The History of England from the Norman Conquest to the Death of John (1066-1216) Part 8

Against Anjou Henry built or strengthened certain fortresses along the border and waited the course of events.

On November 4, 1112, an advantage fell to Henry which may have gone far to secure him the remarkable terms of peace with which the war was closed. He arrested Robert of Belleme, his constant enemy and the enemy of all good men, "incomparable in all forms of evil since the beginning of Christian days." He had come to meet the king at Bonneville, to bring a message from Louis, thinking that Henry would be obliged to respect his character as an envoy. Probably the king took the ground that by his conduct Robert had forfeited all rights, and was to be treated practically as a common outlaw. At any rate, he ordered his arrest and trial. On three specific counts--that he had acted unjustly toward his lord, that summoned three times to appear in court for trial he had not come, and that as the king's viscount he had failed to render account of the revenues he had collected--he was condemned and sentenced to imprisonment. On Henry's return to England he was carried over and kept in Wareham castle, where he was still alive in 1130. The Norman historian Orderic records that this action of Henry's met with universal approval and was greeted with general rejoicing.

During Lent of the next year, 1113, Henry made formal peace with both his enemies, the king of France and the Count of Anjou. The peace with the latter was first concluded. It was very possibly Fulk's refusal to recognize Henry's overlords.h.i.+p of Maine that occasioned the war. To this he now a.s.sented. He did homage for the county, and received invest.i.ture of it from the hand of the king. He also promised the hand of his daughter Matilda to Henry's son William. Henry, on his side, restored to favour the Norman allies of Fulk. A few days later a treaty was made at Gisors, with the king of France. Louis formally conceded to Henry the overlords.h.i.+p of Belleme, which had not before depended upon the duchy of Normandy, and that of Maine, and Britanny. In the case of Maine and of Britanny this was the recognition of long-standing claims and of accomplished facts, for Count Alan Fergant of Britanny, as well as Fulk of Anjou, had already become the va.s.sal of Henry, and had obtained the hand of a natural daughter of the king for his son Conan, who in this year became count. But the important lords.h.i.+p of Belleme was a new cession. It was not yet in Henry's hands, nor had it been reckoned as a part of Normandy, though the lords of Belleme had been also Norman barons. Concessions such as these, forming with Normandy the area of many a kingdom, were made by a king like Louis VI, only under the compulsion of necessity. They mark the triumph of Henry's skill, of his vigorous determination, and of his ready disregard of the legal rights of others, if they would not conform to his ideas of proper conduct or fit into his system of government. The occupation of Belleme required a campaign.

William Talvas, the son of Robert, while himself going to defend his mother's inheritance of Ponthieu, had left directions with the va.s.sals of Belleme for its defence, but the campaign was a short one. Henry, a.s.sisted by his new va.s.sal, the Count of Anjou, and by his nephew, Theobald of Blois, speedily reduced city and lords.h.i.+p to submission.

Orderic Vitalis, who was living in Normandy at this time, in the monastery of St. Evroul, declares that following this peace, made in the spring of 1113, for five years, Henry governed his kingdom and his duchy on the two sides of the sea with great tranquillity. These years, to the great insurrection of the Norman barons in 1118, were not entirely undisturbed, but as compared with the period which goes before, or with that which follows, they deserve the historian's description. One great army was led into Wales in 1114, and the Welsh princes were forced to renew their submission. Henry was apparently interested in the slow incorporation of Wales in England which was going forward, but prudently recognized the difficulties of attempting to hasten the process by violence. He was ready to use the Church, that frequent medieval engine of conquest, and attempted with success, both before this date and later, to introduce English bishops into old Welsh sees. From the early part of this reign also dates the great Flemish settlement in Pembrokes.h.i.+re, which was of momentous influence on all that part of Wales.

These years were also fully occupied with controversies in the Church, whose importance for the state Henry clearly recognized. Out of the conflict over invest.i.tures, regarded from the practical side, the Norman monarchy had emerged, as we have seen, in triumph, making but one slight concession, and that largely a matter of form. From the struggle with the empire on the same issue, which was at this date still unsettled, the Church was destined to gain but little more, perhaps an added point of form, depending for its real value on the spirit with which the final agreement was administered. In the matter of invest.i.tures, the Church could claim but little more than a drawn battle on any field; and yet, in that great conflict with the monarchies of Europe into which the papacy had been led by the genius of Hildebrand, it had gained a real and great victory in all that was of the most vital importance. The pope was no longer the creature and servant of the emperor; he was not even a bishop of the empire. In the estimation of all Christendom, he occupied an equal throne, exercised a co-ordinate power, and appeared even more directly as the representative of the divine government of the world. Under his rule was an empire far more extensive than that which the emperor controlled, coming now to be closely centralized with all the machinery of government, legal, judicial, and administrative, highly organized and pervaded from the highest to the lowest ranks with a uniform theory of the absolute right of the ruler and of the duty of unquestioning obedience which the most perfect secular absolutism would strive in vain to secure. To have transformed the Church, which the emperor Henry III had begun to reform in 1046, into that which survived the last year of his dynasty, was a work of political genius as great as history records.

