One more year of the half decade which still remained of life to Henry was to pass with only a slight foreshadowing, near its close, of the anxieties which were to fill the remainder of his days. The first question of importance which arose in 1185 concerned the kingdom of Jerusalem. England had down to this time taken slight and only indirect part in the great movement of the crusades. The Christian states in the Holy Land had existed for nearly ninety years, but with slowly declining strength and defensive power. Recently the rapid progress of Saladin, creating a new Mohammedan empire, and not merely displaying great military and political skill, but bringing under one bond of interest the Saracens of Egypt and Syria, whose conflicts heretofore had been among the best safeguards of the Christian state, threatened the most serious results. The reigning king of Jerusalem at this moment was Baldwin IV, grandson of that Fulk V, Count of Anjou, whom we saw, more than fifty years before this date, handing over his French possessions to his son Geoffrey, newly wedded to Matilda the Empress, and departing for the Holy Land to marry its heiress and become its king. Baldwin was therefore the first cousin of Henry II, and it was not unnatural that his kingdom should turn in the midst of the difficulties that surrounded it to the head of the house of Anjou now so powerful in the west. The embassy which came to seek his cousin's help was the most dignified and imposing that could be sent from the Holy Land, with Heraclius the patriarch of Jerusalem at its head, supported by the grand-masters of the knights of the Temple and of the Hospital. The grand-master of the Templars died at Verona on the journey, but the survivors landed in England at the end of January, 1185, and Henry who was on his way to York turned back and met them at Reading. There Heraclius described the evils that afflicted the Christian kingdom so eloquently that the king and all the multitude who heard were moved to sighs and tears. He offered to Henry the keys of the tower of David and of the holy sepulchre, and the banner of the kingdom, with the right to the throne itself.
To such an offer in these circumstances there was but one reply to make, and a king like Henry could never have been for a moment in doubt as to what it should be. His case was very different from his grandfather's when a similar offer was made to him. Not merely did the responsibility of a far larger dominion rest on him, with greater dangers within and without to be watched and overcome, but a still more important consideration was the fact that there was no one of his sons in whose hands his authority could be securely left. His departure would be the signal for a new and disastrous civil war, and we may believe that the character of his sons was a deciding reason with the king. But such an offer, made in such a way, and backed by the religious motives so strong in that age, could not be lightly declined. A great council of the kingdom was summoned to meet in London about the middle of March to consider the offer and the answer to be made. The king of Scotland and his brother David, and the prelates and barons of England, debated the question, and advised Henry not to abandon the duties which rested upon him at home. It is interesting to notice that the obligations which the coronation oath had imposed on the king were called to mind as determining what he ought to do, though probably no more was meant by this than that the appeal which the Church was making in favour of the crusade was balanced by the duty which he had assumed before the Church and under its sanction to govern well his hereditary kingdom. Apparently the patriarch was told that a consultation with the king of France was necessary, and shortly after they all crossed into Normandy. Before the meeting of the council in London Baldwin IV had closed his unhappy reign and was succeeded by his nephew Baldwin V, a child who never reached his majority. In France the embassy succeeded no better. At a conference between the kings the promise was made of ample aid in men and money, but the great hope with which the envoys had started, that they might bring back with them the king of England, or at least one of his sons, to lead the Christian cause in Palestine, was disappointed; and Heraclius set out on his return not merely deeply grieved, but angry with Henry for his refusal to undertake what he believed to be his obvious religious duty.
Between the meeting of the council in London and the crossing into Normandy, Henry had taken steps to carry out an earlier plan of his in regard to his son John. He seems now to have made up his mind that Richard could never be induced to give up Aquitaine or any part of it, and he returned to his earlier idea of a kingdom of Ireland. Immediately after the council he knighted John at Windsor and sent him to take possession of the island, not yet as king but as lord (dominus). On April 25 he landed at Waterford, coming, it is said, with sixty ships and a large force of men-at-arms and foot-soldiers. John was at the time nearly nineteen years old, of an age when men were then expected to have reached maturity, and the prospect of success lay fair before him; but he managed in less than six months to prove conclusively that he was, as yet at least, totally unfit to rule a state. The native chieftains who had accepted his father's government came in to signify their obedience, but he twitched their long beards and made sport before his attendants of their uncouth manners and dress, and allowed them to go home with anger in their hearts to stir up opposition to his rule. The Archbishop of Dublin and the barons who were most faithful to his father offered him their homage and support, but he neglected their counsels and even disregarded their rights. The military force he had brought over, ample to guard the conquests already made, or even to increase them, he dissipated in useless undertakings, and kept without their pay that he might spend the money on his own amusements, until they abandoned him in numbers, and even went over to his Irish enemies. In a few months he found himself confronted with too many difficulties, and gave up his post, returning to his father with reasons for his failure that put the blame on others and covered up his own defects. Not long afterwards died Pope Lucius III, who had steadily refused to renew, or to put into legal form, the permission which Alexander III had granted to crown one of Henry's sons king of Ireland; and to his successor, Urban III, new application was at once made in the special interest of John, and this time with success. The pope is said even to have sent a crown made of peacock's feathers intertwined with gold as a sign of his confirmation of the title.
