The Conquering Family Page 4

  This, of course, has no roots in truth. The Empress was not in England when these events occurred, and had she been there, her last thought would have been to counsel peace. Not that resolute lady whose whole life had been dedicated to the winning of the crown! There are certain pieces of evidence on this point, however, which make the possibility of Henry being the son of Stephen a little more than mere surmise. The Empress was in England the year before the birth of the prince and swore at first furiously and definitely that she would not go back to Geoffrey, then changed her mind hurriedly. In some sources it is said that Henry called Stephen his father during the cross-water negotiations, a statement which seems to carry the hallmark of invention on the face of it.

  There is still, however, another bit of evidence, and this time it is both more important and credible, being based at least on fact. When Geoffrey of Anjou died, he left instructions that he was not to be buried until his son Henry had agreed to accept the terms of his will. Now the will had not been opened and could not be immediately, and Henry found himself in a most uncomfortable dilemma. What unacceptable terms might the will contain? What sacrifices might it demand of him? Henry was not the kind of man to enter into blind compacts. And yet there was the body of his father awaiting burial and, it may be assumed, losing something in preservation with each hour. Finally, and most ungraciously, Henry gave in. He would accept the conditions. Without a doubt the body of the dead earl was then lowered at once into the grave.

  When the will was read, it was found that the earldoms of Anjou, Touraine, and Maine, which Geoffrey had held in his own right, were left as a matter of course to the eldest son. Geoffrey, the second son, received three castles, Mirabeau, Chinon, and Loudon. It was added, however, that should Henry become King of England the three earldoms were then to go to Geoffrey. Such wily precautions to trap Henry into acceptance would not have been resorted to if the father had not felt strongly that his own possessions should go to the second son.

  There is still one more point. When Henry became King of England and did not give up the earldoms, being a highly possessive man, the brother loudly proclaimed that the will had been drawn to favor him, whose legitimacy could not be doubted.

  It is still barely beyond the limits of surmise, but it cannot be passed over. There has always been a pride displayed in certain qualities of the English kings who are grouped under the heading of Plantagenet. They were tall, golden men, with piercing blue eyes and immense physical strength; cruel and possessive and revengeful, but nonetheless rulers of ability and of considerable character. How ironic it would be if not a drop of Plantagenet blood had ever flowed in the veins of an English king!

  7

  Stephen survived the Treaty of Wallingford by little more than a year. His strength was depleted and he had become slow and lethargic. It does not appear that he stirred himself to restore order out of the general chaos. The tyranny of the barons continued unchecked. The despairing cries of the people do not seem to have reached his ears. No castles were torn down for their relief. The coinage had become so debased by clipping and filing that trade agreements read in weight, which meant that payment was to be made according to the weight of silver in the coin and not at its face value. Nothing was done about this.

  Stephen had twice been close to death in a condition verging on coma. Now for a third time he lost the power of movement and lay as one dead in the citadel at Dover where he had been when the seizure came. There was no devoted wife to nurse him back to health as had been the case on both other occasions. In any event, it is very doubtful if even the loving care of Matilda could have helped him. His hour had come. He died on October 25, 1154, and the physicians said death had been due to piles and an iliac passion. The symptoms seem to point rather to apoplexy.

  This handsome man, who had wanted everyone to like him, was probably the worst king England ever had because of the suffering he brought the people. During the nineteen years of his reign 1,115 unlicensed castles were built by the lawless barons. In some chronicles it is said that one third of the population died during that short space of time.

  CHAPTER III

  The Epic Reign of a Great King

  THE reign of Henry II, called the first of the Plantagenets or Angevins, has all the elements of an epic novel, all the romance, color, conflict, and guile of the Arthurian legends which men began to write at this time. It is the record of a king who had all the qualities of a great monarch together with many of the faults of a bad one, who corrected Stephen’s anarchy with a sure, iron hand, and who governed, part of the time at least, like a medieval Solomon. He dreamed, this great Henry, of making England the center of an empire more powerful than Charlemagne’s and nearly succeeded in making it so. He married the most glamorous woman in Europe after antlering her husband, Louis of France, so that men called the latter cuckold. He was blessed, or cursed, with many sons, including Richard of the Lionheart and the base John. He loved many women and stole the intended bride of one of his own sons. He put his beautiful wife in a prison for sixteen years. His whelps rose up in rebellion against him and made his last years a nightmare of hate and treachery.

  In this amazing reign of more than a third of a century, chivalry came to its fullest flowering and the voice of the troubadour was heard as often in the land as the clash of arms. Much more important by far, the first whispers rose of a religious unrest which led to John Wyclif and Lollardism and, eventually, to the Reformation. It was then that men began to dress like men, shortening the long womanly tunic in which they had looked like biblical prophets and encasing their legs in close-fitting hose. The first and only English pope was selected by the conclave at Rome at almost the same time that the Veni, Creator Spiritus was sung over Henry at Westminster. It was the period of the dark story of Irish conquest.

  It was, above everything else, the time in which two strong men, Henry himself and that unsolved enigma, Thomas à Becket, split the nation into camps in a contest of wills, giving to history one of its strangest stories.