It was not before the demand of the pope in the matter of invest.i.ture that the Norman absolute government of the Church went down. It fell because the Norman theory of the national Church, closely under the control of the state in every field of its activity, a part of the state machinery, and a valuable a.s.sistant in the government of the nation, was undermined and destroyed by a higher, and for that age a more useful, conception. When the idea of the Church as a world-wide unity, more closely bound to its theocratic head than to any temporal sovereign, and with a mission and responsibility distinct from those of the state, took possession of the body of the clergy, as it began to do in the reign of Henry, it was impossible to maintain any longer the separateness of the Norman Church. But the incorporation of the Norman and English churches in the papal monarchy meant the slipping from the king's hands of power in many individual cases, which the first two Norman kings had exercised without question, and which even the third had continued to exercise.

The struggle of York to free itself from the promise of obedience to Canterbury was only one of the many channels through which these new ideas entered the kingdom. A new tide of monasticism had arisen on the continent, which did not spend itself even with the northern borders of England. The new orders and the new spirit found many abiding places in the kingdom, and drew laity as well as clergy under their strong influence. This was especially, though not alone, true of the Augustinian canons, who possessed some fifty houses in England at the close of Henry's reign, and in the later years of his life, of the Cistercians, with whose founding an English saint, Stephen Harding, had had much to do, and some of whose monasteries founded in this period, Tintern, Rievaulx, Furness, and Fountains, are still familiar names, famous for the beauty of their ruins. This new monasticism had been founded wholly in the ideas of the new ecclesiastical monarchy, and was an expression of them. The monasteries it created were organized, not as parts of the state in which they were situated, but as parts of a great order, international in its character, free from local control, and, though its houses were situated in many lands, forming almost an independent state under the direct sovereignty of the pope. The new monarchical papacy, which emerged from the conflicts of this period, occupied Christendom with its garrisons in these monastic houses, and every house was a source from which its ruling ideas spread widely abroad.

A new education was also beginning in this same period, and was growing in definiteness of content and of organization, in response to a demand which was becoming eager. At many centres in Europe groups of scholars were giving formal lectures on the knowledge of the day, and were attracting larger and larger numbers of students by the fame of their eloquence, or by the stimulus of their new method. The beginnings of Oxford as a place of teachers, as well as of Paris, reach back into this time. The ambitious young man, who looked forward to a career in the Church, began to feel the necessity of getting the training which these new schools could impart. The number of students whom we can name, who went from England to Paris or elsewhere to study, is large for the time; but if we possessed a list of all the English students, at home or abroad, of this reign, we should doubtless estimate the force of this influence more highly, even in the period of its beginning. For the ideas which now reigned in the Church pervaded the new education as they did the new monasticism. There was hardly a source, indeed, from which the student could learn any other doctrine, as there has remained none in the learning of the Roman Church to the present day. The entire literature of the Church, its rapidly forming new philosophy and theology, its already greatly developed canon law, breathed only the spirit of a divinely inspired centralization. And the student who returned, very likely to rapid promotion in the English Church, did not bring back these ideas for himself alone. He set the fas.h.i.+on of thinking for his less fortunate fellows.

It was by influences like these that the gradual and silent transformation was wrought which made of the English Church a very different thing at the end of these thirty-five years from what it had been at the beginning of the reign. The first two Norman kings had reigned over a Church which knew no other system than strict royal control. Henry I continued to exercise to the end of his reign, with only slight modification and the faint beginnings of change, the same prerogatives, but it was over a Church whose officers had been trained in an opposing system, and now profoundly disbelieved in his rights. How long would it avail the Norman monarchy anything to have triumphed in the struggle of invest.i.tures, when it could no longer find the bishop to appoint who was not thoroughly devoted to the highest papal claims? The answer suggested, in its extreme form, is too strong a statement for the exact truth; for in whatever age, or under whatever circ.u.mstances, a strong king can maintain himself, there he can always find subservient tools. But the interested service of individuals is a very different foundation of power from the traditional and unquestioning obedience of a cla.s.s. The history of the next age shows that the way had been prepared for rapid changes, when political conditions would permit; and the grandson of the first Henry found himself obliged to yield, in part at least, to demands of the Church entirely logical in themselves, but unheard of in his grandfather's time.

[18] Eadmer, p. 172.

