Henry the Second Part 3

But the rebellion had wakened in the king's mind a deep alarm, which showed itself in a new severity of temper. Famine and plague had fallen on the country; the treasury was well nigh empty; law and order were endangered. Henry hastened to return as soon as his foreign campaign was over, and in May 1175 "the two kings of England, whom a year before the breadth of the kingdom could not contain, now crossed in one ship, sat at one table, and slept in one bed." In token of reconciliation with the Church they attended a synod at Westminster, and went together on solemn pilgrimage to the martyr's tomb. Then they made a complete visitation of the whole kingdom. Starting from Reading on the 1st of June, they went by Oxford to Gloucester, then along the Welsh border to Shrewsbury, through the midland counties by Lichfield and Nottingham to York, and then back to London, having spent on their journey two months and a few days; and in autumn they made a progress through the south-western provinces. At every halt some weighty business was taken in hand. The Church was made to feel anew the royal power. Twelve of the great abbeys were now without heads, and the king, justly fearing lest the monks should elect abbots from their own body, "and thus the royal authority should be shaken, and they should follow another guidance than his own," sent orders that on a certain day chosen men should be sent to elect acceptable prelates at his court and in his presence. The safety of the Welsh marches was a.s.sured. The castle of Bristol was given up to the king, and border barons and Welsh princes swore fidelity at Gloucester. An edict given at Woodstock ordered that no man who during the war had been in arms against the king should come to his court without a special order; that no man should remain in his court after the setting of the sun, or should come to it before the sun rising; in the England that lay west of the Severn, none might carry bow and arrow or pointed knife. In this wild border district the checks which prevailed elsewhere against violent crime were unknown. The outlaw or stranger who fled to forest or moorland for hiding, might lawfully be slain by any man who met him. No "murder-fine" was known there. The king, not daring perhaps to interfere with the "liberties" of the west, may have sought to check crime by this order against arms; but such a law was practically a dead letter, for in a land where every man was the guardian of his own life it was far more perilous to obey the new edict than to disregard it.

The king's harsh mood was marked too by the cruel prosecutions of offences against forest law which had been committed in the time of the war. The severe punishments were perhaps a means of chastizing is affected landowners; they were certainly useful in filling the empty treasury. n.o.bles and barons everywhere were sued for hunting or cutting wood or owning dogs, and were fined sometimes more than their whole possessions were worth. In vain the justiciar, De Lucy, pleaded for justice to men who had done these things by express orders of the king given to De Lucy himself; "his testimony could prevail nothing against the royal will." Even the clergy were dragged before the civil courts, "neither archbishop nor bishop daring to make any protest." The king's triumph over the rebellion was visibly complete when at York the treaty which had been made the previous year with the King of Scotland was finally concluded, and William and his brother did homage to the English sovereigns. A few weeks later Henry and his son received at Windsor the envoys of the King of Connaught, the only one of the Irish princes who had till now refused homage.

In the Church as in the State the royal power was unquestioned. A papal legate arrived in October, who proved a tractable servant of the king; "with the right hand and the left he took gifts, which he planted together in his coffers". His coming gave Henry opportunity to carry out at last through common action of Church and State his old scheme of reforms. In the a.s.size of Northampton, held in January 1176, the king confirmed and perfected the judicial legislation which he had begun ten years before in the a.s.size of Clarendon. The kingdom was divided into six circuits. The judges appointed to the circuits were given a more full independence than they had before, and were no longer joined with the sheriffs of the counties in their sessions, their powers were extended beyond criminal jurisdiction to questions of property, of inheritance, of wardship, of forfeiture of crown lands, of advowsons to churches, and of the tenure of land. For the first time the name of Just.i.tiarii Itinerantes was given in the Pipe Roll to these travelling justices, and the anxiety of the king to make the procedure of his courts perfectly regular, instead of depending on oral tradition, was shown by the law books which his ministers began at this time to draw up. As a security against rebellion, a new oath of fealty was required from every man, whether earl or villein, fugitives and outlaws were to be more sharply sought after, and felons punished with harsher cruelty. "Thinking more of the king than of his sheep," the legate admitted Henry's right to bring the clergy before secular courts for crimes against forest law, and in various questions of lay fiefs; and agreed that murderers of clerks, who till then had been dealt with by the ecclesiastical courts, should bear the same punishment as murderers of laymen, and should be disinherited. Religious churchmen looked on with helpless irritation at Henry's first formal victory over the principles of Thomas; in the view of his own day he had "renewed the a.s.size of Clarendon, and ordered to be observed the execrable decrees for which the blessed martyr Thomas had borne exile for seven years, and been crowned with the crown of martyrdom."

During the next two years Henry was in perpetual movement through the land from Devon to Lincoln, and between March 1176 and August 1177 he summoned eighteen great councils, besides many others of less consequence. From 1178 to 1180 he paid his last long visit to England, and again with the old laborious zeal he began his round of journeys through the country. "The king inquired about the justices whom he had appointed, how they treated the men of the kingdom; and when he learned that the land and the subjects were too much burthened with the great number of justices, because there were eighteen, he elected five-two clerks and three laymen-all of his own household; and he ordered that they should hear all appeals of the kingdom and should do justice, and that they should not depart from the King's Court, but should remain there to hear appeals, so that if any question should come to them they should present it to the audience of the king, and that it should be decided by him and by the wise men of the kingdom." The Justices of the Bench, as they were called, took precedence of all other judges. The influence of their work was soon felt. From this time written records began to be kept of the legal compromises made before the King's Court to render possible the transference of land. It seems that in 1181 the practice was for the first time adopted of entering on rolls all the business which came to the King's Court, the pleas of the Crown and common pleas between subjects. Unlike in form to the great Roll of the Pipe, in which the records of the Exchequer Court had long been kept, the Plea Rolls consisted of strips of parchment filed together by their tops, on which, in an uncertain and at first a blundering fashion, the clerks noted down their records of judicial proceedings. But practice soon brought about an orderly and mechanical method of work, and the system of procedure in the Bench rapidly attained a scientific perfection. Before long the name of the Curia Regis was exclusively applied to the new court of appeal.

