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A.D. 1152–1154.]

DEATH OF STEPHEN.

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drowning, whereupon the brave Earl of Arundel said it was intolerable that all England should be oppressed and ruined by the ambition of two men.

The competitors had a private interview from the opposite sides of the Thames, at a very narrow part of the river, and a treaty was soon arranged. Stephen was to retain the crown of England during his life, adopting Henry as his son, and leaving him the kingdom as his heir. On these terms, Henry did homage to Stephen; and, as a foretaste of his royal condition, received at the same time the homage of William, the surviving son of Stephen. Nobles, and bishops, and knights all swore to these articles, which were further ratified by the solemn adhesion of the burghs; and the most miserable years of our history came to a close.

§ 10. Henry and Stephen, side by side, and with every appearance of friendship, visited the great towns, and were received with shows and festivals. But when the young Plantagenet took his departure for the continent, the halfdiscrowned king had little enjoyment in his unlineal throne. He was perhaps meditating some means of recovering the advantages, he had lost, but the country was spared the further suffering, if such was his design. He died at Dover, in the fiftieth year of his age, after a reign-if such a troubled existence can be called so-of nineteen years. (25th October, 1154).

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BOOK VII.

THE PLANTAGENET LINE.

CHAPTER I.

HENRY THE SECOND.

FROM A.D. 1154 To A.D. 1189.

CONTEMPORARY SOVEREIGNS.

FRANCE Louis VII. (the Young); Philip II. (Augustus.)
SCOTLAND.-Malcolm IV.; William I.

POPES.-Adrian IV.; Alexander III.; Lucius III.; Urban III.;
Gregory VIII.; Clement III.

§ 1. Accession of Henry II., the first of the Plantagenets. His measures for acquiring popularity.-§ 2. He makes war upon the Welsh. His accessions in the north. Receives a solemn donation of all Ireland from the Pope.-§ 3. State of the Church, and of the Norman and Saxon races.-§ 4. Thomas à Becket, and his rebellious opposition. Increasing demands of the Church, and its exorbitant powers. § 5. Insolent demands of à Becket.-§ 6. The constitutions of Clarendon for retrenching the powers of the Church. -87. Becket's opposition receives the sanction of the Pope. Bitter contests between Henry and the Archbishop.-§ 8. These dissensions prejudicial to Henry's interests both at home and abroad. His contests with the Welsh.-§ 9. Evils of the contests with à Becket and the priesthood. Charters first granted to cities and towns.§ 10. Reconciliation between the king and the archbishop.§ 11. Murder of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. Consternation at the deed.-§ 12. Grief and submission of the king. À Becket declared a saint and a martyr.-§ 13. Conquest of Ireland, and submission of the Irish princes.-§ 14. Revolt of Prince Henry and his brothers against the king's authority. Sanguinary contests. - 15. Henry does penance at the tomb of à Becket. Capture of the King of Scotland. Conciliation of the king's enemies.-§ 16. The kingdom of Jerusalem.-§ 17. His measures to weaken the power of the nobility. 18. Prepares for a crusade, which is prevented by the rebellion of his sons.-§ 19. Death of Prince Henry.-§ 20. Rebellion of Richard against his father. Henry dies of a broken heart, and is buried at Fontevraud. His character.

§ 1. THE English hailed the arrival of the new king as a

A.D. 1154.]

ACCESSION OF HENRY II.

173

triumph of their race over the more alien descendants of the Conqueror. Stephen, indeed, was soon looked on as a usurper even by the townsmen who had maintained his cause; and it almost seemed, from the silence of the nation on the subject of the Norman sovereigns, that it would fain have described them by the same name. The monks of Anglo-Saxon lineage traced this first of the Plantagenets to the greatest of the early kings. "Thou art the son," they said, "of the glorious Empress Matilda, whose mother was Maud, the daughter of Margaret, Queen of Scotland, whose father was Edward, the son of Edmund Ironside, the great-grandson of the noble King Alfred."

