“When the green tree, cut asunder in the midst and severed by the space of three furlongs, shall be grafted in again and shall bring forth flowers and fruit,—then at last may England hope to see the end of her sorrows.”[1]
So closed the prophecy in which the dying king Eadward the Confessor foretold the destiny in store for his country after his departure. His words, mocked at by one of the listeners, incomprehensible to all, found an easy interpretation a hundred years later. The green tree of the West-Saxon monarchy had fallen beneath Duke William’s battle-axe; three alien reigns had parted its surviving branch from the stem; the marriage of Henry I. with a princess of the old English blood-royal had grafted it in again.[2] One flower sprung from that union had indeed bloomed only to die ere it reached its prime,[3] but another had brought forth the promised fruit; and the dim ideal of national prosperity and union which English and Normans alike associated with the revered name of the Confessor was growing at last into a real and living thing beneath the sceptre of Henry Fitz-Empress.
There are, at first glance, few stranger things in history than the revival thus prefigured:—a national revival growing up, as it seems, in the most adverse circumstances, under the pressure of an alien government, of a race of kings who were strangers alike to the men of old English blood and to the descendants of those who had come over with the Conqueror: at a time when, in a merely political point of view, England seemed to be not only conquered but altogether swallowed up in the vast and varied dominions of the house of Anjou. It was indeed not the first time that the island had become an appendage to a foreign empire compared with which she was but a speck in the ocean. Cnut the Dane was, like Henry of Anjou, not only king of England but also ruler of a great continental monarchy far exceeding England in extent, and forming together with her a dominion only to be equalled, if equalled at all, by that of the Emperor. But the parallel goes no farther. Cnut’s first kingdom, the prize of his youthful valour, was his centre and his home, of which his Scandinavian realms, even his native Denmark, were mere dependencies. Whatever he might be when he revisited them, in his island-kingdom he was an Englishman among Englishmen. The heir of Geoffrey of Anjou and Matilda of Normandy, on the other hand, was virtually of no nationality, no country; but if he could be said to have a home at all, it was certainly not on this side of the sea—it was the little marchland of his fathers. In the case of his sons, the southern blood of their mother Eleanor added a yet more un-English element; and of Richard, indeed, it might almost be said that the home of his choice was not in Europe at all, but in Holy Land. Alike to him and to his father, England was simply the possession which gave them their highest title, furnished them with resources for prosecuting their schemes of continental policy, and secured to them a safe refuge on which to fall back in moments of difficulty or danger. It was not till the work of revival was completed, till it had resulted in the creation of the new England which comes to light with Edward I., that it could find a representative and a leader in the king himself. The sovereign in whose reign the chief part of the work was done stood utterly aloof from it in sympathy; yet he is in fact its central figure and its most important actor. The story of England’s developement from the break-down of the Norman system under Stephen to the consolidation of a national monarchy under Edward I. is the story of Henry of Anjou, of his work and of its results. But as the story does not end with Henry, so neither does it begin with him. It is impossible to understand Henry himself without knowing something of the race from which he sprang; of those wonderful Angevin counts who, beginning as rulers of a tiny under-fief of the duchy of France, grew into a sovereign house extending its sway from one end of Christendom to the other. It is impossible to understand his work without knowing something of what England was, and how she came to be what she was, when the young count of Anjou was called to wear her crown.
The project of an empire such as that which Henry II. actually wielded had been the last dream of William Rufus. In the summer of 1100 the duke of Aquitaine, about to join the Crusaders in Holy Land, offered his dominions in pledge to the king of England. Rufus clutched at the offer “like a lion at his prey.”[4] Five years before he had received the Norman duchy on the same terms from his brother Robert; he had bridled its restless people and brought them under control; he had won back its southern dependency, his father’s first conquest, the county of Maine. Had this new scheme been realized, nothing but the little Angevin march would have broken the continuity of a Norman dominion stretching from the Forth to the Pyrenees, and in all likelihood the story of the Angevin kings would never have had to be told. Jesting after his wont with his hunting-companions, William—so the story goes—declared that he would keep his next Christmas feast at Poitiers, if he should live so long.[5] But that same evening the Red King lay dead in the New Forest, and his territories fell asunder at once. Robert of Normandy came back from Palestine in triumph to resume possession of his duchy; while the barons of England, without waiting for his return, chose his English-born brother Henry for their king.