  Henry II was twenty-one years old when he ascended the throne with the staggering responsibility of redeeming the land from the anarchy. He was already married to the beautiful Eleanor of Aquitaine, divorced wife of Louis VII of France. He had won two highly creditable campaigns: the invasion which had led to the Treaty of Wallingford, and a whirlwind of march and countermarch in which he had driven out of Normandy a hostile confederacy headed by Louis and his own brother Geoffrey. He had done very well, it would seem, for a man of his years. His chaplain, Peter of Blois, says of him: “He was ruddy but you must understand that my lord the king is sub-rufus, a pale red … His head is round as in token of great wit … His een pykeled and clear as to color, while he is of pleased will, but through disturbance of heart, like sparkling fire or lightning with hastiness. His head of curly hair when clipped square in the forehead, showeth a lyonous visage …”

  So much for Peter of Blois, who is quoted only to prove that a true picture of the young King may be gained from direct sources. He was a thickset youth, with the chest of a distance runner, a bull neck, and a leonine head. His color was high and his eyes, which were gray, protruded slightly and were said to show fire beneath the surface. He was a man of furious energy. Partly because of this, partly to fight corpulence to which even then he was prone, he seldom sat down. It was his custom to ramble about at meals, getting up from his gold-backed chair on the dais, to take a chop in his hand and eat as he wandered along the length of the table and tossed remarks here and there; coming back, perhaps, for a slice of beef or the leg of a capon before another saunter. He was sparing of food and drink, and this was a great hardship, for he was a man of enormous appetites, for lands and power and gold and, yes, for women, as well as for the beef of England and the wines of Normandy.

  This is the first and most enduring impression one gets of Matilda’s great son, his tremendous and never-ending energy. It shows in everything known of him. It enabled him to carry a burden of administr
ative detail impossible to any other single individual. Daily he would be seen in the office of the clerks of the chancellery, preparing writs for distribution, a score of them, perhaps, in a single day. Not one escaped the scrutiny of the royal eye. If he found one which was not phrased to his liking, he took it in hand and redrafted it himself, quickly, accurately, his pen traveling at furious speed. He was much more of a scholar than Henry I, although he laid no claims to such laurels, nor have such claims been made for him. He read a great deal and liked to discuss what he learned with scholars and wise men. They were about him all the time—all the time, that is, that he spent in England—John of Salisbury, Hugh of Lincoln, Foliot of London, perhaps the most widely read scholar of the day, and John of Oxford. This was one of the bonds which at first bound him to Becket.

  Another proof of Henry’s desire to rule well was his practice of visiting the outlying parts of the kingdom. This habit was a cross which chafed the shoulders and shortened the tempers of the royal entourage. It was no particular hardship on his knights, who spent their days in the saddle anyway, but the priestly clerks and scriveners were a different case. They were not trained to riding, and so it was unfortunate that Henry, that difficult and tumultuous man, did not believe in carriages, holding that their use tended to rob men of strength in their legs. When therefore the word flew through the offices of the Curia Regis and the humbler quarters of the chancellery that another terrible pilgrimage had been ordained, there would be a furious scramble for the gentlest palfreys and the least obstinate mules, and the disconsolate men of the court would pad themselves against the bruises and saddle burns of the canter.

  This mad young King! In addition to his accursed belief (to quote his staff) that a ruler should know his country and his people, he was completely unpredictable. The happy word would be circulated at Gloucester, say, that they would be staying all of the next day and night. The grateful servants and scriveners, and the hangers-on who always follow a king in progress—the dancers, the gamesters, the mountebanks, the jugglers, the prostitutes and pimps, all the parasites, in fact—would open their saddlebags in great content and settle themselves down for a rest on their straw pallets in corners of the packed inns. And then suddenly there would be a buzz of voices, a shouting of orders, the snapping of whips and the creaking of leather, and they would learn that their royal master (that rampaging bull of an Angevin!) had changed his mind. They were starting at once for Hereford!

  Henry might set ten o’clock of a morning for his departure and be up at dawn, roaring orders and bundling up state papers himself to facilitate an immediate start. He was a hard master, but hardest always on himself.

  He had an infallible memory, an inheritance from his otherwise insignificant father. He never forgot a good turn or an ill one, he never entirely lost an affection, and certainly he never relaxed a hatred; more, he carried this prodigious capacity into the smallest details, seeing the mean face of a lawyer and recalling every item of a squabble twenty years before over a hide of land, or hearing the whine of a beggar at Bishops-gate and recognizing him as a man-at-arms who had followed him to Wallingford.

  There are conflicting reports on his religious views. In some chronicles he is said to have been pious. It is written of him that he regularly watched with the monks of Merton for three full nights before Easter and that one of his favorite habits was to visit in disguise the churches of the poor. Others say he had no reverence in him, that he talked in church and scribbled on the back of the royal pew, that he seldom if ever confessed. One thing can be set down as true, that when his great temper was roused he blasphemed with all the ingenuity and color of an Arab street beggar. The truth lies somewhere between the extremes of opinion. An impression grows as one reads farther and farther into the fantastic annals of this reign that he had deep down within him the normal religious belief but that he lacked the patience for the observance of its outward forms.