The work of legal reform had now practically come to an end. Henry indeed still kept a jealous watch over his judges. Once more, on the retirement of De Lucy in 1179, he divided the kingdom into new circuits, and chose three bishops-Winchester, Ely, and Norwich-"as chief justiciars, hoping that if he had failed before, the seat least he might find steadfast in righteousness, turning neither to the right nor to the left, not oppressing the poor, and not deciding the cause of the rich for bribes." In the next year he set Glanville finally at the head of the legal administration. After that he himself was called to other cares. But he had really finished his task in England. The mere system of routine which the wisdom of Henry I. had set to control the arbitrary power of the king had given place to a large and n.o.ble conception of government; and by the genius of Henry II. the law of the land was finally established as the supreme guardian of the old English liberties and the new administrative order.

CHAPTER X

THE COURT OF HENRY

In the years that followed the a.s.size of Northampton Henry was at the height of his power. He was only forty-three, and already his triumph was complete. One of his sons was King of England, one Count of Poitou, one Lord of Britanny, one was named King of Ireland. His eldest daughter, wife of the Duke of Saxony, was mother of a future emperor, the second was Queen of Castile, the third was in 1176 married to William of Sicily, the wealthiest king of his time. All nations hastened to do honour to so great a potentate. Henry's counselors were called together to receive, now amba.s.sadors from Sicily, now the envoys of the Emperors both of the East and of the West, of the Kings of Castile and Navarre, and of the Duke of Saxony, the Archbishop of Reims, and the Count of Flanders.

In England the king's power knew no limits. Rebellion had been finally crushed. His wife and sons were held in check. He had practically won a victory over the Church. Even in renouncing the Const.i.tutions of Clarendon at Avranches Henry abandoned more in word than in deed. He could still fall back on the law of the land and the authority which he had inherited from the Norman kings. Since the Conqueror's days no Pope might be recognized as Apostolic Pope save at the king's command; no legate might land or use any power in England without the king's consent; no ecclesiastical senate could decree laws which were not authorized by the king, or could judge his servants against his will. The king could effectually resist the introduction of foreign canon law; he could control communications with Rome; he could stay the proceedings of ecclesiastical courts if they went too far, or prejudiced the rights of his subjects; and no sentence could be enforced save by his will. Henry was strong enough only six years after the death of Thomas to win control over a vast amount of important property by insisting that questions of advowson should be tried in the secular courts, and that the murderers of clerks should be punished by the common law. He was able in effect to prevent the Church courts from interfering in secular matters save in the case of marriages and of wills. He preserved an unlimited control over the choice of bishops. In an election to the see of St. David's the canons had neglected to give the king notice before the nomination of the bishop. He at once ordered them to be deprived of their lands and revenues. "As they have deprived me," he said, "of all share in the election, they shall have neither part nor lot in this promotion." The monks, stricken with well-founded terror, followed the king from place to place to implore his mercy and to save their livings; with abject repentance they declared they would accept whomsoever the king liked, wherever and whenever he chose. Finally Henry sent them a monk unknown to the chapter, who had been elected in his chamber, at his bedside, in the presence of his paid servants, and according to his orders, "after the fashion of an English tyrant," and who had then and there raised his tremulous and fearful song of thanksgiving. Towards the close of his reign there was again a dispute as to the election of an Archbishop of Canterbury. The monks, under Prior Alban, were determined that the election should lie with them. The king was resolved to secure the due influence of the bishops, on whom he could depend. "The Prior wanted to be a second Pope in England," he complained to the Count of Flanders, to which his affable visitor replied that he would see all the churches of his land burned before he would submit to such a thing. For three months the strife raged between the convent and the bishops in spite of the king's earnest efforts at reconciliation. "Peace is by all means to be sought," he urged. "He was a wise man who said, 'Let peace be in our days'. For the sake of G.o.d choose peace, as much as in you lies follow after peace" "The voice of the people is the voice of G.o.d," he argued in proposing at last that bishops and monks should sit together for the election. "But this he said," observed the monks, "knowing the mind of the bishops, and that they sought rather the favour of the king than of G.o.d, as their fathers and predecessors had done, who denied St. Anselm for Rufus, who forsook Theobald for King Stephen, who rejected the holy martyr Thomas for King Henry." Henry, however, won the day, and his friend and nominee, the good Bishop Baldwin of Worcester, singular for piety and righteousness, was set in the Primate's chair. Of this archbishop we read that "his power was so great and so formidable that no one was equal to him in all England, and without his pleasure no one would dare even to obey the commands of the Pope.... But," adds the irritated chronicler, "I think that he would do nothing save at the orders of the king, even if the Apostle Peter came to England about it."

In the opinion of anxious critics of the day, indeed, the victory which had been almost won by Thomas seemed altogether lost after his death. Even the monasteries, where the ecclesiastical temper was most formidable, were forced to choose abbots and priors whom the king could trust. In its subjection the Church was in Henry's eyes an admirable engine to serve the uses of the governing power. One of the most important steps in the conquest of Wales had been the forcing of the Welsh Church into obedience to the see of Canterbury; and Henry steadily used the Welsh clergy as instruments of his policy. His efforts to draw the Scotch Church into a like obedience were unceasing. In Ireland he worked hard for the same object. On the death of an Archbishop of Dublin, the Irish clergy were summoned to Evesham, and there bidden in the king's court, after the English fashion, to choose an Englishman, c.u.min, as their archbishop. The claims of the papacy were watched with the most jealous care. No legate dared to land in England save at the king's express will. A legate in Ireland who seemed to "play the Roman over them" was curtly told by the king's officers that he must do their bidding or leave the country. In 1184 the Pope sent to ask aid for his necessities in Rome. A council was called to consider the matter, and Glanville urged that if papal messengers were allowed to come through England collecting money, it might afterwards become a custom to the injury of the kingdom. The Council decided that the only tolerable solution of the difficulty was for the king to send whatever he liked to the Pope as a gift from himself, and to accept afterwards from them compensation for what he might have given.