[19] Liebermann, Quadripart.i.tus, p. 155.

[20] Anselm, Epist. iv. 50, 51; Luchaire, Louis VI, Annales, No. 31.

[21] See American Historical Review, viii, 478.

[22] Luchaire, Louis VI, Annales, p. cxv.

CHAPTER VIII

THE KING'S FOREIGN INTERESTS

We need not enter into the details of the long struggle between Canterbury and York. The archbishopric of Canterbury was vacant for five years after the death of Anselm; its revenues went to support the various undertakings of the king. In April, 1114, Ralph of Escures, Bishop of Rochester, was chosen Anselm's successor. The archbishopric of York had been vacant only a few months, when it was filled, later in the summer, by the appointment of Thurstan, one of the king's chaplains. The question of the obligation of the recently elected Archbishop of York to bind himself to obedience to the primate of Britain, whether settled as a principle or as a special case, by an English council or by the king or under papal authority, arose anew with every new appointment. In the period which follows the appointment of Thurstan, a new element of interest was added to the dispute by the more deliberate policy of the pope to make use of it to gain a footing for his authority in England, and to weaken the unity and independence of the English Church. This attempt led to a natural alliance of parties, in which, while the issue was at bottom really the same, the lines of the earlier invest.i.ture conflict were somewhat rearranged. The pope supported the claim of York, while the king defended the right of Canterbury as bound up with his own.

At an important meeting of the great council at Salisbury, in March, 1116, the king forced upon Thurstan the alternative of submission to Canterbury or resignation. The barons and prelates of the realm had been brought together to make formal recognition of the right to the succession of Henry's son William, now fourteen years of age. Already in the previous summer this had been done in Normandy, the barons doing homage and swearing fealty to the prince. Now the English barons followed the example, and, by the same ceremony, the strongest tie known to the feudal world, bound themselves to accept the son as their lord on the death of his father. The prelates, for their part, took oath that if they should survive Henry, they would recognize William as king, and then do homage to him in good faith. The incident is interesting less as an example of this characteristic feudal method of securing the succession, for this had been employed since the Conquest both in Normandy and in England, than because we are told that on this occasion the oath was demanded, not merely of all tenants in chief, but of all inferior va.s.sals. If this statement may be accepted, and there is no reason to doubt it, we may conclude that the practice established by the Conqueror at an earlier Salisbury a.s.sembly had been continued by his sons. This was a moment when Henry was justified in expressing his will, even on a matter of Church government, in peremptory command, and when no one was likely to offer resistance. Thurstan chose to surrender the archbishopric, and promised to make no attempt to recover it; but apparently the renunciation was not long regarded as final on either side. He was soon after this with the king in Normandy, but he was refused the desired permission to go to Rome, a journey which Archbishop Ralph soon undertook, that he might try the influence of his presence there in favour of the cause of Canterbury and against other pretensions of the pope.

From the date of this visit to Normandy, in the spring of 1116, Henry's continental interests mix themselves with those of the absolute ruler of the English Church, and he was more than once forced to choose upon which side he would make some slight concession or waive some right for the moment. Slowly the sides were forming themselves and the opposing interests growing clear, of a great conflict for the dominion of northern France, a conflict forced upon the English king by the necessity of defending the position he had gained, rather than sought by him in the spirit of conquest, even when he seemed the aggressor; a conflict in which he was to gain the victory in the field and in diplomacy, but to be overcome by the might of events directed by no human hand and not to be resisted by any.

The peace between Henry and Louis, made in the spring of 1113, was broken by Henry's coming to the aid of his nephew, Theobald of Blois. Theobald had seized the Count of Nevers on his return from a.s.sisting Louis in a campaign in the duchy of France in 1115. The cause was bad, but Henry could not afford to see so important an ally as his nephew crushed by his enemies, especially as his dominions were of peculiar strategical value in any war with the king of France. To Louis's side gathered, as the war developed, those who had reason from their position to fear what looked like the policy of expansion of this new English power in north-western France, especially the Counts of Flanders and of Anjou. The marriage of Henry's son William with Fulk's daughter had not yet taken place, and the Count of Anjou might well believe--particularly from the close alliance of Henry with the rival power of Blois--that he had more to fear than to hope for from the spread of the Norman influence. At the same time the division began to show itself among the Norman barons, of those who were faithful to Henry and those who preferred the succession of Robert's son William; and it grew more p.r.o.nounced as the war went on, for Louis took up the cause of William as the rightful heir of Normandy. In doing this he began the policy which the French kings followed for so many years, and on the whole with so little advantage, of fomenting the quarrels in the English royal house and of separating if possible the continental possessions from the English.

