So long as King Stephen had only to contend against a woman, however divided England was, he had the best chances of success; but his new rival, Henry, was sixteen years of age: he had just been knighted in Scotland (1149) by his uncle. King David, and on his return he received from his uncle the investiture of Normandy. In 1150 Geoffrey of Anjou died, and his domains reverted to his eldest son, who two years later married Queen Eleanora, the divorced wife of King Louis the Young. She brought him, as her portion, the county of Poitou and the duchy of Aquitaine. He was nineteen years of age; his personal reputation, like his power, was growing daily. The party of the Plantagenets in England began to raise their heads, and when the prince landed in 1153, with an army small in number but strong in discipline, many adherents came to take service under his banner. King Stephen had also gathered together his forces, and the two rivals found themselves face to face at Wallingford, separated only by the Thames. They remained there two days without coming to blows. At length the Earl of Arundel had the courage to declare, that it was a folly to prolong the suffering of an entire nation for the sake of the ambition of two princes. It was resolved to sign a truce with a view to negotiate a permanent peace. About that time Eustace, the eldest son of Stephen, died in consequence of great excesses. The king had now only one son, who was still young and not ambitious. The two rival ecclesiastics, the Bishop of Winchester and the Archbishop of Canterbury, conducted the negotiations, and on the 7th of November, 1153, in a solemn council held at Winchester, King Stephen adopted Prince Henry as a son, giving the kingdom of England as an inheritance to him and his descendants for ever. Henry took the oath of fidelity and homage, receiving in his turn the allegiance of Prince William, the son of Stephen, on whom he conferred all the patrimonial lands of his father. A year later, on the 25th of October, 1154, King Stephen expired at Dover in his fiftieth year. For a while, at least, civil war was not to desolate England.
Chapter VII.
Henry II. (1154-1189).
When King Henry II. ascended the throne in 1154, he was the most powerful monarch that had ever reigned in England, and one of the most powerful in Christendom. To his hereditary possessions, Anjou, Normandy, and Maine, and his beautiful kingdom of England, he had added by his marriage with Eleanor of Aquitaine, Poitou, and Aquitaine, which comprised Saintonge, Auvergne, Perigord, Limousin, Angoumois, and Guienne. He was ambitious and greedy of power. His father, who knew him well, had provided by his will that Anjou should return to his second son Geoffrey, if the eldest should become King of England, and in order to secure this arrangement he had forbidden his own interment before Henry should have sworn to conform to it. The prince hesitated long, then took the oath, and Count Geoffrey Plantagenet was consigned to the tomb. But Henry had become king and his brother had claimed the execution of his promise. The monarch contrived to be relieved of his oath by Nicholas Breakspeare, who had been raised to the pontifical dignity under the name of Adrian IV., the only Englishman who has ever become Pope. Henry Plantagenet retained Anjou, the cradle of that family which he was destined to render so powerful.
When the new king landed in England, six weeks after the death of Stephen, he found his kingdom a prey to horrible anarchy. In the intervals of their power Maud and Stephen had both endeavored to attach to themselves the great nobles by important grants of lands and castles: hence the royal domains were reduced to insignificance and were surrounded on all sides by menacing fortresses guarded by resolute soldiers who recognized no authority but that of their chiefs. Many of these fortresses were in the hands of Flemish and Brabantine mercenaries whom each party in turn had summoned to their assistance. It was by dealing with these men that Henry began the reform which he reckoned upon introducing into the condition of territorial property. On a given day, to the great joy of the Normans and Saxons, he ordered all foreigners to leave the kingdom. "We saw them (says a chronicler), we saw all those Brabantines and Flemings recross the sea to return to their plough-tails, and from being lords become serfs again."
The expulsion of the foreign mercenaries had been popular; but this was not the principal object of the king, who desired to reconstitute the royal domain, and with that object convoked a grand council, which admitted, though not without difficulty, that Henry was under the necessity of resuming the grants made by Stephen and Maud. The king was not more sparing of the partisans of his mother than of her enemies. From the moment that right was on his side he never stopped in his efforts: from castle to castle, from domain to domain, he triumphed over the malcontents, either by the sword or by negotiation. When he became master of one fortress he instantly had it razed to the ground. In this way eleven hundred castles disappeared from the face of England; they had been mere haunts of robbers who oppressed the country roundabout. The peasants and the townspeople applauded the work of destruction.
King Henry had already triumphed over his vassals and defeated his brother Geoffrey, who had refused to acquiesce in his spoliation. He had compelled him to take refuge at Nantes, the population of which town had offered him the government. In 1157 he came to the determination to bring to an end the struggle with the Welsh, who were still fighting proudly for their independence. But Henry did not know well that country of mountains and defiles. He became entangled in the environs of the forest of Coleshill, and the Welsh sallying forth in a mass from the obscure lurking-places where they had been lying in ambush, fell upon the English army. The massacre was great. The Earl of Essex, hereditary standard-bearer of the crown, let fall the royal banner, and took to flight. The rumor spread abroad at once that the king was killed, but he soon rallied his troops and effected his retreat to a more open country, where he pitched his camp, and thence inflicted so much annoyance on the Welsh that without venturing a second time upon a fixed battle they consented to restore to Henry the territory which they had won back from Stephen, and to swear fidelity and homage to him for the lands which they retained. The struggles of King Henry with the Welsh were not ended. Repeated insurrections were destined to recall him into the mountains; but he succeeded nevertheless in securing and extending his dominion over that indomitable population, proud of the antiquity of their race, and convinced that all England belonged to them by right of birth.
