Henry the Second | Page 3

in
the frame of a woman." Her husband was a boy of fifteen. Geoffrey the
Handsome, called Plantagenet from his love of hunting over heath and

broom, inherited few of the great qualities which had made his race
powerful. Like his son Henry II. he was always on horseback; he had
his son's wonderful memory, his son's love of disputations and
law-suits; we catch a glimpse of him studying beneath the walls of a
beleaguered town the art of siege in Vegetius. But the darker sides of
Henry's character might also be discerned in his father; genial and
seductive as he was, he won neither confidence nor love; wife and
barons alike feared the silence with which he listened unmoved to the
bitterest taunts, but kept them treasured and unforgotten for some sure
hour of revenge; the fierce Angevin temper turned in him to
restlessness and petulance in the long series of revolts which filled his
reign with wearisome monotony from the moment when he first rode
out to claim his duchy of Normandy, and along its southern frontier
peasant and churl turned out at the sound of the tocsin, and with fork
and flail drove the hated "Guirribecs" back over the border. Five years
after his marriage, in 1133, his first child was born at Le Mans.
Englishmen saw in the grandson of "good Queen Maud" the direct
descendant of the old English line of kings of Alfred and of Cerdic. The
name Henry which the boy bore after his grandfather marked him as
lawful inheritor of the broad dominions of Henry I., "the greatest of all
kings in the memory of ourselves and our fathers." From his father he
received, with the surname of Plantagenet by which he was known in
later times, the inheritance of the Counts of Anjou. Through his mother
Matilda he claimed all rights and honours that pertained to the Norman
dukes.
Heir of three ruling houses, Henry was brought up wherever the
chances of war or rebellion gave opportunity. He was to know neither
home nor country. His infancy was spent at Rouen "in the home," as
Henry I. said, "of his forefather Rollo." In 1135 his grandfather died,
and left him, before he was yet three years old, the succession to the
English throne. But Geoffrey and Matilda were at the moment hard
pressed by one of their ceaseless wars. The Church was openly opposed
to the rule of the House of Anjou; the Norman baronage on either side
of the water inherited a long tradition of hatred to the Angevin. Stephen
of Blois, a son of the Conqueror's daughter Adela, seized the English
throne, and claimed the dukedom of Normandy. Henry was driven from

Rouen to take refuge in Angers, in the great palace of the counts,
overlooking the river and the vine-covered hills beyond. There he lived
in one of the most ecclesiastical cities of the day, already famous for its
shrines, its colleges, the saints whose tombs lay within its walls, and
the ring of priories and churches and abbeys that circled it about.
The policy of the Norman kings was rudely interrupted by the reign of
Stephen of Blois. Trembling for the safety of his throne, he at first
rested on the support of the Church and the ministers who represented
Henry's system. But sides were quickly changed. The great churchmen
and the ministers were soon cast off by the new ruler. "By my Lady St.
Mary," said Roger of Salisbury, when he was summoned to one of
Stephen's councils, "my heart is unwilling for this journey; for I shall
be of as much use in court as is a foal in battle." The revolution was
completed in 1139, when the king in a mad panic seized and
imprisoned Roger, the representative alike of Church and ministers.
With the ruin of Roger who for thirty years had been head of the
government, of his son Roger the chancellor, and his nephew Nigel the
treasurer, the ministerial system was utterly destroyed, and the whole
Church was alienated. Stephen sank into the mere puppet of the nobles.
The work of the Exchequer and the Curia Regis almost came to an end.
A little money was still gathered into the royal treasury; some judicial
business seems to have been still carried on, but it was only amid
overwhelming difficulties, and over limited districts. Sheriffs were no
longer appointed over the shires, and the local administration broke
down as the central government had done. Civil war was added to the
confusion of anarchy, as Matilda again and again sought to recover her
right. In 1139 she crossed to England, wherein siege, in battle, in
council, in hair-breadth escapes from pursuing hosts, from famine,
from perils of the sea, she showed the masterful authority, the