A School History of England/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
HENRY II TO HENRY III, 1154–1272; THE BEGINNINGS OF PARLIAMENT
The task of the King in 1154.The young man of twenty-one, whom we call Henry II, came to a country absolutely wasted with civil war. When he died, thirty-five years later, he left it the richest, the most peaceful, the most intelligent, the most united Kingdom in Europe. There is no misery like that of civil war; there have been two civil wars since that date, one in the fifteenth and one in the seventeenth century; and of course during these wars the country people suffered. But so firmly did the sense of law and order, which Henry II drove into his people's heads, take root, that there was no complete upset of civil life, even in these later civil wars. We cannot of course attribute all the later good fortune of the country to one man, not even to such a great and wise man as Henry Il. His path had been prepared for him long before, and he was extraordinarily fortunate in his opportunity. His favourable opportunity.A great revival of intelligence had already begun all over Europe, and a great revival of trade, no doubt largely owing to the lessons learned in the Crusades. Long-neglected books of Roman Law had been found, and French and Italian lawyers were reading them. Schools were increasing, and even ‘Universities’, of which Oxford was the first in England, were beginning. The towns had been gaining in riches in spite of the civil war; London, to which Henry I had given a ‘Charter’, allowing it to govern itself and keep its own customs, was even more ahead of the other English towns than it is to-day. The difference of race between Norman and Englishman was being forgotten. We were growing into one ‘people’. The worst followers of the worst barons had killed each other off during the war, or gone away to the Crusades. Henry had little difficulty in getting rid of those that remained, and knocking down their ramshackle castles.
Character of Henry Il.But great as the opportunity was, it would have been of no use if Henry had not been a very great man—one of the greatest kings who ever lived. His power of work, and of making other people work, was amazing; he seemed to have a hundred pairs of eyes. Laziness was to him the one unpardonable crime. For pomp, even for dignity, he cared nothing. He was cursed, as all kings of his race were, with the most frightful temper; but he was merciful and forgiving when his rage was over. Norman on the mothers side, English on the grandmother’s, he was the most French of Frenchmen by his father's family, the House of Anjou. He had just married Eleanor of Aquitaine, the greatest heiress in Europe, who owned all South-Western France, from the River Loire to the Pyrenees.
His foreign possessions really a burden to him.Aquitaine, or ‘Gascony’, or ‘Guienne’, as the southern part of it is called, was a land of small and very turbulent nobles, who could never get enough fighting. Even Henry never succeeded in keeping them in order. But of course, with all this land, and with the riches of England at his back, Henry ought to have been a much more powerful man than his ‘overlord’, the King of France. Yet the truth is, that all these different French provinces, Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, Aquitaine, were rather a trouble than an advantage to him. They cost more to keep in order than they brought in Hostility of England and France.in rents and taxes, and they led to continual quarrels, mostly about frontier castles, with the French King Louis VII and his successor, Philip II. Henry and his son, Richard I, in fact did well in keeping their huge loosely-knit bundle of provinces together as long as they did. John, who succeeded Richard, lost all the best parts of them at once.
For the Kings of France were doing just what our kings were doing; they were trying to make all Frenchmen feel that they were one people. So Henry, Richard and John were really fighting a losing battle in France. For the details of that battle I do not care two straws. Moreover, our sympathies ought to be on the side of the French Kings, unless they invaded England.
Henry II as Law-giver.What really matters to us is what Henry was doing in England. You may be sure that he gave no one any rest there, neither his many friends, nor his few foes. The greatest thing England owes to him is the system of Law, which really began in his reign, and has gone on being improved by skilful lawyers ever since. Till his reign, all the King’s servants, sheriffs, officers, bishops and the rest, had acted as judges, rent-collectors, soldiers, taxing-men without distinction; and the King’s Courts of Justice had been held wherever the King happened to be. But Henry picked out specially trained men for judges, and confined them to the one business of judging. He chose men who knew some Roman Law, and who would be able to improve our stupid. old-fashioned customs by its light. He swept away a great many of such customs, among other things the fines for murder, which he treated by hanging; he built prisons in every county, and kept offenders in them until the judges came round ‘on circuit’, as, you know, they still do four times a year. The judges gave these offenders a fair trial, in which some sort of ‘Jury’ of their neighbours had a hand; and if they were found guilty they were hanged—which surprised them a good deal. The King could not wholly put down the barons’ private courts of Justice, but he took away every shred of real power from them; his sheriffs, he said, were to go everywhere, no matter what privileges a baron might claim.
