Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 26.djvu/12

Henry II suspension, crowned the young king at Westminster, 14 June 1170.

This action was the greatest blunder of Henry's life. The crowning of the heir during his father's lifetime was an innovation wholly at variance with all English constitutional theory and practice, and the moment was singularly ill-chosen for such an unprecedented step. For fifteen years Henry had been developing a scheme of government whereby all separate jurisdictions, all local and personal privileges, were to be brought into direct subjection to the authority of the crown. For six years he had been literally, throughout his English realm at least, over all persons and all causes supreme, and there had been no outward obstacles to hinder the working of his administrative system. It worked, indeed, regularly and in the main successfully, but not without a great deal of very severe friction; and the adherents of Thomas were far from being the only section of the community who saw in Henry's reforms nothing but engines of regal tyranny and extortion. The first visitation of the judges after the assize of Clarendon carried terror and desolation into every shire, while it brought to the treasury an enormous increase of wealth from the fines of justice and the goods and chattels of the criminals condemned under the assize. Scarcely was it concluded when a visitation of the forests was held in 1167, and this again was followed next year by the levy of an aid for the marriage of the king's eldest daughter. The people writhed helplessly under these manifold burdens; the barons watched in sullen silence for an opportunity to break the yoke which Henry was rivetting more tightly upon them year by year. Henry's own sense of an impending crisis in England, on his return thither in March 1170, was shown in the sweeping measure by which he sought to anticipate it. He suspended from their functions all the sheriffs of the counties and all the bailiffs of his own demesnes, and appointed a body of special commissioners to institute during the next two months an inquiry into every detail of the administration, judicial, financial, political, of every royal officer throughout the country and of every local tribunal, no matter to whom appertaining, during the last four years. When the two months expired, out of twenty-seven sheriffs only seven were reinstated in their office; to the places thus left vacant Henry appointed officers of the exchequer whom he knew and trusted. Three days later the feudal nobles, whose claims of hereditary jurisdiction and independence he had thus afresh trampled underfoot, were called upon to do homage and fealty to a new king, chosen by Henry himself to share with him in the sacred dignity which till now had been exclusively his own. The oath was taken readily enough; its possible results were perhaps better foreseen by some of those who took it than by him who demanded it. Meanwhile the wrath of primate and pope at the insult to Canterbury, and the wrath of the French king at the insult to his daughter, who had not been allowed to share in her husband's coronation, rose to such a pitch that in July Henry was driven to a formal reconciliation with both Louis and Thomas. But there was no real peace with either. The king was keeping Christmas at Bures, near Bayeux, when the Archbishop of York and the bishops of London and Salisbury came to tell him that Thomas on his return to England had refused to absolve them from the papal sentence under which they lay for their share in the coronation, and was setting his royal will at defiance. ‘What a parcel of fools and dastards have I nourished in my house,’ he burst out, ‘that not one of them will avenge me of this one upstart clerk!’ Four knights took him at his word, and on 29 Dec. 1170 he was ‘avenged,’ far otherwise than he desired, by the martyrdom of St. Thomas of Canterbury.

For the moment all seemed lost. Alexander threatened to interdict the whole Angevin dominions and excommunicate the king unless he would do penance for the murder and submit unconditionally to the demands of the church, and at once despatched two legates to execute the threat. But the hour of extreme danger was always the hour which Henry turned to account for some specially daring piece of work; and it was at this most perilous crisis of his life that he added a new realm to his dominions. As early as 1155 he had planned the conquest of Ireland, and it was afterwards said that he had obtained from Pope Adrian IV a bull to sanction the enterprise; this bull, however, has never been found among the papal archives, and its genuineness is disputed (cf. Analecta Juris Pontifici, Mai–Juin 1882, Paris; in Dublin Review, 3rd ser. x. 83). The scheme, opposed by his mother, was left in abeyance till at the close of 1166 Diarmait Mac Murchadha, king of Leinster, having been driven from his throne, besought Henry's aid in regaining it, and offered him his homage in return. Henry accepted the homage, and proclaimed that any of his subjects who chose might enlist in the service of the Irish king. A band of knights from the South Welsh border availed themselves of the permission; by the end of 1170 they were masters of the Irish