HENRY IL (OF ENGLAND). 



HENRY II. (OF ENGLAND). 



prinot of Sooth Wales; 8, Richard, drowned in 1120 with Prince 

 William, by the widow of Annkil. a nobleman of Berkshire ; S, Regi- 

 nald, carl of Cornwall, who died in 1176. by Sibylla, daughter of Sir 

 Robert Corbet, and wife of Henry FiU-Herbert ; 4, Robert, by Editha, 

 daughter of Sigewolf, a Saxon nobleman ; 5, Gilbert ; 6, William, 

 earnamed 1V> Tracy; 7, Henry FiU-Herbert, who wa killed in battle 

 in 11S7. alo, according to one aooount by Nesta; 8, Marie (otherwise 

 oalled Maud, ur AdeU), counteat of Ferche, another of those who 

 erishs.1 in the shipwreck of 1120; , Maud, married to Conan the 

 Ura*e, earl of Brittany ; 10, Juliana, married to Eustace of Breteuil, 

 earl of Pacie in Normandy; 11, Conitanoe, married to Uoncelin. 

 Viscount Beaumont in France ; 12, another daughter, married to 

 William Cioet, a Norman ; 13, another, married to Matthew Montmo- 

 rency, the founder of the illustrious French family of that surname ; 

 and 14, Sibylla (otherwise ealled Elisabeth), who was married in 1107 

 to Alexander I. of Scotland, and died in 1182, by Elizabeth, wife of 

 Gilbert de Clare, earl of Pembroke, and father by her of the famous 

 Stroogbow^ 



The character of Henry is sufficiently indicated by the facts that 

 hare been detailed. In a moral point of view it was detestable, but 

 in the line of policy and craft it evinced superlative ability. In the 

 midst of all his profligacy and unscrupulous ambition however he 

 eheriebed a love of letters, and in his hours of leisure was fond of 

 the society of learned men. It must be admitted also that his govern- 

 ment, though arbitrary and tyrannical in a high degree, appears to 

 have been on the whole a considerable improvement on that of his 

 father and his elder brother. He may be said to have led the way in 

 the reformation of the law and the constitution by his re-establishment, 

 partial as it was, of the Saxon laws, and by his charter, the example of 

 that series of subsequent royal concessions, the same in form though 

 much more extended in amount, which lie nt the foundation of the 

 national liberties. There can be no doubt that the country made con- 

 siderable social progress in his reign, undisturbed as it was by any 

 internal commotion, and enjoying, notwithstanding much oppression 

 on the part of the crown, probably a more regular dispensation of 

 justice between man and man, and more security from disorder and 

 violence, than it had known since the coming over of the Normans, 

 ll.-i ry I. was succeeded on the throne of England by Stephen. 



1 1 K N 11 Y 1 1., surnamed Fitz- Empress, was the eldest son of Geoffrey 

 Plantagenet (so named from a sprig of broom in Latin planta genista, 

 in French jilantr genfl which he used to wear in his cap), earl of 

 Anjou, and of Matilda, daughter of Henry I., king of England, whose 

 first husband had been the Emperor Henry V. [HKNICY I.] He was 

 born at Le Mann, the capital of his father's dominions, in March 1133. 

 In the struggle between Stephen and Matilda for the English crown 

 [STTPHEH], Matilda's husband, Geoffrey, had by the year 1141 reduced 

 nearly the whole of Normandy, and his infant son Henry had been 

 acknowledged by the majority of the nobility of that country as their 

 legitimate duke. In June of the following year Matilda's great sup- 

 porter, her bastard half-brother Robert, carl of Gloucester, passed 

 over' to Normandy, and returned to England in December, bringing 

 Prince Henry along with him, together with a small body of troops, 

 obtained from the earl his father. Here the boy remained for nearly 

 five years shut up for safety in the strong castle of Bristol, where his 

 education was superintended by his uncle Gloucester, who was distin- 

 guished for his scholarship and love of letters. He returned to his 

 father, in Normandy, about Whitsuntide 1147. In 1149 however, 

 being now sixteen years of sge, he recrossed the seas, and, at an inter- 

 view held on Whitsuntide in Carlisle with his uncle David I. of 

 Scotland, received from that prince the honour of knighthood, and 

 concerted measures with him and his other friends for recovering his 

 grandfather's throne. He returned to Normandy in the beginning of 

 the following year, and was a few months afterwards, with the consent 

 of his father, formally invested with that dukedom by Louis VII. of 

 France, the portion of the country called the Yexin being ceded to 

 Louis aa the price of his consent to such arrangement By the 

 death of his father, on the 10th of September 1151, Henry became 

 rarl of Anjou, Touraine, and Maine. On Whit-Sunday of the year 

 following, within six weeks after she had been divorced from her first 

 husband, King Ix>ui of France, he married Eleanor, in her own right 

 countess of Poitou and duchess of Quienne or Aquitaine, an alliance 

 which made him master of all the western coast of France, with the 

 exception only of Brittany, from the Somme to the Pyrenees. Soon 

 after this Henry aailed for England at the head of a small but well- 

 appointed force. He and Stephen having advanced, the one from the 

 wert, the other from the east, came in sight of each other at Walling- 

 ford, and in an interview which they bad there, standing on opposite 

 tide* of the Thames, agreed to a truce. The death of Eustace, 

 Stephen's eldest son, having removed the chief obstacle to a perma- 

 nent arrangement between the two competitors, a peace was finally 

 adjusted in a great council held at Winchester on the 7th of November 

 1163, in which Stephen, adopting Henry for his eon, appointed him 

 his sticceMor, and gave the kingdom of England, after his own death, 

 to him and bis heirs for ever. The death of Stephen, on the 

 October 1154, made Henry, in conformity with this agreement, king 

 of England without op|>oiti'in. 