Another splendid thing which Henry did was to establish one coinage for the whole country, stamped at his royal mint; and woe it was to the man who ‘uttered’ false coins!
He trains the nation to war.As regards his army of freeholders, he compelled every man to keep arms in his house to be used when the sheriff called him to battle. A rich landowner had to be armed in complete chain-mail, to provide his own horses and to serve in the cavalry, and was called a ‘knight’. But even a man who possessed the small sum of £6 13s. 4d. had to provide himself with a steel cap, a neck-piece of mail and a spear; while every free man, in town or country, had to have a leather jacket, a steel cap and a spear. And this ‘territorial army’ was not only to fight, but to keep the peace also, to chase rogues and thieves, to watch at night at the town gates; in fact, as we should now say, to ‘assist the police’.
His taxes.As regards taxes, Henry did not demand huge sums from all his subjects without distinction of wealth, but he sent officials round the country, who called together the principal inhabitants of each village and town, and got them to say what their neighbours as well as themselves could afford to pay. So you see, by all these measures, King Henry interested his subjects in the government. He made them see that they had duties as well as rights, a fact which the poorer classes of Englishmen have almost wholly forgotten to-day.
His quarrel with Thomas Becket, 1164-70.But for one frightful stroke of ill-luck Henry might have left an England completely united. Hear the story of St. Thomas Becket.
The twelfth century was the ‘golden age’ of the Church. The aims of the popes, even of those popes who were most hostile to the growth of nations, were not entirely selfish. Christendom was to them one family which God had given them to rule. Kings were to be the earthly instruments of their will, to be petted as long as they obeyed, but scolded and even deposed when they did not. No king and no lay court of justice was to dare to touch a priest, much less to hang him if he committed murder or theft, which too many priests still did. Henry wanted to hang such priests. He was told of a hundred murders committed by priests in the first ten years of his reign, which had gone unpunished, because the Church said all priests were ‘sacred’. So he chose his favourite minister, Thomas Becket, already Chancellor of England, to be Archbishop of Canterbury. He believed that Thomas would help him to make one law for clergymen and laymen alike; but Thomas, as proud and hot-tempered a man as the King, had no sooner become Archbishop than he turned right round and supported the most extreme claims of the Church. He even went further than the Pope, who was most anxious not to quarrel with Henry. ‘The Church lands,’ he said, ‘should pay no taxes; as for hanging priests, he would not hear of it.’ Henry was naturally furious, especially when Thomas went abroad and stirred up the King of France and the Pope against him. After a long and weary quarrel Henry, in a fit of passion, used some rash words which some wicked courtiers interpreted to mean that they were to kill Thomas.Murder of Becket, 1170. They slipped away secretly from the King’s court and murdered the Archbishop in his own cathedral.
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‘Saint Thomas the Martyr.’Such a deed of horror was unknown since the days of the heathen Danes. Thomas at once became both martyr and saint, even in the eyes of those who had hated his pride while he lived. Men believed that miracles were worked at his tomb, that a touch of his bones would restore the dead to life. A pilgrimage his shrine at Canterbury became before long the duty of every pious Englishman.
The last baronial rebellion, 1174–5.But the worst result was that all the King’s attempts to bring the Churchmen under the law utterly failed; and the claims of the Church to be independent of the State actually increased for a century to come. All Henry's enemies also took the opportunity to jump on him at once. A fearful outbreak of the barons (who had been quiet for twenty years), both in England and Normandy, came to a head in 1174, and was supported by both the French and Scottish kings, by Henry's own eldest son (a vain young fool), and by Queen Eleanor herself. Henry’s throne rocked and tottered; but, of course, all good Englishmen stood stiffly for their King, and, when he had knelt in penitence at Becket’s tomb, and allowed the Canterbury monks to give him a sound flogging there, he triumphed over his enemies. He took the King of Scots prisoner, and compelled the rest of the barons to sue for mercy. This mercy he freely gave them. No one was hanged for the rebellion, and most people concerned got off with a fine.
