Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.
London, Macmillan & Co.
It is during these years of prosperity and peace that we are able to get the clearest view of the scope and aims of Henry’s general scheme of home and foreign policy. That policy, when fully matured in its author’s mind, formed a consistent whole; it was however made up of two distinct parts, originating in the twofold position of Henry himself. His empire extended from the western shores of Ireland to the Cévennes, and from the northernmost point of the mainland of Britain to the Pyrenees. But this empire was composed of a number of separate members over which his authority differed greatly in character and degree. These members, again, fell into two well-marked groups. Over the one group Henry ruled as supreme head; no other sovereign had ever claimed to be his superior, none now claimed to be even his equal, within the British Isles. In the other group, however, he had at least a nominal superior in the king of France. It was impossible to deal with these two groups of states on one and the same principle; and Henry had never attempted to do so. The one group had its centre in England, the other in Anjou. As a necessary consequence, Henry’s policy had also two centres throughout his reign. The key to it as a whole lies in its blending of two characters united in one person, yet essentially distinct: the character of the king of England and supreme lord of the British Isles, and the character of the head of the house of Anjou. Henry himself evidently kept the two characters distinct in his own mind. His policy as king of England, however little it may have been consciously aimed at such a result—and we should surely be doing a great injustice to Henry’s sagacity if we doubted that it was so aimed, at least in some degree—certainly tended to make England a strong and independent national state, with its vassal states, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, standing around it as dependent allies. If he had ever for a moment dreamed of reducing his insular dominions to a mere subject-province of the empire which he was building up in Gaul, when he thought of intrusting their government to his boy-heir under the guardianship of Thomas, that dream had been broken at once and for ever by the quarrel which deprived the child of his guardian and the king of his friend. But, on the other hand, Henry certainly never at any time contemplated making his continental empire a mere dependency of the English crown. It was distinctly an Angevin empire, with its centre in the spot whence an Angevin count had been promised of old that the sway of his descendants should spread to the ends of the earth. Henry in short had another work to carry on besides that of Cnut and William and Henry I. He had to carry on also the work of Fulk the Black and Geoffrey Martel and Fulk V.; and although to us who know how speedy was to be its overthrow that work looks a comparatively small matter, yet at the time it may well have seemed equally important with the other in the eyes both of Henry and of his contemporaries. While what may be called the English thread in the somewhat tangled skein of Henry’s life runs smoothly and uneventfully on from the year 1175 to the end, it is this Angevin thread which forms the clue to the political and personal, as distinguished from the social and constitutional, interest of all the remaining years of his reign. And from this interest, although its centre is at Angers, England is not excluded. For the whole continental relations of Henry were coloured by his position as an English king; and the whole foreign relations of England, from his day to our own, have been coloured by the fact that her second King Henry was also head of the Angevin house when that house was at the height of its continental power and glory.
