Yet it is there, and there alone, that we can catch a glimpse of one side of his character which, if we saw him only in England or in Normandy, we should hardly have discerned at all. Strange as it seems to us who know him in his northern realms only as the enterprising and somewhat unscrupulous politician, the stern and vigorous ruler, the hard-headed statesman, the uncompromising opponent of the Church’s claims, Henry is yet the one Angevin count who completely reproduced in his Marchland, as a living reality, the ideal which was represented there by the name of the good count-canon of Tours. Fulk the Black and Fulk the Fifth had both tried to reproduce it, each according to his lights, during those few years when the pressure of external politics and warfare left them free to devote their energies for a while to their country’s internal welfare. But Henry’s whole reign was, for his paternal dominions, a reign of peace. If we drew our ideas of him solely from the traces and traditions which he has left behind him there, we could never have guessed that he was a greater warrior than Fulk Nerra; we should rather have taken him for a quiet prince who, like Fulk the Good, “waged no wars.” These traces and traditions lie scattered over the soil of Anjou, Touraine and Maine as thickly as the traces and the traditions of the Black Count himself. Henry is in fact the only one of the later Angevin counts who made upon the imagination of his people an impression even approaching in vividness to that left by Fulk the Black, and of whose material works there remains anything which can be compared with those of the “great builder” of the preceding century. But the memory which Anjou has retained of Henry differs much in character from that which she has kept of Fulk; and it differs more widely still from that which Henry himself has left in his island-realm. In English popular tradition he appears simply as the hero of a foolish and discreditable romance, or as the man who first caused the murder of S. Thomas and then did penance at his grave; and material traces of him there are literally none, for of his English dwelling-places not one stone is left upon another, and not a single surviving monument of public utility, secular or ecclesiastical, is connected with his name. In the valley of the Loire it was far otherwise. There the two great Angevin builders share between them the credit of well-nigh all the more important monuments which give life to the medieval history of the land—except the military constructions, which belong to Fulk alone. It is not in donjons such as that of Loches or Montrichard, but in palaces and hospitals, bridges and embankments, that we see our Angevin king’s handiwork in his own home-lands. Almost every one of his many local capitals was adorned during his reign with a palace of regal dimensions and magnificence, reared by him in place of the lowlier “halls” which had served for the dwelling of the merely local rulers whom he succeeded. The rebuilding of the ducal palace at Rouen was begun in 1161;[944] that of Caen was nearly finished in 1180; its hall, which still exists, is the traditional seat of the Norman Exchequer.[945] At Tours a round tower which still stands in the barrack-yard is the sole surviving fragment of a castle which Henry is said to have built. His favourite abode in Touraine, however, was not at Tours but at Chinon, where the little fortress above the Vienne which had been the last conquest of Fulk Nerra and the lifelong prison of Geoffrey the Bearded grew under Henry’s hands into a royal retreat of exquisite beauty and splendour—a gem, even now in its ruin, worthy of its setting in the lovely valley of the Vienne, with the background of good greenwood which to Henry was probably its greatest charm. Angers, again, almost put on a new face in the course of Henry’s lifetime. In the year before his birth it had been visited by a fire which reduced to almost total ruin its whole south-western quarter, including the palace of the counts,[946] of which nothing but the great hall seems to have remained. The work of reconstruction, begun no doubt by Geoffrey Plantagenet, was completed on a regal scale by his son, and before the close of Henry’s reign a visitor from England, Ralf de Diceto, could gaze in admiration at the “vast palace,” with its “newly-built apartments, adorned with splendour befitting a king,” which rose at the foot of the vine-clad hills above the purple stream of Mayenne.[947]

But the count-king did not build for himself alone. It was, above all, with works of public usefulness that he delighted to adorn his realms. His beneficence indeed took a different shape from that of his predecessors. Church-building and abbey-founding met with little sympathy from him; throughout his whole dominions, only six religious houses, in the strict sense, could claim him as their founder; and even one of these was as much military as religious, for it was a commandery of knights Templars.[948] But no sovereign was ever more munificent in providing for the sick and needy. Not only do the Norman Exchequer-rolls contain frequent mention of sums set apart out of the ducal revenues for the support of lazar-houses and hospitals in the chief towns of the several bailiwicks;[949] nineteen years before the completion of his own palace at Caen, he had founded an hospital for lepers outside the walls of the town;[950] and a park and hunting-lodge which he had made for himself in the same year, 1161, at Quévilly by Rouen[951] were shortly afterwards given up by him to a colony of monks from Grandmont in Aquitaine, to be converted under their care into another great asylum for victims of the same disease.[952] At his own native Le Mans, the great hall of an almshouse or hospital outside the north-eastern boundary of the city, said to have been reared by him for the reception of its poor and sick folk, is still to be seen, though long since perverted to other uses. At Angers, on the other hand, it is only within the last half-century that the sick and disabled poor have exchanged for a more modern dwelling the shelter provided for them by Henry Fitz-Empress. Some time in the quiet years which followed the barons’ revolt, Stephen,[953] the seneschal of Anjou, bought of the abbess and convent of our Lady of Charity at Angers a plot of ground which lay between their abbey and the river, and on which he designed to build an hospice for the poor. In the last days of 1180 or the first days of 1181 the count-king took under his own care the work which his seneschal had begun, granted to the new hospital a rich endowment in lands and revenues, exempted it from secular charges and imposts, and won from Pope Alexander a confirmation of its spiritual independence.[954] Four priests were appointed to minister to the spiritual needs of its inmates; the care of their bodies was undertaken at first, it seems, by some pious laymen bound by no special rule; some years later, however, the hospital became, like most other establishments of the kind, affiliated to the Order of S. Augustine.[955] The pretty little chapel—dedicated to S. John the Baptist, and still standing,—the cloisters and the domestic offices were all finished before Henry’s death;[956] while of the two great pillared halls which now form the chief architectural glory of the suburb, one, the smaller and simpler, is clearly of his building; and the other, more vast and beautiful, is in all probability the last legacy of his sons to the home which was soon to be theirs no longer.[957]