Henry II's later years, 1175–89.His last years were again disturbed by revolts, but not in England. Philip II was the first of the really great French Kings, bent on uniting all Frenchmen; and he easily enticed, not only Henry's barons, but his three younger sons, Richard, Geoffrey and John, into rebellion. Henry died of a broken heart at their ingratitude in 1189.
His visit to lreland, 1171–2.One event of his reign must not be forgotten, his visit to Ireland in 1171–2. State of Ireland.St. Patrick, you may have heard, had banished the snakes from that island, but had not succeeded in banishing the murderers and thieves, who were worse than many snakes. In spite of some few settlements of Danish pirates and traders on the eastern coast, Ireland had remained purely Celtic and purely a pasture country. All wealth was reckoned in cows; Rome had never set foot there, so there was a king for every day in the week, and the sole amusement of such persons was to drive off each other’s cows, and to kill all who resisted. In Henry I’s time this had been going on for at least 700 years, and during the 700 that have followed much the same thing would have been going on, if the English Government had not occasionally interfered.
Well, in 1168, one of these wild Kings, being in more than usual trouble, came to Henry and asked for help. Henry said, ‘Oh, go and try some of my barons on the Welsh border; they are fine fighting-men. I have no objection to their going to help you.’ The Welsh border barons promptly went, and, of course, being well armed and trained, a few hundred of their soldiers simply drove everything before them in Ireland, and won, as their reward, enormous estates there. The King began to be anxious about the business, and so, in 1171, he sailed over to Waterford and spent half a year in Ireland. The Irish Kings hastened, one after another, to make complete submission to him; he confirmed his English subjects in their new possessions; he divided the island into counties, appointed sheriffs and Judges for it—and then he went home. He had made only a half-conquest, which is always a bad business, and the English he left behind him soon became as wild and barbarous as the Irishmen themselves.
Richard I, 1189–99.Henry was succeeded in all his vast dominions by his eldest surviving son, Richard I, ‘Richard the Lion Heart,’ ‘Richard Yea and Nay,’ so called because he spoke the truth. He found England at profound peace; his father's great lawyers and ministers continued to govern it for him until his death ten years later. He himself cared little for it, except for the money he could squeeze out of it to serve the two objects which really interested him. These were to deliver Jerusalem, which had again been taken by the Saracens, and to save his foreign provinces from being swallowed by the French King.
Richard on the Crusade; his quarrels with France.Richard was a most gallant soldier and a born leader of men in war; he was generous and forgiving; but of his father’s really great qualities he had very few. He had been spoilt as a child, and he remained a great, jolly, impatient child till his death. He and his rival, King Philip, at once set out on the Crusade in 1190, and quarrelled continually. Philip soon slipped off home, and began to grab Richard’s French provinces, with the aid of the treacherous John, Richard's youngest brother, who had stayed in England. John was the one unmitigated scoundrel in the whole family; and he rejoiced greatly when he heard that his brother, who had failed to deliver Jerusalem, had been taken captive on his way home from Palestine, and handed over to the unscrupulous German Emperor, Henry VI. This royal brigand demanded an enormous ransom for Richard, and of course heavy taxes had to be raised in England to pay him. But it did not interrupt the good peace, and Richard, who forgave his wicked brother directly he was free, spent the rest of his short reign in France, fighting King Philip, not altogether without success. He was killed at the siege of a small French castle in 1199. ,_p.71.jpg)
Loss of Normandy, 1205.By 1205, Normandy, Maine, Touraine, Anjou, the inheritance of the mighty Norman and Angevin races, had gone to France for good. And of the French possessions of England, only the far south-west remained.
