Epochs of Modern History

EDITED BY

EDWARD E. MORRIS, M.A., J. SURTEES PHILLPOTTS
B.C.L. AND
C. COLBECK M.A.

THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS

W. STUBBS, M.A.

EPOCHS OF ANCIENT HISTORY.

Edited by Rev. G. W. Cox and Charles Sankey, M. A. Eleven volumes, 16mo, with 41 Maps and Plans. Price per vol., $1.00. The set, Roxburgh style, gilt top, in box, $11.00.

Troy—Its Legend, History, and Literature. By S. G. W. Benjamin
The Greeks and the Persians. By G. W. Cox.
The Athenian Empire. By G. W. Cox.
The Spartan and Theban Supremacies. By Charles Sankey.
The Macedonian Empire. By A. M. Curteis.
Early Rome. By W. Ihne.
Rome and Carthage. By R. Bosworth Smith.
The Gracchi, Marius, and Sulla. By A. H. Beesley.
The Roman Triumvirates. By Charles Merivale.
The Early Empire. By W. Wolfe Capes.
The Age of the Antonines. By W. Wolfe Capes.

EPOCHS OF MODERN HISTORY.

Edited by Edward E. Morris. Eighteen volumes, 16mo, with 77 Maps, Plans, and Tables. Price per vol., $1.00. The set, Roxburgh style, gilt top, in box, $18.00.

The Beginning of the Middle Ages. By R. W. Church.
The Normans in Europe. By A. H. Johnson.
The Crusades. By G. W. Cox.
The Early Plantagenets. By Wm. Stubbs.
Edward III. By W. Warburton.
The Houses of Lancaster and York. By James Gairdner.
The Era of the Protestant Revolution. By Frederic Seebohm.
The Early Tudors. By C. E. Moberly.
The Age of Elizabeth. By M. Creighton.
The Thirty Years War, 1618-1648. By S. R. Gardiner.
The Puritan Revolution. By S. R. Gardiner.
The Fall of the Stuarts. By Edward Hale.
The English Restoration and Louis XIV. By Osmond Airy.
The Age of Anne. By Edward E. Morris.
The Early Hanoverians. By Edward E. Morris.
Frederick the Great. By F. W. Longman.
The French Revolution and First Empire. By W. O’Connor Morris. Appendix by Andrew D. White.
The Epoch of Reform. 1830-1850. By Justin McCarthy.

MEDIEVAL EUROPE

Epochs of Modern History

THE

Early Plantagenets

BY

WILLIAM STUBBS, M.A.

REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

WITH TWO MAPS
NEW YORK:
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS,
1900.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION.

Importance of the Epoch—Its character in French and German History—In English History—Geographical Summary—Italy—Germany—France—Spain Page [1]

CHAPTER II.

STEPHEN AND MATILDA.

Accession of Stephen—Arrest of the Bishops—Election of Matilda—The Anarchy—The PacificationPage [11]

CHAPTER III.

THE EARLY YEARS OF HENRY II.

Terms of Henry’s accession—His character—His early reforms—His relations with France—War of Toulouse—Summary of nine years’ workPage [34]

CHAPTER IV.

HENRY II. AND THOMAS BECKET.

The English Church—Schools of Clergy—Rise of Becket—Quarrel with the King—Exile—DeathPage [58]

CHAPTER V.

THE LATTER YEARS OF HENRY II.

Continued Reforms—Revolt of 1173-1174—Renewed industry of Henry—His later years—Quarrel with Richard—Fall and deathPage [85]

CHAPTER VI.

RICHARD CŒUR DE LION.

Character of the Reign—Richard’s first visit to England—His character—The Crusade—Fall of Longchamp—Richard’s second visit—His struggle with Philip—His death Page [110]

CHAPTER VII.

JOHN.

John’s succession—Arthur’s claims—Loss of Normandy—Quarrel with the Church—Submission to the Pope—Quarrel with the Barons—The Great Charter and its consequences—Arrival of Lewis—John’s death Page [136]

CHAPTER VIII.

HENRY III.

Character of Henry—Administration of William Marshall—Hubert de Burgh—Henry his own minister—Foreign favorites—General misgovernment—Papal intrigue and taxation Page [161]

CHAPTER IX.

SIMON DE MONTFORT.

Delay of the Crisis—Simon de Montfort—Parliament of 1258—Provisions of Oxford—Political troubles—Award of St. Lewis—Battle of Lewes—Baronial government—Battle of Evesham—Closing yearsPage [189]

CHAPTER X.

EDWARD I.

Position and character of Edward—The Crusade—The accession—The conquest of Wales—Edward’s legal reforms—Financial system—Growth of Parliament Page [212]

CHAPTER XI.

THE CONFIRMATION OF THE CHARTERS.

Punishment of the Judges—Banishment of the Jews—Scottish succession—The French quarrel—The Ecclesiastical quarrel—The Constitutional crisis—The Confirmation of the Charters—Parliament of Lincoln—Its sequel—War of Scottish Independence—Edward’s deathPage [238]

CHAPTER XII.

EDWARD II.

Character of Edward II.—Piers Gaveston—The Ordinances—Thomas of Lancaster—The Despensers—The King’s ruin and deathPage [263]

Index Page [291]

MAPS.

THE
EARLY PLANTAGENETS.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION.

Importance of the Epoch—Its character in French and German History—In English History—Geographical Summary—Italy—Germany—France—Spain.

Various
areas and
stages of
human
history.

The geographical area of that history which alone deserves the name has more than once changed. The early home of human society was in Asia. Greece and Italy successively became the theatres of the world’s drama, and in modern times the real progress of society has moved within the limits of Western Christendom. So, too, with the material history. At one period the growth of the life of the world is in its literature, at another in its wars, at another in its institutions. Sometimes everything circles round one great man; at other times the key to the interest is found in some complex political idea such as the balance of power, or the realization of national identity. The successive stages of growth in the more advanced nations are not contemporaneous and may not follow in the same order. The quickened energy of one race finds its expression in commerce and colonization, that of another in internal organization and elaborate training, that of a third in arms, that of a fourth in art and literature. In some the literary growth precedes the political growth, in others it follows it; in some it is forced into premature luxuriance by national struggles, in others the national struggles themselves engross the strength that would ordinarily find expression in literature. Art has flourished greatly both where political freedom has encouraged the exercise of every natural gift and where political oppression has forced the genius of the people into a channel which seemed least dangerous to the oppressor. Still, on the whole, the European nations in modern history emerge from somewhat similar circumstances. Under somewhat similar discipline, and by somewhat similar expedients, they feel their way to that national consciousness in which they ultimately diverge so widely. We may hope, then, to find, in the illustration of a definite section or well ascertained epoch of that history, sufficient unity of plot and interest, a sufficient number of contrasts and analogies, to save it from being a dry analysis of facts or a mere statement of general laws.

The epoch
to be now
treated.

France.

Germany.

Such a period is that upon which we now enter; an epoch which in the history of England extends from the accession of Stephen to the death of Edward II.; that is, from the beginning of the constitutional growth of a consolidated English people to the opening of the long struggle with France under Edward III. It is scarcely less well defined in French and German history. In France it witnesses the process through which the modern kingdom of France was constituted; the aggregation of the several provinces which had hitherto recognized only a nominal feudal supremacy, under the direct personal rule of the king, and their incorporation into a national system of administration. In Germany it comprises a more varied series of great incidents. The process of disruption in the German kingdom, never well consolidated, had begun with the great schism between North and South under Henry IV., and furnished one chief element in the quarrel between pope and emperor. During the first half of the twelfth century it worked more deeply, if not more widely, in the rivalry between Saxon and Swabian. Under Frederick I. it necessitated the remodelling of the internal arrangement of Germany, the breaking up of the national or dynastic dukedoms. Under Frederick II. it broke up the empire itself, to be reconstituted in a widely different form and with altered aims and pretensions under Rudolf of Hapsburg. This is by itself a most eventful history, in which the varieties of combinations and alternations of public feeling abound with new results and illustrations of the permanence of ancient causes.

The Empire.

In the relations of the Empire and the Papacy the same epoch contains one cycle of the great rivalry, the series of struggles which take a new form under Frederick I. and Alexander III., and come to an end in the contest between Lewis of Bavaria and John XXII. It comprises the whole drama of the Hohenstaufen, and the failure of the great hopes of the world under Henry VII., which resulted in the constituting of a new theory of relations under the Luxemburg and Hapsburg emperors.

Whilst these greater actors are thus preparing for the struggle which forms the later history of European politics, Spain and Italy are passing through a different discipline. In the midst of all runs the history of the Church and the Crusades, which supplies one continuous clue to the reading of the period, a common ground on which all the actors for a time and from time to time meet.

An epoch of
great men.

Manners
and religion.

Moral
lessons.

But the interest of the time is not confined to political history. It abounds with character. It is an age in which there are very many great men, and in which the great men not only occupy but deserve the first place in the historian’s eye. It is their history rather than the history of their peoples that furnishes the contribution of the period to the world’s progress. This is the heroic period of the middle ages,—the only period during which, on a great scale and on a great stage, were exemplified the true virtues which were later idealized and debased in the name of chivalry,—the age of John of Brienne and Simon de Montfort, of the two great Fredericks, of St. Bernard and Innocent III., and of St. Lewis and Edward I. It is free for the most part from the repulsive features of the ages that precede, and from the vindictive cruelty and political immorality of the age that follows. Manners are more refined than in the earlier age and yet simpler and sincerer than those of the next; religion is more distinctly operative for good and less marked by the evils which seem inseparable from its participation in the political action of the world. Yet not even the thirteenth century was an age of gold, much less those portions of the twelfth and fourteenth which come within our present view. It was not an age of prosperity, although it was an age of growth; its gains were gained in great measure by suffering. If Lewis IX. and Edward I. taught the world that kings might be both good men and strong sovereigns, Henry III. and Lewis VII. taught it that religious habits and even firm convictions are too often insufficient to keep the weak from falsehood and wrong. The history of Frederick II. showed that the race is not always to the swift or the battle to the strong, that of Conrad and Conradin that the right is not always to triumph, and that the vengeance which evil deeds must bring in the end comes in some cases very slowly and with no remedy to those who have suffered.

Importance
of England’s
work
in this
epoch.

Character
of this book.

It is but a small section of this great period that we propose to sketch in the present volume; the history of our own country during this epoch of great men and great causes; but it comprises the history of what is one at least of England’s greatest contributions to the world’s progress. The history of England under the early kings of the house of Plantagenet unfolds and traces the growth of that constitution which, far more than any other that the world has ever seen, has kept alive the forms and spirit of free government; which has been the discipline that formed the great free republic of the present day; which was for ages the beacon of true social freedom that terrified the despots abroad and served as a model for the aspirations of hopeful patriots. It is scarcely too much to say that English history, during these ages, is the history of the birth of true political liberty. For, not to forget the services of the Italian republics, or of the German confederations of the middle ages, we cannot fail to see that in their actual results they fell as dead before the great monarchies of the sixteenth century, as the ancient liberties of Athens had fallen; or where the spirit survived, as in Switzerland, it took a form in which no great nationality could work. It was in England alone that the problem of national self-government was practically solved; and although under the Tudor and Stewart sovereigns Englishmen themselves ran the risk of forgetting the lesson they had learned and being robbed of the fruits for which their fathers had labored, the men who restored political consciousness, and who recovered the endangered rights, won their victory by argumentative weapons drawn from the storehouse of medieval English history, and by the maintenance and realization of the spirit of liberty in forms which had survived from earlier days. It is an introduction to the study of English history during the period of constitutional growth, that we shall attempt to sketch the epoch, not as a Constitutional History, but as an outline of the period and of the combinations through which the constitutional growth was working, the place of England in European history and the character of the men who helped to make her what she ultimately became. Before we begin, however, we may take a glance at the map of Europe at the point of time from which we start.

Geographical
summary.

Eastern
Europe.

Italy.

