89 THE CHRONICLE OF THE REIGNS OF HENRY II. KNOWN COMMONLY UNDER THE NAME OF BENEDICT [THE following is one of the most celebrated of the Prefaces written by Bishop Stubbs. It contains a very interesting description of the character and aims of Henry II., an explanation of the many difficult problems which he was called upon to solve, and an account of the measures adopted to eliminate feudalism from government.' Henry's judicial, fiscal, religious, and military systems are fully dealt with, and a valuable criticism on the results of the King's life work concludes a very remarkable piece of English history.] HAVING devoted the Preface to the first volume to the discussion of the literary history of this book, I will now proceed to sketch the character and position of the great prince whose reign forms the subject of far the largest portion of its contents. It is almost a matter of necessity for the student of history to work out for himself some definite idea of the characters of the great men of the period he is employed upon. History cannot be well read as a chess problem, and the man who tries to read it so is not worthy to read it at all. Its scenes cannot be realised, its lessons cannot be learned, if the actors are looked on merely as puppets. A living interest must invest those who played a part in making the world what it is: those whose very existence has left indelible traces on its history must have had characteristics worthy of the most careful investigation. tion only approximate Such a judgment as may be formed in the nineteenth century, Such realisaof a king of the twelfth may well seem unsatisfactory. With the utmost pains it is hard to persuade ourselves that a true view is at best obtained, or is even obtainable. We know too little of his personal actions to be able in many cases to distinguish between them and those of his advisers; or to say whether he was a man of weak will or of strong; whether his good deeds proceeded from fear or from virtue, or from the love of praise; whether his bad ones were the workings of hasty impulse, or the breaking out of concealed habit, or the result of a long struggle between good motives and evil passions. Neither can we accept the delineations of contemporary writers without carefully testing them at every step. They are almost always superficial, but if that were the only fault we might be content to accept them as the verdict of ordinary judges, and it is always satisfactory to know what a a man's contemporaries thought of him, even if they were neither close observers nor judicious critics. But their descriptions are seldom to be trusted even in this respect, for they betray almost universally a bias for or against the hero. The one in a thousand who is so far removed from personal feeling as to wish to take a philosophical or consistent view, is probably too far removed from acquaintance to be able to distinguish the truth from falsehood. The contemporary historian cannot view the career of his leading character as a whole; he sees it too closely, or else he sees it through a distorting medium. Hence the unsearchableness of the king's heart is so often given by medieval writers as the reason for measures the bent of which they do not see, and as to which, for the want of acquaintance with other acts of the same kind, they cannot generalise. The heart of kings is unsearchable; but on the other hand their freedom of action is, or rather was in the middle ages, uncontrolled by external restraints. In them, as in no other men, can the outward conduct be safely assumed to be the unrestrained expression of the inward character. It is from observing the general current of the life, from the examination of the recorded acts of it, that the only reasonable view of the character can be obtained. Standing too far off in time and mode of thought to be in much danger of imputing modern principles and motives, we can generalise somewhat as to the inward life of a man if we know what his outward life was; and then we can compare our conclusion with the judgment of contemporaries, and see whether such men as they were would be likely to think as they have done of such a man as we have described to ourselves. If we know enough of the facts of a man's life we can draw such a picture. Character that is not shown in act is not strong enough to be worthy of the name. The man whose character is worth study must be one whose acts bear the marks of character. In the view of a long life, some generalisations can almost always be drawn, from the repetition of acts, from the uniformity or uncertainty of policy. A king who lets his advisers act for him in one case will show the like weakness in others; will act in different ways under different personal influences. But one who all his life chooses his to character counsellors on one principle, and follows with them a uniform line A uniform of policy, chooses them because he approves their policy, or rather policy a key because they will carry out his own. And that policy, if such be traceable, is the expression of the strongest principles of his own character; it may be confused or perplexed by his minor traits, but it cannot be suppressed by them, and if it exists it will be seen in operation. A careful reading of the history of the three centuries of Angevin kings might almost tempt one to think that the legend of their diabolical orgin and hereditary curse was not a mere fairy tale, but the mythical expression of some political foresight or of a strong historical instinct. But, in truth, no such theory is needed; the vices of kings, like those of other men, carry with them their present punishment; whilst with them, even more signally than with other men, the accumulation of subsequent misery is distinctly conspicuous, and is seen to fall with a weight more overwhelming the longer their strength or their position has kept it poised. Curse on the race of Their sins not tragic It was not that their wickedness was of a monstrous kind; such wickedness indeed was not a prominent feature in the character of the medieval devil; nor was it mere capricious cruelty or wanton mischief. Neither were their misfortunes of the appalling sort wrought out by the Furies of Attic tragedy. Of such misery there were not wanting instances, but not enough to give more than an occasional luridness to the picture. Nor was it, as in the case of the Stewarts, that the momentum of inherited misfortune and misery had become a conscious influence under which no knightly or kingly qualities could maintain hope, and a meaner nature sought a refuge in recklessness. All the Plantagenet kings were high-hearted men, rather rebellious against circumstances than subservient to them. But the long pageant shows us uniformly, under