All the mental and bodily gifts wherewith nature had endowed the most favoured members of the Angevin house seemed to have been showered upon the eldest son of Fulk V. and Aremburg of Maine. The surname by which he is most generally known, and which an inveterate usage has attached to his descendants as well as to himself, is in its origin and meaning curiously unlike most historical surnames; it seems to have been derived simply from his boyish habit of adorning his cap with a sprig of “planta-genista,” the broom which in early summer makes the open country of Anjou and Maine a blaze of living gold. With a fair and ruddy countenance, lit up by the lightning-glance of a pair of brilliant eyes; a tall, slender, sinewy frame, made for grace no less than for strength and activity:—[628] in the unanimous opinion of his contemporaries, he was emphatically “Geoffrey the Handsome.” To this prepossessing appearance were added the charms of a gracious manner and a ready, pleasant speech;[629] and beneath this winning exterior there lay a considerable share of the quick wits of his race, sharpened and developed by such a careful education as was given to very few princes of the time. The intellectual soil was worthy of the pains bestowed upon it, and brought forth a harvest of, perhaps, somewhat too precocious scholarship and sagacity. Geoffrey’s fondness for the study of the past seems to have been an inheritance from Fulk Rechin; the historian-count might have been proud of a grandson who carried in his memory all the battles fought, all the great deeds done, not only by his own people but also in foreign lands.[630] Even Fulk the Good might have approved a descendant who when still a mere boy could shine in serious conversation with such a “lettered king” as Henry I.;[631] and Fulk the Black might not have been ashamed of one who in early youth felt the “demon-blood” within him too hot to rest content in luxury and idleness, avoided the corrupting influences of mere revelry, gave himself up to the active exercises of military life,[632] and, while so devoted to letters that he would not even go to war without a learned teacher by his side,[633] turned his book-learning to account in ways at which ruder warriors and more unworldly scholars were evidently somewhat astonished.[634] Like his ancestor the Black Count, Geoffrey was one of those men about whom their intimate associates have a fund of anecdotes to tell. The “History” of his life put together from their information, a few years after his death, is chiefly made up of these stories; and through the mass of trite moralizing and pedantic verbiage in which the compiler has imbedded them there still peeps out unmistakeably the peculiar temper of his hero. Geoffrey’s readiness to forgive those who threw themselves upon his mercy is a favourite theme of his biographer’s praise; but the instances given of this clemency indicate more of the vanity and display of chivalry in its narrower sense than of real tenderness of heart or generosity of soul. Such is the story of a discontented knight whose ill-will against his sovereign took the grotesque form of a wish that he had the neck of “that red-head Geoffrey” fast between the two hot iron plates used for making a wafer-cake called oublie. It chanced that the man whose making of oublies—then, as now, a separate trade—had suggested the wish of this knight at St.-Aignan shortly afterwards made some for the eating and in the presence of Count Geoffrey himself, to whom he related what he had heard. The knight and his comrades were presently caught harrying the count’s lands; and the biographer is lost in admiration at Geoffrey’s generosity in forgiving not only their depredations, but the more heinous crime of having, in a fit of ill-temper after dinner, expressed a desire to make a wafer of him.[635] On another occasion we find the count’s wrath averted by the charms of music and verse, enhanced no doubt by the further charm of a little flattery. Four Poitevin knights who had been taken captive in one of the skirmishes so common on the Aquitanian border won their release by the truly southern expedient of singing in Geoffrey’s hearing a rime which they had composed in his praise.[636] A touch of truer poetry comes out in another story. Geoffrey, with a great train of attendants and noble guests, was once keeping Christmas at Le Mans. From his private chapel, where he had been attending the nocturnal services of the vigil, he set out at daybreak at the head of a procession to celebrate in the cathedral church the holy mysteries of the festival. At the cathedral door he met a poorly-dressed young clerk, whom he flippantly saluted: “Any news, sir clerkling?”—“Ay, my lord, the best of good news!”—“What?” cried Geoffrey, all his curiosity aroused—“tell me quick!”