Henry the Second | Page 4

impetuous daring, the pertinacity which she had inherited from her
Norman ancestors. Stephen fell back on his last source--a body of
mercenary troops from Flanders,--but the Brabançon troops were hated
in England as foreigners and as riotous robbers, and there was no
payment for them in the royal treasury. The barons were all alike ready
to change sides as often as the shifting of parties gave opportunity to
make a gain of dishonour; an oath to Stephen was as easy to break as an

oath to Matilda or to her son. Great districts, especially in the south and
middle of England, and on the Welsh marches, suffered terribly from
war and pillage; all trade was stopped; great tracts of land went out of
cultivation; there was universal famine.
In 1142 Henry, then nine years old, was brought to England with a
chosen band of Norman and Angevin knights; and while Matilda held
her rough court at Gloucester as acknowledged sovereign of the West,
he lived at Bristol in the house of his uncle, Robert of Gloucester, the
illegitimate son of Henry I., who was still in these troubled days loyal
to the cultured traditions of his father's court, and a zealous patron of
learning. Amid all the confusion of a war of pillage and slaughter,
surrounded by half-wild Welsh mercenaries, by the lawless
Norman-Welsh knights, by savage Brabançons, he learned his lessons
for four years with his cousin, the son of Robert, from Master Matthew,
afterwards his chancellor and bishop of Angers. As Matilda's prospects
grew darker in England, Geoffrey recalled Henry in 1147 to Anjou; and
the next year he joined his mother in Normandy, where she had retired
after the death of Earl Robert. There was a pause of five years in the
civil war; but Stephen's efforts to assert his authority and restore the
reign of law were almost unavailing. All the country north of the Tyne
had fallen into the hands of the Scot king; the Earl of Chester ruled at
his own will in the northwest; the Earl of Aumale was king beyond the
Humber.
With the failure of Matilda's effort the whole burden of securing his
future prospects fell upon Henry himself, then a boy of fifteen. Nor was
he slow to accept the charge. A year later, in 1149, he placed himself in
open opposition to Stephen as claimant to the English throne, by
visiting the court of his great-uncle, David of Scotland, at Carlisle; he
was knighted by the Scot king, and made a compact to yield up to
David the land beyond the Tyne when he should himself have won the
English throne. But he found England cold, indifferent, without
courage; his most powerful friends were dead, and he returned to
Normandy to wait for better days. Geoffrey was still carrying on the
defence of the duchy against Stephen's son Eustace, and his ally, the
King of France; and Henry joined his father's army till peace was made

in 1151. In that year he was invested with his mother's heritage and
became at eighteen Duke of Normandy; at nineteen his father's death
made him Count of Anjou, Lorraine, and Maine.
The young Count had visited the court of Paris to do homage for
Normandy and Anjou, and there he first saw the French queen, Eleanor
of Aquitaine. Her marriage with Louis VII. had been the crowning
success of the astute and far-sighted policy of Louis VI.; for the dowry
Eleanor had brought to the French crown, the great province of the
South, had doubled the territories and the wealth of the struggling little
kingdom of France. In the Crusade of 1147 she had accompanied king
and nobles to the Holy Land as feudal head of the forces of Aquitaine;
and had there baffled the temper and sagacity of Louis by her political
intrigues. Sprung of a house which represented to the full the licentious
temper of the South, she scornfully rejected a husband indifferent to
love, and ineffective in war as in politics. She had "married a monk and
not a king," she said, wearied with a superstition that showed itself in
long fasts of more than monkish austerity, and in the humiliating
reverence with which the king would wait for the meanest clerk to pass
before him. In the square-shouldered ruddy youth who came to receive
his fiefs, with his "countenance of fire," his vivacious talk and
overwhelming energy and scant ceremoniousness at mass, she saw a
man destined by fate and character to be in truth a "king." Her decision
was as swift and practical as that of the keen Angevin, who was
doubtless looking to the southern lands so long coveted by his race. A
divorce from her husband was procured in March 1152; and two
months after she was