BOOKS.
HENRY II.*
Mas. GREEN'S Henry II. is an admirable study of the life and work of the great Angevin. Henry II. interests us oft many sides and from many points of view, and to all of these Mrs. Green has done justice. In his own personality Henry is one of the most strangely fascinating figures in history, and Mrs. Green has given us a portrait unrivalled by anything that has before been written of him. The excellent use which. she has made of the contemporary records enables her to bring clearly before us the rough, - vehement King, whose wild, passionate outbursts were compensated by policy and wisdom,. and who so strangely combined the characteristics of some half-mad Squire Western with the mental subtlety of a great jurist, the practical wisdom of a statesman, and the politic ingenuity of a skilled diplomatist. Henry as a soldier baffling his enemies by the extreme rapidity of his movements, or as a King " itinerant," tearing up and down England in his fierce haste to despatch the business of the realm, and to settle matters for himself ; Henry as a states- man surely moulding a great administrative Constitution, and framing a new fiscal and judicial system, or as a diplomatist developing his foreign policy, and using the States of Europe • Hon II. Twelve English Statesmen " Series. By Mrs- J. S gar.
London : and Co. 1888. like puppets in his game ; and, finally, Henry as a determined upholder of the rights of the temporal against the ecclesias- tical power, is brought before us by Mrs. Green with a vividness for which all those who love the record of our early history will be in no small measure grateful.
We cannot, perhaps, make a better beginning in our attempt to show our readers the quality of Mrs. Green's work, than to quote here a specimen of her writing. The following is her admirable sketch of Henry H., the man who at twenty- one found himself King of England, Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine, Count of Poitou, Duke of Aquitaine, and suzerain lord of Brittany, the " ruler of dominions such as no King before him had ever dreamed of uniting,"—of an Empire which stretched, in the words of a contemporary, " from the Arctic Ocean to the Pyrenees :"—
" We see in descriptions of the time the strange rough figure of the new king, Henry Curtmantel,' as he was nicknamed from the short Angevin cape which hung on his shoulders, and marked him out oddly as a foreigner amid the English and Norman knights, with their long fur-lined cloaks hanging to the ground. The square stout form, the bull-neck and broad shoulders, the powerful arms and coarse rough hands, the legs bowed from incessant riding, showed a frame fashioned to an extraordinary strength. His head was large and round; his hair red, close-cut for fear of baldness ; his fiery face much freckled ; his voice harsh and cracked. Those about him saw something 'lion-like' in his face ; his gray eyes, clear and soft in his peaceful moments, shone like fire when he was moved, and few men were brave enough to confront him when his face was lighted up by rising wrath, and when his eyes rolled and became bloodshot in a paroxysm of passion. His overpowering energy found an outlet in violent physical exertion. With an immoderate love of hunting he led unquiet days,' following the chase over waste and wood and mountain ; and when he came home at night he was never seen to sit down save for supper, but wore out his court with walking or standing till after nightfall, even when his own feet and legs were covered with sores from incessant exertion. Bitter were the complaints of his courtiers that there was never any moment of rest for himself or his servants ; in war-time indeed, they grumbled, excessive toil was natural, but time of peace was ill-consumed in continual vigils and labours and in incessant travel—one day following another in merciless and intolerable journeyings. Henry had inherited the qualities of the Angevin race—its tenacity, its courage, its endurance, the sagacity that was without impatience, and the craft that was never at fault. With the ruddy face and unwieldy frame of the Normans other gifts had come to him; he had their sense of strong government and their wisdom; he was laboriods, patient, industrious, politic. He never forgot a face he had once seen, nor anything that he heard which he deemed worthy of remembering; where he once loved he never turned to hate, and where he once hated he was never brought to love. Sparing in diet, wasting little care on his dress—perhaps the plainest in his court,—Irngal, so much as was lawful to a prince,' he was lavish is matters of State or in public affairs. A great soldier and General, he was yet an earnest striver after peace, hating to refer to the doubtful decision of battle that which might be settled by any other means, and stirred always by a great pity, strange in such an age and in such a man, for lives poured out in war. He was more tender to dead soldiers than to the living,' says a chronicler querulously ; and found far more sorrow in the loss of those who were slain than comfort in the love of those who remained.' His pitiful temper was early shown in his determination to put down the barbarous treatment of shipwrecked sailors. He abolished the traditions of the Civil War by forbidding plunder, and by a resolute fidelity to his plighted word. In political craft he was matchless; in great perils none was gentler than he, but when the danger was past none was harsher; and common talk hinted that he was a willing breaker of his word, deeming that in the pressure of difficulty it was easier to repent of word than deed, and to render vain a saying than a fact. His mother's teaching, as we have heard, was this : That he should delay all the business of all men ; that whatever fell into his hands he should retain a long while and enjoy the fruit of it, and keep suspended in hope those who aspired to it ; confirming her sentences with this cruel parable,
" Glut a hawk with his quarry and he will hunt no more ; show it him and then draw it back and you will ever keep him tractable
and obedient." She taught him also that he should be frequently in his chamber, rarely in public ; that he should give nothing to any one upon any testimony but what he had seen and known ; and many other evil things of the same kind. We, indeed,' adds this good hater of Matilda, confidently attributed to her teaching everything in which he displeased us.'
