VOLUME IX SLICE V "English History" (continued 2)

Yet so far as secular affairs went William seemed prosperous enough. Since his brother had pawned the duchy of Normandy to him, so that he reigned at Rouen no less than at London, the danger of rebellion was almost removed. His foreign policy was successful: he installed a nominee of his own, Edgar, the son of Malcolm Canmore, on the throne of Scotland (1097); he reconquered Maine, which his brother Robert had lost; he made successful war upon King Philip of France. His barons subdued much of South Wales, though his own expeditions into North Wales, which he had designed to conquer and annex, had a less fortunate ending. He dreamed, we are told, of attacking Ireland, even of crowning himself king at Paris. But on the 2nd of August 1100 he was suddenly cut off in the midst of his sins. While hunting with some of his godless companions in the New Forest, he was struck by an arrow, unskilfully shot by one of the party. The knight Walter Tyrrell, who was persistently accused of being the author of his master’s death, as persistently denied his responsibility for it; and whether the arrow was his or no, it was not alleged that malice guided it. William’s favourites had all to lose by his death.

The king’s death was unexpected: he was only in his fortieth year, and men’s minds had not even begun to ponder over the question of who would succeed him. The crown of England was left vacant for the boldest kinsman to Succession of Henry I. snatch at, if he dared. William had two surviving brothers, beside several nephews. Robert’s claim seemed the more likely to succeed, for not only was he the elder, but England was full of barons who desired his accession, and had already taken up arms for him in 1087 or 1095. But he was far away—being at the moment on his return journey from Jerusalem—while on the spot was his brother Henry, an ambitious prince, whose previous efforts to secure himself a territorial endowment had failed more from ill-luck than from want of enterprise or ability. Seeing his opportunity, Henry left his brother’s body unburied, rode straight off to Winchester with a handful of companions, and seized the royal treasure. This and his ready tongue were the main arguments by which he convinced the few magnates present, and persuaded them to back him, despite the protests of some supporters of Robert. There was hardly the semblance of an election, and the earl of Warwick and the chancellor William Giffard were almost the only persons of importance on the spot. But Henry, once hailed as king, rode hard for London and persuaded bishop Maurice to crown him without delay at Westminster, since the primate Anselm was absent beyond seas. He certainly lost no time: Rufus was shot on Thursday, the 2nd of August—his successor was crowned on Sunday the 5th of August! The realm heard almost by the same messengers that it had lost one king and that it had gained another.

Henry at once issued a proclamation and charter promising the redress of all the grievances with which his brother had afflicted his feudal tenants, the clergy and the whole nation. He would keep the ancient laws of King Edward, as amended by his father the Conqueror, and give all men good justice. These promises he observed more faithfully than Norman kings were wont to do; if the pledge was not redeemed in every detail, he yet kept England free from anarchy, abandoned the arbitrary and unjust taxation of his brother, and set up a government that worked by rule and order, not by the fits and starts of tyrannical caprice. He was a man of a cold and hard disposition, but full of practical wisdom, and conscious that his precarious claim to the crown must be secured by winning the confidence of his subjects. Almost the first and quite the wisest of his inspirations was to wed a princess of the old English line—Edith,1 the niece of Edgar Ætheling, the child of his sister Margaret of Scotland and Malcolm Canmore. The match, though his Norman barons sneered at it, gave him the hearts of all his English subjects, who supported him with enthusiasm, and not merely (as had been the case with Rufus) because they saw that a strong king would oppress them less than a factious and turbulent baronage. Henry won much applause at the same time by filling up all the bishoprics and abbacies which his brother had kept so long vacant, by inviting the exiled Anselm to return to England, and by imprisoning William’s odious minister Ranulf Flambard. He had just time to create a favourable impression by his first proceedings, when his brother Robert, who had returned from Palestine and resumed possession of Normandy, landed at Portsmouth to claim the crown and to rouse his partisans among the English baronage. Henry bought him off, before the would-be rebels had time to join him, by promising him an annual tribute of 3000 marks and surrendering to him all his estates in Normandy (1101). His policy seemed tame and cautious, but was entirely justifiable, for within a few months of Robert’s departure the inevitable feudal rebellion broke out. If the duke and his army had been on the spot to support it, things might have gone hardly with the king. The rising was led by Robert of Belesme, earl of Shrewsbury, a petty tyrant of the most ruffianly type, the terror of the Welsh marches. He was backed by his kinsmen and many other barons, but proved unable to stand before the king, who was loyally supported by the English shire levies. After taking the strong castles of Arundel, Tickhill, Bridgnorth and Shrewsbury, Henry forced the rebels to submit. He confiscated their estates and drove them out of the realm; they fled for the most part to Normandy, to spur on duke Robert to make another bid for the English crown. From the broad lands which they forfeited Henry made haste to reward his own servants, new men who owed all to him and served him faithfully. From them he chose the sheriffs, castellans and councillors through whom he administered the realm during the rest of his long reign.

This minor official nobility was the strength of the crown, and was sharply divided in spirit and ambition from the older feudal aristocracy which descended from the original adventurers who had followed William the Conqueror. Yet the latter still remained strong enough to constitute a danger to the crown whenever it should fall to a king less wary and resolute than Henry himself.

Henry was by nature more of an administrator and organizer than of a fighting man. He was a competent soldier, but his wish was rather to be a strong king at home than a great conqueror abroad. Nevertheless he was driven by the logic of events to attack Normandy, for as long as his brother reigned there, and as long as many English barons retained great holdings on both sides of the Channel and were subjects of the duke as well as of the king, intrigues and plots never ceased. The Norman war ended in the battle of Tenchebrai (Sept. 28, 1106), where Duke Robert was taken prisoner. His brother shut him up in honourable confinement for the rest of his life, though otherwise he was not ill-treated. For the rest of his reign Henry was ruler of all the old dominions of the Conqueror, and none of his subjects could cloak disloyalty by the pretence of owing a divided allegiance to two masters. With this he was content, and made no great effort to extend his dominions farther; his desire was to reign as a true king in England and Normandy, rather than to build up a loosely compacted empire around them.

Throughout the time of Henry’s Norman war, he was engaged in a tiresome controversy with the primate on the question of lay investitures, the continuation of the struggle which had begun in his brother’s reign. Every English king Henry’s difficulties with the church. for five generations had to face the danger from the church, no less than the danger from the barons. Anselm had come back from Rome confirmed in the theories for which he had contended with Rufus—nay, taught to extend them to a further extreme. He now maintained not only that it was a sin that kings should invest prelates with their spiritual insignia, the pallium, the staff, the ring, but claimed that no clerk ought to do homage to the king for the lands of his benefice, though he himself seven years before had not scrupled to make his oath to his earlier master. He now refused to swear allegiance to the new monarch, though he had recalled him and had restored him to the possession of his see. He also refused to consecrate Henry’s nominees to certain bishoprics and abbacies on the ground that they had not been chosen by free election by their chapters or their monks. The king was loath to take up the quarrel, for he highly respected the archbishop; yet he was still more loath to surrender the ancient claims and privileges of the crown. Anselm was equally reluctant to force matters to an open breach, yet would not shift from his position. There followed an interminable series of arguments, interrupted by truces, till at last Anselm, at the king’s suggestion, went to Rome to see if the pope could arrange some modus vivendi. Paschal II. for some time refused to withdraw from his fixed theory of the relation of church and state, and Anselm, in despair, preferred to remain abroad rather than to press matters to the rupture that seemed the only logical issue of the controversy. But in 1107 the pope consented to a compromise, which satisfied the king, and yet was acceptable to the church. Bishops and abbots were for the future to be canonically elected by the clergy, and were no longer to receive the ring and staff from lay hands. But they were to do homage to the king for their lands, and since they thus acknowledged him as their temporal lord Henry was content. Moreover, he retained in practice, if not in theory, his power to nominate to the vacant offices; chapters and monasteries seldom dared to resist the pressure which the sovereign could bring to bear upon them in favour of the candidate whom he had selected. The arrangement was satisfactory, and served as the model for the similar compromise arrived at between Pope Calixtus II. and the emperor Henry V. fifteen years later.

From 1107 onward Henry was freed from both the dangers which had threatened him in his earlier years, and was free to develop his policy as he pleased. He had yet twenty-eight years to reign, for he survived to the age of sixty-seven, an age unparalleled by any of his predecessors, and by all his successors till Edward I.

It is to Henry, aided by his great justiciar, Roger, bishop of Salisbury, that England owed the institution of the machinery of government by which it was to be ruled during the earlier middle ages. This may be described as a primitive Constitutional machinery. kind of bureaucracy, which gradually developed into a much more complicated system of courts and offices. Around the sovereign was his Curia Regis or body of councillors, of whom the most important were the justiciar, the chancellor and the treasurer, though the feudal officers, the constable and marshal, were also to be found there. The bulk of the council, however, was composed of knights and clerks selected by the king for their administrative or financial ability. The Curia, besides advising the king on ordinary matters of state, had two special functions. It sat, or certain members of it sat, under the presidency of the king or the justiciar, as the supreme court of justice of the realm. In this capacity it tried the suits of tenants-in-chief, and all appeals from the local courts. But Henry, not contented with this, adopted the custom of sending forth certain members of the Curia throughout the realm at intervals, to sit in the shire court, along with or in place of the sheriff, and to hear and judge all the cases of which the court had cognizance. From these itinerant commissioners (justices in eyre) descend the modern justices of assize. The sheriff, the original president of the shire court, was gradually extruded by them from all important business.

