by Edmund Burke
The politics of this remarkable reign consisted of three branches: to redress the gross abuses which prevailed in the civil government and the revenue, to humble the great barons, and keep the aspiring spirit of the clergy within proper bounds. The introduction of a new law with a new people at the Conquest had unsettled everything: for whilst some adhered to the Conqueror’s regulations, and others contended for those of St. Edward, neither of them were well executed or properly obeyed. The king, therefore, with the assistance of his justiciaries, compiled a new body of laws, in order to find a temper between both. The coin had been miserably debased, but it was restored by the king’s vigilance, and preserved by punishments, cruel, but terrifying in their example. There was a savageness in all the judicial proceedings of those days, that gave even justice itself the complexion of tyranny: for whilst a number of men were seen in all parts of the kingdom, some castrated, some without hands, others with their feet cut off, and in various ways cruelly mangled, the view of a perpetual punishment blotted out the memory of the transient crime, and government was the more odious, which, out of a cruel and mistaken mercy, to avoid punishing with death, devised torments far more terrible than death itself.
But nothing called for redress more than the disorders in the king’s own household. It was considered as an incident annexed to their tenure, that the socage vassals of the crown, and so of all the subordinate barons, should receive their lord and all his followers, and supply them in their progresses and journeys, which custom continued for some ages after in Ireland, under the name of coshering. But this indefinite and ill-contrived charge on the tenant was easily perverted to an instrument of much oppression by the disorders of a rude and licentious court; insomuch that the tenants, in fear for their substance, for the honor of their women, and often for their lives, deserted their habitations and fled into the woods on the king’s approach. No circumstance could be more dishonorable to a prince; but happily, like many other great abuses, it gave rise to a great reform, which went much further than its immediate purposes. This disorder, which the punishment of offenders could only palliate, was entirely taken away by commuting personal service for a rent in money; which regulation, passing from the king to all the inferior lords, in a short time wrought a great change in the state of the nation. To humble the great men, more arbitrary methods were used. The adherence to the title of Robert was a cause, or a pretence, of depriving many of their vast possessions, which were split or parcelled out amongst the king’s creatures, with great injustice to particulars, but in the consequences with general and lasting benefit. The king held his courts, according to the custom, at Christmas and Easter, but he seldom kept both festivals in the same place. He made continual progresses into all parts of his kingdom, and brought the royal authority and person home to the doors of his haughty barons, which kept them in strict obedience during his long and severe reign.
His contests with the Church, concerning the right of investiture, were more obstinate and more dangerous. As this is an affair that troubled all Europe as well as England, and holds deservedly a principal place in the story of those times, it will not be impertinent to trace it up to its original. In the early times of Christianity, when religion was only drawn from its obscurity to be persecuted, when a bishop was only a candidate for martyrdom, neither the preferment, nor the right of bestowing it, were sought with great ambition. Bishops were then elected, and often against their desire, by their clergy and the people: the subordinate ecclesiastical districts were provided for in the same manner. After the Roman Empire became Christian, this usage, so generally established, still maintained its ground. However, in the principal cities, the Emperor frequently exercised the privilege of giving a sanction to the choice, and sometimes of appointing the bishop; though, for the most part, the popular election still prevailed. But when, the Barbarians, after destroying the Empire, had at length submitted their necks to the Gospel, their kings and great men, full of zeal and gratitude to their instructors, endowed the Church with large territories and great privileges. In this case it was but natural that they should be the patrons of those dignities and nominate to that power which arose from their own free bounty. Hence the bishoprics in the greatest part of Europe became in effect, whatever some few might have been in appearance, merely donative. And as the bishoprics formed so many seigniories, when the feudal establishment was completed, they partook of the feudal nature, so far as they were subjects capable of it; homage and fealty were required on the part of the spiritual vassal; the king, on his part, gave the bishop the investiture, or livery and seizin of his temporalities, by the delivery of a ring and staff. This was the original manner of granting feudal property, and something like it is still practised in our base-courts. Pope Adrian confirmed this privilege to Charlemagne by an express grant. The clergy of that time, ignorant, but inquisitive, were very ready at finding types and mysteries in every ceremony: they construed the staff into an emblem of the pastoral care, and the ring into a type of the bishop’s allegorical marriage to his church, and therefore supposed them designed as emblems of a jurisdiction merely spiritual. The Papal pretensions increased with the general ignorance and superstition; and the better to support these pretensions, it was necessary at once to exalt the clergy extremely, and, by breaking off all ties between them and their natural sovereigns, to attach them wholly to the Roman see. In pursuance of this project, the Pope first strictly forbade the clergy to receive investitures from laymen, or to do them homage. A council held at Rome entirely condemned this practice; and the condemnation was the less unpopular, because the investiture gave rise to frequent and flagrant abuses, especially in England, where the sees were on this pretence with much scandal long held in the king’s hands, and afterwards as scandalously and publicly sold to the highest bidder. So it had been in the last reign, and so it continued in this.