Eastern Europe, from the coasts of the Adriatic to the limits of Mahometan conquest eastward, was subject to the emperor who reigned at Constantinople, and may, except for its incidental connection with the Crusades, be left out of the present view. The northern portions were in the hands of half-civilized, half-Christianized races, which formed a barrier dangerous but efficacious between the Byzantine emperor and Western Christendom. The kingdom of Hungary, and the acquisitions of Venice on the east of the Adriatic fenced medieval Europe from the same enemies. Italy was divided between the Normans, who governed Apulia and Sicily, and the sway of the Empire, which under Lothar II.—the Emperor who was on the throne when our period begins—had become little more than nominal south of the Alps; the independence of the imperial cities and small principalities reaching from the Alps to Rome itself was maintained chiefly by the inability of the Germans to keep either by administrative organization or by dynastic alliances a permanent hold upon it. With both the Republican north and the Normanized south, the political history of the Plantagenet kings came in constant connection; and even more close and continuous was the relation through the agency of the Church with Rome itself. At the opening of the period, Englishmen were not only studying in the universities of Italy, at Salerno, at Bologna, and at Pavia, but were repaying to Italy, in the services of prelates and statesmen, the debt which England had incurred through Lanfranc and Anselm. An Englishman was soon to be pope. The Norman kings chose ministers and prelates of English birth; and the same Norman power of organization which worked in England under Henry I. and Roger of Salisbury, worked in similar line in Sicily under King Roger and his posterity.

Germany.

Looking northwards, we see Germany, in the middle of the twelfth century, still administered, although uneasily, under the ancient system of the four nations, Saxony, Franconia, Swabia, and Bavaria; four distinct nationalities which refused permanent combination. This system was, however, in its last decay. Its completeness was everywhere broken in upon by the great ecclesiastical principalities which the piety and policy of the emperors had interposed among the great secular states, to break the impulse of aggressive warfare, to serve as models of good order, and to maintain a direct hold in the imperial hands on territories which could not become hereditary in a succession of priests. Not only so; the debatable lands which lay between the great nations were breaking up into minor states: landgraves, margraves, and counts palatine were assuming the functions of dukes; the dukes, where they could not maintain the independence of kings, were seeing their powers limited and their territories divided. Thus Bavaria was soon to be dismembered to form a duchy of Austria; Saxony was falling to pieces between the archbishops of Cologne and the margraves of Brandenburg: Franconia between the Emperor and the Count Palatine; Swabia was the portion of the reigning imperial house, the treasury therefore out of which the Emperor had to carve rewards for his servants. Between the great house of the Welf in Saxony, Bavaria, and Lombardy, and the Hohenstaufen on the imperial throne and in Franconia and Swabia, subsisted the jealousy which was sooner or later to reach the heart of the Empire itself, to supply the force which threw the dislocated provinces into absolute division.

The intermediate
provinces.

France.

Westward was France under Lewis VII., divided from Germany by the long narrow range of the Lotharingian provinces, over which the imperial rule was recognized as nominal only. These provinces formed a debatable boundary line, which had for one of its chief functions the maintenance of peace between the descendants of Hugh Capet and the representatives of the majesty of Charles and Otto; and which served its turn, for between France and the Hohenstaufen empire there was peace and alliance. But many of the provinces which now form part of France were then imperial, and beyond the Rhone and Meuse the king of Paris had no vassals and but uncertain allies. Within his feudal territory, the count of Flanders to the north, the duke of Aquitaine to the south, the duke of Normandy with his claims over Maine and Brittany, cut him off from the sea; and even the little strip of coast between Flanders and Normandy was held by the count of Boulogne, who at the moment was likewise king of England. Yet the kingdom of France was by no means at its deepest degradation. Lewis VI. had kept alive the idea of central power, and had obtained for his son the hand of the heiress of Aquitaine; the schemes were already in operation by which the kings were to offer to the provinces a better and firmer rule than they enjoyed under their petty lords, by which fraud and policy were to split up the principalities and attract them fragment by fragment to the central power, and by which even Normandy itself was in little more than fifty years to be recovered; by which a real central government was to be instituted, and the semblance of national unity to be completed by the formation of a distinct national character.

The Low
Countries.

North of France the imperial provinces of Lower Lorraine, and the debatable lands between Lorraine and Saxony, had much the same indefinite character as belonged to the southern parts of the intermediate kingdom. They seldom took part in the work of the Empire, although they were nominally part of it, and the stronger emperors enforced their right. But as a rule they were too distant from the centre of government to fear much interference, and, enjoying such freedom as they could, they gladly recognized the emperor’s sway when they required his help. We shall see the princes of Lorraine taking no small part in the negotiations between England and Germany under Richard and John, but they generally played a game with Flanders, France, and the Empire which has but an indirect bearing on European politics; and we chiefly hear of these lands as furnishing the hordes of mercenary soldiers for the crusades and internal wars of Europe, until almost suddenly the Flemish cities break upon our eye as centres of commerce and political life.

Spain and
Portugal.

Southward lie Spain and Portugal; divided into several small kingdoms between closely allied and kindred kings, all employed in the long crusade of seven centuries against the Moor; a crusade which is now beginning to have hopes of successful issue. Central Spain, on the line of the Tagus, is still in dispute, although Toledo had been taken in 1085, and Saragossa in 1118. Lisbon was taken with the help of the Crusaders in 1147. In each of the Christian states of Spain, free institutions of government, national assemblies and local self-government, preserved distinct traces of the Teutonic or Gothic origin of the ruling races; and even before the English parliament grew to completeness, the Cortes of Castile and Aragon were theoretically complete assemblies of the three estates. The growth of Spain is one of the distinct features of our epoch; but it is a growth apart. There are as yet scarcely more than one or two points at which it comes in contact with the general action of Europe.

CHAPTER II.

STEPHEN AND MATILDA.

Accession of Stephen—Arrest of the Bishops—Election of Matilda—The Anarchy—The Pacification.

Results of
the Norman
rule.

The English had had hard times under the Conqueror and his sons, but they had learned a great lesson; they had learned that they were one people. The Normans too, the great nobles who had divided the land, and hoped to create little monarchies of their own in every county and manor, had had hard times. Confiscation, mutilation, exile, death had come heavily upon them. They also had had a lesson to learn, to rid themselves of personal and selfish aims, to consolidate a powerful state under a king of their own race, and to content themselves as servants of the law with the substantial enjoyment of powers which they found themselves too weak to wrest out of the hands of the king, the supreme lawgiver and administrator of the law. This lesson they had not learned. They had submitted with an ill grace to the strong rule of the king’s ministers, the men whom they had taught to guard against their attempts at usurpation. Hence throughout these reigns the Norman king and the English people had been thrown together. They soon learned that they had common aims, finding themselves constantly in array against a common enemy. Hence, too, the English had already an earnest of the final victory. They grew whilst their adversaries wasted. The successive generations of the Normans found their wiser sons learning to call themselves English, while those who would not learn English ways declined in number and strength from year to year.

Alliance
of king and
people.

The Conqueror in a measure, and Henry I. with more clearness, perceived this, and foresaw the result. They were careful not only to call themselves English kings, but nominally at least to maintain English customs, and to rule by English laws. One by one the great houses which furnished rivals to their power dropped before them, and Henry I. at the close of his reign was so strong that, had it not been for the fact that he had by habit and routine made himself a law to himself, he might easily have played the part of a tyrant. But the forces which he and his father had so sturdily repressed were not extinguished; nor was the administrative system, by which they at once maintained the rights of the English and kept their own grasp of power, sufficiently consolidated to stand steadily when the hands that had reared it were taken away.

Question of
succession.

This also, it may seem probable, Henry I. distinctly saw. It was to his apprehensions on this account that for years before his death he was busily employed in securing the succession by every possible means to his own children. The feeling which led him to do so is not quite capable of simple analysis. He had no great love for his daughter, the empress Matilda; what paternal affection he had to lavish had been spent on his son William, whose death was no doubt the trouble that went nearest to his heart. We cannot suppose that he cared much for the people whom, although they had delivered him more than once in the most trying times, he never scrupled, when it suited his purpose, to treat as slaves. It would almost seem as if he felt that, unless he could anticipate the continuance of power in the hands of his daughter and her offspring, his own tenure of it for the present would be incomplete, and the great glory of the sons of Rollo would suffer diminution in his hands.

Precautions
taken by
Henry I.

Three times, therefore, by the most solemn oaths, he had tried to secure the adherence of the nation to her and to her son. Vast assemblies had been held, attended by Normans and English alike. Earl Stephen and earl Robert had vied with one another as to who should take the first oath of homage; the concurrence of the Church had been promised and, so far as gratitude and a sense of interest as well as duty could go, had been secured. But all this had been insufficient to stay Henry’s misgivings. At the time of his death he had been already four years in Normandy striving to keep peace between Matilda and her husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, between the Normans and the Angevins, and to consolidate his hold on the duchy, which had at last, since the death of his nephew and brother, become indisputably his own. His sudden death occurred in the midst of these designs. It was said and sworn to by his steward, Hugh Bigot, a man whose later career adds little to his authority as a witness, that just before his death, provoked by her perverseness, he had disinherited his daughter. It may have been so; the threat of disinheritance may have been a menace which his unexpected death gave him no time to recall. But the very report was enough. He died on December 1, 1135; and from that moment the succession was treated as an open question, to be discussed by Normans and Englishmen, together or apart, as they pleased.

Who were
the competitors?

Stephen of
Blois.

We may if we choose speculate on the motives that swayed the great men. No doubt the pure Norman nobles would gladly have set aside altogether the descendants of Harlotta; all the Normans together would have refused the rule of Geoffrey of Anjou. A new duke, if they must have a duke, might be chosen from the house of Champagne, from among the sons of Adela, the Conqueror’s greatest and most famous daughter; Count Theobald was the reigning count, but he was not the eldest son, and as his elder brother had been set aside so might he. Stephen, the next brother, the Count of Mortain and Boulogne, and first baron of Normandy, had already his footing in the land. His wife too was of English descent. Her mother was sister to the good queen of Henry I., and whatever the old king had hoped to gain by his blood connection with his subjects, Stephen might gain by his wife. Stephen was a brave man, too, and he had as yet made no enemies.

Stephen’s
arrival in
England.

But his success, such as it was, was due to his own promptness. He had, as count of Boulogne, the command of the shortest passage to England. Whilst the Normans were discussing the merits of his brother Theobald, he took on himself to be his own messenger. He remembered how his uncle had won the crown and treasure of William Rufus; he left the Norman lords to look after the funeral of their dead lord and sailed for Kent; at Dover and at Canterbury he was received with sullen silence. The men of Kent had no love for the stranger who came, as his predecessor Eustace had done, to trouble the land; on he went to London, and there he learned that the same prejudice which existed in Normandy against the Angevins was in full force. “We will not have,” the Londoners said, “a stranger to rule over us;” though how Stephen of Champagne was more a stranger than Geoffrey of Anjou it is not easy to see. Anyhow, as nothing succeeds like success, nothing is so potent to secure the name of king as the wearing of the crown. So Stephen went on to Winchester, and there secured the crown and treasure. In little more than three weeks he had come again to London and claimed the crown as the elect of the nation.

Election of
Stephen
and coronation.

The assembly which saw the coronation and did homage on St. Stephen’s day was but a poor substitute for the great councils which had attended the summons of William and Henry, and in which Stephen, as a subject, had played a leading part. There was his brother Henry of Winchester, the skilled and politic churchman, who was willing enough to be a king’s brother if he might build up ecclesiastical supremacy through him; there was Archbishop William of Corbeuil, who had undertaken by the most solemn obligations to support Matilda, and who knew that his prerogative vote might decide the contest against Stephen, although it could not restore the chances of peace; there was Roger of Salisbury, the late king’s prime minister, the master builder of the constitutional fabric, undecided between duty and the desire of retaining power. Very few of the barons were there; Hugh Bigot, indeed, with his convenient oath, and a few more whose complicity with Stephen had already thrown them on him as a sole chance of safety. The rest of the great men present were the citizens of London, Norman barons of a sort, foreign merchants, some few rich Englishmen: all of them men who were used to public business, who knew how Henry I. had held his courts, who believed confidently in force and money. They had first encouraged Stephen from fear of Geoffrey; and more or less they held to Stephen as long as he lived. These men constituted the witenagemot that chose him king, and overruled the scruples of the inconstant archbishop. They took upon them to represent the nation that should ratify the election of a new king with their applause.

First charter
of Stephen.

Henry I. was not yet in his grave; but all promises made to him were forgotten. With what seems a sort of irony, Stephen issued as his coronation charter a simple promise to observe and compel the observance of all the good laws and good customs of his uncle.

