Henry the Second

by Alice Stopford Green

Meanwhile the king had in 1185 made a further attempt at a permanent settlement of the distracted island. John was formally appointed king over Ireland, and accompanied by Glanville, landed in Waterford on the 25th of April. His coming with a new batch of Norman followers completed the misfortunes of the first settlers. The Norman-Welsh knights of the border had by painful experience learned among their native woods and mountains how to wage such war as was needed in Ireland-a kind of war where armour was worse than useless, where strength was of less account than agility, where days and nights of cold and starvation were followed by impetuous assaults of an enemy who never stood long enough for a decisive battle, a war where no mercy was given and no captives taken. On the other hand, their half Celtic blood had made it easy for them to mingle with the Irish population, to marry and settle down among them. But the followers of John were Norman and French knights, accustomed to fight in full armour upon the plains of France; and to add to a rich pay the richer profits of plunder and of ransom. The seaport towns and the castles fell into the hands of new masters, untrained to the work required of them. "Wordy chatterers, swearers of enormous oaths, despisers of others," as they seemed to the race of Nesta's descendants, the new rulers of the country proved mere plunderers, who went about burning, slaying, and devastating, while the old soldiery of the first conquest were despised and cast aside. Divisions of race which in England had quite died out were revived in Ireland in their full intensity; and added to the two races of the Irish and the Danes we now hear of the three hostile groups into which the invaders were broken—the Normans, the English, and the men of the Welsh border. To the new comers the natives were simply barbarians. When the Irish princes came to do homage, their insolent king pulled their long beards in ridicule; at the outrage they turned their backs on the English camp, and the other kings hearing their tale, refused to do fealty. Any allies who still remained were alienated by being deprived of the lands which the first invaders had left them. Even the newly-won Church was thrown into opposition by interference with its freedom and plunder of its lands; the ancient custom of carrying provisions to the churches for safe keeping in troubled times was contemptuously ignored when a papal legate gave the English armies leave to demand the opening of the church doors, and the sale of such provisions as they chose to require. There were complaints too in the country of the endless lawsuits that now sprang up, probably from the infinite confusion that grew out of the attempt to override Irish by English law. But if Glanville tried any legal experiments in Ireland, his work was soon interrupted. Papal legates arrived in England at Christmas 1186 to crown the King of Ireland with the crown of peacocks' feathers woven with gold which the Pope himself had sent. But John never wore his diadem of peacocks' feathers. Before it had arrived he had been driven from the country.

Thus ended the third and last attempt in Henry's reign to conquer Ireland. The strength and the weakness of the king's policy had alike brought misery to the land. The nation was left shattered and bleeding; its native princes weakened in all things save in the habits of treachery and jealousy; its Danish traders driven into exile; its foreign conquerors with their ranks broken, and their hope turned to bitterness. The natural development of the tribal system was violently interrupted by the half-conquest of the barons and the bringing in of a feudal system, for which the Irish were wholly unprepared. But the feudal conquerors themselves were only the remnants of a broken and defeated party, the last upholders of a tradition of conquest and of government of a hundred years earlier. Themselves trembling before the coming in of a new order of things, they could destroy the native civilization, but they could set nothing in its place. There remained at last only the shattered remnants of two civilizations which by sheer force were maintained side by side. Their fusion was perhaps impossible, but it was certainly rendered less possible by the perplexed and arbitrary interferences of later rulers in England, almost as foreign to the Anglo-Irish of the Pale as to the native tribes who, axe in hand and hidden in bog and swamp and forest, clung desperately to the ancient traditions and inheritance of their forefathers.