The questions raised by the king between Church and State in England had everywhere to be faced sooner or later. Even so devoted a servant of the Church as St. Louis of France was forced into measures of reform as far-reaching as those which Henry had planned a century earlier. But Henry had begun his work a hundred years too soon; he stood far before his age in his attempt to bring the clergy under a law which was not their own. His violence had further hindered the cause of reform, and the work which he had taken in hand was not to be fully carried out till three centuries and a half had pa.s.sed away. We must remember that in raising the question of judicial reform he had no desire to quarrel with the Church or priesthood. He refused indeed to join in any fanatical outbreak of persecution of the Jews, such as Philip of France consented to; and when persecution raged against the Albigenses of the south he would have no part or lot in it, and kept his own dominions open as a refuge for the wandering outcasts; but this may well have been by the counsel of the wise churchmen about him. To the last he looked on the clergy as his best advisers and supporters. He never demanded tribute from churches or monasteries, a monkish historian tells us, as other princes were wont to do on plea of necessity; with religious care he preserved them from unjust burthens and public exactions. By frequent acts of devotion he sought to win the favour of Heaven or to rouse the religious sympathies of England on his behalf. In April 1177 he met at Canterbury his old enemy, the Archbishop of Reims, and laid on the shrine of St. Thomas a charter of privileges for the convent. On the 1st of May he visited the shrine of St. Eadmund, and the next day that of St. Aetheldreda at Ely. The bones of a saint stolen from Bodmin were restored by the king's order, and on their journey were brought to Winchester that he might do them reverence. Relics discovered by miraculous vision were buried with pomp at St. Albans. Since his vow four years before at Avranches to build three monasteries for the remission of his sins, he had founded in Normandy and England four or five religious houses for the Templars, the Carthusians, and the Austin canons; he now brought nuns from Fontevraud, for whom he had a special reverence, and set them in the convent at Amesbury, whose former inhabitants were turned out to make way for them; while the canons of Waltham were replaced by a stricter order of Austin canons. A templar was chosen to be his almoner, that he might carry to the king the complaints of the poor which could not come to his own ears, and distribute among the needy a tenth of all the food and drink that came into the house of the king.

It is true that on Henry himself the strife with the Church left deep traces. He became imperious, violent, suspicious. The darker sides of his character showed themselves, its defiance, its superst.i.tion, its cynical craft, its pa.s.sionate pride, its ungoverned wrath. His pa.s.sions broke out with a reckless disregard of earlier restraints. Eleanor was a prisoner and a traitor; she was nearly fifty when he himself was but forty-one. From this time she practically disappeared out of Henry's life. The king had bitter enemies at court, and they busied themselves in spreading abroad dark tales; more friendly critics could only plead that he was "not as bad as his grandfather." After the rebellion of 1174 he openly avowed his connection with Rosamond Clifford, which seems to have begun some time before. Eleanor was then in prison, and tales of the maze, the silken clue, the dagger, and the bowl, were the growth of later centuries. But "fair Rosamond" did not long hold her place at court. She died early and was carried to G.o.dstowe nunnery, to which rich gifts were sent by her friends and by the king himself. A few years later Hugh of Lincoln found her shrine before the high altar decked with gold and silken hangings, and the saintly bishop had the last finery of Rosamond swept from the holy place, till nothing remained but a stone with the two words graven on it, "Tumba Rosamundae."

But behind Henry's darkest and sternest moods lay a nature quick in pa.s.sionate emotion, singularly sensitive to affection, tender, full of generous impulse, clinging to those he loved with yearning fidelity and long patience. The story of St. Hugh shows the unlimited influence won over him by a character of singular holiness. Henry had brought Hugh from Burgundy, and set him over a newly-founded Cistercian priory at Witham. The little settlement was in sore straits, and the impatient monks railed pa.s.sionately at the king, who had abandoned them in their necessities. It was just after the rebellion, and Henry, hard pressed by anxiety, was in his harshest and most bitter temper. "Have patience," said Hugh, "for the king is wise beyond measure and wholly inscrutable; it may be that he delays to grant our request that he may try us." But brother Girard was not to be soothed, and in a fresh appeal to the king his vehemence broke out in a torrent of reproaches and abuse. Henry listened unmoved till the monk ceased from sheer lack of words. There was dead silence for a time, while Prior Hugh bent down his head in distress, and the king watched him under his eyelids. At last, taking no more notice of the monk than if he never existed, Henry turned to Hugh, "What are you thinking of, good man?" he said. "Are you preparing to go away and leave our kingdom?" Hugh answered humbly and gently, "I do not despair of you so far, my lord; rather I have great sorrow for the troubles and labours which hinder the care for your soul. You are busy now, but some day, when the Lord helps, we will finish the good work begun." At this the king's self-control broke down; his tears burst forth as he fell on Hugh's neck, and cried with an oath, "By the salvation of my soul, while you have the breath of life you shall not depart from my kingdom! With you I wilt hold wise counsel, and with you I will take heed for my soul!" From that time there was none in the kingdom whom Henry loved and trusted as he did the Prior of Witham, and to the end of his life he constantly sought in all matters the advice of one who gave him scant flattery and much sharp reproof. The coa.r.s.e-fibred, hard-worked man of affairs looked with superst.i.tious reverence on one who lived so near to G.o.d that even in sleep his lips still moved in prayer. Such a man as Hugh could succeed where Thomas of Canterbury had failed. He excommunicated without notice to the king a chief forester who had interfered with the liberties of the Lincoln clergy, and bluntly refused to make amends by appointing a royal officer to a prebend in his cathedral, saying that "benefices were for clergy and not for courtiers." A general storm of abuse and calumny broke out against him at the palace. Henry angrily summoned him to his presence. The bishop was received by the king in an open s.p.a.ce under the trees, where he sat with all the courtiers ranged in a close circle. Hugh drew near and saluted, but there was no answer. Upon this the bishop put his hand lightly on the n.o.ble who sat next to the king, and made place for himself by Henry's side. Still the silence was unbroken, the king speechless as a furious man choked with his anger. Looking up at last, he asked a servant for needle and thread, and began to sew up a torn bandage which was tied round a wounded finger. The lively Frenchman observed him patiently; at last he turned to the king, "How like you are now," he said, "to your cousins of Falaise!" The king's quick wit caught the extravagant impertinence, and in an ecstasy of delight he rolled on the ground with laughter, while a perplexed merriment ran round the circle of courtiers who scarce knew what the joke might be. At last the king found his voice. "Do you hear the insolence of this barbarian? I myself will explain." And he reminded them of his ancestress, the peasant girl Arlotta of Falaise, where the citizens were famous for their working in skins. "And now, good man," he said, turning to the bishop in a broad good-humour, "how is it that without consulting us you have laid our forester under anathema, and made of no account the poor little request we made, and sent not even a message of explanation or excuse?"-"Ah," said Hugh, "I knew in what a rage you and your courtiers were!" and he then proceeded boldly to declare what were his rights and duties as a bishop of the Church of G.o.d. Henry gave way on every point. The forester had to make open satisfaction and was publicly flogged, and from that time the bishop was no more tormented to set courtiers over the Church. There were many other theologians besides Hugh of Lincoln among the king's friends-Baldwin, afterwards archbishop; Foliot, one of the chief scholars of his time; Richard of Ilchester, as learned in theology as capable in administration; John of Oxford, lawyer and theologian; Peter of Blois, ready for all kinds of services that might be asked, and as skilled in theology as in rhetoric. Henry was never known to choose an unworthy friend; laymen could only grumble that he was accustomed to take advice of bishops and abbots rather than that of knights even about military matters. But theology was not the main preoccupation of the court. Henry, inquisitive in all things, learned in most, formed the centre of a group of distinguished men which, for varied intellectual activity, had no rival save at the university of Paris. There was not a court in Christendom in the affairs of which the king was not concerned, and a crowd of travellers was for ever coming and going. English chroniclers grew inquisitive about revolutions in Norway, the state of parties in Germany, the geography of Spain. They copied despatches and treaties. They asked endless questions of every traveller as to what was pa.s.sing abroad, and noted down records which have since become authorities for the histories of foreign states. Political and historical questions were eagerly debated. Gerald of Wales and Glanville, as they rode together, would discuss why the Normans had so fallen away in valour that now even when helped by the English they were less able to resist the French than formerly when they stood alone. The philosophic Glanville might suggest that the French at that time had been weakened by previous wars, but Gerald, true to the feudal instincts of a baron of the Norman-Welsh border, spoke of the happy days before dukes had been made into kings, who oppressed the Norman n.o.bles by their overbearing violence, and the English by their insular tyranny; "For there is nothing which so stirs the heart of man as the joy of liberty, and there is nothing which so weakens it as the oppression of slavery," said Gerald, who had himself felt the king's hand heavy on him.

