avoided all unnecessary wars, and got on well with the Scottish and sometimes even with the

  French kings.

  But his only son was drowned in the wreck of the White Ship in crossing the Channel; and when Henry died, in 1135, his heir was his only daughter, Matilda, whose second husband was

  Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou in France.

  Now no woman had ever reigned in England,

  and so, when Count Stephen of Blois, son of

  William I’s daughter Adela, appeared in London and claimed the crown, he was welcomed as,

  King, although he and most of the barons had already promised to uphold the claim of Matilda. Stephen was known to be a kind-hearted fellow who would not rule too strictly; he was in fact just like his uncle Robert.

  Alas for England! Matilda, naturally enough,

  claimed her “ rights,” and civil war began almost at once. Nothing could have suited the baronsbetter. They changed sides continually and fought now for Stephen and now for Matilda,

  as long as there was any one left to fight. “For nineteen winters,” says the old English chronicler, who was still writing in his monastery at Peterboro, “this went on.” Castles sprang up everywhere, “full of devils,” who tortured men for their riches, made war for sport, burned towns and corn crops, coined their own money and compelled the poor to take it in payment.

  At the end of the reign it was said there were over three hundred unlicensed castles in England. Poor Stephen did his best; he flew hither and thither besieging these castles, but seldom had patience to take one. He and Matilda

  (who was just as bad, and a horrid female into the bargain) could only think of bribing the great barons to fight for them by heaping lands,

  riches, and offices on them; and, between the pair of them, the treasures of the crown of

  England were soon spent. The King of Scots,

  David I, who was Matilda’s cousin, rushed in at the very beginning with a great army of wild men, and, though the Yorkshiremen gave him a sound thrashing at the “Battle of the Standard,” near Northallerton (1138), he stuck to

  Cumberland, and Stephen soon tried to bribe him by giving him Northumberland also. So,

  as the old chronicler says, “it seemed to Eng-lishmen as if God slept and all His saints.” The

  Church alone remained a refuge for the oppressed, and, naturally enough, the Church came out at the end of it all, not only much richer, but with much more power over the hearts of men.

  At last, in 1152, young Henry, the son of Matilda and Geoffrey, made peace at Wallingford with Stephen, who was now an old and wornout man. Henry was to govern England as chief minister while Stephen lived, and then to succeed to the crown. And in two years

  Stephen died and Henry II became King of

  England.

  CHAPTER IV

  HENRY II TO HENRY III,

  1154-1272: THE BEGINNINGS OF

  PARLIAMENT

  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, and 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 II. His path had been prepared for him long before, and he was extraordinarily fortunate in his 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 4’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.

  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 mother’s 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 Southwestern France, from the River Loire to the

  Pyrenees.

  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 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 theydid. 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.

  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 thefines 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!

  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 13^. M. 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 tofight, 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.”

  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.

  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 farther 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. They slipped away secretly from the

  King’s court and murdered the Archbishop in his own cathedral.

  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 to his shrine at Canterbury became before long the duty of every pious Englishman.

  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 therebellion, and most people concerned got off with a fine.

  His last six 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.

  One event of his reign must not be forgotten,

  his visit to Ireland in 1171-2. 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 reck,

  oned 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 II’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, beingin 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 halfconquest, which is always a bad business, and the English he left behind him soon became as wild and barbarous as the Irishmen themselves.

  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 moneyhe 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 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 spoiled 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, by 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.

  The proper heir to the throne was Arthur of Brittany, a mere boy, son of Henry II’s third son Geoffrey, who had died in 1186. But John was in England and seized the crown without much difficulty. Of course he quarrelled at once with his old friend Philip, and Philip knew that his own time and that of France had now come.

  John did, indeed, get hold of little Arthur and had him murdered; but then dawdled away his time in small sieges and useless raids in France,

  while Philip overran all John’s French dominions except Aquitaine with perfect ease.

  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.

  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