English nation its individuality.

The affairs of the kingdom could not be neglected for coronation festivities, and at his Christmas court, held at Bermondsey, Henry took the first step for ensuring peace by the expulsion of the lawless Flemish mercenaries. Their leader, William of Ipres, was allowed to retain the large revenues from lands in Kent granted to him by Stephen and well earned by his loyalty and skill, and some few of his followers were sent to join the colony of Flemings established on the borders of Wales, but the bulk of the “Flemish wolves” were packed off to satisfy their appetite for war and plunder on the Continent. Having thus disposed of these alien robbers, the king had next to deal with those of his own subjects who had abused their own powers and the weakness of the central government during the anarchy to extend their possessions at the expense of the royal demesnes and to strengthen their position by the erection of castles. The destruction of the “adulterine” castles, erected without royal licence, had been promised, and to some extent performed, by Stephen in the last months of his reign,[7] but Henry now determined to complete the work and at the same time to revoke the grants of royal demesne whether made by King Stephen or by the empress.

In thus recovering the Crown lands the king was no doubt partly influenced by the desire to increase the very scanty royal revenues, and partly by his deliberate anti-feudal policy. It did not require the acute intelligence which Henry possessed to learn from the events of the last twenty years that it would be wise to clip the wings of the great barons, who threatened to overshadow the throne itself, and to play for popular support. It was clearly to his interest that the people should be prosperous, contented, and loyal, and he was not slow to adopt measures which would render the nobles less able alike to oppose the Crown and to oppress the people. Throughout his reign he acted on these anti-feudal principles. Although Henry had a distinct appreciation of justice, it may be doubted if the legal reforms, which were in many ways the most important features of his reign, would ever have seen the light had they not tended towards the elevation of the smaller men and the consequent depression of the greater. With a few exceptions it will be found that when Henry required, as he usually did, to increase his revenues by means of doubtful legality, he preferred to extort large sums from the wealthy rather than an equivalent multitude of small amounts from the poorer classes. So also the frequent substitution of money payments for military service helped to discourage the maintenance of large bands of armed retainers, kept nominally for the king’s service but liable to be used for the furthering of their lord’s ambition. Yet in all cases Henry acted with a wise moderation, which, leaving the great lords in possession of their titles and estates, left them in the position of having more to lose than gain by rebellion.

The king’s orders were as a whole acquiesced in with little resistance, the estates wrested from the Crown were restored, the castles demolished, life and property were once more secure, commerce revived, the merchants came forth to find customers and the Jews to seek their debtors. But William of Aumâle, Earl of Yorkshire, who, under Stephen, had enjoyed a semi-regal independence, hesitated to conform to the new state of affairs, and prepared to offer armed resistance to the king’s demands. Henry left Oxford, whither he had gone at the beginning of the new year, 1155, and moved slowly northwards, halting apparently at Northampton to re-create Hugh Bigot, Earl of Norfolk, his charter taking the form of a re-creation rather than a confirmation, possibly as a hint to the shifty earl that his dignities were not secure beyond all risk. By the time that the king reached York Earl William, finding himself unsupported, had reconsidered his position and wisely submitted to the royal demands, surrendering his fortress of Scarborough. A precipitous bluff projecting into the sea, whose waves washed it on three sides, joined to the mainland only on the west by a narrow neck, the rock of Scarborough presented an ideal spot for the rearing of a castle, and here accordingly the earl had set his great stronghold, surrounding the spacious plateau on the top of the cliff with a wall, digging a well, and building a keep four-square upon the narrow neck by which alone access was possible. Nestling against the western base of the rock lay the little town of Scarborough, itself surrounded with a wall and thus forming an outwork of the castle. The position was too formidable to be left in the hands of a subject, and King Henry took care to retain it for the remainder of his reign; and when in the course of a few years the earl’s keep fell into decay, it was rebuilt and enlarged at a cost equivalent to some £10,000 of modern money, the work beginning in 1159 and spreading over the next three years.[8]

On his way either to or from York Henry appears to have visited Lincoln, the priory of Spalding, and the great abbeys of Peterborough, Thorney, and Ramsey. The news of the king’s approach to Nottingham so stirred the guilty conscience of William Peverel, burdened with the murder of the Earl of Chester, that he sought to save body and soul at the expense of his possessions by becoming a monk in a priory of which he was himself patron at Lenton. It was no doubt while in the neighbourhood of Nottingham that the king received information of the birth of his second son, Henry, on 28th February, and shortly afterwards he returned to London, where he held a council at the end of March. During the previous three months Roger, Earl of Hereford, had been contemplating resistance to the king’s demands for the surrender of his castles, but the arguments of his kinsman, Gilbert Foliot, Bishop of Hereford, supported by the success of Henry’s expedition into Yorkshire, brought him to a wiser mind, and he placed the castles of Hereford and Gloucester in the king’s hands. Hugh de Mortimer, however, the great lord of the Welsh Marches, who had been the chief instigator of Earl Roger’s disaffection, maintained his attitude of opposition and fortified his castles of Cleobury, Wigmore, and Bridgnorth. Henry accordingly moved west, halting at Wallingford, where on 10th April he held a council at which the nobles swore allegiance to his elder son William, or in the event of his death, which occurred the following year, to the infant Henry. Mortimer’s strongholds were invested and, after some resistance, reduced, he himself making his peace with the king at Bridgnorth early in July.