CHAPTER IX

REVOLT OF THE BARONAGE

All hope of progress, of any wise and statesmanlike settlement of Ireland, utterly died away when, on Easter night, 16th April 1172, Henry sailed from Wexford. The next morning he landed near St. David's. He entered its gates as a pilgrim, on foot and staff in hand, while the monks came out in solemn procession to lead him to the ancient church on the other side of the river. Suddenly a Welsh woman sprang out from among the crowd, and striking her hands together wildly, threw herself at his feet crying with a loud voice, "Avenge us to-day, Lechlavar! Avenge the people of this land!" The woman's bitter cry told the first thought of all the thronging multitudes of eager Welshmen that day, how Merlin had prophesied that an English king, the conqueror of Ireland, should die on Lechlavar, a great stone which formed a rude natural bridge across the stream, and round which the pagan superstitions of an immemorial past still clung. When the strange procession reached the river, Henry stood for a moment looking steadily at the stone, then with a courage which we can scarcely measure, he firmly set his foot on it and slowly crossed over; and from the other side, in the face of all the people he turned and flung his taunt at the prophet, "Who will ever again believe the lies of Merlin?" As he passed through Cardiff another omen met him; a white-robed monk stood before him as he came out of church. "God hold thee, Cuning!" he cried in the English tongue, and broke out into passionate warnings of evil to come unless the king would show more reverence to the Sunday, a matter about which there was at this time a great stirring of religious feeling. "Ask this rustic," said Henry in French to a knight who held his rein, "whether he has dreamed this." The monk turned from the interpreter to the king and spoke again: "Whether I have dreamed this or no, mark this day, for unless thou amendest thy life, before this year has passed thou shalt hear such news of those thou lovest best, and shalt win such sorrow from them, that it shall not fail thee till thy dying day!"

From Wales Henry struck across England, "turning neither to right nor left, and marching at a double pace." In a few days he was at Portsmouth. To hinder further mischief the younger Henry was ordered to join him and carried over sea; and the first news that reached Louis was the king's arrival in Normandy. "The King of England," Louis cried in his amazement, "is now in Ireland, now in England, now in Normandy; he may rather be said to fly than go by horse or boat!" Henry hastened on his landing to meet the legates. Negotiations were opened in May. Submission was inevitable, for fear of the rebellion which was then actually brewing left him in fact no choice of action. He agreed unreservedly to their demands. As an earnest of repentance and reformation he consented to a new coronation of his son; and on the 27th of August the young king was crowned again, along with his wife, at Winchester. Henry completed his submission at Avranches on the 27th of September. He swore that he had not desired the death of Thomas, but to make satisfaction for the anger he had shown, he promised to take the cross, to give funds to the Knights Templars for the defence of Jerusalem, and to found three religious houses. He renounced the Constitutions of Clarendon. He swore allegiance to Alexander against the anti-Pope. He promised that the possessions of Canterbury should be given back as they were a year before the flight of Thomas, and that his exiled friends should be restored to their possessions. No king of England had ever suffered so deep a humiliation. It seemed as thought he martyr were at last victorious. A year after the murder, in December 1172, Canterbury cathedral was once more solemnly opened, amid the cries of a vast multitude of people, "Avenge, O Lord, the blood which has been poured out!" On the anniversary of the Christmas Day when Thomas had launched his last excommunications, the excited people noted "a great thunder sudden and horrible in Ireland, in England, and in all the kingdoms of the French." Very soon mighty miracles were wrought by the name of the martyr throughout the whole of Europe. The metal phials which hung from the necks of pilgrims to the shrine of Canterbury became as famous as the shell and palm branch which marked the pilgrims to Compostella and Jerusalem. Before ten years were passed the King of France, the Count of Nevers, the Count of Boulogne, the Viscount of Aosta, the Archbishop of Reims, had knelt at his shrine among English prelates, nobles, knights, and beggars. The feast of the Trinity which Thomas had appointed to be observed on the anniversary of his consecration spread through the whole of Christendom. Henry, in fact, had to bear the full storm of scorn and hatred that falls on every statesman who stands in advance of the public opinion of his day. But his seeming surrender at Avranches won for the politic king immediate and decisive advantages. All fear of excommunication and interdict had passed away. The clergy were no longer alienated from him. The ecclesiastical difficulties raised by the coronation, and the jealousies of Louis, were set at rest. The alliance of the Pope was secured. The conquest of Ireland was formally approved. Success seemed to crown Henry's scheme for the building up of his empire. Britanny had been secured for Geoffrey in 1171; in June 1172 Richard was enthroned as Duke of Aquitaine; in the following August Henry was crowned for the second time King of England. Only the youngest child, scarcely five years old, was still "John Lackland," and in this same year Henry provided a dominion for John by a treaty of marriage between him and the heiress of the Count of Maurienne. Her inheritance stretched from the Lake of Geneva almost to the Gulf of Genoa; and the marriage would carry the Angevin dominions almost from the Atlantic to the Alps, and give into Henry's control every pass into Italy from the Great St. Bernard to the Col di Tenda, and all the highways by which travellers from Geneva and German lands beyond it, from Burgundy or from Gaul, made their way to Rome. To celebrate such a treaty Henry forgot his thrift. The two kings of England travelled with ostentatious splendour to meet the Count of Maurienne in Auvergne in January 1173. The King of Aragon and the Count of Toulouse met them at Montferrand, and a peace which Henry concluded between Toulouse and Aragon declared the height of his influence. Raymond bent at last to do homage for Toulouse, an act of submission which brought the dominion of Anjou to the very border of the Mediterranean.