The news of the great event traveled rapidly. Count Theobald, vexed and disappointed as he was, refused to contest the crown which his brother already wore; Geoffrey and Matilda were quarrelling with their own subjects in Anjou; and Robert of Gloucester, who hated Stephen more than he loved Matilda, saw that he must bide his time. Some crisis must soon occur; he knew that Stephen would soon spend his treasure and break his promises. Meanwhile the old king must be buried like a king; and the great lords came over with the corpse to Reading where he had built his last resting-place. There Stephen met them, within the twelve days of Christmas; and after the funeral, at Oxford or somewhere in the neighborhood, he arranged terms with them; terms by which he endeavored, amplifying the words of his charter, to catch the good-will of each class of his subjects. To the clergy he promised relief from the exactions of the late reign and freedom of election; to the barons he promised a relaxation of the forest law, the execution of which had been hardened and sharpened by Henry I.; and to the people he promised the abolition of danegeld. “These things chiefly and other things besides he vowed to God,” says Henry of Huntingdon, “but he kept none of them.” The promises were perhaps not insincere at the time; anyhow they had the desired effect, and united the nation for the moment.

First invasion
by the Scots.

The king by this means got time to hasten into the North, where King David of Scots, the uncle of the empress, had invaded the country in her name. The two kings met at Durham. David had taken Newcastle and Carlisle; Newcastle he surrendered, Carlisle Stephen left in his hands as a bribe for neutrality. It was too much for David, who, although a good king, was a Scot. He agreed to make peace: but he had sworn fealty to his niece: he could not become Stephen’s man. His son Henry, however, might bear the burden; so Henry swore and Stephen sealed the bargain with the gift of Huntingdon, part of the inheritance of Henry’s mother, the daughter of Waltheof, the last of the English earls. Then Stephen went back to London and so to Oxford. There he published a new charter, intended to comprise the new promises of good government.

Second charter
of Stephen.

This was done soon after Easter, and, as the name of earl Robert of Gloucester is found among the witnesses, it is clear that he had submitted; but the oath which he took to Stephen was a conditional one, more like that of a rival potentate than of a dependent; he would be faithful to the king so long as the king should preserve to him his rights and dignities. This was no slight concession, made by Robert, doubtless because he saw that his sister’s cause was hopeless; but it was no slight obligation for Stephen to undertake. Robert had great feudal domains in England, and all the personal friends of his father and sister were at his beck. Stephen might have been safer with him as a declared enemy. But for the moment there was peace.

The charter, published at Oxford, promised good government very circumstantially; the abuses of the Church, of the forests, and of the sheriffs, were all to be remedied. But the enactments made were not nearly so clear or circumstantial as the promises made at the late king’s funeral.

Rebellion
of 1136.

The first cloud, and it was a very little one, arose soon after. Before Whitsuntide Stephen was taken ill, and a rumor went forth that he was dead. The Norman rage for treason began to ferment. Hugh Bigot, the lord of Norwich, was the first to take up arms; Baldwin of Redvers, the greatest lord in Devonshire, followed. But the king recovered as quickly as he had sickened. He took Norwich and Exeter, but—deserting thus the uniform policy of his predecessors—spared the traitors. Cheered by this measure of success, he immediately broke the second of his constitutional promises, holding a great court of inquiry into the forests, and impleading and punishing at his pleasure.

Beginning
of troubles.

Second
invasion by
the Scots,
in 1138.

Battle of
the Standard.

The year 1136 affords little more of interest; the year 1137 was spent in securing Normandy, which Geoffrey and Matilda were unable to hold against him, and in forming a close alliance with France. When he returned, just before Christmas, he had spent nearly all his money, and the evil day was not far off. Rebellion was again threatening, and a mighty dark cloud had for the second time arisen in the North. We are not told by the historians exactly whether the king’s misrule made the opening for the revolt, or the revolt forced him into misrule. Possibly the two evils waxed worse and worse together; for neither party trusted the other, and under the circumstances every precaution wore the look of aggression. Stephen was to the last degree impolitic; and to say that is to allow that he was more than half dishonest. Still he had the great majority of the people on his side. A premature but general rebellion in the early months of 1138 was crushed in detail. Castle after castle was taken; but Robert of Gloucester had now declared himself, and King David, seeing Stephen busily employed in the South, invaded Yorkshire. It was a great struggle, but the Yorkshiremen were equal to the trial. Whether or not they loved Stephen they hated the Scots. The great barons who were on the king’s side did their part; the ancient standards of the northern churches, of St. Peter of York, St. Wilfrid of Ripon, and St. John of Beverley, were hoisted, and all men flew to them. The old archbishop Thurstan, who had struggled victoriously twenty years before against King Henry and the archbishop of Canterbury to boot, sent his suffragan to preach the national cause. Not only the knights with their men-at-arms, but the husbandmen, with their sons and servants, the old Anglo-Saxon militia, the parish priests at the head of their parishioners, streamed forth over hill and plain, and in the Battle of the Standard, as it was called, they beat the Scots at Cowton Moor with such completeness that the rebellion came to nothing in consequence.

Stephen’s
imprudent
policy.

His
new
earls.

Coinage
debased.

Mercenaries
imported.

Stephen felt no small addition of strength from this victory, but he was nearer the end of his treasure and the days of peace were over. Without money it is hard to act like a statesman; the difficulties were too strong for Stephen’s gratitude and good faith. Yet he began his misrule not without some method. The power of Robert of Gloucester lay chiefly in his influence with the great earls who represented the families of the Conquest. Stephen also would have a court of great earls, but in trying to make himself friends he raised up persistent enemies. He raised new men to new earldoms, but as he had no spare domains to bestow, he endowed them with pensions charged on the Exchequer: thus impairing the crown revenue at the moment that his personal authority was becoming endangered. To refill the treasury he next debased the coinage. To recruit his military power, diminished by the rebellion, and by the fact that the weakness of his administration was letting the county organization fall into decay, he called in Fleming mercenaries. The very means that he took to strengthen his position ruined him. The mercenaries alienated the people: the debased coinage destroyed the confidence of the merchants and the towns: the new and unsubstantial earldoms provoked the real earls to further hostility; and the newly created lords demanded of the king new privileges as the reward and security for their continued services.

Breach with
the clergy.

Still the clergy were faithful; and the clergy were very powerful; they conducted the mechanism of government, they filled the national councils; they were rich too, and earnest in the preservation of peace. With Henry of Winchester his brother, Roger of Salisbury his chief minister, Theobald of Canterbury his nominee, he might still flourish. The Church at all events was sure to outlive the barons. With almost incredible imprudence Stephen contrived to throw the clergy into opposition, and by one fell stroke to break up all the administrative machinery of the realm. It may be that he was growing suspicious, or jealous: it is more probable that he acted under foolish advice. Anyhow he did it.

Roger of
Salisbury.

Roger of Salisbury, the great justiciar of Henry I., was now an old man. He had contributed more perhaps than any other to set Stephen on the throne, and had not only first placed in his hands the sinews of war, but had maintained the revenue of the crown by maintaining the administration of justice and finance. He had not served for naught. He had got his son made chancellor; two of his nephews were bishops, one of them treasurer of the king as well. He had no humble idea of his own position: he had built castles the like of which for strength and beauty were not found north of the Alps. He had perhaps some intention of holding back when the struggle came and of turning the scale at the last moment as seemed him best, an intention which he shared with the chief of his brethren; for Henry of Winchester, although the king’s brother, was before all things a churchman; and Theobald of Canterbury, although he owed his place either to the good-will or to the connivance of Stephen, was consistently and more or less actively a faithful adherent to Matilda and her son.

Arrest of
the bishops,
1139.

How much Stephen knew of the designs of the bishops we know not, what he suspected we can only suspect: but the result was unmistakable. He tried a surprise that turned to his own discomfiture. He arrested bishop Roger and his nephew, Alexander, bishop of Lincoln, and compelled them to resign the castles which he pretended to think they were fortifying against him. At once the church was in arms: sacrilege and impiety determined even Henry of Winchester, who in 1139 became legate of the see of Rome, against his brother.

The Empress
Matilda
arrives.

This would have been hard enough to bear, as many far stronger kings than Stephen had learnt and were to learn to their cost. But the very men on whom his violence had fallen were his own ministers, justiciar, chancellor, and treasurer. The Church was in danger, the ministers were in prison: justice, taxation, police, everything else was in abeyance; and just at the right time the empress landed. At Christmas 1139 the whole game was up: the land was divided, the empress had the west, Stephen the east; the Church was in secession from the State. Roger died broken-hearted. Henry was negotiating with the empress. The administration had come to naught, there were no courts of law, no revenue, no councils of the realm. There was not even strength for an honest open civil war. The year 1140 is filled with a mere record of anarchy. At the court at Whitsuntide only one bishop attended and he was a foreigner. Stephen we see now obdurate, now penitent; now energetic, now despondent; the barons selling their services for new promises from each side.

Beginning
of anarchy.

It is now that the period begins which William of Newburgh likens to the days when there was no king in Israel, but every man did what was right in his own eyes, nay, not what was right, but what was wrong also, for every lord was king and tyrant in his own house. Castles innumerable sprang up, and as fast as they were built they were filled with devils; each lord judged and taxed and coined. The feudal spirit of disintegration had for once its full play. Even party union was at an end, and every baron fought on his own behalf. Feudalism had its day, and the completeness of its triumph ensured its fall.

Stephen taken
prisoner, 1141.

Election of
Matilda.

All this was not realized at once. The new year 1141 found Stephen besieging Lincoln, which was defended by Ranulf, earl of Chester, and Robert of Gloucester. Stephen had not yet been defeated in the field, and he had still by his side a considerable body of barons, though none so great as the almost independent earl whom he was attacking. Now, however, he was outmatched or out-generaled. After a struggle marked chiefly by his own valiant exploits he was taken prisoner, and sent to the empress by her brother as a great prize. The battle of Lincoln was fought on February 2, and a week after Easter, in a great council of bishops, barons, and abbots, Matilda, the empress of the Romans, was elected Lady of England at Winchester. This assembly was, it must be allowed, mainly clerical; but there is no doubt that it represented the wishes of a great part of the barons, who, so far as they were willing to have a king or queen at all, preferred Matilda to Stephen. Henry of Winchester, however, took advantage of the opportunity to make somewhat extravagant claims on behalf of his order, declaring that the clergy had the right to elect the sovereign, and actually carrying out the ceremony of election. The citizens of London pleaded hard for the release of Stephen, whom they, six years before, had elected with scarcely less audacious assumption, but in vain. Henry was now at the crest of the wave, and he saw the triumph of the Church in the humiliation of his brother. War was the great trial by combat ordained between kings. Stephen had failed in that ordeal; judgment of God was declared against him; like Saul he was found wanting.

Purpose of
the barons.

So Matilda became the Lady of the English; she was not crowned, because perhaps the solemn consecration which she had received as empress sufficed, or perhaps Stephen’s royalty was so far forth indefeasible; but she acted as full sovereign nevertheless, executed charters, bestowed lands and titles, and exerted power sufficient to show that she had all the pride and tyrannical intolerance of her father, without his prudence or self-control. She, too, was on the crest of her wave and had her little day. But the barons looked coolly on the triumph; it was their policy that neither competitor should destroy the other, but that both should grow weaker and weaker, and so leave room for each several feudatory to grow stronger and stronger. Neither king nor empress had anything like command of his or her friends, or anything like general acceptance.

Matilda’s
imprudent
rule.

Stephen’s fortunes reached their lowest depth when the Londoners a few days before Midsummer received the empress as their sovereign. She had no sooner achieved success than she began to alienate the friends who had won it for her. The bishop of Winchester, although he had not scrupled to sacrifice his brother’s title to the exigencies of his policy, bore no grudge against the queen and her children, and endeavored to prevail on the empress to guarantee to the latter at least their mother’s inheritance. Matilda would be satisfied with nothing less than the utter ruin of the rival house, and although the queen was raising a great army in Kent for Stephen’s liberation, she refused even to temporize. Henry in disgust retired from court and took up his residence at Winchester; thither the empress, having in vain attempted to recall him to her side, and having made London too hot to hold her, followed him, and established herself in the royal castle as he had done in the episcopal palace. Winchester thus witnessed the gathering of the two hosts for a new struggle.

The earl of
Gloucester
taken
prisoner.

Exchange
of prisoners.

The queen brought up her army from Kent, the king of Scots and the earl of Gloucester brought up their forces from the north and west. But the queen showed the most promptitude. The baronage who were not bound to the legate’s policy refused to complete the king’s ruin, and stood aloof, intending to profit by the common weakness of the competitors. In attempting to secure the empress’s retreat to Devizes, on September 14, the earl of Gloucester was taken prisoner, and the two parties from this time forward played with more equal chances. An exchange of the two great captives was at once proposed, but mutual distrust, and the desire on both sides to take the utmost advantage of their situation, delayed the negotiation for six weeks. Stephen at Bristol, Robert at Rochester, must have watched the debate with longing eyes. The countess Mabilia of Gloucester was prepared to ship Stephen off to Ireland, if a hair of Robert’s head were injured; the queen demanded no less security for her husband’s safety. At last, on All Saints’ Day, both were released, each leaving security in the hands of the other that the terms should be fairly observed.