Anger of the barons.The English barons, most of whom had owned lands in Normandy ever since 1066, were of course furious with their King, especially when he kept on screwing enormous sums of money from them, calling out large armies to fight and then running away without fighting. As for Aquitaine, none of them owned lands there, and they refused to defend it. John raved and cursed, and practised horrible cruelties on any enemies he could catch, and generally behaved in a most unkingly fashion. John’s quarrel with Pope Innocent III, 1206–13.But in 1206 he began quite a new quarrel with the English Church and the Pope. His cause was at first a good one, for it was about the appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Both the Pope and the monks at Canterbury had refused to accept the man whom John named as Archbishop; and the Pope had even appointed one Stephen Langton in his place. John swore a horrid oath that he would never receive Langton as Archbishop; and for five years he held his own. The Pope tried every weapon at his command; he ‘excommunicated’ John, that is to say, he cut him off from all Christian rites; he put England under an ‘interdict’, which meant that no one could be buried with the full burial service, no one married in church, no church bells rung, and in fact all the best religious services and sacraments were suspended. Finally, the Pope declared John deposed, and told Philip to go and depose him.
Now, much as Englishmen hated their tyrannical King, they hated still more the idea of an Italian priest dealing thus with the crown and liberty of England; and most honest men were prepared to support even John against Philip and the Pope.
John submits to the Pope, 1213.John, for his part, confiscated all Church property in England and bestowed it on a set of foreign favourites and parasites, mostly mercenary soldiers from Flanders. Then suddenly he gave away his own cause. In 1218 he became frightened, made the most abject submission to the Pope, and promised to hold his crown and country for the future as the Pope's ‘vassal’, and to pay tribute for it. Fury of Englishmen.This was too much for all Englishmen, and the country fairly boiled over with rage.
The barons lead the revolt of the nation, 1214, 1215.Yet ‘rebellion’ was a dreadful thing. John was rich, powerful, and held all the important castles of England in his own hands. The man who gave the English barons courage to resist was the very man over whom all this fuss had begun—Stephen Langton. He called meetings of the leading barons, and either drew up or got them to draw up a list of their grievances and those of other classes of Englishmen. This document was to be taken to the King and, if he refused to listen, the barons were to rebel. Nearly all the towns and most of the churchmen were on their side; yet they were only able to raise a little army of 2,000 men. Luckily John again lost his head and agreed to all their demands. The Great Charter of 1215.The document which they presented to him at Runnymede, near Windsor, in June, 1215, and which he signed (or rather, sealed), was called ‘Magna Charta’—the ‘Great Charter of Liberties’.
John soon repented of signing it, sent for his hireling soldiers, sent to his Holy Father’ the Pope (who at once absolved him from his oath to observe the Charter, and hurled dreadful curses at the rebel barons), and scattered the little national army like chaff before him. In despair some of the barons took the foolish step of calling in Prince Louis of France and offering him the English crown. Death of John, 1216.But within fifteen months England was saved. John, having grossly overeaten himself one night at Newark Abbey, died suddenly in October, 1216.
Contents of the Great Charter.If you will consider the Great Charter for a few minutes you will see what a long road towards union and peace England had travelled since the last barons’ rebellion in 1174. In that year the fight had been one of barons against king and people; now it was one of barons and people against king. All classes of the nation suffered, and had called on the barons to lead them. They could not have done this if the barons had still held their lands in Normandy; and so it was the loss of those lands that finally made the barons Englishmen.
The nation had grown up; it had ‘come of age’. What it wanted was to make its king give security that he would not oppress it in future. So, by the Great Charter, it proposed to ‘tie his hands’ in several ways. ,_p.74.jpg)
KING JOHN SIGNS THE GREAT CHARTER
And so on. No doubt to many of the barons of this year, 1215, it was their own grievances of which they were thinking most—the grinding taxes, the loss of their Norman lands, their cruelly murdered Kinsfolk. But in order to get these grievances redressed they were obliged to ask also for the redress of the grievances from which other classes were suffering; even ‘villeins’ are carefully protected by one of the articles of the Charter; even to the hated Scots and Welsh ‘Justice’ is to be done. To the Church much more than justice is to be done; it is to be ‘made free’, which, I fear, means that the Kings are not to appoint its bishops. But later Kings always found a way of avoiding this restriction.
The Reeds of Runnymede.
Runnymede, June 15, 1210.
What say the reeds at Runnymede?
The lissom reeds that give and take,
That bend so far, but never break,
They keep the sleepy Thames awake
With tales of John at Runnymede.