John was, however, never actually crowned king of Ireland, and indeed it is probable that he never revisited the island. In the summer of the next year, 1186, news came, in the words of a contemporary, "that a certain Irishman had cut off the head of Hugh of Lacy." Henry is said to have rejoiced at the news, for, though he had never found it possible to get along for any length of time without the help of Hugh of Lacy in Ireland, he had always looked upon his measures and success with suspicion. Now he ordered John to go over at once and seize into his hand Hugh's land and castles, but John did not leave England. At the end of the year legates to Ireland arrived in England from the pope, one object of whose mission was to crown the king of Ireland, but Henry was by this time so deeply interested in questions that had arisen between himself and the king of France because of the death of his son Geoffrey, the Count of Britanny, that he could not give his attention to Ireland, and with the legates he crossed to Normandy instead, having sent John over in advance.
Affairs in France had followed their familiar course since the conference between Henry and Philip on the subject of the crusade in the spring of 1185. Immediately after that meeting Henry had proceeded with great vigour against Richard. He had Eleanor brought over to Normandy, and then commanded Richard to surrender to his mother all her inheritance under threat of invasion with a great army. Richard, whether moved by the threat or out of respect to his mother, immediately complied, and, we are told,[48] remained at his father's court "like a well-behaved son," while Henry in person took possession of Aquitaine. In the meantime the war between Philip II and the Count of Flanders had gone steadily on, the king of England declining to interfere again. At the end of July, 1185, the count had been obliged to yield, and had ceded to Philip Amiens and most of Vermandois, a very important enlargement of territory for the French monarchy. This first great success of the young king of France was followed the next spring by the humiliation and forced submission of the Duke of Burgundy.
In all these events the king of England had taken no active share. He was a mere looker-on, or if he had interfered at all, it was rather to the advantage of Philip, while the rival monarchy in France had not merely increased the territory under its direct control, but taught the great vassals the lesson of obedience, and proclaimed to all the world that the rights of the crown would be everywhere affirmed and enforced. It was clearly the opening of a new era, yet Henry gave not the slightest evidence that he saw it or understood its meaning for himself. While it is certain that Philip had early detected the weakness of the Angevin empire, and had formed his plan for its destruction long before he was able to carry it out, we can only note with surprise that Henry made no change in his policy to meet the new danger of which he had abundant warning. He seems never to have understood that in Philip Augustus he had to deal with a different man from Louis VII. That he continued steadily under the changed circumstances his old policy of non-intervention outside his own frontiers, of preserving peace to the latest possible moment, and of devoting himself to the maintenance and perfection of a strong government wherever he had direct rule, is more creditable to the character of Henry II than to the insight of a statesman responsible for the continuance of a great empire, and offered the realization of a great possibility. To Philip Augustus it was the possibility only which was offered; the empire was still to be created: but while hardly more than a boy, he read the situation with clear insight and saw before him the goal to be reached and the way to reach it, and this he followed with untiring patience to the end of his long reign.
When Henry returned to England at the end of April, 1186, he abandoned all prospect of profiting by the opportunity which still existed, though in diminished degree, of checking in its beginning the ominous growth of Philip's power, an opportunity which we may believe his grandfather would not have overlooked or neglected. By the end of the summer all chance of this was over, and no policy of safety remained to Henry but a trial of strength to the finish with his crafty suzerain, for Philip had not merely returned successful from his Burgundian expedition, but he had almost without effort at concealment made his first moves against the Angevin power. His opening was the obvious one offered him by the dissensions in Henry's family, and his first move was as skilful as the latest he ever made. Richard was now on good terms with his father; it would even appear that he had been restored to the rule of Aquitaine; at any rate Henry's last act before his return to England in April had been to hand over to Richard a great sum of money with directions to subdue his foes. Richard took the money and made successful and cruel war on the Count of Toulouse, on what grounds we know not. Geoffrey, however, offered himself to Philip's purposes. Henry's third son seems to have been in character and conduct somewhat like his eldest brother, the young king. He had the same popular gifts and attractive manners; he enjoyed an almost equal renown for knightly accomplishments and for the knightly virtue of "largesse"; and he was, in the same way, bitterly dissatisfied with his own position. He believed that the death of his brother ought to improve his prospects, and his mind was set on having the county of Anjou added to his possessions. When Richard and his father refused him this, he turned to France and betook himself to Paris. Philip received him with open arms, and they speedily became devoted friends. Just what their immediate plans were we cannot say. They evidently had not been made public, and various rumours were in circulation. Some said that Geoffrey would hold Britanny of Philip; or he had been made seneschal of France, an office that ought to go with the county of Anjou; or he was about to invade and devastate Normandy. It is probable that some overt action would have been undertaken very shortly when suddenly, on August 19, Geoffrey died, having been mortally hurt in a tournament, or from an attack of fever, or perhaps from both causes. He was buried in Paris, Philip showing great grief and being, it is said, with difficulty restrained from throwing himself into the grave.
