Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 26.djvu/16

Henry II Frênaye Henry recovered his self-control and planned the last adventure which was to be the fitting close of his adventurous life. Sending on his followers to Normandy with instructions for the gathering of fresh forces and the disposal of the Norman castles, he turned back almost alone and made his way through the heart of the conquered land to Chinon. Fever-stricken, death-stricken, he lay there or at Saumur while Philip and Richard stormed Tours; on 4 July he dragged himself, by a supreme effort, to meet them at Colombières. He was forced to put himself at their mercy, to pardon and release from their allegiance all those who had conspired against him, to renew his homage to Philip, to acknowledge Richard heir to all his lands, and to give him the kiss of peace. The kiss was given with a muttered curse; but it was not Richard's treason that broke his father's heart. That night Henry bade his vice-chancellor read him the list of the traitors whose names Philip had given up. The first name was that of John. ‘Enough,’ murmured the king as he turned his face to the wall; ‘now let things go as they may; I care no more for myself or for the world.’ For two days he lay tossing in anguish and delirium, cursing his sons and himself, muttering ‘Shame, shame on a conquered king!’ till the approach of death, and the tender care of the one child who had remained with him to the last, his illegitimate son Geoffrey, brought him back to reason, penitence, and peace, and on 6 July he passed quietly away. Two days later he was buried in the abbey church of Fontevraud, where the characteristic outlines of the face so vividly described by his courtiers may still be seen in the effigy sculptured on his tomb.

Henry's children by his queen are enumerated in the biography of their mother [see ]. He is known to have had three illegitimate sons: Geoffrey, born probably before his accession to teh crown, possibly even before his marriage [see, archbishop of York [q. v.]; Morgan, whose mother is said to have been the wife of a knight called Ralf Bloeth (Hist. Dunelm. Scriptt. Tres, Surtees Soc., p. 35); and William Longespée [q. v.], afterwards Earl of Salisbury, who may have been a child of Fair Rosamond. The romantic adjuncts of the Rosamond legend [see ] have been swept away, but its central fact remains. Of the darker tale about Adela of France (Gesta Ric., ed. Stubbs, p. 160; De Instr. Princ. dist. iii. c. 2; cf., in Howlett, Chron. of Stephen and Henry II, iii. 403) it can only be said, on the one hand, that it seems to have rested on evidence strong enough to convince her betrothed husband Richard and her brother Philip Augustus; and, on the other, that Richard was only too ready to believe any evil of his father, while Philip was equally ready to feign belief of anything, if it suited his policy at the moment. Still, though the pictures of Henry's private character given by lampooners such as Gerald de Barri and Ralph the Black may well be painted in needlessly glaring colours, we can hardly venture to say more in its defence than was said by another contemporary, that ‘he left the palm of vice to his grandfather.’ His nature was full of passion; but the passion was far from being all evil, though it was lavished too often upon unworthy objects, among the most unworthy being, unhappily, his own spoiled, ill-trained, mismanaged, but tenderly loved sons. Except in the case of his children, however, Henry's bestowal of honour and power was never dictated by blind partiality to a personal favourite. Despot as he was, his ministers were no mere tools of the royal caprice, but responsible statesmen such as the elder Earl Robert of Leicester, Richard de Lucy ‘the loyal,’ and Richard's successor, the great lawyer Ranulf de Glanville [q. v.], men who were not afraid to speak their minds and act upon their convictions, and to whom Henry, on his part, was not afraid to entrust the whole administration of affairs in his own absence from the country. His personal friends again, from Thomas Becket up to St. Hugh of Lincoln [q. v.], were far better men than himself; they were in fact among the purest and noblest characters of their time; and the more unlike they were to him, the holier and more unworldly were their lives, the more loyally and devotedly he clung to them, the more readily he accepted their counsel and their rebukes, and the more, too, he seems to have inspired in them a corresponding warmth of affection. The half droll, half pathetic stories of his relations with St. Hugh told in the ‘Magna Vita S. Hugonis’ reveal glimpses of a side of his character which is otherwise hardly perceptible in his career as an English king, but which has left traces to this day in the home-lands of his race, in the great hospitals which he built at Angers and at Le Mans, and in the remains or the records of the lazar-houses which he endowed in the chief towns of Normandy, that at Quévilly, near Rouen, indeed, being formed out of a hunting-seat which he had originally built for his own enjoyment.

Henry was a great builder, though not like his predecessors, of churches and abbeys.