England was now his only refuge. In these closing years of his reign, when the whole interest of the story centres round the person of the king, the character of those few incidents which take place on English ground is in striking contrast with the state of affairs which occupied him in Gaul. While the Angevin dominions on the continent were threatening disruption under their owner’s very eyes, each of his visits to England was marked by some fresh indication of the firm hold which he had gained upon his island realm and its dependencies, or of the lofty position which England under him had acquired among the powers of the world. Of the internal affairs of England itself, indeed, we hear absolutely nothing save a few ecclesiastical details, and of Wales and Scotland scarcely more. Henry’s first business after his landing in 1184 had been to lead an army against South Wales;[1127] but at the mere tidings of his approach Rees hurried to make submission at Worcester.[1128] William of Scotland was in still greater haste to meet the English king with a suit for the hand of his granddaughter Matilda of Saxony,[1129] who was now in England with her parents. The project was foiled by the Pope’s refusal to grant a dispensation,[1130] without which such a marriage was impossible, owing to the descent of both parties from Malcolm III. and Margaret. Henry, however, on his next visit to England in 1186, proposed that William should wed in Matilda’s place her kinswoman Hermengard of Beaumont.[1131] Hermengard stood even nearer than Matilda in descent from Henry I., but there was no obstacle to her marriage with the king of Scots; he therefore willingly embraced the offer; and before the year closed the alliance between the two kings was doubly cemented, first at Carlisle by the final submission of Galloway to Henry, William himself standing surety for its obedience;[1132] and afterwards, at Woodstock on September 5, by the marriage of Hermengard and William, to whom Henry restored Edinburgh castle as his contribution to the dowry of the bride.[1133]

Henry is said to have received in the course of the same year another proposal, from a more distant quarter, for his granddaughter’s hand. According to one writer, Bela of Hungary had at first desired the young Saxon princess for his queen, and it was only Henry’s long delay in answering his suit which provoked him to transfer it to Margaret.[1134] Both Matilda’s suitors must have been attracted solely by the ambition of forming a family connexion with her grandfather King Henry; and that attraction must have been a very strong one, for at the time of William’s suit, if not at the time of Bela’s, it had to counterbalance the fact that Matilda herself, her parents, and all their other children, were landless and penniless exiles. To Henry’s load of family cares there had been added since 1180 that of the troubles of his eldest daughter and her husband, Duke Henry the Lion of Saxony. During the retreat of the Imperial forces from Italy in 1179 the duke fell under the displeasure of his cousin the Emperor; next year he was deprived of all his estates and placed under the ban of the Empire. In the summer of 1182 he and his family made their way to the sole refuge left them, the court of his father-in-law; and there for the most part they remained during the next two years. Towards the close of 1184 the English king’s influence in Germany prevailed to obtain the duke’s restoration to his patrimonial duchy of Brunswick;[1135] and another token of the eagerness with which Henry’s alliance was sought may be seen in the fact that among the conditions demanded by Frederic was the betrothal of one of his own daughters to Richard of Poitou.[1136] This condition, which might have added considerably to Henry’s difficulties in France, was annulled by the speedy death of the intended bride.[1137] On the other hand, the restoration of the exiled duke was far from complete; Brunswick was only a small part of the vast territories which he had formerly possessed; although he returned to Germany in 1185,[1138] it was as a suspected and ruined man; and before Henry’s reign closed another sentence of banishment drove him and his wife again to seek the shelter of her father’s court.

Early in 1185 came a crowning proof of the estimation in which the English king was held both at home and abroad. King Baldwin III. of Jerusalem, the eldest son and successor of Queen Melisenda and Fulk of Anjou, had died in 1162, the year of Thomas Becket’s appointment to the see of Canterbury. He was succeeded by his brother Almeric, who died while Henry was struggling with his rebellious barons in 1173. During the twelve years which had passed since then, Almeric’s son, another Baldwin, had fought on bravely against overwhelming odds to keep out the Infidel foe. But the struggle grew more hopeless year by year and day by day. The young king himself was in natural temper as gallant a knight as ever sprang from the blood of Anjou; but he was crippled physically, socially and politically by a disease which made his life a burthen—he was a leper; his kingdom was torn by the mutual jealousies of the kinsmen on whom he was compelled to rely for its government and defence; while the political and military power of the Turks was growing to a height such as it had never before attained, under their famous leader Saladin.[1139] If the necessities of Palestine had been grievous when King Baldwin II. had called upon Fulk to protect Melisenda on her perilous throne—if they had been grievous when Melisenda sought the aid of the western princes for her infant son Baldwin III.—they were far more grievous now. But times were changed in the west since Melisenda had been obliged to rest content with a general appeal addressed to Latin Christendom through the abbot of Clairvaux. Independent of the claim of the king of Jerusalem to the sympathy and the succour of all Christian princes, Baldwin had a direct personal claim upon one prince, and that one well-nigh the mightiest of all. He himself represented one branch of the race whose power had spread from the black rock of Angers to the ends of the earth; the other, the elder branch, was represented by Henry Fitz-Empress. As Baldwin’s nearest kinsman, as the foremost descendant alike of Fulk the King and of Fulk the Canon, as head of the whole Angevin race on both sides of the sea, it was to the Angevin king of England that the Angevin king of Jerusalem appealed, as a matter of right and almost of duty, for succour in his extremity.[1140] And he threw his appeal into a shape which made it indeed irresistible. Henry was at Nottingham, on his way northward to York, in the last days of January 1185, when he was stopped by tidings that two of the highest dignitaries of the Latin Church in the east, Heraclius the Patriarch of Jerusalem and the Grand Master of the Hospital, had arrived at Canterbury on a mission from Holy Land.[1141] He at once changed his course and hurried southward again to meet them at Reading.[1142] With a burst of tears Heraclius laid at the feet of the English king the royal standard of Jerusalem, the keys of the city, those of the Tower of David and of the Holy Sepulchre itself, beseeching him in Baldwin’s name to carry them back at the head of his crusading host.