On Henry's side were a majority of the Norman barons and the counts of Britanny and of Blois. For the first time, also, appeared upon the stage of history in this war Henry's other nephew, Stephen, who was destined to do so much evil to England and to Henry's plans before his death. His uncle had already made him Count of Mortain. The lords.h.i.+p of Belleme, which Henry had given to Theobald, had been by him transferred to Stephen in the division of their inheritance. It was probably not long after this that Henry procured for him the hand of Matilda, heiress of the county of Boulogne, and thus extended his own influence over that important territory on the borders of Flanders. France, Flanders, and Anjou certainly had abundant reason to fear the possible combination into one power of Normandy, Britanny, Maine, Blois, and Boulogne, and that a power which, however pacific in disposition, showed so much tendency to expansion. For France, at least, the cause of this war was not the disobedience of a va.s.sal, nor was it to be settled by the siege and capture of border castles.

The war which followed was once more not a war of battles. Armies, large for the time, were collected, but they did little more than make threatening marches into the enemy's country. In 1118 the revolt of the Norman barons, headed by Amaury of Montfort, who now claimed the county of Evreux, a.s.sumed proportions which occasioned the king many difficulties. This was a year of misfortunes for him. The Count of Anjou, the king of France, the Count of Flanders, each in turn invaded some part of Normandy, and gained advantages which Henry could not prevent. Baldwin of Flanders, however, returned home with a wound from an arrow, of which he shortly died. In the spring of this year Queen Matilda died, praised by the monastic chroniclers to the last for her good deeds. A month later Henry's wisest counsellor, Robert of Meulan, died also, after a long life spent in the service of the Conqueror and of his sons. The close of the year saw no turn of the tide in favour of Henry. Evreux was captured in October by Amaury of Montfort, and afterwards Alencon by the Count of Anjou.

The year 1119, which was destined to close in triumph for Henry, opened no more favourably. The important castle of Les Andelys, commanding the Norman Vexin, was seized by Louis, aided by treachery. But before the middle of the year, Henry had gained his first great success. He induced the Count of Anjou, by what means we do not know,--by money it was thought by some at the time,--to make peace with him, and to carry out the agreement for the marriage of his daughter with the king's son. The county of Maine was settled on the young pair, virtually its transfer to Henry. At the same time, Henry granted to William Talvas, perhaps as one of the conditions of the treaty, the Norman possessions which had belonged to his father, Robert of Belleme. In the same month, June, 1119, Baldwin of Flanders died of the wound which he had received in Normandy, and was succeeded by his nephew, Charles the Good, who reversed Baldwin's policy and renewed the older relations with England. The sieges of castles, the raiding and counter-raiding of the year, amounted to little until, on August 20, while each was engaged in raiding, the opposing armies commanded by the two kings in person unexpectedly found themselves in the presence of one another. The battle of Bremule, the only encounter of the war which can be called a battle, followed. Henry and his men again fought on foot, as at Tinchebrai, with a small reserve on horseback. The result was a complete victory for Henry. The French army was completely routed, and a large number of prisoners was taken, though the character which a feudal battle often a.s.sumed from this time on is attributed to this one, in the fact reported that in the fighting and pursuit only three men were killed.

A diplomatic victory not less important followed the battle of Bremule by a few weeks. The pope was now in France. His predecessor, Gelasius II, had been compelled to flee from Italy by the successes of the Emperor Henry V, and had died at Cluny in January, 1119, on his way to the north.

The cardinals who had accompanied him elected in his stead the Archbishop of Vienne, who took the name of Calixtus II. Gelasius in his short and unfortunate reign had attempted to interfere with vigour in the dispute between York and Canterbury, and had summoned both parties to appear before him for the decision of the case. This was in Henry's year of misfortunes, 1118, and he was obliged to temporize. The early death of Gelasius interrupted his plan, but only until Calixtus II was ready to go on with it. He called a council of the Church to meet at Reims in October, to which he summoned the English bishops, and where he proposed to decide the question of the obedience of York to Canterbury. Henry granted a reluctant consent to the English bishops to attend this council, but only on condition that they would allow no innovations in the government of the English Church. To Thurstan of York, to whom he had restored the temporalities of his see, under the pressure of circ.u.mstances nearly two years before, he granted permission to attend on condition that he would not accept consecration as archbishop from the pope. This condition was at once violated, and Thurstan was consecrated by the pope on October 19. Henry immediately ordered that he should not be allowed to return to any of the lands subject to his rule.

