The Project Gutenberg eBook, Henry the Second, by Mrs. J. R. Green

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Title: Henry the Second

Author: Mrs. J. R. Green

Release Date: December 18, 2003 [eBook #10494]

Language: English

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HENRY THE SECOND***

E-text prepared by Ted Garvin, Bonny Fafard, and Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders

HENRY THE SECOND

BY

MRS. J. R. GREEN

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

HENRY PLANTAGENET

CHAPTER II

THE ANGEVIN EMPIRE

CHAPTER III

THE GOVERNMENT OF ENGLAND

CHAPTER IV

THE FIRST REFORMS

CHAPTER V

THE CONSTITUTIONS OF CLARENDON

CHAPTER VI

THE ASSIZE OF CLARENDON

CHAPTER VII

THE STRIFE WITH THE CHURCH

CHAPTER VIII

THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND

CHAPTER IX

REVOLT OF THE BARONAGE

CHAPTER X

THE COURT OF HENRY

CHAPTER XI

THE DEATH OF HENRY

CHAPTER I

HENRY PLANTAGENET

The history of the English people would have been a great and a noble history whatever king had ruled over the land seven hundred years ago. But the history as we know it, and the mode of government which has actually grown up among us is in fact due to the genius of the great king by whose will England was guided from 1154 to 1189. He was a foreign king who never spoke the English tongue, who lived and moved for the most part in a foreign camp, surrounded with a motley host of Brabançons and hirelings; and who in intervals snatched from foreign wars hurried for a few months to his island-kingdom to carry out a policy which took little heed of the great moral forces that were at work among the people. It was under the rule of a foreigner such as this, however, that the races of conquerors and conquered in England first learnt to feel that they were one. It was by his power that England, Scotland, and Ireland were brought to some vague acknowledgment of a common suzerain lord, and the foundations laid of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It was he who abolished feudalism as a system of government, and left it little more than a system of land-tenure. It was he who defined the relations established between Church and State, and decreed that in England churchman as well as baron was to be held under the Common law. It was he who preserved the traditions of self-government which had been handed down in borough and shire-moot from the earliest times of English history. His reforms established the judicial system whose main outlines have been preserved to our own day. It was through his "Constitutions" and his "Assizes" that it came to pass that over all the world the English-speaking races are governed by English and not by Roman law. It was by his genius for government that the servants of the royal household became transformed into Ministers of State. It was he who gave England a foreign policy which decided our continental relations for seven hundred years. The impress which the personality of Henry II. left upon his time meets us wherever we turn. The more clearly we understand his work, the more enduring does his influence display itself even upon the political conflicts and political action of our own days.

For seventy years three Norman kings had held England in subjection William the Conqueror, using his double position as conqueror and king, had established a royal authority unknown in any other feudal country William Rufus, poorer than his father when the hoard captured at Winchester and the plunder of the Conquest were spent, and urged alike by his necessities and his greed, laid the foundation of an organized system of finance. Henry I., after his overthrow of the baronage, found his absolute power only limited by the fact that there was no machinery sufficient to put in exercise his boundless personal power; and for its support he built up his wonderful administrative system. There no longer existed any constitutional check on the royal authority. The Great Council still survived as the relic and heir both of the English Witenagemot and the Norman Feudal Court. But in matters of State its "counsel" was scarcely asked or given; its "consent" was yielded as a mere matter of form; no discussion or hesitation interrupted the formal and pompous display of final submission to the royal will. The Church under its Norman bishops, foreign officials trained in the King's chapel, was no longer a united national force, as it had been in the time of the Saxon kings. The mass of the people was of no account in politics. The trading class scarcely as yet existed. The villeins tied to the soil of the manor on which they had been born, and shut out from all courts save those of their lord; inhabitants of the little hamlets that lay along the river-courses in clearings among dense woods, suspicious of strangers, isolated by an intense jealousy of all that lay beyond their own boundaries or by traditional feuds, had no part in the political life of the nation.

But the central government had proved in the long run too weak to check the growth of feudal tendencies. The land was studded with fortresses—the homes of lords who exercised criminal jurisdiction without appeal, and who had their private prisons and private gallows. Their manor courts, whether they were feudal courts established by the new nobility of the Conquest, or whether they represented ancient franchises in which Norman lords succeeded to the jurisdiction of earlier English rulers, were more and more turned into mere feudal courts. In the Shire courts themselves the English sheriff who used to preside over the court was replaced by a Norman "vicecomes," who practically did as he chose, or as he was used to do in Normandy, in questions of procedure, proof, and judgment. The old English hundred courts, where the peasants' petty crimes had once been judged by the freemen of the district, had now in most cases become part of the fief of the lord, whose newly-built castle towered over the wretched hovels of his tenants, and the peasants came for justice to the baron's court, and paid their fees to the baron's treasury. The right of private coinage added to his wealth, as the multitude of retainers bound to follow them in war added to his power. The barons were naturally roused to a passion of revolt when the new administrative system threatened to cut them off from all share in the rights of government, which in other feudal countries were held to go along with the possession of land. They hated the "new men" who were taking their places at the council-board; and they revolted against the new order which cut them off from useful sources of revenue, from unchecked plunder, from fines at will in their courts of hundred and manor, from the possibility of