But there were other developments of the Curia. The justiciar, chancellor and treasurer sat with certain other members of the council as the court of exchequer, not only to receive and audit the accounts of the royal revenue, but to give legal decisions on all questions connected with finance. Twice in every year the sheriffs and other royal officials came up to the exchequer court, which originally sat at Winchester, with their bags of money and their sheaves of accounts. Their figures were subjected to a severe scrutiny, and the law was laid down on all points in which the interests of the sheriff and the king, or the sheriff and the taxpayer, came into conflict. In this way the exchequer grew into a law court of primary importance, instead of remaining merely a court of receipt. Though its members were originally the same men who sat in the Curia Regis, the character of the question to be tried settled the capacity in which they should sit, and two separate courts were evolved. (See Exchequer.)

Under the superintendence of the Curia Regis and the exchequer, the sheriff still remained the king’s factotum in local affairs. He led the shire-levies, collected the royal revenues both feudal and non-feudal, and presided in the shire-court as judge, till in the course of years his functions in that sphere were gradually taken over by the itinerant justices. On his fidelity the king had to rely both for military aid in times of baronial revolt and for the collection of the money which formed the sinews of war. Hence the position was one of the highest importance, and Henry’s new nobility, the men of ability whom he selected and promoted, found their special occupation in holding the office of sheriff. It was they who had to see that the shire court, and in minor affairs the hundred court, did not allow cases to slip away into the jurisdiction of the feudal courts of the baronage.

Henry I. must count not merely as the father of the English bureaucracy, but as a fosterer of the municipal independence of the towns. He gave charters of a very liberal character to many places, and in especial to London, where the citizens were allowed to choose their own sheriff, and to deal directly with the exchequer in matters of revenue. He even farmed out to them the charge of the taxes of the whole shire of Middlesex, outside the city walls. Such a grant was exceptional—though Lincoln also seems to have been granted the privilege of dealing directly with the exchequer. But in many other smaller towns the first grants—the smaller beginnings of autonomy—may be traced back to this period (see Borough).

Though Henry was an autocrat, and governed through bureaucratic officials who were entirely under his hand, yet a reign of law and order such as his was indirectly favourable to the growth of constitutional liberty. It was equally favourable to the growth of national unity: it was in his time that Norman and English began to melt together: intermarriage in all classes became common, and only thirty years after his death a contemporary writer could remark that it was hard for any man to call himself either Norman or English, so much had blood been intermingled.

It is unnecessary to go into the very uninteresting and unimportant history of Henry’s later years. A long war with France, prosecuted without much energy, led to no results, for the French king’s attempts to stir up rebellions in the name of William the Clito (q.v.), the son of Duke Robert, came to an end with that prince’s death in 1129. But the extension of the English borders in South Wales by the conquests of the lords marcher as far as Pembroke and Cardigan deserves a word of notice.

The question of the succession was the main thing which occupied the mind of the king and the whole nation in Henry’s later years. It had a real interest for every man in an age when any doubt as to the heir meant the outbreak Henry’s heir. of civil war such as had occurred at the death of the Conqueror and of Rufus. There was now a problem of some difficulty to be solved. Henry’s only son William had been drowned at sea in 1120. He had no other child born in wedlock save a daughter, Matilda, who married the emperor Henry V., but had no issue by him. On the emperor’s decease she wedded as her second husband Geoffrey of Anjou (1127), to whom during her father’s last years she bore two sons. But the succession of a woman to the crown was as unfamiliar to English as to Norman ideas, nor did it seem natural to either to place a young child on the throne. Moreover, Matilda’s husband Geoffrey was unpopular among the Normans; the Angevins had been the chief enemies of the duchy for several generations, and the idea that one of them might become its practical ruler was deeply resented. The old king, as was but natural, had determined that his daughter should be his successor; he made the great council do homage to her in 1126, and always kept her before the eyes of his people as his destined heir. But though he had forced or cajoled every leading man in England and Normandy to take his oath to serve her, he must have been conscious that there was a large chance that such pledges would be forgotten at his death. The prejudice against a female heir was strong, and there were too many turbulent magnates to whom the anarchy that would follow a disputed succession presented temptations which could not be resisted.

Henry died suddenly on the 25th of November 1135, while he was on a visit to his duchy of Normandy. The moment that his death was reported the futility of oaths became apparent. A majority of the Norman barons appealed Matilda, and Stephen. to Theobald, count of Blois, son of the Conqueror’s daughter Adela, to be their duke, and to save them from the yoke of the hated Angevin. His supporters and those of Matilda were soon at blows all along the frontier of Normandy. Meanwhile in England another pretender had appeared. Stephen, count of Boulogne, the younger brother of Theobald, had landed at Dover within a few days of Henry’s death, determined to make a snatch at the crown, though he had been one of the first who had taken the oath to his cousin a few years before. The citizens of London welcomed him, but he was not secure of his success till by a swift swoop on Winchester he obtained possession of the royal treasure—an all-important factor in a crisis, as Henry I. had shown in 1100. At Winchester he was acknowledged as king by the bishop, his own brother Henry of Blois, and by the great justiciar, Roger, bishop of Salisbury, and the archbishop, William of Corbeil. The allegiance of these prelates was bought by an unwise promise to grant all the demands of the church party, which his predecessor had denied, or conceded only in part. He would permit free election to all benefices, and free legislation by ecclesiastical synods, and would surrender any claims of the royal courts to have jurisdiction over clerks or the property of clerks. It then remained necessary to buy the baronage, of which only a few members had as yet committed themselves to his side. It was done by grants of lands and privileges, the first instalment of a never-ending crop of ruinous concessions which Stephen continued to make from the day of his accession down to the day of his death.

The pretender was crowned at Westminster on the 22nd of December 1135—less than a month after his uncle’s death. No one yet openly withstood him, but he was well aware that his position was precarious, and that the claims of Matilda would be brought forward ere long by the section of the baronage which had not yet got from him all they desired. Meanwhile, however, he was encouraged to persevere by the fact that his brother Theobald had withdrawn his claim to the duchy of Normandy, and retired in his favour. For a space he was to be duke as well as king; but this meant merely that he would have two wars, not one, in hand ere long. Matilda’s adherents were already in the field in Normandy; in England their rising was only delayed for a few months.

Stephen, though he had shown some enterprise and capacity in his successful snatch at the crown, was a man far below his three predecessors on the throne in the matter of perseverance and foresight. He was a good fighter, a liberal giver, and a faithful friend, but he lacked wisdom, caution and the power to organize. Starting his career as a perjurer, it is curious that he was singularly slow to suspect perjury in others; he was the most systematically betrayed of all English kings, because he was the least suspicious, and the most ready to buy off and to forgive rebels. His troubles began in 1136, when sporadic rebellions, raised in the name of Matilda, began to appear; they grew steadily worse, though Stephen showed no lack of energy, posting about his realm with a band of mercenary knights whenever trouble broke out. But in 1138 the crisis came; the baronage had tried the capacity of their new master and found him wanting. The outbreak was now widespread and systematic—caused Civil war. not by the turbulence of a few wild spirits, but by the deliberate conspiracy of all who saw their advantage in anarchy. Matilda had a few genuine partisans, such as her half-brother Robert, earl of Gloucester, the illegitimate son of Henry I., but the large majority of those who took arms in her name were ready to sell their allegiance to either candidate in return for lands, or grants of rank or privilege. A long list of doubly and triply forsworn nobles, led by Geoffrey de Mandeville, Aubrey de Vere and Ralph of Chester, made the balance of war sway alternately from side to side, as they transferred themselves to the camp of the highest bidder. It is hard to trace any meaning in the civil war—it was not a contest between the principle of hereditary succession and the principle of elective kingship, as might be supposed. It was rather, if some explanation must be found for it, a strife between the kingly power and feudal anarchy. Unfortunately for England the kingly power was in the hands of an incapable holder, and feudal anarchy found a plausible mask by adopting the disguise of loyalty to the rightful heiress.

The civil war was not Stephen’s only trouble; foreign invasion was added. David I., king of Scotland, was the uncle of Matilda, and used her wrongs as the plea for thrice invading northern England, which he ravaged with great cruelty. His most formidable raid was checked by the Yorkshire shire levies, at the battle of the Standard (Aug. 22, 1138). Yet in the following year he had to be bought off by the grant of all Northumberland (save Newcastle and Bamborough) to his son Earl Henry. Carlisle and Cumberland were already in his hands. Some years later the Scottish prince also got possession of the great “Honour of Lancaster.” It was not Stephen’s fault that the boundary of England did not permanently recede from the Tweed and the Solway to the Tyne and the Ribble.

But the affairs of the North attracted little attention while the civil war was at its height in the South. In 1139 Stephen had wrought himself fatal damage by quarrelling with the ecclesiastical bureaucrats, the kinsmen and allies of Roger of Salisbury, who had been among his earliest adherents. Jealous of their power and their arrogance, and doubting their loyalty, he imprisoned them and confiscated their lands. This threw the whole church party on to the side of Matilda; even Henry, bishop of Winchester, the king’s own brother, disowned him and passed over to the other side. Moreover, the whole machinery of local government in the realm fell out of gear, when the experienced ministers who were wont to control it were removed from power.