Henry received these gratulations with great satisfaction, as evidences of his popularity with the people. He next made a movement which brought him the favour of the nobles. In the course of the late civil wars adventurers from all lands had come over in search of fortune. Of these the most numerous and most successful were the men of Brabant, who had already become the mercenaries of Europe. Many of them had taken service with Stephen, and rewarded themselves for their efforts with the spoils of the champions of the opposite side. They had seized large properties, and built and fortified strong castles, oppressing both parties with pitiless impartiality. The king raised his banner against the interlopers, and gave them a very short delay within which to leave the island. Their usurped lands were restored to their original holders, and the trampled thrall of a Norman baron looked on at this banishment of one swarm of his foreign oppressors as an emblem and prefiguration of what might yet happen to his master himself. With the great masses of his subjects reconciled to his authority by his Anglo-Saxon descent, and the nobles attached to him by his vindication of their rights and restoration of their lands, there was nothing too high or ambitious for the hopes of Henry II. § 2. Henry was one-and-twenty years of age, healthy and

strong; celebrated ever since his knighthood at Carlisle as an accomplished cavalier and able man-at-arms, and holding in right of his wife Eleanor-whom Louis VII. had divorced for her misbehaviour, and the English prince had married for her possessions-all the west coast of France from the Pyrenees to the Somme. It was his first object to settle his domestic affairs, that he might interfere with more authority in the affairs of other States. The Welsh hung still on his western flank, a people whom it seemed impossible either to subdue or pacify. After a vain attempt to penetrate their defiles, in which he suffered a great loss of men, he retired from the inhospitable land, and contented himself with the old chain of fortresses from the Severn to the Solway. Whether by fear or favour, he was more successful with the Scottish king, who not only surrendered the northern counties, as belonging to the English crown, but did homage for Lothian itself, as having formed at one time a portion of Northumberland. In addition to these present accessions to his territories, he held a solemn donation of the whole island of Ireland from the Pope, of which he only waited a fitting time to avail himself, by adding it to his realm.

end

§ 3. But there were counterbalancing circumstances which weakened him in the great struggle which was at hand between the crown and the spiritual power, and a few words will be sufficient to point them out before we enter on the interesting and dramatic contest between à Becket and the king. The Normans had been settled in England nearly a hundred years when the great quarrel began. They had come over with all the aid the Papal benediction could bestow. Their first efforts accordingly were directed to the subjugation of the national church, which yielded little more than a nominal submission to the central power at Rome. The higher offices in abbey and cathedral were soon filled with an alien and unintelligible priesthood, but the lower ranks continued to consist of the poorer parochial clergy and the

A.D. 1154-1158.]

STATE OF PARTIES.

175

Anglo-Saxon monks who had occupied their cells through the reign of Edward. Between the dignitaries of the Church and the magnates of the land there was unity and friendship. The Norman bishop was the equal and companion of the Norman lord; but the line was so distinctly drawn between the two peoples inhabiting the soil, by birth and language, that association between the conquerors and the few surviving gentlemen of the Anglo-Saxon line was impossible. The Franklin lived by himself, despised and insulted by his neighbours from over the sea, who envied him the wretched fragments of his old estate which the rapacity of the Williams had left. The high-born priest, in the same way, looked with discontented eyes on the few offices of trust and emolument still in English hands; and in this manner little combination had taken place between the gentry of the two races by the period we have now reached.

But with the humbler classes it was very different. It was impossible for all the followers of William to be gentlemen, and in the course of a few years many of them were scattered all over England, and not much wealthier than the original inhabitants by whom they were surrounded. And all through those years of misery and subjugation the AngloSaxon priest had continued true to his Anglo-Saxon countrymen. In their calamities, public and private, when the cruelty of their conquerors had devastated their fields-when the barons' exactions were too hard to be borne, they had sympathizers, if not protectors, in the poor monks and friars, who spoke their language and understood their sufferings. Marriages between the adherents of a baron and the maidens of the neighbouring village had begun at an early period. While the vassal was engaged in his lord's work, the children were playing on the mud floor of the hut in the little clearing of the wood, under the guardianship of their English mother, and speaking as unmistakeable Anglo-Saxon as if they had been born in the days of Alfred. A further departure from t1

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