Part 12

The tide which had borne both Henry and Stephen to their triumph was in truth now rising far above their heads. The religious movement of which Henry had once seemed destined to become a leader had gone sweeping on till it left him far behind. It was the one element of national life whose growth, instead of being checked, seems to have been actually fostered by the anarchy. The only bright pages in the story of those “nineteen winters” are the pages in the _Monasticon Anglicanum_ which tell of the progress and the work of the new religious orders, and shew us how, while knights and barons, king and Empress, were turning the fairest regions of England into a wilderness, Templars and Hospitaliers were setting up their priories, Austin canons were directing schools and serving hospitals, and the sons of S. Bernard were making the very desert to rejoice and blossom as the rose. The vigour of the movement shewed itself in the diversity of forms which it assumed. Most of them were offshoots of the Order of S. Augustine. The Augustinian schools were the best in England; the “Black Canons” excelled as teachers; they excelled yet more as nurses and guardians of the poor. One of the most attractive features of the time is the great number of hospices, hospitals, or almshouses as we should call them now, established for the reception and maintenance of the aged, the needy and the infirm. Such were the two famous houses of S. Giles, Cripplegate, and S. Bartholomew, Smithfield; such was the Hospital of S. Katharine near the Tower, founded in 1148 by Stephen’s queen Matilda, and served by the canons of Holy Trinity at Aldgate, to whom the younger “good Queen Maude” was almost as devoted a friend as her aunt and namesake had been. Such, too, was another foundation whose white church, nestling amid a clump of trees in the meadows through which the little blue Itchen goes winding down to the sea, is the only unmutilated remnant that Winchester still retains of the handiwork of her legate-bishop Henry. There, before he built his own fortified house, Henry founded for thirteen poor old men the Hospital of the Holy Cross; and there, while the dwelling which he made so strong for himself has perished, the “Almshouse of noble Poverty” still stands--the hospital indeed rebuilt by a later bishop to whom it owes its poetical name, but the church unaltered since its founder’s days--a lasting memorial of that better, spiritual side of his character which the world least saw and least believed in. Another class of hospitals was destined for the reception of poor travellers, especially pilgrims. Such had been, in far-off Palestine, the original purpose of two societies of pious laymen which had now made their way back into Europe and even into England in the shape of two great military orders, the Hospitaliers or Knights of S. John and the Templars. They, too, lived by the rule of S. Austin. Another offshoot of the Augustinian order consisted of the White Canons or Premonstratensians (so called from their first establishment at Prémontré in the diocese of Laon), for whom, in the midst of the civil war, Peter de Gousla endowed a priory at Newhouse in Lincolnshire, while his wife founded a house at Brodholm in Nottinghamshire for sisters of the same order.[1038] “What shall we think,” exclaims an inmate of one of the great Augustinian houses of Yorkshire, William of Newburgh,--“what shall we think of all these religious places which in King Stephen’s time began more abundantly to arise and to flourish, but that they are God’s castles, wherein the servants of the true Anointed King do keep watch, and His young soldiers are exercised in warfare against spiritual evil? For indeed at that time, when the royal authority had lost all vigour, the mighty men of the realm, and whosoever was able, were all building castles either for their own protection or for their neighbours’ hurt; and thus while through King Stephen’s weakness, or rather through the malice of the Devil, who is ever a nourisher of strife, evils were swarming and abundant, there did yet more abound and more gloriously shine forth the wise and salutary providence of the Almighty King, Who at that very time did the more mightily confound the king of pride by raising up for Himself such fortresses as beseemed the King of Peace. For in the short while that Stephen reigned, or rather bore the title of king, there arose in England many more dwellings of the servants and handmaids of God than had arisen there in the course of the whole previous century.”[1039]

[1038] The Augustinian houses are in Dugdale’s _Monast. Angl._, vol. vi. pt. 1; the hospitals, the military orders and the Premonstratensians in vol. vi. pt. 2.

[1039] Will. Newb., l. i. c. 15 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 53).

It is significant that this enthusiastic outburst of the historian-canon of Newburgh is called forth by the contemplation not of his own order, but of three great Cistercian houses, Byland, Rievaux and Fountains. Buried in their lonely wildernesses, the Cistercians seem at first glance to have been intent only on saving their own souls, taking no part in the regeneration of society at large. But the truth is far otherwise. While the other orders were--if we may venture to take up the suggestive figure employed by William of Newburgh--the working, fighting rank and file of the spiritual army, the White Monks were at once its sentinels, its guides and its commanding officers; they kept watch and ward over its organization and its safety, they pointed the way wherein it should go, they directed its energies and inspired its action. For the never-ending crusade of the Church against the world had at this time found its leader in a simple Cistercian monk, who never was Pope, nor legate, nor archbishop, nor even official head of his own order--who was simply abbot of Clairvaux--yet who, by the irresistible, unconscious influence of a pure mind and a single aim, had brought all Christendom to his feet. It was to the “Bright Valley,” to Clairvaux, that men looked from the most distant lands for light amid the darkness; it was to S. Bernard that all instinctively turned for counsel and for guidance. The story of S. Gilbert of Sempringham may serve for an example. The father of Gilbert was a Norman holding property in Lincolnshire in the time of Henry I.; his mother was a woman of Old-English descent. The boy ran away from school and made his escape to France; there he repented of his idleness, threw himself zealously into the pursuit of letters, and after some years came home to set up in his native place a school for boys and girls. He taught them a great deal more than mere book-learning; his purity, sweetness and fervour won the very hearts and souls of all who came under his influence; and there was something in his lofty yet tender nature which made him seem peculiarly fitted for a spiritual director of women. Seven maidens first devoted themselves to the religious life under his guidance; others soon followed their example; several men did the like. A double monastery thus grew up at Sempringham, under the protection of Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, in the earliest years of Stephen’s reign. For some time it continued subject to no other rule than its founder’s own will. He saw, however, the necessity for a more lasting basis of organization; instead of trying to devise one himself, he applied to the general chapter of Cîteaux and besought them to take charge of his little flock. They, however, refused; since Gilbert had been inspired to found a new religious society, they would not presume to interfere with his mission; he must draw up a rule for his own spiritual children. He ended by working out his scheme into a composite institution which aimed at combining the excellencies of all earlier rules, but in which the Cistercian element strongly predominated. The Gilbertine priories, when fully constituted, consisted of four orders of persons: canons, who followed the rule of S. Austin; lay-brethren, nuns and lay-sisters, all bound by the rule of Cîteaux; while the whole community was held together by certain additional regulations specially devised by the founder. The new order spread rapidly through eastern England; and before S. Gilbert’s own life reached its close, he had the satisfaction of seeing his spiritual children take a highly honourable part in the great ecclesiastical struggle of which the foremost champion and victim was S. Thomas of Canterbury.[1040]

[1040] On the Gilbertines and their founder see Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. vi. pt. 2, pp. iii*–lix*; and Will. Newb., l. i. c. 16 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 54, 55).

One sees in this story how instinctively the religious reformers of the day went to Cîteaux for a model and a guide; and one sees, too, how little the Cistercians were as yet inclined to abuse their influence by reaping where they had not sown. The extraordinary position of Bernard himself was not of his own seeking; the “care of all the churches” came upon him whether he would or not; as one of his biographers expresses it, all Christendom looked upon him as a divinely-appointed Moses of whom the ordained hierarchy and even the supreme pontiff himself were but subordinate mouthpieces and representatives.[1041] Like their prototype in the Old Testament, the Aarons of the time did not always understand the policy or appreciate the aims of their inspired brother, and the spiritual party in the Church sometimes found its worst stumbling-block within the walls of the Lateran. Year by year, however, its influence grew and spread, till on the death of Pope Lucius II. in February 1145 a Cistercian, Bernard abbot of S. Anastasius at Rome, was raised to the chair of S. Peter by the name of Eugene III. With him the anti-Bernardine party had no chance of a moment’s hearing; threats, flatteries or bribes were all alike thrown away upon a pontiff whose glory and whose strength lay in having no will of his own, in being simply the voice which proclaimed and the hand which executed the thoughts of his greater namesake at Clairvaux. “They say I am Pope, not you!” wrote S. Bernard to him,[1042] half playfully, half in gentle reproach, and Eugene gloried in the saying. A new departure in the policy of the Roman see was marked by the fulfilment of one of Bernard’s most cherished schemes, the preaching of a new crusade for the deliverance of the Holy Land, whence an imploring cry for help came from the widowed Queen Melisenda--for King Fulk of Anjou had been cut off suddenly in the midst of his labours, and his realm, left to the rule of a woman and a child, was rapidly falling a prey to the Infidels.[1043] At Vézelay, on Easter-day 1146, the young King Louis of France took the cross from S. Bernard’s own hands amid a scene of the wildest enthusiasm. The Emperor Conrad soon followed his example, and at Pentecost 1147 the expedition set out.