One of the most striking features of the court was the group of great lawyers which surrounded the king. The official n.o.bility trained at the Exchequer and Curia Regis, and bound together by the daily work of administering justice, formed a cla.s.s which was quite unknown anywhere on the continent. It was not till a generation later that a few clerks learned in civil law were called to the king's court of justice in France, and the system was not developed till the time of Louis IX.; in Germany such a reform did not take place for centuries. But in England judges and lawyers were already busied in building up the scientific study of English law. Richard Fitz-Neal, son of Bishop Nigel of Ely and great-nephew of Roger of Salisbury, and himself Treasurer of the Exchequer and Bishop of London, began in 1178 the Dialogus de Scaccario, an elaborate account of the whole system of administration. Glanville, the king's justiciar, drew up probably the oldest version which we have of the Conqueror's laws and the English usages which still prevailed in the inferior jurisdictions. A few years later he wrote his Tractatus de Legibus Angliae, which was in fact a handbook for the Curia Regis, and described the new process in civil trials and the rules established by the Norman lawyers for the King's Court and its travelling judges. Thomas Brown, the king's almoner, besides his daily record of the king's doings, left behind him an account of the laws of the kingdom.

The court became too a great school of history. From the reign of Alfred to the end of the Wars of the Roses there is but one break in the contemporary records of our history, a break which came in the years that followed the outbreak of feudal lawlessness. In 1143 William of Malmesbury and Orderic ceased writing; in 1151 the historians who had carried on the task of Florence of Worcester also ceased; three years later the Saxon Chronicle itself came to an end, and in 1155 Henry of Huntingdon finished his work. From 1154 to 1170 we have, in fact, no contemporary chronicle. In the historical schools of the north compilers had laboured at Hexham, at Durham, and in the Yorkshire monasteries to draw together valuable chronicles founded on the work of Baeda; but in 1153 the historians of Hexham closed their work, and those of Durham in 1161. Only the monks of Melrose still carried on their chronicle as far as 1169. The great tradition, however, was once more worthily taken up by the men of Henry's court, kindled by the king's intellectual activity. A series of chronicles appeared in a few years, which are unparalleled in Europe at the time. At the head of the court historians stood the treasurer, Richard Fitz Neal, the author of the Dialogus, who in 1172 began a learned work in three columns, treating of the ecclesiastical, political, and miscellaneous history of England in his time-a work which some scholars say is included in the Gesta Henrici II that was once connected with the name of Benedict of Peterborough. The king's clerk and justiciar, Roger of Hoveden, must have been collecting materials for the famous Chronicle which he began very soon after Henry's death, when he gathered up and completed the work of the Durham historians. Gervase of Tilbury, marshal of the kingdom of Arles, well known in every great town of Italy and Sicily, afterwards the writer of Otia Imperialia for the Emperor Otto IV., wrote a book of anecdotes, now lost, for the younger King Henry. Gerald of Wales, a busy courtier, and later a chaplain of the king, was the brilliant historian of the Irish conquest and the mighty deeds of his cousins, the Fitz Geralds and Fitz Stephens. "In process of time when the work was completed, not willing to hide his candle under a bushel, but to place it on a candlestick that it might give light to all, he resolved to read it publicly at Oxford, where the most learned and famous English clergy were at that time to be found. And as there were three distinctions or divisions in the work, and as each division occupied a day, the reading lasted three successive days. On the first day he received and entertained at his lodgings all the poor of the town, on the next day all the doctors of the different faculties and such of their pupils as were of fame and note, on the third day the rest of the scholars with the milites, townsmen, and many burgesses. It was a costly and n.o.ble act; the authentic and ancient times of poesy were thus in some measure renewed, and neither present nor past time can furnish any record of such a solemnity having ever taken place in England."

