The general line of policy which Henry had hitherto pursued he took up almost at the identical point at which it had been interrupted by the rebellion; but instead of seeking for John a provision on the Continent, he determined to find him a wife and an endowment in England, and, when he should be old enough, to make him king of Ireland. With this idea he arranged for him, in 1176, a marriage with Hawisia, the daughter of William, Earl of Gloucester, his cousin; and the next year, in a great assembly at Oxford, he divided the still unconquered provinces of Ireland into great fiefs, the receivers of which took the oath of fealty, not only to himself, but to John as their future king. The Pope also was canvassed as to the erection of Ireland into a kingdom and the coronation of John. The same year Johanna, the king’s youngest daughter, was married with very great pomp to the young king William the Good, as he is called, of Sicily, a prince who had an unbounded admiration for his father-in-law, and would have settled the reversion of his kingdoms upon him if Henry had accepted the offer. Eleanor, the second daughter, was already married to Alfonso, King of Castile, who in 1177 referred to the judgment of Henry a great lawsuit between himself and his kinsman the King of Navarre. This arbitration not only illustrates the estimation in which Henry after his great victory was held on the Continent, but shows us also how he deliberated with his councillors. He held a very great court of bishops and superior clergy, of barons and other tenants-in-chief, on the occasion; the arguments of the parties were laid before them, and, in conformity with their advice asked and given, the judgment was delivered.
Visits to
England.
Intrigues of
the younger
Henry.
The two or three years that followed the rebellion were the period of Henry’s longest stay in England. He came in April 1175, and stayed until August 1177 after a year spent in Normandy and Anjou he returned in 1178, and stayed until the end of June 1180; after which, although he paid several long visits to England, his absences were much longer. These years were periods of great activity in political matters. The number of councils that he held, the variety of public business that he despatched in them, the series of changes intended to promote the speedy attainment of justice, the unfailing purpose which he showed of fulfilling the pledge which in his early days he had given to his people, all these come out in the simple details of the historian with remarkable fulness. Henry was not at this time, or ever after, a happy man; his son Henry, nominally reconciled, was constantly intriguing against him with his father-in-law, Lewis, and the discontented lords of the foreign dominion. He took up the part of an advocate of local rights and privileges, and headed confederations against his father, and against his brother Richard as the oppressor of the barons of Poictou. He complained that his father treated him meanly, not giving enough money, and jealously refusing him his share of power. The father treated him generously and patiently, but he could not trust him, and did not pretend to do so.
Queen
Eleanor.
Queen Eleanor, too, was now imprisoned, or sequestered from her husband in honorable captivity. This great lady, who deserves to be treated with more honor and respect than she has generally met with, had behaved very ill to her husband in the matter of the rebellion; and, although he occasionally indulged her with the show of royal pomp and power, he never released her from confinement or forgave her. She was a very able woman, of great tact and experience, and still greater ambition; a most important adviser whilst she continued to support her husband, a most dangerous enemy when in opposition. Her political intrigues in the East, when she accompanied her first husband on the Crusade, had made him contemptible, and that Lewis never forgave her. But her second husband was made of sterner stuff. He took and kept the upper hand; it was only after his death that Eleanor’s real powers found room for play; and had it not been for her governing skill while Richard was in Palestine, and her influence on the Continent during the early years of John, England would have been a prey to anarchy, and Normandy lost to the house of Anjou long before it was.
The quarrel with his wife and the mistrust of his children threw the king under very evil influences, although as a king he tried hard to do his duty; and they sowed the seed of later difficulties which at last overwhelmed him. The internal history of these years is occupied with the judicial and financial doings which have been sketched in the early pages of this chapter; outside there was peace, except in Poictou, where Richard was learning the art of war, winning his first laurels and making his worst and most obstinate enemies.
Accession of
Phillip II.,
1179.
In 1180 the long strife and jealousy between Henry II., and Lewis VII., came to an end. The weak and unprincipled King of France, after resigning his crown to his son Philip, a boy of sixteen, retired into a convent and died. Philip inherited all his hatred of Henry, although he was better able to appreciate his wisdom, and showed in his early years a desire to have him as a political adviser and instructor. He inherited, too, all his father’s falseness, craft, and dishonesty, but not his morbid conscience nor his irresoluteness. Without being so great a coward as his father, Philip was yet a long way from being a brave man, and loses much by his juxtaposition with Richard and even with John in that respect. But he was very unscrupulous, very pertinacious, and in result very successful, outliving all his rivals, and leaving his kingdom immensely stronger than it was when he succeeded to it. In the domestic quarrels of his early years, with his stepmother and the counts of Champagne, he availed himself of the advice of Henry, which was given honestly and effectually; but, after Henry’s quarrels with his sons began again, Philip saw his way clearly enough to the humiliation of the rival house; and he took too sure and too fatal advantage of his opportunity.
There is no need to dwell on the events of 1181 and 1182; the chief mark of the former year is that assize of arms which has been already mentioned. In 1182 the king was a good deal in Poictou. England was governed now, and chiefly for the rest of the reign, by Ranulf Glanvill, the chief justiciar, who in 1180 or 1179 had succeeded to Richard de Lucy. The country was quiet; so quiet, that when the troubles began on the Continent not a hand or foot in England stirred against the king. English history during these and the following years is a simple record of steady growth; all interest, personal and political, centres in the king.