[1041] Ern. Bonneval, _Vita S. Bernardi_, l. ii. c. 4 (_S. Bern. Opp._, ed. Mabillon, vol. ii. col. 1102).

[1042] S. Bernard. Ep. ccxxxix (_Opp._, Mabillon, vol. 1. col. 235).

[1043] On Fulk’s reign in Palestine see Will. Tyr., ll. xiv. and xv. The exact date of his death is doubtful; Will. Tyr., l. xv. c. 27, and l. xvi. c. 2, gives it as November 13, 1142, and says that Baldwin II. was crowned on the following Christmas-day. But in l. xvi. c. 4 he says that Edessa was lost in the interval between Fulk’s death and his son’s coronation, and it is known from other sources that Edessa was taken by the Infidels on Christmas-night 1144. Moreover there is in Paoli’s _Codice Dipl. del S. Mil. Ord. Gerosol._, vol. i. p. 29, a charter of Melisenda dated “1149, Indictione xii.,” which she calls the fifth year of her son’s reign. The Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. (Marchegay, _Eglises_, pp. 35, 146), Chron. Turon. Magn. (Salmon, _Chron. Touraine_, p. 134), Chron. Namnet. (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. xii. p. 558) and Ric. Poitiers (_ib._ p. 415) all date Fulk’s death 1143; the Chron. S. Flor. Salm. (Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 191) places it in 1141, but couples it with the death of Pope Innocent, which certainly occurred in 1143. Fulk’s end was characteristic, being caused by his own impetuosity. He was thrown from his horse in dashing too hastily after a hare started by some children, as he was riding with Melisenda outside the walls of Acre (Will. Tyr., l. xv. c. 27). See the peculiar philosophizing of the Tours chronicler thereon (Salmon, as above).

As far as its direct object was concerned, this second crusade failed completely; yet it had not been projected in vain. As said a friend and biographer of S. Bernard: “If it was God’s will thereby to deliver, not the bodies of many eastern folk from the bondage of the heathen, but the souls of many western folk from the bondage of sin, who shall dare to ask why He has thus done?”[1044] If the movement did nothing for Palestine, it did something for England. Torn and exhausted with her internal divisions, she could take no part in it as a state; but nowhere was it more readily joined by individual volunteers. The preaching of the Crusade was a spark which kindled into flame, in the heart of more than one of the troublers of the land, the smouldering embers of a capacity for better things; it was a trumpet-call which roused more than one brave knight to forsake the miserable party-strife with which perhaps in his secret soul he had long been growing disgusted, and fling into a better cause the energies which he had been wasting upon his country’s ruin.[1045] But the movement did more for England than this. It brought to light among the English people a spirit whose existence at such a time could otherwise hardly have been suspected. The one success of the Crusade was achieved by a little independent squadron of one hundred and sixty-four ships which sailed from Dartmouth on May 23, six days before the feast of the Ascension, 1147. The expedition consisted of Germans, Flemings and Englishmen, the latter being the most numerous. Nearly all were men of low degree; they had no commander-in-chief; each nationality chose its own leader. The “men of the Empire”--a body of Low-Germans who, for some unknown reason, chose to be independent of the great Imperial host--followed Count Arnold of Aerschot, who seems to have been the only person of rank in the whole assemblage; the Flemings and the men of Queen Matilda’s county of Boulogne were led by Christian of Gistelles. The English grouped themselves according to the districts of their birth under the guidance of four marshals; Hervey of Glanville led the men of Norfolk and Suffolk; Simon of Dover[1046] commanded the ships of Kent; a man named Andrew was chief of the Londoners; and a miscellaneous contingent from other parts of the country was headed by Saher de Arcelles. The whole company bound themselves by vows almost as stringent as those of a religious order; they were pledged to eschew all fine clothes and personal indulgences, and to help and avenge one another in all things as sworn brethren; each ship had its own chaplain and its regular services, as if it were a parish; every man confessed and communicated once a week; and for the enforcement of all these rules two men were elected out of every thousand to form a body of sworn judges[1047] who should administer the common funds and assist the marshals in maintaining order. These warrior-pilgrims, sailing down the western coast of the Spanish peninsula on their way to the Mediterranean Sea, touched at Oporto; at the entreaty of the Portuguese King Alfonso and his people they exchanged their intended crusade in Holy Land for one which was perhaps more useful--a campaign for the deliverance of Christian Portugal from its Moorish oppressors. The Moors who occupied Lisbon were starved into surrender by a four months’ blockade; the crusaders entered the city in triumph; in the hour of temptation English discipline proved strong enough to control German greed,[1048] and renouncing all share in the fruit of their victory these single-hearted soldiers of the Cross made over the future capital of Portugal to its Christian sovereign and went home rejoicing that they, a few poor men of lowly birth and no reputation, had been counted worthy to strike a successful blow for the Faith, while its royal and imperial champions at the head of their countless hosts met with nothing but disaster and disgrace.[1049]

[1044] Geoff. Clairvaux, _Vita S. Bern._, l. iii. c. 4 (_S. Bern. Opp._, Mabillon, vol. ii. col. 1120).

[1045] See, in particular, the cases of William of Cricklade and Philip of Gloucester, _Gesta Steph._ (Sewell), pp. 111, 119, 120.

[1046] “Dorobernensis,” Osbern. _De Expugn. Lyxbon._ (prefixed to _Itinerarium Regis Ricardi_, Stubbs), p. cxliv. This ought to mean Canterbury; but is not Dover more likely in this case?

[1047] “Qui judices et conjurati dicerentur.” Osbern (Stubbs, _Itin. Reg. Ric._), p. cxliv.

[1048] The characteristic way in which the Germans and the English acted when they got into the city should be noticed in Osbern (Stubbs, _Itin. Reg. Ric._), pp. clxviii.–clxxx.

[1049] Osbern (Stubbs, _Itin. Reg. Ric._), pp. clxxxi, clxxxii. See also a letter in Martène and Durand, _Ampliss. Coll._, vol. i. cols. 800–802; another in Pertz, _Mon. Germ. Hist._, vol. xvii. p. 27; and Hen. Hunt. l. viii. c. 27 (Arnold, p. 281).

There was no need to despair of a country whose middle and lower classes could still produce men capable of an exploit such as this. When a spontaneous gathering of poor yeomen, common sailors and obscure citizens could reveal such a spirit, it was plain that all England wanted to rescue her from her misery was a competent leader. S. Bernard, watching over the fortunes of the English Church through the eyes of his brethren at Fountains and Rievaux, had seen this already; and he saw, too, that it was vain to look for such a leader in either the king or the king-maker, Henry of Winchester. Before the Church of England could rescue the state, she must be freed from the political entanglements into which she had been dragged by Henry’s impetuosity, and enabled to resume a position of spiritual independence under her rightful leader, the archbishop of Canterbury. With this view the whole Cistercian order in England, supported and directed by S. Bernard, had set their faces against William Fitz-Herbert’s appointment to the see of York, as an attempt of king and legate to override the constitutional rights of the southern primate and of the Church as a whole. “The bishop of Winchester and the archbishop of York do not walk in the same spirit with the archbishop of Canterbury, but go their own way in opposition to him; and this comes from the old quarrel about the legation”--thus Bernard summed up the case.[1050] Moreover the saving clause whereby William of Durham was allowed to swear by proxy in behalf of his namesake appears to have been interpolated by the latter’s friends into the Papal decree; for “One William has not sworn, yet the other is archbishop”[1051] was the burthen of S. Bernard’s cry to the Pope; and when in 1144 a cardinal-legate, Hicmar, came to England with a pall for William of York, he promised Bernard not to give it till he should have received the oath from the bishop of Durham in person.[1052]

[1050] In a letter to Eugene III., S. Bern. Ep. ccxxxviii. (_Opp._ Mabillon, vol. i. col. 234).