Geoffrey had lately died at Nantes (1158) and his brother claimed that city as belonging to him by inheritance. In vain the citizens protested: in vain Conan, duke of Brittany, and earl of Richmond in England, maintained the rights of his vassals, King Henry confiscated the lands of the Earl of Richmond and crossed the sea with so powerful an army that the inhabitants of Nantes were terrified and opened their gates to him. Henry immediately took possession of all the territory between the Loire and the Vilaine, and proposed to the duke to terminate their differences by affiancing his daughter Constance to Geoffrey, the third of the English princes. In order to obtain the consent of the King of France, Louis VII., to this increase of his power upon French soil, Henry had sought the hand of Margaret of France on behalf of Henry, his eldest son.
This gleam of a good understanding between the great powers of the earth was very soon disturbed by new ambitious dreams of Henry Plantagenet. Eleanor of Aquitaine had, or believed herself to have through her grandmother, claims to the countship of Toulouse. Her first husband, Louis VII., had relinquished those rights by treaty after an attempt to seize them by force of arms; but by virtue of the divorce, Eleanor had vested her pretensions in her second husband, Henry, king of England, who claimed the cession pure and simple of the countship by Raymond of St. Gilles, count of Toulouse. The latter invoked the aid of his suzerain lord, the King of France. In the prospect of this distant struggle, Henry commuted the military service which his vassals were bound to render into a tax, and by means of this money he secured the services of an army of Brabantines. With these marched Malcolm, king of Scotland; and the King of Aragon, who like the King of France and the Duke of Brittany had lately affianced his daughter to one of the sons of Henry, and the most warlike of the English barons. But Louis VII. had already entered Toulouse, when Henry advanced against that city. Louis had but few troops with him and the King of England might easily have attempted an assault: scruples based upon his position of vassal of his lord, however, restrained him. When the French army had joined Louis VII. a few feats of arms of little importance soon brought the war to an end; but it had left indelible traces. The inhabitants of the south of France had acquired the habit of calling to their aid sometimes the King of France, sometimes the King of England, and their independence was destined to succumb under these powerful protectors. It was so well known upon the banks of the Garonne that the southern provinces were at peace when their dangerous allies were quarrelling elsewhere that people openly asked, in the form of a prayer, "When will the truce between the English and the Tournois come to an end?"
In the midst of these wars and negotiations, these invasions and these treaties. King Henry relied on all sides upon the advice and the support of Thomas Becket, or à Becket, chancellor of England, the son of Gilbert à Becket, a merchant of the city of London, of Norman origin. A romantic story attaches to the birth of Thomas Becket. It is related that the busy passers-by in the streets of London, had, to their great surprise, observed one day a woman wearing Oriental costume who was wandering about repeating the name of Gilbert. To questions put to her she gave no answer, and she knew no other English words than "Gilbert" and "London." The people around her had begun to murmur, when she was recognized by a servant who had accompanied Gilbert Becket to the crusades. Both had been made prisoners and had succeeded in escaping: but the daughter of the Emir who had held them captive had conceived a passion for Gilbert; she had followed his traces to the shore and had found means of going to England, and then to London, without any other guide to the whereabouts of him she loved than this name of Gilbert, at that time a very common one. Becket consulted his confessor; the Saracen princess was baptized under the name of Matilda, and Gilbert married her. Her husband made a great fortune and his son Thomas, a handsome and intelligent youth, had been brought up with great care, then sent into France and Italy to finish his education. He had been taken notice of from his childhood by Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury, who took him into his house as soon as he had completed his studies and employed him in the most delicate diplomatic affairs, when at the accession of King Henry II. he himself fulfilled the functions of prime minister. The king took a liking to the young archdeacon, and in 1156 appointed him chancellor, at the same time confiding to him the education of his eldest son. He also made him constable of the Tower, with the custody of considerable domains. The ecclesiastical benefices often vacant, which the chancellor was in no haste to fill up, caused to flow into the treasury the rich revenues of the bishoprics and abbeys. Gilbert Becket was dead, and his son had inherited a great fortune. He was forty years of age, elegant in his person magnificent in his attire, skilled in all bodily exercises, and at the same time learned, courageous, enterprising, and able. The king, who saw only through his eyes, kept him incessantly at his side, and could not endure his absence. Becket kept a splendid retinue, remarkable, even at that period of magnificent extravagance. His house was filled with knights and daughters of great lords who designed to secure by this means the favor of the king, and to bring up their children in the manners of the court. His sumptuously furnished table was open to all comers, and when a diplomatic mission led the chancellor abroad, the retinue which accompanied him was so magnificent and so numerous that the spectators exclaimed, "What must the king of England be, when his servant travels with such pomp?" It was in this way that Thomas Becket presented himself at the French court to negotiate on the affair of Brittany and the alliance of Prince Henry with Margaret of France. With similar grand display, although of a different nature, he accompanied the king in his campaign through the countship of Toulouse, of which he directed in person the greater part of the operations. He was at the head of seven hundred knights and men of arms, supported at his expense, when he attacked the town of Cahors and the castles which surrounded it. His sagacity, his good humor, his caustic and fertile wit were to the king a continual source of amusement. He lived with his favorite in almost brotherly intimacy, and the administrative talents which the chancellor displayed in domestic affairs added to his popularity. "I will make thee Archbishop of Canterbury," Henry often said. Becket smiled and shook his head. When the prior of Leicester, a rigid ecclesiastic, reproached him with the worldliness and outward show of his mode of living, reminding him that he was destined to become primate of England, the chancellor exclaimed, "I know three poor priests more fitted than I for that dignity. If ever I attained it, I should either lose the king's favor, or forget my duty towards God."