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The History of England From the Norman Conquest to the Death of John
The King's First Work
by Adams, George Burton
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Henry of Anjou, for whom the way was opened to the throne of his
grandfather so soon after the treaty with Stephen, was then in his
twenty-second year. He was just in the youthful vigour of a life of more
than usual physical strength, longer in years than the average man's of
the twelfth century, and brilliant in position and promise in the eyes of
his time. But his life was in truth filled with annoying and hampering
conflict and bitter disappointment. Physically there was nothing fine or
elegant about him, rather the contrary. In bodily and mental
characteristics there was so much in common between the Angevin house and
the Norman that the new blood had made no great changes, and in physique
and in spirit Henry II continued his mother's line quite as much as his
father's. Certainly, as a modern writer has remarked, he could never have
been called by his father's name of "the Handsome." He was of middle
height, strongly built, with square shoulders, broad chest, and arms that
reminded men of a pugilist. His head was round and well shaped, and he
had reddish hair and gray eyes which seemed to flash with fire when he
was angry. His complexion also was ruddy and his face is described as
fiery or lion-like. His hands were coarse, and he never wore gloves
except when necessary in hawking. His legs were hardly straight. They
were made for the saddle and his feet for the stirrups. He was heedless
of his person and his clothes, and always cared more for action and deeds
than for appearances.
In the gifts of statesmanship and the abilities which make a great ruler
Henry seemed to his own time above the average of kings, and certainly
this is true in comparison with the king who was his rival during so much
of his reign, Louis VII of France. Posterity has also agreed to call him
one of the greatest, some have been inclined to say the greatest, of
English sovereigns. The first heavy task that fell to him, the
establishment of peace and strong government in England, he fully
achieved; and this work was thankfully celebrated by his contemporaries.
All his acts give us the impression of mental and physical power, and no
recasting of balances is ever likely to destroy the impression of great
abilities occupied with great tasks, but we need perhaps to be reminded
that to his age his position made him great, and that even upon us its
effect is magnifying. Except in the pacification of England he won no
signal success, and the schemes to which he gave his best days ended in
failure or barely escaped it. It is indeed impossible to say that in his
long reign he had before him any definite or clear policy, except to be a
strong king and to assert vigorously every right to which he believed he
could lay claim. The opportunity which his continental dominions offered
him he seems never to have understood, or at least not as it would have
been understood by a modern sovereign or by a Philip Augustus. It is
altogether probable that the successful welding together of the various
states which he held by one title or another into a consolidated monarchy
would have been impossible; but that the history of his reign gives no
clear evidence that he saw the vision of such a result, or studied the
means to accomplish it, forces us to classify Henry, in one important
respect at least, with the great kings of the past and not with those of
the coming age. In truth he was a feudal king. Notwithstanding the severe
blows which he dealt feudalism in its relation to the government of the
state, it was still feudalism as a system of life, as a source of ideals
and a guide to conduct, which ruled him to the end. He had been brought
up entirely in a feudal atmosphere, and he never freed himself from it.
He was determined to be a strong king, to be obeyed, and to allow no
infringement of his own rights,--indeed, to push them to the farthest
limit possible,--but there seems never to have been any conflict in his
mind between his duties as suzerain or vassal and any newer conception of
his position and its opportunities.
It was in England that Henry won his chief and his only permanent
success. And it was indeed not a small success. To hold under a strong
government and to compel into good order, almost unbroken, a generation
which had been trained in the anarchy and license of Stephen's reign was
a great achievement. But Henry did more than this. In the machinery of
centralization, he early began a steady and systematic development which
threatened the defences of feudalism, and tended rapidly toward an
absolute monarchy. In this was his greatest service to England. The
absolutism which his work threatened later kings came but little nearer
achieving, and the danger soon passed away, but the centralization which
he gave the state grew into a permanent and beneficent organization. In
this work Henry claimed no more than the glory of following in his
grandfather's footsteps, and the modern student of the age is more and
more inclined to believe that he was right in this, and that his true
fame as an institution maker should be rather that of a restorer than of
a founder. He put again into operation what had been already begun; he
combined and systematized and broadened, and he created the conditions
which encouraged growth and made it fruitful: but he struck out no new
way either for himself or for England.