Literature was shaking itself free from the limits imposed upon it while it lay wholly in the hands of churchmen, and Gerald's writings, the first books of vivacious and popular prose-writing in England, were avowedly composed for "laymen and uneducated princes," and professed to tell "the doings of the people." He declared his intention to use common and easily understood words as he told his tales of Ireland and Wales, of their physical features, their ways and customs, and with a literary instinct that knew no scruple, added scandal, gossip, satire, bits of folk-lore or of cla.s.sical learning or of Bible phrases, which might serve the purposes of literary artifice or of frank conceit. The independent temper which had been stirred by the fight with the Church was ill.u.s.trated in his Speculum Ecclesiae, a bitter satire on the monks and on the Roman Curia. A yet more terrible scorn of the crime and vice which disgraced the Church inspired the Apocalypse and the Confession of Bishop Goliath, the work of Walter Map, Archdeacon of Oxford, king's chaplain ever since the days when Becket was chancellor, justiciar, amba.s.sador, poet, scholar, theologian, satirist. The greater part of the legends of the Saint Graal that sprang out of the work of Robert de Boron were probably woven together by his genius; and were used in the great strife to prove that the English Church originated independently of Rome. His Courtier's Triflings, suggested by John of Salisbury's Polycraticus, is the only book which actually bears his name, and with its gossip, its odd acc.u.mulations of learning, its fragments of ancient history, its outbursts of moral earnestness, its philosophy, brings back to us the very temper of the court and the stir and quickening of men's minds-a stir which found expression in other works of bitter satire, in the lampoon of Ralph Niger, and in the violent attacks on the monks by Nigellus.

Nor was the new intellectual activity confined to the court. The whole country shared in the movement. Good cla.s.sical learning might be had in England, if for the new-fashioned studies of canon law and theology men had to go abroad; but conservative scholars grumbled that now law and physics had become such money-making sciences that they were beginning to cut short the time which used to be given to cla.s.sical studies. Gerald of Wales mourned over the bringing in from Spain of "certain treatises, lately found and translated, pretended to have been written by Aristotle," which tended to foster heresy. The cathedral schools, such as York, Lincoln, or London, played the part of the universities in our own day. The household of the Archbishop of Canterbury had been the earliest and the most distinguished centre of learning. Of all the remarkable men of the day there was none to compare with John of Salisbury, the friend of Theobald and of Becket, and his book, the __Polycraticus_ (1156-59), was perhaps the most important work of the time. It begins by recounting the follies of the court, pa.s.ses on to the discussion of politics and philosophy, deals with the ethical systems of the ancients, and hints at a new system of his own, and is everywhere enriched by wide reading and learning acquired at the schools of Chartres and Paris London could boast of the historian Ralph of Diceto, always ready with a quotation from the cla.s.sics amid the court news and politics of his day. Monasteries rivaled one another in their collection of books and in drawing up of chronicles. If their brethren were more famed for piety than for literary arts, they would borrow some noted man of learning, or even a practised scribe, who would for the occasion write under a famous name. The friends and followers of Becket told on every side and in every way, in prose or poetry, in Latin or Norman-French, the story of their master's martyrdom and miracles. The greatest historian of his day, William of Newburgh, was monk in a quiet little Yorkshire monastery. Gervase, a monk of Canterbury, began the Chronicle that bears his name in 1185. The historical workers of Durham, of Hexham, and of Melrose started into a new activity. A canon of the priory of St. Bartholomew's in London wrote before Henry's death a life of its founder Rahere, and noted the first cases received into the hospital. Joseph of Exeter, brother of Archbishop Baldwin, was the brilliant author of a Latin poem on the Troy Story, and of a poetic history of the first crusade. There was scarcely a religious house in the whole land which could not boast of some distinction in learning or literature.

Even the feudal n.o.bles caught the prevailing temper. A baron was not content to have only his household dwarf or jester, he must have his household poet too. Intellectual interest and curiosity began to spread beyond the cla.s.s of clerks to whom Latin, the language of learning and worship, was familiar, and a demand began to spring up for a popular literature which could be understood of the unlearned baron or burgher. Virgil and Statius and Ovid were translated into French. Wace in 1155 dedicated to Eleanor his translation into Norman-French of the History of Geoffrey of Monmouth, a book which came afterwards to be called the Brut d'Engleterre, and was one of the sources of the first important English poem, Layamon's Brut. Later on, in honour of Henry, Wace told in the Roman de Rou the story of his Norman ancestors, and the poem, especially in the account of Senlac, has given some brilliant details to history. Other Norman-French poems were written in England on the rebellion, on the conquest of Ireland, on the life of the martyred Thomas-poems which threw off the formal rules of the stilted Latin fashion, and embodied the tales of eye-witnesses with their graphic brief descriptions. An Anglo-Norman literature of song and sermon fast grew up, absolutely identical in tongue with the Norman literature beyond the Channel, but marked by special characteristics of thought and feeling. Meanwhile English, as the speech of the common folk, still lived on as a tongue apart, a tongue so foreign to judges and barons and Courtiers that authors or transcribers could not copy half a dozen English lines without a mistake. The serfs and traders who spoke it were too far removed from the upper court circle to take into their speech foreign words or foreign grammatical forms; the songs which their minstrels sang from fair to fair only lived on the lips of the poor, and left no echo behind them.

CHAPTER XI

THE DEATH OF HENRY

In the last nine years of Henry's reign his work lay elsewhere than in his English kingdom. They were years spent in a pa.s.sionate effort to hold together the unwieldy empire he had so laboriously built up. On the death of Louis in 1180 the peaceful and timid traditions of his reign were cast aside by the warlike Philip, who had from childhood cherished a violent hatred against Henry, and who was bent on the destruction of rival powers, and the triumph of the monarchy in France. Henry's absorbing care, on the other hand, was to prevent war; and during the next four years he constantly forced reconciliation on the warring princes of France. "All who loved peace rejoiced at his coming," the chroniclers constantly repeat. "He had faith in the Lord, that if he crossed over he could make peace." "As though always at his coming peace should certainly be made."

