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The Constitutional history of England in its origin and development by William Stubbs

HENRY II

The sixty years that followed the death of Stephen comprise a period of English history which has a special importance. It is a period of constant growth, although the growth is far from being regular or uniform. The chain of events that connects the peace of Wallingford and the charter of Runnymede is traceable link by link. The nation which at the beginning of the period is scarcely conscious of its unity, is able, at the end of it, to state its claims to civil liberty and self-government as a coherent organized society. Norman end Englishman are now one, with a far more real identity than was produced by joint ownership of the land or joint subjection to one sovereign. England has been enabled, by the fortunate incapacity of Jonh, to cut herself free from Normandy; and the division of interest between the two races has ceased. The royal power has curbed the feudal spirit and reduced the system to its proper insignificance. The royal power, having reached its climax, has forced on the people trained under it the knowledge that it in its turn must be curbed, and that they have the strength to curb it. The church, the baronage, and the people have found by different ways their true and common interest. This has not been done without struggles that have seemed at certain times to be internecine. The people, the baronage, and the church have been severely crushed, reformed, revived, and reorganised. More than once the balance of forces has been readjusted. The crown has humbled the baronage with the help of the people, and the church with the help of the baronage. Each in turn has been made to strengthen the royal power, and has been taught in the process to know its own strenght. By law the people have been raised from the dust, the baronage forced to obedience, the clergy deprived of the immunities that were destroying their national character and counteracting their spiritual work. The three estates, trained in and by royal law, have learned how law can be applied to the very power that forced the lesson upon them. What the king has reformed and reorganised in order to gain a firm and real basis for his own power, has discovered its own strength and the strength of law, and has determined to give its service and sacrifices no longer without conditions. The history is to be worked out in some detail.

Henry II is the first of the three great kings who have left on the constitution indelible marks of their own individuality. What the reorganised Edward I defined and completed. The Tudor policy, which is impersonated in Henry VIII, tested to the utmost the soundness of the fabric: the constitution stood the shock, and the Stewarts paid the cost of the experiment. Each of the three sovereigns had a strong idiosyncrasy, and in each case the state of things on which he acted was such as to make the impression of personal character distinct and permanent.

Henry II at his accession found the kingdom in a state of dissolution: his only advantage was the absolute exhaustion of all the forces which had produced that dissolution. The task before him was one which might have appalled an experienced legislator, and Henry was little more than twenty-one years old. He did not succeed to the inheritance of a band of veteran counsellors; the men with whom he had to work were the survivors of the race that had caused the anarchy. He was a young man of keen bright intellect, patient, laborious, methodical; ambitious within certain well-defined limits, tenacious of power, ingenious even to minuteness in expedients; prompt and energetic in execution; at once unscrupulous and cautious. These characteristics mark also the later stages of his career, even when, disappointed of his dearest hopes and mortified in his tenderest affections, he gave way to violent passion and degrading licence; for his private vices made no mark on his public career, and he continued to the last a most industrious, active, and business –like king. There was nothing in him of the hero, and of the patriot scarcely more than an almost instructive knowledge of the needs of his people, a knowledge which can hardly ever be said to be the result of sympathy. Thus much all the historians who have described him join in allowing; although they form very different estimates of his merit as a ruler, and of the objects of his policy. These objects seem to have been mainly the consolidation of his power: in England the strengthening and equalising of the royal administration; on the Continent the retention and thorough union of the numerous and variously constituted provinces which by marriage or inheritance had come into his hands. The English nation may gratefully recognise his merit as a ruler in the vastness of the benefits that resulted from the labours even of a selfish life.

Henry II was born at La Mans on the 5 th of March, 1133, when his grandfather was despairing of an heir. When quite an infant, he received the fealty and homage of the barons as their future king. He was the child of parents singularly ill-matched: his father was of the weak, unprincipled, and impulsive type into which the strong and astute nature of the Angevin house sank in its lowest development; his mother a Norman lady who had all the strong characteristics of her race, and had too carly exchanged the religious training which would have curbed them for the position of the spoiled child-wife of the cold-blooded despotic emperor. As empress she had enjoyed the power and splendour of her position too heartily to endure the rule of a husband so personally insignificant as Geoffrey of Anjou, or to submit to the restraints of a policy which would have been desperate but for the craft and energy of Robert of Gloucester. Yet in spite of her imperious behaviour and her want of self-control, Matilda was a woman of considerable ability, in her old age she was a safe and sagacious counsellor; and some part at least of her son,s education must be put to her credit. Henry was brought to England when he was eight years old to be trained in arms; four years were spent at Bristol under the instructions of a master named Matthew who is afterwards called his chancellor; at the age of sixteen he was knighted by his great-unkle David of Scotland; in 1151 he received the duchy of Normandy, and soon after succeeded his father in the county of Anjou; the next year he married Eleanor, and added Poitou and Guienne to his dominions; at the age of twenty he undertook the recovery of England, brought Stephen, partly by war and partly by negotiation, to terms which insured his own succession, and in less than a year after the pacification succeeded to the English throne.

An education so disturbed and so curtailed can hardly have contained much legal or constitutional teaching. The court of King David might have furnished training for either a warrior or a monk, but not for a lawyer or a constitutional king; in France Henry had scarcely spent more time than can be accounted for by the business of his succession and marriage; and in England he had remained only a few weeks after the pacification. He had in his wife and mother two counsellors of ability and experience, but his own genius for government must have been innate; and next to his genius the most important element in the creation of his characteristic policy must be looked for in his choice of advisers.

There must have been in Henry himself some gift that called forth or detected the ability of the servants.

Stephen died on the 25 th of October, 1154, and Henry landed in England on the 8 th of December. Nothing can show more clearly the exhaustion of society than the fact that the interregnum of two months was peaceful . Archbishop Theobald seems to have taken the helm of state, and notwithstanding the presence of Stephen,s mercenary troops, which were yet undismissed, no man laid hands on his neighbour. After receiving the fealty of the chief barons at Winchester the duke of Normandy hastened to London, where he was elected and crowned on the 19 th of December, and issued a charter of liberties as brief and comprehensive as that of Stephen had been. He grants and confirms all the gifts, liberties, and customs that his grandfather had granted, promises the abolition of all evil customs that he had abolished, and enjoins that the church, his earls, barons, and all his men, shall have and hold, freely, and quietly, well, in peace and wholly, of him and his heirs, to them and their heirs, all the liberties and free customs that King Henry I had granted and secured by his charter. The reference to the charter of Henry is as marked as the omission of all mention of Stephen. The charter is attested by Richard de Lucy, who therefore was probably in the office of justiciar. On Christmas Day the king held his court at Bermondsey, and having debated with the barons on the measures necessary to the state of the kingdom, directed the expulsion of the mercenaries and the demolition of the adulterine castles. William of Ypres consequently departed with his Fleming soldiers, and the demolition of the fortified houses was speedily begun. The bishop of Ely was recalled to the Exchequer; Thomas Becket was made chancellor, and the official dignity of the court was replaced on its old footing. Whether at this assembly new sheriffs were appointed, or that measure had been already taken before Stephen,s death, is uncertain; the persons who are found in the office, so soon as the regular Exchequer accounts furnish us with authentic names, are generally barons of great local importance. In Devonshire and Wiltshire the earls of the county, and in Herefordshire the claimants of the earldom, appear as sheriffs; Richard de Lucy accounts for Essex and Hertfordshire; but as a rule the sheriffs seem to be persons of local importance only, and chosen from what may be called the second rank of the baronage.