  He was rough and ready in everything. It is a fact that he appeared at his coronation in a doublet and short Angevin cloak (which earned him in some chronicles the name of Curtmantle) made of rich brocade and that he fairly blazed with jewels. This was one occasion when a man had to appear at his best. Ordinarily he wore garments of costly materials which did not fit him because he refused to waste time with his tailors. He invariably looked like a king of the vagabonds or a squire who had been handed the used clothes of his master and who found them tight in the waist and cramping in shoulder. He considered it enough tribute to his high station if he wore on his person some insignia of royalty. When he desisted from his sauntering at meals to help himself to wine, his nails might show need of attention, but there would be rings of great value on his fingers, and the flagon from which he drank would be rimmed with rubies and emeralds.

  In an age of mad passions and deep superstitions, Henry was as full of common sense as a modern titan of industry. A story may be told to show how level was the head he carried on his great, muscular shoulders. When he returned from his one journey to Ireland, he stopped at St. David’s in Wales. An old woman approached him to beg for some favor. He did not grant it, and the beldame burst into a loud denunciation of him.

  “Avenge us, Lech-laver!” she screeched, waving her skinny arms above her head. “Avenge us this day!”

  The knights in Henry’s train turned pale in superstitious dread. Lech-laver had figured in a prophecy by Merlin. A king of England, returning from the conquest of Ireland, would meet his death on a rock of that name. A small stream ran by close at hand, and stretching across it was a rock of the most curious conformation. Clearly it did not owe its position to nature and it probably had been placed there by the Druids. A native, questioned by the uneasy knights, mumbled that this rock was called Lech-laver.

  In this day men were so full of superstition that they stared in dread if a shadow fell unexpectedly across the sky, fearing it might mean the end of the world. If a monk in some isolated monastery had a dream involving a king, any king, the abbot would send out mounted messengers to carry the story so that the ruler in question would be in a position to guard against what it portended. There were words which meant death if uttered by human lips, and men would die on the rack rather than speak them. Everyone had heard of Merlin’s prophecy and believed in it implicitly, and so it was no wonder that Henry’s followers looked at the curiously shaped rock and begged him to ride away as fast as his horse could gallop.

  Henry laughed. He walked to the end of Lech-laver, mounted it, and crossed the stream to the other side. Then he retraced his steps without any haste. He was cool, amused, a little contemptuous. With an eye on the old woman, who had ceased her screeching and had watched him with fascinated fear, he said to his men:

  “Who will now have any faith in that liar Merlin?”

  Here, truly, was a man. How fortunate for England that the power fell into his hands at this time when the need was so great for the restoration of order after the anarchy. How much more fortunate it would have been if he had been content to rule the country, if he had not been consumed by an ambition which kept him away from the island for so much of his time. It has been estimated that of the thirty-five years of his reign only thirteen of them were spent in England. For the rest he was following a star which blazed directly above him and so blinded him that he found it hard to see anything else.

  A final word about his character: one writer of the day says, “When at peace, there was a great sweetness in his eyes.”

  2

  The first thing the young King did was to summon back the ministers of his grandfather, Henry I, who had been so recklessly discarded by the simple Stephen. Roger of Salisbury was dead, but his nephew Nigel, now Bishop of Ely, was appointed to the post of treasurer, which he had formerly filled. Robert de Lacey was made justiciar. They were old men but wise in the ways of the wise old King, and Henry showed good judgment in bringing them out of obscurity. At the head of his Council was the Archbishop of Canterbury, gentle and pious old Theobald
.

  They held their first meeting on Christmas Day, 1154, in a small room of the chancellery. The eyes of Eleanor, his French wife, had been red that morning, and the ladies she had brought with her from the south sat around her in another small room in a dismal circle, extending their feet toward a tub of steaming water. To them Christmas was a day of sunshine and gentle winds softening the peal of the bells; and to see the snow piled up on the sills and to hear a blustering wind about the roofs was just cause for melancholy. The yule log had been dragged into the White-Hall and was blazing there, and the royal officers of minor degree were already gathered about it and in a sufficiendy convivial mood to fill the palace with a hint of revelry.

  Henry, one thumb tucked in his belt of blue leather and gold plate, his other hand tossing a walnut in the air, stalked about the room in complete unawareness of the season. It was not a large apartment and it was not comfortable, for the only heat was supplied by a charcoal brazier in the center. The old men clustered around this while their sovereign paced vigorously about. Already he had seen to it that his own armorial bearings were cut into the gray stone of the wall. He had changed the leopards to lions in the insignia of the kings of England and had added a third, some say in honor of Eleanor.

  As he strutted, he talked briskly, making it clear to his newly appointed ministers that in dealing with conditions he would not be swayed by weak scruples. The only thing to come out of this Christmas Day conference, however, was another appointment. Theobald sang the praises of the Archdeacon of Canterbury, whose name was Thomas and who was the son of a prosperous merchant of London of Norman descent named Gilbert Becket. Theobald had come to lean on this man in everything and was so insistent on his worth that Henry finally gave in. By the body of God, let him see this prodigy!