There was a wild outbreak of alarm among all Henry's enemies as from his late humiliation he suddenly rose to this new height of power. The young king listened eagerly to those who plotted mischief, and one night in mid-Lent he fled to the court of Louis. In an agony of apprehension Henry sought to close the breach, and sent messages of conciliation to the French king. "Who sends this message to me?" demanded Louis. "The King of England," answered the messengers. "It is false," he said; "behold the King of England is here, and he sends no message to me by you; but if you so call his father who once was king, know ye that he asking is dead." The Counts of Flanders, of Boulogne, and of Blois, joined the young king in Paris, and did homage to him for fiefs which he bestowed on them—Kent, Dover, Eochester, lands in Lincolnshire, and domains and castles in Normandy—while he won the aid of the Scot king by granting him all Northumberland to the Tyne. The rebellion was organized in a month. Eleanor sent Richard, commander of the forces of Aquitaine, and Geoffrey, lord of Britanny, to take their share in the revolt; she herself was hastening after them when she was seized and thrown into prison. In Aquitaine, where the people impartially hated both French and Normans, the enthusiasm for independence was stirred by songs such as those of the troubadour, Bertrand de Born, lord of a fortress and a thousand men, who "was never content, save when the kings of the North were at war." In Normandy old hatreds had deepened year by year as Henry had gone on steadily seizing castles and lands which had fallen out of the possession of the crown. In 1171 he had doubled the revenue of the duchy by lands which the nobles had usurped. In 1172 he had alarmed them by having a new return made of the feudal tenures for purposes of taxation. The great lords of the duchy with one consent declared against him. Britanny sprang to arms. If Maine and Anjou remained fairly quiet, there was in both of them a powerful party of nobles who joined the revolt. The rebel party was everywhere increased by all who had joined the young king, "not because they thought his the juster cause," but in fierce defiance of a rule intolerable for its justice and its severity. England was no less ready for rebellion. The popular imagination was still moved by the horror of the archbishop's murder. The generation that remembered the miseries of the former anarchy was now passing away, and to some of the feudal lords order doubtless seemed the greater ill. The new king too had lavished promises and threats to win the English nobles to his side. "There were few barons in England who were not wavering in their allegiance to the king, and ready to desert him at any time." The more reckless eagerly joined the rebellion; the more prudent took refuge in France, that they might watch how events would go; there was a timid and unstable party who held outwardly to the king in vigilant uncertainty, haunted by fears that they should be swept away by the possible victory of his son. Such descendants of the Normans of the Conquest as had survived the rebellions and confiscations of a hundred years were eager for revenge. The Earl of Leicester and his wife were heirs of three great families, whose power had been overthrown by the policy of the Conqueror and his sons. William of Aumale was descended from the Count who had claimed the throne in the Conqueror's days, and bitterly remembered the time before Henry's accession, when he had reigned almost as king in Northern England. Hugh of Puiset, Bishop of Durham, whose diocese stretched across Northumberland, and who ruled as Earl Palatine of the marchland between England and Scotland; the Earl of Huntingdon, brother of the Scot king; Roger Mowbray, lord of the castles of Thirsk and Malessart north of York, and of a strong castle in the Isle of Axholm; Earl Ferrers, master of fortresses in Derby and Stafford; Hugh, Earl of Chester and Lord of Bayeux and Avranches, joined the rebellion. So did the old Hugh Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, who had already fought and schemed against Henry in vain twenty years before. The Earls of Clare and Gloucester on the Welsh border were of very doubtful loyalty. Half of England was in revolt, and north of a line drawn from Huntingdon to Chester the king only held a few castles—York, Richmond, Carlisle, Newcastle, and some fortresses of Northumberland. The land beyond Sherwood and the Trent, shut off by an almost continuous barrier of marsh and forest from the south, was still far behind the rest of England in civilization. The new industrial activity of Yorkshire was not yet forty years old; in a great part of the North money-rents had scarcely crept in, and the serfs were still toiling on under the burden of labour-dues which had been found intolerable elsewhere. The fines, the taxes, the attempt to bring its people under a more advanced system of government must have pressed very hardly on this great district which was not yet ready for it; and to the fierce anger of the barons, and the ready hostility of the monasteries, was perhaps added the exasperation of freeholder and serf.

