After threatening and beseeching him by turns all through the winter, Henry so far lost patience that he gave permission to John—now fifteen years old—to lead an army into his brother’s territories and win an heritage for himself if he could.[1107] It does not appear, however, that any such attempt was actually made till after Henry himself had gone back to England in June 1184.[1108] As soon as his back was turned, his two younger sons joined to harry the lands of the eldest; Richard retaliated by pushing across the Angevin border and making a raid upon Britanny; and in November Henry found it necessary to check the lawless doings of all three by summoning them to rejoin him in England.[1109] On S. Andrew’s day a sort of public reconciliation of the whole family took place in a great council at Westminster; Eleanor was suffered to resume her place as queen, and the three sons were compelled formally at least to make peace among themselves.[1110] Geoffrey was at once sent back to Normandy;[1111] Richard and John stayed to keep the Christmas feast with their father and mother amid a brilliant gathering of the court at Windsor.[1112] Soon afterwards Richard also returned to his troublesome duchy;[1113] for Henry had now abandoned all idea of transferring it to John. Falling back upon his earlier plans for his youngest child, on Mid-Lent Sunday 1185 he knighted John at Windsor, and thence despatched him as governor to Ireland.[1114]

Meanwhile the king himself was again called over sea by fresh troubles in Gaul. The king of France and the count of Flanders had been quarrelling for the last two years over the territories of the latter’s deceased wife, the counties of Amiens and Vermandois;[1115] Henry’s last act before he left Normandy had been to arrange a truce between them.[1116] Two months later—in August 1184—while Philip of Flanders was away in England on a pilgrimage to the martyr’s tomb at Canterbury, Philip of France broke the truce by stirring up his father-in-law the count of Hainaut to attack Flanders in his behalf: Philip of Flanders appealed for help to his other overlord the Emperor Frederic; the archbishop of Cöln, who had been his fellow-pilgrim, at once joined him in a counter-invasion of Hainaut;[1117] and the incalculable dangers of a war between France and Germany were only averted by Frederic’s wise reluctance to interfere, strengthened, we may perhaps suspect, by the influence of the English king. It seemed indeed as if nothing but Henry’s presence could avail to keep order in Gaul. When he returned thither, in April 1185,[1118] his first task was to pacify another quarrel between his own sons. This time the elder one seems to have been the aggressor; and Henry grew so angry that he once more summoned Richard to give up Aquitaine altogether, not, however, to either of his brothers, but to its own lawful lady, his mother, Queen Eleanor. Despite all her faults, Eleanor was reverenced by her sons; Richard especially treated her throughout his life with the utmost respect and affection; and the demand thus made in her behalf met with immediate submission.[1119] For nine months Henry’s dominions were quiet, and his hands were free to deal with the quarrels of France and Flanders. But before he had succeeded in pacifying them, a further complication was added. King Bela of Hungary made suit to Philip of France for the hand of his sister the widowed Queen Margaret,[1120] and this at once re-opened the question about her dower; for the agreement made two years before had been conditional upon Richard’s marriage with Adela, and as this event seemed as far off as ever, Philip again laid claim to the whole dowry, including Gisors. He was however too much in need of Henry’s assistance in his dispute with Flanders over the dower-lands of Isabel of Vermandois to risk a quarrel with him about those of the young queen; and by Henry’s tact and diplomacy both questions were settled in a conference at Gisors itself early in 1186.[1121] The count of Flanders gave up Vermandois to Philip Augustus,[1122] while Philip and Margaret again consented, in return for a money-compensation from Henry, to make Gisors over to him on the old condition—that Richard should marry Adela without further delay.[1123] The condition however remained unfulfilled. Richard was again despatched into Aquitaine, not indeed as its duke—for Henry had placed all its fortresses under officers of his own appointment[1124]—but still as his father’s representative, charged in his name with the maintenance of obedience and order.[1125] As for Eleanor, Henry had clearly never intended again to intrust her with any real authority; and in April he carried her back with him to England.[1126]

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.