Henry the Second | Page 6

confirmed at
Westminster. Henry was made the adopted son of Stephen, a sharer of
his kingdom while he lived, its heir when he should die. "In the
business of the kingdom," the king promised, "I will work by the
counsel of the duke; but in the whole realm of England, as well in the
duke's part as my own, I will exercise royal justice." Henry did homage
and swore fealty to Stephen, while, as they embraced, "the bystanders
burst into tears of joy," and the nobles, who had stood sullenly aloof
from counsel and consent, took oaths of allegiance to both princes. For
a few months Henry remained in England, months marked by
suspicions and treacheries on all sides. Stephen was helpless, the nobles
defiant, their strongholds were untouched, and the treaty remained
practically a dead letter. After the discovery of a conspiracy against his

life supported by Stephen's second son and the Flemish troops, Henry
gave up for the moment the hopeless task, and left England. But before
long Stephen's death gave the full lordship into his hands. On the 19th
of December 1154 he was crowned at Winchester King of England,
amid the acclamations of crowds who had already learned "to bear him
great love and fear."
King of England, Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou, Maine, and
Touraine, Count of Poitou, Duke of Aquitaine, suzerain lord of
Britanny, Henry found himself at twenty-one ruler of dominions such
as no king before him had ever dreamed of uniting. He was master of
both sides of the English Channel, and by his alliance with his uncle,
the Count of Flanders, he had command of the French coast from the
Scheldt to the Pyrenees, while his claims on Toulouse would carry him
to the shores of the Mediterranean. His subjects told with pride how
"his empire reached from the Arctic Ocean to the Pyrenees;" there was
no monarch save the Emperor himself who ruled over such vast
domains. But even the Emperor did not gather under his sway a
grouping of peoples so strangely divided in race, in tongue, in aims, in
history. No common tie of custom or of sympathy united the unwieldy
bundle of states bound together in a common subjection; the men of
Aquitaine hated Anjou with as intense a bitterness as they hated France;
Angevin and Norman had been parted for generations by traditional
feuds; the Breton was at war with both; to all England was "another
world"--strange in speech, in law, and in custom. And to all the
subjects of his heterogeneous empire Henry himself was a mere
foreigner. To Gascon or to Breton he was a man of hated race and alien
speech, just as much as he was to Scot or Welshman; he seemed a
stranger alike to Angevin and Norman, and to Englishmen he came as a
ruler with foreign tastes and foreign aims as well as a foreign tongue.
We see in descriptions of the time the strange rough figure of the new
king, "Henry Curtmantel," as he was nicknamed from the short
Angevin cape which hung on his shoulders, and marked him out oddly
as a foreigner amid the English and Norman knights, with their long
fur-lined cloaks hanging to the ground. The square stout form, the
bull-neck and broad shoulders, the powerful arms and coarse rough

hands, the legs bowed from incessant riding, showed a frame fashioned
to an extraordinary strength. His head was large and round; his hair red,
close-cut for fear of baldness; his fiery face much freckled; his voice
harsh and cracked. Those about him saw something "lion-like" in his
face; his gray eyes, clear and soft in his peaceful moments, shone like
fire when he was moved, and few men were brave enough to confront
him when his face was lighted up by rising wrath, and when his eyes
rolled and became bloodshot in a paroxysm of passion. His
overpowering energy found an outlet in violent physical exertion.
"With an immoderate love of hunting he led unquiet days," following
the chase over waste and wood and mountain; and when he came home
at night he was never seen to sit down save for supper, but wore out his
court with walking or standing till after nightfall, even when his own
feet and legs were covered with sores from incessant exertion. Bitter
were the complaints of his courtiers that there was never any moment
of rest for himself or his servants; in war time indeed, they grumbled,
excessive toil was natural, but time of peace was ill-consumed in
continual vigils and labours and in incessant travel--one day following
another in merciless and intolerable journeyings. Henry had inherited
the qualities of the Angevin race--its tenacity, its courage, its endurance,
the sagacity that was without impatience, and the craft that