The crisis was now close at hand; Stephen was at last face to face with his true rival. He appears to have consented, as if in desperation, to the proposed trial at Rome. It seems at first glance as if the envoys whom he sent to represent him there must indeed have been driven to their wits’ end for an argument in his behalf when they raked up again a scandal which S. Anselm had laid to rest half a century ago, as to the validity of the marriage between Matilda’s father and mother.[1073] Yet such was the argument publicly put forth by many voices against the legality of her claims to the crown; and though one account of the proceedings states that her adversaries were triumphantly confuted by Bishop Ulger of Angers,[1074] another, written by an eye-witness whose own opinions were wholly in her favour, declares that her advocates answered never a word.[1075] The trial seems to have ended without any decision;[1076] it was however quickly followed by a very significant event. The witness just referred to was Gilbert Foliot, a Cluniac monk who since 1139 had been abbot of Gloucester, and whose reputation for learning, wisdom and holiness had secured to him the confidence of the primate and the consideration of all parties alike in Church and state. He had reluctantly and after some delay obeyed Theobald’s summons to join him at the papal court; once there, he seems to have flung all his energies into the organization of the new policy of which Theobald was to be the leader.[1077] During the session of the council at Reims the bishop of Hereford died.[1078] The Pope at once appointed Gilbert Foliot vicar of the diocese;[1079] in September he was consecrated by Theobald at St. Omer, with the consent and approval of the young duke of the Normans, given on the express condition that he should do homage for the temporalities of his see to the duke and not to the king.

The very first thing Gilbert did was to break this promise;[1080] but that Theobald should have consecrated such a man on such terms was a sign of the times which Stephen could hardly fail to understand. Theobald himself soon afterwards ventured back to England; crossing from Gravelines, he landed at Gosford in the territories of Hugh Bigod, by whom he was hospitably received; the bishops of London, Chichester and Norwich, with several barons, came to meet him at Hugh’s castle of Framlingham; the king was reconciled, the primate restored, the interdict raised, and the suspended prelates, all save one, allowed to resume their functions.[1081] The exception was Henry of Winchester, who by neglecting to go to Rome within the prescribed six months had necessarily fallen under the sentence pronounced against him by Eugene at the council of Reims. Even to him, however, Theobald was willing at Stephen’s request to hold out the hand of fellowship and forgiveness.[1082] But Henry of Winchester’s days of king-making were over. It was time for another Henry to appear upon the political scene, to take his cause into his own hands and stand forth as the champion of his own claims against the man who had supplanted him on his grandfather’s throne.

CHAPTER VIII.
HENRY DUKE OF THE NORMANS.
1149–1154.

No loving hands have done for the early life of Henry Fitz-Empress what they did for that of his contemporary, his friend, his opponent Thomas of London; we have no stories of his boyhood, no picture of his home. Home indeed, in the full sense of the word, he never had and never could have. That instinctive attachment to one particular spot, or at the least to one particular country, which is innate in most men, was to a child of Geoffrey and Matilda simply impossible. Geoffrey was the son of an Angevin count and a Cenomannian countess; Matilda was the daughter of a king born in England of a Norman father and a Flemish mother, and of a queen whose parents were the one a Scottish Celt, the other a West-Saxon with a touch of High-German blood. In the temper of the Empress the Norman element was undoubtedly the strongest; no trace can be seen in her of the gentle spirit of her mother; and it is clear that no lingering regrets for the land of her birth[1083] haunted the girl-bride of the Emperor in her palace at Aachen as they haunted the monk Orderic, from boyhood to old age, in his cell at Saint-Evroul. Yet when she came to Normandy in her twenty-third year, she came there unwillingly and as a complete stranger. If Henry was to inherit any national or patriotic feeling at all, it could not be from his mother; what she transmitted to him instead was a sort of cosmopolitanism which saved the future duke of Normandy and king of England from the too exclusive influence of the demon-blood of Anjou, not by making him a Norman, still less an Englishman, but by rendering his nationality a yet more insoluble problem than her own. Even in his father, too, there are signs of a divided national sentiment. The son of Aremburg of Maine, the grandson and heir of Elias, could not cling to the black rock of Angers with the exclusive attachment of its earlier counts; a share of his patriotic affection and pride must have been given to that other, red rock above the Sarthe which had held out so long and so bravely against both Normandy and Anjou, to that Cenomannian land of heroes which Norman and Angevin alike had counted it their highest glory to overcome and win. It may have been by chance, or it may have been of set purpose, that Geoffrey and Matilda were at Le Mans when their first child was born; no other spot could have been half so appropriate. The land which Normans and Angevins and even Englishmen[1084] had done their utmost to wipe out of the list of states, the land whose claim to a separate existence, ignored or denied by them all, had yet proved the insurmountable stumbling-block which forced them into union:—that land was the most fitting birth-place for the child who was to be neither Norman, nor Angevin, nor English, and yet was to be all three at once. The vengeance of Maine upon her conquerors formed a characteristic close to her national career. They had swallowed her up at last; but they had no sooner done it than she gave a master to them all.

If, then, Normandy, England and Anjou had each a part in Henry, Le Mans had two parts, as being at once the home of his father’s mother and the scene of his own birth. His earliest recollections, however, must rather have been associated with Normandy. His first journey thither was made when he was about twelve months old, when he accompanied his mother on a visit to King Henry in the spring 1134. His brother Geoffrey was born at Argentan on June 1, and the two children narrowly escaped being left motherless under their grandfather’s care.[1085] Possibly this made them all the dearer to him; he certainly found in them his last earthly pleasure, of which he was finally deprived by a quarrel with their mother, who seems to have sent them back to Angers shortly before her own return thither in the autumn of 1135.[1086] For the next seven years little Henry can have seen nothing of his future duchy; and we have no means of knowing whether its stately capital, its people, its dialect, had left any impression upon him, or whether any dim personal remembrance was associated in his mind with that name of “my grandfather King Henry” to which he appealed so constantly in later life. His training, after his return to Angers as before, must have devolved chiefly upon Matilda; for Geoffrey during the next three years was too busy with unsuccessful fighting abroad in the interest of his wife and son to have much leisure for devoting himself to their society at home. It was not till the close of 1138 that his influence can have been seriously brought to bear upon his children, of whom there were now three, another son, named William, having been born in August 1136.[1087] After the disaster of Toucques the count appears to have spent his time until the beginning of 1141 for the most part quietly at home, where his wife’s departure over sea left him in his turn sole guardian of his boys. In one respect at least he did not neglect his paternal duty. “Unlettered king, crowned ass,” was a reproach which would have fallen with double disgrace upon the son of Geoffrey Plantagenet and the grandson of Henry I.; and Geoffrey took care that his firstborn should never be exposed to it. It may even be that in those two years when war and politics left him at leisure for the quieter enjoyments of his books, his hunting and his home, the young father himself took up the task, of which he was certainly quite capable, of instilling into his child the first rudiments of that book-learning which he loved so well. At any rate, it was he who chose the first teacher to whom Henry’s education was intrusted. As if on purpose to add one more to the varied influences already working in that young mind, the teacher was neither Angevin, nor Cenomannian, nor Norman. He was one Master Peter of Saintes, “learned above all his contemporaries in the science of verse.”[1088]