Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 7.djvu/259

 HENRY

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HENRY

Despite the confusion and civil war which marked the ensuing years, young Henry seems to have been well educated, partly in England, partly abroad. When he was sixteen he was knighted at Carlisle by King David of Scotland, when he was eighteen he succeeded to Normandy and Anjou, when nineteen he married Eleanor of Aquitaine, the divorced wife of Louis VII of France, and secured her inheritance, and when he was twenty he came to England and forced King Stephen to submit to terms. It is plain that when, a year later, upon Stephen's death, he suc- ceeded to the English crown, men felt that they had no novice to deal with either in diplomacy or in war. Whether through the accident of heredity or through conscious imitation, Henry II at once took up with signal success that work of constitutional and legal reform which marked the administration of his grand- father, Henry I. The Angevin Henry was not a hero or a patriot as we understand the terms nowadays, but he was, as Stubbs has said, "a far-seeing King who recognised that the well-being of the nation was the surest foundation of his own power". At home, then, he set to work from the beginning to face a series of problems which had never yet been settled, the question of Scotland, the question of Wales, the frauds of fiscal officers, the defects of royal justice, and the encroachments of the feudal courts. In all these un- dertakings he was loyally seconded by his new chan- cellor, one who had been cordially recommended to him by Archbishop Theobald and one who was suffi- ciently near his own age to share his vigour and his enthusiasm. There is but one voice amongst con- temporaries to render homage to the strong and beneficial government carried on by Henry and his chancellor Thomas Becket during seven or eight years. All dangerous resistance was crushed, the numlierless feudal castles were surrendered, and the turbulent barons were not unwilling to acquiesce in the security and order imparted by the reorganized machinery of the exchequer and by a more comprehensive system of judicial administration. The details cannot be given here. The reforms were largely embodied in the "Assizes" issued later in the reign, but in most cases the work of reorganization had been set on foot from the beginning. As regards foreign policy Henry found himself possessed of dominions such as no Eng- lish king before him had ever known. Normandy, Maine, Anjou, and Aquitaine were united to the Eng- lish crown in 1154, and before twenty years had passed Nantes, Quercy, Brittany, and Toulouse had all prac- tically fallen under English rule. It has recently been maintained (by Hardegen, " Imperialpolitik Hein- richs II.", 190.5) that Henry delilierately adopted a pol- icy of competing with the emperor and that he made the empire itself, as Giraldus Cambrensis seems to state (Opera, VIII, 157), the object of his ambition, being invited thereto both by the whole of Italy and by the city of Rome. If this be an exaggerated view, it is nevertheless certain that Henry occupied a fore- most position in Europe, and that England for the first time exerted an influence which was felt all over the Continent.

The prosperity which smiled on Henry's early years seems in a strange way to have been broken by his quarrel with his former favourite and chancellor. He whom we now honour as St. Thomas of Canter- bury was raised to the archbishopric at his royal master's desire in 1162. It is probable that Henry was influenced in his choice of a primate by the anti- cipation of conflicts with the Church. No doubt he was already planning his attack on the jurisdiction of the Courts-Christian, and it is also probable enough that Thomas himself had divined it. This, if true, would explain the plainly expressed forebodings which the future archbishop uttered on hearing of his nomi- nation. The story of the famous Constitutions of Clarendon has already been given in some little detail

in the article Engl.^nd (Vol. V, p. 4.36). In his attack on the jurisdiction of the spiritual courts Henry may have desired sincerely to remedy an abuse, but the extent of that abuse has been very much exagger- ated by the anti-papal sympathies of Anglican his- torians, more especially of so influential a WTiter as Bishop Stubbs. Henry's masterful and passionate nature was undoubtedly embittered by what he deemed the ingratitude of liis former favourite — even St. Thomas's resignation of the chancellorship, on being made archbishop, had deeply mortified him — but when, as the climax of six years of persecution which followed the saint's rejection of the Constitu- tions of Clarendon, the archliishop was brutally mur- dered on 29 December, 1170, there is no reason to doubt that Henry's remorse was sincere. His sub- mission to the humiliating penance, which he per- formed barefoot at the martyr's shrine in 1174, was

Seal of Henky II
 * ' Henricus Dei Glratiri] Rex Anglorum "

an example to all Europe. When the news came that on that very day the Scottish king, who was support- ing a dangerous insurrection in the North, had been taken prisoner at Alnwick, men not unnaturally re- garded it as a mark of the Divine favour. It is not impossible, and has been recently suggested by L. Delisle, that the restoration of the style "Dei gratia Rex Anglorum" (by the grace of God King of the English), which is observable in the royal charters after 1172, may be due to intensified religious feeUng. In any case there is no sufficient reason for saying with Stubbs that St. Thomas was responsible for a grievous change in Henry's character towards the close of his life. The misconduct and rebellion of his sons, prob- ably at the instigation of his queen, Eleanor of Aqui- taine, are amply sufficient to account for some measure of bitterness and vindictiveness. On the other hand, after Henry by his penance had owned himself beaten upon the question of the Church Courts, his legal and constitutional reforms (such as those which developed the germs of trial by jury, the circuits of the travelling justices, etc.) were pushed on more actively than ever. This fact forms a strong argument for the view that St. Thomas was resisting nothing which was essential to the well-being of the kingdom. More- over, it is in these last years of Henry's life that we find the most attractive presentment of liis character in his relations with the Carthusian, St. Hugh of Lin- coln, a saint whom the king himself had promoted to his bishopric. St. Hugh evidently had a tender feel- ing for Henry, and he was not a man to connive at wickedness. Again, the list of Henry's religious foundations is a considerable one, even apart from the