[1051] S. Bern. Epp. ccxxxv.–ccxxxvi., both to Celestine II. (as above, cols. 229–231).

[1052] S. Bern. Ep. ccclx. (as above, cols. 324, 325)--to Abbot William of Rievaux. See also Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 149, and, for date, note _u_, _ibid._

Neither prelate took any notice of Hicmar’s presence; but when he was recalled by the death of Pope Lucius and the accession of Eugene, the archbishop of York suddenly perceived what a blunder he had made, and hurried to Rome in quest of the pall about which he had hitherto been so indifferent. Instead of giving it, Eugene suspended him from all episcopal functions till such time as William of Durham should have taken the oath required by the sentence of Pope Innocent. The archbishop hereupon retired to Sicily and took up his abode there with his fellow-countryman the chancellor, Robert of Selby or Salisbury,[1053] under the protection of King Roger. As Roger was then at bitter feud with the Church, this step was not likely to mend William’s ecclesiastical reputation. His cause, bad from the first and made worse by his own carelessness, was presently ruined by his friends. The leaders of the opposition to him in England were the abbots of Rievaux and Fountains; the latter, Henry Murdac, was a native of Yorkshire who in Archbishop Thurstan’s time had given up houses and lands, home and kindred, to go out to Clairvaux at the call of S. Bernard. In 1135 he was sent thence to found the abbey of Vauclair;[1054] in 1143 he was appointed to succeed Abbot Richard II. of Fountains, who had died at Clairvaux while on his way to attend the general chapter of his order at Cîteaux.[1055] Henry Murdac went back to his native land charged with an implied commission to make Fountains an English Clairvaux and himself an English representative of S. Bernard, and he fulfilled his charge with true Cistercian zeal and fidelity.[1056] As soon as William’s suspension became known, his friends attributed it to the influence of Murdac, whom they sought to punish by making an armed raid upon his abbey. Plunder, of course, they got little or none in a freshly-reformed Cistercian house;[1057] so, after a hurried and unsuccessful search for Murdac himself, they set the place on fire. Every stone of it perished except the church, which escaped as by miracle; and the abbot escaped with it, for he had been lying all the while, unnoticed by the passion-blinded eyes of his foes, prostrate in prayer before the high altar. The energy of the monks and the sympathy of their neighbours soon enabled Fountains to rise from its ashes more glorious than before;[1058] but William’s day of grace was at once brought to a close by this outrage. At a council held in Paris in the spring of 1147, the abbot of Fountains and a deputation from the chapter of York once more formally presented to the Pope their charges against their primate, and Eugene deposed William from his episcopal office.[1059] On the eve of S. James the chapter of York, with the two suffragan bishops of the province--Durham and Carlisle--met in obedience to a papal mandate for the election of a new archbishop. The choice of the majority fell upon Henry Murdac. From Clairvaux, whither he had gone after the council, the abbot of Fountains was summoned to the papal court at Trier, and there, on the octave of S. Andrew, he received his consecration and his pall both at once from Pope Eugene’s own hand.[1060]

[1053] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 150–152. Robert was “oriundus in Angliâ, scilicet in Salesbiâ.” Mr. Raine renders this Selby; Twysden made it Salisbury; Bishop Stubbs (_Lect. on Mediev. and Mod. Hist._, p. 133), leaves the question undecided.

[1054] On the earlier life of Henry Murdac see Dixon and Raine, _Fasti Ebor._, pp. 210–213; and Walbran, _Memor. of Fountains_, vol. i. p. 84, note 3.

[1055] Walbran, _Memor. of Fountains_, vol. i. pp. 78, 81–83. S. Bern. Epp. cccxx, cccxxi (_Opp._ Mabillon, vol. i. cols. 297, 298).

[1056] Walbran, _Memor. of Fountains_, vol. i. pp. 84, 85.

[1057] “Ferentes secum spolia, parum quidem pecuniæ, sed plurimum dampnationis.” Walbran, _Memor. of Fountains_, vol. i. p. 102.

[1058] _Ib._ pp. 101, 102.

[1059] On the council of Paris see Labbe, _Concilia_ (Cossart), vol. xxi., cols. 709, 710. As to the date, it appears from Jaffé (_Regesta Pontif. Rom._, pp. 626, 627) that Eugene reached Paris before Easter (April 20) and was there till June 11; so the council must fall in the interval. On William’s deposition see Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 134. “Hoc concilio” ought, by all logical and grammatical rules, to mean the council of Reims, held in March 1148, and of which Gervase has just been speaking. Accordingly most of his commentators (including the editors of the Fountains and Hexham books, and the compilers of the _Fasti Eboracenses_) say that William was deposed at the council of Reims; and then, as his successor was undoubtedly consecrated in December 1147, they are obliged to antedate the council of Reims by a year. But Gervase himself says, almost in the same breath, that the deposition took place in _Paris_. He has confused the two councils; see Pagi’s note to Baronius, _Annales_, vol. xix. pp. 7, 8; and cf. Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 154.

[1060] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 154, 155. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 135. Walbran, _Memor. of Fountains_, vol. i. p. 103. Will. Newb., l. i. c. 17 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 56). The _Hist. Pontif._ (Pertz, _Mon. Germ. Hist._, vol. xx. p. 518) says Henry was consecrated at Auxerre, but this is incompatible with dates.

The subsequent conduct of Stephen and Henry of Winchester proved that their aim in securing the occupation of the northern primacy had been rightly understood by Eugene and Bernard. They had staked everything upon the success of their scheme, and when it failed not only the king but even the once cool and sagacious bishop completely lost his head. Upon William himself the papal sentence had the very opposite effect; it woke him from his dreams of easy dignity and worldly pride; from that moment the idle, showy, self-indulgent young ecclesiastic changed into an humble saint, and when he came home next year it was not to renew the strife but to turn away from the world and possess his soul in patience.[1061] But his uncles would not hear of submission; Henry took him to live in his own house, and there persisted in ostentatiously treating him with all the honours due to the archbishop of York;[1062] and when in the summer of 1148 the new archbishop also came back to England, Stephen demanded sworn security for his fidelity before he would let him set foot in the country.[1063] The citizens of York, instigated by the treasurer of the see, Hugh of Puiset, who like William was a nephew of the king, shut their gates in their primate’s face; he withdrew to Ripon, laid his diocese under interdict and excommunicated Hugh; but Hugh, strong in the support of his uncles, defied the interdict and was even impudent enough to return the excommunication.[1064]

[1061] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 154.

[1062] _Ibid._ Will. Newb. as above.

[1063] _Ibid._ Oddly enough, this York affair is almost the only one in which William rather inclines to take the part of the king.

[1064] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 158.

In the southern province matters had come to a still more dangerous crisis. Early in 1148 all the English bishops were summoned by the Pope to a council which was to meet at Reims on Mid-Lent Sunday. Three of them--Hereford, Chichester and Norwich--were sent by Stephen himself; but when the archbishop of Canterbury made the usual application for leave to quit the country, the king refused, set a watch at every port to stop his egress, and at his brother Henry’s instigation swore that if Theobald did go he should be banished on his return. Theobald however had made up his mind to go at any cost; he slipped away in an old broken boat with only two companions--Roger of Pont-l’Evêque and Thomas of London, the latter of whom had now been for several years the most trusted medium of intercommunication between the primate and the court of Rome. The daring voyagers reached their journey’s end in safety, and Theobald was triumphantly presented to the council by the Pope as one who had swum rather than sailed across the Channel for the sake of his duty to the Church.[1065] The bishops who had failed to attend were all suspended, Henry of Winchester being specially mentioned by name. His brother, however,--the good count of Blois who seems to have been at once the scapegoat and the peacemaker for all the sins of his family, and who was held in the deepest esteem by both Eugene and Bernard--made intercession on his behalf, and obtained a relaxation of the sentence against him on condition of his coming to Rome within six months.[1066] As for the king, Eugene would have excommunicated him at once; but for him the other Theobald stepped forward as mediator, like Anselm in a somewhat similar case, and procured him a respite of three months.[1067] The intercessor’s reward was the threatened sentence of banishment, issued as soon as he returned to Canterbury. He withdrew into France and appealed to the Pope, while Stephen seized the temporalities of the see and began playing the part of the Red King on a small scale. Eugene wrote to all the English bishops, severally and in a body, bidding them summon the king to restore the primate at once, lay all his dominions under interdict if he refused, and tell him that he should certainly be excommunicated by the Pope on Michaelmas day. The bishops however were all on the court-side; the interdict, duly published by Theobald, was unheeded save in his own diocese; and the king remained obstinate.[1068] But his wiser queen, aided by William of Ypres, who, however he may have sinned against others, was unquestionably Stephen’s truest friend, made an effort to restore peace; and at their request Theobald removed to St. Omer, as being a more accessible place for negotiation than his French retreat.[1069]

[1065] _Hist. Pontif._ (Pertz, _Mon. Germ. Hist._, vol. xx.), p. 519; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 134. Both accounts seem to be derived from a letter of S. Thomas (Ep. ccl., Robertson, _Becket_, vol. vi. pp. 57, 58). Thomas’s presence at the council is distinctly stated in _Hist. Pontif._ (as above), p. 522, and so is that of Roger of Pont-l’Evêque.