Thirteen years before, at his father’s death, Henry, the only child of William and Matilda who was actually born in the purple—the child of a crowned king and queen, born on English soil, and thus by birth, though not by descent, entitled to rank as an English Ætheling—had been launched into the world at the age of nineteen without a foot of land that he could call his own. The story went that he had complained bitterly to the dying Conqueror of his exclusion from all share in the family heritage. “Have patience, boy,” was William’s answer, “let thine elder brothers go before thee; the day will come when thou shalt be greater than either of them.” Henry was, however, not left a penniless adventurer dependent on the bounty of his brothers; the Conqueror gave him a legacy of ten thousand pounds as a solid provision wherewith to begin his career. A year had scarcely passed before Duke Robert, overwhelmed with troubles in Normandy, found himself at his wits’ end with an empty treasury, and besought Henry to lend him some money. The Ætheling, as cool and calculating as his brothers were impetuous, refused; the duke in desperation offered to sell him any territory he chose, and a bargain was struck whereby Henry received, for the sum of three thousand pounds, the investiture of the Cotentin, the Avranchin, and the Mont-St.-Michel—in a word, the whole western end of the Norman duchy.[6] Next summer, while the duke was planning an attempt on the English crown and vainly awaiting a fair wind to enable him to cross the Channel, the count of the Cotentin managed to get across without one, to claim the estates in Gloucestershire formerly held by his mother and destined for him by his father’s will. He was received by William Rufus only too graciously, for the consequence was that some mischief-makers, always specially plentiful at the Norman court, persuaded Duke Robert that his youngest brother was plotting against him with the second, and when Henry returned in the autumn he had no sooner landed than he was seized and cast into prison.[7] Within a year he was free again, reinstated, if not in the Cotentin, at least in the Avranchin and the Mont-St.-Michel, and entrusted with the keeping of Rouen itself against the traitors stirred up by the Red King. William, while his young brother was safe in prison, had resumed the Gloucestershire estates and made them over to his favourite Robert Fitz-Hamon. Henry in his natural resentment threw himself with all his energies into the cause of the duke of Normandy, acted as his trustiest and bravest supporter throughout the war with Rufus which followed, and at the close of the year crowned his services by the promptitude and valour with which he defeated a conspiracy for betraying the Norman capital to the king of England.[8] The struggle ended in a treaty between the elder brothers, in which neither of them forgot the youngest. Their remembrance of him took the shape of an agreement to drive him out of all his territories and divide the spoil between themselves. Their joint attack soon brought him to bay in his mightiest stronghold, the rock crowned by the abbey of S. Michael-in-Peril-of-the-Sea, commonly called Mont-Saint-Michel. Henry threw himself into the place with as many knights as were willing to share the adventure; the brethren of the abbey did their utmost to help, and for fifteen days the little garrison, perched on their inaccessible rock, held out against their besiegers.[9] Then hunger began to thin their ranks; nothing but the inconsistent generosity of Robert saved them from the worse agonies of thirst;[10] one by one they dropped away, till Henry saw that he must yield to fate, abide by his father’s counsel, and wait patiently for better days. He surrendered; he came down from the Mount, once again a landless and homeless man; and save for one strange momentary appearance in England as a guest at the Red King’s court,[11] he spent the greater part of the next two years in France and the Vexin, wandering from one refuge to another with a lowly train of one knight, three squires, and one chaplain.[12] He was at length recalled by the townsmen of Domfront, who, goaded to desperation by the oppressions of their lord Robert of Bellême, threw off his yoke and besought Henry to come and take upon himself the duty of defending them, their town and castle, against their former tyrant. “By the help of God and the suffrages of his friends,” as his admiring historian says,[13] Henry was thus placed in command of his father’s earliest conquest, the key of Normandy and Maine, a fortress scarcely less mighty and of far greater political importance than that from which he had been driven. He naturally used his opportunity for reprisals, not only upon Robert of Bellême, but also upon his own brothers;[14] and by the end of two years he had made himself of so much consequence in the duchy that William Rufus, again at war with the duke, thought it time to secure his alliance. The two younger brothers met in England, and when Henry returned in the spring of 1095 he came as the liegeman of the English king, sworn to fight his battles and further his interests in Normandy by every means in his power.[15]
William and Henry had both learned by experience that to work with Robert for any political purpose was hopeless, and that their true interest was to support each other—William’s, to enlist for his own service Henry’s clear cool head and steady hand; Henry’s, to secure for himself some kind of footing in the land where his ultimate ambitions could not fail to be centred. He had learned in his wanderings to adapt himself to all circumstances and all kinds of society; personally, he and Rufus can have had little in common except their passion for the chase. Lanfranc’s teaching, moral and intellectual, had been all alike thrown away upon his pupil William the Red. Henry, carefully educated according to his father’s special desire, had early shown a remarkable aptitude for study, was a scholar of very fair attainments as scholarship went among laymen in his day, and retained his literary tastes not only through all his youthful trials but also through the crowd of political and domestic cares which pressed upon his later life. Yet such tastes seem almost as strange in Henry as they would in William Rufus. The one prosaic element in the story of Henry’s youth is the personality of its hero. No man had ever less of the romantic or poetic temperament; if he had none of the follies or the faults of chivalry, he had just as little of its nobler idealism. From his first bargain with Robert for the purchase of the Cotentin to his last bargain with Fulk of Anjou for the marriage of his heir, life was to him simply a matter of business. The strongest points in his character were precisely the two qualities which both his brothers utterly lacked—self-control, and that “capacity for taking trouble” which is sometimes said to be the chief element of genius. But of the higher kind of genius, of the fire which kindles in the soul rather than merely in the brain, Henry had not a spark. He was essentially a man of business, in the widest and loftiest sense of the words. His self-control was not, like his father’s, the curb forcibly put by a noble mind upon its own natural impetuosity; it was the more easily-practised calmness of a perfectly cold nature which could always be reasonable because it had to fight with no impulse of passion, which was never tempted to “follow wandering fires” because they lit in it no responsive flame; a nature in which the head had complete mastery over the heart, and that head was one which no misfortunes could disturb, no successes turn, and no perplexities confuse.