Matilda had landed in England in the winter of 1139-1140; for a year her partisans made steady progress against the king, and on the 2nd of February 1141 Stephen was defeated and taken prisoner at the battle of Lincoln. All England, save the county of Kent and a few isolated castles elsewhere, submitted to Matilda. She was hailed as a sovereign by a great assembly at Winchester, over which Stephen’s own brother Bishop Henry presided (April 7, 1141) and entered London in triumph in June. It is doubtful whether she would have obtained complete possession of the realm if she had played her cards well, for there were too many powerful personages who were interested in the perpetuation of the civil war. But she certainly did her best to ruin her own chances by showing an unwise arrogance, and a determination to resume at once all the powers that her father had possessed. When she annulled all the royal acts of the last six years, declared charters forfeited and lands confiscated, and began to raise heavy and arbitrary taxes, she made the partisans of Stephen desperate, and estranged many of her own supporters. A sudden rising of the citizens drove her out of London, while she was making preparations for her coronation. The party of the imprisoned king rallied under the wise guidance of his wife Matilda of Boulogne and his brother Henry, and many other of the late deserters adhered to it. Their army drove the lately triumphant party out of Winchester, and captured its military chief, Robert, earl of Gloucester. So much was his loss felt that his sister exchanged him a few months later for King Stephen.

After this the war went on interminably, without complete advantage to either side, Stephen for the most part dominating the eastern and Matilda the western shires. It was the zenith of the power of the baronial anarchists, who moved from camp to camp with shameless rapidity, wresting from one or other of the two rival sovereigns some royal castle, or some dangerous grant of financial or judicial rights, at each change of allegiance. The kingdom was in the desperate state described in the last melancholy pages of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, when life and property were nowhere safe from the objectless ferocity of feudal tyrants—when “every shire was full of castles and every castle filled with devils and evil men,” and the people murmured that “Christ and his saints slept.”

Such was England’s fate till 1153, when Matilda had retired from the strife in favour of her son, Henry of Anjou, and Stephen was grown an old man, and had just lost his heir, Eustace, to whom he had desired to pass on the crown. Both parties were exhausted, both were sick of the incessant treachery of their more unscrupulous barons, and at last they came to the compromise of Wallingford (October 1153), by which it was agreed that Stephen should reign for the remainder of his life, but that on his death the crown should pass to Henry. Both sides promised to lay down their arms, to dismiss their mercenaries, and to acquiesce in the destruction of unlicensed castles, of which it is said, with no very great exaggeration, that there were at the moment over 1000 in the realm. Henry then returned to Normandy, of which his mother had been in possession since 1145, while Stephen turned his small remaining strength to the weary task of endeavouring to restore the foundations of law and order. But he had accomplished little when he died in October 1154. The task of reconstruction was to be left to Henry of Anjou: his predecessor was only remembered as an example of the evil that may be done by a weak man who has been reckless enough to seize a throne which he is incapable of defending. England has had many worse kings, but never one who wrought her more harm. If his successor had been like him, feudal anarchy might have become as permanent in England as in Poland.

Fortunately the young king to whom Stephen’s battered crown now fell was energetic and capable, if somewhat self-willed and hasty. He was inferior in caution and self-control to his grandfather Henry I., though he Henry II. resembled him in his love of strong and systematic governance. From the point of view of his English subjects his main achievement was that he restored in almost every detail the well-organized bureaucracy which his ancestor had created, and with it the law and order that had disappeared during Stephen’s unhappy reign. But there was this essential difference between the position of the two Henries, that the elder aspired to be no more than king of England and duke of Normandy, while the younger strove all his life for an imperial position in western Europe. Such an ambition was almost forced upon him by the consequences of his descent and his marriage. Besides his grandfather’s Anglo-Norman inheritance, he had received from his father Geoffrey the counties of Anjou and Touraine, and the predominance in the valley of the Lower Loire. But it was his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, two years before his accession to the English throne, which gave him the right to dream of greatness such as his Norman forbears had never enjoyed. This lady, the divorced wife of Louis VII. of France, brought to her second husband the whole of the lands from Poitou to the Pyrenees, the accumulated gains of many warlike ancestors. In wealth and fighting strength the duchy of Aquitaine was a full third of France. Added to Anjou and Normandy it made a realm far more important than England. Hence it came that Henry’s ambitions and interests were continental more than English. Unlike his grandfather he dwelt for the greater part of his time beyond seas. It must be remembered, too, that his youth had been spent abroad, and that England only came to him when he was already a grown man. The concerns of his island realm were a matter of high importance to him, but only formed a part of his cares. Essentially he was an Angevin, neither a Norman nor an Englishman, and his primary ambition was to make the house of Anjou supreme in France. Nor did this seem impossible; he owned a far broader and wealthier domain beyond the Channel than did his nominal suzerain King Louis VII., and—what was of more importance—he far excelled that prince both in vigour and in capacity.

On succeeding to the English crown, however, he came over at once to take possession of the realm, and abode there for over a year, displaying the most restless energy in setting to rights the governance of the realm. He expelled all Stephen’s mercenaries, took back into his hands the royal lands and castles which his predecessor had granted away, and destroyed hundreds of the “adulterine” castles which the barons and knights had built without leave during the years of the anarchy. Hardly a single magnate dared to oppose him—Bridgnorth, now a castle of the Mortimers, was the only place which he had to take by force. His next care was to restore the bureaucracy by which Henry I. had been wont to govern. He handed over the exchequer to Nigel, bishop of Ely, the nephew of the old justiciar Roger of Salisbury, and the heir of his traditions. His chancellor was a young clerk, Thomas Becket, who was recommended to him by archbishop Theobald as the most capable official in the realm. A short experience of his work convinced the king that his merits had not been exaggerated. He proved a zealous and capable minister, and such a strong exponent of the claims of the crown that no one could have foreseen the later developments by which he was to become their greatest enemy.

The machine of government was beginning to work in a satisfactory fashion, and the realm was already settling down into order, when Henry was called abroad by a rebellion raised in Anjou by his brother Geoffrey—the first of the innumerable dynastic troubles abroad which continued throughout his reign to distract his attention from his duties as an English king. He did not return for fifteen months; but when he did reappear it was to complete the work which he had begun in 1155, to extort from the greater barons the last of the royal fortresses which still remained in their hands, and to restore the northern boundaries of the realm. Malcolm IV., the young king of Scotland, was compelled to give up the earldoms of Northumberland and Cumberland, which his father Henry had received from Stephen. He received instead only the earldom of Huntingdon, too far from the border to be a dangerous possession, to which he had a hereditary right as descending from Earl Waltheof. He did homage to the king of England, and actually followed him with a great retinue on his next continental expedition. In the same year (1157) Henry made an expedition into North Wales, and forced its prince Owen to become his vassal, not without some fighting, in which the English army received several sharp checks at the commencement of the campaign.

Yet once more Henry’s stay on the English side of the Channel was but for a year. In 1158 he again departed to plunge into schemes of continental conquest. This time it was an attempt to annex the great county of Toulouse, and so to carry the borders of Aquitaine to the Mediterranean, which distracted him. Naturally Louis of France was unwilling to see his great vassal striding all across his realm, and did what he could to hinder him. Into the endless skirmishes and negotiations which followed the raising of the question of Toulouse it would be fruitless to enter. Henry did not achieve his purpose, indeed he seems to have failed to use his strength to its best advantage, and allowed himself to be bought off by a futile marriage treaty by which his eldest son was to marry the French king’s daughter (1160). This was to be but the first of many disappointments in this direction; there was apparently some fatal scruple, both in Henry’s own mind and in that of his continental subjects, as to pressing their suzerain too hard. But it must also be remembered that a feudal army was an inefficient weapon for long wars, and that the mercenaries, by whom alone it could be replaced, were both expensive and untrustworthy. Henry developed as far as he was able the system of “scutage” (q.v.) which his grandfather had apparently invented; by this the vassal compounded for his forty days’ personal service by paying money, with which the king could hire professional soldiers. But even with this help he could never keep a large enough army together.