This Hospice of S. John formed a third with Fulk Nerra’s abbey of S. Nicolas and Hildegard’s nunnery of our Lady of Charity in the group of pious and charitable foundations round which there gathered, on the meadows that bordered the right bank of the Mayenne, the suburb now known as Ronceray or La Doutre,—a suburb which even before the close of Henry’s reign had grown almost as populous as Angers itself, and was actually preferred to it as a residence by Ralf de Diceto.[958] Twice in Henry’s reign the bridge which linked it to the city was destroyed by fire;[959] the present “Grand-Pont” probably owes its erection to him. Fire was, however, by no means the most destructive element in the valleys of the Loire and its tributaries. “Well-nigh disappearing in summer, choked within their sandy beds,” these streams were all too apt, as Ralf de Diceto says of the Mayenne, to “rage and swell in winter like the sea;”[960] and the greatest and most lasting of all Henry’s material benefactions to Anjou was the embankment or “Levée”—a work which he seems characteristically to have planned and executed in the very midst of his struggle with the Church[961]—which stretches along Loire-side, from Ponts-de-Cé, just above the junction of the Mayenne and the Loire, some thirty miles eastward to Bourgueil. Further south, in the valley of the Vienne, the legend of the “Pont de l’Annonain” illustrates the curious but not altogether unaccountable confusion which grew up in popular imagination between the two great builders of Anjou. The “bridge,” a long viaduct which stretched from Chinon across river and meadow south-westward to the village of Rivière, was in reality built by Henry to secure a safe transit from Chinon into Poitou across the low ground on the south bank of the Vienne, which in rainy seasons was an all but impassable swamp. Later ages, however, connected it with a dim tradition, which still lingered in the district, of the wonderful night-ride across Loire and Vienne whereby Fulk Nerra had won Saumur, and in the belief of the peasantry the Pont de l’Annonain became a “devil’s bridge,” built in a single night by the Black Count’s familiar demon[962]—a demon who is but a popular personification of that spirit of dauntless enterprise and ceaseless activity which, alike in their material and in their political workmanship, was the secret of Henry’s success no less than of Fulk’s.

One portion, however, of Henry’s continental dominions has during these years a political and military history of its own, which is not without a bearing upon that of our own land. Geographically remote as it was from England, still more remote in the character of both country and people, Aquitaine yet concerns us more than any other part of Henry’s Gaulish possessions. For not only was it a chief source of the political complications which filled the closing years of his life; it was the only one of those possessions whose connexion with England survived the fall of the Angevin house. The heritages of Geoffrey and Matilda were lost by their grandson; the heritage of Eleanor remained, in part at least, in the hands of her descendants for more than two hundred years.

It was in truth a dower at once valuable and burdensome that Henry had received with his Aquitanian wife. She had made him master of a territory whose extent surpassed that of all his Norman and Angevin dominions put together, and was scarcely equalled by that of England—a territory containing every variety of soil and of natural characteristics, from the flat, rich pastures of Berry and the vineyards of Poitou and Saintonge to the rugged volcanic rocks and dark chestnut-woods of Auvergne, the salt marshes, sandy dunes, barren heaths and gloomy pine-forests of the Gascon coast, and the fertile valleys which open between the feet of the Pyrenees:—a territory whose population differed in blood and speech from their fellow-subjects north of Loire almost as widely as Normans and Angevins differed from Englishmen; while in temper and modes of thought and life they stood so apart from the northern world that in contradistinction to them Angevins and Normans and English might almost be counted, and indeed were almost ready to count themselves, as one people. It was a territory, too, whose political relations varied as much as its physical character, and were full of dangers which all Henry’s vigilance and wisdom were powerless to guard against or overcome. Setting aside, for the moment, the internal difficulties of Aquitaine, its whole eastern frontier, from the banks of the Cher to the Pyrenees, was more or less in dispute throughout his reign. The question of Toulouse, indeed, was settled in 1173; thenceforth the county of Toulouse, with its northern dependencies Rouergue and Alby, became a recognized underfief of the Poitevin duchy of Aquitaine, to which its western dependency, Quercy or the county of Cahors, had been already annexed after the war of 1160. The north-eastern portions of the older Aquitania, Berry and Auvergne, were sources of more lasting trouble. Berry had long ago been split into two unequal portions, of which the larger had remained subject to the dukes of Aquitaine, while the smaller northern division formed the viscounty of Bourges, and was an immediate fief of the French Crown. Naturally, the king was disposed to use every opportunity of thwarting the duke in the exercise of his authority over southern Berry; and Henry was equally desirous to lose no chance of re-asserting his ducal rights over Bourges.[963] The feudal position of Auvergne was a standing puzzle which king and duke, count, clergy and people, all in vain endeavoured to solve. During the struggle for supremacy in southern Gaul between the houses of Poitiers and Toulouse, Auvergne, after fluctuating for nearly a hundred years between the rival dukedoms, had virtually succeeded in freeing itself from the control of both, and in the reign of Louis VI. it seems to have been regarded as an immediate fief of the French Crown, to which however it proved a most unruly and troublesome possession. But the dukes of Aquitaine had never relinquished their claim to its overlordship; and when a quarrel broke out between two rival claimants of the county, it was naturally followed by a quarrel between Henry and Louis VII. as to their respective rights, as overlord and as lord paramount, to act as arbiters in the strife.[964] During five-and-twenty years it was a favourite device of Louis and of his successor, at every adverse crisis in Henry’s fortune, to despatch a body of troops into Auvergne to occupy that country and threaten Aquitaine through its eastern marches,[965] just as they habitually threatened Normandy through the marches of the Vexin.