Mrs. Green, in her treatment of Henry's great struggle with the Church, seems to us, on the whole, judicious. She evidently understands both sides, and while recognising that Henry was perfectly right in refusing to allow the ecclesiastical power to become supreme, she does not fail to do justice to Becket. Though Henry no doubt urged his case with an over- bearing vehemence which must have made it very difficult for a man of proud or independent nature to yield to him, it cannot be doubted that the King was as right in his law as in his policy. Not only was it in the abstract unwise to allow the Church to form an imperium in invperio over whose members
the State was not to be permitted to exercise its ordinary functions, but such pretensions on the part of the clergy were novel, and undoubtedly contrary to the customs of the realm. The Constitutions of Clarendon not only did not profess to be special enactments, but were, in fact, nothing but the ancient usages of the realm committed to writing. They may, perhaps, have been a little stiffened in the process, but that is unavoidable when unwritten custom passes into a formal statement of the law. Thomas, in refusing to be bound by them, was, in fact, trying to produce a revolu- tion in the relations between Church and State. Mrs. Green has stated his position admirably when she says :—" He vehemently asserted that the `customs' of the Church were of greater authority than any `customs' of the Kingdom, that its canon law claimed obedience as against all traditional national law whatever ; and with keen political insight he insisted on the dangers that would follow if once they allowed the charm of prescription to be broken or the ecclesiastical liberties to be touched." On the whole, Mrs. Green's treat- ment of the subject is satisfactory, though, of course, the limits of her space do not allow her to give such a full picture of the great Archbishop as many of her readers would perhaps have liked. Her book is a study of Henry, and to bring any other figure on her canvas into equal prominence would be to spoil the picture. There are so many points of interest touched upon by Mrs. Green in the course of her narrative, that it is only possible to notice here a very small number of them. We must not fail, however, to say some- thing of the way in which she has treated Henry's judicial reforms. To the ordinary reader, her chapter on the " Assize of Clarendon,"—the Angevin King's code of judicial procedure which did so much to maintain and create the centralisation of English justice,—may seem dry. The lawyer, however, and the student of our early history will probably find it the most valuable and interesting portion of her book. Indeed, Mrs. Green may almost be said to be most at home when she is writing of Shire Courts, and Justices Itinerant. Her description of the County Court, the assembly in which the King's Justices opened their commission, and in which, in later times, the Sheriff held the election for the Knights of the Shire, is one of the clearest and most accurate short descrip- tions which we ever remember to have seen. We do not, how- ever, think she is quite accurate when she says that in the trial by battle the only arms allowed to men of humble birth were " a shield of leather or wood and a stick without knots or points." Is there not an .account of an early duel between husbandmen, which was conducted with spades by way of weapons ? Probably, however, the real fact is that the custom varied in the different local Courts.
A word must be said as to the way in which Mrs. Green tells the stories from the chroniclers. It is beyond praise. She does not attempt to embroider or set them off, but simply selects and translates, and thus gives as the main features in the very words of the original. Very striking is the story of the Welsh woman who, when Henry landed near St. David's on his return from Ireland, cried out against the King, " Avenge us to-day, Lechlavar r—Lechlavar was a great stone making a natural bridge over a stream across which lay the King's way, and Merlin had prophesied that an English King, the conqueror of Ireland, should die on Lechlavar. When Henry reached the river, he stood a moment—Henry was of all men given up to belief in visions and prophecies—and looked at Lechlavar,—" Then with a courage which we can scarcely measure, he firmly set his foot on it and slowly crossed over; and from the other side, in the face of all the people, he turned and flung his taunt at the prophet,' Who will ever again believe the lies of Merlin?'" We quote this but as an example. There are a hundred other tales as freshly and as vigorously told.
One more word and we must leave Mrs. Green's delightful and scholarly work. Why does she not expand her study into a more complete work on the reign ? Let the present volume stand as an introduction, and let her add to it—(1), transla- tions of the most important portions of the writings of the chroniclers dealing with Henry II.'s reign,; (2), the Constitu- tions of Clarendon ; (3), the Assize of Clarendon ; (4), a typical selection from Glanvill, the Rolla, and other records of the time, such as the " Dialogue de Scaccario." To have all the docu- ments necessary for really understanding Henry's reign collected in one book—it must be a large one—would be an immense benefit to future students, and would earn Mrs. Green the high place among historical writers she deserves.
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