In mind and body Henry overflowed with energy. He wearied out his court
with his incessant and restless activity. In learning he never equalled
the fame of his grandfather, Henry Beauclerc, but he loved books, and his
knowledge of languages was such as to occasion remark. He had the
passionate temper of his ancestors without the self-control of Henry I,
and sometimes raved in his anger like a maniac. In matters of morals also
he placed no restraints upon himself. His reputation in this regard has
been kept alive by the romantic legend of Rosamond Clifford; and, though
the pathetic details of her story are in truth romance and not history,
there is no lack of evidence to show that Eleanor had occasion enough for
the bitter hostility which she felt towards him in the later years of his
life. But Henry is not to be reckoned among the kings whose policy or
public conduct were affected by his vices. More passionate and less
self-controlled than his grandfather, he had something of his patience
and tenacity of purpose, and a large share of his diplomatic skill; and
the slight scruples of conscience, which on rare occasions interfered
with an immediate success, arose from a very narrow range of ethical
ideas.
An older man and one of longer training in statecraft and the management
of men might easily have doubted his ability to solve the problem which
lay before Henry in England. To control a feudal baronage was never an
easy task. To re-establish a strong control which for nearly twenty years
had been greatly relaxed would be doubly difficult. But in truth the work
was more than half done when Henry came to the throne. Since the peace
declared at Winchester much had been accomplished, and most of all
perhaps in the fact that peace deprived the baron of the even balancing
of parties which had been his opportunity. On all sides also men were
worn out with the long conflict, and the material, as well as the
incentive, to continue it under the changed conditions was lacking. It is
likely too that Henry had made an impression in England, during the short
time that he had stayed there, very different from that made by Stephen
early in his reign; for it is clear that he knew what he wanted and how
to get it, and that he would be satisfied with nothing less. Nor did
there seem to be anything to justify a fear that arrangements which had
been made during the war in favour of individual men were likely to be
disturbed. So secure indeed did everything seem that Henry was in no
haste to cross to England when the news of Stephen's death reached him.
The Duke of Normandy had been occupied with various things since his
return from England in April, with the recovery of the ducal lands, with
repressing unimportant feudal disorders, and with negotiations with the
king of France. On receiving the news he finished the siege of a castle
in which he was engaged, then consulted his mother, whose counsel he
often sought to the end of her life, in her quiet retreat near Rouen, and
finally assembled the barons of Normandy. In about a fortnight he was
ready at Barfleur for the passage, but bad winds kept back the unskilful
sailors of the time for a month. In England there was no disturbance.
Everybody, we are told, feared or loved the duke and expected him to
become king, and even the Flemish troops of Stephen kept the peace. If
any one acted for the king, it was Archbishop Theobald, but there is no
evidence that there was anything for a regent to do. At last, at the end
of the first week in December, Henry landed in England and went up at
once to Winchester. There he took the homage of the English barons, and
from thence after a short delay he went on to London to be crowned. The
coronation on the 19th, the Sunday before Christmas, must have been a
brilliant ceremony. The Archbishop of Canterbury officiated in the
presence of two other archbishops and seventeen bishops, of earls and
barons from England and abroad, and an innumerable multitude of people.
Henry immediately issued a coronation charter, but it is, like Stephen's,
merely a charter of general confirmation. No specific promises are made.
The one note of the charter, the keynote of the reign for England thus
early struck, is "king Henry my grandfather." The ideal of the young
king, an ideal it is more than likely wholly satisfactory to his
subjects, was to reproduce that reign of order and justice, the time to
which men after the long anarchy would look back as to a golden age. Or
was this a declaration, a notice to all concerned, flung out in a time of
general rejoicing when it would escape challenge, that no usurpation
during Stephen's reign was to stand against the rights of the crown? That
time is passed over as a blank. No man could plead the charter as
guaranteeing him in any grant or privilege won from either side during
the civil war. To God and holy Church and to all earls and barons and all
his men, the king grants, and restores and confirms all concessions and
donations and liberties and free customs which King Henry his grandfather
had given and granted to them. Also all evil customs which his
grandfather abolished and remitted he grants to be abolished and
remitted. That is all except a general reference to the charter of Henry
I. Neither Church nor baron could tell from the charter itself what
rights had been granted or what evil customs had been abolished. But in
all probability no one at the moment greatly cared for more specific
statement. The proclamation of a general policy of return to the
conditions of the earlier age was what was most desired.
