A.D. 1135.] DEATH OF HENRY. 153 deposited with regal ceremonies in the great abbey at Reading, which he had lately built. Superstition or hatred saw strange evidences of the Divine wrath in the circumstances of his death; and the common people, when they heard that the embalmer had been suffocated by the poisonous exhalations of the body, only added him to the long list of the victims of the royal cruelty. "He was the last man," says the chronicler, "whom King Henry put to death." Here was the end of a reign of thirty-five years; and if we consider some of the changes that occurred in it, we shall see the beneficial tendency of a lengthened tenure of power, in the firmness and permanency which it impresses on the acts of one mind. Steady and persevering in his great object of lowering the dangerous independence of the nobility, his policy had the effect of protecting the people. His declaration, or first charter, was a renewal of the laws which had been broken through or abrogated by his Norman predecessors. His second, or the charter of London, relieved commerce from many of its chains, gave self-government to the citizens, and placed them beyond the exactions or tyranny to which they had been exposed. Not that the worthy son of William and brother of Rufus cared much for the happiness of his subjects, but he would allow no man to trample on them but himself. Another gain was the perceptible separation which occurred in this reign between the interests of Normandy and England. Even though united under the same sceptre, it was soon very evident that Henry played one set of great feudatories against the other, and that properties on the Seine were held out as tempting baits to the English barons, while in the same way the rich possessions. of Shrewsbury or Montgomery assured to the lord paramount the support of as many greedy warriors from Rouen as he required. Each revolting lord felt the frightful strictness of the feudal law while he raised the sword against his superior; whereas his position would have been more independent if the crowns had been held by different persons. Opposition to the foreign ruler would not have been treason as well as war. But no one dared to whisper a doubt of the perfect justice and truth of the firm-willed and pitiless master who held Normandy in subjection with the aid of England, and trampled on the English peers with the aid of Normandy. The dominions, however, instead of being welded together by the weight that oppressed them, were ready to take separate and independent forms the moment the pressure was removed. § 11. And yet we cannot doubt that when the evil times which succeeded the Beauclerc's reign were upon them, nobles, and priests, and peasantry regretted the restraining rod from which they had all suffered so long. As this was the last of the legitimate Normans, he combined in his own person the good and bad qualities of his race. Cunning and revengeful as the Conqueror, he also possessed a certain magnificence of mind, which displayed itself in noble buildings and rich religious foundations. England copied from Normandy the majestic style of architecture, of which so many specimens still remain, reminding us of a time when cathedrals and abbeys and churches were a kind of devout conscience-money paid in acknowledgment of guilt and lowliness in the sight of heaven, at the very time that the sumptuous edifice spread over all the land the name and generosity of the founder. If these sacred monuments were indeed memorials of crime and violence, we need not wonder that the Normans were ecclesiastical architects on the largest scale. Henry, for instance, whose career we have sketched, had outraged every feeling of kindliness or compassion in his treatment of friend and foe. He had two grandchildren, the offspring of his illegitimate daughter Juliana, whom he had married to a certain barbarous feudatory called Eustace of Breteuil. Eustace and Juliana displeased him, and he exacted their little girls as pledges of their fidelity; but as a pledge also of his own he commanded a courtier of the name of Harenc to confide his son to the A.D. 1135.] CHARACTER OF HENRY. 155 care of the offended parents. Eustace with brutal fury plucked out the eyes of the youthful hostage, and Harenc appealed to the king. Was there no court before which so great a crime could be tried ?