Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/138

 the closest description; and we understand how the great Longchamp or Walter of Coutances could send down important dispatches to be copied into the historical collections of Ralph de Diceto. For when we talk of the public and of the court of Henry II, we are not talking of such a vague and abstract idealism as the court and public of the reign of Victoria, made up of society at large at one end and the press and newspaper correspondents at the other; with all that lies between; the Court is a small body of well-known men, and the public is the aggregate of the clergy and knights who know foreign lands, can speak foreign tongues and take an intelligent interest in European politics. Not to dwell, however, on these points; in 1176 there were at the English Court at Westminster, on the 13th of November, embassies from Constantinople, and from Frederick I, the Eastern and Western Cæsars, from France, both Rheims and Flanders, and from Henry the Lion; the same year the Sicilian envoys came to demand Johanna in marriage for their king, and the kings of Navarre and Castile applied to Henry to arbitrate on a great international dispute in Spain. It is true that on this last occasion there were some difficulties of interpretation; the English could not understand the Spanish envoys, a fact which seems to indicate that thus early Spanish Latin had become somewhat rusty, for of course it must have been in Latin that the negotiations would be conducted; but the difficulty was surmounted and the arbitration settled; the documents concerning it, which are totally without interest to the English mind except in so far as they contained a full pedigree of the Spanish dynasties, being circulated among the chroniclers of the time, and so preserved in several authorities.

With Italy and Sicily, owing first to the constant recourse to Rome during the Becket and other Canterbury quarrels, and secondly to the sustained connexion with the Sicilian Normans, which came to its climax in the marriage of Johanna, the offer of the Sicilian crown to Henry himself, and the contract of marriage between Arthur of Brittany and king Tancred's daughter, the relations of the English were very close.

But in fact the diplomatic activity of Henry II throughout