One other rebel there was who stood indeed on a different footing from all the rest, and whose defection had a wider political significance. The king of Scots—William the Lion, brother and successor of Malcolm IV.—had long been suspected of a secret alliance with France against his English cousin and overlord. The younger Henry now offered him the cession of all Northumberland as far as the Tyne for himself, and for his brother David confirmation in the earldom of Huntingdon,[676] with a grant of the earldom of Cambridge in addition, in return for the homage and services of both brothers:—offers which the king of Scots accepted.[677] Only three prelates, on either side of the sea, shewed any disposition to countenance the rebellion; in the south, William, the new-made archbishop of Bordeaux;[678] in the north, Arnulf of Lisieux[679] and Hugh of Durham. Arnulf’s influence at court had long been on the wane; all his diplomacy had failed, as far as his personal interest with King Henry was concerned; but he possessed the temporal as well as the spiritual lordship of his see; and the man’s true character now shewed itself at last, justifying all Henry’s suspicions, in an attempt to play the part of a great baron rather than of a bishop—to use his diplomatic gifts in temporizing between the two parties, instead of seeking to make peace between them or to keep his straying flock in the path of loyalty as a true pastor should. He did but imitate on a smaller scale and under less favourable conditions the example set by Hugh of Puiset in his palatine bishopric of Durham, where he had been throughout his career simply a great temporal ruler, whose ecclesiastical character only served to render almost unassailable the independence of his political position. It was the pride of the feudal noble, not the personal sympathies of the churchman, that stirred up both Hugh and Arnulf to their intrigues against Henry. Personal sympathies indeed had as yet little share in drawing any of the barons to the side of the boy-king. What they saw in his claims was simply a pretext and a watchword which might serve them to unite against his father. Young Henry himself evidently relied chiefly on his foreign allies—his father-in-law, the counts of Flanders and Boulogne, and the count of Blois, the last of whom was bribed by a promise of an annual pension and the restitution of Château-Renaud and Amboise; while to Philip of Flanders was promised the earldom of Kent with a pension in English gold, and to Matthew of Boulogne the soke of Kirton-in-Lindsey and the Norman county of Mortain.[680]

The first hostile movement was made directly after Easter by a body of Flemings who crossed the Seine at Pacy; but they had no sooner touched Norman soil than they were driven back by the people of the town, and were nearly all drowned in attempting to recross the river.[681] Henry meanwhile, after spending Easter at Alençon,[682] had established his head-quarters at Rouen, where he remained till the end of June, apparently indifferent to the plots that were hatching around him, and entirely absorbed in the pleasures of the chase.[683] In reality however he was transacting a good deal of quiet business, filling up vacant sees in England;[684] appointing a new chancellor, Ralf of Varneville, to the office which had been in commission—that is, virtually, in the hands of Geoffrey Ridel—ever since S. Thomas had resigned it ten years before;[685] and writing to all his continental allies to enlist their sympathies and if possible their support in the coming struggle.[686] One of them at least, his future son-in-law William of Sicily, returned an answer full of hearty sympathy;[687] neither he nor his fellow-kings, however, had anything more substantial to give. The only support upon which Henry could really depend was that of a troop of twenty thousand Brabantine mercenaries, who served him indeed bravely and loyally, but by no means for nothing;[688] and if we may trust a writer who, although remote from the present scene of action, seems to have had a more intimate acquaintance than most of his fellow-historians with all matters connected with the Brabantines, Henry’s finances were already so exhausted that he was obliged to give the sword of state used at his coronation in pledge to these men as security for the wages which he was unable to pay them.[689] Yet he could trust no one else in Normandy; and as yet he scarcely knew his own resources in England.

Early in June Robert of Leicester and William of Tancarville, the high-chamberlain of Normandy, sought license from the justiciars in London to join the king at Rouen. Immediately on landing, however, they hastened not to Henry II., but to his son.[690] The justiciar himself, Richard de Lucy, was in such anxiety that he seems to have had some thoughts of going in person to consult with the king.[691] The consultation however was to be held not in Normandy but in England. In the last days of June or the first days of July, while the counts of Flanders and Boulogne were easily overcoming the mock resistance of Aumale and Driencourt, and Louis of France was laying siege to Verneuil,[692] Henry suddenly crossed the sea, made his way as far inland as Northampton, where he stayed four days, collected his treasure and his adherents, issued his instructions for action against the rebels, and was back again at Rouen so quickly that neither friends nor foes seem ever to have discovered his absence.[693]

Hurried, however, as was the king’s visit to England, it did its work in bracing up the energies and determining the action of the vassals who were faithful to him there. In personal and territorial importance indeed these were very unequally matched with the rebels. The fidelity of the Welsh princes, David Ap-Owen and Rees Ap-Griffith,[694] could not balance the hostility of the King of Scots. Among the loyal English barons, the most conspicuous were a group of the king’s immediate kinsmen, none of whom however ranked high among the descendants of the ducal house of Normandy:—his half-brother Earl Hameline of Warren, his uncle Reginald of Cornwall, his cousin William of Gloucester;[695] besides Earl William of Arundel the husband of his grandfather’s widow Queen Adeliza, his son William, and his kinsman Richard of Aubigny. The earl of Essex, William de Mandeville, was a son of that Geoffrey de Mandeville who had accepted the earldom of Essex from both Stephen and Matilda, and who had been one of the worst evil-doers in the civil war; but the son was as loyal as the father was faithless; he seems indeed to have been a close personal friend of the king, and to have well deserved his friendship.[696] The loyalty of Earl Simon of Northampton may have been quickened by his rivalry with David of Scotland for the earldom of Huntingdon. That of William of Salisbury was an inheritance from his father, Earl Patrick, who had earned his title by his services to the Empress, and had fallen honourably at his post of governor of Aquitaine in the rising of 1168. The loyal barons of lesser degree are chiefly representatives of the class which half a century before had been known as the “new men”—men who had risen by virtue of their services in the work of the administration, either under Henry himself or under his grandfather. Such were the justiciar Richard de Lucy and the constable Humfrey de Bohun; William de Vesci, son of Eustace Fitz-John, and like his father a mighty man in the north; his nephew John, constable of Chester;—the whole house of Stuteville, with Robert de Stuteville the sheriff of Yorkshire at its head;[697]—and Ralf de Glanville,[698] sheriff of Lancashire, custodian of the honour of Richmond,[699] and destined in a few years to wider fame as the worthy successor of Richard de Lucy. The Glanvilles, the Stutevilles and the de Vescis now wielded in Yorkshire as the king’s representatives the influence which had been usurped there by William of Aumale before his expulsion from Holderness; while in Northumberland a considerable share of the power formerly exercised by the rebellious house of Mowbray had passed to servants of the Crown such as Odelin de Umfraville[700] and Bernard de Bailleul,[701] whose name in its English form of Balliol became in after-times closely associated with that borne by two other loyal northern barons—Robert and Adam de Bruce.[702] To the same class of “new men” belonged Geoffrey Trussebut, Everard de Ros, Guy de Vere, Bertram de Verdon, Philip de Kime and his brother Simon.[703]