[1066] _Hist. Pontif._ (as above), p. 520. Cf. Gilb. Foliot, Ep. lxxvi. (Giles, vol. i. p. 92).

[1067] _Hist. Pontif._ (as above), p. 519.

[1068] _Hist. Pontif._ (Pertz, _Mon. Germ. Hist._, vol. xx.), pp. 530, 532.

[1069] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 135.

Matilda of Boulogne doubtless saw what Theobald must have known full well, that the quarrel involved a great deal more than strictly ecclesiastical questions. The issue which the ordeal of battle had failed to decide was on its trial now in a different form and before another tribunal. The most curious symptom of this feeling, perhaps, was the action of Brian Fitz-Count, who, after having been for years Matilda’s most devoted and most successful champion in the field, suddenly exchanged the sword for the pen and brought out a defence of his Lady’s rights in the shape of a little treatise which gained the approval of one of the cleverest men and greatest scholars of the time, Gilbert Foliot, abbot of Gloucester.[1070] Geoffrey Plantagenet, with his Angevin quickness, was the first openly to proclaim the true position of affairs by sending to Stephen, through Bishop Miles of Térouanne, a formal challenge to give up his ill-gotten realm and submit to an investigation of his claims before the papal court. Stephen retorted by a counter-challenge, calling upon Geoffrey to give up his equally ill-gotten duchy before he would agree to any further proceeding in the matter.[1071] Geoffrey took him at his word, but in a way which he was far from desiring. He did give up the duchy of Normandy, by making it over to his own son, Henry Fitz-Empress.[1072]

[1070] Gilb. Foliot, Ep. lxxix. (Giles, vol. i. pp. 94–102).

[1071] _Hist. Pontif._ (as above), p. 531.

[1072] Chron. S. Albin. a. 1149 (Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 36). But the story of Gilbert Foliot’s consecration shews that the cession must really have taken place in 1148.

The crisis was now close at hand; Stephen was at last face to face with his true rival. He appears to have consented, as if in desperation, to the proposed trial at Rome. It seems at first glance as if the envoys whom he sent to represent him there must indeed have been driven to their wits’ end for an argument in his behalf when they raked up again a scandal which S. Anselm had laid to rest half a century ago, as to the validity of the marriage between Matilda’s father and mother.[1073] Yet such was the argument publicly put forth by many voices against the legality of her claims to the crown; and though one account of the proceedings states that her adversaries were triumphantly confuted by Bishop Ulger of Angers,[1074] another, written by an eye-witness whose own opinions were wholly in her favour, declares that her advocates answered never a word.[1075] The trial seems to have ended without any decision;[1076] it was however quickly followed by a very significant event. The witness just referred to was Gilbert Foliot, a Cluniac monk who since 1139 had been abbot of Gloucester, and whose reputation for learning, wisdom and holiness had secured to him the confidence of the primate and the consideration of all parties alike in Church and state. He had reluctantly and after some delay obeyed Theobald’s summons to join him at the papal court; once there, he seems to have flung all his energies into the organization of the new policy of which Theobald was to be the leader.[1077] During the session of the council at Reims the bishop of Hereford died.[1078] The Pope at once appointed Gilbert Foliot vicar of the diocese;[1079] in September he was consecrated by Theobald at St. Omer, with the consent and approval of the young duke of the Normans, given on the express condition that he should do homage for the temporalities of his see to the duke and not to the king.

[1073] Gilb. Foliot, Ep. lxxix. (Giles, vol. i. p. 101). _Hist. Pontif._ (Pertz, _Mon. Germ. Hist._, vol. xx.), p. 543.

[1074] _Hist. Pontif._ (as above), p. 544.

[1075] Gilb. Foliot, Ep. lxxix. (as above).

[1076] From the way in which this trial is brought into the _Hist. Pontif._, it would at first glance seem to have taken place in 1151. But the presence of Bishops Ulger of Angers and Roger of Chester, both of whom died in 1149, and the account of the proceedings written by Gilbert Foliot to Brian Fitz-Count clearly prove the true date to be 1148.

[1077] Gilb. Foliot, Epp. vi., vii., lxxvi. (Giles, vol. i. pp. 13, 14, 92).

[1078] _Hist. Monast. S. Petr. Glocestr._ (Hart), vol. i. p. 18.

[1079] “G. gratiâ Dei abbas, et Herefordiensis ecclesiæ mandato Domini Papæ vicarius,” runs the salutation of his Ep. lxxviii. (Giles, vol. i. p. 93).

The very first thing Gilbert did was to break this promise;[1080] but that Theobald should have consecrated such a man on such terms was a sign of the times which Stephen could hardly fail to understand. Theobald himself soon afterwards ventured back to England; crossing from Gravelines, he landed at Gosford in the territories of Hugh Bigod, by whom he was hospitably received; the bishops of London, Chichester and Norwich, with several barons, came to meet him at Hugh’s castle of Framlingham; the king was reconciled, the primate restored, the interdict raised, and the suspended prelates, all save one, allowed to resume their functions.[1081] The exception was Henry of Winchester, who by neglecting to go to Rome within the prescribed six months had necessarily fallen under the sentence pronounced against him by Eugene at the council of Reims. Even to him, however, Theobald was willing at Stephen’s request to hold out the hand of fellowship and forgiveness.[1082] But Henry of Winchester’s days of king-making were over. It was time for another Henry to appear upon the political scene, to take his cause into his own hands and stand forth as the champion of his own claims against the man who had supplanted him on his grandfather’s throne.

[1080] _Hist. Pontif._ (Pertz, _Mon. Germ. Hist._, vol. xx.), pp. 532, 533.

[1081] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 136, 137.

[1082] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 152.

CHAPTER VIII.

HENRY DUKE OF THE NORMANS.

1149–1154.

No loving hands have done for the early life of Henry Fitz-Empress what they did for that of his contemporary, his friend, his opponent Thomas of London; we have no stories of his boyhood, no picture of his home. Home indeed, in the full sense of the word, he never had and never could have. That instinctive attachment to one particular spot, or at the least to one particular country, which is innate in most men, was to a child of Geoffrey and Matilda simply impossible. Geoffrey was the son of an Angevin count and a Cenomannian countess; Matilda was the daughter of a king born in England of a Norman father and a Flemish mother, and of a queen whose parents were the one a Scottish Celt, the other a West-Saxon with a touch of High-German blood. In the temper of the Empress the Norman element was undoubtedly the strongest; no trace can be seen in her of the gentle spirit of her mother; and it is clear that no lingering regrets for the land of her birth[1083] haunted the girl-bride of the Emperor in her palace at Aachen as they haunted the monk Orderic, from boyhood to old age, in his cell at Saint-Evroul. Yet when she came to Normandy in her twenty-third year, she came there unwillingly and as a complete stranger. If Henry was to inherit any national or patriotic feeling at all, it could not be from his mother; what she transmitted to him instead was a sort of cosmopolitanism which saved the future duke of Normandy and king of England from the too exclusive influence of the demon-blood of Anjou, not by making him a Norman, still less an Englishman, but by rendering his nationality a yet more insoluble problem than her own. Even in his father, too, there are signs of a divided national sentiment. The son of Aremburg of Maine, the grandson and heir of Elias, could not cling to the black rock of Angers with the exclusive attachment of its earlier counts; a share of his patriotic affection and pride must have been given to that other, red rock above the Sarthe which had held out so long and so bravely against both Normandy and Anjou, to that Cenomannian land of heroes which Norman and Angevin alike had counted it their highest glory to overcome and win. It may have been by chance, or it may have been of set purpose, that Geoffrey and Matilda were at Le Mans when their first child was born; no other spot could have been half so appropriate. The land which Normans and Angevins and even Englishmen[1084] had done their utmost to wipe out of the list of states, the land whose claim to a separate existence, ignored or denied by them all, had yet proved the insurmountable stumbling-block which forced them into union:--that land was the most fitting birth-place for the child who was to be neither Norman, nor Angevin, nor English, and yet was to be all three at once. The vengeance of Maine upon her conquerors formed a characteristic close to her national career. They had swallowed her up at last; but they had no sooner done it than she gave a master to them all.

