Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 26.djvu/8

Henry II stretching from the Somme to the Loire and covering the whole western side of the royal domain of France, Henry in May 1152 added the great duchy of Aquitaine by his marriage with its duchess Eleanor, the divorced wife of the French king. The young duke found himself strong enough to disregard a citation before the royal court (‘Gesta Ludov. Reg.,’ in, Hist. Franc. Scriptt. iv. 411; ‘Hist. Ludov. Reg.,’ ib. p. 414), to repel an attack made by Louis upon Normandy, to crush a rebellion of his own brother Geoffrey in Anjou, and to risk another visit to England at Epiphany 1153. Nine months of fighting and negotiation ended in the treaty of Wallingford (November), whereby Stephen and Henry adopted each other as father and son, Henry leaving the crown to Stephen for his life, on a promise of its reversion at his death, and Stephen undertaking to govern meanwhile according to Henry's advice; as Roger of Howden expresses it, ‘the king made the duke justiciar of England under him, and by him all the affairs of the kingdom were settled.’ The discovery of a plot among the king's Flemish troops to assassinate Henry drove him back to France early in 1154. On 24 Oct. Stephen died. Contrary winds detained Henry in Normandy till 7 Dec.; but the ‘mickle awe’ with which he was already regarded in England sufficed to keep the land in peace during the interregnum; and on Sunday, 19 Dec., he was crowned at Westminster.

There was little of regal dignity in the young king's look and ways, in his square-built, thick-set frame, his sturdy limbs, his bullet-shaped head with its mass of close-cropped tawny hair, his ‘lion-like’ face with its freckled skin, and its prominent eyes that, for all their soft grey colour, could glow like balls of fire when the demon-spirit of Anjou was roused; in his absorbing passion for the chase; in the disregard of conventionalities shown by his coarse gloveless hands, his careless dress, his rough-and-ready speech; in the restlessness which kept him on his feet from morning till night, scorning every seat but the saddle, grudging every minute withdrawn from active occupation, beguiling with scribbling or with whispered talk the enforced tranquillity even of the hour of mass, dragging his weary courtiers about the country in ceaseless journeys, often to the most unlikely and inconvenient places, with equal indifference to their comfort and to his own; or in the outbreaks of a temper which mounted to sheer momentary madness, when he would utter the most unaccountable blasphemies, or gnaw the rushes from the floor and lie rolling among them like one possessed. Yet already England had discerned in this uncouth lad of twenty-one the quiet strength of a born ruler of men. ‘All folk loved him,’ says the English chronicler, summing up the impression left by the five months which had elapsed between Henry's treaty with Stephen and his return to Normandy, ‘for he did good justice and made peace.’ And ‘justice’ and ‘peace,’ in the sense which those words conveyed to the men of his day, were to be the main characteristics of his reign in England.

Henry's first kingly act was the issuing of a charter declaring, as the basis of his scheme of government, the restitution and confirmation of all liberties in church and state as settled by his grandfather. He next put in force certain hitherto unfulfilled provisions of the treaty of 1153, for the expulsion of Stephen's Flemish mercenaries, the demolition of castles built by individual barons without royal license and held by them independently of royal control, and the restoration of royal fortresses and other crown property which had passed into private hands during the anarchy. William of Aumale in Yorkshire, Hugh of Mortimer and Roger of Hereford in the west, openly resisted this last decree; but in January 1155 Henry's mere approach brought William to restore Scarborough; Roger submitted in April; and a siege of Hugh's castle of Bridgnorth by the king in person ended in its surrender, 7 July. By the close of the year order was fairly re-established throughout the realm. The old machinery of justice, of finance, of general administration, was at work again; judges went on circuit through the country; capable ministers were set over the various departments of state business; even the succession to the crown had been thought of and carefully provided for in a council at Wallingford, 10 April 1155. The part of Henry's life-work bequeathed to him by his English grandfather was so well in train that he could safely turn his attention to that other, and probably in his eyes more important work, which he had inherited from his paternal ancestors: the building up of an empire which, as had been foretold to one of them, was to spread from the rock of Angers to the ends of the earth. It spread now from the Flemish border to the Pyrenees, commanding the whole western coast of France, and covering more than half the soil whose nominal lord paramount was King Louis VII of France. But it was made up of five distinct fiefs, with claims of suzerainty over some half-dozen others; all held on different tenures, all jealous of one another, and most of them in a state of chronic disaffection, which Louis, jealous as he naturally was of his formidable