The prophecy said to have been made to Fulk the Good was now literally fulfilled. The dominions of his posterity reached to the uttermost ends of the known world. In the far east, one grandson of Fulk V. ruled over the little strip of Holy Land which formed the boundary of Christendom against the outer darkness of unexplored heathendom. In the far west, another of Fulk’s grandsons was, formally at least, acknowledged overlord of the island beyond which, in the belief of those days, lay nothing but a sea without a shore. Scarcely less remarkable, however, was the fulfilment of the prediction in a narrower sense. The whole breadth of Europe and the whole length of the Mediterranean sea parted the western from the eastern branch of the Angevin house. But in Gaul itself, the Angevin dominion now stretched without a break from one end of the land to the other. The Good Count’s heir held in his own hands the whole Gaulish coast-line from the mouth of the Somme to that of the Bidassoa, and he could almost touch the Mediterranean Sea through his vassal the count of Toulouse. Step by step the lords of the little Angevin march had enlarged their borders till they enclosed more than two-thirds of the kingdom of France. Fulk Nerra and Geoffrey Martel had doubled their possessions by the conquest of Touraine to the south-east; Fulk V. had tripled them by the annexation of Maine to the northward; Geoffrey Plantagenet’s marriage with the heiress of Normandy had brought him to the shores of the English Channel. The whole series of annexations and conquests whereby his son expanded his continental dominions to the extent which they covered thirty years after Geoffrey’s death resulted simply from a continuation of the same policy which, a century and a half before, had laid the foundations of the Angevin empire. Count Henry Fitz-Empress stood in a figure, like Count Fulk the Black, upon the rock of Angers, looked around over his marchland and its borders, noted every point at which those borders might be strengthened, rounded off or enlarged, and set himself to the pursuit of Fulk Nerra’s work in Fulk Nerra’s own spirit. For such a survey indeed he needed a more wide-reaching vision than even that of the Black Falcon. The work had altered vastly in scale since it left the “great builder’s” hands; but it had not changed in character. Henry’s policy in Gaul was essentially the same as Fulk’s—a policy of consolidation, rather than of conquest. He clearly never dreamed, as a man of less cautious ambition might well have done in his place, of pitting the whole strength of his continental and insular dominions against that of the French Crown in a struggle for the mastery of Gaul; he seems never to have dreamed even of trying to free himself from his feudal obedience to a sovereign far inferior to him in territorial wealth and power; he never, so far as we can see, aspired to stand in any other relation to the French king than that which had been held by his forefathers. He aimed in fact simply at compacting and securing his own territories in Gaul, and maintaining the rank of the head of the Angevin house, as the most influential vassal of the Crown. If he ever saw, on a distant horizon, a vision of something greater than this, he kept his dream to himself and, like Fulk of old, left his successors to attempt its fulfilment.
Map VI.
Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.
London, Macmillan & Co.
An ambition so moderate as this entailed no very complicated schemes of foreign diplomacy. As a matter of fact, Henry was at some time or other in his reign in diplomatic relations with every state and every ruler in Christendom, from Portugal to Norway, and from the count of Montferrat to the Eastern and Western Emperors. But these relations sprang for the most part from his insular rather than from his continental position; or, more exactly, they arose from his position as a king of England, but a king far mightier than any who had gone before him. It was the knowledge that Henry had at his back all the forces of the island-crown which roused in Louis VII. such a restless jealousy of his power in Gaul; and it was the jealousy of Louis which drove Henry into a labyrinth of diplomacy and of war, neither of which was a natural result of Henry’s own policy. A very brief glance at Henry’s foreign relations will suffice to shew that they concerned England far more than Anjou. A considerable part of them arose directly out of his quarrel with the English primate. Such was the case with his German and Italian alliances, designed to counterbalance the French king’s league with the Pope. The alliances formed through the marriages of his daughters were all strictly alliances made by the English Crown. The immediate occasion of Matilda’s marriage with Henry of Saxony was her father’s quarrel with S. Thomas; in another point of view, this union was only a natural continuation of a policy which may be traced through the wedding of her grandmother with Henry V. and that of Gunhild with Henry III. back to the wedding of Æthelstan’s sister Eadgifu with Charles the Simple. The marriages of Eleanor and Jane were first planned during the same troubled time; in each case the definite proposal came from the bridegroom, and came in the shape of an humble suit to the king of England for his daughter’s hand; and in the case of all three sisters, the proposal was laid before a great council of the bishops and barons of England, and only accepted after formal deliberation upon it with them, as upon a matter which concerned the interests of England as a state.[926] When Jane went to be married to the king of Sicily in 1176, the details of her journey to her new home and of the honours which she received on her arrival there were recorded in England as matters of national interest and national pride.[927] When in the following year her sister Eleanor’s husband, Alfonso of Castille, submitted a quarrel between himself and his kinsman the king of Navarre to his father-in-law’s arbitration, the case was heard in an assembly of the English barons and wise men at Westminster.[928] Henry’s daughters in short were instruments of his regal, his national, his English policy; for the carrying out of his Angevin, his family policy, he looked to his sons.