[1083] She was born in London: Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, _Becket_, vol. iii.), p. 13.

[1084] Eng. Chron. a. 1073.

If, then, Normandy, England and Anjou had each a part in Henry, Le Mans had two parts, as being at once the home of his father’s mother and the scene of his own birth. His earliest recollections, however, must rather have been associated with Normandy. His first journey thither was made when he was about twelve months old, when he accompanied his mother on a visit to King Henry in the spring 1134. His brother Geoffrey was born at Argentan on June 1, and the two children narrowly escaped being left motherless under their grandfather’s care.[1085] Possibly this made them all the dearer to him; he certainly found in them his last earthly pleasure, of which he was finally deprived by a quarrel with their mother, who seems to have sent them back to Angers shortly before her own return thither in the autumn of 1135.[1086] For the next seven years little Henry can have seen nothing of his future duchy; and we have no means of knowing whether its stately capital, its people, its dialect, had left any impression upon him, or whether any dim personal remembrance was associated in his mind with that name of “my grandfather King Henry” to which he appealed so constantly in later life. His training, after his return to Angers as before, must have devolved chiefly upon Matilda; for Geoffrey during the next three years was too busy with unsuccessful fighting abroad in the interest of his wife and son to have much leisure for devoting himself to their society at home. It was not till the close of 1138 that his influence can have been seriously brought to bear upon his children, of whom there were now three, another son, named William, having been born in August 1136.[1087] After the disaster of Toucques the count appears to have spent his time until the beginning of 1141 for the most part quietly at home, where his wife’s departure over sea left him in his turn sole guardian of his boys. In one respect at least he did not neglect his paternal duty. “Unlettered king, crowned ass,” was a reproach which would have fallen with double disgrace upon the son of Geoffrey Plantagenet and the grandson of Henry I.; and Geoffrey took care that his firstborn should never be exposed to it. It may even be that in those two years when war and politics left him at leisure for the quieter enjoyments of his books, his hunting and his home, the young father himself took up the task, of which he was certainly quite capable, of instilling into his child the first rudiments of that book-learning which he loved so well. At any rate, it was he who chose the first teacher to whom Henry’s education was intrusted. As if on purpose to add one more to the varied influences already working in that young mind, the teacher was neither Angevin, nor Cenomannian, nor Norman. He was one Master Peter of Saintes, “learned above all his contemporaries in the science of verse.”[1088]

[1085] Chron. S. Albin. a. 1134 (Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 33); Rob. Torigni, a. 1134. Cf. Will. Jumièges Contin., l. viii. cc. 27, 28 (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._, pp. 305, 306).

[1086] Will. Jumièges Contin., l. viii. c. 34 (as above, p. 310).

[1087] Rob. Torigni, _ad ann._

[1088] “Hic [sc. Gaufridus] filium suum Enricum natu majorem ad erudiendum tradidit cuidam magistro Petro scilicet Xantonensi, qui in metris instructus est super omnes coætaneos suos.” Anon. Chron., _Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. xii. p. 120.

Under Peter’s care the boy remained till the close of 1142, when, as we have seen, he was sent to England in company with his uncle Robert of Gloucester. Henry now entered upon a third phase of education. For the next four years his uncle took charge of him and kept him in his own household at Bristol under the care of one Master Matthew, by whom he was to be “imbued with letters and instructed in good manners, as beseemed a youth of his rank.”[1089] This arrangement may have been due to the Empress, or it may have originated with Geoffrey when he sent the boy over sea in the earl’s company; for much as they differed in other matters, on the subject of a boy’s training the two brothers-in-law could hardly fail to be of the same mind. A well-balanced compound of soldier, statesman and scholar was Earl Robert’s ideal no less than Count Geoffrey’s; an ideal so realized in his own person that he might safely be trusted to watch over its developement in the person of his little nephew. As far as the military element was concerned, the earl of Gloucester, with his matured experience and oft-proved valour, was no less capable than the count of Anjou of furnishing a model of all knightly prowess, skill and courtesy; and if Henry’s chivalry was to be tempered with discretion--if it was to be regulated by a wise and wary policy--if he was to acquire any insight into the principles of sound and prudent state-craft--Robert was certainly, among the group of adventurers who surrounded the Empress, the only man from whom he could learn anything of the kind. The boy was indeed scarce ten years old, and even for the heir of Anjou and England it was perhaps somewhat too early to begin such studies as these. For the literary side of his education, later years proved that Robert’s choice of a teacher was as good as Geoffrey’s had been; the seed sowed by Peter of Saintes was well watered by Matthew, and it seems to have brought forth in his young pupil’s mind a harvest of gratitude as well as of learning, for among the chancellors of King Henry II. there appears a certain “Master Matthew” who can hardly be any other than his old teacher.[1090]

[1089] “Puer autem Henricus sub tutelâ Comitis Roberti apud Bristoviam degens, per quatuor annos traditus est magisterio cujusdam Mathæi, litteris imbuendus et moribus honestis ut talem decebat puerum instituendus.” Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs.), vol. i. p. 125.

[1090] “The person meant was no doubt that Matthew who is called Henry’s chancellor in Foliot’s letters.” Stubbs, _Gerv. Cant._, vol. i. p. 125, note 2. (“Master Matthew, the chancellor,” is named in Gilb. Foliot, Ep. cli., Giles, vol. i. pp. 201, 202). In his _Lect. on Med. and Mod. Hist._, p. 120, Bishop Stubbs speaks of Matthew as the king’s “tutor, who was some time his chancellor, and who probably was identical with the Bishop of Angers, Matthew of London.” Bishop Matthew of Angers is described by the editors of _Gall. Christ._ (vol. xiv. col. 570) as a native of _Loudun_--“Losduni natus.” He was consecrated in 1155, which seems hardly to leave time for his chancellorship.

To teach the boy “good manners”--in the true sense of those words--must have been a somewhat difficult task amid his present surroundings. Bristol, during the years of Henry’s residence there, fully kept up its character as the “stepmother of all England”; he must have been continually seeing or hearing of bands of soldiers issuing from the castle to ravage and plunder, burn and slay, or troops of captives dragged in to linger in its dungeons till they had given up their uttermost farthing or were set free by a miserable death. It seems likely, however, that the worst of these horrors occurred during Robert’s absence and without his sanction, for even the special panegyrist of Stephen gives the earl credit for doing his utmost to maintain order and justice in the shires over which he ruled.[1091] It was not his fault if matters had drifted into such a state that his efforts were worse than useless; and his good intentions were at any rate not more ineffectual than those of the king. Within the domestic circle itself it is not unlikely that the child was better placed under the influence of Robert and Mabel than either in the household of his violent-tempered mother or in that of his refined but selfish father, whom he rejoined in the spring of 1147, a year before the return of the Empress. He was in his sixteenth year when Geoffrey ceded to him the duchy of Normandy. A boy of that age, especially in the house of Anjou, was counted a man, and expected to act as such. The cession was in fact intended and understood as a solemn proclamation both to friends and foes that henceforth they would have to deal with King Henry’s chosen heir no longer indirectly, but in his own person; that his rights were to be vindicated in future not by his parents but by himself.

[1091] _Gesta Steph._ (Sewell), p. 94.

