Just at the same moment Henry had crossed from Normandy with his Brabançons, and made a pilgrimage to Becket’s grave. His triumph was now regarded as a token of Divine forgiveness. He marched at once into Norfolk, where he received the submission of the Bigots and the Mowbrays, the latter of whom had been overcome by the king’s natural son, Geoffrey, now bishop elect of Lincoln, and afterwards so well known as Archbishop of York. All his foes were now at his feet; the King of Scots and the two great earls were prisoners; the rest entirely humiliated. In less than a month from his landing he was able to go back to Normandy.

End of the
war.

The French war came to an end on the collapse of the English rebellion, and in the month of September all Henry’s dominions were at rest, his children reconciled, even the King of France admitted to peace.

Submission
of Scotland,
1175.

And now we have true evidence of Henry’s real greatness in policy and spirit, notwithstanding his provocations and the changed strain of his character and temper. He shed no blood, he took no ransoms, he condemned to destitution not one of the leaders of the rebellion; he laid his hands for a few years on their estates, but even these were shortly restored, and no man was disinherited by way of punishment. But he pulled down their castles. The nests of feudal tyranny and insubordination he not merely dismantled, but in some cases destroyed so utterly as to leave not one stone upon another, that they might be no more the beginning of the temptation to such a design. Against the Scots his hand was very heavy; he insisted on abject submission. Before he would release the king from his captivity he insisted that he should do homage, acknowledging the supremacy of his crown over the Scottish crown, and of the English Church over the Scottish. The Scottish barons must become his men; the Scottish bishops must declare their obedient subjection to the English Church; and the castles of the Lowlands must be retained in the hands of men whom he should place there with English garrisons. This humiliating negotiation, concluded at Falaise before William’s liberation, was confirmed at York in the following August. From this time, until Richard I. sold back to William the Lion the rights that he had lost, Scotland was subject to the English king as overlord, and her king as king was our king’s vassal. The Church, however, escaped subjection, because the archbishops of Canterbury and York could not agree which should rule her, and before their quarrel was ended the Pope stepped in and declared the Scottish Church the immediate care and peculiar daughter of the Roman see. Besides this, the half-independent prince of Galloway was compelled to acknowledge himself a vassal of both the kings.

Importance of
this struggle.

So completely was the authority of Henry II., re-established by the peace of 1174, that we are almost tempted to underrate the importance of the elements that had been arrayed against him. It was not, however, in the want of strength and spirit that the confederation against him failed; the kings of France and Scotland, the counts of Champagne, Boulogne, and Flanders, the earls of Chester, Leicester, Norfolk, and Derby, his own sons and his own wife, were united in their hostility. The religious feeling of the nation, which since the death of Becket had to a remarkable degree realized or rather exaggerated his merits as a statesman and a churchman, was used as a weapon against him. Every interest that he had injured, or that had suffered in the process of his reforms, was made to take its part. Yet all failed. They failed partly, no doubt, because they had really no common cry, no common cause. They had many grievances and a good opportunity; but all their several aims were selfish; their plan, so far as they had one, destructive not constructive; their leaders unwilling to sacrifice or risk anything of their own, greedy to grasp what belonged of right to the king, the nation, or even to their own fellows. They fought one by one against a prompt, clear-headed, accomplished warrior, and they were beaten one by one; not, however, without a very considerable intermingling of what is ordinarily called good fortune on the king’s side. Thus Henry in the twentieth year of his reign was more powerful by far than when, at the beginning of it, the desire and darling of the whole people, he brought back peace and light and liberty after the evil days.

Henry resumes
his
schemes.

Provisions
made for John.

Marriages of
the king’s
daughters.