The first work before the young king would be to select those who should
aid him in the task of government in the chief offices of the state. He
probably already had a number of these men in mind from his knowledge of
England and of the leaders of his mother's party. In the peace with
Stephen, Richard de Lucy had been put in charge of the Tower and of
Windsor castle. He now seems to have been made justiciar, perhaps the
first of Henry's appointments, as he alone signs the coronation charter
though without official designation. Within a few days, however, Robert
de Beaumont, Earl of Leicester, was apparently given office with the same
title, and together they fill this position for many years, Robert
completing in it the century and more of faithful service which his
family had rendered to every successive king. The family of Roger of
Salisbury was also restored to the important branch of the service which
it had done so much to create, in the person of Nigel, Bishop of Ely, who
was given charge of the exchequer. The most important appointment in its
influence on the reign was that to the chancellorship. Archbishop
Theobald, who was probably one of Henry's most intimate counsellors, had
a candidate in whose favour he could speak in the strongest terms and
whose services in the past the king would gratefully recall. This was the
young Thomas Becket, who had done so much to prevent the coronation of
Eustace.
Immediately after his coronation, at Christmas time, Henry held at
Bermondsey the first of the great councils of his reign. Here the whole
state of the kingdom was discussed, and it was determined to proceed with
the expulsion of Stephen's mercenaries, and with the destruction of the
unlawful castles. The first of these undertakings gave no trouble, and
William of Ypres disappears from English history. The second, especially
with what went with it,--the resumption of Stephen's grants to great as
well as small,--was a more difficult and longer process. To begin it in
the proper way, the king himself set out early in 1155 for the north. For
some reason he did not think it wise at this time to run the risk of a
quarrel with Hugh Bigod, and it was probably on this journey at
Northampton that he gave him a charter creating him Earl of Norfolk, the
title which he had obtained from Stephen. The expedition was especially
directed against William of Aumale, Stephen's Earl of Yorkshire, and he
was compelled to surrender a part of his spoils including the strong
castle of Scarborough. William Peverel of the Peak also, who was accused
of poisoning the Earl of Chester, and who knew that there were other
reasons of condemnation against him, took refuge in a monastery, making
profession as a monk when he heard of Henry's approach, and finally fled
to the continent and abandoned everything to the king. Some time after
this, but probably during the same year, another of Stephen's earls,
William of Arundel or Sussex, obtained a charter of confirmation of the
third penny of his county.
One of the interesting features of Henry's first year is the frequency of
great councils. Four were held in nine months. It was the work of
resumption, and of securing his position, which made them necessary. The
expressed support of the baronage, as a whole, was of great value to him
as he moved against one magnate and then another, and demanded the
restoration of royal domains or castles. The second of these councils,
which was held in London in March, and in which the business of the
castles was again taken up, did not, however, secure the king against all
danger of resistance. Roger, Earl of Hereford, son of Miles of
Gloucester, who had been so faithful to Henry's mother, secretly left the
assembly determined to try the experiment of rebellion rather than to
surrender his two royal castles of Hereford and Gloucester. In this
attitude he was encouraged by Hugh Mortimer, a baron of the Welsh Marches
and head of a Conquest family of minor rank which was now rising to
importance, who was also ready to risk rebellion. Roger did not persist
in his plans. He was brought to a better mind by his kinsman, the Bishop
of Hereford, Gilbert Foliot, and gave up his castles. Mortimer ventured
to stand a siege in his strongholds, one of which was Bridgenorth where
Robert of Bellême had tried to resist Henry I in similar circumstances,
but he was forced to surrender before the middle of the summer. This was
the only armed opposition which the measures of resumption excited,
because they were carried out by degrees and with wise caution in the
selection of persons as well as of times. It was probably in this spirit
that in January of the next year Henry regranted to Aubrey de Vere his
title of Earl of Oxford and that of the unfaithful Earl of Essex to the
younger Geoffrey de Mandeville. It was twenty years after Henry's
accession and in far different circumstances that he first found himself
involved in conflict with a dangerous insurrection of the English barons.