At this council King Louis of France, defeated in the field and now without allies, appealed in person to the pope for the condemnation of the king of England. He is said, by Orderic Vitalis who was probably present at the council and heard him speak, to have recited the evil deeds of Henry, from the imprisonment of Robert to the causes of the present war. The pope himself was in a situation where he needed to proceed with diplomatic caution, but he promised to seek an interview with Henry and to endeavour to bring about peace. This interview took place in November, at Gisors, and ended in the complete discomfiture of the pope. Henry was now in a far stronger position than he had been at the beginning of the year, and to the requests of Calixtus he returned definite refusals or vague and general answers of which nothing was to be made. The pope was even compelled to recognize the right of the English king to decide when papal legates should be received in the kingdom.

Henry was, however, quite willing to make peace. He had won over Louis's allies, defeated his attempt to gain the a.s.sistance of the pope, and finally overcome the revolted Norman barons. He might reasonably have demanded new advantages in addition to those which had been granted him in the peace of 1113, but all that marks this treaty is the legal recognition of his position in Normandy. Homage was done to Louis for Normandy, not by Henry himself, for he was a king, but by his son William for him. It is probable that at no previous date would this ceremony have been acceptable, either to Louis or to Henry. On Louis's part it was not merely a recognition of Henry's right to the duchy of Normandy, but it was also a formal abandonment of William c.l.i.to, and an acceptance of William, Henry's son, as the heir of his father. This act was accompanied by a renewal of the homage of the Norman barons to William, whether made necessary by the numerous rebellions of the past two years, or desirable to perfect the legal chain, now that William had been recognized as heir by his suzerain, a motive that would apply to all the barons.

This peace was made sometime during the course of the year 1120. In November Henry was ready to return to England, and on the 25th he set sail from Barfleur, with a great following. Then suddenly came upon him, not the loss of any of the advantages he had lately gained nor any immediate weakening of his power, but the complete collapse of all that he had looked forward to as the ultimate end of his policy. His son William embarked a little later than his father in the White s.h.i.+p, with a brilliant company of young relatives and n.o.bles. They were in a very hilarious mood, and celebrated the occasion by making the crew drunk.

Probably they were none too sober themselves; certainly Stephen of Blois was saved to be king of England in his cousin's place, by withdrawing to another vessel when he saw the condition of affairs on the White s.h.i.+p.

It was night and probably dark. About a mile and a half from Barfleur the s.h.i.+p struck a rock, and quickly filled and sank. It was said that William would have escaped if he had not turned back at the cries of his sister, Henry's natural daughter, the Countess of Perche. All on board were drowned except a butcher of Rouen. Never perished in any similar calamity so large a number of persons of rank. Another child of Henry's, his natural son Richard, his niece Matilda, sister of Theobald and Stephen, a nephew of the Emperor Henry V, Richard, Earl of Chester, and his brother, the end of the male line of Hugh of Avranches, and a crowd of others of only lesser rank. Orderic Vitalis records that he had heard that eighteen ladies perished, who were the daughters, sisters, nieces, or wives of kings or earls. Henry is said to have fallen to the ground in a faint when the news was told him, and never to have been the same man again.

But if Henry could no longer look forward to the permanence in the second generation of the empire which he had created, he was not the man to surrender even to the blows of fate. The succession to his dominions of Robert's son William, who had been so recently used by his enemies against him, but who was now the sole male heir of William the Conqueror, was an intolerable idea. In barely more than a month after the death of his son, the king took counsel with the magnates of the realm, at a great council in London, in regard to his remarriage. In less than another month the marriage was celebrated. Henry's second wife was Adelaide, daughter of Geoffrey, Duke of Lower Lorraine, a va.s.sal of his son-in-law, the emperor, and his devoted supporter, as well as a prince whose alliance might be of great use in any future troubles with France or Flanders. This marriage was made chiefly in hope of a legitimate heir, but it was a childless marriage, and Henry's hope was disappointed.

For something more than two years after this fateful return of the king to England, his dominions enjoyed peace scarcely broken by a brief campaign in Wales in 1121. At the end of 1120, Archbishop Thurstan, for whose sake the pope was threatening excommunication and interdict, was allowed to return to his see, where he was received with great rejoicing.

But the dispute with Canterbury was not yet settled. Indeed, he had scarcely returned to York when he was served with notice that he must profess, for himself at least, obedience to Canterbury, as his predecessors had done. This he succeeded in avoiding for a time, and at the beginning of October, in 1122, Archbishop Ralph of Canterbury died, not having gained his case. An attempt of Calixtus II to send a legate to England, contrary to the promise he had made to Henry at Gisors, was met and defeated by the king with his usual diplomatic skill, so far as the exercise of any legatine powers is concerned, though the legate was admitted to England and remained there for a time. In the selection of a successor to Ralph of Canterbury a conflict arose between the monastic chapter of Christ church and the bishops of the province, and was decided undoubtedly according to the king's mind in favour of the latter, by the election of William of Corbeil, a canon regular. Another episcopal appointment of these years ill.u.s.trates the growing importance in the kingdom of the great administrative bishop, Roger of Salisbury, who seems to have been the king's justiciar, or chief representative, during his long absences in Normandy. The long pontificate of Robert Bloet, the brilliant and worldly Bishop of Lincoln, closed at the beginning of 1123 by a sudden stroke as he was riding with the king, and in his place was appointed Roger's nephew, Alexander.