—“‘Unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given!’” Abashed, Geoffrey asked the youth his name, bade him join the other clergy in the choir, and as soon as mass was over went straight to the bishop: “For the love of Him Who was born this day, give me a prebend in your church.” It was no sooner granted than taking his new acquaintance by the hand, he begged leave to make him his substitute, and added the further gift of a stall in his own chapel, as a token of gratitude to the poor clerk whose answer to his thoughtless question had brought home to him, perhaps more deeply than he had ever felt them before, the glad tidings of Christmas morning.[637] From another of these anecdotes Geoffrey seems, as far as we can make out, to have been the original hero of an adventure which has since, in slightly varying forms, been attributed to several other princes, from Charles the Great down to James the Fifth of Scotland, and which indeed may easily have happened more than once. Led away by his ardour in pursuit of the chase—next to literature, his favourite recreation—the count one day outstripped all his followers, and lost his way alone in the forest of Loches. At last he fell in with a charcoal-burner, who undertook to conduct him back to the castle. Geoffrey mounted his guide behind him; and as they rode along, the peasant, ignorant of his companion’s rank, and taking him for a simple knight, let himself be drawn into conversation on sundry matters, including a free criticism on the government of the reigning count, and the oppressions suffered by the people at the hands of his household officers. When they reached the gates of Loches, the burst of joy which greeted the wanderer’s return revealed to the poor man that he had been talking to the count himself. Overwhelmed with dismay, he tried to slip off the horse’s back; but Geoffrey held him fast, gave him the place of honour at the evening banquet, sent him home next day with a grant of freedom and a liberal gift of money, and profited by the information acquired from him to institute a thorough reform in the administration of his own household.[638]
Such stories as these, while they help us to form some picture of the manner of man that Geoffrey was, set him before us in the romantic light in which he appears to the best advantage. When one turns from them to a survey of his life as a whole, one is struck with a sense of something wanting in him. The deficiency was in truth a very serious one; it was a lack of steady principle and of genuine feeling. The imaginative and impulsive vein which ran through all the more refined characters of his race lay in him very near the surface, but it did not go very deep. His imagination was sensitive, but his heart was cold; his impulses sprang from the play of a quick fancy, not from the passion of an ardent soul. One more story may furnish a slight, but significant, illustration of his temper. For some wrong done to the see of Tours Geoffrey was once threatened by the archbishop with excommunication. Either the earlier or the later Fulk of Jerusalem would have almost certainly begun by a reckless defiance of the threat, and the later one, at least, would almost as surely have ended by hearty penance. Geoffrey began and ended with a jest: “Your threats are vain, most reverend father; you know that the archbishop of Tours has no jurisdiction over the patrimony of S. Martin, and that I am one of his canons!”[639] In all the sterling qualities of a ruler and a man, the hasty, restless, downright Fulk V. was as superior to his clever charming son as Fulk the Black was superior to Geoffrey Martel. But it is only fair to bear in mind that Geoffrey Plantagenet’s life was to a great extent spoilt by his marriage. The yoke which bound together a lad of fifteen and a woman of twenty-five—especially such a woman as the Empress Matilda—could not fail to press heavily on both parties; but the one most seriously injured by it was probably the young husband. Even in a political point of view, to him personally his marriage was more of a hindrance than an advantage; it cut him off from all chance of striking out an independent career. The man himself was in fact sacrificed to his posterity. Chained down while his character was yet undeveloped to the irksome position of a mere appendage to King Henry’s heiress;—plunged suddenly, and for life, into a sphere of interests and duties alien from his own natural temper and inclinations:—weak, selfish, unprincipled as Geoffrey too plainly shewed himself to be, still it was well not only for him but for others that he had enough of the dogged Angevin thoroughness to carry him safely and successfully, if not always gloriously, through his somewhat dreary task till he could make it over to the freer, as well as stronger, hands of his son.
