HENRY II.-III. OF ENGLAND 



him iiml the otlicr prelates to agree to the 'Con- 

 stitutions of Clarendon ' (q.v.) ; Imi I Ji-rket proved 

 a sturdy churcliinaii, and the long and obstinate 

 traggle l>etween him and hi* monarch was only 

 ti'iiniiiated by his murder (nee BKCKKT). Henry 

 was barely saved from excommunication by IIIH 

 messi'iigiM-s making for him ;ui unreserved MI!I 

 mi-Mini to tin* pope; Inn he was determined not 

 to repeat their oath. At a later date (1174) he 

 dill penance at Rocket's grave, allowing himself to 

 be scourged by monks ; but, though the ' Con- 

 si it u (ions of Clarendon' were formally repealed, 

 the king was ultimately successful in reducing the 

 church tn subordination in civil matters. Before 

 Becket's death Henry had made three military 

 expeditions into Wales, none of them, however, of 

 any permanent effect ; and, while negotiations 

 were pending for his absolution, he organised an 

 expedition to Ireland. The English pope, Adrian 

 IV., had in 1155, by the famous bull Laudabiliter, 

 given Henry authority over the entire island ; and 

 in 1167 a number of Norman- Welsh knights, having 

 been called in to the aid of a banished king of 

 Leinster, had gained a footing in the country. 

 Others soon followed, among them, in 1170, Richard 

 de Clare, afterwards nicknamed Strongbow, who 

 married the heiress of Leinster, and in 1171 

 assumed rule as the Earl of Leinster. Henry was 

 jealous of the rise of a powerful feudal baronage 

 in Ireland, and during nis stay there, from the 

 autumn of 1171 to Easter 1172, while waiting for 

 the arrival of the friendly legates from Rome, he 

 secured the submission of kings and bishops, and 

 left the power of Strongbow and the other nobles 

 broken. For thirteen years his governors carried 

 out his system of interference and persecution ; and 

 when in 1185 Prince John was appointed king of 

 Ireland, he took with him a batch of Norman and 

 French knights who pushed the soldiers of the first 

 conquest aside. But before the end of 1186 John 

 himself was driven from the country, and all was 

 left in confusion. 



The third period of Henry's reign is occupied 

 with the rebellion of his sons. The eldest had died 

 in childhood; the second, Henry, born in 1155, 

 was crowned as his father's associate and successor 

 in the kingdom in 1170, having been married at 

 the age of five to the little princess Margaret of 

 France. In 1173, incited by their jealous mother, 

 Queen Eleanor, the prince and his brother Richard 

 rebelled against their father, and their cause was 

 spoused by the kings of France and Scotland. 

 Tin' latter, William the Lion, was ravaging the 

 north of England with an army, when he was sur- 

 prised at Alnwick, and taken prisoner, 12th July 

 1174. To obtain his liberty, he submitted to do 

 homage to Henry for Scotland ( see SCOTLAND ; 

 also EDWARD I.). By September 1174 Henry had 

 defeated the great league thus formed against 

 him, and re-established his authority in all his 

 dominions. In the course of a second rebellion, 

 Prince Henry died of a fever at the age of twenty- 

 eight ; and in 1185 Geoffrey, the next son, was 

 killed in a tournament at Paris. At the end of 

 1188, while Henry was engaged in a war with 

 Philip of France, Richard joined the French king ; 

 and in July, Henry, having lost the chief castles of 

 Maine and the town of Le Mans, ill and broken in 

 spirit, agreed to a treaty of peace, of which one of 

 the stipulations was for an indemnity for all the 

 followers of Richard. The sight of the name of 

 his favourite son John in the list broke his heart ; 

 and he died at Chinon on 6th July 1189. 



Upon the whole, Henry was an able and en- 

 lightened sovereign, a clear-headed, unprincipled 

 politician, an able general. He did not use his 

 power despotically ; and such enemies as he could 

 either win over or disable he spared. His reign 



was one of great legal reforms. With the ex- 

 rln-i|ii.-i ihe ancient office of the hherifl's was 

 restored, tin; jury system was extended, circuit 

 courts were established, and a high court of justice 

 formed; whilst the institution of Scutage (i.v. ) 

 and the revival of the old Anglo-Saxon militia 

 system did much to break the jo\ver of the great 

 feudal lords. The earliest writer on English law, 

 Kami If de Glanvill (q.v.), was Henry's chief 

 justiciary from 1180. He was ambitious for hi* 

 children, but he used them so freely as counters in 

 the great game of politics that he ultimately alien- 

 ated whatever affection they had to give ; yet, 

 even so, he was sinned against deeply by both his 

 wife and his sons. When not restrained by policy 

 his temper was passionate and outrageous ; and 

 his personal vices were those of the first Henry. 

 Fair Rosamond ( see CLIFFORD ) is commonly said 

 to have had two sons by him, William Longsword, 

 Earl of Salisbury, and Geoffrey, who became Arch- 

 bishop of York, and who was faithful to him when 

 his four legitimate sons took up arms against him. 

 But there is no positive evidence that the former 

 was her son ; while Geoffrey's mother appears to 

 have been a woman of degraded character, named 

 Ykenai or Hikenai. 



See Freeman ; Stubbs, Constitutional History, and 

 preface to voL ii. of the Chronicle of Benedict of Peter- 

 borough ( 1867 ) ; and Mrs Green, Henry the Second, in 

 ' Twelve English Statesmen ' series (1888). 



Henry III. of England, grandson of Henry 

 II., and eldest son of King John, was born 1st 

 October 1207, and succeeded to the throne on his 

 father's death at the age of nine. His reign is one 

 of the longest and most troubled in English history, 

 and he himself one of its least attractive and 

 least interesting figures. The first forty- two years 

 are for the most part a dreary record of misgov- 

 ernment and purposeless extravagance, the next 

 seven a period of strife and civil war, the remainder 

 of little interest. Henry was more devout than 

 his predecessors, and could boast more domestic 

 virtxies ; but he inherited his father's faithlessness, 

 and through all his impolicy exhibited a stubborn 

 determination to be at least as autocratic as he. 

 The interest of the reign, however, centres not in 

 the king, but in the birth and infancy of the 

 English constitution. In 1227 Henry declared 

 himself of age to govern ; in 1232 he deprived 

 Hubert de Burgh, who had ruled England well as 

 regent, and as justiciary had practically continued 

 to govern the country, of all his offices ; and in 

 1234 he was compelled to dismiss Huliert's rival 

 and successor, Peter des Roches. He took the 

 administration into his own hands, and hence- 

 forward managed everything ill both at home 

 and abroad. A war with France cost him 

 1 'niton, and might have cost him all his contin- 

 ental possessions, and even his own liberty, but 

 for the generous disposition of the French king, 

 Louis IX. In his boyhood, under the direction of 

 the judicious Earl of Pembroke, he re-issued the 

 Great Charter, though with certain important 

 omissions ; and he confirmed it more than once 

 afterwards, but always as a condition of a money 

 grant. He was beset with favourites, chiefly from 

 the country of his queen, Eleanor of Provence, and 

 he allowed exorbitant exactions on the part of the 

 pope. His misrule and extortion roused all classes, 

 and in 1258 the parliament, as the assembly of the 

 barons and bishops was already called, headed by 

 his brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort, Earl of 

 Leicester, forced him to agree to the Provisions of 

 Oxford ( q.v. ), whereby he transferred his power tem- 

 porarily to a commission of barons. But jealousy 

 and disunion among the barons soon enabled Henry 

 to repudiate his oath, and after a brief period of 

 open war (1263) the whole matter was referred to 