Before the submission of Hugh Mortimer the third of the great councils of
the year had been held at Wallingford early in April, and there the
barons had been required to swear allegiance to Henry's eldest son
William, and in case of his death to his brother Henry who had been born
a few weeks before. The fourth great council met at Winchester in the
last days of September, and there a new question of policy was discussed
which led ultimately to events of great importance in the reign, and of
constantly increasing importance in the whole history of England to the
present day,--the conquest of Ireland. Apparently Henry had already
conceived the idea, to which he returns later in the case of his youngest
son, of finding in the western island an appanage for some unprovided
member of the royal house. Now he thought of giving it to his youngest
brother William. Religious and political prejudice and racial pride have
been so intensely excited by many of the statements and descriptions in
the traditional account of Henry's first steps towards the conquest,
which is based on contemporary records or what purports to be such, that
evidence which no one would think of questioning if it related to humdrum
events on the dead level of history has been vigorously assailed, and
almost every event in the series called in question. The writer of
history cannot narrate these events as they seem to him to have occurred
without warning the reader that some element of doubt attaches to his
account, and that whatever his conclusions, some careful students of
the period will not agree with him.
A few days before Henry landed in England to be crowned, Nicholas
Breakspear, the only Englishman who ever became pope, had been elected
Bishop of Rome and had taken the name of Hadrian IV. He was the son of an
English clerk, who was later a monk at St. Albans, and had not seemed to
his father a very promising boy; but on his father's death he went
abroad, studied at Paris, and was made Abbot of St. Rufus in Provence.
Then visiting Rome because of trouble, with his monks, he attracted the
notice of the pope, was made cardinal and papal legate, and finally was
himself elected pope in succession to Anastasius IV. We cannot say,
though we may think it likely, that the occupation of the papal throne by
a native Englishman made it seem to Henry a favourable time to secure so
high official sanction for his new enterprise. Nor is it possible to say
what was the form of Henry's request, or the composition of the embassy
which seems certainly to have been sent, or the character of the pope's
reply, though each of these has been made the subject of differing
conjectures for none of which is there any direct evidence in the sources
of our knowledge. The most that we can assert is what we are told by John
of Salisbury, the greatest scholar of the middle ages.
John was an intimate friend of the pope's and spent some months with him
in very familiar intercourse in the winter of 1155-1156. He relates in
a passage at the close of his Metalogicus, which he wrote, if we may
judge by internal evidence, on learning of Hadrian's death in 1159, and
which there is no reason to doubt, that at his request the pope made a
written grant of Ireland to Henry to be held by hereditary right. He
declares that the ground of this grant was the ownership of all islands
conveyed to the popes by the Donation of Constantine, and he adds that
Hadrian sent Henry a ring by which he was to be invested with the right
of ruling in Ireland. Letter and ring, he says, are preserved in England
at the time of his writing. The so called Bull "Laudabiliter" has been
traditionally supposed to be the letter referred to by John of Salisbury,
but it does not quite agree with his description, and it makes no grant
of the island to the king.45 The probability is very strong that it
is not even what it purports to be, a letter of the pope to the king
expressing his approval of the enterprise, but merely a student's
exercise in letter writing. But the papal approval was certainly
expressed at a later time by Pope Alexander III. No doubt can attach,
however, to the account of John of Salisbury. As he describes the
grant it would correspond fully with papal ideas current at the time,
and it would be closely parallel with what we must suppose was the
intention of an earlier pope in approving William's conquest of England.
If Henry had asked for anything more than the pope's moral assent to the
enterprise, he could have expected nothing different from this, nor does
it seem that he could in that case have objected to the terms or form of
the grant described by John of Salisbury.
The expedition, however, for which Henry had made these preparations was
not actually undertaken. His mother objected to it for some reason which
we do not know, and he dropped the plan for the present. About the same
time Henry of Winchester, who had lived on into a new age, which he
probably found not wholly congenial, left England without the king's
permission and went to Cluny. This gave Henry a legal opportunity, and he
at once seized and destroyed his castles. No other event of importance
falls within the first year of the reign. It was a great work which had
been done in this time. To have plainly declared and successfully begun
the policy of reigning as a strong king, to have got rid of Stephen's
dangerous mercenaries without trouble, to have recovered so many castles
and domains without exciting a great rebellion, and to have restored the
financial system to the hands best fitted to organize and perfect it,
might satisfy the most ambitious as the work of a year. "The history of
the year furnishes," in the words of the greatest modern student of the
age, "abundant illustration of the energy and capacity of a king of
two-and-twenty."
Early in January, 1156, Henry crossed to Normandy. His brother Geoffrey
was making trouble and was demanding that Anjou and Maine should be
assigned to him. We are told an improbable story that their father on his
deathbed had made such a partition of his lands, and that Henry had been
required blindly to swear that he would carry out an arrangement which
was not made known to him. If Henry made any such promise as heir, he
immediately repudiated it as reigning sovereign. He could not well do
otherwise. To give up the control of these two counties would be to cut
his promising continental empire into two widely separated portions.
