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HENRY THE LION 



HENRY IV. OF GERMANY 



he inspired the most devoted affection of those in 

 immediate contact with him. ' Had Henry been 

 the wilful, capricious, and self-indulgent monarch 

 he is sometimes represented, ' says Professor Brewer, 

 ' the intense personal devotion of such men as 

 Wolsey, Cromwell, More, Gardiner, and Fitz- 

 william, so unlike each other in all respects, this 

 one excepted, would have been the most unintel- 

 ligible paradox in history.' In the point of personal 

 morals Henry was purity itself compared with his 

 contemporaries Francis and James V. of Scotland. 

 In the sense of kingly responsibility, also, he bears 

 the most favourable comparison with the French 

 king. Even in the shedding of blood Henry was 

 merciful compared with Francis. In the case of 

 the victims or the Bloody Statute, and even in the 

 case of the deaths of such men as More and Fisher, 

 we are bound to admit that Henry had a certain 

 justification in principle and in the interest of the 

 country. But in the wholesale massacre of the 

 Protestants by Francis we have simply the 

 gratuitous act of a monarch devoid himself of 

 all religious conviction, prompted by the moment- 

 ary caprice of selfish interest. Only a prince of 

 the most imperious will could have effected the 

 ecclesiastical revolution that makes Henry's reign 

 perhaps the most important in English history. 

 At the same time, the whole past policy of England 

 towards Rome had its necessary result in Henry's 

 rejection of his papal supremacy. By the law of 

 prcemunire the power of the pope had ceased to be 

 more than a form, and it only required an occasion 

 such as the divorce of Catharine, and a king with 

 the resolution of Henry, to snap the bond that was 

 already worn to the extremest tenuity. In the 

 suppression of the monasteries, also, Henry in 

 reality acted in accordance with the highest con- 

 sciousness of the nation. The mass of the people 

 were unfavourable to the revolution, but that 

 section of the community which represented the 

 moral sense of the nation was all on the side of 

 Henry. It is in his manner of carrying out what 

 was a necessary revolution, in his coarseness of 

 nature, which deserves the harsher name of sheer 

 brutality, that the instinctive feeling of revulsion 

 against Henry finds its real justification. 



See the articles WOLSEY, CROMWELL, MORE, CRANMER, 

 &c. ; Froude's History of England (vols. i.-iv.); The 

 Reign of Henry VIII., from hi* Accession to the Death of 

 Wolsey, by J. S. Brewer, edited by J. Gairdner (2 vols. 

 1884 ) from the prefaces to the Rolls publications ; 

 Mandell Creighton's Cardinal Wolsey (1888); Stubbs's 

 Lectures on Medieval and Modem History ( 1887 ) ; and 

 Gasquet's Dissolution of the English Monasteries (2 vols. 

 1889). 



Henry, PRINCE OF WALES. See JAMES I. 



Henry, surnamed THE LION (1129-1195), Duke 

 of Saxony and Bavaria, was the son of Henry the 

 Proud, and the head of the Guelphs. After Ba- 

 varia, which had been taken from his father, was 

 restored to him (1154) by the Emperor Frederick I., 

 he became the most powerful noble in Germany, 

 his possessions extending from the North Sea and 

 the Baltic to the shores of the Adriatic. His great 

 power and his ambitious designs roused against 

 Mm a league of princes, ecclesiastical and temporal, 

 in 1166 ; but Henry, with the emperor's counten- 

 ance, was able to make head successfully against 

 his enemies. Frederick I. at length grew alarmed, 

 deprived Henry of his dominions and placed him 

 under the ban of the empire in 1180. Nor was he 

 fully reconciled to Frederick's successor, Henry 

 VI., until about three years before his own death. 

 Henry the Lion pursued an enlightened policy in 

 ruling his dominions, in that he encouraged agri- 

 culture and trade ; he fostered the commerce of 

 Hamburg and Liibeck, and was the founder of 

 Munich. 