But in Britanny and in Aquitaine there was no peace. The sons whom he had set over his provinces had already revolted in 1173. In 1177 fresh troubles broke out, and from that time their history was one of unbroken revolt against their father and strife amongst themselves. "Dost thou not know," Geoffrey once answered a messenger of his father's, sent to urge him to peace, "that it is our proper nature, planted in us by inheritance from our ancestors, that none of us should love the other, but that ever brother should strive against brother, and son against father. I would not that thou shouldst deprive us of our hereditary right, nor vainly seek to rob us of our nature!" In 1182 Henry sought once more to define the authority of his sons, and to a.s.sert the unity of the Empire under his own supremacy by ordering Richard and Geoffrey to do homage to their brother for Aquitaine and Britanny. Richard's pa.s.sionate refusal struck the first open blow at his father's imperial schemes, and war at once broke out. The n.o.bles of Aquitaine, weary of the severe rule of Richard, had long plotted to set in his place his gentler brother Henry, and the young king, along with Geoffrey, lent himself openly to the conspiracy. In 1183 they called for help from Flanders, France, and Normandy, and a general revolt seemed on the point of breaking out, like that of ten years before. Henry II. was forced to march himself into Aquitaine. But in a war with his sons he was no longer the same man as when he fought with French king or rebel barons. His political sagacity and his pa.s.sionate love of his children fought an unequal battle. Duped by every show of affection, he was at their mercy in intrigue. Twice peaceful emba.s.sies, which he sent to Henry and Geoffrey, were slain before their eyes without protest. As he himself talked with them they coolly saw one of their archers shoot at him and wound his horse. The younger Henry pretended to make peace with his father, sitting at meat with him, and eating out of the same dish, that Geoffrey might have time to ravage the land unhindered. Geoffrey successfully adopted the same device in order to plunder the churches of Limoges. The wretched strife was only closed at last by the death of the younger Henry in 1183.

His death, however, only opened new anxieties. Richard now claimed to take his brother's place as heir to the imperial dignity, while at the same time he exercised undivided lordship over an important state a position which the king had again and again refused to Henry. Geoffrey, whose over-lord the young king had been, sought to rule Britanny as a dependent of Philip, and his plots in Paris with the French king were only ended by his death in 1185. Philip, on his part, demanded, at the death of the young king, the restoration of Margaret's dowry, the Vexin and Gisors; when Geoffrey died he claimed to be formally recognized as suzerain of Britanny, and guardian of his infant; he demanded that Richard should do homage directly to him as sovereign lord of Aquitaine, and determined to a.s.sert his rights over the lands so long debated of Berri and Auvergne. For the last years of Henry's reign disputes raged round these points, and more than once war was only averted by the excitement which swept over Europe at the disastrous news from the Holy Land.

After the death of the young king a precarious peace was established in Aquitaine, and Henry returned to England. In March 1185 he received at Reading the patriarch of Jerusalem and the master of the Hospital, bearing the standard of the kings of the Holy Land, with the keys of the Holy Sepulchre, of the tower of David, and of the city of Jerusalem. "Behold the keys of the kingdom," said the patriarch Heracles with a burst of tears, "which the king and princes of the land have ordered me to give to thee, because it is in thee alone, after G.o.d, that they have hope and confidence of salvation." The king reverently received them before the weeping a.s.sembly, but handed them back to the safekeeping of the patriarch till he could consult with his barons. He had long been pledged to join the holy war; he had renewed his vow in 1177 and 1181. But it was a heavy burden to be now charged with the crown of Jerusalem. Since the days of his grandfather, Fulk of Anjou, the last strong king of Jerusalem, there had been swift decay. Three of his successors were minors; Antone was a leper; the fifth was repudiated by every one of his va.s.sals. The last forty years had been marked by continual disaster. The armies of the Moslem were closing in fast on every side. A pa.s.sion of sympathy was everywhere roused by the sorrows of the Holy City. All England, it was said, desired the crusade, and Henry's prudent counting of the cost struck coldly on the excited temper of the time. Gerald of Wales officiously took on himself, in the middle of a hunting party, to congratulate the king on the honour done to him and his kingdom, since the patriarch had pa.s.sed by the lands of emperors and kings to seek out the English sovereign. Talk of this kind before all the court at such a critical moment much displeased the prudent king, and he answered in his biting way, "If the patriarch, or any other men come to me, they seek rather their own than my gain." The unabashed Gerald still went on, "Thou shouldst think it thy highest gain and honour, king, that thou alone art chosen before all the sovereigns of the earth for so great a service to Christ." "Thus bravely," retorted Henry, "the clergy provoke us to arms and dangers, since they themselves receive no blow in the battle, nor bear any burden which they may avoid!"

Henry's council, however, held firm against the general tide of romantic enthusiasm. In the weighty question of the eastern crown the king had formally and openly pledged himself to act by the advice of his wise men, as no king before him since the Conquest had ever done. An a.s.sembly was summoned at Clerkenwell on the 18th of March. No councillors were called from Anjou or Normandy or Aquitaine; the decision was made solely by the advice of the prelates and barons of England. "It seemed to all," declared the council, "to be more fitting, and more for the safety of his soul, that he should govern his kingdom with moderation and preserve it from the irruptions of barbarians and from foreign nations, than that he should in his own person provide for the safety of the eastern nations." The verdict showed the new ideal of kingship which had grown up during Henry's reign, and which made itself deeply felt over the whole land when in the days of his successor the duties of righteous government were thrown aside for the vainglories of religious chivalry. But the patriarch heard the answer with bitter disappointment, and was not appeased by promises of money and forces for the war. "Not thus will you save your soul nor the heritage of Christ," he declared. "We come to seek a king, not money; for every corner of the world sends us money, but not one a prince." And in open court he flung his fierce prophecy at the king, that as till now he had been greatest among the kings of the earth, so henceforth, forsaken by G.o.d and dest.i.tute of His grace, until his latest breath his glory should be turned into disaster and his honour into shame. Henry, as he rode with the patriarch back to Dover, listened with his strange habitual forbearance while Heraclius poured forth angry reproaches for the iniquities of his whole life, and declared at last that he had almost with his own hands slain St. Thomas. At this the king fiercely turned, with his eyes rolling in a mad storm of pa.s.sion, and the patriarch bent his head. "Do with me," he cried, "what you did to Thomas. I would rather have my head cut off by you in England than by the Saracens in Palestine, for in truth you are worse than any Saracen!" The king answered with an oath, "If all the men of my kingdom were gathered in one body and spoke with one mouth they would not dare to say this to me." Heraclius pointed scornfully to the train of followers. "Do you indeed think that these men love you-these who care only for your wealth? It is the plunder, and not the man, that this crowd follows after!" Henry spoke of the danger from his sons if he should quit his dominions. "No wonder," was the parting taunt of Heraclius; "from the devil they came, and to the devil they will go."