Meanwhile England, though somewhat heavily taxed, was at least enjoying quiet and strong governance. There is every sign that Henry’s early years were a time of returning prosperity. But there was also much friction between Quarrel with the church. the crown and its subjects. The more turbulent part of the baronage, looking back to the boisterous times of Stephen with regret, was reserving itself for a favourable opportunity. The danger of feudal rebellion was not yet past, as was to be shown ten years later. The towns did not find Henry an easy master. He took away from London some of the exceptional privileges which his grandfather had granted, such as the free election of sheriffs of Middlesex, and the right of farming the shire at a fixed rent. He asserted his power to raise “tallages”—arbitrary taxation—from the citizens on occasion. Yet he left the foundations of municipal liberty untouched, and he was fairly liberal in granting charters which contained moderate privileges to smaller towns. His most difficult task, however, was to come to a settlement with the Church. The lavish grants of Stephen had made an end of the old authority which the Conqueror and Henry I. had exercised over the clergy. Their successor was well aware of the fact, and was resolved to put back the clock, so far as it was in his power. It was not, however, on the old problems of free election, of lay investiture, that his quarrel with the clerical body broke out, but on the comparatively new question of the conflicting claims of ecclesiastical and secular courts. The separate tribunals of the church, whose erection William I. had favoured, had been developing in power ever since, and had begun to encroach on the sphere of the courts of the state. This was more than ever the case since Stephen had formally granted them jurisdiction over all suits concerning clerics and clerical property. During the first few years of his reign Henry had already been in collision with the ecclesiastical authorities over several such cases; he had chafed at seeing two clerks accused of murder and blackmailing claimed by and acquitted in the church courts; and most of all at the frequency of unlicensed appeals to Rome—a flagrant breach of one of the three rules laid down by William the Conqueror. Being comparatively at leisure after the pacification with France, he resolved to turn his whole attention to the arrangement of a new modus vivendi with the church. As a preliminary move he appointed his able chancellor Thomas Becket to the archbishopric of Canterbury, which fell vacant in Becket. 1162. This was the greatest mistake of his reign. Becket was one of those men who, without being either hypocrites or consciously ambitious, live only to magnify their office. While chancellor he was the most zealous servant of the crown, and had seemed rather secular than clerical in his habits and his outlook on life. But no sooner had he been promoted to the archbishopric than he put away his former manners, became the most formal and austere of men, and set himself to be the champion of the church party in all its claims, reasonable or unreasonable, against the state. The king’s astonishment was even greater than his indignation when he saw the late chancellor setting himself to oppose him in all things. Their first quarrel was about a proposed change in some details of taxation, which seems to have had no specially ecclesiastical bearing at all. But Becket vehemently opposed it, and got so much support when the great council met at Woodstock that Henry withdrew his schemes. This was only a preliminary skirmish; the main battle opened in the following year, when the king, quite aware that he must for the future look on Thomas as his enemy, brought forward the famous Constitutions of Clarendon, of which the main purport was to assert the jurisdiction of the state over clerical offenders by a rather complicated procedure, while other clauses provided that appeals to Rome must not be made without the king’s leave, that suits about land or the presentation to benefices, in which clerics were concerned, should be tried before the royal courts, and that bishops should not quit the realm unless they had obtained permission to do so from the king (see Clarendon, Constitutions of). Somewhat to the king’s surprise, Becket yielded for a moment to his pressure, and declared his assent to the constitutions. But he had no sooner left the court than he proclaimed that he had grievously sinned in giving way, suspended himself from his archiepiscopal functions, and wrote to the pope to beg for pardon and absolution. He then made a clandestine attempt to escape from the realm, but was detected on the seashore and forced to return.

Incensed with Becket for his repudiation of his original submission, Henry proceeded to open a campaign of lawsuits against him, in order to force him to plead in secular courts. He also took the very mean step of declaring that he should call him to account for all the moneys that had passed through his hands when he was chancellor, though Becket had been given a quittance for them when he resigned the office more than two years before. The business came up at the council of Northampton (October 1164), when the archbishop was tried for refusing to recognize the jurisdiction of the king’s courts, and declared to have forfeited his movable goods. The sentence was passed by the lay members of the Curia Regis alone, the bishops having been forbidden to sit, and threatened with excommunication if they did so, by the accused primate. When Becket was visited by the justiciar who came to rehearse the judgment, he started to his feet, refused to listen to a word, declared his repudiation of all lay courts and left the hall. That same night he made a second attempt to escape from England and this time succeeded in getting off to Flanders. From thence he fled to the court of the pope, where he received less support than he had expected. Alexander III. privately approved of all that he had done, and regarded him as the champion of the Church, but he did not wish to quarrel with King Henry. He had lately been driven from Rome by the emperor Frederick I., who had installed an antipope in his place, and had been forced to retire to France. If he sided with Becket and thundered against his persecutor, there was small doubt that the king of England would adhere to the schism. Accordingly he endeavoured to temporize and to avoid a rupture, to the archbishop’s great disgust. But since he also declared the Constitutions of Clarendon uncanonical and invalid, Henry was equally offended, and opened negotiations with the emperor and the antipope. This conduct forced Alexander’s hand, and he gave Becket leave to excommunicate his enemies. The exile, who had taken refuge in a French abbey, placed the justiciar and six other of the king’s chief councillors under the ban of the Church, and intimated that he should add Henry himself to the list unless he showed speedy signs of repentance (April 1166).

Thus the quarrel had come to a head. Church and State were at open war. Henry soon found that Becket’s threats had more effect than he liked. Many of the English clergy were naturally on the side of the primate in a dispute which touched their loyalty to the Church and their class feeling. Several bishops declared to the king that, since his ministers had been duly excommunicated, they did not see how they could avoid regarding them as men placed outside the pale of Christendom. Fortunately the pope interfered for a moment to lighten the friction; being threatened with a new invasion by the emperor Frederick, he suspended the sentences and sent legates to patch up a peace. They failed, for neither the king nor the archbishop would give way. At this juncture Henry was desirous of getting his eldest son and namesake crowned as his colleague, the best mode that he could devise for avoiding the dangers of a disputed succession at his death. He induced the archbishop of York, assisted by the bishops of London and Salisbury, to perform the ceremony. This was a clear invasion of the ancient rights of the primate, and Becket took it more to heart than any other of his grievances.

Yet the next move in the struggle was a hollow reconciliation between the combatants—a most inexplicable act on both sides. The king offered to allow Becket to return from exile, and to restore him to his possessions, without exacting from him any promise of submission, or even a pledge that he would not reopen the dispute on his return. Apparently he had made a wrong interpretation of the primate’s mental attitude, and thought him desirous of a truce, if not ready for a compromise. He had wholly misjudged the situation; Becket made neither promises nor threats, but three weeks after he reached Canterbury publicly excommunicated the bishops of London and Salisbury for the part that they had taken in the coronation of the young king, and suspended from their functions the other prelates who had been present at the ceremony. He then proceeded to excommunicate a number of his minor lay enemies.

The news was carried overseas to Henry, who was then in Normandy. It roused one of the fits of wild rage to which he was not unfrequently liable; he burst out into ejaculations of wrath, and cursed “the cowardly idle servants Becket’s murder. who suffered their master to be made the laughing-stock of a low-born priest.” Among those who stood about him were four knights, some of whom had personal grudges against Becket, and all of whom were reckless ruffians, who were eager to win their master’s favour by fair means or foul. They crossed the Channel with astonishing speed; two days after the king’s outburst they stood before Becket at Canterbury and threatened him with death unless he should remove the excommunications and submit to his master. The archbishop answered with words as scornful as their own, and took his way to the minster to attend vespers. The knights went out to seek their weapons, and when armed followed him into the north transept, where they fell upon him and brutally slew him with many sword-strokes (December 29, 1170). Thomas had been given time to fly, and his followers had endeavoured to persuade him to do so. It seems that he deliberately courted martyrdom, anxious apparently that his death should deal the king the bitterest blow that it was in his power to inflict (see Becket).

Nothing could have put Henry in such an evil plight; the whole world held him responsible for the murder, and he was forced to buy pardon for it by surrendering many of the advantages over the Church which he had Its results. hoped to gain by enforcing the Constitutions of Clarendon. Especially the immunity of clerical offenders from the jurisdiction of lay courts had to be conceded; for the rest of the middle ages the clerk guilty of theft or assault, riot or murder, could plead his orders, and escape from the harsh justice of the king’s officers to the milder penalties of the bishop’s tribunal. “Benefit of clergy” became an intolerable anomaly, all the more so because the privilege was extended in practice not only to all persons actually in minor orders, but to all who claimed them; any criminal who could read had a fair chance of being reckoned a clerk. Another concession which Henry was forced to make was that the appeals to Rome of litigants in ecclesiastical suits should be freely permitted, provided that they made an oath that they were not contemplating any wrong to the English crown or the English church, a sufficiently easy condition. Such appeals became, and remained, innumerable and vexatious. Pope Alexander also extorted from the king a pledge that he would relinquish any customs prejudicial to the rights of the Church which had been introduced since his accession. To the pope this meant that the Constitutions of Clarendon were disavowed; to the king, who maintained that they were in the main a mere restatement of the customs of William I., it bore no such general interpretation. The points were fought out in detail, and not settled for many years. Practically it became the rule to regard suits regarding land, or presentations to benefices, as pertaining to the king’s court, while those regarding probate, marriage and divorce fell to the ecclesiastical tribunal. The question of election to bishoprics and abbacies went back to the stage which it had reached in the time of Henry I.; the choice was made in canonical form, by the chapters or the monasteries, but the king’s recommendation was a primary factor in that choice. When the electors disregarded it, as was sometimes the case, there was friction; a weak king was sometimes overruled; a strong one generally got his way in the end.

Becket’s death, then, gave a qualified triumph to the church party, and he was rightly regarded as the successful champion of his caste. Hence they held his death in grateful remembrance; the pope canonized him in 1173, and more churches were dedicated to him during the next two centuries than to any other English saint. In the eyes of most men his martyrdom had put the king so much in the wrong that the obstinacy and provocative conduct which had brought it about passed out of memory. His life of ostentatious austerity, and the courage with which he met his death, had caused all his faults to be forgotten. Henry himself felt so much the invidious position in which he was placed that even after making his submission to the pope’s legates at Avranches in 1172, he thought it necessary to do penance before Becket’s tomb in 1174, on which occasion he allowed himself to be publicly scourged by the monks of Canterbury, who inflicted on him three cuts apiece.