Henry III., emperor of Germany, only son of 

 the Emperor Conrad II., was born on 28th October 

 1017, elected king of the Germans in 1026, Duke of 

 Bavaria in 1027, Duke of Swabia in 1038, and 

 succeeded his father as emperor in 1039. A man. 

 of stern though pious disposition, he resolutely 

 maintained the imperial prerogatives of power, and 

 encouraged the efforts of the Clugniac monks to 

 reform the ecclesiastical system of Europe. Having 

 summoned a council at Sutri in 1046, he put an 

 -end to the scandalous intrigues of the rival popes, 

 Benedict IX., Sylvester III., and Gregory IV., by 

 deposing all three and securing the election of 

 Clement II. in their stead. In 1042 he compelled 

 the Duke of Bohemia to acknowledge himself a 

 vassal of the empire. The outcome of repeated 

 campaigns in Hungary was the establishment of 

 the supremacy of the empire over that kingdom in 

 1044. Henry also stretched his authority over the 

 Norman conquerors of Apulia and Calabria. He 

 died suddenly at Bodfeld, in the Harz country, on 

 5th October 1056. He \vas a zealous promoter of 

 learning and the arts, especially music. He 

 founded numerous monastic schools, over which 

 he placed learned monks of Brittany, and built 

 several churches, including the cathedrals of 

 Worms, Mainz, and Spires, in the last of which 

 he was buried. See Steindorff, Jahrbucher des 

 Deutschen Eeichs unter Heinrich III. ( 1874-81 ). 



Henry IV., emperor of Germany, was born 

 at Goslar on llth November 1050, elected king 

 of the Germans in 1054, and succeeded his father, 

 Henry III., in 1056, his mother being named regent 

 of the empire. She was soon ousted by the 

 Archbishop of Cologne, and he in turn by the 

 Archbishop of Bremen. About 1070 Henry began 

 to act for himself. His first care was to break the 

 power of the nobles of the land ; but his measures 

 provoked a rising of the Saxons, who in 1074 forced 

 upon Henry humiliating terms of pacification. In 

 the following year he defeated them in a great 

 battle at Hohenburg, and then proceeded to take 

 vengeance upon the princes, secular and ecclesias- 

 tical, who had ventured to contest power with him. 

 The case of the latter gave the pope, Gregory VII., 

 the pretext he longed for to interfere in the affairs 

 of Germany. This was the beginning of the great 

 duel between pope and emperor which has been 

 already recorded under Gregory VII. (q.v. ). This 

 conflict between the representatives of secular and 

 ecclesiastical power was marked by several dramatic 

 events. In 1076 Henry declared the pontiff deposed. 

 Gregory VII. retaliated by excommunicating Henry 

 and absolving his subjects from all obedience to 

 him. The king, seeing his vassals and princes 

 gradually falling away from their allegiance, hast- 

 ened, in midwinter, to Italy to make submission to 

 the pope. For three days in January 1077 he was 

 compelled to stand in the courtyard of the castle of 

 Canossa, exposed to the inclemency of the weather, 

 barefooted, and clothed only in the haircloth shirt 

 of a penitent, before the pontiff consented to remove 

 the ban of excommvinication. Then, having found 

 adherents among the Lombards, Henry renewed 

 the conflict, but was again excommunicated. His 

 counter-move to this was to appoint a new pope, 

 Clement III., and to hasten over the Alps and lay 

 siege to Rome. Henry in 1084 got possession of 

 the city and caused himself to be crowned emperor 

 by the antipope. Gregory, who had taken refuge 

 in the castle or San Angelo, was only saved by the 

 approach of Robert Guiscard at the head of the 

 Italian and Sicilian Normans. In Germany, dur- 

 ing Henry's long absence in Italy, three rival 

 kings of the Germans successively found support 

 amongst the princes. But Henry managed to 

 triumph over them all. Crossing the Alps for the 

 third time, he in 1090 restored the fortunes of his 