Geoffrey attempted to appeal to arms in the three castles which had been
given him earlier, but was quickly forced to submit. All this year and
until April of the next, 1157, Henry remained abroad, and before his
return to England he was able to offer his brother a compensation for his
disappointment which had the advantage of strengthening his own position.
The overlordship of the county of Britanny had, as we know, been claimed
by the dukes of Normandy, and the claim had sometimes been allowed. To
Henry the successful assertion of this right would be of great value as
filling out his occupation of western France. Just at this time Britanny
had been thrown into disorder and civil strife by a disputed succession,
and the town of Nantes, which commanded the lower course of the Loire, so
important a river to Henry, refused to accept either of the candidates.
With the aid of his brother, Geoffrey succeeded in planting himself there
as Count of Nantes, in a position which promised to open for the house of
Anjou the way into Britanny.
The greater part of the time of his stay abroad Henry spent in passing
about from one point to another in his various provinces, after the usual
custom of the medieval sovereign. In Eleanor's lands he could exert much
less direct authority than in England or Normandy; the feudal baron of
the south was more independent of his lord; but the opposition which was
later to be so disastrous had not yet developed, and the year went by
with nothing to record. Soon after his coming to Normandy he had an
interview with Louis VII who then accepted his homage both for his
father's and his wife's inheritance. If Louis had at one time intended to
dispute the right of Eleanor to marry without his consent, he could not
afford to continue that policy, so strong was Henry now. It was the part
of wisdom to accept what could not be prevented, to arrange some way of
living in peace with his rival, and to wait the chances of the future.
It is in connexion with this expedition to Normandy that there first
appears in the reign of Henry II the financial levy known as "scutage"--a
form of taxation destined to have a great influence on the financial and
military history of England, and perhaps even a greater on its
constitutional history. The invention of this tax was formerly attributed
to the statesmanship of the young king, but we now know that it goes back
at least to the time of his grandfather. The term "scutage" may be
roughly translated "shield money," and, as the word implies, it was a tax
assessed on the knight's fee, and was in theory a money payment accepted
or exacted by the king in place of the military service due him under the
feudal arrangements. The suggestion of such a commutation no doubt arose
in connexion with the Church baronies, whose holders would find many
reasons against personal service in the field, especially in the
prohibition of the canon law, and who in most cases preferred not to
enfeoff on their lands knights enough to meet their military obligations
to the king. In such cases, when called on for the service, they would be
obliged to hire the required number of knights, and the suggestion that
they should pay the necessary sum to the king and let him find the
soldiers would be a natural one and probably agreeable to both sides. The
scutage of the present year does not seem to have gone beyond this
practice. It was confined to Church lands, and the wider application of
the principle, which is what we may attribute to Henry II or to some
minister of his, was not attempted.
Returning to England in April, 1157, Henry took up again the work which
had been interrupted by the demands of his brother Geoffrey. He was ready
now to fly at higher game. Stephen's son William, whose great possessions
in England and Normandy his father had tried so carefully to secure in
the treaty which surrendered his rights to the crown, was compelled to
give up his castles, and Hugh Bigod was no longer spared but was forced
to do the same. David of Scotland had died before the death of Stephen,
and his kingdom had fallen to his grandson Malcolm IV. The new king had
too many troubles at home to make it wise for him to try to defend the
gains which his grandfather had won from England, and before the close of
this year he met Henry at Chester and gave up his claim on the northern
counties, received the earldom of Huntingdon, and did homage to his
cousin, but for what, whether for his earldom or his kingdom, was not
clearly stated. Wales Stephen had practically abandoned, but Henry had no
mind to do this, and a campaign during the summer in which there was some
sharp fighting forced Owen, the prince of North Wales, to become his man,
restored the defensive works of the district, and protected the Marcher
lords in their occupation. The Christmas court was held at Lincoln; but
warned perhaps by the recent ill luck of Stephen in defying the local
superstition, Henry did not attempt to wear his crown in the city. Crown
wearing and ceremony in general were distasteful to him, and at the next
Easter festival at Worcester, together with the queen, he formally
renounced the practice.
Half of the year 1158 Henry spent in England, but the work which lay
before him at his accession was now done. Much work of importance and
many events of interest concern the island kingdom in the later years of
the reign, but these arise from new occasions and belong to a new age.