The hope which inspired both the king of England and the count of Anjou when they planned their children’s marriage can only have been the hope of a grandson in whom the blood of both would be united, who would gather into his own person all conflicting claims, and in whom all feuds would have an end. On this depended all King Henry’s schemes for the future; on this were concentrated all his desires, on this were founded all his plans and arrangements during the last seven years of his reign. In the internal history of England those years are an almost complete blank; they are in fact simply seven more years of the administration of Bishop Roger of Salisbury, for Henry himself spent almost the whole of them upon the continent. His work was finished, and all that remained to do was to maintain the order of things which he had established so as to hand it on in full working to his successor. He must, however, have begun to doubt the success of his schemes when Geoffrey and Matilda separated little more than twelve months after their marriage. At first, everything had seemed to be turning in favour of Henry’s arrangements. Six weeks after the wedding, the death of William the Clito, wounded in a skirmish with a rival claimant of the county of Flanders,[640] removed the only competitor whom the king could deem likely to stand in the way of his plans for the descent of the crown. In the spring Fulk’s departure for Holy Land left the young couple sole masters at Angers. All things looked tranquil and secure when Henry returned to England in July 1129. He had, however, been there only a few days when he learned, to his great indignation, that his daughter had been sent away with scorn by her husband, and had betaken herself with a few attendants to Rouen.[641] There she remained for nearly two years, while Geoffrey was busy with a general revolt among his barons. East and west and south and north had all risen at once; the list of rebels includes the chief landowners in all parts of the Angevin dominions, from the old eastern outpost Amboise to Laval on the Breton border, and from Sablé on the confines of Anjou and Maine to Montreuil-Bellay, Thouars and Mirebeau in the Aquitanian territory of Loudun, and the yet more remote fief of Parthenay in Poitou.[642] It seems as if the disaffected barons, worsted in their struggle with Fulk, had only been waiting till he was out of the country, and now, when Geoffrey by his quarrel with his wife had deprived himself of all chance of help from his father-in-law, they closed in upon the boy-count with one consent, thinking to get him into their power and wring from him any concessions they pleased. They unintentionally did him an immense service, for by thus suddenly throwing him upon his own resources they made a man of him at once. No one knew better than Geoffrey Plantagenet that he was not the first count of Anjou who had been left to shift for himself in difficult circumstances at the age of fifteen; and he faced the danger with a promptitude and energy not unworthy of Fulk Nerra’s representative. One after another he besieged the rebel leaders in their strongholds; one after another was forced, tricked or frightened into submission. Once, while besieging Theobald of Blazon in the great fortress of Mirebeau, Geoffrey was blockaded in his turn by the count of Poitou, whom the traitors had called to their aid; even from this peril, however, his quick wit and youthful energy extricated him in triumph; and the revolt was finally crushed by a severe punishment inflicted on its most powerful leader, Lisiard of Sablé. Geoffrey ravaged the whole of Lisiard’s estates, razed his castle of Briolet, seized that of Suze and kept it in his own hands for the rest of its owner’s life; while to guard against further dangers from the same quarter, by the advice of his faithful barons he reared, for the express purpose of defence against incursions from Sablé, a fortress to which he gave the name of Châteauneuf, on the left bank of the Sarthe, just below the bridge made famous by the death of Count Robert the Brave.[643]
King Henry had joined his daughter in Normandy in the summer of 1130; in July of the next year they returned to England together. They were soon followed by a message from Geoffrey, who was now becoming awake to his rights and duties as husband of King Henry’s heiress, and having made himself thoroughly master in his own dominions felt it time to demand the return of his wife. A great council held at Northampton on September 8 decided that his request should be granted;[644] and the assembled prelates and barons repeated their homage to Matilda as her father’s destined successor.[645] She then went back to her husband, by whom she was, if not warmly welcomed, at least received with all due courtesy and honour.[646] Fortunately for the ill-matched couple, they were both of that cold-blooded temperament to which intense personal affection is not a necessary of life. Henceforth they were content to work together as partners in political enterprise, and to find in community of worldly interests a sufficient bond of union. On Mid-Lent Sunday—March 5, 1133—the bond was made indissoluble by the birth of their son and heir. Most fittingly, the child to whom so many diverse nationalities looked as to their future sovereign[647] was born not in the actual home of either of his parents, but in that city of Le Mans which lay midway between Normandy and Anjou, which had so long been the ground of their strife, and had at last been made the scene of their union.[648] He was baptized in the cathedral church by the bishop of the diocese on Easter Eve, receiving the name of his grandfather Henry, and was then, by his mother’s special desire, solemnly placed under the protection of the local patron saint on the same altar where his father had been dedicated in like manner thirteen years before.[649]