He lost no time in beginning his work. In the middle of May 1149 Stephen, while endeavouring to put down a fresh revolt of the earls of Chester and Pembroke,[1092] was startled by news of Henry’s arrival in England. The young duke of the Normans landed we know not where, and made his way northward, recruiting a few of his mother’s old adherents as he went: his great-uncle King David welcomed him at Carlisle, and there knighted him on Whit-Sunday.[1093] Stephen evidently took this act as a challenge, for he immediately retorted by knighting his eldest son Eustace, thus pointedly setting up his own heir as a rival to his young kinsman.[1094] He then hastened with all his forces to York, but no hostilities took place.[1095] The intended campaign of David and Henry was frustrated by Ralf of Chester’s failure to keep his engagement with them;[1096] the two kings sat awhile, one at York and the other at Carlisle, each waiting for the other to strike, till David grew weary and retired to his own kingdom,[1097] taking his nephew with him; and in January Henry again withdrew beyond the sea.[1098] He saw that the political scales were as yet too evenly balanced to be turned by the mere weight of his maiden sword; and his work was being done for him, better than he could do it himself, by clerk and primate, abbot and Pope--most surely of all, by the blundering king himself.

[1092] _Gesta Steph._ (Sewell), pp. 124–127, gives the details of this rising.

[1093] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 140, 141. Cf. Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 29 (Arnold, p. 282). Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 159. Rob. Torigni, a. 1149. The writer of _Gesta Steph._ (pp. 128, 129) has a most romantic account of Henry’s adventures. Henry, he says, came over with a very small force, and nothing to pay them with except promises. He made an attempt upon Bourton and Cricklade, and was repulsed; whereupon his troops all fell away and left him so helpless that he was obliged to ask his mother for some money. She had none to give him; he then asked his uncle Gloucester, but the latter, “suis sacculis avide incumbens,” refused. Then Henry in desperation appealed to the king, beseeching his compassion for the sake of their kindred blood; and Stephen at once sent him the needful sum. The trait is just what might be expected in Stephen; but it is hard to conceive Henry ever getting into such a plight; and the mention of Robert of Gloucester as still alive shews there must be something wrong in the story.

[1094] Hen. Hunt. as above. Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 160. _Gesta Steph._ (Sewell), p. 130.

[1095] Hen. Hunt. as above.

[1096] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 159, 160. Ralf had agreed to give up his claims on Carlisle and accept instead the honour of Lancaster for himself and the hand of one of David’s granddaughters for his son; he promised on these conditions to join David and Henry in an attack upon Lancaster, but was, as usual, false to the tryst.

[1097] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 29 (Arnold, p. 282).

[1098] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 142.

A double chain connected English politics with those of the Roman court. The links of the one chain were S. Bernard and Henry Murdac; those of the other were Theobald of Canterbury and Thomas of London. What was the exact nature of those communications between the primate and the Pope of which Thomas was the medium--how much of the credit of Theobald’s policy is due to himself and how much to his confidential instrument and adviser--we have no means of determining precisely. The aim of that policy was to consolidate the forces of the English Church by deepening her intercourse and strengthening her connexion with the sister-Churches of the West, and thus bring the highest religious and political influences of Latin Christendom to bear upon the troubles of the English state. The way had been paved by Henry of Winchester in his legatine days. He and the councils which he convened had first suggested the possibility of finding a remedy for the lack of secular administration in an appeal to the authority of the canon law, now formulated as a definite code by the labours of a Bolognese lawyer, Gratian. The very strifes and jealousies which arose from Henry’s over-vigorous assertion of his authority tended to a like result; they led to more frequent appeals to Rome, to elaborate legal pleadings, to the drawing of subtle legal distinctions unknown to the old customary procedure of the land; as a contemporary writer expresses it, “Then were laws and lawyers first brought into England.”[1099] On the Continent the study of the civil jurisprudence of the Roman Empire had been revived together with that of the canon law; some members of Archbishop Theobald’s household resolved to introduce it into England, hoping thereby, as it seems, to sow amid the general confusion some seeds of a more orderly and law-abiding spirit. During the time of comparative quiet which intervened between his first journey to Rome in 1143 and his expedition with Theobald to the council of Reims in 1148, Thomas of London had spent a year at Bologna and Auxerre to perfect himself in the literary culture which he had somewhat neglected in his youth.[1100] The university of Bologna was the chief seat of the new legal learning; it may therefore have been through Thomas that a Lombard teacher, Vacarius, was induced to visit England in 1149 and open lectures at Oxford on the Roman law.[1101] Rich and poor flocked to hear him, and at the request of his poorer scholars he made an abridgement of the Code and Digests, sufficient for practical use, and more within reach of their scanty means than the heavy folios of Justinian.[1102] His lectures however were summarily brought to an end by order of the king; Stephen, scared by young Duke Henry’s presence in the north, jealous of the primate, jealous of the Church, jealous of everything in which he saw or thought he saw the least token of an influence which might be used against himself, at once silenced the teacher and ordered the students to give up their books. He gained as little as is usually gained by such a mode of proceeding in such cases. The study of the civil law only spread and prospered the more for his efforts to hinder it;[1103] and the law-school of the future university of Oxford may have sprung from a germ left in the cloisters of Oseney or S. Frideswide’s by the brief visit of the Lombard master, just as the divinity-school may have sprung from a germ left there sixteen years before by the lectures of Robert Pulein.

[1099] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 384.

[1100] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, _Becket_, vol. iii.), p. 17.

[1101] Gerv. Cant. as above. Rob. Torigni, a. 1149. Joh. Salisb., _Polycraticus_, l. viii. c. 22 (Giles, vol. iv. p. 357), says that “domus venerabilis patris Theobaldi” brought the Roman law into England.

[1102] Rob. Torigni, a. 1149.

[1103] Joh. Salisb. as above.

Stephen had struck at the southern primate indirectly this time; with the northern one he was still at open feud. One use which he made of his stay in Yorkshire was to exact a heavy fine from the inhabitants of Beverley, as a punishment for having given shelter to Henry Murdac. After the king’s departure the archbishop at last succeeded in enforcing his interdict at York; Eustace hurried thither, insisted upon the restoration of the services, and drove out all who refused to take part in them; there was a great tumult, in which the senior archdeacon was killed by the followers of the king’s son.[1104] About the same time a cardinal-legate, John Paparo, on his way to Ireland, asked for a safe-conduct through the dominions of the English king; Stephen refused to give it unless he would promise to do nothing on his journey to the prejudice of the English realm. John went home highly indignant at such an insinuation against his honour and that of the Apostolic See.[1105] Meanwhile Archbishop Murdac was writing bitter complaints both to S. Bernard and to the Pope. They apparently determined to give Stephen a warning which even he could not fail to understand; and they did it by sending a commission as resident legate _a latere_ for all Britain to the archbishop of Canterbury.[1106]

[1104] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 160. Will. Newb., l. i. c. 17 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 56, 57).

[1105] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 164. In the _Hist. Pontif._ (Pertz, _Mon. Germ. Hist._, vol. xx. pp. 518, 519) this first legation of John Paparo seems to be dated some years earlier. But the _Hist. Pontif._ is very erratic in its chronology; and John of Hexham seems quite clear and consistent in his account of the matter.

[1106] The date of Theobald’s legatine commission seems to be nowhere stated. He had certainly received it before Lent 1151; it was therefore in all probability granted some time in 1150, under the circumstances related above.