The age of Stephen was at an end, the Norman absolutism was once more
established, and the influence of the time of anarchy and weakness was
felt no longer. It was probably the death of his brother and the question
of the occupation of Nantes that led Henry to cross to Normandy in
August. He went first of all, however, to meet the king of France near
Gisors. There it was agreed that Henry's son Henry, now by the death of
his eldest brother recognized as heir to the throne, should marry Louis's
daughter Margaret. The children were still both infants, but the
arrangement was made less for their sakes than for peace between their
fathers and for substantial advantages which Henry hoped to gain. First
he desired Louis's permission to take possession of Nantes, and later, on
the actual marriage of the children, was to come the restoration of the
Norman Vexin which Henry's father had been obliged to give up to France
in the troubles of his time. Protected in this way from the only
opposition which he had to fear, Henry had no difficulty in forcing his
way into Nantes and in compelling the count of Britanny to recognize his
possession. This diplomatic success had been prepared, possibly secured,
by a brilliant embassy undertaken shortly before by Henry's chancellor
Thomas Becket. One of the biographers of the future saint, one indeed who
dwells less upon his spiritual life and miracles than on his external
history, rejoices in the details of this magnificent journey, the
gorgeous display, the lavish expenditure, the royal generosity, which
seem intended to impress the French court with the wealth of England and
the greatness of his master, but which lead us to suspect the chancellor
of a natural delight in the splendours of the world.
With his feet firmly planted in Britanny, in a position where he could
easily take advantage of any future turn of events to extend his power,
Henry next turned his attention to the south where an even greater
opportunity seemed to offer. The great county of Toulouse stretched from
the south-eastern borders of Eleanor's lands towards the Mediterranean
and the Rhone over a large part of that quarter of France. A claim of
some sort to this county, the exact nature of which we cannot now decide
from the scanty and inconsistent accounts of the case which remain to us,
had come down to Eleanor from the last two dukes of Aquitaine, her father
and grandfather. The claim had at any rate seemed good enough to Louis
VII while he was still the husband of the heiress to be pushed, but he
had not succeeded in establishing it. The rights of Eleanor were now in
the hands of Henry and, after consulting with his barons, he determined
to enforce them in a military campaign in the summer of 1159.
By the end of June the attacking forces were gathering in the south. The
young king of Scotland was there as the vassal of the king of England and
was knighted by his lord. Allies were secured of the lords to the east
and south, especially the assistance of Raymond Berenger who was Count of
Barcelona and husband of the queen of Aragon, and who had extensive
claims and interests in the valley of the Rhone. His daughter was to be
married to Henry's son Richard, who had been born a few months before.
Negotiations and interviews with the king of France led to no result, and
at the last moment Louis threw himself into Toulouse and prepared to
stand a siege with the Count, Raymond V, whose rights he now looked at
from an entirely different point of view. This act of the king led to a
result which he probably did not anticipate. Apparently the feudal spirit
of Henry could not reconcile itself to a direct attack on the person of
his suzerain. He withdrew from the siege, and the expedition resulted
only in the occupation of some of the minor towns of the county. Here
Thomas the chancellor appears again in his worldly character. He had led
to the war a body of knights said to have been 700 in number, the finest
and best-equipped contingent in the field. Henry's chivalry in refusing
to fight his suzerain seemed to him the height of folly, and he protested
loudly against it. This chivalry indeed did not prevent the vassal from
attacking some of his lord's castles in the north, but no important
results were gained, and peace was soon made between them.
Far more important in permanent consequences than the campaign itself
were the means which the king took to raise the money to pay for it. It
was at this time, so far as our present evidence goes and unless a
precedent had been made in a small way in a scutage of 1157 for the
campaign in Wales, that the principle of scutage was extended from
ecclesiastical to lay tenants in chief. Robert of Torigny, Abbot of
Mont-Saint-Michel, tells us that Henry, having regard to the length and
difficulty of the way, and not wishing to vex the country knights and the
mass of burgesses and rustics, took from each knight's fee in Normandy
sixty shillings Angevin (fifteen English), and from all other persons in
Normandy and in England and in all his other lands what he thought best,
and led into the field with him the chief barons with a few of their men
and a great number of paid knights.