During this period also, probably within a year after the death of his son William, Henry took measures to establish the position of one of his illegitimate sons, very likely with a view to the influence which he might have upon the succession when the question should arise. Robert of Caen, so called from the place of his birth, was created Earl of Gloucester, and was married to Mabel, heiress of the large possessions of Robert Fitz Hamon in Gloucester, Wales, and Normandy. Robert of Gloucester, as he came to be known, was the eldest of Henry's illegitimate sons, born before his father's accession to the throne, and he was now in the vigour of young manhood. He was also, of all Henry's children of whom we know anything, the most nearly like himself, of more than average abilities, patient and resourceful, hardly inheriting in full his father's diplomatic skill but not without gifts of the kind, and earning the reputation of a lover of books and a patron of writers. A hundred years earlier there would have been no serious question, in the circ.u.mstances which had arisen, of his right to succeed his father, at least in the duchy of Normandy. That the possibility of such a succession was present in men's minds is shown by a contemporary record that the suggestion was made to him on the death of Henry, and rejected at once through his loyalty to his sister's son. Whether this record is to be believed or not, it shows that the event was thought possible.[23]

Certainly there was no real movement, not even the slightest, in his favour, and this fact reveals the change which had taken place in men's ideas of the succession in a century. The necessity of legitimate birth was coming to be recognized as indisputable, though it had not been by the early Teutonic peoples. Of the causes of this change, the teachings of the Church were no doubt the most effective, becoming of more force with its increasing influence, and especially since, as a part of the Hildebrandine reformation, it had insisted with so much emphasis on the fact that the son of a married priest could have no right of succession to his father's benefice, being of illegitimate birth; but the teachings of the sacredness of the marriage tie, of the sinfulness of illicit relations, and of the nullity of marriage within the prohibited degrees, were of influence in the change of ideas. It is also true that men's notions of the right of succession to property in general were becoming more strict and definite, and very possibly the importance of the succession involved in this particular case had its effect. One may almost regret that this change of ideas, which was certainly an advance in morals, as well as in law, was not delayed for another generation; for if Robert of Gloucester could have succeeded on the death of Henry without dispute, England would have been saved weary years of strife and suffering.

The death of the young William was a signal to set Henry's enemies in motion again. But they did not begin at once. Henry's position was still unweakened. Very likely his speedy marriage was a notice to the world that he did not propose to modify in the least his earlier plans. Probably also the absence of Fulk of Anjou, who had gone on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem soon after his treaty of 1119 with Henry, was a cause of delay, for the natural first move would be for him to demand a return of his daughter and her dowry. Fulk's stay was not long in the land of which he was in a few years to be king, and on his return he at once sent for his daughter, probably in 1121. She returned home, but as late as December, 1122, there was still trouble between him and Henry in regard to her dowry, which Henry no doubt was reluctant to surrender.

About the same time, Henry's old enemy, Amaury of Montfort, disliking the strictness of Henry's rule and the frequency of his demands for money, began to work among the barons of Normandy and with his nephew, the Count of Anjou, in favour of William c.l.i.to. It was already clear that Henry's hope of another heir was likely to be disappointed, and Normandy would naturally be more easily attracted to the son of Robert than England The first step was one which did not violate any engagement with Henry, but which was, nevertheless, a decided recognition of the claims of his nephew, and an open attack on his plans. Fulk gave his second daughter, Sibyl, in marriage to William c.l.i.to, and with her the county of Maine, which had been a part of Matilda's dower on her marriage with Henry's son William. Under the circ.u.mstances, this was equivalent to an announcement that he expected William c.l.i.to to be the Duke of Normandy. Early in 1123, Henry sent over troops to Normandy, and in June of that year he crossed himself, to be on the spot if the revolt and war which were threatening should break out. In September the discontented barons agreed together to take arms. It is of interest that among these was Waleran of Meulan, the son of the king's faithful counsellor, Count Robert. Waleran had inherited his father's Norman possessions while his brother Robert had become Earl of Leicester in England.

In all this the hand of Louis, king of France, was not openly seen.

Undoubtedly, however, the movement had his encouragement from the beginning, and very likely his promise of open support when the time should come. The death of the male heir to England and Normandy would naturally draw Henry's daughter Matilda, and her husband the emperor, nearer to him; and of this, while Henry was still in England, some evidence has come down to us though not of the most satisfactory kind.