With the collapse of Mortimer’s rebellion all active opposition to the king ceased. Henry, Bishop of Winchester, brother of the late King Stephen, having possibly displayed his sympathy with the defeated party too prominently, deemed it prudent to retire to the Continent, leaving his castles to share the fate of other private fortresses. Peace being thus ensured in England, King Henry was at liberty to look abroad, and at a council held in Winchester at Michaelmas he broached the subject of the conquest of Ireland, proposing to subdue that turbulent and uncivilised country and place it under the rule of his brother William. To strengthen his position and justify his action he sent John of Salisbury to represent to the pope the urgent need for reform, ecclesiastical and political, in Ireland. The pope at this time, Adrian IV., was an Englishman, his father being a poor clerk of Langley, who entered the monastery of St. Albans shortly after his son’s birth: the young Nicholas Brakespere, endeavouring to follow his father’s example, was rejected by the authorities at St. Albans and went out of England to Provence, where he rose to be abbot of St. Ruphus; his monks, regretting their election of a foreigner, appealed to the pope to depose him, and he again prospered by rejection, as he was at once promoted to the bishopric of Albano and made papal legate to Scandinavia, where his success was so great that, upon the death of Pope Eugenius III., in December 1154, he was elected to the papacy, taking the title of Adrian IV. Pope Adrian heartily approved of Henry’s project, and sent back John of Salisbury with a letter commending the proposed crusade and an emerald ring symbolic of the sovereignty of Ireland, with which he invested Henry by virtue of the alleged supremacy of the popes over all islands.[10] Feeling in England, however, does not seem to have been in favour of the expedition, and the empress, doubtless foreseeing that William would find the Irish throne an insecure position of little glory and less profit, strongly opposed the project. Her influence with her son was sufficient to cause him to abandon the idea, or at least to postpone it until a more favourable opportunity.

Henry kept Christmas at Westminster, and early in January 1156 sailed from Dover for Normandy, his last act before leaving being to re-create Aubrey de Vere, who the previous year had paid 500 marks to be High Chamberlain of England,[11] Earl of Oxford. At the beginning of the next month he met Louis VII. on the borders of France and Normandy and did homage to him for all his continental possessions, including Anjou and Maine, which his brother Geoffrey claimed under his father’s will. Geoffrey, persisting in his claims and refusing Henry’s offers of compensation, garrisoned his castles of Loudun, Chinon, and Mirabeau. By the beginning of July the two latter were in the king’s hands, and Geoffrey had agreed to be content with retaining Loudun and a money pension. Shortly afterwards the people of Nantes and Lower Brittany expelled their ruler, Count Hoel, and elected Geoffrey in his place. Henry gladly assented to the election, and upon Geoffrey’s death in 1158 successfully enforced his own claims, as heir to his brother, against Conan, Earl of Richmond and Count of Upper Brittany.

The king’s first daughter, Maud, had been born at London early in the summer, and towards the end of August Queen Eleanor crossed from England and joined her husband in Anjou. The court returned to England in April 1157, and a short tour was made through the eastern counties, the king wearing his crown in state at Bury St. Edmunds on 19th May and staying the following week at Colchester. In continuation of his former policy he now caused William de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, to surrender the castles of Norwich and Pevensey, which he had hitherto retained, apparently compensating him by further additions to his great estates in Norfolk.[12] Earl Hugh of Norfolk was also deprived of his castles, and in Essex one of Earl Geoffrey’s strongholds was destroyed.

Henry was now so firmly established on the throne that he could insist upon a far more important resumption of territory, and accordingly he demanded from the young King Malcolm of Scotland the cession of Northumberland, Westmoreland, and Cumberland. Malcolm, unable to offer any effective resistance to his demands, travelled south through Yorkshire and Lincolnshire to the castle of the Peak. Meanwhile Henry, after holding a council on 17th July at Northampton, where he left the queen, was moving westwards. The two kings met at the Peak and passed on together to Chester, where Malcolm formally restored the northern counties, receiving in exchange the earldom of Huntingdon, for which he did homage to Henry. The Scottish king then returned to his own country to repress the rebellion raised by his nobles in indignation at his surrender to the English demands, while Henry completed his arrangements for the invasion of North Wales.