The sudden vacancy of the English throne found every one else quite unprepared for such an emergency. Henry was never unprepared. His quickness and decision secured him the keys of the treasury and the formal election of those barons and prelates who had been members of the fatal hunting-party, or who hurried to Winchester at the tidings of its tragic issue; and before opposition had time to come to a head, it was checked by the coronation and unction which turned the king-elect into full king.[16] Henry knew well, however, that opposition there was certain to be. Robert of Normandy, just returned from the Crusade and covered with glory, was sure to assert his claim, and as sure to be upheld by a strong party among the barons, to whom a fresh severance of England and Normandy was clearly not desirable. In anticipation of the coming struggle, Henry threw himself at once on the support of his subjects. In addition to the pledges of his coronation-oath—taken almost in the words of Æthelred to Dunstan[17]—he issued on the same day a charter in which he solemnly and specifically promised the abolition of his brother’s evil customs in Church and state, and a return to just government according to the law of the land. The details were drawn up so as to touch all classes. The Church, as including them all, of course stood first; its freedom was restored and all sale or farming of benefices renounced by the king. The next clause appealed specially to the feudal vassals: those who held their lands “by the hauberk”—the tenants by knight-service—were exempted from all other imposts on their demesne lands, that they might be the better able to fulfil their own particular obligation. The tenants-in-chief were exempted from all the unjust exactions with regard to wardships, marriages, reliefs and forfeitures, which had been practised in the last reign; but the redress was not confined to them; they were distinctly required to exercise the same justice towards their own under-tenants. The last clause covered all the rest: by it Henry gave back to his people “the laws of King Eadward as amended by King William.”[18] Like Cnut’s renewal of the law of Eadgar—like Eadward’s own renewal of the law of Cnut—the charter was a proclamation of general reunion and goodwill. As a pledge of its sincerity, the Red King’s minister, Ralf Flambard, in popular estimation the author of all the late misdoings, was at once cast into the Tower;[19] the exiled primate was fetched home as speedily as possible; and in November the king identified himself still more closely with the land of his birth by taking to wife a maiden of the old English blood-royal, Eadgyth of Scotland, great-granddaughter of Eadmund Ironside.[20]
His precautions were soon justified. Robert had refused the thorny crown of Jerusalem, but the crown of England had far other charms; and his movements were quickened by Ralf Flambard, who early in the spring made his escape to Normandy.[21] It was probably through Ralf’s management that the duke won over some of the sailors who guarded the English coast and thus got ashore unexpectedly at Portsmouth while the king was keeping watch for him at the old landing-place, Pevensey.[22] At the first tidings of the intended invasion Henry, like Rufus in the same case thirteen years before, had appealed to Witan and people, and by a renewal of his charter gained a renewal of their fealty. No sooner, however, was Robert actually in England than the great majority of the barons prepared to go over to him in a body. But the king born on English soil, married to a lady of the old kingly house, had a stronger hold than ever Rufus could have had upon the English people; and they, headed by their natural leader and representative, the restored archbishop of Canterbury, clave to him with unswerving loyalty.[23] The two armies met near Alton;[24] at the last moment, the wisdom either of Anselm, of the few loyal barons, or of Henry himself, turned the meeting into a peaceful one. The brothers came to terms: Robert renounced his claim to the crown in consideration of a yearly pension from England; Henry gave up all his Norman possessions except Domfront, whose people he refused to forsake;[25] and, as in the treaty made at Caen ten years before between Robert and William, it was arranged that whichever brother lived longest should inherit the other’s dominions, if the deceased left no lawful heirs.[26]