As soon as they were free they both prepared for a continuance of the struggle. The empress fixed her court again at Oxford; Stephen, who seems at once to have resumed his royal position, the claims founded by the election of the empress suffering a practical refutation by his release, re-entered London. The legate, still desiring to direct the storm, called a council at Westminster in December, where he apologized for his conduct rather than defended it, and where the king laid a formal complaint against the treason of the men who had taken and imprisoned him. But the time for open hostilities was deferred, the certain exhaustion which after a few months more renders the history an absolute blank, was beginning to tell. Six months passed without a sign. By Easter the empress had determined to send for her husband. Geoffrey would not obey his wife’s summons until he had earl Robert’s personal assurance that he should not be made a fool of. Earl Robert went to persuade his brother-in-law to throw his sword into the scale. Geoffrey determined first to secure Normandy, and kept the earl at work there until the news from England peremptorily recalled him.

Success of
Stephen in
1142.

The
kingdom
divided.

Stephen had waited until Robert had left England, and then, emerging from his sick room, had pounced down upon Wareham, the strong castle which the earl had entrusted to his son, had taken it, and then hastening northwards, had burnt the town of Oxford, and shut up the empress in the castle. There she remained until her brother could succor her. He returned at once, recovered Wareham and some castles in Dorset, and called together the forces of his party at Cirencester. But the winter was now advancing; the empress contrived a romantic escape in the snow from Oxford, and before active war could be resumed she directed that the castle should be surrendered. So the year 1142 comes to an end, and we see the two parties resting in their exhaustion. The western shires acknowledged Matilda, who reigned at Gloucester; the eastern acknowledged Stephen, who made Kent his head quarters. The midland counties were the seat of languid warfare, partly carried on about Oxford, which was a central debating ground between the two competitors, partly in Lincolnshire and Essex, where Stephen had to keep in order those great nobles who aimed at independence. Geoffrey de Mandeville, the earl of Essex, who accepted his earldom from both the courts, employed him chiefly in 1143 and 1144. The earl of Chester, who was uniformly opposed to Stephen, but who no doubt fought for himself far more than for the empress, held Lincoln as a constant thorn in the royal side. In 1145 Oxfordshire and Berkshire were the seat of war; in 1146 Stephen surprised the earl of Chester at Northampton and compelled him to give up Lincoln, and now for the first time seems to have thought himself a king. In despite of all precedent and all prejudice, defying a superstition to which even Henry II. thought it wise to bow, that no king should wear his crown within the walls of Lincoln, he wore his crown there on Christmas Day.

Period of
anarchy.

In passing thus rapidly over these years we are but following the example of our historians, who share in the exhaustion of the combatants, recording little but an occasional affray, and a complaint of general misery. Neither side had strength to keep down its friends, much less to encounter its enemies. The price of the support given to both was the same—absolute license to build castles, to practice private war, to hang their private enemies, to plunder their neighbors, to coin their money, to exercise their petty tyrannies as they pleased. England was dismembered. North of the Tees ruled the king of Scots, David the lawgiver and the church builder, under whose rule Cumberland, Westmoreland and Northumberland were safe; the bishopric of Durham, too, under his wing, had peace. The West of England, as we have seen, was under the earl of Gloucester, who in his sister’s name founded earldoms, and endeavored to concentrate in the hands of his supporters such vestiges of the administrative organization as still subsisted. But the great earls of the house of Beaumont, Roger of Leicester and Waleran of Meulan, who dominated the midland shires, chose to act as independent sovereigns and made terms both in England and Normandy as if they had been kings.

Departure
of Matilda.

In all the misery, and exhaustion, and balance of evils, however, time was working. The first generation of actors was leaving the stage, and a new one—if not better, still freed from the burden of odium, duplicity, and dishonesty which had marked the first—came into play. And the balance of change veered now to Stephen’s side. The year 1145 cut off Geoffrey de Mandeville in the midst of his sins, the year 1143 had seen the death of Miles of Hereford, the empress’s most faithful servant. In 1147 the great earl Robert of Gloucester passed away, and it is no small sign of the absolute deadness of the country at the time, that both his death and the departure of the empress, which must have almost coincided with it, are not even noticed in the best of the contemporary historians.

The second
Crusade.

This year 1147 sees Stephen again ostensibly the sole ruler; really, however, devoid of power, as he had always been of counsel, his only strength being the weakness of every one else. This year is marked by the great crusade of the emperor Conrad of Hohenstaufen, and of Lewis VII., and Eleanor of Aquitaine, an expedition in which England nationally had no share, and in which few of the barons took part, but which was recruited to a considerable extent by volunteers from the English ports. The capture of Lisbon from the Moors, and the placing of the kingdom of Portugal upon a sound footing thereby, was the work mainly of the English pilgrims, but it was not a national work, and it touches our history merely as suggesting a probability that some of our most turbulent spirits may have joined the crusade, and thereby increased the chances of peace at home. With 1147, then, begins a new series of movements and a new set of actors, the details of whose doings are involved and obscure.

Proceedings
at Rome.

Quarrel
with
the
archbishop.

The death of earl Robert and the departure of the empress left their party without an ostensible head; for Geoffrey of Anjou was far more intent on securing Normandy than England, and his son Henry was only just springing into manhood, David of Scotland being looked upon apparently as the guardian of his interests. Henry of Winchester had lost the legation, which had given him such great strength in the earlier part of the struggle; the popes who had conferred it and promised to renew it, had rapidly given way to successors who were less favorable, and the chair of St. Peter was now filled by Eugenius III., the friend of St. Bernard, who was at this time the great spiritual power in European politics. The scantiness of our authorities does not allow us to speak with certainty, or to decide whether St. Bernard in the English quarrel was moved by a conviction of Stephen’s wrong-doing, or by the influence of the Cistercian order; it is, however, certain that the king and his brother by attempting to force their nephew, afterward canonized as St. William, into the see of York, in opposition to the Cistercian abbot of Fountains, had thrown that strong order, of which Bernard was the ornament, into opposition; and it is also certain that the strings of political intrigue were held by Eugenius III., and that every possible advantage was given by him to Henry of Anjou. The Englishman, Nicolas of St. Alban’s, afterward pope Adrian IV., was a close confidant of the pope, and John of Salisbury, the friend of Becket, was a close confidant of Nicolas; Becket was the clerk and secretary of Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury. These may have been the three strands of a strong diplomatic cord. The first impulse, however, which was to bring about Stephen’s final humiliation was, as before, given by himself. In 1148, Eugenius III. called a council at Rheims. Archbishop Theobald asked leave to go. Stephen suspected that a plot would be concocted on behalf of the empress and her son; Henry of Winchester suspected that the archbishop wanted to apply for the legation. Leave was therefore refused, and Theobald went without leave; Stephen took the measures usual in such cases, confiscation and threats, and sent his chief ministers, Richard de Lucy and William Martel, to counteract the archbishop’s influence in the council. This had the effect of throwing Theobald, who had hitherto only been restrained by his oath of allegiance from taking the side of the empress, openly into the arms of her party; so much so that he preferred exile to submission, and even went so far as to consecrate the celebrated Gilbert Foliot, the abbot of Gloucester, and nominee of Henry of Anjou, to the see of Hereford, in opposition to both king and bishops. Neither Stephen nor Theobald was, however, as yet in a position to act freely. Stephen confiscated and Theobald excommunicated, but a hollow peace was patched up between them in the autumn by Hugh Bigot and the bishops.

Question of
succession.

In 1149, Henry of Anjou, now sixteen years old, was knighted by his great uncle David, at Carlisle. Stephen, accounting this the beginning of war, hastened to York; but went no farther, and that cloud seemed to have passed away. The king was growing old, and it was necessary for him to secure the succession to his son Eustace; the military interest of the time, always very languid, now flags altogether, and the real business is conducted at the papal court. There, as usual, fortune seems to halt according to the depth of the purses of the rivals, the balance, however, in the main inclining as the pope would have it. Sometimes there is talk of peace; now the bishop of Winchester is to be made archbishop of Wessex, now Theobald is to have the legation; now the bishops are persuaded to recognise Eustace, now they are forbidden peremptorily to do any such thing. And this goes on for five years, Stephen relieving the monotony of the time by an occasional expedition into the West of England.

Progress of
Henry of Anjou.

Henry, however, was making good use of his time on the Continent. Eustace, whose marriage with Constantia of France, a marriage purchased by the treasures of bishop Roger in 1139, made him a dangerous competitor, laid claim to Normandy. Geoffrey, after defending it on his son’s behalf during two years, finally made it over to him in 1151 and then died. Henry the next year married Eleanor of Aquitaine, the divorced wife of Lewis VII., and so secured nearly the whole of Western France. By the Christmas of 1152 he was ready to make a bold stroke for England also.

Arrival of
Henry, 1153.

Negotiations
for peace.

Stephen’s
death 1154.

And England was ready for him. The bishops were watching for their time. The young Eustace was offending and oppressing. The king had now thrown the great house of Leicester as well as the prelates into determined opposition. The cessation of justice and the prevalence of private war made every one long for any change that would bring rest. In 1152 the bishops, acting under instructions from Rome, finally refused to sanction the coronation of Eustace, and Stephen, having again tried force, was compelled to acquiesce. But he saw the end approaching. In January 1153 Henry of Anjou landed. His friends gathered round him, Stephen and Eustace collected their mercenaries. At Malmesbury, and again at Wallingford, the two armies stood face to face, but the great barons refused to abide by the decision of arms; on both occasions they mediated, and the armies separated without a blow. Just after the second meeting Eustace died, and Stephen whose health was failing, who had lost his noble-hearted wife in 1152, and whose surviving children were too young to be exposed to the chances or risks of a disputed succession, could only give way. The negotiations, begun at Wallingford, were carried on and completed by a treaty at Westminster, concluded in November, in which Stephen recognised Henry as his heir, and Henry guaranteed the rights of Stephen’s children to the inheritance of their parents. At the same time a scheme of reform, which was to replace the administrative system of Henry I., on its basis, was determined on, the details of which form a clue to the early policy of the reign of Henry II. Henry left England some three months after the conclusion of the peace. His life, it was said, was not safe, and the pressure which he had to put upon Stephen to induce him to carry out the reforms was only too likely to result in the renewal of war. He went away about Easter 1154. Stephen blundered on for six months and then died; not of a broken heart, perhaps, as the kings of history generally die, but certainly a disappointed man.

Estimate of
Stephen’s character.

The reign of Stephen was, it may be fairly said, the period at which all the evils of feudalism came in England into full bearing, previous to being cut off and abolished forever under his great successor. The reign exemplifies to us what the whole century that followed the Conquest must have been if there had not been strong kings like William I., and Henry I., sturdily to repress all the disintegrating designs of their barons and to protect the people. The personal character of Stephen needs no comment. He was brave. He was at least so far gentle that none of the atrocious cruelties alleged against his predecessors are attributed to him. He was false, partly no doubt under the pressure of circumstances, which he could not control, but in which he had involved himself by his first betrayal of faith. What may be the legal force of his election by the nation we need not ask: it was the breach of his oath that condemned him. No man trusted him; and as he trusted no one, knowing that he did not deserve trust, and that those who had betrayed their oath to his uncle would not hesitate to betray their oaths to him, he expected no one to trust him. He was not great, either for good or for evil, in himself. If he had had more wisdom he might have shown more honesty; certainly if he had been more honest he would have gained more credit for wisdom. Had he been either a more unscrupulous knave or a more honest man he would certainly have been far more successful.

CHAPTER III.

THE EARLY YEARS OF HENRY II.

Terms of Henry’s accession—His character—His early reforms—His relations with France—War of Toulouse—Summary of nine years’ work.

Importance
attached by
contemporaries
to Henry’s
accession.

Very few epochs of history are more clearly marked than the accession of Henry II. Most great eras are determined, and their real importance ascertained, long after the event; the famous Parliament of Simon de Montfort, in 1265, for instance, is scarcely named by the contemporary historians, and only rises into importance as later history unfolds its real bearings. But the succession of Henry is hailed by the writers of his time as a dawn of hope, a certain omen of restoration and refreshing. Often and often, it is true, such omens are discerned on the accession of a new king; men hasten to salute the rising sun; good wishes to the new sovereign take the form of prophecy, and, where they are fulfilled, partly help on their own fulfilment. Here, however, we have omens that were amply fulfilled, and an epoch which those who lived in it were the first to recognise. The fact proves how weary England was of Stephen’s incompetency, how thoroughly she had learned the miserable consequences of a feudal system of society unchecked by strong government, how readily she welcomed the young and inexperienced but strong and, in the main, honest rule of Henry.

