PART THE SECOND
When the King heard how Thomas a Becket had lost his life in CanterburyCathedral, through the ferocity of the four Knights, he was filled withdismay. Some have supposed that when the King spoke those hasty words,'Have I no one here who will deliver me from this man?' he wished, andmeant a Becket to be slain. But few things are more unlikely; for,besides that the King was not naturally cruel (though very passionate),he was wise, and must have known full well what any stupid man in hisdominions must have known, namely, that such a murder would rouse thePope and the whole Church against him.
He sent respectful messengers to the Pope, to represent his innocence(except in having uttered the hasty words); and he swore solemnly andpublicly to his innocence, and contrived in time to make his peace. Asto the four guilty Knights, who fled into Yorkshire, and never againdared to show themselves at Court, the Pope excommunicated them; and theylived miserably for some time, shunned by all their countrymen. At last,they went humbly to Jerusalem as a penance, and there died and wereburied.
It happened, fortunately for the pacifying of the Pope, that anopportunity arose very soon after the murder of a Becket, for the King todeclare his power in Ireland--which was an acceptable undertaking to thePope, as the Irish, who had been converted to Christianity by onePatricius (otherwise Saint Patrick) long ago, before any Pope existed,considered that the Pope had nothing at all to do with them, or they withthe Pope, and accordingly refused to pay him Peter's Pence, or that taxof a penny a house which I have elsewhere mentioned. The King'sopportunity arose in this way.
The Irish were, at that time, as barbarous a people as you can wellimagine. They were continually quarrelling and fighting, cutting oneanother's throats, slicing one another's noses, burning one another'shouses, carrying away one another's wives, and committing all sorts ofviolence. The country was divided into five kingdoms--DESMOND, THOMOND,CONNAUGHT, ULSTER, and LEINSTER--each governed by a separate King, ofwhom one claimed to be the chief of the rest. Now, one of these Kings,named DERMOND MAC MURROUGH (a wild kind of name, spelt in more than onewild kind of way), had carried off the wife of a friend of his, andconcealed her on an island in a bog. The friend resenting this (thoughit was quite the custom of the country), complained to the chief King,and, with the chief King's help, drove Dermond Mac Murrough out of hisdominions. Dermond came over to England for revenge; and offered to holdhis realm as a vassal of King Henry, if King Henry would help him toregain it. The King consented to these terms; but only assisted him,then, with what were called Letters Patent, authorising any Englishsubjects who were so disposed, to enter into his service, and aid hiscause.
There was, at Bristol, a certain EARL RICHARD DE CLARE, called STRONGBOW;of no very good character; needy and desperate, and ready for anythingthat offered him a chance of improving his fortunes. There were, inSouth Wales, two other broken knights of the same good-for-nothing sort,called ROBERT FITZ-STEPHEN, and MAURICE FITZ-GERALD. These three, eachwith a small band of followers, took up Dermond's cause; and it wasagreed that if it proved successful, Strongbow should marry Dermond'sdaughter EVA, and be declared his heir.
The trained English followers of these knights were so superior in allthe discipline of battle to the Irish, that they beat them againstimmense superiority of numbers. In one fight, early in the war, they cutoff three hundred heads, and laid them before Mac Murrough; who turnedthem every one up with his hands, rejoicing, and, coming to one which wasthe head of a man whom he had much disliked, grasped it by the hair andears, and tore off the nose and lips with his teeth. You may judge fromthis, what kind of a gentleman an Irish King in those times was. Thecaptives, all through this war, were horribly treated; the victoriousparty making nothing of breaking their limbs, and casting them into thesea from the tops of high rocks. It was in the midst of the miseries andcruelties attendant on the taking of Waterford, where the dead lay piledin the streets, and the filthy gutters ran with blood, that Strongbowmarried Eva. An odious marriage-company those mounds of corpse's musthave made, I think, and one quite worthy of the young lady's father.
He died, after Waterford and Dublin had been taken, and various successesachieved; and Strongbow became King of Leinster. Now came King Henry'sopportunity. To restrain the growing power of Strongbow, he himselfrepaired to Dublin, as Strongbow's Royal Master, and deprived him of hiskingdom, but confirmed him in the enjoyment of great possessions. TheKing, then, holding state in Dublin, received the homage of nearly allthe Irish Kings and Chiefs, and so came home again with a great additionto his reputation as Lord of Ireland, and with a new claim on the favourof the Pope. And now, their reconciliation was completed--more easilyand mildly by the Pope, than the King might have expected, I think.
At this period of his reign, when his troubles seemed so few and hisprospects so bright, those domestic miseries began which gradually madethe King the most unhappy of men, reduced his great spirit, wore away hishealth, and broke his heart.