But Henry was never to come back to England. One day in June a certain Walter of the royal household was terrified by a vision of St. Thomas, who appeared bearing a shining sword which he declared had been newly forged to pierce through the king himself. Walter hurried to the chapel, where Henry was at ma.s.s, to tell his tale. Three times the king bent before the altar and signed himself devoutly as though he prayed to the Lord, and then pa.s.sed to his council chamber. The next day he called Walter to his presence, and sadly shaking his head, spoke with deep sighs, "Walter, Walter, I have felt how cruelly thy sword can strike, for we have lost Chateauroux!" War had in fact broken out in Aquitaine. Toulouse had risen against Richard. Philip, in violation of his treaty, invaded Berri and marched into Auvergne. Hastily gathering an army, Henry crossed to France in a terrible storm. He met Philip at Gisors on the 30th of September, but after three days' bitter strife the kings parted. In November they met again at Bonmoulins in the presence of the Archbishop of Reims, and a great mult.i.tude of courtiers and knights. Richard, outraged by the rumour that Henry proposed to give Aquitaine to John, turned suddenly to Philip, while the people crowded round wondering, ungirt his sword, and stretched out his hands to do homage to him for all his father's lands from the Channel to the Pyrenees. His unhappy father started back, stunned by this new calamity, "for he had not forgotten the evil which Henry his son had done to him with the help of King Louis, and this Philip was yet worse than his father Louis." As father and son fell apart the people rushed together, while at the tumult the outer ring of soldiers laid their hands upon their swords, and thus Philip and Richard went out together, leaving Henry alone.

A great solitude had indeed fallen on the old king. His wife was still guarded as a prisoner. Two of his sons had died traitors to their father. A third was in open rebellion. All his daughters were in far-off lands, and one of them was soon to die. Only one son remained to him of all his household, and to him Henry now clung with a great love-the fierce tenacity of an affection that knew no other hope. The king himself was only fifty-six; but he was already an old man, worn out by the prodigious labours and anxieties of forty years. There were moments when a pa.s.sionate despair settled down on his soul. One day he called his two friends, Baldwin and Hugh, out from the crowd of courtiers to ride beside him, and the bitterness of his heart broke forth, "Why should I revere Christ!" he cried, "why should I think Him worthy of honour who takes from me all honour in my lands, and suffers me to be thus shamefully confounded before that camp follower?" as he called the king of France. Then, as if beside himself, he struck spurs into his horse, and dashed back again into the throng of courtiers.

In the eyes of the world, however, Henry was still the most renowned among the kings of the earth in his una.s.sailable triumph and success. For forty years his reign had been one long triumph. From every difficulty conquered he had gained new strength; every rebellion had left him more unquestioned master. He had never yet known defeat. The Church was now earnest in his support. Papal legates won for him a truce of two months after the conference at Bonmoulins, and when at its close Britanny broke out in revolt, and Richard led an army against his father's lands, the legates again procured peace till after Easter. From February to June of 1189 Henry waited at Le Mans, still confident, it would seem, of peace. Once more legates were appointed to bring about a settlement between the two kings at La Ferte Bernardon the 4th of June. With a fierce outburst of anger Henry pa.s.sionately refused the demands of Philip. The legate threatened to lay France under an interdict if Philip persisted in war, but Philip only retorted that the Roman Church had no right to interfere between the king of France and his rebel va.s.sals, and added with a sneer that the cardinals already smelt English gold. Then at last Henry abandoned the hope of peace. His treasury was empty, and his lands on both sides of the water had been taxed to the last penny. His troops had melted away in search of more abundant pay. He was shut in between hostile forces-Breton rebels to westward, and the allied armies of Philip and Richard to eastward. The danger roused his old defiant energy. Glanville hurried to England "to compel all English knights, however exhausted and poor, to cross to France," while the king himself, with a few faithful barons and a small body of mercenaries, fell back on Le Mans, swearing that he would never forsake the citizens of the town where he had been born.

The French army, however, followed hard after him. On the 9th of June Philip and Richard halted fifteen miles off Le Mans, on the 11th of June they encamped under its walls. The next day they broke through the handful of troops who desperately held the bridge. A wealthy suburb which could no longer be defended was set on fire, so that it should not give shelter to the enemy, the wind swept the flames into the city, and Henry saw himself shut in between the burning town and the advancing Frenchmen. Then for the first time in his life he turned his back upon his enemies. At the head of 700 hors.e.m.e.n he rode out over a bridge to the north, and fled towards Normandy. As he mounted the spur of a hill two miles off, he turned to look at the flames that rose from the city, and in the bitterness of his humiliation he cursed G.o.d-"The city which I have loved best on earth, the city in which I was born and bred, where my father lies buried, where is the body of Saint Julian-this Thou, O G.o.d, to the heaping up of my confusion, and to the increase of my shame, hast taken from me in this base manner! I therefore will requite as best I can; I will a.s.suredly rob Thee too of the thing in me which Thou lovest best!"

For twenty miles the king, with his son Geoffrey the chancellor, and a few faithful followers, rode furiously under the burning sun through narrow lanes and broken roads till knights sank and died on the way. Once he was only saved from capture by the breaking of a bridge over a stream which was too deep for the pursuers to ford. Once Count Richard himself followed so hard upon them that he came up with the flying troop. William the marshal turned and raised his lance. "G.o.d's feet, marshal, do not kill me!" cried Richard; "I have no hauberk!" William struck his spear into the count's horse, so that it fell dead. "No, I will not kill you. Let the devil kill you!" he shouted with a fierce memory of the old prophecy. By nightfall Henry reached La Frenaye, within a day's ride of the Norman border. He threw himself on a bed, refusing to be undressed, and would scarcely allow Geoffrey to cover him with his own cloak. The next morning he sent his friends forward into Normandy to gather its forces and renew the war. But he himself, in spite of all prayers and warnings, declared that he would go back to Anjou. His pa.s.sionate emotion threw aside all cold calculations of reason. Every fortress on the way was in the hands of enemies; hostile armies were pressing in on every side; the roads were held by foreign troops,-French and Poitevin, Flemish mercenaries and Breton rebels-as the stricken king rode through the forests and along the trackways he had learned to know as a hunter in earlier days. Never had his indomitable will, his romantic daring, been so great as in this last desperate ride to reach the home of his race. He started on the 13th of June. Before the end of the month Geoffrey had hurried back from Normandy, and together they went to Chinon.