ENGLAND and FRANCE
1152-1327

Youth and
education of
Henry.

Henry II. was born in 1133; and if we may believe the testimony of Roger Hoveden, who was one of his chaplains, and a very conscientious compiler of histories, he was recognized by Henry I. as his successor directly after his birth. When his grandfather died he was two years old. His father and mother made, as we have seen, a very ill-concerted effort to secure the succession, and it was not until the boy was eight years old that the struggle for the crown really began. In 1141 he was brought to England; then no doubt he learned a dutiful hatred of Stephen, and was trained in the use of arms; but whether he received his training under his father in France or under his uncle, Robert of Gloucester, in England, or under his great uncle, David of Scotland, we are not told. Only we know that, when he was sixteen, he was knighted at Carlisle by King David; that, like a wise boy, he determined to secure his French dominions before he attempted the recovery of England; that he succeeded to Normandy and Anjou in 1151, when he was eighteen; married his wife, the Duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine who had been divorced from Lewis VII., and secured her inheritance, when he was nineteen; that he came again to England and forced Stephen to submit to terms when he was twenty; and that at the age of twenty-one he succeeded him on the throne in pursuance of those terms. These dates are sufficient to prove that, although Henry might have got considerable experience in arms as a boy and young man, he could scarcely have had yet the education of a lawgiver. Somewhat of politics he might have learnt, but he had not had time or opportunity to learn a regular theory of policy, or to create a method of government which, when the time for action came, he might put into execution. The extraordinary power which he showed when the time for action really arrived was in part a gift of genius; partly too it arose from his wisdom in choosing experienced advisers, and partly it was an effect of his following the broad lines of his grandfather’s administrative reforms.

Character of
Henry II.

His family
policy.

His great position
in Christendom.

Henry II. was a very great sovereign in many ways: he was an admirable soldier, most careful in forming plans, wonderfully rapid in the execution of them; he was at once cautious and adventurous, sparing of human life and moderate in the use of victory. Yet he was far from being a mild or gentle enemy; and he was economical of human life rather because of its cost in money than from any pitifulness. If he spared an enemy it was only when he had entirely disabled him from doing harm, or when he was fully assured of his power to turn him into a friend. His foes accused him of being treacherous, but his treachery mainly consisted in letting them deceive themselves. Thus he was no hero of probity, and his craft may have gone farther in the direction of cunning than was approved by the rough diplomacy of his time. He is said to have had a maxim, that it is easier to repent of words than of deeds, and therefore wiser to break your word than to fulfil an inconvenient obligation; but it cannot be said that the facts of history show him to have acted upon this shameless avowal, captious and unscrupulous as his policy more than once appears. He had no doubt a difficult part to play. His dominions brought him into close contact with all the great sovereigns of Europe. He had considerable ambitions—for himself, to hold fast all that he had acquired by inheritance and marriage; for his sons to obtain by marriage or other settlement provinces which, united to their hereditary provision, might make them either a family of allied sovereigns or an imperial federation under himself, and in each form the mightiest house in Christendom. Such a network of design was spread before him from the first. As the head of the house of Anjou the kings and princes of Palestine regarded him as their family representative, the grandson of King Fulk, and the man created for the re-conquest of the East. To him in their utmost need they sent the offer of their crown, the keys of the Holy Sepulchre and of the Tower of David. As the head of the Normans he was looked up to by the Sicilian king as the presumptive successor, and had the strange fortune and self-restraint to decline the offer of a second crown. The Italians thought him a likely competitor for the empire when they saw him negotiating for his son John a marriage with the heiress of Savoy, which would give him the command of the passes of the Alps; Spain saw in him the leader of a new crusade against the Moors when he sought for his son Richard a bribe in the Princess of Aragon, whose portion would give him the passes of the Pyrenees. Frederick Barbarossa might well feel suspicious when he heard that English gold was given to build the walls of Milan, and when he remembered that Henry the Lion, the great Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, the head of the Welfic house, his cousin and friend, whom with heavy heart he had sacrificed to the necessities of state, was also son-in-law of the king of the English. So wide a system of foreign alliances and designs helped to make Henry both cautious and crafty.

Lewis VII.

Nearer home his ability was tasked by Lewis VII., whose whole policy consisted in a habit of pious falsehood, who really acted upon the principle which Henry ironically formulated, and who by either cowardice or faithlessness made himself far more dangerous than by his strength.

Henry’s mismanagement
of his
children.

Henry was a kind and loving father, but his political game led him to sacrifice the real interest of his children to the design for their advancement. They soon found out that he used them like chess-men, and could not see the love which prompted his design. To his people he was a politic ruler, a great reformer and discipliner; not a hero or patriot, but a far-seeing king who recognized that the well-being of the nation was the surest foundation of his own power. As a lawgiver or financier, or supreme judge, he made his hand felt everywhere; and at the beginning of his reign, when the need of the reforms was forcibly impressed on the minds of his subjects by their recent misery, his reforms were welcomed; he was popular and beloved. By and by, when he had educated a new generation, and when the dark cloud of sin and sorrow and ingratitude settled down upon him, they forgot what he had done in his early days; but they never forgot how great a king he was. We may not say that he was a good man; but his temptations were very great, and he was sinned against very much by his wife and children. It is only in a secondary sense that he was a good king, for he loved his power first and his people only second; but he was good so far as selfish wisdom and deep insight into what is good for them could make him. In his early years he gave promise of something more than this, and some share of the blame that attends his later short-comings must rest with those who scrupled at nothing that might humiliate and disappoint him.

In appearance, we are told, Henry was a tall, stout man, with a short neck, and projecting but very expressive eyes; he was a careless dresser, a great hunter, a man of business rather than a model of chivalry; capable of great exertion, moderate in meat and drink, and anything but extravagant in personal as opposed to official expenditure. He was a builder of halls and castles, not very much of churches; but that may easily be accounted for. We are glad to have him pictured for us even with this scanty amount of detail, for he is well worth the trouble of an attempt at least to realize his outward presentment. Every one knows Henry VIII. by sight; it might be as well if we had as definite an impression of Henry II.

Plan of
reform.

We have observed, in sketching the close of the last reign, the existence of certain terms by which Henry and Stephen, after or in preparation for the peace of November 1153, agreed that the country should be governed. Those terms are not preserved in any formal document, but they occur in two or three of the historians of the time, in a somewhat poetical garb, disguised in language adapted partly from the prophecies of Merlin, king Arthur’s seer, which were in vogue at the time, and partly from the words of Holy Scripture; and yet, from the clue they furnish to the reforms actually carried out by Henry, they seem to be based upon certain real articles of agreement.

Term of
pacification.

By these terms the administration of justice was to be restored, sheriffs to be appointed to the counties, and a careful examination into their honesty and justice to be instituted; the castles which had been built since the death of Henry I. were to be destroyed; the coinage was to be renewed, a uniform silver currency of lawful weight; the mercenaries who had flooded the kingdom under Stephen were to be sent back to their own countries; the estates which had been usurped were to go to their lawful owners; all property alienated from the crown was to be resumed, especially the pensions on the Exchequer with which Stephen endowed his newly-created earls; the royal demesnes were to be re-stocked, the flocks to return to the hills, the husbandman to the plough, the merchant to his wares; the swords were to be turned into ploughshares and the spears into pruning-hooks.

Meaning of
these terms.

These sentences give us a clue to Henry’s reforms; that is, they show us clearly the evils that first called for his attention. The kingdom, divided in two under Stephen, had been in constant war; the barons on one side had entered on the lands of the barons on the other; Stephen had confiscated the estates of Matilda’s friends in the East of England, Matilda had retaliated or authorized reprisals in the West. All this must be set right. The crown had been the greatest loser, and the impoverishment of the crown involved the oppression of the people. Henry gained the crown by a national act; he must then resume not only the wasteful grants of Stephen but those of his mother also, and, in his character of king, know neither friends nor foes amongst his own people. So the Exchequer, the board which managed the royal revenue, must be placed on its old footing, and under its old managers. With the Exchequer would revive the ancient office of the sheriffs, to whom both the collection of revenue, the administration of justice in the shires, and the maintenance of the military force was entrusted. Thus local security would restore and revive trade and commerce. And when the local administration of the sheriff was revived, no doubt the feudal usurpations of the lords of castles and manors must end. The fortified houses must be pulled down; no more should the petty tyrants tax and judge their men, fight their battles like independent princes, and coin their money as so many kings. The great Peace should be restored, of which the king was guardian and keeper. In fact, the golden age was to return. Nor was it to be delayed until Henry came to the crown; it was to be Stephen’s last and expiatory task to bring about these happy results. Stephen, as we saw, wanted either the will or the power to accomplish it.

Arrival of
Henry as
successor
to Stephen,
1154.

Henry’s
advisers.

Bishop
of Winchester.

The
Empress.

Theobald
and Becket.

Stephen died on October 25, 1154. Henry was in France at the time, and was not able, owing to the weather, to reach England before December 8. During this time the management of affairs rested with Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury, and in some measure perhaps with his secretary, Thomas Becket, who had been so busy negotiating the succession of Henry. Although it was the theory that during the vacancy of the throne all law and police were suspended, and no one could be punished for offences committed in a general abeyance of justice, the country remained quiet during these six weeks. Perhaps the rogues were cowed by the apprehension of a strong king coming, perhaps the religious obedience inculcated by the archbishop was really maintained; perhaps the same bad weather that kept Henry in Normandy kept thieves and robbers within doors. Nor was there any political rising during the interregnum. Stephen’s children were not thought of, at least on this side of the Channel, as rivals to Henry. The Bishop of Winchester had learnt moderation, that might in him well pass for wisdom; he might well feel that his position was a hazardous one, to be maintained only by caution; and he had no reason, nor excuse for seeking a reason, for evading the compact which he had had a chief hand in making. It shows, however, his importance that as soon as Henry landed, which he did near Southampton, he hastened to Winchester, and there visited his powerful kinsman, who, as we learn, was now busily employed in collecting statues and sculpture from southern Europe, and with whom he made a friendship which, although once or twice seriously endangered, was never actually broken. Amongst the other leaders who likewise had learned wisdom we must count the Empress Matilda, who, strange to say, appears to us no more as the arrogant, self-willed virago, but as a sage politician and a wise, modest, pious old lady, living at Rouen, and ruling Normandy in the name of her son with prudent counsel. Not a word is said now of her succeeding to the throne or even resigning her rights to Henry; all that was regarded as arranged by the settlement made with Stephen. Henry succeeded without a competitor. Stephen’s minister, Richard de Lucy, became his minister. Theobald continued to be, as his office made him, the great constitutional adviser; and to reconcile personal convenience with constitutional precedent, he presented his secretary to the king as his future Chancellor. Thomas Becket thus entered on his high and fatal office.

Coronation.

Banishment
of mercenaries.

All this done, Henry appeared at Westminster on the 19th of December, and was there crowned with the ceremonies observed at his grandfather’s coronation, now more than half a century past, and bound himself by the same ancient and solemn promises which Ethelred had made to Dunstan, and which the Conqueror, Henry I., and Stephen had renewed. Nor, when crowned, did he lose a moment: he issued a charter, as Stephen had done, at his coronation, confirming his grandfather’s laws. The same week he held a great court and council at Bermondsey. At once he re-established the Exchequer, recalling to the head of it Bishop Nigel of Ely, whom Stephen had displaced in 1140, and setting at work at once with the business of the revenue. From this court at Bermondsey went forth the decree that the Flemish and other foreign mercenaries should leave the kingdom at once, and that the castles built under Stephen should be thrown down. The mercenaries fled forthwith. Their presence was perhaps the most offensive of all insults to the national pride, and the late reign had taught Normans and Englishmen that they had now a common nationality in suffering, if not in conquest. By this article of the agreement Henry faithfully stood. Although he fought all his foreign wars with mercenaries, he never but once—and that in the greatest emergency, and to repel foreign mercenaries brought against him by the rebellious earls in 1174—introduced any such force into England. Even Richard employed in the kingdom no more foreigners than formed his ordinary surroundings, and it is not until John’s reign that we find the country again oppressed and insulted by hired foreign soldiery.

Destruction of
castles.