Our knowledge of the treasury accounts of this period is not sufficient
to enable us to explain every detail of this taxation, but it is
sufficient to enable us to say that the statement of the abbot is in
general accurate. The tax on the English knight's fee was heavier than
that on the Norman; payment does not seem to have been actually required
from all persons outside the strict feudal bond, nor within it for that
matter; and the exact relationship between payment and service in the
field we cannot determine. Two things, however, of interest in the
history of taxation in relation both to earlier and later times seem
clear. In the first place a new form of land-tax had been discovered of
special application to the feudal community, capable of transforming a
limited and somewhat uncertain personal service into a far more
satisfactory money payment, capable also of considerable extension and,
in the hands of an absolute king, of an arbitrary development which
apparently some forms of feudal finance had already undergone. This was
something new,--that is, it was as new as anything ever is in
constitutional history. It was the application of an old process to a new
use. In the second place large sums of money were raised, in a purely
arbitrary way, it would seem, both as to persons paying and sums paid,
from members of the non-feudal community and also from some tenants in
chief who at the same time paid scutage. These payments appear to have
rested on the feudal principle of the gracious or voluntary aid and to
have been called "dona," though the people of that time were in general
more accurate in the distinctions they made between things than in the
use of the terms applied to them. There was nothing new about this form
of taxation. Glimpses which we get here and there of feudalism in
operation lead us to suspect that, in small matters and with much
irregularity of application to persons, it was in not infrequent use.
These particular payments, pressing as they did heavily on the Church and
exciting its vigorous objection, carry us back with some interest to the
beginning of troubles between Anselm and the Red King over a point of the
same kind.
In theory and in strict law these "gifts" were voluntary, both as to
whether they should be made at all and as to their amount, but under a
sovereign so strong as Henry II or William Rufus, the king must be
satisfied. Church writers complained, with much if not entire justice,
that this tax was "contrary to ancient custom and due liberty," and they
accused Thomas the chancellor of suggesting it. As a matter of fact this
tax was less important in the history of taxation than the extension of
the principle of scutage which accompanied it. The contribution which it
made to the future was not so much in the form of the tax as in the
precedent of arbitrary taxation, established in an important instance of
taxation at the will of the king. This precedent carried over and applied
to scutage in its new form becomes in the reign of Henry's son one of the
chief causes of revolutionary changes, and thus constitutes "the scutage
of Toulouse" of 1159, if we include under that term the double taxation
of the year, one of the great steps forward of the reign of Henry.
At the close of the Toulouse campaign an incident of some interest
occurred in the death of Stephen's son William and the ending of the male
line of Stephen's succession. His Norman county of Mortain was at once
taken in hand by Henry as an escheated fief, and was not filled again
until it was given years afterwards to his youngest son. To Boulogne
Henry had no right, but he could not afford to allow his influence in the
county to decline, though the danger of its passing under the influence
of Louis VII was slight. Stephen's only living descendant was his
daughter Mary, now Abbess of Romsey. The pope consented to her marriage
to a son of the Count of Flanders, and Boulogne remained in the circle of
influence in which it had been fixed by Henry I. The wide personal
possessions of William in England were apparently added to the royal
domain which had already increased so greatly since the death of Stephen.
A year later the other branch of Stephen's family came into a new
relationship to the politics of France and England. At the beginning of
October, 1160, Louis's second wife died, leaving him still without a male
heir. Without waiting till the end of any period of mourning, within a
fortnight, he married the daughter of Stephen's brother, Theobald of
Blois, sister of the counts Henry of Champagne and Theobald of Blois, who
were already betrothed to the two daughters of his marriage with Eleanor.
This opened for the house of Blois a new prospect of influence and gain,
and for the king of England of trouble which was in part fulfilled. Henry
saw the probable results, and at once responded with an effort to improve
his frontier defences. The marriage of the young Henry and Margaret of
France was immediately celebrated, though the elder of the two was still
a mere infant. This marriage gave Henry the right to take possession of
the Norman Vexin and its strong castles, and this he did. The war which
threatened for a moment did not break out, but there was much fortifying
of castles on both sides of the frontier.
It is said that the suggestion of this defensive move came from Thomas
Becket. However this may be, Thomas was now near the end of his career of
service to the state as chancellor, and was about to enter a field which
promised even greater usefulness and wider possibilities of service.
Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury died on April 18, 1161. For some months
the king gave no sign of his intentions as to his successor. Then he
declared his purpose. Thomas, the chancellor, was about to cross to
England to carry out another plan of Henry's. The barons were to be asked
to swear fealty to the young Henry as the direct heir to the crown. Born
in February, 1155, Henry was in his eighth year when this ceremony was
performed. Some little time before he had been committed by his father to
the chancellor to be trained in his courtly and brilliant household, and
there he became deeply attached to his father's future enemy. The
swearing of fealty to the heir, to which the barons were now accustomed,
was performed without objection, Thomas himself setting the example by
first taking the oath.