He had four sons. HENRY, now aged eighteen--his secret crowning of whomhad given such offence to Thomas a Becket. RICHARD, aged sixteen;GEOFFREY, fifteen; and JOHN, his favourite, a young boy whom thecourtiers named LACKLAND, because he had no inheritance, but to whom theKing meant to give the Lordship of Ireland. All these misguided boys, intheir turn, were unnatural sons to him, and unnatural brothers to eachother. Prince Henry, stimulated by the French King, and by his badmother, Queen Eleanor, began the undutiful history,
First, he demanded that his young wife, MARGARET, the French King'sdaughter, should be crowned as well as he. His father, the King,consented, and it was done. It was no sooner done, than he demanded tohave a part of his father's dominions, during his father's life. Thisbeing refused, he made off from his father in the night, with his badheart full of bitterness, and took refuge at the French King's Court.Within a day or two, his brothers Richard and Geoffrey followed. Theirmother tried to join them--escaping in man's clothes--but she was seizedby King Henry's men, and immured in prison, where she lay, deservedly,for sixteen years. Every day, however, some grasping English noblemen,to whom the King's protection of his people from their avarice andoppression had given offence, deserted him and joined the Princes. Everyday he heard some fresh intelligence of the Princes levying armiesagainst him; of Prince Henry's wearing a crown before his own ambassadorsat the French Court, and being called the Junior King of England; of allthe Princes swearing never to make peace with him, their father, withoutthe consent and approval of the Barons of France. But, with hisfortitude and energy unshaken, King Henry met the shock of thesedisasters with a resolved and cheerful face. He called upon all Royalfathers who had sons, to help him, for his cause was theirs; he hired,out of his riches, twenty thousand men to fight the false French King,who stirred his own blood against him; and he carried on the war withsuch vigour, that Louis soon proposed a conference to treat for peace.
The conference was held beneath an old wide-spreading green elm-tree,upon a plain in France. It led to nothing. The war recommenced. PrinceRichard began his fighting career, by leading an army against his father;but his father beat him and his army back; and thousands of his men wouldhave rued the day in which they fought in such a wicked cause, had notthe King received news of an invasion of England by the Scots, andpromptly come home through a great storm to repress it. And whether hereally began to fear that he suffered these troubles because a Becket hadbeen murdered; or whether he wished to rise in the favour of the Pope,who had now declared a Becket to be a saint, or in the favour of his ownpeople, of whom many believed that even a Becket's senseless tomb couldwork miracles, I don't know: but the King no sooner landed in Englandthan he went straight to Canterbury; and when he came within sight of thedistant Cathedral, he dismounted from his horse, took off his shoes, andwalked with bare and bleeding feet to a Becket's grave. There, he laydown on the ground, lamenting, in the presence of many people; and by-and-by he went into the Chapter House, and, removing his clothes from hisback and shoulders, submitted himself to be beaten with knotted cords(not beaten very hard, I dare say though) by eighty Priests, one afteranother. It chanced that on the very day when the King made this curiousexhibition of himself, a complete victory was obtained over the Scots;which very much delighted the Priests, who said that it was won becauseof his great example of repentance. For the Priests in general had foundout, since a Becket's death, that they admired him of all things--thoughthey had hated him very cordially when he was alive.
The Earl of Flanders, who was at the head of the base conspiracy of theKing's undutiful sons and their foreign friends, took the opportunity ofthe King being thus employed at home, to lay siege to Rouen, the capitalof Normandy. But the King, who was extraordinarily quick and active inall his movements, was at Rouen, too, before it was supposed possiblethat he could have left England; and there he so defeated the said Earlof Flanders, that the conspirators proposed peace, and his bad sons Henryand Geoffrey submitted. Richard resisted for six weeks; but, beingbeaten out of castle after castle, he at last submitted too, and hisfather forgave him.
To forgive these unworthy princes was only to afford them breathing-timefor new faithlessness. They were so false, disloyal, and dishonourable,that they were no more to be trusted than common thieves. In the verynext year, Prince Henry rebelled again, and was again forgiven. In eightyears more, Prince Richard rebelled against his elder brother; and PrinceGeoffrey infamously said that the brothers could never agree welltogether, unless they were united against their father. In the very nextyear after their reconciliation by the King, Prince Henry again rebelledagainst his father; and again submitted, swearing to be true; and wasagain forgiven; and again rebelled with Geoffrey.
But the end of this perfidious Prince was come. He fell sick at a Frenchtown; and his conscience terribly reproaching him with his baseness, hesent messengers to the King his father, imploring him to come and seehim, and to forgive him for the last time on his bed of death. Thegenerous King, who had a royal and forgiving mind towards his childrenalways, would have gone; but this Prince had been so unnatural, that thenoblemen about the King suspected treachery, and represented to him thathe could not safely trust his life with such a traitor, though his owneldest son. Therefore the King sent him a ring from off his finger as atoken of forgiveness; and when the Prince had kissed it, with much griefand many tears, and had confessed to those around him how bad, andwicked, and undutiful a son he had been; he said to the attendantPriests: 'O, tie a rope about my body, and draw me out of bed, and lay medown upon a bed of ashes, that I may die with prayers to God in arepentant manner!' And so he died, at twenty-seven years old.