Between the outbreak of the king’s quarrel with Becket at the council of Woodstock and the compromise of Avranches no less than ten years had elapsed—the best years of Henry’s manhood. During this period his struggle with the Church had been but one of his distractions. His policy of imperial aggrandisement had been in progress. In 1163 he had completed the conquest of South Wales; the marcher lords were now in possession of the greater part of the land; the surviving Welsh princes did homage for the rest. In 1166 Henry got practical possession of the duchy of Brittany, the only remaining large district of western France which was not already in his hands. Conan, the last prince of the old Breton house, recognized him as his lord, and gave the hand of his heiress Constance to Geoffrey, the king’s third son. When the count died in 1171 Henry did not transfer the administration of the land to the young pair, who were still but children, but retained it for himself, and clung to it jealously long after his son came of age. Intermittent wars with France during these years were of small importance; Henry never pushed his suzerain to extremity. But the Angevin dominions were extended in a new direction, where no English king had yet made his power felt.

The distressful island of Ireland was at this moment enjoying the anarchy which had reigned therein since the dawn of history. Its state had grown even more unhappy than before since the Danish invasions of the 10th century, which had not welded the native kingdoms into unity by pressure from without—as had been the case in England—but had simply complicated Conquest of Ireland. affairs, by setting up two or three alien principalities on the coastline. As in England, the vikings had destroyed much of the old civilization; but they had neither succeeded in occupying the whole country nor had they been absorbed by the natives. The state of the island was much like that of England in the days of the Heptarchy: occasionally a “High King” succeeded in forcing his rivals into a precarious submission; more usually there was not even a pretence of a central authority in the island, and the annals of objectless tribal wars formed its sole history. King Henry’s eyes had been fixed on the faction-ridden land since the first years of his reign. As early as 1155 he had asked and obtained the approval of Pope Adrian IV., the only Englishman who ever sat upon the papal throne, for a scheme for the conquest of Ireland. The Holy See had always regarded with distaste the existence in the West of a nation who repudiated the Roman obedience, and lived in schismatical independence, under local ecclesiastical customs which dated back to the 5th century, and had never been brought into line with those of the rest of Christendom. Hence it was natural to sanction an invasion which might bring the Irish within the fold. But Henry made no endeavour for many years to utilize the papal grant of Ireland, which seems to have been made under the preposterous “Donation of Constantine,” the forged document which gave the bishop of Rome authority over all islands. It was conveniently forgotten that Ireland had never been in the Roman empire, and so had not even been Constantine’s to give away.

Not till 1168, thirteen years after the agreement with Pope Adrian, did the interference of the English king in Ireland actually begin. Even then he did not take the conquest in hand himself, but merely sanctioned a private adventure of some of his subjects. Dermot MacMorrough, king of Leinster, an unquiet Irish prince who for good reasons had been expelled by his neighbours, came to Henry’s court in Normandy, proffering his allegiance in return for restoration to his lost dominions. The quarrel with Becket, and the French war, were both distracting the English king at the moment. He could not spare attention for the matter, but gave Dermot leave to enlist auxiliaries among the turbulent barons of the South Welsh Marches. The Irish exile enlisted first the services of Maurice Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzstephen, two half-brothers, both noted fighting men, and afterwards those of Richard de Clare, earl of Pembroke, an ambitious and impecunious magnate of broken fortunes. The two barons were promised lands, the earl a greater bribe—the hand of Dermot’s only daughter Eva and the inheritance of the kingdom of Leinster. Fitzgerald and Fitzstephen crossed to Ireland in 1169 with a mere handful of followers. But they achieved victories of an almost incredible completeness over Dermot’s enemies. The undisciplined hordes of the king of Ossory and the Danes of Wexford could not stand before the Anglo-Norman tactics—the charge of the knights and the arrow-flight of the archers, skilfully combined by the adventurous invaders. Dermot was triumphant, and sent for more auxiliaries, aspiring to evict Roderic O’Connor of Connaught from the precarious throne of High King of Ireland. In 1170 the earl of Pembroke came over with a larger force, celebrated his marriage with Dermot’s daughter, and commenced a series of conquests. He took Waterford and Dublin from the Danes, and scattered the hosts of the native princes. Early in the next spring Dermot died, and Earl Richard, in virtue of his marriage, claimed the kingship of Leinster. He held his own, despite the assaults of a great army gathered by Roderic the High King, and of a viking fleet which came to help the conquered jarls of Waterford and Dublin. At this moment King Henry thought it necessary to interfere; if he let more time slip away, Earl Richard would become a powerful king and forget his English allegiance. Accordingly, with a large army at his back, he landed at Waterford in 1171 and marched on Dublin. Richard did him homage for Leinster, engaging to hold it as a palatine earldom, and not to claim the name or rights of a king. The other adventurers followed his example, as did, after an interval, most of the native Irish princes. Only Roderic of Connaught held aloof in his western solitudes, asserting his independence. The clergy, almost without a murmur, submitted themselves to the Roman Church.

Such was the first conquest of Ireland, a conquest too facile to be secure. Four years later it appeared to be completed by the submission of the king of Connaught, who did homage like the rest of the island chiefs. But their oaths were as easily broken as made, and the real subjection of the island was not to be completed for 400 years. What happened was that the Anglo-Norman invaders pushed gradually west, occupying the best of the land and holding it down by castles, but leaving the profitless bogs and mountains to the local princes. The king’s writ only ran in and about Dublin and a few other harbour fortresses. Inland, the intruding barons and the Irish chiefs fought perpetually, with varying fortunes. The conquest hardly touched central and western Ulster, and left half Connaught unsubdued: even in the immediate vicinity of Dublin the tribes of the Wicklow Hills were never properly tamed. The English conquest was incomplete; it failed to introduce either unity or strong governance. After a century and a half it began to recede rather than to advance. Many of the districts which had been overrun in the time of the Angevin kings were lost; many of the Anglo-Norman families intermarried with and became absorbed by the Irish; they grew as careless of their allegiance to the crown as any of the native chiefs. The “Lordship of Ireland” was never a reality till the times of the Tudors. But as long as Henry II. lived this could not have been foreseen. The first generation of the conquerors pushed their advance with such vigour that it seemed likely that they would complete the adventure. (See Ireland: History.)

It was in 1173, the year after his return from Ireland and his submission to the papal legates at Avranches, that King Henry became involved in the first of a series of troubles which were to pursue him for the rest of his life—the Rebellion of Henry’s sons. rebellions of his graceless sons. His wife Eleanor of Aquitaine had borne him many children. Henry, the eldest surviving son, had already been crowned in 1170 as his father’s colleague and successor; not only he, but Richard the second, and Geoffrey the third son, were now old enough to chafe against the restraints imposed upon them by an imperious and strong-willed father. The old king very naturally preferred to keep his dominions united under his own immediate government, but he had designated his eldest son as his successor in England and Normandy, while Richard was to have his mother’s heritage of Aquitaine, and Geoffrey’s wife’s dowry, the duchy of Brittany, was due to him, now that he had reached the verge of manhood. The princes were shamelessly eager to enter on their inheritance, the king was loath to understand that by conferring a titular sovereignty on his sons he had given them a sort of right to expect some share of real power. Their grudge against their father was sedulously fostered by their mother Eleanor, a clever and revengeful woman, who could never forgive her husband for keeping her in the background in political matters and insulting her by his frequent amours. Her old subjects in Aquitaine were secretly encouraged by her to follow her son Richard against his father, whom the barons of the south always regarded as an alien and an intruder. The Bretons were equally willing to rise in the name of Geoffrey and Constance against the guardian who was keeping their prince too long waiting for his inheritance. In England the younger Henry had built himself up a party among the more turbulent section of the baronage, who remembered with regret and longing the carnival of licence which their fathers had enjoyed under King Stephen. Secret agreements had also been made with the kings of France and Scotland, who were eager to take advantage of the troubles which were about to break out.

In 1173 the plot was complete, and Henry’s three elder sons all took arms against him, collecting Norman, Breton and Gascon rebels in great numbers, and being backed by a French army. At the same moment the king of Scots invaded Northumberland, and the earls of Norfolk, Chester and Leicester rose in the name of the younger Henry. This was in all essentials a feudal rebellion of the old type. The English barons were simply desirous of getting rid of the strong and effective governance of the king, and the alleged wrongs of his sons were an empty excuse. For precisely the same reason all classes in England, save the more turbulent section of the baronage, remained faithful to the elder king. The bureaucracy, the minor landholders, the towns, and the clergy refused to join in the rising, and lent their aid for its suppression, because they were unwilling to see anarchy recommence. Hence, though the rebellious princes made head for a time against their father abroad, the insurrection of their partisans in England was suppressed without much difficulty. The justiciar, Richard de Lucy, routed the army of the earl of Leicester at Fornham in Suffolk, the castles of the rebel earls were subdued one after another, and William of Scotland was surprised and captured by a force of northern loyalists while he was besieging Alnwick (1173-1174). The war lingered on for a space on the continent; but Henry raised the siege of Rouen, which was being attacked by his eldest son and the king of France, captured most of Richard’s castles in Poitou, and then received the submission of his undutiful children. Showing considerable magnanimity, he promised to grant to each of them half the revenues of the lands in which they were his destined heirs, and a certain number of castles to hold as their own. Their allies fared less well; the rebel earls were subjected to heavy fines, and their strongholds were demolished. The king of Scots was forced to buy his liberty by doing homage to Henry for the whole of his kingdom. Queen Eleanor, whom her husband regarded as responsible for the whole rebellion, was placed in a sort of honourable captivity, or retirement, and denied her royal state.

