The death of the Young King left as Henry’s eldest heir Richard, known to the modern world as the Lion-Hearted. With much of his father’s energy, Richard seems to have inherited more than any of his brothers the tastes and temperament of his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Adventurous and high-spirited, fond of pomp and splendor, a lover of poetry and music, be it the songs of Provençal minstrels or the solemn chants of the church, he belonged on this side of his nature to the dukes of Aquitaine and the country of the troubadours. He loved war and danger, in which he showed great personal courage, and in the conduct of military enterprises gave evidence of marked ability as a strategist; but his gifts as a ruler stopped there. The glamour of his personal exploits and the romance of his crusading adventures might dazzle the imagination of contemporaries more than the prosaic achievements of his father, and his gifts to religious houses might even predispose monastic historians in his favor, but for all this splendor his subjects paid the bills. In spite of his great income, he was always in need of money for his extravagances; and for his fiscal exactions there was never the excuse of large measures of public policy. Indeed, so far as we can see, Richard had no public policy. “His ambition,” says Stubbs, “was that of a mere warrior: he would fight for anything whatever, but he would sell everything that was worth fighting for.”[42] Self-willed and self-centred, he followed wherever his desires led, with no sense of loyalty to his obligations or of responsibility as a ruler. Made duke of Aquitaine at seventeen, he sought to ride down every obstacle and bring immediate order and unity into a region which had never enjoyed either of these benefits; and he quickly had by the ears the land which he should have best understood. He was soon in revolt against his father and also at war with the Young King; for his own purposes he later went over to the king of France, and jested with his boon companions over his father’s discomfiture and downfall. Even as king at the age of thirty-two, Richard remained an impetuous youth; he never really grew up. Haughty and overbearing, he alienated friends and allies; inheriting the rule of the vast Plantagenet empire, he showed no realization of imperial duty or opportunity. Thus he visited England but twice in the course of his reign of ten years and valued it solely as a land from which revenue might be wrung by his ministers, nor did his continental dominions derive advantage from his presence. Impetuous and short-sighted, Richard Yea-and-Nay had to meet the greatest statesman of his day in deadly rivalry; and though panegyrists placed him above Alexander, Charlemagne, and King Arthur, he went down ignominiously before Philip Augustus.
Last of all comes the youngest son John, “my heart, my best beloved.” Never did father lavish his affection on a more unworthy child. False to his father, false to his brother Richard, John proved false to all, man or woman, who ever trusted him. He had none of the dash and courage of Richard, none of his large and splendid way, and none of his popularity and gift of leadership. Men saw him as he was, no Charlemagne or Arthur, but petty, mean, and cowardly, small even in his blasphemies, swearing by the feet or the teeth of God, when Henry II had habitually sworn by his eyes, and William the Conqueror by his splendor—par la resplendor De! Always devious in his ways, John’s cunning sometimes got him the reputation for cleverness, and John Richard Green went so far as to call him “the ablest and most ruthless of the Angevins.” But his ability, particularly in military matters not inconsiderable, was of the kind which wasted itself in temporary expedients and small successes; it was incapable of continuous policy or sustained efforts; and it everywhere ended in failure. Gerald the Welshman, the friend of his youth, at the end can only pronounce him the worst of history’s tyrants. John’s whole career offers the most convincing evidence of the futility of talent when divorced from character, by which is here meant, not so much private virtue,—for John’s private vices were shared with others of his family and his time,—but merely common honor, trustworthiness, and steadfastness. Even in his wickedness John was shifty and false, and his loss of his empire was due, not to any single blunder or series of blunders, but to the supreme sin of lack of character.
It is thus possible to see how largely the collapse of the Norman empire was bound up with the family history of Henry II—the foolish indulgence of the father, the ambitions and intrigues of the mother, the jealousies, treachery, and political incapacity of the sons. A personal creation, the Plantagenet state fell in large measure for personal reasons. If it was Henry’s misfortune to have such sons, one may say it was also his misfortune to have more than one son of any sort, since each became the nucleus of a separatist movement in some particular territory. The kings of France, it has often been pointed out, had for generations the great advantage of having a son to succeed, but only a single son. The crowning of the French heir in his father’s lifetime assured an undisputed succession; the crowning of the Young King left him dissatisfied and stirred up the rivalry of his younger brothers.
