A history of England

by Charles Oman

Conspiracy of Princes Henry and Richard.

In less than a year after the penance at Avranches, Henry was plunged into a new sea of troubles, in which the Church party saw the vengeance of Heaven for the fate of Becket. All these troubles sprang from the undutiful conduct of Henry's sons, four graceless youths who had been brought up in the worst of schools by their able but unprincipled mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Henry, the eldest son, was now in his nineteenth year; Richard, the second son, in his seventeenth. But, in spite of their youth, the two boys, encouraged and supported by their mother, conspired against their father and king. In 1173 Henry fled to the court of Lewis of France, alleging as his grievance the fact that the king would not grant him a great appanage—England or Normandy—to rule in his own right. With the aid of Louis VII, the young Henry stirred up all the discontented elements in his father's dominions. He arranged for a simultaneous rising of the discontented barons of Brittany, Anjou, and Poitou, for a rebellion in England to be headed by the earls of Leicester, Derby, and Norfolk, and for an invasion of Northumbria by William, the King of the Scots.

Suppression of the rebels.—Moderation of Henry.

This widespread conspiracy actually came to a head; but its outbreak only served to show King Henry's strength and activity. He was himself in France when the storm burst: taking in hand the work that lay nearest to him, he put down the Bretons and Angevins, and forced the King of France to conclude a truce. Then in the winter of 1173-4 he turned upon his son Richard's partisans in Poitou, and, after much fighting, pacified the land. Meanwhile the king's representative in England, the Justiciar Richard de Lucy, had called out the levies of the shires against the revolted barons. The campaign was settled by a battle at Fornham, in Suffolk, where the rebels were scattered and the Earl of Leicester taken prisoner. One after another the castles of the disloyal barons fell, and when England was pacified, Ralf de Glanville led a force against the Scots, surprised them at Alnwick, and took their king William the Lion prisoner (1174).

Thus Henry had triumphed over all his foes. In the moment of victory he showed extraordinary moderation. He neither executed any of the rebels nor confiscated their lands, but only insisted that all their castles should be demolished. He gave his sons a full pardon, and restored them to his favour; with their mother he was far more wroth, and never would live with her again. The King of the Scots was only released on doing homage to the English crown, not merely for his earldoms of Huntingdon and Lothian, which had always been reckoned English fiefs, but for his whole kingdom of Scotland (1175).

This was Henry's greatest triumph: the danger of feudal anarchy had once more assailed him, and he had beaten it down with such a firm hand that England was never troubled again with a purely selfish and anarchic baronial rising for more than two centuries. But this victory did not win the king a quiet and glorious end to his reign. His wicked and ungrateful sons were to be the bane of his elder years.

Prosperity and Legislation.—Itinerant justices.—The fyrd.

The effect of the blow that he had dealt his disloyal subjects lasted about eight years, a period of quiet and prosperity on both sides of the Channel, during which Henry passed many excellent laws, and more especially dealt with the administration of justice, arranging permanent circuits for the itinerant justices who sat in the county courts to hold the assizes. He also issued regulations for the uniform arming and mustering of the shire-levies, the old English fyrd which had served him so well against the rebels in 1173. Abroad he was universally recognized as the greatest king of the West. He was chosen as the fairest arbitrator in several disputes between contemporary princes—even by the distant Kings of Spain. He married his daughters to the Kings of Castile and Sicily and the great Duke of Saxony, the chief vassal of the German crown. To each of his sons he promised a great inheritance: Henry was to have England, Normandy, and Anjou; Richard was to take his mother's portion in Aquitaine; Geoffrey was already provided for with his wife's duchy of Brittany: John, the youngest son, was to be King of Ireland, and the Irish chiefs were made to do homage to him.

Second rebellion of Henry and Geoffrey.

All this prosperity lasted till 1183, when Henry was fifty-two, and his four sons respectively twenty-eight, twenty-six, twenty-four, and sixteen. Tired of waiting any longer for his inheritance, and forgetful of the warning that he had received in 1174, Henry the younger once more took arms against his father: his aider and abettor was the new King of France, Philip Augustus, the son of Lewis VII., as bitter an enemy of the Angevin house as his predecessor had been. Henry also persuaded his brother Geoffrey to bring in the Bretons to his aid. Richard and John, the king's second and fourth sons, were for the time being faithful to their father; indeed, the actual casus belli, which Henry the younger published as his justification, was that the king had unfairly favoured Richard against him. This time the fighting was all on the continent; the English baronage were too much cowed to stir.