Henry appeared completely triumphant; but the fourteen years which he had yet to live were for the most part to be times of trouble and frustrated hopes. He was growing old; the indomitable energy of his early career was beginning to slacken; his dreams of extended empire were vanishing. In the last period of his life he was more set on defending what he already enjoyed, and perfecting the details of administration in his realms, than on taking new adventures in hand. Probably the consciousness that his dominions would be broken up among his sons after his death had a disheartening effect upon him. At any rate his later years bear a considerable resemblance to the corresponding period of his grandfather’s reign. The machinery of government which the one had sketched out the other completed. Under Henry II. the circuits of the itinerant justices became regular instead of intermittent; the judicial functions of the Curia Regis were delegated to a permanent committee of that body which took form as the court of king’s bench (Curia Regis in Banco). The sheriffs were kept very tightly in hand, and under incessant supervision; once in 1170 nearly the whole body of them were dismissed for misuse of their office. The shire levies which had served the king so well against the feudal rebels of 1173 were reorganized, with uniformity of weapons and armour, by the Assize of Arms of 1181. There was also a considerable amount of new legislation with the object of protecting the minor subjects of the crown, and the system of trial by jurors was advanced to the detriment of the absurd old practices of trial by ordeal and trial by wager of battle. The 13th-century jury was a rough and primitive institution, which acted at once as accuser, witness and judge—but it was at any rate preferable to the chances of the red-hot iron, or the club of the duellist.

The best proof that King Henry’s orderly if autocratic régime was appreciated at its true value by his English subjects, is that when the second series of rebellions raised by his undutiful sons began in 1182, there was no stir whatever in England, though in Normandy, Brittany and Aquitaine the barons rose in full force to support the young princes, whose success would mean the triumph of particularism and the destruction of the Angevin empire. Among the many troubles which broke down King Henry’s strong will and great bodily vigour in those unhappy years, rebellion in England was not one. For this reason he was almost constantly abroad, leaving the administration of the one loyal section of his realm to his great justiciar. Hence the story of the unnatural war between father and sons has no part in English history. It is but necessary to note that the younger Henry died in 1183, that Geoffrey perished by accident at a tournament in 1186, and that in 1189, when the old king’s strength finally gave out, it was Richard who was leading the rebellion, to which John, the youngest and least worthy of the four undutiful sons, was giving secret countenance. It was the discovery of the treachery of this one child whom he had deemed faithful, and loved over well, that broke Henry’s heart. “Let things go as they will; I have nothing to care for in the world now,” he murmured on his death-bed, and turned his face to the wall to breathe his last.

The death of the younger Henry had made Richard heir to all his father’s lands from the Tweed to the Bidassoa save Brittany, which had fallen to Arthur, the infant son of the unlucky Geoffrey. John, the new king’s only surviving Richard I. brother, had been declared “Lord of Ireland” by his father in 1185, but Henry had been forced to remove him for persistent misconduct, and had left him nothing more than a titular sovereignty in the newly conquered island. In this Richard confirmed him at his accession, and gave him a more tangible endowment by allowing him to marry Isabella, the heiress of the earldom of Gloucester, and by bestowing on him the honour of Lancaster and the shires of Derby, Devon, Cornwall and Somerset. The gift was over-liberal and the recipient was thankless; but John was distinctly treated as a vassal, not granted the position of an independent sovereign.

Of all the medieval kings of England, Richard I. (known as Cœur de Lion) cared least for his realm on the English side of the Channel, and spent least time within it. Though he chanced to have been born in Oxford, he was far more of a foreigner than his father; his soul was that of a south French baron, not that of an English king. Indeed he looked upon England more as a rich area for taxation than as the centre of a possible empire. His ambitions were continental: so far as he had a policy at all it was Angevin—he would gladly have increased his dominions on the side of the upper Loire and Garonne, and was set on keeping in check the young king of France, Philip Augustus, though the latter had been his ally during his long struggle with his father. Naturally the policy of Richard as a newly crowned king was bound to differ from that which he had pursued as a rebellious prince. As regards his personal character he has been described, not without truth, as a typical man of his time and nothing more. He was at heart a chivalrous adventurer delighting in war for war’s sake; he was not destitute of a conscience—his undutiful conduct to his father sat heavily on his soul when that father was once dead; he had a strong sense of knightly honour and a certain magnanimity of soul in times of crisis; but he was harsh, thriftless, often cruel, generally lacking in firmness and continuity of purpose, always careless of his subjects’ welfare when it interfered with his pleasure or his ambitions of the moment. If he had stayed long in England he would have made himself hated; but he was nearly always absent; it was only as a reckless and spasmodic extorter of taxation, not as a personal tyrant, that he was known on the English side of the Channel.

At the opening of his reign Richard had one all-engrossing desire; he was set on going forth to the Crusade for the recovery of Jerusalem which had been proclaimed in 1187, partly from chivalrous instincts, partly as a penance The Crusade. for his misconduct to his father. He visited England in 1189 only in order to be crowned, and to raise as much money for the expedition as he could procure. He obtained enormous sums, by the most unwise and iniquitous expedients, mainly by selling to any buyer that he could find valuable pieces of crown property, high offices and dangerous rights and privileges. The king of Scotland bought for 15,000 marks a release from the homage to the English crown which had been imposed upon him by Henry II. The chancellorship, one of the two chief offices in the realm, was sold to William Longchamp, bishop of Ely, for £3000, though he was well known as a tactless, arrogant and incapable person. The earldom of Northumberland, with palatine rights, was bought by Hugh Puiset, bishop of Durham. Countless other instances of unwise bargains could be quoted. Having raised every penny that he could procure by legal or illegal means, Richard crossed the Channel, and embarked at Marseilles with a great army on the 7th of August 1190. The only security which he had for the safety of his dominions in his absence was that his most dangerous neighbour, the king of France, was also setting out on the Crusade, and that his brother John, whose shifty and treacherous character gave sure promise of trouble, enjoyed a well-merited unpopularity both in England and in the continental dominions of the crown.

Richard’s crusading exploits have no connexion with the history of England. He showed himself a good knight and a capable general—the capture of Acre and the victory of Arsuf were highly to his credit as a soldier. But he quarrelled with all the other princes of the Crusade, and showed himself as lacking in tact and diplomatic ability as he was full of military capacity. The king of France departed in wrath, to raise trouble at home; the army gradually melted away, the prospect of recovering Jerusalem disappeared, and finally Richard must be reckoned fortunate in that he obtained from Sultan Saladin a peace, by which the coastland of Palestine was preserved for the Christians, while the Holy City and the inland was sacrificed (Sept. 2, 1192). While returning to his dominions by the way of the Adriatic, the king was shipwrecked, and found himself obliged to enter the dominions of Leopold, duke of Austria, a prince whom he had offended at Acre during the Crusade. Though he disguised himself, he was detected by his old enemy and imprisoned. The duke then sold him to the emperor Henry VI., who found pretexts for forcing him to buy his freedom by the promise of a ransom of 150,000 marks. It was not till February 1194 that he got loose, after paying a considerable instalment of this vast sum. The main bulk of it, as was to be expected, was never made over; indeed it could not have been raised, as Richard was well aware. But, once free, he had no scruple in cheating the imperial brigand of his blackmail.

For five years Richard was away from his dominions as a crusader or a captive. There was plenty of trouble during his absence, but less than might have been expected. The strong governance set up by Henry II. proved John’s treachery. competent to maintain itself, even when Richard’s ministers were tactless and his brother treacherous. A generation before it is certain that England would have been convulsed by a great feudal rising when such an opportunity was granted to the barons. Nothing of the kind happened between 1190 and 1194. The chancellor William Longchamp made himself odious by his vanity and autocratic behaviour, and was overthrown in 1191 by a general rising, which was headed by Prince John, and approved by Walter, archbishop of Rouen, whom Richard had sent to England with a commission to assume the justiciarship if William should prove impossible as an administrator. Longchamp fled to the continent, and John then hoped to seize on supreme power, even perhaps to grasp the crown. But he was bitterly disappointed to find that he could gather few supporters; the justiciar and the bureaucrats of the Curia Regis would give him no assistance; they worked on honestly in the name of the absent king. Among the baronage hardly a man would commit himself to treason. In vain John hired foreign mercenaries, garrisoned his castles, and leagued himself with the king of France when the latter returned from the Crusade. It was only the news of his brother’s captivity in Austria which gave the intriguing prince a transient hope of success. Boldly asserting that Richard would never be seen alive again he went to France, and did homage to King Philip for Normandy and Aquitaine, as if they were already his own. Then he crossed to England with a band of mercenaries, and seized Windsor and Wallingford castles. But no one rose to aid him, and his garrisons were soon being besieged by loyal levies, headed by the justiciar and by Hubert Walter, the newly elected archbishop of Canterbury. At the same time King Philip’s invasion of Normandy was repulsed by the barons of the duchy. Richard’s faithful ministers, despite of all their distractions, succeeded in raising the first instalment of his ransom by grinding taxation—a fourth part of the revenue of all lay persons, a tithe from ecclesiastical land, was raised, and in addition much church plate was seized, though the officials who exacted it were themselves prelates. John and Philip wrote to the emperor to beg him to detain his captive at all costs, but Henry VI. pocketed the ransom money and set Richard free. He reached England in March 1194, just in time to receive the surrender of the last two castles which were holding out in his treacherous brother’s name. With astonishing, and indeed misplaced, magnanimity, Richard pardoned his brother, when he made a grovelling submission, and restored him to his lordship of Ireland and to a great part of his English lands.

