Henry the Second

Henry the Second

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Title: Henry the Second
Author: Mrs. J. R. Green
Release Date: December 18, 2003 [eBook #10494]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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HENRY THE SECOND
BY
MRS. J. R. GREEN

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
HENRY PLANTAGENET

CHAPTER II

THE ANGEVIN EMPIRE

CHAPTER III
THE GOVERNMENT OF ENGLAND

CHAPTER IV
THE FIRST REFORMS

CHAPTER V
THE CONSTITUTIONS OF CLARENDON

CHAPTER VI
THE ASSIZE OF CLARENDON

CHAPTER VII
THE STRIFE WITH THE CHURCH

CHAPTER VIII
THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND

CHAPTER IX
REVOLT OF THE BARONAGE

CHAPTER X
THE COURT OF HENRY

CHAPTER XI
THE DEATH OF HENRY

CHAPTER I
HENRY PLANTAGENET
The history of the English people would have been a great and a noble
history whatever king had ruled over the land seven hundred years ago.
But the history as we know it, and the mode of government which has
actually grown up among us is in fact due to the genius of the great
king by whose will England was guided from 1154 to 1189. He was a
foreign king who never spoke the English tongue, who lived and
moved for the most part in a foreign camp, surrounded with a motley
host of Brabançons and hirelings; and who in intervals snatched from
foreign wars hurried for a few months to his island-kingdom to carry
out a policy which took little heed of the great moral forces that were at
work among the people. It was under the rule of a foreigner such as this,
however, that the races of conquerors and conquered in England first
learnt to feel that they were one. It was by his power that England,
Scotland, and Ireland were brought to some vague acknowledgment of

a common suzerain lord, and the foundations laid of the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It was he who abolished
feudalism as a system of government, and left it little more than a
system of land-tenure. It was he who defined the relations established
between Church and State, and decreed that in England churchman as
well as baron was to be held under the Common law. It was he who
preserved the traditions of self-government which had been handed
down in borough and shire-moot from the earliest times of English
history. His reforms established the judicial system whose main
outlines have been preserved to our own day. It was through his
"Constitutions" and his "Assizes" that it came to pass that over all the
world the English-speaking races are governed by English and not by
Roman law. It was by his genius for government that the servants of the
royal household became transformed into Ministers of State. It was he
who gave England a foreign policy which decided our continental
relations for seven hundred years. The impress which the personality of
Henry II. left upon his time meets us wherever we turn. The more
clearly we understand his work, the more enduring does his influence
display itself even upon the political conflicts and political action of
our own days.
For seventy years three Norman kings had held England in subjection
William the Conqueror, using his double position as conqueror and
king, had established a royal authority unknown in any other feudal
country William Rufus, poorer than his father when the hoard captured
at Winchester and the plunder of the Conquest were spent, and urged
alike by his necessities and his greed, laid the foundation of an
organized system of finance. Henry I., after his overthrow of the
baronage, found his absolute power only limited by the fact that there
was no machinery sufficient to put in exercise his boundless personal
power; and for its support he built up his wonderful administrative
system. There no longer existed any constitutional check on the royal
authority. The Great Council still survived as the relic and heir both of
the English Witenagemot and the Norman Feudal Court. But in matters
of State its "counsel" was scarcely asked or given; its "consent" was
yielded as a mere matter of form; no discussion or hesitation
interrupted the formal and pompous display of final submission to the

royal will. The Church under its Norman bishops, foreign officials
trained in the King's chapel, was no longer a united national force, as it
had been in the