The treaty was ratified at Winchester in the first days of August;[27] and thus, almost on the anniversary of the Red King’s death, ended the last Norman invasion of England. But the treaty of Winchester, like that of Caen, failed to settle the real difficulty. That difficulty was, how to control the barons. According to one version of the treaty, it was stipulated that those who had incurred forfeiture in England by their adherence to Robert and those who had done the same in Normandy in Henry’s behalf should alike go unpunished;[28] according to another, perhaps a more probable account, the brothers agreed to co-operate in punishing traitors on both sides.[29] Henry set to work to do his part methodically. One after another, at different times, in various ways, by regular process of law, the offenders were brought to justice in England: some heavily fined, some deprived of their honours and exiled. It was treason not so much against himself as against the peace and order of the realm that Henry was bent upon avenging; Ivo of Grantmesnil was fined to the verge of ruin for the crime of making war not upon the king in behalf of the duke, but upon his own neighbours for his own personal gratification—a crime which was part of the daily life of every baron in Normandy, but which had never been seen in England before,[30] and never was seen there again as long as King Henry lived. The most formidable of all the troublers of the land was Henry’s old enemy at Domfront—Robert, lord of Bellême in the border-land of Perche, earl of Shrewsbury and Arundel in England, count of Alençon and lord of Montgomery in Normandy, and now by his marriage count of Ponthieu. Robert was actually fortifying his castles of Bridgenorth and Arundel in preparation for open revolt when he was summoned to take his trial on forty-five charges of treason against the king of England and the duke of Normandy. As he failed to answer, Henry led his troops to the siege of Bridgenorth. In three weeks it surrendered; Shrewsbury and Arundel did the same, and Robert of Bellême was glad to purchase safety for life and limb at the cost of all his English possessions.[31]
From that moment Henry’s position in England was secured; but all his remonstrances failed to make his indolent elder brother fulfil his part of their compact. The traitors whom Henry expelled from England only carried their treason over sea to a more congenial climate, and the helpless, heedless duke looked passively on while Robert of Bellême, William of Mortain the banished earl of Cornwall, and their fellows slaked their thirst for vengeance upon King Henry by ravaging the Norman lands of those who were faithful to him in England.[32] Their victims, as well as Henry himself, began to see that his personal intervention alone could re-establish order in the duchy. On his appearance there in 1104 he was joined by all the more reasonable among the barons. For the moment he was pacified by fresh promises of amendment on Robert’s part, and by the cession of the county of Evreux; but he knew that all compromise had become vain; and in the last week of Lent 1105 he landed again at Barfleur in the full determination of making himself master of Normandy. His Norman partisans rallied round him at once,[33] and he was soon joined by two valuable allies, Elias count of Maine and his intended son-in-law, the young count Geoffrey of Anjou.[34] It was they who won for Henry his first success, the capture of Bayeux.[35] Warned by the fate of this unhappy city, which was burnt down, churches and all, Caen surrendered at once, and Henry thus came into possession of the Norman treasury. A siege of Falaise failed through the unexplained departure of Count Elias,[36] and the war dragged slowly on till Henry, now busy in another quarter with negotiations for the return of S. Anselm, went back at Michaelmas to England. Thither he was followed first by Robert of Bellême, then by Robert of Normandy,[37] both seeking for peace; but peace had become impossible now. Next summer Henry was again in Normandy, reconciled to S. Anselm, released from anxieties at home, free to concentrate all his energies upon the final struggle. It was decided with one blow. As he was besieging the castle of Tinchebray on Michaelmas Eve Duke Robert at the head of all his forces approached and summoned him to raise the siege. He refused, “preferring,” as he said, “to take the blame of a more than civil war for the sake of future peace.” But when the two hosts were drawn up face to face, the prospect of a battle seemed too horrible to be endured, composed as they were of kinsmen and brothers, fathers and sons, arrayed against each other. The clergy besought Henry to stay his hand; he listened, pondered, and at length sent a final message to his brother. He came, he said, not wishing to deprive Robert of his duchy or to win territories for himself, but to answer the cry of the distressed and deliver Normandy from the misrule of one who was duke only in name. Here then was his last proposition: “Give up to me half the land of Normandy, the castles and the administration of justice and government throughout the whole, and receive the value of the other half annually from my treasury in England. Thus you may enjoy pleasure and feasting to your heart’s content, while I will take upon me the labours of government, and guarantee the fulfilment of my pledge, if you will but keep quiet.” Foolish to the last, Robert declined the offer; and the two armies made themselves ready for battle.[38] In point of numbers they seem to have been not unequally matched, but they differed greatly in character. Robert was stronger in footsoldiers, Henry in knights; the flower of the Norman nobility was on his side now, besides his Angevin, Cenomannian and Breton allies;[39] while of those who followed Robert some, as the issue proved, were only half-hearted. Of Henry’s genuine English troops there is no account, but the men of his own day looked upon his whole host as English in contradistinction to Robert’s Normans, and the tactics adopted in the battle were thoroughly English. The king of England fought on foot with his whole army, and it seems that the duke of Normandy followed his example.[40]