The king abode for no more than three months in England; he got himself recrowned at Winchester, apparently to wipe out the stain of his German captivity and of an enforced homage which the emperor had extorted from him. Then he raised a heavy tax from his already impoverished subjects, sold a number of official posts and departed to France—never to return, though he had still five years to live. He left behind Archbishop Hubert Walter as justiciar, a faithful if a somewhat high-handed minister.

Richard’s one ruling passion was now to punish Philip of France for his unfriendly conduct during his absence. He plunged into a war with this clever and shifty prince, which lasted—with certain short breaks of truces and treaties—till his death. He wasted his considerable military talents in a series of skirmishes and sieges which had no great results, and after spending countless treasures and harrying many regions, perished obscurely by a wound from a cross-bow-bolt, received while beleaguering Châlus, a castle of a rebellious lord of Aquitaine, the viscount of Limoges (April 6, 1199).

During these years of petty strife England was only reminded at intervals of her king’s existence by his intermittent demands for money, which his ministers did their best to satisfy. The machine of government continued to work without English constitutional development. his supervision. It has been observed that, from one point of view, England’s worst kings have been her best; that is to say, a sovereign like Richard, who persistently neglected his duties, was unconsciously the foster father of constitutional liberty. For his ministers, bureaucrats of an orderly frame of mind, devised for their own convenience rules and customs which became permanent, and could be cited against those later kings who interfered more actively in the details of domestic governance. We may trace back some small beginnings of a constitution to the time of Henry II.—himself an absentee though not on the scale of his son. But the ten years of Richard’s reign were much more fruitful in the growth of institutions which were destined to curb the power of the crown. His justiciars, and especially Hubert Walter, were responsible for several innovations which were to have far-spreading results. The most important was an extension of the use of juries into the province of taxation. When the government employs committees chosen by the taxpayers to estimate and assess the details of taxation, it will find it hard to go back to arbitrary exactions. Such a practice had been first seen when Henry II., in his last year, allowed the celebrated “Saladin Tithe” for the service of the crusade to be assessed by local jurors. In Richard’s reign the practice became regular. In especial when England was measured out anew for the great carucage of 1197—a tax on every ploughland which replaced the rough calculation of Domesday Book—knights elected by the shires shared in all the calculations then made for the new impost. Another constitutional advance was that which substituted “coroners,” knights chosen by the county court, for the king’s old factotum the sheriff in the duty of holding the “pleas of the crown,” i.e. in making the preliminary investigations into such offences as riot, murder or injury to the king’s rights or property. The sheriff’s natural impulse was to indict every man from whom money could be got; the new coroners were influenced by other motives than financial rapacity, and so were much more likely to deal equitably with accusations. The towns also profited in no small degree from Richard’s absence and impecuniosity. One of the most important charters to London, that which granted the city the right of constituting itself a “commune” and choosing itself a mayor, goes back to October 1191, the troubled month of Longchamp’s expulsion from England. It was given by Prince John and the ministers, who were then supporting him against the arrogant chancellor, to secure the adherence of London. Richard on his return seems to have allowed it to stand. Lincoln was also given the right of electing its own magistrates in 1194, and many smaller places owe grants of more or less of municipal privilege to Hubert Walter acting in the name of the absent king. The English nation began to have some conception of a régime of fixed custom, in which its rights depended on some other source than the sovereign’s personal caprice. The times, it may be remembered, were not unprosperous. There had been no serious civil war since the baronial rising of 1173. Prince John’s turbulence had only affected the neighbourhood of a few royal castles. Despite of the frequent and heavy demands for money for the king’s service, wealth seems to have been increasing, and prosperity to have been widespread. Strong and regular governance had on the whole prevailed ever since Henry II. triumphed over baronial anarchy.

III. The Struggle for Constitutional Liberty (1199-1337)

Richard’s queen, Berengaria of Navarre, had borne him no children. At the moment of his premature death his nearest kinsmen were his worthless brother John, and the boy Arthur of Brittany, the heir of Geoffrey, the third son Accession of John. of Henry II. On his death-bed the king had designated John as his successor, holding apparently that a bad ruler who was at least a grown man was preferable to a child. John’s claim prevailed both in Normandy and in England, though in each, as we are told, there were those who considered it a doubtful point whether an elder brother’s son had not a better right than a younger brother. But the ministers recognized John, and the baronage and nation acquiesced, though with little enthusiasm. In the lands farther south, however, matters went otherwise. The dowager duchess Constance of Brittany raised her son’s claim, and sent an army into Anjou, and all down the Loire many of the nobles adhered to his cause. The king of France announced that he should support them, and allowed Arthur to do him homage for Anjou, Maine and Touraine. There would have been trouble in Aquitaine also, if the aged Queen Eleanor had not asserted her own primary and indefeasible right to her ancestral duchy, and then declared that she transferred it to her best loved son John. Most of her subjects accepted her decision, and Arthur’s faction made no head in this quarter.

It seemed for a space as if the new king would succeed in retaining the whole of his brother’s inheritance, for King Philip very meanly allowed himself to be bought off by the cession of the county of Evreux, and, when his troops were withdrawn, the Angevin rebels were beaten down, and the duchess of Brittany had to ask for peace for her son. But it had not long been granted, when John proceeded to throw away his advantage by acts of reckless impolicy. Though cunning, he was destitute alike of foresight and of self-control; he could never discern the way in which his conduct would be judged by other men, because he lacked even the rudiments of a conscience. Ere he had been many months on the throne he divorced his wife, Isabella of Gloucester, alleging that their marriage had been illegal because they were within the prohibited degrees. This act offended the English barons, but in choosing a new queen John gave much greater offence abroad; he carried off Isabella of Angoulême from her affianced husband, Hugh of Lusignan, the son of the count of la Marche, his greatest vassal in northern Aquitaine, and married her despite the precontract. This seems to have been an amorous freak, not the result of any deep-laid policy. Roused by the insult the Lusignans took arms, and a great part of the barons of Poitou joined them. They appealed for aid to Philip of France, who judged it opportune to intervene once more. He summoned John to appear before him as suzerain, to answer the complaints of his Poitevin subjects, and when he failed to plead declared war on him and declared his dominions War with Phillip Augustus. escheated to the French crown for non-fulfilment of his feudal allegiance. He enlisted Arthur of Brittany in his cause by recognizing him once more as the rightful owner of all John’s continental fiefs save Normandy, which he intended to take for himself. Philip then entered Normandy, while Arthur led a Breton force into Anjou and Poitou to aid the Lusignans. The fortune of war at first turned in favour of the English king. He surprised his nephew while he was besieging the castle of Mirebeau in Poitou, where the old Queen Eleanor was residing. The young duke and most of his chief supporters were taken prisoners (August 1, 1202). Instead of using his advantage aright, John put Arthur in secret confinement, and after some months caused him to be murdered. He is said also to have starved to death twenty-two knights of Poitou who had been among his captives. The assassination of his nearest kinsman, a mere boy of sixteen, was as unwise as it was cruel. It estranged from the king the hearts of all his French subjects, who were already sufficiently disgusted by many minor acts of brutality, as well as by incessant arbitrary taxation and by the reckless ravages in which John’s mercenary troops had been indulging. The French armies met with little or no Loss of Normandy. resistance when they invaded Normandy, Anjou and Poitou. John sat inert at Rouen, pretending to take his misfortunes lightly, and boasting that “what was easily lost could be as easily won back.” Meanwhile Philip Augustus conquered all western Normandy, without having to fight a battle. The great castle of Château Gaillard, which guards the Lower Seine, was the only place which made a strenuous resistance. It was finally taken by assault, despite of the efforts of the gallant castellan, Roger de Lacy, constable of Chester, who had made head against the besiegers for six months (September 1203-March 1204) without receiving any assistance from his master. John finally absconded to England in December 1203; he failed to return with an army of relief, as he had promised, and before the summer of 1204 was over, Caen, Bayeux and Rouen, the last places that held out for him, had been forced to open their gates. The Norman barons had refused to strike a blow for John, and the cities had shown but a very passive and precarious loyalty to him. He had made himself so well hated by his cruelty and vices that the Normans, forgetting their old hatred of France, had acquiesced in the conquest. Two ties alone had for the last century held the duchy to the English connexion: the one was that many Norman baronial families held lands on this side of the Channel; the second was the national pride which looked upon England as a conquered appendage of Normandy. But the first had grown weaker as the custom arose of dividing family estates between brothers, on the principle that one should take the Norman, the other the English parts of a paternal heritage. By John’s time there were comparatively few landholders whose interests were fairly divided between the duchy and the kingdom. Such as survived had now to choose between losing the one or the other section of their lands; those whose holding was mainly Norman adhered to Philip; those who had more land in England sacrificed their transmarine estates. For each of the two kings declared the property of the barons who did not support him confiscated to the crown. As to the old Norman theory that England was a conquered land, it had gradually ceased to exist as an operative force, under kings who, like Henry II. or Richard I., were neither Norman nor English in feeling, but Angevin. John did not, and could not, appeal as a Norman prince to Norman patriotism.