The warning took effect; Stephen changed his policy at once. He was weary of all his fruitless labour; his chief anxiety now was to secure the crown to his son; and he suddenly awoke to the necessity of setting himself right with the one power which alone could enable him to carry out his desire. Eustace himself was sent to act as mediator between his father and Henry Murdac; a reconciliation took place, and the archbishop was enthroned at York on S. Paul’s day 1151. Thence he went to keep Easter with the Pope, having undertaken, at Stephen’s request, to intercede for him with Eugene concerning the state of politics in England, and especially to obtain, if possible, the papal sanction to a formal acknowledgement of Eustace as heir to the crown.[1107] The southern primate meanwhile was beginning his legatine career with a Mid-Lenten council in London, at which Stephen, Eustace, and the principal barons of England were present. The main feature of this council was a crowd of appeals to Rome, whereof three were made by the bishop of Winchester.[1108] One of these appeals must have been against the suspension to which he had been sentenced at the council of Reims, and by which the Pope, less placable than the primate, still held him bound. Moreover, complaints against him were pouring into Rome from all quarters; so he carried his appeals in person, and went to clear himself before the supreme pontiff. He succeeded in obtaining absolution;[1109] his friends, of whom there were still many at the papal court, tried hard to win for him something more--either a renewal of the legation, or the accomplishment of his old scheme of a primacy over Wessex, or at least the exemption of his own see from the jurisdiction of Canterbury; but Eugene was inexorable. He believed that Stephen’s misconduct towards the Church was instigated by his brother; a very natural view, but somewhat unjust to the bishop.[1110] The truth seems rather to be that Henry, after vainly trying to rule the storm, had for awhile been swept away by its violence. Now he had emerged into the calm once more; and there henceforth he was content to remain. He consoled himself for the failure of his political hopes with a choice collection of antique statues purchased in Rome for the adornment of his palace at Winchester, and sailed quietly home with these treasures, stopping on his way to pay his devotions at the shrine of S. James at Compostella.[1111] At his request the Pope ordered Archbishop Murdac to absolve Hugh of Puiset, who was making himself useful at Winchester, not on clerical duty, but in taking charge of the bishop’s castles during his absence.[1112] With Hugh’s absolution the schism in the northern province came to an end, and the English Church was once again reunited.

[1107] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), p. 162.

[1108] Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 31 (Arnold, p. 282): “Totum illud concilium novis appellationibus infrenduit.” It is, however, rather too hard upon Henry of Winchester when he adds that appeals to Rome had not been used in England till that prelate in his legatine days “malo suo crudeliter intrusit.”

[1109] Ann. Winton. a. 1151 (Luard, _Ann. Monast._, vol. ii. pp. 54, 55).

[1110] As the author of the _Hist. Pontif._ (Pertz, _Mon. Germ. Hist._, vol. xx. p. 542) truly says: “Credebatur fratrem suum regem contra ecclesiam instigare; sed rex, quod manifesta declarant opera, nec illius nec sapientis alterius consilio agebatur.”

[1111] _Hist. Pontif._ (Pertz, _Mon. Germ. Hist._, vol. xx.), p. 542.

[1112] Joh. Hexh. (Raine), pp. 158, 162. He places Hugh’s absolution in 1150, but on his own shewing it cannot have occurred before 1151.

For England and for Stephen alike the prospect seemed to be brightening. Stephen however was clearly beginning to feel that for him as well as for his Angevin rivals it was time to give place to a younger generation. It must have been chiefly for Eustace’s sake that he valued his crown; and in Eustace’s case, as in that of Henry Fitz-Empress, there were many circumstances which might make the pretensions of the child more generally acceptable than those of the parent. Eustace seems to have been about the same age as Henry, or probably a few years older; he was free from the personal obloquy and suspicion attaching to Stephen from the errors of the past; on the other hand, as the son of Matilda of Boulogne, he might reap the benefit of his mother’s well-earned personal popularity, as well as of her descent from the royal house of Wessex. Henceforth, therefore, Stephen showed a disposition to treat Henry Fitz-Empress as the rival less of himself than of his son, and to follow up every movement in Henry’s public life by a parallel step in the career of Eustace. And as Henry’s first independent act had been a sort of reconnoitring expedition to England, so the first retaliation was a visit made by Eustace to the king of France, with a view to ascertain his chances of support in an attempt to regain Normandy.

The existing phase of the rivalry between the houses of Anjou and Blois--their struggle for the dominion of Normandy and England--was a matter which concerned the interests of the French Crown almost as deeply as the earlier phase in which Fulk the Black and Odo of Champagne strove with each other for political mastery over their common lord paramount. Neither the accumulation of England, Normandy, Maine, Anjou and Touraine in a single hand, nor the acquisition of Normandy and England by a branch of the mighty and troublesome house which already held Blois, Chartres and Champagne, could be viewed by the French king without grave uneasiness. Either alternative had its dangers; to Louis VII., however, the danger would appear much less threatening than to his father. Shortly before the dying Louis VI. granted the investiture of Normandy to Stephen’s little son in 1137, the last of the old line of the dukes of Aquitaine--William IX., son of the gay crusader and troubadour whom the Red King had hoped to succeed--died on a pilgrimage at Compostella.[1113] His only son was already dead, and before setting out for his pilgrimage he did what a greater personage had done ten years before: with the consent of his barons, he left the whole of his dominions to his daughter. Moreover, he bequeathed the girl herself as wife to the young King Louis of France.[1114] This marriage more than doubled the strength of the French Crown. It gave to Louis absolute possession of all western Aquitaine, or Guyenne as it was now beginning to be called; that is, the counties of Poitou and Gascony, with the immediate overlordship of the whole district lying between the Loire and the Pyrenees, the Rhône and the ocean:--a territory five or six times as large as his own royal domain, and over which his predecessors had never been able to assert more than the merest shadow of a nominal superiority.[1115] To a man who was at once king of France and duke of Aquitaine it was comparatively no great matter whether the dominions of Henry I. were to be annexed to those of Geoffrey of Anjou or allied to those of Theobald of Blois. The truest interest of France, however, obviously was that England and Normandy should be divided, one of them being held by each of the two competitors; and it was doubtless with this view that Louis, while sanctioning and aiding Geoffrey’s conquest of the Norman duchy, still kept on peaceful terms with the English king, and held to a promise of marriage made some years before between his own sister and Stephen’s son Eustace.[1116]

[1113] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 909. _Hist. Franc._ (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. xii.), p. 116. Anon. Chron. (_ibid._) p. 119. Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Maxent. a. 1137 (Marchegay, _Eglises_, pp. 34, 432).

[1114] Suger, _Vita Ludov._ (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. xii.) p. 62. Chron. Mauriniac. (_ibid._) p. 83. _Hist. Franc._ (_ibid._), p. 116. Ord. Vit. as above. See also Besly, _Comtes de Poitou_, p. 137.

[1115] Perhaps the most striking indication of the importance of the duke of Aquitaine is the ceremony of the ducal crowning, which Louis, as husband of the duchess, underwent at Poitiers immediately after his marriage; Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 911. There was a special “Ordo ad benedicendum ducem Aquitaniæ” (printed in Besly, _Comtes de Poitou, preuves_, pp. 183 _et seq._, and _Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. xii. pp. 451–453), nearly as solemn as the office for the crowning of a king.

[1116] Rob. Torigni, a. 1139. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 112. Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 125.

At the time of Geoffrey’s final success Louis was at deadly strife with the count of Blois; a strife in which the king was wholly in the wrong, and for whose disastrous consequences he afterwards grieved so deeply that his penitence was the chief motive which induced him to go on crusade.[1117] Since then, Geoffrey in his turn had incurred the royal displeasure. There was a certain Gerald, lord of a castle called Montreuil-Bellay, near the southern border of Anjou--one of the fortresses raised by the great castle-builder Fulk Nerra in the earliest days of his warfare with Odo of Blois--whom an Angevin chronicler describes as an absolute monster of wickedness,[1118] but who had so won the favour of the king that he made him seneschal of Poitou. In 1147 this Gerald was the ring-leader of a fresh revolt of the Angevin barons against their count. The revolt was as usual soon put down: but it was not so easy to punish Gerald; for Montreuil was an almost impregnable fortress, with a keep of great strength and height, “lifting itself up to the stars,” surrounded by a double wall and rampart, and further protected by an encircling chasm, very deep and precipitous, which was called the “Valley of Judas,” and prevented any engines of war from coming within range of the castle.[1119] Some time in 1148 Geoffrey built three towers of stone in the neighbourhood of Montreuil, as a base for future operations against it.[1120] In the summer of 1150 an outrage committed by Gerald upon the abbot and monks of S. Aubin at Angers brought matters to a crisis;[1121] Geoffrey made the monks’ quarrel his own and at once set his engineers to level the ground all around Montreuil, in preparation for bringing up his machines to the assault. After nearly twelve months’ labour,[1122] however, the “Judas-Valley” still yawned between himself and his foes, till he ordered the annual fair usually held at Saumur to be transferred to Montreuil. In a fortnight the energies of the crowd who flocked to the fair, joined to those of his own soldiers, filled up the valley and made it into level ground.[1123] Geoffrey could now bring his engines within range, and he used them with such effect that at the first assault the outworks were destroyed and the garrison driven to take refuge in the keep. A summons to surrender was, however, scornfully rejected by Gerald, trusting in the strength of his tower and the expected help of the king.[1124]

[1117] See Arbois de Jubainville, _Comtes de Champagne_, vol. ii. pp. 344 _et seq._

[1118] Chron. Mairom. (Marchegay, _Eglises_), p. 84.