To King Henry the birth of his grandson was the crowning of all his hopes. The greatest difficulty which had hitherto stood in the way of his scheme for the descent of the crown—the objection which was sure to be made against Matilda on account of her sex—would lose more than half its force now that she could be regarded as regent for her infant son; and Henry at once summoned another great council at which he again made the archbishops, bishops, earls and barons of his realm swear fealty to the Empress “and also to her little son whom he appointed to be king after him.”[650] All things seemed as safe as human foresight could make them when in the beginning of August he crossed over to Normandy.[651] Signs and wonders in earth and sky, related afterwards as tokens of coming evil, accompanied his voyage;[652] but nearly two years passed away before the portents were fulfilled. In the spring Matilda joined her father at Rouen, and there, shortly before Whitsuntide, her second son was born.[653] The old king’s pleasure in his two little grandchildren was great enough to keep him lingering on in Normandy with them and their mother, leaving England to the care of Bishop Roger, till the middle of the following year,[654] when there came tidings of disturbance on the Welsh border which made him feel it was time he should return.[655] His daughter however set herself against his departure. Her policy is not very clear; but it seems impossible to acquit her of playing a double game and secretly instigating her husband to attack her father while the latter was living with her in unsuspecting intimacy and confidence. Geoffrey now suddenly put forth a claim to certain castles in Normandy which he asserted had been promised to him at his marriage.[656] Henry denied the claim; the Angevin temper burst forth at once; Geoffrey attacked and burned the castle of Beaumont, whose lord was like himself a son-in-law of Henry, and altogether behaved with such insulting violence that the king in his wrath was on the point of taking Matilda, who was with him at Rouen all the while, back with him to England. But he now found it impossible to leave Normandy. The land was full of treason; many barons who only disguised their real feelings from awe of the stern old king had been gained over in secret to the Angevin cause; among those whose fidelity was most suspected were Roger of Toëny and William Talvas the lord of Alençon, who had been restored to the forfeited estates of his family at the intercession of Geoffrey’s father in 1119. Roger’s castle of Conches was garrisoned by the king; William Talvas was summoned to Rouen more than once, but the conscious traitor dared not shew his face; at last Henry again seized his estates, and then, in September, Talvas fled across the border to be received with open arms by the count of Anjou.[657] The countess pleaded warmly with her father for the traitor’s pardon, but in vain. When she found him inexorable, she suddenly threw off the mask and shewed on which side her real sympathies lay by parting from the king in anger and going home to her husband at Angers.[658] Father and daughter never met again. In the last week of November Henry fell sick while hunting in the Forest of Lions; feeling his end near, he sent for his old friend Archbishop Hugh of Rouen to receive his confession and give him the last sacraments. His son Earl Robert of Gloucester hurried to the spot at the first tidings of his illness; his daughter made no sign of a wish for reconciliation; yet when the earl and the primate asked for his final instructions concerning the succession to the crown, he remained true to his cherished purpose and once more bequeathed all his dominions on both sides of the sea to Matilda and her heirs for ever.[659] He died on the night of December 1, 1135.[660]
With him expired the direct male line of the Conqueror; for Duke Robert’s long captivity had ended a year before.[661] Of the nine children of William the Conqueror and Matilda of Flanders, the youngest and the last survivor was now gone, leaving as his sole representatives his daughter the countess of Anjou and her infant boys. By a thrice-repeated oath the barons of Normandy and England stood pledged to acknowledge her as their sovereign. Suddenly there sprang forth an unexpected competitor. A rivalry which had seemed dead for nearly a hundred years revived in a new form; and the house of Anjou, on the very eve of its triumph, found itself once more face to face with the deadliest of its early foes—the house of Blois.