Oh hear the reeds at Runnymede:—
‘You mustn’t sell, delay, deny,
A freeman’s right or liberty,
It wakes the stubborn Englishry,
We saw ‘em roused at Runnymede!
With little thought of praise or blame,
But resolute to play the game,
They lumbered up to Runnymede;
And there they launched in solid line,
The first attack on Right Divine—
The curt, uncompromising “Sign!”
That settled John at Runnymede.
Your rights were won at Runnymede!
No freeman shall be fined or bound,
Or dispossessed of freehold ground,
Except by lawful Judgement found
And passed upon him by his peers!—
Forget not, after all these years,
The charter signed at Runnymede.
Too rude a hand on English ways,
The whisper wakes, the shudder plays,
Across the reeds at Runnymede.
And Thames, that knows the moods of kings,
And crowds and priests and suchlike things,
Rolls deep and dreadful as he brings
Their warning down from Runnymede!
Henry III, 1216–72.John's heir was a boy of nine years, who was to reign for fifty-six years as Henry III. A wise Regent was quickly chosen for him, William Marshall, Earl of Pem- broke, the French prince was still in the land, but his friends soon deserted him, and he was glad to make a treaty and go away. The Pope supported the new government, for by John’s submission the young King had become his ‘vassal’. The power of the Pope.The Pope expected to make a good thing out of it, and he intended Henry to help him, which Henry, when he grew up, was only too ready to do. Character of Henry III.For the King, with many good qualities, such as piety and mercy, with much learning and good taste for art and building, was quite un-English. He was the first king, since Edward the Confessor, who had leaned wholly upon foreign favourites and despised his own sturdy people. He was frightfully extravagant, and a natural, though not an intentional liar. England was to him only a very rich farm, out of which he could squeeze for himself and our ‘Holy Father’ the Pope at Rome, cash, more cash, and ever more and more cash. His own share of it he spent on building beautiful churches, such as Westminster Abbey, and in useless wars with his noble overlord, King Louis IX of France, who always beat him, but allowed him to retain Southern Aquitaine, that is, Gascony. Down till about 1232 Henry governed by native English or Norman ministers; and, so long as Langton lived, the Pope did not Interfere much. Extravagance of Henry III.But soon after that the King's extravagance and the Popes increasing demands for money began to be felt, and the nation grumbled. The barons were now thorough Englishmen, who had no interests outside England at all. They began to wonder whether Magna Charta was a mere bit of waste paper or not; the King observed few of its provisions, though he constantly swore to observe them. In fact, he published it at the beginning of his reign with several important articles omitted. Yet it was difficult to catch him out. He was not in the least a ‘gory tyrant’, like his father; he simply maddened every one by his useless extravagance, by never paying his debts, and by never keeping his promises. Remonstrance of the barons.At last the barons found that he had promised the Pope an enormous sum of money, in return for which the Pope had promised to one of Henrys sons the crown of Sicily. Sicily, forsooth! What had England to do with an island in the Mediterranean, while French pirates were burning the towns on our south coast without a single King’s ship being sent to prevent them?
National rising, 1257–65.This was in 1257. The barons met the King in council after council and utterly refused to pay a penny for the Sicilian job. Endless documents were drawn up for the King to sign. He signed them quite readily, promised whatever he was asked, but never kept his word. Simon de Montfort.The chief spokesman of the barons was one Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester. The nation and all the best of the churchmen rallied heartily to Simons side, especially the men of London, and things ended in a kind of war; where, at the battle of Lewes in 1264, the King and his eldest son, Prince Edward, fell into Earl Simons hands. For a year Simon governed in the King’s name; but he was a hot-headed and rather grasping man, and quarrelled with his own best supporters. He even called in the aid of the Welsh. Prince Edward learns a lesson.At last Prince Edward escaped from captivity, rallied his father’s friends, defeated and slew Simon at Evesham, and put his father back on the throne. Little vengeance was taken; and the last seven years of Henry's reign were peaceful, so peaceful indeed, that, though Prince Edward was away in Palestine when Henry died in 1272, no one questioned his right to be crowned king when he returned.