The demolition of the castles, which one contemporary writer reckons at three hundred and seventy-five, another a little later at eleven hundred and fifteen, was a still greater boon; for these, had they been suffered to stand, would not only have fitted England to be a constant scene of civil war, but have continued to afford to their owners a shadow of claim for the exercise of those feudal jurisdictions which on the Continent made every baron a petty despot. Castles were unfortunately not entirely destroyed at this time; the older strongholds, which had been built under Henry, were untouched, and gave trouble enough in the one civil war that marks the reign; but the legal misuse of them was abolished, and they ceased to be centres of feudal lawlessness.

Fate of the
new earls.

Another measure which must have been taken at the coronation, when all the recognised earls did their homage and paid their ceremonial services, seems to have been the degrading or cashiering of the supposititious earls created by Stephen and Matilda. Some of these may have obtained recognition by getting new grants; but those who lost endowment and dignity at once, like William of Ypres, the leader of the Flemish mercenaries, could make no terms. They sank to the rank from which they had been so incautiously raised.

Resumption of
lands.

Resistance
of William
of Aumâle.

Surrender
of
the malcontents.

The resumption of royal estates, and the restoration of the dispossessed on each side, was probably a much more difficult business than the humiliation of the earls. Doubtless the enemies of Henry’s mother would bear their reverses silently, to avoid entire ruin; or only those would think of continuing in opposition who had no hope but in terms which might be granted to pertinacious resistance; but Matilda’s supporters might well think it hard that they should be called upon to resign their hard-won gains. Still, Henry was a national king; the resumption of domain was not an Angevin conquest; it was a national restoration of the state of affairs as it stood before the beginning of the national quarrel. As a matter of fact only two or three of the nobles made any resistance. William of Aumâle, the Lord of Holderness, who had commanded at the Battle of the Standard, and who played the part of a petty king in Yorkshire, objected to surrender his great castle at Scarborough. He, of course, had been on Stephen’s side, and was, indeed, a member of the House of Champagne—the son of that Count Stephen who had been brought forward by the Norman earls as competitor with William Rufus. Of Matilda’s old friends, Hugh Mortimer, the lord of Wigmore, and Roger of Hereford, the son of Miles the Constable, declined to submit. The King of Scots too, Malcolm IV., grandson of King David and half-cousin of Henry, although the Northern counties had been held in trust for Henry, wished to retain them for himself. In January, 1155, however, Henry marched northwards and brought the Count of Aumâle to his feet. In March he was at London holding council for the restoration of peace and the confirmation of the ancient laws. He declared that neither friend nor foe should be spared. Roger of Hereford immediately surrendered. Hugh of Mortimer still held out, and did not submit until Henry had called out the national force for the capture of Bridgenorth. On exactly the same ground it was that Henry I., had won his victory over Robert of Belesme, when in 1102 he laid the axe to the tree of feudal misrule, and his subjects, rejoicing at the overthrow of the oppressor, hailed him as now for the first time a king. This was accomplished in July. And this was a permanent pacification; it was nearly twenty years before anything like rebellion reared its head.

Restoration
of judicature.

Frequent
councils.

Proposal to
conquer Ireland.

The history of the first year of Henry’s reign is not, however, filled up thus. He restored the administration of justice, and sent itinerant members of his judicial court to enforce the law which had been so long in abeyance. He himself learned the law as an apt scholar. Even at Bridgenorth he found time to hear suits brought before him as supreme judge; at Nottingham, whilst he was on his way from Scarborough, he threatened William Peverell with a charge of having poisoned the Earl of Chester. The very threat caused Peverell to take refuge in a monastery. He held council after council, taking advice from his elders, and making friends everywhere. In one assembly held at Wallingford after Easter he obtained the recognition of his little son William, who afterwards died, as his successor. In another, held at Winchester, at Michaelmas, he proposed that the conquest of Ireland should be attempted and a kingdom founded there for his brother William. The empress objected to this, and it was given up, at least during her life, although the English Pope, Adrian IV., by his famous Bull Laudabiliter, issued about this time, was already anxious to give the papal authorization to a scheme that would complete the symmetrical conformation of Western Christendom. A national expedition, Henry may have thought, would do more than anything else to consolidate the national unity which was growing rapidly into more than a name. But clearly the time was not come for England, shorn of her Northern provinces, and with the Welsh unsubdued, to attempt foreign conquest; and Henry had other states besides England to take thought for.

Hugh Bigot
humbled, 1157.

Second
coronation.

The whole of the next year he had to spend in Normandy and Anjou, and, when he returned in 1157, he found abundant work ready for his hands in his still undetermined relations with Wales and Scotland. His first visit was to the Eastern counties, and there he combined business with pleasure. William of Warenne, Count of Boulogne and Earl of Surrey, the son of Stephen, had received a considerable estate in Norfolk, including the castle of Norwich; and Hugh Bigot, the earl of the county of Norfolk, the same Hugh who had sworn that Henry I., disinherited the empress, was very reluctant to accept the strong rule of the new king. Whether Hugh was now acting on behalf of Stephen’s family or in opposition to them is not clear. It was his attitude that drew the king into that country. He was made to surrender his castles; and William of Warenne likewise surrendered his special provision, on the understanding that he was to receive his hereditary estates. Henry added solemnity to this visit by holding a solemn court and wearing his crown in state on Whit-Sunday, at St. Edmund’s, the second recorded coronation-day of the reign. This ceremony was a revival of the great courts held by the Conqueror and his sons on the great festivals, Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide, at Gloucester, Westminster, and Winchester, the three chief cities of the South. At such gatherings all the great men attended, both witan and warriors, clerk and lay. The king heard the complaints of his subjects, and decided their suits with the advice of his wise men; the feudal services, by which the great estates were held, were solemnly rendered; a special peace was set, the breakers of which within the purlieus of the court were liable to special penalties; and during the gathering, whilst the people were amused and humored by the show, the king and his really trusted advisers contrived the despatch of business. The ceremony of coronation, which gave the name to these courts, was not, as is sometimes supposed, a repetition of the formal rite of initiation by which the king at his accession received the authorization of God through the hands of the bishops; the character so impressed was regarded as indelible, and hence the only way of disposing of a bad king was to kill him. That rite, the solemn consecration and unction, was incapable of being repeated. The crown was, however, on these occasions placed on the king’s head in his chamber by the archbishop of Canterbury, with special prayers, and the court went in procession to mass, where the king made his offering, and afterwards the barons did their services, as at the real coronation. These courts had been given up by Stephen, as the historian Henry of Huntingdon notes with an expressive lamentation, in the year 1140, when the clergy ceased to attend them; and he had made only one unlucky attempt, the Lincoln coronation, in 1147, to revive them. Henry, however, renewed the custom on this occasion, and twice after this we find it observed. At the Christmas of this year he was crowned at Lincoln, but not, like Stephen, in the cathedral, for he feared the omen; and at Easter 1158 he was crowned at Worcester. After that he never actually wore the crown again, although he did occasionally hold these formal courts, in order to receive the honorary services by which his courtiers held their estates. This coronation, then, at St. Edmund’s was, as usual, turned to purposes of business. The king was ready for a Welsh war; measures were taken for providing men and money.

First Welsh
war.

At another council, held in July, at Northampton, the expedition started. This was Henry’s first Welsh war, and it was no great success. The army advanced into North Wales; at Consilt, near Flint, an awkward pass, they were resisted by the Welsh. There Henry of Essex, the Constable, let fall the royal standard, as he declared, by accident. The army, thinking that the king was killed or the battle lost, fell into confusion, and the day was claimed by the Welsh as a victory. That it was merely a misfortune of little importance is proved by the fact that Henry continued his march to Rhuddlan. The ostensible pretext of the expedition being to arrange a quarrel between Owen Gwynneth and his brother Cadwalader, there was no overt attempt at conquest. The king returned from Wales into Nottinghamshire to meet the young Malcolm IV., who seems at this time to have finally surrendered his hold on the Northern counties. At Christmas Henry was at Lincoln.

Long visit
to France,
1158-1163.

In 1158 he wore his crown, as we have seen, at Easter, at Worcester; in the summer he went into Cumberland, no doubt to set the machinery of government at work there in due order after the change of rulers; and at Carlisle on Midsummer-day he conferred knighthood on William of Warenne. In August he went to France, whence he did not return until January, 1163. This brings us to the point of time at which the struggle with Becket begins, to which, with its attendant circumstances, we may devote another chapter.

Foreign
possessions
of Henry.

His relations
with his
vassals.

We may, therefore, now take up the thread of the foreign transactions at the beginning of the reign and bring it down to the same point. The geographical extent of Henry’s dominions furnishes the leading clue to this part of his history. They embraced, speaking roughly and roundly, Normandy, Maine, Touraine, Anjou, Guienne, Poictou, and Gascony. But this statement has to be accepted with some very important limitations. In the first place, each of these states, and each bundle of them, had come to him in a different way—some from his father, some from his mother, some by his wife—and each bundle had been got together by those from whom he received it in similar ways. The result of that was that in each state or bundle of states there was a distant relation between the lord and his vassals—a constitution, we might call it, by which various rights and privileges and a varying legal system or customs subsisted. What was law in Normandy was not customary in Anjou; and the barons of Poictou had, or claimed, customs which must, if they could have enforced them, have produced utter anarchy. Here was a constant and abundant source of administrative difficulties, the adjustment of which was one of the causes of Henry’s long absence from England. But a second incidental result was, that, as many of these estates came into the common inheritance on very deficient title, conquest in one case, chicanery in another, there were a number of claimants in each, claimants who by prescriptive right might have lost all chance of recovering their lands, but whose very existence gave trouble. In Anjou, for instance, Henry had to contend against his own brother Geoffrey, to whom their father had left certain cities, and who might have a claim to the whole county. In Normandy the heirs of Stephen claimed the county of Mortain; in Maine, Saintonge, and other Southern provinces, there were the remnants of older dynasties, always ready to give trouble.

His relation
to the King
of France.

But further than this, the feudal law, as it was then recognized in France, gave the king, in his manifold capacities as king, duke, and count, certain rights and certain obligations that are puzzling now, and must have been actually bewildering then. Henry, as Duke of Normandy, inherited the relation, entered into by his ancestor Duke Richard the Fearless, of vassal to the Duke of the Franks; but the Duke of the Franks had now become King of France. It was a serious question how the duties of vassalage were to be defined. As Duke of Normandy also he had a right to the feudal superiority of Brittany. Yet it was no easy thing to say how Brittany could be made to act in case of a quarrel between king and duke. The tie which bound him as Count of Anjou was different from that which bound him as Duke of Normandy to the same King of France. As Count of Poictiers he was feudally bound to the Duke of Aquitaine, but he was himself duke of Aquitaine, unless he chose to regard his wife as duchess and himself as count, in which case he would be liable to do feudal service to his wife only, and she would be responsible for the service to the King of France; a very curious relation for a lady who had been married to both. We do not, however, find, that this contrivance was employed by Henry himself, although it was used by John. And this same point of difficulty arose everywhere. The feudal rights of Aquitaine—the right, that is, to demand homage and service—extended far beyond the limits of the sovereign authority of the dukes, and it was always an object to turn a claim of overlordship into an actual exercise of sovereign authority. The tie between the great county of Toulouse and the duchy of Aquitaine was complicated both by legal difficulty and by questions of descent. The rights over Auvergne, claimed by both the king and the duke, were so complex as to be the matter of continual arbitration, and at last were left to settle themselves.

Questions of
boundary.

Personal
questions.

And to these must be added, in the third place, local and personal questions; local, such as arose from uncertain boundaries, the line which separated Normandy from France, the Norman from the French Vexin, being perhaps the chief; personal, arising from the enmity between Eleanor and her first husband, from the attitude of the house of Champagne, from which Louis VII. had selected his third wife, and which had the wrongs of Stephen to avenge. The Count of Flanders also was a pertinacious enemy of Henry.

Henry’s
true policy.

His French
wars.

Under these circumstances it is not difficult to see that Henry’s policy, however ambitious he might be, was peace; at all events, peace long enough to consolidate his dominions and crush antagonism in detail. And this must account for the fact that, with the exception of the war of Toulouse, in which Louis VII. took part, not as a principal but as an ally of the count, there was no overt war between Eleanor’s two husbands until it was produced by an entirely new quarrel. It could not be expected that there should be any love or friendship, but there was peace. Henry’s policy was peace; Lewis was averse to war, having neither skill nor resources. All Henry’s French campaigns, then, during this period were occasioned by the circumstances which have been thus stated. The object of the war of 1156 was, sad to say, the subjugation of Geoffrey of Nantes, the king’s own brother, who submitted to him, after he had taken his castles one by one, in the July of that year, and who died two years after. The business of 1158 was to secure the territories that Geoffrey had left without heirs, and, that done, to prepare for the enforcement of Eleanor’s claims on Toulouse.