[1119] _Hist. Gaufr. Ducis_ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), pp. 282–284. See also Chron. S. Serg. a. 1151 (Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 147).

[1120] Rob. Torigni, a. 1149. As he himself, as well as the chronicles, makes the siege last altogether three years and end in 1151, he must mean 1148.

[1121] See the whole curious story in _Cartæ et Chronn. de Obedientiâ Mairomni_ (Marchegay, _Eglises_), pp. 65 _et seq._

[1122] Chron. Mairom. (as above), p. 87. Chron. S. Serg. a. 1151 (_ib._ p. 147).

[1123] _Hist. Gaufr. Ducis_ (as above), p. 284.

[1124] _Ib._ p. 285.

For Louis had now returned from Palestine;[1125] and so great was his wrath at Geoffrey’s treatment of his favourite that he consented to join Eustace in an attack upon the Norman duchy. Its defence was left to its young duke, then busy with the siege of Torigni on the Vire, held against him by his cousin Richard Fitz-Count--a son of Earl Robert of Gloucester.[1126] Louis and Eustace marched upon Arques; Henry led a force of Normans, Angevins and Bretons to meet them; but his “older and wiser” barons averted a battle,[1127] and nothing more came of the expedition. Geoffrey had never stirred from his camp before Montreuil. Despite a formidable array of engines,[1128] he made little progress; every breach made in the walls by day was mended by night with oaken beams, of which the besieged seemed to have a never-ending supply. Geoffrey was characteristically taking counsel with his books as to the best method of overcoming this difficulty when some monks of Marmoutier came to him on an errand for their convent. One of them took up the book which the count laid down--the treatise of Vegetius Renatus _De Re Militari_, then, and long after, the standard work on military engineering. It may have been some memory of bygone days when he, too, had worn helm and hauberk instead of cowl and scapulary that brought into the monk’s eyes a gleam which made Geoffrey exclaim, “Stay with me till to-morrow, good brother, and what you are now reading shall be put in action before you.” Next day a large red-hot iron vessel filled with boiling oil was launched from the beam of a mangonel against one of the timber insertions in the wall, and its bursting set the whole place on fire.[1129] Gerald, his spirit broken at last, came forth with his family and his garrison “like serpents crawling out of a cave,” as a hostile chronicler says,[1130] and surrendered to the mercy of the count, who sent him to prison at Angers. The keep was razed at once, save one fragment of wall, left by Geoffrey, and still standing at this hour, as a memorial of his victory and of the skill and perseverance by which it had been won.[1131]

[1125] He returned in the autumn of 1149. See Rob. Torigni, _ad ann._, and M. Delisle’s note thereon, vol. i. p. 252, note 1.

[1126] Rob. Torigni, a. 1151 and 1154.

[1127] Rob. Torigni, a. 1151. See also Chronn. S. Albin. a. 1150 and S. Serg. a. 1151 (Marchegay, _Eglises_, pp. 36, 148).

[1128] “Petroritas, fundibularias, mangonellos et arietes,” _Hist. Gaufr. Ducis_ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 285, and “sex tormenta quæ vulgo perreriæ vocantur.” Chron. S. Serg. (as above), p. 147.

[1129] _Hist. Gaufr. Ducis_ (as above), pp. 286, 287. The monk is called “frater G.” M. Marchegay suggests that he may have been the “Gauterius Compendiensis,” monk of Marmoutier, whom the writer names among his authorities in the Proœmium to his _Hist. Abbrev._ (_ib._ p. 353). If so, this detailed account of the last scene at the siege of Montreuil is due to an eye-witness.

[1130] Chron. Mairom. (Marchegay, _Eglises_), p. 87.

[1131] _Hist. Gaufr. Ducis_ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 287.

The count of Anjou now moved northward to help his son against the king. By the help of a brother of his old ally William Talvas he gained possession of La Nue, a castle belonging to the king’s brother Count Robert of Dreux.[1132] Louis and Robert avenged themselves by burning the town of Séez. Presently after, in August, Louis gathered together all his forces and brought them down the Seine to a spot between Meulan and Mantes. Geoffrey and Henry collected an opposing army on their side of the Norman border; but an attack of fever detained the king in Paris, and a truce was made until he should recover.[1133] The ostensible ground of the dispute was Geoffrey’s treatment of Gerald of Montreuil, which certainly seems to have been unjustly cruel. Not content with receiving his unconditional surrender, razing his castle, and forcing him to make full atonement to the injured monks of S. Aubin, Geoffrey still persisted in keeping in prison not only Gerald himself but also his whole family. The Pope anathematized him for his unchristianlike severity;[1134] but anathemas usually fell powerless upon an Angevin count. Geoffrey was in truth visiting upon Gerald his wrath at the double-dealing of Gerald’s royal master; for he was well aware that King Louis’s interference was prompted by far other motives than disinterested sympathy for his seneschal. Louis was, according to his wont, playing fast and loose with the rival claimants of Normandy, in such shameless fashion that his own chief minister, Suger, had been the first to reprove him in strong terms for his unwarrantable attack upon the Angevins, had stood firmly by Geoffrey all through the struggle, and was now endeavouring, through the mediation of the count of Vermandois and the bishop of Lisieux, to baffle the schemes of Eustace and his party and bring the king back to his old alliance with Anjou.[1135]

[1132] Rob. Torigni, a. 1151 (Delisle, vol. i. p. 254; see the editor’s note 3, _ib._)

[1133] Rob. Torigni, a. 1151.

[1134] Geoff. Clairv., _Vita S. Bern._, l. iv. c. 3 (_S. Bern. Opp._, Mabillon, vol. ii. col. 1135).

[1135] Suger, Epp. cl., cliii., clxvii., clxviii., clxxv. (Migne, _Patrologia_, vol. 186, cols. 1418, 1419–1420, 1427–1429, 1432).

As soon as Louis was sufficiently recovered a meeting was held in Paris to discuss the possibility of a settlement, and the cause of peace was pleaded by no less an advocate than S. Bernard in person. But, almost for the first time, Bernard pleaded in vain; Geoffrey started up in the midst of the colloquy, and without a word of salutation to any one, sprang upon his horse and rode away. The assembly broke up in despair, and Gerald, who had been brought to hear its result, threw himself at the feet of S. Bernard to implore a last benediction before returning, as he thought, to lifelong captivity. “Fear not,” replied the saint, “deliverance is nearer than you think.” Scarcely had the prisoner turned away when his jailer reappeared.[1136] Geoffrey during his solitary ride had revolved the political situation in his mind and perceived that for his son’s sake he must make peace with the king. Matters in England had reached such a crisis that it was absolutely necessary to secure Henry’s tenure of Normandy, as he might at any moment be required to go beyond sea. To that end Geoffrey did more than give up his personal vengeance upon Gerald of Montreuil; he persuaded Henry to give up the Norman Vexin--the land between the Epte and the Andelle, so long the battle-ground of France and Normandy--to the king of France, in exchange for the investiture of the rest of the duchy. If we may believe the French chroniclers, the young duke made a yet further sacrifice and became the “liegeman” of the king--a form of homage to which none of his predecessors had ever stooped.[1137] Of the homage in some shape or other there is however no doubt;[1138] and it appears that the same opportunity was taken to secure for Henry, without waiting for his father’s death, the investiture of his father’s own dominions.[1139]

[1136] Geoff. Clairv., _Vita S. Bern._, l. iv. c. 3 (_S. Bern. Opp._, Mabillon, vol. i. col. 1135).

[1137] _Hist. Ludov._, _Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. xii. p. 127; _Chron. Reg. Franc._ (_ibid._), p. 213. Both these writers, however, tell an apocryphal story of Louis, at Geoffrey’s and Henry’s request, reconquering the duchy for them and receiving these concessions in return for his help.

[1138] Rob. Torigni, a. 1151.

[1139] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 291 (Marchegay, _Comtes_, p. 336).