Since Geoffrey Martel’s victory over Theobald III. in 1044 the counts of Blois have ceased to play a prominent part in our story. Theobald himself accepted his defeat as final; he seems indeed to have been almost crushed by it, for he scarcely makes any further appearance in history, save at his brother Stephen’s death in 1047, when he requited the help which Stephen had given him against Anjou by turning his son out of Champagne and appropriating all his possessions. The injured heir took refuge in Normandy, married the Conqueror’s sister, and afterwards found in England such ample compensation for what he had lost that neither he nor his posterity ever made any attempt to regain their continental heritage. The reunion of Champagne thus helped to repair the fortunes of the elder line of Blois, so severely shattered by the blows of the Angevin Hammer; and the ill-gotten gain prospered so far that some thirty-five years later Theobald’s son and successor—the young Count Stephen-Henry who in 1069 received Fulk Rechin’s homage for Touraine—could venture on aspiring to the hand of King William’s daughter Adela.[662] In winning her he won a prize of which he was scarcely worthy. Stephen-Henry was indeed, in every way, a better man than either his father or his grandfather; but he had the nerveless, unstable temper which was the curse of his race. He went on the Crusade, and deserted before Antioch was won. He came home to bury his shame; his wife sent him out again to expiate it. Her burning words changed the coward into a martyr, and the stain was washed out in his life-blood beneath the walls of Ramah.[663] In the ordinary course of things, his successor in the counties of Blois, Chartres and Champagne would have been his eldest son William. But Stephen had left the entire control of his affairs, including the disposal of his territories, to his wife; and Adela knew that her firstborn was a youth of slow wit, quite unfit for public life. She therefore disinherited him, to his own complete satisfaction; for he had sense enough to be conscious of his incapacity for government, and gladly withdrew to the more congenial life of a simple country gentleman on the estates of his wife, the lady of Sully in Champagne, while the duties and responsibilities of the head of the family were laid on the abler shoulders of his next brother, Theobald. Of the two remaining brothers, the youngest had been from his infancy dedicated to the Church; the third, who bore his father’s name of Stephen, had been intrusted for education to his uncle the king of England.[664] Adela seems to have been Henry’s favourite sister; she was certainly, in all qualities both of heart and head, well worthy of his confidence and esteem; and she once at least did him a service which deserved his utmost gratitude, for it was she who contrived the opportunity for his reconciliation with S. Anselm. She was moreover the only one of his sisters who had children; and the relation between a man and his sister’s son was in the Middle Ages held as a specially dear and sacred tie. Its force was fully acknowledged by Henry in the case of the little Stephen. He had the child carefully brought up at his court with his own son; he knighted him with his own hand, and bestowed on him, in addition to ample estates in England, the Norman county of Mortain, which had been for several generations held by a near connexion of the ducal house, and entitled its possessor to rank as the first baron of the duchy. Finally, some few years before the second marriage of the Empress, he arranged a match between Stephen and another Matilda of scarcely less illustrious descent—the only daughter and heiress of Count Eustace of Boulogne and Mary of Scotland, sister to Henry’s own queen.[665] Stephen seems in fact to have been, next to William the Ætheling, the person for whom Henry cared most; and after the disaster of the White Ship—in which a lucky attack of illness saved him from sharing—he became virtually the king’s adoptive son, and the first layman in the kingdom. His position is illustrated by a dispute which occurred when the barons took the oath of homage and fealty to Matilda in the Christmas council of 1126. They swore in order of precedence. The first place among the lay peers belonged as an unquestioned right to the king of Scots; the second was claimed at once by Stephen and by the king’s son Earl Robert of Gloucester; the dignity of the nephew was held to outweigh the privilege of the son; and the second layman who swore on bended knee to acknowledge the Empress Matilda as her father’s successor was her cousin Count Stephen of Mortain and Boulogne.[666]