Any evidence at the time that this alliance was likely to become more close would excite the fear of the king of France and make him ready to support any movement against the English king. Flanders would feel the danger as keenly, and in these troubles Charles the Good abandoned his English alliance and supported the cause of France.

The contest which followed between the king and his revolted barons is hardly to be dignified with the name of war. The forced surrender of a few strongholds, the long siege of seven weeks, long for those days, of Waleran of Meulan's castle, of Pont Audemer and its capture, and the occupation of Amaury of Montfort's city of Evreux, filled the remainder of the year 1123, and in March of 1124 the battle of Bourgtheroulde, in which Ralph, Earl of Chester, defeated Amaury and Waleran and captured a large number of prisoners, virtually ended the conflict. Upon the leaders whom he had captured Henry inflicted his customary punishment of long imprisonment, or the worse fate of blinding. The Norman barons had taken arms, and had failed without the help from abroad which they undoubtedly expected. We do not know in full detail the steps which had been taken to bring about this result, but it was attributed to the diplomacy of Henry, that neither Fulk of Anjou nor Louis of France was able to attack him.

Henry probably had little difficulty in moving his son-in-law, the emperor Henry V, to attack Louis of France. Besides the general reason which would influence him, of willingness to support Matilda's father at this time, and of standing unfriendliness with France, he was especially ready to punish the state in which successive popes had found refuge and support when driven from Italy by his successes. The policy of an attack on Louis was not popular with the German princes, and the army with which the Emperor crossed the border was not a large one. To oppose him, Louis advanced with a great and enthusiastic host. Taking in solemn ceremony from the altar of St Denis the oriflamme, the banner of the holy defender of the land, he aroused the patriotism of northern France as against a hereditary enemy. Even Henry's nephew, Theobald of Blois, led out his forces to aid the king. The news of the army advancing against them did not increase the ardour of the German forces; and hearing of an insurrection in Worms, the Emperor turned back, having accomplished nothing more than to secure a free hand for Henry of England against the Norman rebels.

Against Fulk of Anjou Henry seems to have found his ally in the pope. The marriage of William c.l.i.to with Sibyl, with all that it might carry with it, was too threatening a danger to be allowed to stand, if in any way it could be avoided. The convenient plea of relations.h.i.+p, convenient to be remembered or forgotten according to the circ.u.mstances, was urged upon the pope. The c.l.i.to and his bride were related in no nearer degree than the tenth, according to the reckoning of the canon law, which prohibited marriage between parties related in the seventh degree, and Henry's own children, William in his earlier, and Matilda in her later marriage, with the sister and brother of Sibyl, were equally subject to censure. But this was a different case. Henry's arguments at Rome--Orderic tells us that threats, prayers, and money were combined--were effective, and the marriage was ordered dissolved. Excommunication and interdict were necessary to enforce this decision; but at last, in the spring of 1125, Fulk was obliged to yield, and William c.l.i.to began his wanderings once more, followed everywhere by the "long arm" of his uncle.

At Easter time in 1125, probably a few days before the date of the papal bull of interdict which compelled the dissolution of the marriage of William and Sibyl, a papal legate, John of Crema, landed in England.

Possibly this departure from Henry's practice down to this time was a part of the price which the papal decision cost. The legate made a complete visitation of England, had a meeting with the king of Scots, and presided at a council of the English Church held in September, where the canons of Anselm were renewed in somewhat milder form. On his return to Rome in October, he was accompanied by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, who went there about the still unsettled question of the obedience of the latter. Not even now was this question settled on its merits, but William of Corbeil made application, supported by the king, to be appointed the standing papal legate in Britain. This request was granted, and formed a precedent which was followed by successive popes and archbishops. This appointment is usually considered a lowering of the pretensions of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and an infringement of the independence of the English Church, and to a considerable extent this is true. Under a king as strong as Henry I, with an archbishop no stronger than William of Corbeil, or, indeed, with one not exceptionally strong, the papal authority gained very little from the arrangement. But it was a perpetual opportunity; it was a recognition of papal right. Under it the number of appeals to Rome increased; it marks in a legal way the advance of papal authority and of a consciousness of unity in the Church since the accession of the king, and it must have been so regarded at Rome. The appointment gave to Canterbury at once undoubted supremacy over York, but not on the old grounds, and that question was pa.s.sed on to the future still unsettled.