The commencement of the reign of Henry II. is reckoned from his 

 coronation at Westminster along with his queen, 19th December 1154. 



His first proceedings were strikingly indicative of the system of 

 combined energy and policy which continued to characterise his 

 government Ho dismissed* the foreign troop* which Stephen had 

 brought into the kingdom ; razed to the ground nearly all the numerous 

 castles that had been erected throughout the country by the barons 

 in the preceding twenty years of anarchy ; and resumed with remorse- 

 less determination all the lands that bad been alienated from the 

 crown since the death of Henry I., the grants only excepted that had 

 been made to the church and to William, the aeoond son of Stephen. 

 This last act of rigour, the most daring upon which he adventured, 

 was undertaken with the express concurrence of tho great council or 

 assembly of the immediate teuanU of the crown. He next proceeded 

 to settle the succession, and for that purpose n great council was 

 assembled at Wallingford, soon after Easter 1155, which ordained 

 that after his death the crown should descend to his eldest son 

 William, now in his third year, and in case of the death of William 

 (which in fact took place the following year), to his younger brother 

 Henry, who was as yet only a few months old. Oaths of fealty were 

 at the same time taken to both the young princes. It was in another 

 council, or parliament, as some writers call it, held at London after 

 these arrangements had been made, that Henry, in conformity with 

 the now established practice, granted a short charter, confirming, for 

 himself and his heirs, to the clergy, the nobility, and tho commonalty, 

 all the rights, liberties, and customs (' consuetudines') which had been 

 conceded by his grandfather Henry I. 



His presence was now called for across the seas by the attempt of 

 his younger brother Geoffrey to wrest from him his paternal inherit- 

 ance of Anjou, Touraine, and Maine, on the pretence, as stated by 

 some authorities, that the will of their father had directed that Henry 

 should resign these earldoms as soon as he should have obtained 

 possession of the English crown. After a very short contest Geoffrey 

 was forced to givo up his claim in exchange for a pension of 1000 

 English and 2000 Angevin crowns, which be enjoyed little more than 

 a year. He died in 1 1 58 at Nantes, the inhabitants of which city had 

 chosen him for their governor, in consequence of which circumstance 

 tho place was immediately claimed by Henry, as having devolved to 

 him as his brother's heir. Partly by force, partly by management, 

 Henry succeeded in acquiring through this claim first the virtual and 

 eventually the actual possession of tho whole of Brittany ; the only 

 portion of territory that was wanting to complete his sovereignty over 

 all the western coast of France, and indeed over nearly the entire 

 half of that kingdom. Conan, tho hereditary count or duke of lirit- 

 tany, who was also earl of Richmond in England, was now in the first 

 instance induced, or compelled, to sign a treaty by which he bequeathed 

 the country after his death to his daughter Constantia, an infant, 

 whom he affianced to Henry's youngest sou Geoffrey. At the same 

 time the neutrality of Louis of France was secured by another arrange- 

 ment, according to which it was agreed that Henry's eldest son, 

 William, should marry that king's infant daughter, Margaret (her 

 mother was Constance of Castile, whom Louis had married after his 

 separation from Eleanor), three castles in the Vexin being made over 

 along with the princess aa her dower. Henry had already recovered 

 from the young Malcolm IV. of Scotland the northern counties which 

 had been taken possession of by his predecessor David I., and the 

 cession of which in perpetuity had been one of Henry's engagements 

 with his uncle in 1149 ; he had also driven back the Welsh from those 

 parts of the English territory which they had seized during the reign 

 of Stephen, and even, as it would appear, compelled the princes of 

 North and South Wales to acknowledge him as their feudal superior. 

 His next attempt was upon the great French earldom of Toulouse, 

 which he claimed in right of his wife Eleanor, whose grandfather 

 William, duke of Aquitaine, had married 1'hilippa, the only child of 

 William, tho fourth earl of Toulouse. He was here opposed both by 

 Knymond de St. Gilles, the descendant of a brother of earl William, 

 in whose line the principality had descended for nearly a In. 

 years, and by Louis of France, whose sister had married liaymond, 

 and to whom, besides, the progressive aggrandisement of his ambitious 

 vassal was every day becoming a subject of more serious alarm. 

 Henry's expedition to France in support of this claim is memorable 

 for the introduction of the practice of commuting the military service 

 of the vassals of the crown for a payment in money, an innovation the 

 credit of which is attributed to Thomas h Becket, recently elevated 

 to the place of chancellor of the kingdom. The contest which ensued 

 was suspended by a peace in May 1160, by which Henry was allowed 

 to retain a few places he had conquered in Toulouse ; and although 

 it soon broke out anew, it was after a few months put an end to 

 by a second peace, concluded in 1162 by the mediation of pope 

 Alexander III. 



The history of the reign of Henry II. for the next eight years is 

 principally that of his contest with the haughty and intrepiil church 

 man, who, from an obscure origin having advanced through the 

 degrees of royal favourite, prime minister, and chancellor, to the eccle- 

 siastical sovereignty of archbishop of Canterbury, forthwith proceeded 

 to assume the bearing of a rival monarch, and made his former master 

 feel that he was only half king in the dominions he called his own. 

 [BECKET.] This struggle for supremacy between the church and the 

 state was not even terminated by the murder of 1 Socket. 29th of Decem- 

 ber 1 1 70 : the blood of the martyr crying from the ground was found 