—was there no bishop or priest to inform the crowned.scholar that the law of retaliation had been done away? Henry gave his hostages, the daughters of Juliana, into the hands of Harenc, and Harenc, with a thrill of gratified hate, mutilated their faces, and burnt out their eyes. Juliana heard of the deed, and when her father besieged the castle of Breteuil, demanded parley with him from the walls. When he appeared, she aimed an arrow from her crossbow at his breast, but missed. The siege, therefore, went OL, and when hunger, fever, and the usual concomitants of war in those ages compelled the guilty pair to surrender, Henry, with a grim humour, would not pardon his daughter till he had humiliated her in the sight of all the camp, and Juliana was forced to lower herself in a basket from the battlements, to wade up to her neck across the dirty moat, and, dripping and disgraced, was received in the royal tent, and admitted into her father's favour. Not all the churches and hospitals that give such holy beauty to the landscape of England could wash away the stain of such unforgivingness and crime, and Henry must be remembered as a successful wielder of authority, but unredeemed by a single social or christian virtue. A.D. LANDMARKS OF CHRONOLOGY. 1100. Henry I. is recognised as king, and crowned at Westminster. 1105. The king makes war upon his brother Robert, takes him prisoner, and reduces Normandy to subjection. 1120. Prince William and his bride, with two others of the king's children, and all their attendants, shipwrecked and lost on their return from Normandy. A.D. 1127. The nobility swear fealty to Ma- FRANCE. Louis VI., the Fat; Louis VII., the Young. SCOTLAND.-David I.; Malcolm IV. POPES.-Celestine II.; Lucius II.; Eugenius III.; Anastasius IV. § 1. Accession of STEPHEN. Claims of Matilda to the throne. Constitution of feudalism opposed to a female succession.-§ 2. Measures pursued by Stephen to secure the crown. His coronation. §3. Despotism and anarchy of Stephen's reign. § 4. The great coalitions formed against him.-§ 5. David of Scotland enters into hostilities against Stephen. Hatred of the Scotch towards the Norman race. Robert Bruce. Battle of the Standard, and great slaughter of the Scotch.-§ 6. Influence of the clergy. Punishment inflicted by Stephen.-§ 7. Matilda arrives in England. State of public feeling. General anarchy and oppression.-§ 8. Stephen's forces defeated, and himself taken prisoner. Matilda obtains the crown. Flight of Matilda, and her departure from the kingdom. 9. Prince Henry Plantagenet, son of Matilda. Treaty entered into, by which Henry was acknowledged as Stephen's successor.— § 10. Death of Stephen. § 1. WHEN the reader remembers all the oaths of allegiance to the Empress Maud, all the care bestowed by the politic Henry to secure her accession, and the farther advantage she possessed in being the mother of three hopeful sons, he is surprised at seeing the name Stephen as the heading to the succeeding reign. Who was Stephen, and by what means did he manage to disappoint the wisdom of Henry and the ambition of Matilda? A little inquiry will moderate our A.D. 1135.] STEPHEN AND MATILDA. 157 surprise, and show how naturally the interruption to the direct succession occurred. Stephen was the son of Adela, the daughter of the Conqueror. He was therefore nephew of the late king. His father was Count of Blois, one of the petty feudatories of France, and his life would probably have been passed in the obscure contentions of a small principality if the greater theatre of England and Normandy had not been opened to his ambition by the favour of the kinsman whose daughter he was about to supplant. Henry, indeed, spared no pains to elevate him and his brothers to the highest point. Stephen was handsome, courageous, and gay; so winning in manner that he was a favourite with the mob, so gallant in action that he was a pattern to the knights, his partial uncle procured for him the hand of the daughter and heiress of the Count of Boulogne, and enriched him with manors and territories sufficient to do honour to the lofty station of his bride. But she was richer in the eyes of the English with the hereditary blood of their ancient kings than with all the estates of which her husband was lord. For she was the niece of David of Scotland and of Henry's first wife, Matilda, the niece of Edgar Atheling; and as if further to endear her to the regretful heart of the oppressed, she herself was known by the name of Maud. Henry had been equally lavish in his bestowal of ecclesiastical wealth on the brother of Stephen, who was at this time Bishop of Winchester, and the most powerful churchman in the realm. The case of a female succession had not occurred in all our Saxon or Norman annals. The constitution of feudalism was directly contrary to it, as it was founded on the idea of the indissoluble union between property and the sword; and when the more vigorous spirits among the nobility compared the competitors for the crown, the choice could not be long and difficult between the grandson of the Conqueror by a daughter, and the granddaughter of the Conqueror by a son. |