Henry the Second | Page 8

You know that the King of Sicily was my pupil for a year; you yourself
taught him the element of verse-making and literary composition; from
me he had further and deeper lessons, but as soon as I left the kingdom
he threw away his books, and took to the easy-going ways of the court.
But with the King of England there is school every day, constant
conversation of the best scholars and discussion of questions."
Behind all this amazing activity, however, lay the dark and terrible side
of Henry's character. All the violent contrasts and contradictions of the
age, which make it so hard to grasp, were gathered up in his varied
heritage; the half-savage nature which at that time we meet with again
and again united with first-class intellectual gifts; the fierce defiance
born of a time when every man had to look solely to his own right hand
for security of life and limb and earthly regard--a defiance caught now
and again in the grip of an overwhelming awe before the portents of the
invisible world; the sudden mad outbreaks of irresponsible passion
which still mark certain classes in our own day, but which then swept
over a violent and undisciplined society. Even to his own time, used as
it was to such strange contrasts, Henry was a puzzle. Men saw him
diligently attend mass every day, and restlessly busy himself during the
most solemn moments in scribbling, in drawing pictures, in talking to
his courtiers, in settling the affairs of State; or heard how he refused
confession till forced to it by terror in the last extremity of sickness,
and then turned it into a surprising ceremony of apology and
self-justification. At one time they saw him, conscience-smitten at the

warning of some seer of visions, sitting up through the night amid a
tumultuous crowd to avert the wrath of Heaven by hastily restoring
rights and dues which he was said to have unjustly taken, and when the
dawning light of day brought cooler counsel, swift to send the rest of
his murmuring suitors empty away; at another bowing panic-stricken in
his chapel before some sudden word of ominous prophecy; or as a
pilgrim, barefoot, with staff in hand; or kneeling through the night
before a shrine, with scourgings and fastings and tears. His steady sense
of order, justice, and government, broken as it was by fits of violent
passion, resumed its sway as soon as the storm was over; but the awful
wrath which would suddenly break forth, when the king's face changed,
and he rolled on the ground in a paroxysm of madness, seemed to have
something of diabolic origin. A story was told of a demon ancestress of
the Angevin princes: "From the devil they came, and to the devil they
will go," said the grim fatalism of the day.

CHAPTER II
THE ANGEVIN EMPIRE
The new kingdom which Henry had added to his dominions in France
might well seem to a man of less inexhaustible energy to make the task
of government impossible. The imperial system of his dreams was as
recklessly defiant of physical difficulties as it was heedless of all the
sentiments of national tradition. In the two halves of his empire no
common political interest and no common peril could arise; the
histories of north and south were carried on apart, as completely as the
histories of America and England when they were apparently united
under one king, and were in fact utterly severed by the ocean which
defined the limits of two worlds. England had little part or lot in the
history of Europe. Foreign policy it had none; when its kings passed to
Normandy, English chroniclers knew nothing of their doings or their
wars. Some little trade was carried on with the nearest lands across the
sea,--with Normandy, with Flanders, or with Scandinavia,--but the
country was almost wholly agricultural. Feudal in its social structure,
governed by tradition, with little movement of inner life or contact with

the world about it, its people had remained jealous of strangers, and as
yet distinguished from the nations of Europe by a strange immobility
and want of sympathy with the intellectual and moral movements
around them. Sometimes strangers visited its kings; sometimes English
pilgrims made their way to Rome by a dangerous and troublesome
journey. But even the connection with the Papacy was slight. A foreign
legate had scarcely ever landed on its shores; hardly any appeals were
carried to the Roman Curia; the Church managed its own business after
a customary fashion which was in harmony with English traditions,
which had grown up during centuries of undisturbed and separate life.
On the other side of the Channel Henry ruled over a straggling line of
loosely compacted states equal in extent to almost