so great a variety Common of individual character, such signs of great gifts and opportunities tics of the thrown away, such unscrupulousness in action, such uncontrolled race passion, such vast energy and strength wasted on unworthy aims, such constant failure and final disappointment, in spite of constant successes and brilliant achievements, as remind us of the conduct and luck of those unhappy spirits who, throughout the middle ages, were continually spending superhuman strength in building in a night inaccessible bridges and uninhabitable castles, or purchasing with untold treasures souls that might have been had for nothing, and invariably cheated of their reward. Only two in the whole list strike us as free from the hereditary sins: Edward I. and Henry VI., the noblest and the unhappiest of the race; and of these the former owes his real greatness in history, not to the success of his personal ambition, but to the brilliant characteris Exceptions in the cases of Edward I. vi. and Henry Varieties of individual character among the qualities brought out by the exigencies of his affairs; whilst on the latter, both as a man and as a king, fell the heaviest crash of accumulated misery. None of the others seem to have had a wish to carry out the true grand conception of kingship. And thus it is with the extinction of the male line of Plantagenet that the social happiness of the English people begins. Even Henry VII., though, perhaps, as selfish a man as any of his predecessors, and certainly less cared for or beloved, seems to open an era during which the vices of the monarchs have been less disastrous to their subjects than before, and the prosperity of the state has increased in no proportion to the ability of the kings. And yet no two of these princes were alike in the constituent proportions of their temperament. The leading feature of one was Plantagenets falsehood, of another cruelty, of another licentiousness, of another unscrupulous ambition: one was the slave of women, another of unworthy favourites; one a raiser of taxes, another a shedder of the blood of his people. Yet there was not one thoroughly contemptible person in the list. Many had redeeming qualities, some had great ones; all had a certain lion-like nobility, some had a portion of the real elements of greatness. Some were wise; all were brave; some were pure in life, some gentle as well as strong; but is it too hard to say that all were thoroughly selfish, all were in the main unfortunate? In the character of Henry II. are found all the characteristics of this race. Not the greatest, nor the wisest, nor the worst, nor the most unfortunate, he still unites all these in their greatest relative proportions. Not so impetuous as Richard, or Edward III., or Henry V.; not so wise as Edward I.; not so luxurious as John or Edward IV. ; not so false as Henry III., nor so greedy as Henry IV., nor so cruel as the princes of the house of York; he was still eminently wise and brave, eminently cruel, lascivious, greedy, and false, and eminently unfortunate also, if the ruin of all the selfish aims of his sagacious plans, the disappointment of his affections, and the sense of having lost his soul for nothing, can be called misfortune. Henry II. combined most of these Apparent anomalies in the charac II. It would be a great mistake to view the personal and political character of Henry as one of unmingled vice. It was a strange ter of Henry compound of inconsistent qualities rather than a balance of opposing ones, yet the inconsistencies were so compounded as to make him restless rather than purposeless, and the opposing qualities were balanced sufficiently to suffer him to carry out a consistent policy. His fortunes, therefore, bear the impress of the man. He was 1 William of Newburgh compares him with his grandfather to the disadvantage of the latter: In libidinem pronior, conjugalem modum excessit, formam quidem in hoc tenens avitam, sed tamen avo hujus intemperantiæ palmam reliquit.' Hist. Angl. iii. 26. a brave and consummate warrior, yet he never carried on war on a large scale, or hesitated to accept the first overtures of peace. He was impetuous and unscrupulous, yet he never tempted fortune. He was violent in hatred, yet moderate in revenge; a lover of good men, a corrupter of innocent women; at once religious and profane, lawless and scrupulous of right; a maker of good laws, and a seller of justice; 3 the most patient and provoking of husbands; the most indulgent and exacting of fathers; playing with the children, whose ingratitude was breaking his heart, the great game of statecraft as if they had been pawns. He was tyrannical in mood without being a tyrant either in principle or in the exigencies of policy. In power and character, by position and alliances, the arbiter of Western Europe in both war and peace, 1 he never waged a great war or enjoyed a sound peace; he never until his last year made an unsatisfactory peace or fought an unsuccessful battle. The most able and successful politician of his time, and thoroughly unscrupulous about using his power for his own ends, he yet died in a position less personally important than any that he had occupied during the thirty-five years of his reign, and, on the whole, less powerful than he began. Yet if we could distinguish between the man and the king, between personal selfishness and official or political statesmanship, between the ruin of his personal aims and the real success of his administrative conceptions, we might conclude by saying that altogether he was great and wise and successful. 4 Contrast personal and tive successes between his administra. Variety of judgments upon the character of Henry II. by the In so mixed a character it would be strange if partial judges could not find much to praise and much to blame. In the eyes of a friend the abilities of Henry excuse his vices, and the veriest experiments of political sagacity wear the aspect of inventions of profound constituphilanthropic devotion. To the enemy the same measures are the tionalist, transparent disguise of a crafty and greedy spirit anxious only for selfish aggrandisement. The constitutional historian cannot help looking with reverence on one under whose hand the foundations of liberty and national independence were so clearly marked and so deeply laid that in the course of one generation the fabric was safe for ever from tyrants or conquerors. The partisan of ecclesiastical the immunities or monastic discipline can see in him only the apostate and the persecutor. The pure moralist inclines to scrutinise per- and the sonal vices and to give too little credit to political merit. It is by such that the character of Henry has for the most part been written. ecclesiastic, moralist |