But this is not the whole of the story. The very strength and efficiency of Henry’s government were sure to produce a reaction in favor of feudal liberties in which his sons serve simply as convenient centres of crystallization. Only time could unify each of these dominions internally, while far more time was required to consolidate them into a permanent kingdom, and these processes were interrupted when they had barely begun. Such a solution of the ultimate problem of consolidation was, we have seen, entirely possible and even natural; but another was possible and also natural, namely the union of these territories under the king of France. Geography, as well as history, favored the second alternative.
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The geographical unity of France is one of the most obvious facts on the map of Europe. The Alps and the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, are its natural frontiers; only on the northeast are the lines blurred by nature and left to history to determine. Within these limits there are of course many clearly marked subdivisions—the valleys of the Rhone, Garonne, Loire, and Seine, Gascony, Brittany, Normandy, Flanders, and the rest—which formed the great fiefs of the Middle Ages and the great provinces of later times. Sooner or later, however, as population increased, as trade and commerce developed, and as the means of communication were strengthened, these divisions were certain to draw together into a single great state. Where the centre of the new state would lie was not a matter of accident but was largely determined by the great lines of communication, and especially by the commercial axis which runs from the Mediterranean to Flanders and the English Channel. On this line are situated the Roman capital of the Gauls, Lyons, and the modern capital, Paris. This fact, combined with the central and dominant position of the Paris basin in relation to the great valleys of the Seine, the Loire, and the Meuse, established the region about Paris, the Ile-de-France of history, as the natural centre of this future nation. Such a state might grow from without toward its centre, as the modern kingdom of Italy closed in on Rome, but the more natural process was from the centre outward, as England grew about Wessex or Brandenburg about the region near Berlin. In the great contest between Capetian and Plantagenet the Capetian “held the inner lines.” Shut off from the sea on the side of the Loire as well as on the side of the Seine, he was in a position to concentrate all his efforts to break through the iron ring, while the Norman rulers had to hold together the whole of their far-spread territories against reaction and rebellion at home as well as against the French at Tours and LeMans and in the Vexin. Meanwhile up and down these valleys the influences of trade, commerce, and travel were at work breaking down the political barriers and drawing the remoter regions toward the geographical centre. The rivers in their courses fought against the Plantagenets.
The personal element in the struggle was weighted against the Anglo-Norman empire even more strongly than the physiographic, for the weak links in the Plantagenet succession ran parallel to the strongest portion of the Capetian line. Against a knight-errant like Richard and a trifler like John, stood a great European statesman in the person of Philip Augustus, king of France during forty-four years, and more than any single man the creator of the French monarchy.
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Philip Augustus was not an heroic figure, and to the men of his age he was probably less sympathetic than his adversary Richard. Vigorous and enduring, a generous liver, quick-tempered but slow to cherish hatred, Philip was preëminently the cautious, shrewd, unscrupulous, far-sighted statesman. He could fight when necessary, but he had no great personal courage and excelled in strategy and prevision rather than in tactics or leadership in the field, and he preferred to gain his ends by the arts of diplomacy. The quality upon which all his contemporaries dwell is his wisdom. Throughout his long reign he kept before him as his one aim the increase of the royal power, and by his patient and fortunate efforts he broke down the Plantagenet empire, doubled the royal revenue and more than doubled the royal domain, and made France the leading international power in western Europe.
As we have already seen, Philip had made substantial headway even during the lifetime of Henry II. Crowned in 1179 at the age of fourteen, a year before the death of his paralytic father Louis VII, Philip was naturally treated as a boy by Henry, who seems, however, to have acted throughout with due regard to Philip’s position as king and his feudal suzerain. In the complications of those early years we find Henry constantly arranging disputes with the king’s vassals and more than once saving him from a tight place. But as time went on this relation became impossible. Philip openly abetted the revolts of the Young King and of Richard, and in the war which broke out at the end Richard fought openly on his side. As soon, however, as Richard succeeded to the throne, Philip began hostilities with him, and he soon used John against Richard as he had used Richard against his father. “Divide and rule,” was clearly Philip’s policy, and he always had on his side the fact that he was king in France and the Plantagenets on the Continent were his vassals.