War of
Toulouse,
1159.

The war of Toulouse, with its preparations and results, occupied the greater part of 1159, although the campaign itself was short. Henry had assembled his full court of vassals. William of Warenne, the son of Stephen, and Malcolm, King of Scots, followed him as his liegemen rather than as allies. Becket, as his Chancellor, came with an equipment not inferior to that of any of his earls and counts. Altogether it was a very splendid and expensive affair. The king marched to Toulouse; but at Toulouse was his enemy, his friend, his lord, his wife’s first husband. Henry could not proceed to extremes against the man whom in his youthful sincerity he still recognized as his feudal lord, and whose personal humiliation would have degraded the idea of royalty, of which he was himself so proud. So he left Becket to continue the siege and returned westward. The French were attempting a diversion on the Norman frontier. Toulouse, therefore, was not taken. Towards the end of the year a truce was made with Lewis, and early in 1160 the truce was turned into an alliance. But the alliance brought with it the seeds of new and more fatal divisions.

Henry’s
sons and
daughters.

We have noted the way in which Henry used his children as his tools or as the counters of his game. He began with them very young. His eldest child, William, to whom we have seen homage done immediately after the coronation, died very soon after, and Henry, who was born in February, 1155, and had received conditional homage when he was two months old, now became the heir apparent. The next child was a daughter, Matilda, born in 1156; in 1157 Richard was born, at either Oxford or Woodstock; Geoffrey, the next brother, came in 1158; then Eleanor, in 1162; Johanna, in 1165; and last of all John, in 1167. On Henry’s attempts to provide for these children hangs nearly all the interest of his foreign wars; and the marriages of the daughters form a key to the history of the foreign policy of England and her alliances for many ages.

His projects
of marriage
for them.

Marriage of
Henry and
Margaret.

The game may be considered to begin with Richard, who at the age of a year was betrothed to the daughter of Raymond of Barcelona and Queen Petronilla of Aragon. This was done, it appears, to bind the count and queen either to help or to stand neutral in the war of Toulouse. The betrothal came to nothing. Henry, the elder brother, was the next victim. The peace of 1160 assigned him, at the age of five, as husband to the little lady Margaret of France, Lewis’s daughter by his second wife, Constance of Castile. This marriage was not only to seal the peace but to secure to Henry a good frontier between Normandy and France. The castles of Gisors and Neafle, and the county of the Vexin, which lay between Normandy and Paris, were to be Margaret’s portion, not to be surrendered until the marriage could be formally celebrated, and until then to remain in the custody of the Templars. Henry, however, did not stick at trifles. The little Margaret had been put into his hands to learn English or Norman ways. He had the marriage celebrated between the two children, and then prevailed on the Templars to surrender the castles. Lewis never forgave that, and the Vexin quarrel remained an open sore during the rest of the reign; for after the death of the younger Henry his rights were transferred to Richard by another unhappy marriage contract with another of Lewis’s daughters. Practically the question was settled by the betrayal of Gisors to Philip, by Gilbert of Vacœuil, whilst Richard was in Palestine; but the struggle continued until John finally lost not only the Vexin but Normandy itself and all else that he had to lose. For the present, however, the outbreak of war, to which Henry’s sharp practice led, was only a brief one. Henry was successful, and peace was concluded in August, 1161. The year 1162 he spent in Normandy, holding councils and organizing the administration of the duchy, as he had done that of the kingdom in his first year.

England
during the
king’s
absence.

During the whole of this long absence from England the country was governed by Richard de Lucy and Earl Robert of Leicester, as the king’s chief justices or justiciars; the little Henry taking his father’s place on occasions of ceremony, when he happened to be in England. The historians of these years tell us little or nothing of what was going on. There were no wars or revolts; abbots and bishops died and their successors were appointed; notably the good Archbishop Theobald, to whom Henry owed so much, died in 1161, and Becket succeeded him.

Progress of
reforms.

Nature of
the revenue.

Administration
of
justice.

From other sources we learn that Henry’s legal reforms were in full operation. He had restored the machinery of the Exchequer, and with it the method of raising revenue which had been arranged in his grandfather’s time. That revenue arose, firstly, from the ferm or rent of the counties; that is, the sum paid by the sheriffs as royal stewards; by way of composition for the rents of royal lands in the shire, and the ordinary proceeds of the fines and other payments made in the ancient shiremoot or county court; secondly, from the Danegeld, a tax of two shillings on the hide of land, originally levied as tribute to the Danes under Ethelred, but continued, like the Income Tax, as a convenient ordinary resource; thirdly, from the feudal revenue, arising from the profits of marriages, wardships, transfers of land, successions, and the like, and from the aids demanded by the king from the several barons or communities that owed him feudal support. To these we may add a fourth source, the proceeds of courts of justice, held by the king’s officers to determine causes for which the ancient popular courts were not thought competent; such as began with suits between the king’s immediate dependents, and by degrees extended to all the civil and criminal jurisdiction of the country. Judicature and finance were thus bound very closely together; the sheriffs were not only tax-gatherers but executors of the law, and every improvement in the law was made to increase the income of the Exchequer. To this we must attribute the means taken by Henry to administer justice in the counties, sending some of the chief members of his judicial staff, year after year, through the country, forcing their way into the estates and castles of the most despotic nobles, and spreading the feeling of security together with the sense of loyalty, and the conviction that ready justice was well worth the money that it seemed to cost. Besides the revival of the provincial judicature in this shape Henry, from the beginning of the reign, added form and organization to the proceedings of his supreme court of justice, which comes into prominence later on.

Scutage.

Next to these his most important measure was the institution or expansion of what is called Scutage. According to the ancient English law every freeman was bound to serve in arms for the defence of his country. That principle Henry only meddled with so far as to direct and improve it. But, according to the feudal custom, quite irrespective of this, every man who held land to the amount of twenty pounds’ worth of annual value was obliged to perform or furnish the military service of a knight to his immediate lord. This kept the barons always at the head of bodies of trained knights, who might be regarded as ultimately a part of the king’s army, but in case of a rebellion would probably fight for their immediate lord. Henry, by allowing his vassals to commute their military service for a money payment, went a long way to disarm this very untrustworthy body; and with the money so raised he hired stipendiaries, with whom he fought his Continental wars. He began to act on this principle in the first year of his reign, when he made the bishops, notwithstanding strong objections from Archbishop Theobald, pay scutage for their lands held by knight-service. But in 1159 he extended the plan very widely, and took money instead of service from the whole of his dominions, compelling his chief lords to serve in person, but hiring, with the scutages of the inferior tenants, a splendid army of mercenaries, with which he fought the war of Toulouse.

By thus disarming the feudal potentates, and forcing his judges into their courts, he completed the process by which he intended to humiliate them. Feudalism in England, after the reign of Henry II., never reared its head so high as to be again formidable.

Increase of
national
unity.

Other results incidentally followed from the special measures by which this great end was secured; the more thorough amalgamation of the still unfused nationalities of Norman and Englishman followed from a state of things in which both were equal before the law, and the distinctions or privileges of blood were no longer recognized among free men. The diminution of military power in the hands of the territorial lords left the maintenance of peace and the defence of the country to be undertaken, as it had been of old, by the community of free Englishmen, locally trained, and armed according to their substance. This created or revived a strong warlike spirit for all national objects, without inspiring the passion for military exploit or glory, which is the bane of what is called a military nation. On the national character, thus in a state of formation, the idea that law is and ought to be supreme was now firmly impressed; and although the further development of the governmental system furnished employment for Henry’s later years, and was never neglected, even in the busiest and unhappiest period of his reign, it may be fairly said that the foundation was laid in the comparative peace and industry of these early years. At the age of thirty Henry had been nearly nine years a king, and had already done a work for which England can never cease to be grateful.

CHAPTER IV.

HENRY II. AND THOMAS BECKET.

The English Church—Schools of Clergy—Rise of Becket—Quarrel with the King—Exile—Death.

The English
Church.

The history of the Church of England is during many ages the chief part of the history of the nation; throughout it is a very large part of the history of the people. Their ways of thinking, their system of morals, their intellectual growth, their intercourse with the world outside, cannot be understood but by an examination of the vicissitudes of their religious history; and it plays a scarcely less important part in the development of their political institutions. Christianity in England, looked at by the eye of history, means not only the knowledge of God and His salvation by Christ Jesus; it carries with it, besides, all that is implied in civilization, national growth and national unity.

Under the
Heptarchy.

When the English, under the seven or eight struggling and quarrelling dynasties whose battles form for centuries all the recorded life of the island, were seven or eight distinct nationalities,—some of them tribally connected, some of them using allied systems of law, but otherwise having scarcely anything in common beyond dialects of a common growing language,—altogether without any common organization or the desire of forming one,—the conversion in the seventh century taught them to regard themselves as one people. They were formed by St. Gregory and Archbishop Theodore into an organized Christian Church, the several dioceses of which represented the several kingdoms or provinces of their divided state.

National
unity first
realized.

Thus arranged in one or, later on, in two ecclesiastical provinces, the wise men of the several tribes learned to act in concert; the tribes themselves, casting aside their tribal superstitions for a common worship, found how few real obstacles there were to prevent them from acting as one people; and from the date of the conversion the tendency of the kingdoms was to unite rather than to break up. Although this process was slow—for it went on for four centuries, and was scarcely completed when the Norman Conquest forced the mass of varied national elements into cohesion—it was a uniform tendency, contrasted with, and counteracting numerous and varying tendencies towards separation. The Church built up the unity of the State, and in so doing it built up the unity of the nation.

Great power
of the
clergy.

And one result of this was to make the Church extremely powerful in the state. There was but one archbishop of Canterbury when there were seven kings; that archbishop’s word was listened to with respect and obeyed in all the seven kingdoms, in any one of which the command of a strange king would have been received with contempt. The archbishop was exceedingly powerful, both in Kent, his peculiar diocese, and by his alliances with the states and churches of the Continent; and the diocesan bishops were each, in his own district, a match for their kings, because they knew that in any struggle they could depend on the friendship of all their fellows outside their special kingdom, much more than the peccant king could depend on the assistance of his fellow-kings. They could meet in one council, whilst the several kings could only collect their own Witenagemots; they were, in fact, the rulers of the Church of England, whilst the kings were only kings of Kent, Mercia and Wessex. And when the kingdoms became one under the descendants of Egbert the prelates retained the same power.

Alliance of
Church and
State.

Never, perhaps, in any country were Church and State more closely united than they were in Anglo-Saxon times in England; for they were united, with careful recognition of their distinct functions, not, as in Spain and some other lands, confounding what should have been kept distinct, or making the prelates great temporal lords, or the national deliberations mere ecclesiastical councils. The prelates, the bishops and abbots, formed, as wise men, qualified by their spiritual office to be counsellors, a very large proportion of the Witenagemot, the ruling council of the kingdom; in every county the bishop sat in the courts with the sheriff, to declare the Divine law, as the sheriff did the secular law. The clergy were, for all moral offences, under the same rules as the laity, save that it was the bishop who in the common court attended to their case and saw substantial justice enforced. So matters went on until the Conquest, the changes which took place in the meantime affecting the spiritual discipline and character rather than the constitutional position of the clergy; making them, that is, more or less secular in their views and aims, but not lessening their power. Nay, every change strengthened rather than weakened their position. Dunstan was the prime minister of the last mighty king; but under Canute the prelates were even more powerful than under Edgar; and we can understand from the history of the Conquest that it was not the fault of the English-born bishops that William the Norman obtained the victory in the council as well as in the field.

Effects of
the Conquest
on the
Church.

The Hildebrandine
revival.

Church
policy of the
Conqueror.

