A better mode of securing his authority in Dublin was probably suggested to him by the ravages which war and famine had made among its population. Eight years before he had taken the burghers of Bristol, so long the medium of trading intercourse between England and Ireland, under his especial patronage and protection.[575] He now granted to them the city of Dublin, to colonize and to hold of him and his heirs by the same free customs which they enjoyed in their own town of Bristol.[576] It is plain that Henry was already aiming at something far other than a mere military conquest of Ireland; and the long and varied list of English names, from all parts of the country, which is found in a roll of the Dublin citizens only a few years later,[577] shews how willingly his plans were taken up, not only at Bristol but throughout his realm, by the class to which he chiefly and rightly trusted for aid in their execution. Unluckily, they were scarcely formed when he was obliged to leave their developement to other hands; and the consequence was a half success which proved in the end to be far worse than total failure. On Easter night[578] he sailed from Wexford;[579] next day he landed at Portfinnan, hard by S. David’s;[580] before the octave was out he had hurried through South Wales to Newport;[581] in a few days more he was at Portsmouth;[582] and before Rogation-tide he was once more in Normandy, ready to face the bursting of a storm whose consequences were to overshadow all his remaining years and to preclude all chance of his return to complete his conquest of Ireland.

CHAPTER IV.
HENRY AND THE BARONS.
1166–1175.

For the last eight years Henry had been literally, throughout his English realm, over all persons and all causes supreme. From the hour of Thomas’s flight, not a hand, not a voice was lifted to oppose or to question his will; England lay passive before him; the time seemed to have come when he might work out at leisure and without fear of check his long-cherished plans of legal, judicial and administrative reform. In the execution of those plans, however, he was seriously hampered by the indirect consequences of the ecclesiastical quarrel. One of these was his own prolonged absence from England, which was made necessary by the hostility of France, and which compelled him to be content with setting his reforms in operation and then leave their working to other hands and other heads, without the power of superintending it and watching its effects with his own eyes, during nearly six years. He had now to learn that the enemy with whom he had been striving throughout those years was after all not the most serious obstacle in his way;—that the most threatening danger to his scheme of government still lay, as it had lain at his accession, in that temper of the baronage which it had been his first kingly task to bring under subjection. The victory which he had gained over Hugh Bigod in 1156 was real, but it was not final. The spirit of feudal insubordination was checked, not crushed; it was only waiting an opportunity to lift its head once more; and with the strife that raged around S. Thomas of Canterbury the opportunity came.

Henry’s attitude towards the barons during these years had been of necessity a somewhat inconsistent one. He never lost sight of the main thread of policy which he had inherited from his grandfather: a policy which may be defined as the consolidation of kingly power in his own hands, through the repression of the feudal nobles and the raising of the people at large into a condition of greater security and prosperity, and of closer connexion with and dependence upon the Crown, as a check and counterpoise to the territorial influence of the feudataries. On the other hand, his quarrel with the primate had driven him to throw himself on the support of those very feudataries whom it was his true policy to repress, and had brought him into hostility with the ecclesiastical interest which ought to have been, and which actually had been until now, his surest and most powerful aid. If it was what we may perhaps venture to call the feudal side of the ecclesiastical movement—its introduction of a separate system of law and jurisdiction, traversing and impeding the course of his own uniform regal administration—which roused the suspicions of the king, it was its anti-feudal side, its championship of the universal rights and liberties of men in the highest and widest sense, that provoked the jealousy of the nobles. This was a point which Henry, blinded for the moment by his natural instinct of imperiousness, seems to have overlooked when at the council of Northampton he stooped to avail himself of the assistance of the barons to crush the primate. They doubtless saw what he failed to see, that he was crushing not so much his own rival as theirs. The cause of the Church was bound up with that of the people, and both alike were closely knit to that of the Crown. Sceptre and crozier once parted, the barons might strive with the former at an advantage such as they had never had while Lanfranc stood beside William and Anselm beside Henry I., such as they never could have had if Thomas had remained standing by the side of Henry II.[583]