It was doubtless on his triumphant return that the king of Scots came to meet him at Chester.[1394] Whichever of the royal kinsmen might have the better cause, Malcolm now clearly perceived that the power to maintain it was all on Henry’s side. He therefore surrendered the three disputed shires,[1395] with the fortresses of Newcastle, Bamborough and Carlisle,[1396] and acknowledged himself the vassal of the English king “in the same manner as his grandfather had been the man of King Henry the Elder.”[1397] The precise import of this formula is uncertain, and was probably not much less so at the time; the exact nature and grounds of the Scottish homage to England formed a question which both parties usually found it convenient to leave undetermined.[1398] For Henry’s present purpose it sufficed that, on some ground or other, the homage was done.

The closing feast of the year was celebrated with a brilliant gathering of the court at Lincoln. More cautious than his predecessor, Henry did not venture to defy local tradition by appearing in his regal insignia within the city itself; he wore his crown on Christmas day, not in the great minster on the hill-top, but in the lesser church of S. Mary in the suburb of Wigford beyond the river.[1399] Next Easter the king and queen went through this ancient solemnity of the “crown-wearing” together, and for the last time, in Worcester cathedral. When the moment came for making their oblations, they laid their crowns upon the altar and vowed never to wear them again.[1400] The motive for this renunciation was probably nothing more than Henry’s impatience of court pageantry; but the practice thus solemnly forsaken was not revived, save once under very exceptional circumstances in the middle of the next reign, till the connexion between England and Anjou was on the eve of dissolution; and as it happens, the abandonment of this custom of Old-English royalty marks off one of the lesser epochs in Henry’s career. He was about to plunge into a sea of continental politics and wars which kept him altogether away from his island-realm for six years, and from which he never again thoroughly emerged. This last crown-wearing at Worcester serves as a fitting point at which we may leave our own country for a while and glance once more at the history of the lands united with her beneath the sceptre of the Angevin king.

CHAPTER X.
HENRY AND FRANCE.
1156–1161.

Formidable as was the task of England’s internal reorganization, it was but a small part of the work which lay before Henry Fitz-Empress. His accession brought the English Crown into an entirely new relation with the world at large. The realm which for ages had been counted almost as a separate sphere, whose insularity had been strong enough to survive even the Norman conquest and to turn the conqueror’s own native land into a dependency of the conquered island, suddenly became an unit in a vast group of states gathered into the hands of a single ruler, and making up altogether the most extensive and important empire in Christendom. Among the earlier kings of England Cnut is the only one whose dominions were at all comparable in extent to those of Henry II. But the empire of Cnut and that of Henry differed widely in character and circumstances. Cnut’s northern empire was to a certain extent homogeneous; its members had at least one thing in common besides their common allegiance—they were all, geographically and politically, almost as completely severed from the rest of Europe as England herself. It was only as an indirect consequence partly of his territorial power, but still more of his personal greatness, that Cnut and his realms came into connexion with central and southern Europe. In Henry’s case, on the contrary, such a connexion was rendered inevitable by the geographical position of his continental territories. They lay in the very heart of western Christendom; they covered the largest and some of the fairest regions of Gaul; they positively surrounded on two sides the domains of the French Crown to which they owed a nominal homage; they touched the borders of Spain, and they went very near to those old Burgundian lands which formed the south-western march of Germany and the north-western march of Italy. Again, Cnut’s territories were all perfectly independent of any ruler save himself; no rival power disputed his claims to any one of them; no other sovereign had any pretension to receive homage from him. Henry, on the other hand, was by the possession of his Gaulish fiefs placed in direct personal connexion with the French king who was not merely his neighbour but also his overlord. A like connexion had indeed existed between the Norman kings of England and the French kings as overlords of Normandy. But Henry’s relations with France were far more complex and fraught with far weightier political consequences than those of his Norman predecessors. He held under the king of France not a single outlying province, but—at the lowest reckoning—not less than five separate fiefs, all by different titles and upon different tenures, which were yet further complicated by the intricate feudal and political relations of these fiefs one with another.

Normandy was the least puzzling member of the group; Henry had inherited it from his mother, and held it on the same tenure as all her ancestors from Hrolf downwards. About Anjou, again—the original patrimony of the heirs of Fulk the Red—there could hardly be any question; and the old dispute whether Maine should count as an independent fief of the Crown or as an underfief of Normandy or of Anjou was not likely to be of any practical consequence when the immediate ruler of all three counties was one and the same. Yet all these had to be treated as separate states; each must have its special mention in the homage done by Henry to Louis; each must be governed according to its own special customs and institutions. So, too, must the other appendage of Anjou—Touraine, for which homage was still owed to the count of Blois, and where he still possessed a few outlying lands which might easily be turned into bones of contention should he choose to revive the ancient feud. Lastly, over and above all this bundle of family estates inherited from his father and his mother, Henry’s marriage had brought him the duchy of Aquitaine:—that is, the immediate possession of the counties of Poitou and Bordeaux; the overlordship of a crowd of lesser counties and baronies which filled up the remaining territory between the Loire and the Pyrenees; and a variety of more or less shadowy claims over all the other lands which had formed part of the old Aquitanian kingdom, and whose feudal relations with each other, with Poitou and with the Crown of France were in a state of inextricable confusion:—added to which, there was a personal complication caused by the two marriages of Eleanor, whereby her second husband owed homage to the first for the territories which he held in her name. Without going further into the details of the situation, we can easily see that it was crowded with difficulties and dangers, and that it would require the utmost care, foresight and self-restraint on the part of both Henry and Louis to avoid firing, at some point or other, a train which might produce an explosion disastrous to both alike.

Henry’s chief assistant in the management of his continental affairs was his mother, the Empress Matilda. Still closer to his side, indeed, stood one who in after-years shewed herself gifted with far greater administrative sagacity, and who had already acquired considerable political experience as queen of France and duchess of Aquitaine. As yet, however, Henry was likely to derive less assistance from the somewhat dangerously quick wit of his wife than from the mature wisdom of his mother. Matilda had been a harsh, violent, impracticable woman; but there was in her character an element of moral and intellectual grandeur which even in her worst days had won and kept for her the devotion of men like Miles of Hereford and Brian Fitz-Count, and which now in her latter years had fairly gained the mastery over her less admirable qualities. She had inherited a considerable share of her father’s talents for government; she had indeed failed to use them in her own behalf, but she had learned from her failure a lesson which enabled her to contribute not a little, by warnings and suggestions, to the success of her son. In England, where the haughtiness of her conduct had never been forgiven, whatever was found amiss in Henry’s seems to have been popularly laid to her charge.[1401] In Normandy, however, she was esteemed far otherwise. From the time of her son’s accession to the English crown she lived quietly in a palace which her father had built hard by the minster of Notre-Dame-des-Prés, outside the walls of Rouen;[1402] taking no direct share in politics, but universally held in profound respect by reason of her dignified and pious life, and of the influence which she was known to exercise upon the mind and policy of the young duke. His first step on the tidings of Stephen’s death had been to hold a consultation with her; so long as she lived, her opinions and her wishes were an element never absent from his calculations before entering upon any serious undertaking; and if he did not formally leave her as regent of the Norman duchy, yet he trusted in great measure to her for the maintenance of its tranquillity and order during his own absence beyond the sea.