Henry, however, was absolute master of the whole central administration of the realm. Moreover, by his decree of the year before he had set over every shire a sheriff who was wholly under his own control, trained in his court, pledged to his obedience, and who had firm hold of the courts, the local forces, and the finances. The king now hastened to appoint bishops whom he could trust to the vacant sees. Geoffrey, an illegitimate son who had been born to him very early, probably about the time when he visited England to receive knighthood, was sent to Lincoln; and friends of the king were consecrated to Winchester, Ely, Bath, Hereford, and Chichester. Prior Richard of Dover, a man "laudably inoffensive who prudently kept within his own sphere," was made Archbishop of Canterbury. Richard de Lucy remained in charge of the whole kingdom as justiciar. The towns and trading classes were steadfast in loyalty, and the baronage was again driven, as it had been before, to depend on foreign mercenaries.

War first broke out in France in the early summer of 1173. Normandy and Anjou were badly defended, and their nobles were already half in revolt, while the forces of France, Flanders, Boulogne, Chartres, Champagne, Poitou, and Britanny were allied against Henry. The counts of Flanders and Boulogne invaded Normandy from the north-east, and the traitor Count of Aumale, the guardian of the Norman border, gave into their hands his castles and lands. Louis and Henry's sons besieged Verneuil in the south-west. To westward the Earl of Chester and Ralph of Fougères organized a rising in Britanny. In "extreme perplexity," utterly unable to meet his enemies in the field, Henry could only fortify his frontier, and hastily recall the garrison which he had left in Ireland, while he poured out his treasure in gathering an army of hired soldiers. Meanwhile he himself waited at Rouen, "that he might be seen by all the people, bearing with an even mind whatever happened, hunting oftener than usual, showing himself with a cheerful face to all who came, answering patiently those who wished to gain anything from him; while those whom he had nourished from days of childhood, those whom he had knighted, those who had been his servants and his most familiar counsellors, night by night stole away from him, expecting his speedy destruction and thinking the dominion of his son at once about to be established." Never did the kings show such resource and courage as in the campaign that followed. The Count of Boulogne was killed in battle, and the invading army in the north-east hesitated at the unlucky omen and fell back. Instantly Henry seized his opportunity. He rode at full speed to Verneuil with his army, a hastily collected mob of chance soldiers so dissatisfied and divided in allegiance that he dared not risk a battle. An audacious boast saved the crafty king. "With a fierce countenance and terrible voice" he cried to the French messengers who had hurried out to see if the astounding news of his arrival were true, "Go tell your king I am at hand as you see!" At the news of the ferocity and resolution of the enemy, Louis, "knowing him to be fierce and of a most bitter temper, as a bear robbed of its whelps rages in the forest," hastily retreated, and Henry, as wise a general as he was excellent an actor, fell back to Rouen. Meanwhile he sent to Britanny a force of Brabantines, whom alone he could trust. They surrounded the rebels at Dol; and before Henry, "forgetting food and sleep" and riding "as though he had flown," could reach the place, most of his foes were slain. The castle where the rest had taken refuge surrendered, and he counted among his prisoners the Earl of Chester, Ralph of Fougères, and a hundred other nobles. The battle of Dol practically decided the war. It seemed vain to fight against Henry's good luck. A few Flemings once crossed the Norman border, and were defeated and drowned in retreat by the bridge breaking. "The very elements fight for the Normans!" cried the baffled and disheartened Louis. "When I entered Normandy my army perished for want of water, now this one is destroyed by too much water." In despair he sought to save himself by playing the part of mediator; and in September Henry met his sons at Gisors to discuss terms of peace. His terms were refused and the meeting broke up; but Henry remained practically master of the situation.

Meanwhile in England the rebellion had broken out in July. The Scottish army ravaged the north; the Earl of Leicester, with an army of Flemings which he had collected by the help of Louis and the younger Henry, landed on the coast of Suffolk, where Hugh Bigod was ready to welcome him. De Lucy and Bohun hurried from the north to meet this formidable danger, and with the help of the Earls of Cornwall, Arundel, and Gloucester, they defeated Leicester in a great battle at Fornham on the 17th of October. The earl himself was taken prisoner, and 10,000 of his foreign troops were slain. He and his wife were sent by Henry's orders to Normandy, and there thrown into prison. A truce was made with Scotland till the end of March. The king of France and the younger Henry abandoned hope, "for they saw that God was with the king;" and there was a general pause in the war.