But for that council and its oath, the succession both to the English crown and to the Norman ducal coronet would have been at Henry’s death an open question. Had Matilda’s child been old enough to step at once into the place destined for him by his grandfather, there would most likely have been no question at all; Henry II. would have succeeded Henry I. without opposition, and England would have been spared nineteen years of anarchy. But Henry Fitz-Empress was not yet three years old. The practical choice at the moment lay between the surviving adult descendants of the Conqueror; and of these there were, besides the Empress, at least two others who might be considered quite as well qualified to represent him as she was. Independently of any special engagement, the barons would be fully entitled to choose between the daughter of William’s son and the sons of his daughter—between Matilda of Anjou, Theobald of Blois, and Stephen of Boulogne. Of the three, Matilda was on the whole the one who had least to recommend her. Her great personal advantage was that she, and she alone, was the child of a crowned king and queen, of the “good Queen Maude” in whose veins flowed the ancient royal blood of Wessex, and the king whom his English subjects revered after he was gone as “a good man,” who “made peace for men and deer.”[667] Matilda’s birth would be a valuable qualification in English eyes; but it would carry very little weight in Normandy. Old-English blood-royal went for nothing there; and King Henry’s good peace had been much less successfully enforced, and when enforced much less appreciated, in the duchy than in the kingdom. Personally, Matilda was almost a stranger in both countries. She had left her own people and her father’s house at the age of eight years, to be educated not as the daughter of the English king but as the child-wife of the Emperor. All her associations, all her interests, were in Germany; there she was known and respected, there she was at home. She had only returned to England very unwillingly for a couple of years, and then left it again to become the wife of a man known there only as the son of that “earl of Anjou” who had been King Henry’s most troublesome foe; while in Normandy the Angevin was known but too well, and hated with a mingled hate and scorn which had grown with the growth and strengthened with the strength of both county and duchy ever since the days of Geoffrey Martel. If the principle of female succession was to be admitted at all—if the Conqueror’s throne was to be filled by a stranger—one of his daughter’s sons might fill it at least as worthily as his son’s daughter and her Angevin husband. And if a sovereign was to be chosen for his personal qualifications, it would have been hard to find a better choice than Theobald the Great, count of Blois, Chartres and Champagne. He did not owe his historical epithet solely to his vast possessions; he was almost the only member of the house of Blois who shewed any trace of intellectual or moral greatness. His public life was one long series of vexations and disappointments; the misfortunes which his race were so apt to bring upon themselves by their own unsteadiness and self-will seemed to fall upon him without provocation on his part; it was as if his heritage had come to him charged with the penalties of all his forefathers’ errors. But it had not come to him charged with the heavier burthen of their fatal intellectual perversity and moral weakness. In its place he had the tact, the dignity, the stedfastness of his Norman mother; and the whole of his after-career fully justified the esteem of the Norman barons, grounded upon their acquaintance with his person and character during those wars against the king of France in which his cause had been inseparably bound up with that of his uncle Henry. In England, however, he could only be known by report, as the nephew and ally of the king, and the elder brother of Stephen. It was Stephen, not Theobald, who had been the king’s favourite and constant companion, lacking nothing of the rank of an adoptive son save the avowed prospect of the crown. Stephen had lived in England from his childhood; his territorial possessions, his personal interests, lay wholly in England and Normandy; his name and his face were almost as familiar there as those of Henry himself; he was the first baron of the duchy, the first layman of the kingdom; moreover, he was the husband of a lady who stood as near to the Old-English royal line and represented it, to say the least, as worthily as her imperial cousin and namesake. Lastly, his marriage gave him yet one more advantage, slight in itself, but of no small practical use at the moment. As count of Boulogne, he had immediate command of the shortest passage from the Continent to England.