This was his last service of importance as chancellor. Before his
departure from Normandy on this errand, the king announced to him his
intention to promote him to the vacant primacy. The appointment would be
a very natural one. Archbishop Theobald is said to have hoped and prayed
that Thomas might succeed him, and the abilities which the chancellor had
abundantly displayed would account for a general expectation of such a
step, but Thomas himself hesitated. We are dependent for our knowledge of
the details of what happened at this time on the accounts of Thomas's
friends and admirers, but there is no reason to doubt their substantial
accuracy. It is clear that there were better grounds in fact for the
hesitation of Thomas than for the insistence of Henry, but they were
apparently concealed from the king. His mother is said to have tried to
dissuade him, and the able Bishop of Hereford, Gilbert Foliot, records
his own opposition. But the complete devotion to the king's will and the
zealous services of Thomas as chancellor might well make Henry believe,
if not that he would be entirely subservient to his policy when made
archbishop, at least that Church and State might be ruled by them
together in full harmony and co-operation, and the days of William and
Lanfranc be brought back. Becket read his own character better and knew
that the days of Henry I and Anselm were more likely to return, and that
not because he recognized in himself the narrowness of Anselm, but
because he knew his tendency to identify himself to the uttermost with
whatever cause he adopted.
Thomas had come to the chancellorship at the age of thirty-seven. He had
been a student, attached to the household of Archbishop Theobald, and he
must long have looked forward to promotion in the Church as the natural
field of his ambition, and in this he had just taken the first step in
his appointment to the rich archdeaconry of Canterbury by his patron. As
chancellor, however, he seems to have faced entirely about. He threw
himself into the elegant and luxurious life of the court with an
abandon and delight which, we are tempted to believe, reveal his
natural bent. The family of a wealthy burgher of London in the last part
of the reign of Henry I may easily have been a better school of manners
and taste than the court of Anjou. Certainly in refinement, and in the
order and elegance of his household as it is described, the chancellor
surpassed the king. Provided with an ample income both from benefices
which he held in the Church and from the perquisites of his office, he
indulged in a profusion of expenditure and display which the king
probably did not care for and certainly did not equal, and collected
about himself such a company of clerks and laymen as made his household a
better place for the training of the children of the nobles than the
king's. In the king's service he spent his money with as lavish a hand as
for himself, in his embassy to the French court or in the war against
Toulouse. He had the skill to avoid the envy of either king or courtier,
and no scandal or hint of vice was breathed against him. The way to the
highest which one could hope for in the service of the state seemed open
before him, and he felt himself peculiarly adapted to enjoy and render
useful such a career. One cannot help speculating on the interesting but
hopeless problem of what the result would have been if Becket had
remained in the line of secular promotion and the primacy had gone to the
next most likely candidate, Gilbert Foliot, whose type of mind would have
led him to sympathize more naturally with the king's views and purposes
in the questions that were so soon to arise between Church and State in
England.
The election of Becket to the see of Canterbury seems to have followed
closely the forms which had come into use since the compromise between
Henry I and Anselm, and which were soon after described in the
Constitutions of Clarendon. The justiciar, Richard de Lucy, with three
bishops went down to Canterbury and made known the will of the king and
summoned the monks to an election. Some opposition showed itself among
them, apparently because of the candidate's worldly life and the fact
that he was not a monk, but they gave way to the clearly expressed will
of the king. The prior and a deputation of the monks went up to London;
and there the formal election took place "with the counsel of" the
bishops summoned for the purpose, and was at once confirmed by the young
prince acting for his father. At the same time Henry, Bishop of
Winchester, made a formal demand of those who were representing the king
that the archbishop should be released from all liability for the way in
which he had handled the royal revenues as chancellor and treasurer, and
this was agreed to. On the next Sunday but one, June 3, 1162, Thomas was
consecrated Archbishop at Canterbury by the Bishop of Winchester, as the
see of London was vacant. As his first official act the new prelate
ordained that the feast in honour of the Trinity should be henceforth
kept on the anniversary of his consecration.
Footnotes
[45] See the review of the whole controversy in Thatcher,
Studies Concerning Adrian IV (1903).
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