In the spring of 1125 also occurred an event which again changed the direction of Henry's plans. On May 23, the emperor Henry V died, without children by his marriage to Matilda. The widowed Empress, as she was henceforth called by the English though she had never received the imperial crown, obeyed her father's summons to return to him in Normandy with great reluctance. She had been in Germany since her early childhood, and she was now twenty-three years of age. She could have few recollections of any other home. She loved the German people, and was beloved by them. We are told even that some of them desired her to reign in her husband's stead, and came to ask her return of Henry. But the death of her husband had rendered her succession to the English throne a matter of less difficulty, and Henry had no mind to sacrifice his own plans for the benefit of a foreign people. In September, 1126, he returned with Matilda to England, and in January following, at a great council in London, he demanded and obtained of the baronage, lay and spiritual, an oath to accept Matilda as sovereign if he should die without a male heir. The inference is natural from the account William of Malmesbury gives of this event, that in the argument before the council much was made of the fact that Matilda was a descendant of the old Saxon, as well as of the Norman, line. It is evident, also, that there was hesitation on the part of the barons, and that they yielded reluctantly to the king's demand.

The feudalism of France and England clearly recognized the right of women to succeed to baronies, even of the first importance, though with some irregularities of practice and the feudal right of marriage which the English kings considered so important rested, in the case of female heirs, on this principle. The king's son, Robert of Gloucester, and his nephew Stephen, now Count of Boulogne, who disputed with one another the right to take this oath to Matilda's succession next after her uncle, David, king of Scots, had both been provided for by Henry in this way.

Still, even in these cases, a difference was likely to be felt between succession to the barony itself, and to the t.i.tle and political authority which went with it, and the difference would be greater in the case of the highest of t.i.tles, of the throne of such a dominion as Henry had brought together. Public law in the Spanish peninsula had already, in one case, recognized the right of a woman to reign, but there had been as yet no case in northern Europe. The dread of such a succession was natural, in days when feudal turbulence was held in check only by the reigning king, and when even this could be accomplished only by a king of determined force. The natural feeling in such cases is undoubtedly indicated by the form of the historian's statement referred to above, that Robert of Gloucester declined the suggestion that he should be king out of loyalty to "his sister's son." It was the feeling that the female heir could pa.s.s the t.i.tle on to her son, rather than that she could hold it herself.

William of Malmesbury states, in his account of these events, that he had often heard Bishop Roger of Salisbury say that he considered himself released from this oath to Matilda because it had been taken on condition that she should not be married out of the kingdom except with the counsel of the barons.[24] The writer takes pains at the same time to say that he records this fact rather from his sense of duty as a historian than because he believes the statement. It has, however, a certain amount of inherent probability. To consult with his va.s.sals on such a question was so frequently the practice of the lord, and it was so entirely in line with feudal usage, that the barons would have had some slight ground on which to consider themselves released from this oath, even if such a specific promise had not been made, nor is it likely that Henry would hesitate to make it if he thought it desired. It is indeed quite possible that Henry had not yet determined upon the plan which he afterwards carried out, though it may very likely have been in his mind, and that he was led to this by events which were taking place at this very time in France.

Matilda's return to her father, and Henry's evident intention to make her the heir of his dominions, of Normandy as well as of England, seem to have moved King Louis to some immediate action in opposition. The separation of the duchy from the kingdom, so important for the interests of the Capetian house, could not be hoped for unless this plan was defeated. The natural policy of opposition was the support of William c.l.i.to. At a great council of his kingdom, meeting at the same time with Henry's court in which Matilda's heirs.h.i.+p was recognized, the French king bespoke the sympathy and support of his barons for "William of Normandy."

The response was favourable, and Louis made him a grant of the French Vexin, a point of observation and of easy approach to Normandy. At the same time, a wife was given William in the person of Jeanne, half sister of Louis's queen, and daughter of the Marquis of Montferrat. A few weeks later William advanced with an armed force to Gisors, and made formal claim to Normandy.

It was hardly these events, though they were equivalent to a formal notification of the future policy of the king of France, which brought Henry to a decision as to his daughter's marriage. On March 2, the Count of Flanders, Charles the Good, was foully murdered in the Church of St.

Donatian at Bruges. He was without children or near relatives, and several claimants for the vacant counts.h.i.+p at once appeared. Even Henry I is said to have presented his claim, which he would derive from his mother, but he seems never seriously to have prosecuted it. Louis, on the contrary, gave his whole support to the claim of William c.l.i.to, and succeeded with little difficulty in getting him recognized by most of the barons and towns as count. This was a new and most serious danger to Henry's plans, and he began at once to stir up troubles for the new count among his va.s.sals, by the support of rival claimants, and in alliance with neighbouring princes. But the situation demanded measures of direct defence, and Henry was led to take the decisive step, so eventful for all the future history of England, of marrying Matilda a second time.

Immediately after Whitsuntide of 1127, Matilda was sent over to Normandy, attended by Robert of Gloucester and Brian Fitz Count, and at Rouen was formally betrothed by the archbishop of that city to Geoffrey, son of Fulk of Anjou. The marriage did not take place till two years later.