The death of Geoffrey may have made a change in the form of Philip's plans, and perhaps in the date of his first attempt to carry them out, but not in their ultimate object. It furnished him, indeed, with a new subject of demand on Henry. There had been no lack of subjects in the past, and he had pushed them persistently: the question of Margaret's dower lands,—the return of the Norman Vexin,—and of the payment of her money allowance, complicated now by her second marriage to Bela, king of Hungary; the standing question of the marriage of Philip's sister Adela; the dispute about the suzerainty of Auvergne still unsettled; and finally Richard's war on the Count of Toulouse. Now was added the question of the wardship of Britanny. At the time of his death one child had been born to Geoffrey of his marriage with Constance,—a daughter, Eleanor, who was recognized as the heiress of the county. Without delay Philip sent an embassy to Henry in England and demanded the wardship of the heiress, with threats of war if the demand was not complied with. The justice of Philip's claim in this case was not entirely clear since he was not the immediate lord of Britanny, but kings had not always respected the rights of their vassals in the matter of rich heiresses, and possibly Geoffrey had actually performed the homage to Philip which he was reported to be planning to do. In any case it was impossible for Henry to accept Philip's view of his rights, but war at the moment would have been inconvenient, and so he sent a return embassy with Ranulf Glanvill at its head, and succeeded in getting a truce until the middle of the winter. Various fruitless negotiations followed, complicated by an attack made by the garrison of Gisors on French workmen found building an opposing castle just over the border. Henry himself crossed to Normandy about the middle of February, 1187, but personal interviews with Philip led to no result, and the situation drifted steadily toward war. The birth of a posthumous son to Geoffrey in March—whom the Bretons insisted on calling Arthur, though Henry wished to give him his own name, a sure sign of their wish for a more independent position—brought about no change. Philip had protected himself from all danger of outside interference by an alliance with the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and was determined on war. By the middle of May both sides were ready. Henry divided his army into four divisions and adopted a purely defensive policy.
Philip's attack fell on the lands of disputed allegiance on the eastern edge of the duchy of Aquitaine near his own possessions, and after a few minor successes he laid siege to the important castle of Châteauroux. This was defended by Richard in person, with his brother John, but Philip pressed the siege until Henry drew near with an army, when he retired a short distance and awaited the next move. Negotiations followed, in the course of which the deep impression that the character of Philip had already made on his great vassals is clearly to be seen.[49] Henry's desire was to avoid a battle, and this was probably the best policy for him; it certainly was unless he were willing, as he seems not to have been, to bring on at once the inevitable mortal struggle between the houses of Capet and Anjou. Unimportant circumstances on both sides came in to favour Henry's wish and to prevent a battle, and finally Henry himself, by a most extraordinary act of folly, threw into the hands of Philip the opportunity of gaining a greater advantage for his ultimate purposes than he could hope to gain at that time from any victory. Henry's great danger was Richard. In the situation it was incumbent on him from every consideration of policy to keep Richard satisfied, and to prevent not merely the division of the Angevin strength, but the reinforcement of the enemy with the half of it. He certainly had had experience enough of Richard's character to know what to expect. He ought by that time to have been able to read Philip Augustus's. And yet he calmly proceeded to a step from which, it is hardly too much to say, all his later troubles came through the suspicion he aroused in Richard's mind,—a step so unaccountable that we are tempted to reject our single, rather doubtful account of it. He wrote a letter to Philip proposing that Adela should be married to John, who should then be invested with all the French fiefs held by the house of Anjou except Normandy, which with the kingdom of England should remain to Richard.[50] If Henry was blind enough to suppose that the Duke of Aquitaine could be reconciled to such an arrangement, Philip saw at once what the effect of the proposal would be, and he sent the letter to Richard.
The immediate result was a treaty of peace to continue in force for two years, brought about apparently by direct negotiations between Richard and Philip, but less unfavourable to Henry than might have been expected. It contained, according to our French authorities, the very probable agreement that the points in dispute between the two kings should be submitted to the decision of the curia regis of France, and Philip was allowed to retain the lordships of Issoudun and Fréteval, which he had previously occupied, as pledges for the carrying out of the treaty. The ultimate result of Philip's cunning was that Richard deserted his father and went home with the king of France, and together they lived for a time in the greatest intimacy. Philip, it seemed, now loved Richard "as his own soul," and showed him great honour. Every day they ate at table from the same plate, and at night they slept in the same bed. One is reminded of Philip's ardent love for Geoffrey, and certain suspicions inevitably arise in the mind. But at any rate the alarm of Henry was excited by the new intimacy, and he did not venture to go over to England as he wished to do until he should know what the outcome was to be. He sent frequent messengers to Richard, urging him to return and promising to grant him everything that he could justly claim, but without effect. At one time Richard pretended to be favourably inclined, and set out as if to meet his father, but instead he fell upon the king's treasure at Chinon and carried it off to Aquitaine to use in putting his own castles into a state of defence. His father, however, forgave even this and continued to send for him, and at last he yielded. Together they went to Angers, and there in a great assembly Richard performed liege homage to his father once more and swore fealty to him "against all men," a fact which would seem to show that Richard had in some formal way renounced his fealty while at Philip's court, though we have no account of his doing so. During this period, in September, 1187, an heir was born to King Philip, the future Louis VIII.