The Friars in England.Two things rendered Henry's long reign memorable: the coming of the Friars, and the beginning of Parliament. The Friars were the last offshoot of the dying tree of monkery. Wise people began to see that a monk who shut himself up in a monastery might no doubt save his own soul, but could do little for the souls of other people. What was wanted was men who could go about in the world preaching and doing good. Two great men, St. Dominic, a Spaniard, and St. Francis, an Italian, founded brotherhoods of ‘Friars’ (the word means brothers), who were to fulfil this mission. It was a splendid ideal, and St. Francis is one of the most beautiful figures in history. The Friars came and lodged with the very poor in the filthy slums, and did such work as our clergy are doing to-day in all great cities. Others walked all over the land, preaching in the streets and villages. But soon this movement also began to fail; for pious laymen heaped lands and riches on these brotherhoods, until in little more than a century they had become as rich and as worldly as the monks. Moreover, the ordinary parish and town priests, who suffered even more than the laymen from the greedy demands of the Pope, began to think of monks and friars alike as mere agents of the Pope, as something foreign to the ‘national Church’. Hence, after 1300, there were few gifts of land to monks or friars; Schools and colleges.people preferred rather to found schools and colleges. Both at Oxford and Cambridge colleges had been founded before that year.
The Germ of Parliament.The second thing, the beginning of Parliament, is even more important. Ever since Magna Charta had been signed the idea that the nation ought in some way to control the King was in the air; and the question was what shape this control should take. As you know, Parliament to-day consists of two Houses, Lords and Commons. The House of Lords.The House of Lords is a direct descendant of the barons of the thirteenth century. The eldest son of a baron, earl, marquis or duke inherits the right to receive from the King a letter calling him by name to Parliament whenever it meets. The King can ‘create’ a man a baron, and the creation carries with it this right to receive the letter of summons. Perhaps there were nearly two hundred great barons in Henry II’s reign; there are now over six hundred. The bishops always received a similar letter of summons, and, until the Reformation, so did the leading abbots. It was in the reign of Henry III that this Great Council began to take its shape. The King no doubt disliked it, for he disliked all control, and its business certainly was to control him. But he found that he could not do without it.
The House of Commons.The origin of the House of Commons is quite different. It, to-day, also has over six hundred members, chosen from different towns and districts of the United Kingdom, by all persons who have the right to vote. Now, before the end of the reign of Henry Il, as I told you, the King had been in the habit of sending officials into each county and town to consult with the chief landowners and citizens, and to discover what amount of taxes that county or city could bear. These people met in the old Saxon court of justice, called the ‘County Court’, to which all free landowners ought to come; and they elected ‘knights’ or gentlemen to speak for them. In Henry III’s reign the brilliant idea occurred to somebody, ‘Why not send these elected knights or gentlemen to meet the King himself in some general assembly? Each of them can speak for his own county, and the King will get a fair idea of what amount of money the whole of England is able to give him.’
The first Parliaments in the reign of Henry III.Now no general assembly other than that of the Great Council of barons existed, so the elected knights from the counties and the elected citizens from the towns used occasionally to be called to the Great Council, and there met the barons and the King. Then there would be a great Talking or ‘Parliamentum’ (French parler, to talk). Such knights and citizens would naturally grow bolder when they found themselves met together, and found that the barons were much the same sort of fellows as themselves, and had the same ideas about the King’s extravagance and his ridiculous foreign wars. It was on such occasions that they thoroughly realized that the barons were their natural leaders. Soon, they too would begin to present petitions about the grievances of their districts, and to beg the King to make particular laws. Earl Simon has got much fame because, while he was ruling in 1265, there met, for the first time, in one assembly, barons, bishops, abbots, ‘knights of the shire’ and citizens. You will see in the next chapter how Edward I shaped these assemblies into regular Parliaments, and what powers they won for themselves.
My Father’s Chair.
Priest and People and Lords and Crown.
I sit on all of ’em fair and square,
And that is the reason it don’t break down.
To carry my weight when I sit me down,
I want all four of em under me—
Priest and People and Lords and Crown.
Priest, nor People, nor Lords, nor Crown—
And I never tilt in my chair, my son,
And that is the reason it don't break down!
Remember your Father's habits and rules,
Sit on all four legs, fair and square,
And never be tempted by one-legged stools!