The successes of Philip Augustus did not cease with the conquest of Normandy. His armies pushed forward in the south also; Anjou, Touraine and nearly all Poitou submitted to him. Only Guienne and southern Aquitaine held Loss of Anjou, Touraine and Poitou. out for King John, partly because they preferred a weak and distant master to such a strenuous and grasping prince as King Philip, partly because they were far more alien in blood and language to their French neighbours than were Normans or Angevins. The Gascons were practically a separate nationality, and the house of Capet had no ancient connexion with them. The kings of England were yet to reign at Bordeaux and Bayonne for two hundred and fifty years. But the connexion with Gascony meant little compared with the now vanished connexion with Normandy. Henry I. or Henry II. could run over to his continental dominions in a day or two days; Dieppe and Harfleur were close to Portsmouth and Hastings. It was a different thing for John and his successors to undertake the long voyage to Bordeaux, around the stormy headlands of Brittany and across the Bay of Biscay. Visits to their continental dominions had to be few and far between; they were long, costly and dangerous when a French fleet—a thing never seen before Philip Augustus conquered Normandy—might be roaming in the Channel. The kings of England became perforce much more home-keeping sovereigns after 1204.

It was certainly not a boon for England that her present sovereign was destined to remain within her borders for the greater part of his remaining years. To know John well was to loathe him, as every contemporary chronicle bears witness. The two years that followed the loss of Normandy were a time of growing discontent and incessant disputes about taxation. The king kept collecting scutages and tallages, yet barons and towns complained that nothing seemed to be done with the money he collected. At last, however, in 1206, the king did make an expedition to Poitou, and recovered some of its southern borders. Yet, with his usual inconsequence, he did not follow up his success, but made a two years’ truce with Philip of France on the basis of uti possidetis—which left Normandy and all the territories on and about the Loire in the hands of the conqueror.

It is probable that this pacification was the result of a new quarrel which John had just taken up with a new enemy—the Papacy. The dispute on the question of free election, which was to range over all the central years of his Quarrel with the Papacy. reign, had just begun. In the end of 1205 Hubert Walter, archbishop of Canterbury, had died. The king announced his intention of procuring the election of John de Gray, bishop of Norwich, as his successor; but, though his purpose was well known, the chapter (i.e. the monks of Christ Church, Canterbury) met secretly and elected their sub-prior Reginald as archbishop. They sent him to Rome at once, to receive confirmation from Pope Innocent III., whom they knew to be a zealous champion of the rights of the Church. But John descended upon them in great wrath, and by threats compelled them to hold a second meeting, and to elect his nominee Gray, in whose name application for confirmation was also made to the pope. Innocent, however, seeing a splendid chance of asserting his authority, declared both the elections that had taken place invalid, the first because it had been clandestine, the second because it had been held under force majeure, and proceeded to nominate a friend of his own—Cardinal Stephen Langton, an Englishman of proved capacity and blameless life, then resident in Rome. He was far the worthiest of the three candidates, but it was an intolerable invasion of the rights of the English crown and the English Church that an archbishop should be foisted on them in this fashion. The representatives of the chapter who had been sent to Rome were persuaded or compelled to elect him in the pope’s presence (Dec. 1206).

King John was furious, and not without good reason; he refused to accept Langton, whom he declared (quite unjustly) to be a secret friend of Philip of France, and sequestrated the lands of the monks of Canterbury. On this the pope threatened to lay an interdict on himself and his realm. The king replied by issuing a proclamation to the effect that he would outlaw any clerk who should accept the validity of such an interdict and would confiscate his lands. Despising such threats Innocent carried out his threat, and put England under the ban of the Church on the 23rd of March 1208.

In obedience to the pope’s orders the large majority of the English clergy closed their churches, and suspended the ordinary course of the services and celebration of the sacraments. Baptism and extreme unction only were continued, lest souls should be lost; and marriages were permitted but not inside the walls of churches. Foreseeing the wrath of the king against all who obeyed the mandate from Rome, the larger number of the bishops and many others of the higher clergy fled overseas to escape the storm. Those who were bold enough to remain behind had much to endure. John, openly rejoicing at the plunder that lay before him, declared the temporalities of all who had accepted the interdict, whether they had exiled themselves or no, to be confiscated. His treasury was soon so well filled that he could dispense with ordinary taxation. He also outlawed the whole body of the clergy, save the timid remnant who promised to disregard the papal commands.

Nothing proves more conclusively the strength of the Angevin monarchy, and the decreasing power of feudalism, than that an unpopular king like John could maintain his strife with the pope, and suppress the discontents of his Character of John’s rule. subjects, for nearly five years before the inevitable explosion came. Probably his long immunity was due in the main to the capacity of his strong-handed justiciar Geoffrey Fitz-Peter; the king hated him bitterly, but generally took his advice. The crash only came when Geoffrey died in 1213; his ungrateful master only expressed joy. “Now by God’s feet am I for the first time king of England,” he exclaimed, when the news reached him. He proceeded to fill the vacancy with a mere Poitevin adventurer, Peter des Roches, whom he had made bishop of Winchester some time before. Indeed John’s few trusted confidants were nearly all foreigners, such men as the mercenary captains Gerard of Athies and Engelhart of Cigogné, whom he made sheriffs and castellans to the discontent of all Englishmen. He spent all his money in maintaining bands of hired Brabançons and routiers, by whose aid he for some time succeeded in terrorizing the countryside. There were a few preliminary outbreaks of rebellion, which were suppressed with vigour and punished with horrible cruelty. John starved to death the wife and son of William de Braose, the first baron who took arms against him, and hanged in a row twenty-eight young boys, hostages for the fidelity of their fathers, Welsh princes who had dabbled in treason. Such acts provoked rage as well as fear, yet the measure of John’s iniquities was not full till 1212. Indeed for some time his persistent prosperity provoked the indignant surprise of those who believed him to be under a curse. If his renewed war with Philip of France was generally unsuccessful, yet at home he held his own. The most astounding instance of his success is that in 1210 he found leisure for a hasty expedition to Ireland, where he compelled rebellious barons to do homage, and received the submission of more than twenty of the local kinglets. It is strange that he came back to find England undisturbed behind him.

His long-deserved humiliation only began in the winter of 1212-1213, when Innocent III., finding him so utterly callous as to the interdict, took the further step of declaring him deposed from the throne for contumacy, and John does homage to the pope. handing over the execution of the penalty to the king of France. This act provoked a certain amount of indignation in England, and in the spring of 1213 the king was able to collect a large army on Barham Down to resist the threatened French invasion. Yet so many of his subjects were discontented that he dared not trust himself to the chances of war, and, when the fleet of King Philip was ready to sail, he surprised the world by making a sudden and grovelling submission to the pope. Not only did he agree to receive Stephen Langton as archbishop, to restore all the exiled clergy to their benefices, and to pay them handsome compensation for all their losses during the last five years, but he took the strange and ignominious step of declaring that he ceded his whole kingdom to the pope, to hold as his vassal. He formally resigned his crown into the hands of the legate Cardinal Pandulf, and took it back as the pope’s vassal, engaging at the same time to pay a tribute of 1000 marks a year for England and Ireland. This was felt to be a humiliating transaction by many of John’s subjects, though to others the joy at reconciliation with the Church caused all else to be forgotten. The political effect of the device was all that John had desired. His new suzerain took him under his protection, and forbade Philip of France to proceed with his projected invasion, though ships and men were all ready (May 1213). John’s safety, however, was secured in a more practical way when his bastard brother, William Longsword, earl of Salisbury, made a descent on the port of Damme and burnt or sunk a whole squadron of the French transports. After this John’s spirits rose, and he talked of crossing the seas himself to recover Normandy and Anjou. But he soon found that his subjects were not inclined to follow him; they were resigned to the loss of the Angevin heritage, whose union with England brought no profit to them, however much it might interest their king. The barons expressed their wish for a peace with France, and when summoned to produce their feudal contingents pleaded poverty, and raised a rather shallow theory to the effect that their services could not be asked for wars beyond seas—against which there were conclusive precedents in the reigns of Henry I. and Henry II. But any plea can be raised against an unpopular king. John found himself obliged to turn back, since hardly a man save his mercenaries had rallied to his standard at Portsmouth. In great anger and indignation he marched off towards the north, with his hired soldiery, swearing to punish the barons who had taken the lead in the “strike” which had defeated his purpose. But the outbreak of war was to be deferred for a space. Archbishop Langton, who on assuming possession of his see had shown at once that he was a patriotic English statesman, and not the mere delegate of the pope, besought his master to hold back, and, when he refused, threatened to renew the excommunication which had so lately been removed. The old justiciar Geoffrey Fitz-Peter, now on his death-bed, had also refused to pronounce sentence on the defaulters. John hesitated, and meanwhile his enemies began to organize their resistance.