The whole assembly wept with the Patriarch; and the king himself was deeply moved.[1143] How many of his earlier projects of going on crusade—now to Spain, now to Holy Land, now alone, now with the king of France—had been mere political expedients, we cannot tell; there may have been more sincerity in them than one is at first disposed to imagine. Little as Henry cared for either war or adventure merely for its own sake, still there flowed in his veins, no less than in those of his young cousin Baldwin, the blood of Angevin pilgrims and crusaders. The lifelong dream of Fulk Nerra and Fulk V. may have been also the dream of Henry, although none of the three was a man to let his dreams influence his conduct until he saw a clear possibility of realizing them. Whether there was such a possibility now, however, was a question whose decision did not rest with Henry alone. If he was to head a crusade, he must head it not merely as count of Anjou but as king of England, with all England’s powers and resources, material and moral, at his back; and this could only be if England sanctioned his undertaking. The “faithful men of the land”—the bishops and barons, the constitutional representatives of the nation—were therefore gathered together in council at Clerkenwell on March 18; Henry bade them advise him as they thought best for his soul’s health, and promised to abide by their decision. After deliberation, they gave it as their unanimous judgement that he must remain at home and not venture to abandon, for the sake of giving his personal assistance in the east, the work to which he was pledged by his coronation-oath, of keeping his own realms in peace and order and securing them from external foes.[1144] Whether or not the decision thus arrived at was wise for the interests of Christendom at large—whether or not it redounds altogether to the honour of England—it was surely the highest tribute she could pay to her Angevin king. A ruler from whom his people were so unwilling to part had clearly some better hold over them than that of mere force. That they shrank with such dread from any interruption of his kingly labours is the best proof how greatly they had benefited by those labours during the past thirty years.

The Patriarch was bitterly disappointed, and vented his disappointment upon Henry in unmeasured terms. In vain did he intreat that at least John, the only one of the king’s sons then in England, might be sent to infuse some new life into the rapidly-dying stock of the Angevin house in Palestine. John himself, it is said, was eager to go,[1145] but the king refused his consent, and six weeks later, as we have seen, despatched him as governor to Ireland. This mission failed completely, through John’s own fault. He was received with every demonstration of loyalty both by the native princes and by the English settlers; but in a very few months he contrived to set them all against him. He treated the English leaders with the most overbearing insolence; he insulted the Irish chieftains who came to bring him their loyal greetings at Waterford more brutally still, mocking at their dress and manners, and even pulling their beards;[1146] he sent the mercenaries who had accompanied him from England to make a raid upon North Munster, in which they were repulsed with great loss,[1147] and then exasperated them to mutiny by keeping them penniless while he spent their wages upon his own pleasure.[1148] By September he had brought matters to such a pass that his father was obliged to recall him and bid John de Courcy undertake the government of Ireland in his place.[1149] Henry however was far from abandoning his cherished scheme. Blinded by his fatal partiality for his youngest child, he was willing to attribute John’s failure to any cause except the true one; he determined that the lad should return to his post, but clothed with fuller powers and loftier dignity. Taking advantage of a change in the Papacy, he at once applied to the new Pope, Urban III., for leave to have his son anointed and crowned as king of Ireland. Urban not only gave his consent, but accompanied it with a gift of a crown made of peacock’s feathers set in gold.[1150] Next summer there came to England news that “a certain Irishman had cut off the head of Hugh de Lacy”;[1151] Henry, seeing in this event an opportunity of recovering for the Crown Hugh’s vast estates in Ireland, hurried John off thither at once[1152] without waiting to have him crowned, or possibly intending that the coronation should take place in Dublin. But before John had sailed, he was recalled by tidings of another death which touched his father more nearly.