Three years afterwards, Prince Geoffrey, being unhorsed at a tournament,had his brains trampled out by a crowd of horses passing over him. So,there only remained Prince Richard, and Prince John--who had grown to bea young man now, and had solemnly sworn to be faithful to his father.Richard soon rebelled again, encouraged by his friend the French King,PHILIP THE SECOND (son of Louis, who was dead); and soon submitted andwas again forgiven, swearing on the New Testament never to rebel again;and in another year or so, rebelled again; and, in the presence of hisfather, knelt down on his knee before the King of France; and did theFrench King homage: and declared that with his aid he would possesshimself, by force, of all his father's French dominions.
And yet this Richard called himself a soldier of Our Saviour! And yetthis Richard wore the Cross, which the Kings of France and England hadboth taken, in the previous year, at a brotherly meeting underneath theold wide-spreading elm-tree on the plain, when they had sworn (like him)to devote themselves to a new Crusade, for the love and honour of theTruth!
Sick at heart, wearied out by the falsehood of his sons, and almost readyto lie down and die, the unhappy King who had so long stood firm, beganto fail. But the Pope, to his honour, supported him; and obliged theFrench King and Richard, though successful in fight, to treat for peace.Richard wanted to be Crowned King of England, and pretended that hewanted to be married (which he really did not) to the French King'ssister, his promised wife, whom King Henry detained in England. KingHenry wanted, on the other hand, that the French King's sister should bemarried to his favourite son, John: the only one of his sons (he said)who had never rebelled against him. At last King Henry, deserted by hisnobles one by one, distressed, exhausted, broken-hearted, consented toestablish peace.
One final heavy sorrow was reserved for him, even yet. When they broughthim the proposed treaty of peace, in writing, as he lay very ill in bed,they brought him also the list of the deserters from their allegiance,whom he was required to pardon. The first name upon this list was John,his favourite son, in whom he had trusted to the last.
'O John! child of my heart!' exclaimed the King, in a great agony ofmind. 'O John, whom I have loved the best! O John, for whom I havecontended through these many troubles! Have you betrayed me too!' Andthen he lay down with a heavy groan, and said, 'Now let the world go asit will. I care for nothing more!'
After a time, he told his attendants to take him to the French town ofChinon--a town he had been fond of, during many years. But he was fondof no place now; it was too true that he could care for nothing more uponthis earth. He wildly cursed the hour when he was born, and cursed thechildren whom he left behind him; and expired.
As, one hundred years before, the servile followers of the Court hadabandoned the Conqueror in the hour of his death, so they now abandonedhis descendant. The very body was stripped, in the plunder of the Royalchamber; and it was not easy to find the means of carrying it for burialto the abbey church of Fontevraud.
Richard was said in after years, by way of flattery, to have the heart ofa Lion. It would have been far better, I think, to have had the heart ofa Man. His heart, whatever it was, had cause to beat remorsefully withinhis breast, when he came--as he did--into the solemn abbey, and looked onhis dead father's uncovered face. His heart, whatever it was, had been ablack and perjured heart, in all its dealings with the deceased King, andmore deficient in a single touch of tenderness than any wild beast's inthe forest.
There is a pretty story told of this Reign, called the story of FAIRROSAMOND. It relates how the King doted on Fair Rosamond, who was theloveliest girl in all the world; and how he had a beautiful Bower builtfor her in a Park at Woodstock; and how it was erected in a labyrinth,and could only be found by a clue of silk. How the bad Queen Eleanor,becoming jealous of Fair Rosamond, found out the secret of the clue, andone day, appeared before her, with a dagger and a cup of poison, and lefther to the choice between those deaths. How Fair Rosamond, aftershedding many piteous tears and offering many useless prayers to thecruel Queen, took the poison, and fell dead in the midst of the beautifulbower, while the unconscious birds sang gaily all around her.
Now, there _was_ a fair Rosamond, and she was (I dare say) the loveliestgirl in all the world, and the King was certainly very fond of her, andthe bad Queen Eleanor was certainly made jealous. But I am afraid--I sayafraid, because I like the story so much--that there was no bower, nolabyrinth, no silken clue, no dagger, no poison. I am afraid fairRosamond retired to a nunnery near Oxford, and died there, peaceably; hersister-nuns hanging a silken drapery over her tomb, and often dressing itwith flowers, in remembrance of the youth and beauty that had enchantedthe King when he too was young, and when his life lay fair before him.
It was dark and ended now; faded and gone. Henry Plantagenet lay quietin the abbey church of Fontevraud, in the fifty-seventh year of hisage--never to be completed--after governing England well, for nearlythirty-five years.