The first line of the Norman or ducal host under William of Mortain charged the English front under Ralf of Bayeux, and by the fury of their onset compelled them to fall back, though without breaking their ranks. The issue was still doubtful, when the only mounted division of Henry’s troops, the Bretons and Cenomannians under Count Elias, came up to the rescue, took the duke’s army in flank, and cut down two hundred men in a single charge. Those Cenomannian swords which William the Conqueror was so proud to have overcome now carried the day for his youngest son. Robert of Bellême, as soon as he saw how matters were going, fled with all his followers, and the duke’s army at once dissolved.[41] In Henry’s own words, “the Divine Mercy gave into my hands, without much slaughter on our side, the duke of Normandy, the count of Mortain, William Crispin, William Ferrers, Robert of Estouteville, some four hundred knights, ten thousand foot—and the duchy of Normandy.”[42]
Forty years before, on the very same day, William the Conqueror had landed at Pevensey to bring the English kingdom under the Norman yoke. The work of Michaelmas Eve, 1066, was reversed on Michaelmas Eve, 1106; the victory of Tinchebray made Normandy a dependency of England.[43] Such was the view taken by one of the most clear-sighted and unprejudiced historians of the time, a man of mingled Norman and English blood. Such was evidently the view instinctively taken by all parties, and the instinct was a true one, although at first glance it seems somewhat hard to account for. The reign of Henry I., if judged merely by the facts which strike the eye in the chronicles of the time, looks like one continued course of foreign policy and foreign warfare pursued by the king for his own personal ends at the expense of his English subjects. But the real meaning of the facts lies deeper. The comment of the archbishop of Rouen upon Henry’s death—“Peace be to his soul, for he ever loved peace”[44]—was neither sarcasm nor flattery. Henry did love peace, so well that he spent his life in fighting for it. His early Norman campaigns are enough to prove that without being a master of the art of war like his father, he was yet a brave soldier and a skilful commander; and the complicated wars of his later years, when over and over again he had to struggle almost single-handed against France, Flanders and Anjou, amid the endless treasons of his own barons, show still more clearly his superiority to nearly all the other generals of his time. But his ambitions were not those of the warrior. Some gleam of the old northman’s joy of battle may have flashed across the wandering knight as he defied his besiegers from the summit of his rock “in Peril of the Sea,” or swooped down upon the turbulent lords of the Cenomannian border, like an eagle upon lesser birds of prey, from his eyrie on the crest of Domfront; but the victor of Tinchebray looked at his campaigns in another light. To him they were simply a part of his general business as a king; they were means to an end, and that end was not glory, nor even gain, but the establishment of peace and order. In his thirteen years of wandering to and fro between England, Normandy and France he had probably studied all the phases of tyranny and anarchy which the three countries amply displayed, and matured his own theory of government, which he practised steadily to the end of his reign. That theory was not a very lofty or noble one; the principle from which it started and the end at which it aimed was the interest of the ruler rather than of the ruled; but the form in which Henry conceived that end and the means whereby he sought to compass it were at any rate more enlightened than those of his predecessor. The Red King had reigned wholly by terror; Henry did not aspire to rule by love; but he saw that, in a merely selfish point of view, a sovereign gains nothing by making himself a terror to any except evil-doers, that the surest basis for his authority is the preservation of order, justice and peace, and that so far at least the interests of king and people must be one. It is difficult to get rid of a feeling that Henry enforced justice and order from motives of expediency rather than of abstract righteousness. But, as a matter of fact, he did enforce them all round, on earl and churl, clerk and layman, Norman and Englishman, without distinction. And this steady, equal government was rendered possible only by the determined struggle which he waged with the Norman barons and their French allies. His home policy and his foreign policy were inseparably connected; and the lifelong battle which he fought with his continental foes was really the battle of England’s freedom.