The Conquering Family (20 page)

He occupied himself while in Ireland with establishing order and setting up an administration along the sound lines of his reforms in England. Officers trained in his ways were put in charge of justice and the raising of taxes. It had been the same everywhere, in sunny Aquitaine, in Anjou, and in Brittany. Always he had proceeded to codify the laws and set the wheels of justice to turning. Always it had been done in the face of bitter opposition from the nobility, who saw their feudal advantages reduced by a system which took the law out of their hands.

He did much to establish what was later known as the Pale, a strip of territory along the eastern coast and centering at Dublin, in which the supremacy of the invaders was acknowledged and English ways of living were introduced. The Pale changed in shape and size in the centuries
which followed, sometimes shrinking, sometimes growing, but it remained the core of Anglo-Saxon occupation and the one part of the country where the imprint of the invaders was never wiped out.

More than ten years later, after Strongbow had died and various governors had followed him, Henry formally declared his son John King of the country. John, now seventeen years of age, was well loved by Henry, although he was beginning to show the traits which were to make him later the most execrated of all rulers. He had, moreover, been a sorry failure in some military operations in France. Henry was determined that his youngest son was to be a king in his own right, and so to Ireland sailed the smiling, indolent, false John with a considerable force to make good his claim to the full suzerainty of the island. By his side was Ranulf de Glanville, the shrewdest lawyer and administrator in England and the general who captured William the Lion. Henry never allowed his sons out of leading strings. He might make them kings and dukes, but always beside them were long-nosed Normans who knew exactly what Henry himself would want under any circumstances and who had authority to see that things were done his way.

All the skilled officers Henry had trained since the days of the magic chancellorship of Thomas à Becket would have failed to keep John in control. That young man discovered that the Welsh-Normans who had conquered the coast and who were in the main well disposed to the Irish people had become to some degree assimilated. These tall, fair knights had married Irish wives (adopting the native custom of a trial marriage of one year from the Feast of Samhain but liking their mates well enough to put the relationship on a permanent basis) and had settled down on their lands with no more desire for destruction or conquest. This was all the excuse the amiable John needed to shove them aside for the men he had brought with him. They were Normans fresh from France, as rapacious as the adventurers who had followed the Conqueror into England, looking for spoils and ransoms. They started the trouble all over again, burning, slaying, making little distinction between the native Irish and the men of Strongbow.

John himself behaved like a malicious schoolboy, pulling the long beards of the Irish kings and chiefs when they bent the knee to him in submission. He allowed his men to commit the final offense, which was to break open churches and to despoil them of their sacred vessels.

Glanville could do nothing in the face of the bloody and yet farcical turmoil which John created about him. He seems to have given up in despair. Anything he accomplished would, in any event, have been swept
aside in the fury of resentment which brought all Ireland raging about the Pale.

It had been arranged that John would be crowned on Christmas Day of the following year. The Pope, who seems to have remained blind to what was going on, sent a crown of gold in the form of peacock feathers to be used at the coronation. Neither could His Holiness have had any realization of the peculiar fitness of such a crown for the vain and arrogant youth on whose brow it was to rest.

But the crowning never took place. John had not lived up to Merlin’s prediction of him, “Born of the fell fire-king, a sparklet prince shall dart his bolt of icy fear to Erin’s quaking heart.” There was no trace of icy fear in the kings of Limerick, Connaught, and Meath when they met his forces at Tegas and scored a decisive victory over them. In the chronicle of Benedict it is said that most of the prince’s troops had deserted and gone over to the natives. At any rate, John found himself in a most precarious position and decided that personal safety was better than a coronation. He sailed back to England.

After this reverse Henry gave up his efforts to reduce Ireland. The Pale remained the only part of the country where English rule was maintained.

H
ENRY’S
troubles came upon him when his power was at its height. In 1171 his third son Geoffrey was married to Constance, the heiress of Brittany, and assumed the title of duke of that rugged corner of France, with its rocky shores and tumultuous streams, jutting out between the Sleeve (as the French always called the Channel) and the Bay of Biscay. Now all of northern France was included in the Angevin empire, as well as the west and some of the south. Henry was titular head of the Norman dynasty in Sicily and through his marriage to Eleanor occupied the same suzerainty to the Aquitainian kings of Antioch. England stood higher in the Christian world than at any time before. In London there were always special ambassadors (though that term for them had not yet been coined) from other countries to negotiate military or trade agreements. Englishmen were playing prominent parts on the Continent. As a final step in fitting the futures of his children into his dream of empire, Henry arranged a marriage for John with the heiress of Maurienne.

This mountainous province, lying south of Lake Geneva and extending almost to the Gulf of Genoa, was of much greater importance than its relatively small size would suggest. It controlled the approaches to Italy. With a foothold here, the English King would be able to gaze across the Alps at Frederick Barbarossa with a sense of equality. Nay, at the moment the elements in Germany opposed to their red-bearded Emperor were secretly negotiating with Henry to take his place, and so the English ruler had every reason to see himself as another and greater Charlemagne.

The little heiress of Maurienne would not live long enough to play any part in the designs of the ambitious King, but this was in the future and no premonition of it placed a damper on the good spirits of the scheming fathers when they met in the city of Limoges to settle the details of the match. Henry had brought his whole ménage with him: Eleanor, young Henry and his French wife Marguerite, the younger French princess, Alice, who was to marry Richard when she was old enough, and, of course,
the youthful John, who undoubtedly derived a sense of importance from the role he was playing.