Such a threat implied a far more serious danger in the south than in the north. The Aquitanian border was guarded by no such chain of strongly-fortified, stoutly-manned ducal castles as girt in the Norman duchy from Gisors to Tillières; and Henry’s hold over his wife’s dominions was very different from his grasp of the heritage of his mother. Twenty years of Angevin rule, which for political purposes had well-nigh bridged over the channel that parted England from Gaul, seem to have done nothing towards bridging over the gulf that parted Aquitaine from France and Anjou. If our Angevin king sometimes looks like a stranger amongst us, he was never anything but a stranger among the fellow-countrymen of his wife. Nowhere throughout his whole dominions was a spirit of revolt and insubordination so rife as among the nobles of Poitou and its dependencies; but it was a spirit utterly unlike the feudal pride of the Norman baronage. The endless strife of the Aquitanian nobles with their foreign duke and with each other sprang less from political motives than from a love of strife for its own sake; and their love of strife was only one phase of the passion for adventure and excitement which ran through every fibre of their nature and coloured every aspect of their social life. The men of the south lived in a world where the most delicate poetry and the fiercest savagery, the wildest moral and political disorder, and the most refined intellectual culture, mingled together in a confusion as picturesque as it was dangerous. The southern warrior was but half a knight if the sword was his only weapon—if he could not sing his battles as well as fight them. From raid and foray and siege he passed to the “Court of Love,” where the fairest and noblest women of the land, from the duchess herself downwards, presided over contests of subtle wit, skilful rime and melodious song, conducted under rules as stringent and with earnestness as deep as if life and death were at stake upon the issue; and in truth they sometimes were at stake, for song, love and war all mingled together in the troubadour’s life in an inextricable coil which the less subtle intellects of the north would have been powerless to unravel or comprehend. The sirvente or poetical satire with which he stung his enemies into fury or roused the slumbering valour of his friends often wrought more deadly mischief than sharp steel or blazing firebrand. The nature of the men of the south was like that of their country: it was made up of the most opposite characteristics—of the lightest fancies, the stormiest passions, the most versatile capabilities of body and mind, the most indolent love of ease and pleasure, the most restless and daring valour, the highest intellectual refinement and the lowest moral degradation. It was a nature which revolted instinctively from constraint in any direction,—whose impetuosity burst all control of law and order imposed from without upon its restless love of action and adventure, just as it overflowed all conventional bounds of thought and language with its exuberant play of feeling and imagination in speech or song.[966] We may see a type of it in the portrait, drawn by almost contemporary hands, of one who played an important part both in the social and in the political history of Aquitaine throughout the closing years of Henry II. and the reign of his successor. “Bertrand de Born was of the Limousin, lord of a castle in the diocese of Périgueux, by name Hautefort. He had at his command near a thousand men. And all his time he was at war with all his neighbours, with the count of Périgord, and the viscount of Limoges, and with his own brother Constantine—whom he would have liked to disinherit, had it not been for the king of England—and with Richard, while he was count of Poitou. He was a good knight, and a good warrior, and a good servant of ladies, and a good troubadour of sirventes; he never made but two songs, and the king of Aragon assigned the songs of Guiraut de Borneil as wives to his sirventes; and the man who sang them for him was named Papiol. And he was a pleasant, courteous man, wise and well-spoken, and knew how to deal with good and evil. And whenever he chose, he was master of King Henry and his sons; but he always wanted them to be at war among themselves, the father and the sons and the brothers one with another; and he always wanted the king of France and King Henry to be at war too. And if they made peace or a truce, he immediately set to work to unmake it with his sirventes, and to shew how they were all dishonoured in peace. And he gained much good by it, and much harm.”[967]