The Conquest had some very marked effects in this region of life. In the first place, it was absolutely necessary for William to have the clergy on his side; if he had not he would have nothing to form a counterpoise for the power of the barons, which was already threatening, nor would he have been able to get hold of the people. He wanted to be a national king—the protector of the national Church, the king of the English people. In the hope of securing the support of the bishops he waited for three years before he took summary measures against those who were still secretly or overtly hostile. When patience was seen to be unavailing he deposed Archbishop Stigand, no doubt at the instigation of the Pope, but in his place he set, not a Norman, who would have alienated the people, but a wise Italian, under whose counsels the Norman king and the English people were drawn together almost as closely as the king and people had been before the Normans came. Two effects resulted directly from this. The Conquest of England coincides in point of time with the great period of the Hildebrandine ideas; the reign of Gregory VII. and of the Popes appointed by his influence, in which a new interpretation was put on the relations of Church and State, and a jealous equilibrium established or attempted, the result of which in France and Germany seemed to be the tying of the State to the chariot-wheels of the Church. Of such a consummation there was in England no chance under William and Lanfranc, but nevertheless the coincidence in time was not without its consequences. England and her Church were drawn into the vortex of the Church politics of Europe, and the relations between Church and State in England were re-modelled upon the new type. The courts of the bishops for the trial of clerks were separated from the courts of the sheriffs; the election of prelates was arranged by a sort of compromise between royal power and canonical form; the bishops became barons and held their lands, or a portion of them, by the new baronial tenure; and their councils were marked off by a much broader line than they had been from the councils of the Witan, or the courts of the king. Then, too, a new concordat was arranged to regulate the exercise of the papal power, for which, before the Conquest, the English had had a respectful but very distant regard. The king insisted that when there were rival popes he should be the judge to determine which should be accepted in England; no suit or appeal should be carried to Rome without his leave; none of his servants should be excommunicated against his sovereign will; no legate should land without his permission; no ecclesiastical legislation should be enforced without his approval.

The
Norman
Bishops.

Within these limits the bishops had a great deal of new power; and, as they succeeded in a great measure to the implicit faith and obedience which the nation had given to their own English bishops, they were able to exert a very strong influence towards keeping the nation together. They were kept by the king upon his side, as opposed to the barons, and securing them he secured the nation. This is clear even in the history of Anselm, who, although opposed to and persecuted by the king, never forgot his duty to the people so far as to take part with the barons against him. Besides the bishops, however, there was in the monasteries a great reserve fund of national feeling; and, up to the reign of Henry II., what little we can trace of English feeling is to be traced in the writings of the monks; they kept alive an English sentiment as distinct from the new national idea that was to blend English and Norman, the king and the bishops more distinctly representing the latter.

In Stephen’s
reign.

Secular
school.

These things being so, we are able to understand what it was that gave the prelates the great moral weight they possessed in Stephen’s reign, and to perceive how vast was the importance of maintaining the alliance between them and the crown. We learn too how the many streams of influence which they guided reacted upon the clerical body itself, and produced several distinct schools or classes of ecclesiastical character. In the first place, the kings had taken prelates to be their ministers, and had promoted their ministers to be prelates. Bishop Roger of Salisbury was not only a powerful ecclesiastic but the royal justiciar, the head of all the courts and the treasurer of all the money of the king. Under him was a set of clerks who would set the fashion for one school of the clergy, secular in mind and aim and manners; often married men, so far as their right to marry can be accounted valid, canons of cathedrals where they provided for their children and made estates for themselves; worthy men most of them, the predecessors of the clerical magistrates of this day, far greater in quarter sessions and county meetings than in convocation or missionary work. That was one very strong school—a school that required tender handling both politically and ecclesiastically, and in the view of which we can understand how important it was for Bishop Roger to secure the consent of the Pope and the archbishops to his holding secular office. For it is said that, worldly man as he was, he refused, as a matter of conscience as well as policy, to act as the king’s minister, without the distinct approval of the saintly Anselm and his successors, the archbishops as well as the popes.

Ecclesiastical
school.

A second class was composed of the ecclesiastical politicians, men, that is, who were before all things Churchmen, of whom Henry of Winchester is one of the best specimens. These did not like the first, sink the clergyman in the statesman or the magistrate, and accept preferment as the mere reward of political service; they were not the Sadducees but the Pharisees of the time; they would not marry, nor sell livings, nor act against the Pope; whatever secular power they could get they would use for the benefit of the Church. To say this is not to condemn them; they saw in the service of the Church the clearest and readiest way of serving both God and man. These men were in tone and morals a higher set of men than the first. They were in close alliance with the see of Rome; they knew far more than the others about the state of Christendom generally; they were scholars, the founders of universities, the protectors of culture; they prevented the Church from becoming thoroughly secular; and, if there was a higher type, it was a type also much more liable to be assumed by counterfeits. It is a great mistake to undervalue this school. It would seem probable that both Archbishop Theobald as well as his rival, Henry of Winchester, should be referred to it; it was the party of the Legate, the party that tried to introduce the Civil law as a subject of study at Oxford; that went abroad to attend councils, that bearded royal tyranny in Church and State.

The Spiritual
school.

And there was a higher type—a type we will call it rather than a school, because the graces that compose it are not learned in men’s schools, but under the discipline of a Divine master; the pure religious type, which we find, with some alloy, in such men as Anselm; the meek and quiet spirit that has a zeal for righteousness and a love of souls; that will bear all things for itself, but rise up to avenge the cause of the helpless. It is the noblest type; to which belong the true hero, the true martyr, the saint indeed; but it is a type which to man’s eye is the most easily counterfeited by the popular hero, the self-advertising saint, the professed candidate for mock martyrdom.

Such, then, are the three types of character which perhaps mark all ages of the Church, but which come out most markedly and distinctly in the present period; and the career of Thomas Becket, the hero of this part of our national history, cannot be understood without a clear idea of them.

Rise of
Thomas
Becket.

Becket as
Chancellor.

For Becket was a very extraordinary man. In whatever he did he acted on Solomon’s maxim and did it with his might; and, as he passed through each of the phases of character that mark these three schools, his career may be divided accordingly. In the first phase he was a secular Churchman. He had been trained in the house of his father, a London merchant of Norman blood; he had been schooled in accounts by Master Octonummi; he had learned accomplishments in the hall of Richer de l’Aigle; and then had entered Archbishop Theobald’s family as secretary. There, no doubt, he got his knowledge of civil and canon law, and learned the business of a diplomatist. Although Theobald was an ecclesiastical politician of the second stamp, he did not as yet impress that character on Becket. John of Salisbury, who also was Theobald’s secretary, took some such impression from him, and shows it in a constant criticism of Becket from the point of view natural to the Churchman pure and simple. Still Becket learned that side of life during these experiences. With this training he was qualified not only to conduct the negotiations that secured the crown to Henry II., but, when he was made Chancellor, as he was at the king’s accession, he was able to manage and extend the duties of his office, magnifying it as no other Chancellor had done before. The Chancellor was a sort of secretary of state for all departments; he was not so powerful in himself, or in his constitutional position, as the Justiciar, but he had nearly as much real power through his hold on the king, whose letters he wrote, whose accounts he kept, all whose formal business he recorded, and all whose irksome duties he took off his hands. We find Becket, then, in this relation to Henry, who had no great love of public pomp, and was willing enough that the Chancellor should share the expense. Becket at this time appears to us as a very splendid officer, with a great retinue of knights and a great revenue from his churches; an indefatigable letter-writer, an efficient judge, a cunning financier; as yet not a great Churchman in politics, for the plan of taxing the bishops by scutage was set on foot by him, in opposition to the archbishop, his old patron.

Henry’s confidence
in him.

Becket becomes
archbishop.

Henry might well think himself fortunate in securing such a minister; he threw himself with entire confidence upon him, and there can be little doubt that Becket is to a great degree answerable for the grievous change in Henry’s character that followed their quarrel. To anticipate, however: when Henry made his Chancellor Archbishop of Canterbury he contemplated securing, at the head of the Church, a friend who would sympathize with his statesmanlike designs, who was sure to be able to sway the clergy, and who would repay his unbounded confidence with grateful and straightforward service. But he was sadly disappointed. Becket was not the man to exchange his splendid position as Chancellor for the life of an ordinary commonplace archbishop. If he undertook the office he would act up to the highest idea of its requirements. Never was there a more sudden transformation. One day he is, like Roger of Salisbury, hearing causes and framing his budget, counting out his money, or reviewing his knights; the next he is Lanfranc in miniature, or not so much Lanfranc as Anselm, or Henry of Winchester rather than Anselm;—the high ecclesiastic pure and simple, coveting the Papal legation, hand-and-glove with the Pope, full of ideas based on the canon law, which his friend Gratian had just codified in the Decretum; an unflinching and unreasoning supporter of all clerical claims, right or wrong, wholesome or unwholesome, consistent or inconsistent with his previous life and opinions.

Becket in
his later
phase.

A third phase awaits him. In his new character he is pretty sure to quarrel with the king; he does so, and, however just his cause, he does it in a way that does not prejudice us in his favor; his object is studiously to put Henry in the wrong; his conduct in the last degree exasperating. The second form of clerical life has served its time. Now he comes out as a candidate for martyrdom. In this also he will do what he has to do with all his might. Unmindful of the early friendship of the king, from whom certainly he had never met with anything but kindness and the most familiar courtesy, he declares that he is in danger of his life; he insists on celebrating mass at the altar of the protomartyr and on appearing at court carrying his own cross, partly as a safeguard against violence which he has no reason to apprehend, partly in an awful miserable parody of the great day of Calvary. All the rest of his career is the same—a morbid craving after the honors of martyrdom, or confessorship at the least, a crafty policy for embroiling Henry with his many enemies, combined with a plausible allegation that it is all for his good and that of the Church. There is in him some greatness of character still, some sincerity, we will hope, but no self-renunciation, no self-restraint, no earnest striving for peace; little, very little, care of the flock over which he was overseer, and which was left shepherdless.

On a calm review of his life it seems that Becket was most at home in his first position; that in the second he was ill at ease and awkward, divided between two aims and failing in conduct as well as in cause. The third phase becomes him least of all; and it is only by considering the horrible sufferings of his death that we pardon him for the conduct that brought the pains of death upon him.

He becomes
archbishop.

Briefly to recapitulate the stages of the career of this man, to whom even his enemies allow the title of greatness: Becket was Chancellor from the accession of Henry, in 1154, to his consecration as Archbishop of Canterbury, in June, 1162. The king was still in France when Theobald died. It was regarded as a somewhat unprecedented measure to make so secular a person as Thomas archbishop, but Henry’s influence and his own were supreme; he had accepted the dignity with misgiving, but having accepted he did not hesitate about the measures to be taken for securing it; the consent of the bishops and monks was readily yielded, and one who was, so far as his place of birth could make him, an Englishman, sat once more on the throne of Augustine. All difficulties were smoothed for him; he had not to go to Rome for his pall; it arrived a few weeks after his consecration; and he had six months’ quiet and peace in his new dignity before the king came home.

Henry
returns from
France
1163.

Becket
resigns the
Chancery.

This was on the 25th of January, 1163. Henry found, as was to be expected, that considerable arrears of business had accrued during his long absence. He was meditating a new expedition to Wales in order to enforce the homage due to him and his heir-apparent from the Welsh princes. The trial of Henry of Essex, who had been accused of treason and cowardice by Robert de Montfort, for letting fall the standard at the battle of Consilt, and who was to defend himself by battle, was also imminent; and already some apprehensions were felt as to the conduct of the archbishop. He had resigned, much in opposition to Henry’s wishes, his office of Chancellor on his appointment as Archbishop, and had procured from the justiciar a full acquittance for all sums which he had received for the king during his tenure of office, especially the sums arising from the revenue of vacant churches, a source of royal income which was specially administered by the Chancellor. But he had not resigned the great manors of Eye and Berkhampstead, which were usually held as part of the endowment of the Chancellor; these it is possible he intended to hold only until his successor was appointed, but no successor was appointed, and the strange spectacle was seen of the Archbishop of Canterbury holding two of the finest pieces of the secular patronage of the crown without any official claim to them.

He enforces
the feudal
rights of his
see.

In another point he also showed himself somewhat grasping, or at all events made enemies at a moment when his experience should have taught him to be more politic. Many of the old possessions of his see had come into the hands of laymen, who were negligent in performing their services, and probably wished to throw off the yoke of the archbishop altogether. In order to enforce his rights he acted in a way which, justifiable as it was, was nevertheless imprudent; the result was a royal inquest as to the archiepiscopal fiefs; and, as the archbishop was already becoming unpopular, the verdict of the jury robbed him of some rights that might otherwise have been successfully maintained. In all this, however, he had no coolness with the king. Henry felt the resignation of the Chancellorship as a personal wrong; for although in the empire, where the king looked for precedents, the office of Arch-chancellor was held by the three great metropolitans of Germany, Becket had followed the usage almost unbroken in England in resigning; but there was nothing like an open quarrel. The spring of the year passed without one. In March the fate of Henry of Essex was decided; he was defeated in the battle trial, and the king, greatly against his will it was said—for he believed that the fall of the standard at Consilt was accidental—was obliged by the Norman law to declare his estates forfeited. Henry of Essex retired into a monastery, and so Henry lost one of his best friends.

Second
Welsh war,
1163.

Council at
Woodstock.