Limoges had never seen since the days of the Roman occupation, when it had been a large place, such an assemblage of the great of the earth within the walls of the Château, as the more ancient half of the city was called. In addition to the English royal family and the nobility of Aquitaine, who always flocked around when Eleanor appeared, there was the Count of Maurienne and a train of Italian noblemen and, to the excitement of everyone, Raimund of Toulouse. This important and elusive feudal figure had come to pay homage for the first time to Henry for his rich and extensive domain which included all of the southwestern corner of France. The arrival of Raimund was the capstone in Henry’s arch of glory, for now at last his sway extended from the farthest north corner of the British Isles to the southernmost part of France.

Limoges was to see the beginning of one of the strangest situations in history. This ancient city, the capital of Limousin, had grown up on the banks of the Vienne and was built solidly of stone, which gave it a notable air of permanence in the eyes of the visitors familiar with the precarious state of wooden London. It was of a great quaintness and charm, a cluster of fine slate-topped spires and much rich-stained glass. Here the bellows of the apprentices blew hot fires for the making of the new champlevé enamel, and here came the pilgrims, who had never heard of St. Thomas the Martyr, to pray at the tomb of St. Martial, filling the narrow streets with their processions on donkeys. The visitors had been taken in at the castle of the viscounts of Limousin, and they were even sleeping up under the battlements.

It was in the hall of the castle that Raimund of Toulouse paid homage to Henry. He was a man of proud and unstable humors, as were most of the rulers of south Gaul, and his decision to acknowledge the suzerainty of the English King instead of the French was a matter of policy, from which at this particular moment he expected to reap some benefit. He swore the usual oath, which contained a promise to reveal any information he might have of machinations against the King. When he came to this part the tall count paused with deliberate intent.

“It becomes my duty,” he said in a whisper meant only for the ears of the King, “to warn you. Make safe your fortresses in Poitou and Aquitaine. Distrust your wife and sons.”

The hands of the new vassal were in Henry’s when he said this. The King’s hands tightened their grip instinctively, but he said nothing to indicate he had heard. The ceremony was carried through and the incident seemed to have ended there.

Supper that night was a sumptuous affair of many courses with “warners” in between which usually consisted of feathered and roasted peacocks or figures done in pastry. There was, of course, a succession of the
finest wines of the south. Seated between Eleanor and Raimund of Toulouse, the King imposed enough restraint on himself to stay in his chair and not get up for his usual jaunts around the room. He had little desire for food and his hand seldom raised the jeweled wine cup to his lips. Although not a man of subtle mood, Henry was conscious of a tension in the room. He stole many side glances at Queen Eleanor, who also appeared to have lost her appetite. Ordinarily she talked easily and beguilingly, and much; but this evening her eyes were lowered and she had little to say. She had passed the fifty mark and was no longer the radiant beauty who had once scandalized Europe, but Henry as usual was aware that she had remained a woman of great charm. Her dark eyes made light of the lines at their corners and they were as animated, or nearly so, as when she and her sister Petronille had been queens of the Courts of Love. Her hair, still dark and still lustrous, was held in a gold net called a crespine, over which she wore a small and severely plain circlet of gold. The tight fit of her upper tunic, under which was a bodice strengthened by bone, showed that she was almost as slender as when he had first seen her.

What Raimund of Toulouse had told him was not new to Henry. He had realized for some time that his sons were turning against him and he knew that Eleanor was the chief cause of it. He had hoped this triumph would quiet them down, that they would perceive at last the greatness of what he was striving for and be content to have shares in it. The rift with Eleanor was, of course, an entirely different matter. He allowed his eyes to stray down the table to where the fifteen-year-old Princess Alice was sitting. She also was feeling the tension in the air. At any rate, he had not heard her low-pitched voice all evening. He could not see much of her now, only the blackness of her hair beyond the gold circlet of her sister Marguerite. Eleanor, who always seemed to know everything which went on, was well aware of the interest he took in Princess Alice.

Distrust your wife and sons, Raimund had said! That suave and scornful man was enjoying the good food and wines with the discrimination of a gourmet and was conversing with an ease which irritated his suzerain. Henry had little liking for men of this particular stamp, intellectual triflers who took their duties lightly and considered the details of administration beneath them. At the moment his anger was all for the Count of Toulouse who had dared put into words what he, Henry, had known for some time. Many, in fact, had known of it, but none had shown the audacity to speak of it.

Unable to contain himself any longer, Henry got to his feet and strolled down the length of the dais. He could now see his son Henry,
Li Reys Josnes
, as they called him in Normandy, the Young King. Neither as tall nor as goldenly handsome as Richard, the eldest son was still large and regal enough to cut a good figure. Surely he could have no part in this
family discontent, his eldest son! It would not matter as much about the others if he could only be sure of the loyalty of
Li Reys Josnes
.

He stopped beside one of his officers and whispered in his ear. The man, too startled for words, looked up at this strange master, asking himself if this meant the King was going back to his old habit of racing from town to town and making his people live in their saddles. It had been understood there would be a long and pleasant stay at Limoges in order to take full advantage of the presence of Raimund of Toulouse and the Count of Maurienne. Why, then, was the King ordering a start for the north in the morning?