Henry was now shut in on every side. Poitou and Britanny were both in revolt. The forts along the Sarthe, the Loir, and the Loire had fallen into the hands of Philip. On the 30th of June his army was seen under the walls of Tours. Henry himself was on the same day suddenly struck down by fever; unable to meet the French king, he fell back down the river to Saumur. The great French princes, aghast at the swift catastrophe which had fallen, men scarcely knew how, on the Angevin king, trembling lest in this strange victory of the French monarchy his ruin should be the beginning of their own destruction, made a last effort for peace. But Philip stood firm, "seeing that G.o.d had delivered his enemy into his hand." On Monday, the 3d of July, the walls of Tours fell before his a.s.sault, and he sent a final summons to Henry to meet him at Colombieres, a field near Tours. The king travelled as far as the house of the Templars at Ballan. But there he was seized with intolerable agony in every nerve of his body from head to foot. Leaning for support against a wall in his extreme anguish, he called to him William the marshal, and the pitying bystanders laid him on a bed. News of his illness was carried to the French camp. But Richard felt no touch of pity. His father was but feigning some excuse to put off the meeting, he told Philip; and a message was sent back commanding him to appear on the next day. The sick king again called the marshal, and prayed him at whatever labour to carry him to the conference. "Cost what it may," he vowed, "I will grant whatever they ask to get them to depart. But this I tell you of a surety, if I can but live I will heal the country from war, and win my land back again." With a final effort of his indomitable will he rode on the 4th of July through the sultry summer heat to Colombieres. The great a.s.sembly gathered to witness the triumph of France was struck with horror at the marks of suffering on his face, and Philip himself, moved by a sudden pity, called for a cloak to be spread on the ground on which the king might sit. But Henry's fierce temper flashed out once more; he would not sit, he said; even as he was he would hear what they asked of him, and why they cut short his lands. Then Philip stated his demands. Henry must do homage, and place himself wholly at the French king's mercy to do whatever he should decree. Richard must receive, as Henry's heir, the fealty of the barons of the lands on both sides the sea. A heavy sum was to be paid to Philip for his conquests in Berri. Richard and Philip were to hold Le Mans and Tours, and the other castles of Maine and Touraine, or else the castles of the Vexin, until the treaty was completely carried out. Henry's barons were to swear that they would force him to observe these terms.

As Henry hesitated for a moment at these crushing demands, a sudden terrible thunder broke from the still air. Both kings fell back with superst.i.tious awe, for there had been no warning cloud or darkness. After a little s.p.a.ce they again went forward, and again out of the serene sky came a yet louder and more awful peal. Henry, half fainting with suffering, was only prevented from falling to the ground by the friends who held him up on horseback while he made his submission to his rival and accepted the terms of peace. Then for the last time he spoke with his faithless son Richard. As the formal kiss of peace was given, the count caught his father's fierce whisper, "May G.o.d not let me die until I have worthily avenged myself on thee!" The terrible words were to Richard only a merry tale, with which on his return he stirred the French court to great laughter.

Henry was carried back the same day in a litter to Chinon. So sudden and amazing a downfall was to the superst.i.tious terror of the time, evident token that the curse of Thomas had come to rest on him. The vengeance of the implacable martyr seemed to follow him through every act of the great drama. In Philip's scornful refusal to allow Henry to swear obedience, "saving his honour and the dignity of his kingdom," the zealots of the day saw a just retribution. At Chinon a deputation of monks from Canterbury met him. "Trusting that in his affliction he might pity the affliction of the Church," and grant demands long urged by the convent, they had sought him out, "going through swords." "The convent of Canterbury salutes you as their lord," they began, as they forced their way into the sick king's presence. Henry broke in with bitter indignation, "Then lord I have been, and am still, and will be yet-small thanks to you, ye evil traitors!" he added in a lower voice, which just caught the ears of the furious monks. But he listened patiently to their complaint. "Now go out," he said, "I will speak with my faithful servants." As the monks pa.s.sed out one of them stopped and laid his curse on the king, who trembled and grew pale at the terrible words. "The omnipotent G.o.d of His ineffable mercy, and for the merits of the blessed martyr Thomas, if his life and pa.s.sion has been well pleasing to Him, will shortly do us justice on thy body." Tortured with suffering, Henry still summoned strength for his last public act. He called his clerk and dictated a letter to Canterbury, to urge patience till his return, when he would consider their complaint and find a way out of the difficulty. The same evening his chancellor, whom he had sent to Philip at Tours, returned with the list of those who had conspired against him Henry bade him read the names. "Sire," he said, "may Jesus Christ help me! the first name which is written here is the name of Count John your son." The king started up from his pillow. "Is it true," he cried, "that John, my very heart, whom I have loved beyond all my sons, and for whose gain I have brought upon me all this misery, has forsaken me?" Then he laid himself down again and turned his face to the wall. "Now you have said enough," he said. "Let all the rest go as it will, I care no more for myself nor for the world." From this time he grew delirious. But still in the intervals of his ravings the great pa.s.sionate nature, the defiance, the unconquered will broke out with inextinguishable force. He cursed the day on which he was born, and called down Heaven's vengeance on his sons. The great king's pride was bowed in the extremity of his ruin and defeat. "Shame," he muttered constantly, "shame on a conquered king." Geoffrey watched by him faithfully, and the dying king's last thoughts turned to him with grateful love. On the 6th of July, the seventh day of his illness, he was seized with violent hemorrhage, and the end came almost instantaneously. The next day his body was borne to Fontevraud, where his sculptured tomb still stands. To the astonished onlookers at the great tragedy, the grave in a convent church, separated from the tombs of his Angevin forefathers and of his Norman ancestors, far from his English kingdom, seemed part of the strange disasters foretold by Merlin and inspired messengers. But no ruler of his age had raised for himself so great a monument as Henry. Amid the ruin that overwhelmed his imperial schemes, his realm of England stood as the true and lasting memorial of his genius. Englishmen then, as Englishmen now, taught by the "remembrance of his good times," recognized him as one of the foremost on the roll of those who have been the makers of England's greatness.