Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 26.djvu/17

Henry II He founded but seven religious houses in the course of his life; the erection of three of these was part of the penance imposed on him for the death of St. Thomas; and though the commandery of Knights Templars at Vaubourg was founded in 1173, and the Charterhouse of Witham in the following year, while that of Le Liget in Touraine is said to date from 1175, they remained so insignificant that many years later Gerald de Barri could affect to ignore the very existence of two of them, and sneered at the niggardliness with which Henry was supposed to have fulfilled his vow at his predecessors' expense, by putting regular instead of secular canons into Harold's old foundation at Waltham, and foreign nuns from Fontevraud instead of English Benedictine sisters into the ancient abbey of Amesbury. His other religious foundations attained no greater fame; they were an Austin priory at Beauvoir in Normandy, established before his accession to the crown; a second near La Flèche in Maine, founded about 1180; a third at Newstead in Sherwood, dating possibly from 1170, more probably from 1166 or earlier; and a Gilbertine house at Newstead in Ancholm, which came into existence before 1175. Henry built much for himself, and, as he hoped, for his successors; Caen, Rouen, Angers, Tours were all adorned with royal palaces in his reign. He built yet more for his subjects, and while of his palaces scarcely a fragment remains, save the ruined pile at Chinon where he died, the waters of the Loire are kept in to this day by a great embankment or levée, thirty miles long, which he constructed as a safeguard against its frequent and disastrous floods. The ‘Grand Pont’ at Angers seems to have been built by him, in place of an earlier bridge destroyed by fire in 1177. The popular astonishment at the greatness of his architectural undertakings, and the rapidity with which they were accomplished, is expressed in the legend of the ‘Pont de l'Annonain,’ a viaduct over a swamp near Chinon, built by Henry, but locally said to have been reared by the devil in a single night at the bidding of his ancestor Fulk Nerra, the one other Angevin count who lived, side by side with Henry FitzEmpress, in the memory of the Angevin people.

The English people, on the other hand, seem to have quickly cooled in their enthusiasm for the king whom before his accession they had ‘all loved;’ it was only by slow degrees, and after he was gone, that they learned to appreciate his real merits as a ruler. Henry never courted popularity. He by no means shunned personal contact with the multitude, and when he did go forth into their midst, he and they alike flung etiquette to the winds. But he did not lay himself out to please them, as his grandfather had done, by a routine, at once familiar and splendid, of daily life lived of set purpose before their very eyes. When counsellors, courtiers, and spectators had flocked together from far and near at his summons for a great judicial and political assembly, he would disappear at dawn and keep them all vainly awaiting his return till nightfall put an end to his day's hunting. His household was a by-word for confusion and discomfort, to which he himself was utterly indifferent, and which went on unchecked while he withdrew to his chamber and there buried himself in his own pursuits. Chief among these was the discussion of literary questions with the scholars who thronged his court, and whom he delighted to honour. He had inherited both from his father and from his maternal grandfather a great love of learning; he was probably the most highly educated sovereign of his day, and amid all his busy, active life he never lost his interest in literature and intellectual discussion; he loved reading only less than hunting, and it was said by one of his courtiers that his hands were never empty, they always held either a bow or a book. He could speak, and speak well, in at least two languages, French and Latin, and is said to have known something of every tongue ‘between the Bay of Biscay and the Jordan,’ a definition which seems to exclude the English tongue. Of the varied elements, Angevin, Norman, and English, united in Henry FitzEmpress, the last indeed can hardly be traced at all in his strangely complex character. Yet the work that he did for England was the only part of his work that outlasted his own life, and it has lasted for seven centuries. It was under his rule 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