Henry, though vigorously attacked, with great resolution maintained the rights of his crown with regard to investitures, whilst he saw the Emperor, who claimed a right of investing the Pope himself, subdued by the thunder of the Vatican. His chief opposition was within his own kingdom. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, a man of unblamable life, and of learning for his time, but blindly attached to the rights of the Church, real or supposed, refused to consecrate those who received investitures from the king. The parties appealed to Rome. Rome, unwilling either to recede from her pretensions or to provoke a powerful monarch, gives a dubious answer. Meanwhile the contest grows hotter. Anselm is obliged to quit the kingdom, but is still inflexible. At last, the king, who, from the delicate situation of his affairs in the beginning of his reign, had been obliged to temporize for a long time, by his usual prudent mixture of management with force obliged the Pope to a temperament which seemed extremely judicious. The king received homage and fealty from his vassal; the investiture, as it was generally understood to relate to spiritual jurisdiction, was given up, and on this equal bottom peace was established. The secret of the Pope’s moderation was this: he was at that juncture close pressed by the Emperor, and it might be highly dangerous to contend with two such enemies at once; and he was much more ready to yield to Henry, who had no reciprocal demands on him, than to the Emperor, who had many and just ones, and to whom he could not yield any one point without giving up an infinite number of others very material and interesting.
A.D. 1120.
A.D. 1127.As the king extricated himself happily from so great an affair, so all the other difficulties of his reign only exercised, without endangering him. The efforts of France in favor of the son of Robert were late, desultory, and therefore unsuccessful. That youth, endued with equal virtue and more prudence than his father, after exerting many useless acts of unfortunate bravery, fell in battle, and freed Henry from all disturbance on the side of France. The incursions of the Welsh in this reign only gave him an opportunity of confining that people within narrower bounds. At home he was well obeyed by his subjects; abroad he dignified his family by splendid allian
ces. His daughter Matilda he married to the Emperor. But his private fortunes did not flow with so even a course as his public affairs. His only son, William, with a natural daughter, and many of the flower of the young nobility, perished at sea between Normandy and England. From that fatal accident the king was never seen to smile. He sought in vain from a second marriage to provide a male successor; but when he saw all prospect of this at an end, he called a great council of his barons and prelates. His daughter Matilda, after the decease of the Emperor, he had given in marriage to Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou. As she was his only remaining issue, he caused her to be acknowledged as his successor by the great council; he enforced this acknowledgment by solemn oaths of fealty, — a sanction which he weakened rather than confirmed by frequent repetition: vainly imagining that on his death any ties would bind to the respect of a succession so little respected by himself, and by the violation of which he had procured his crown. Having taken these measures in favor of his daughter, he died in Normandy, but in a good old age, and in the thirty-sixth year of a prosperous reign.
CHAPTER V.
REIGN OF STEPHEN.
A.D. 1135.Although the authority of the crown had been exercised with very little restraint during the three preceding reigns, the succession to it, or even the principles of the succession, were but ill ascertained: so that a doubt might justly have arisen, whether the crown was not in a great measure elective. This uncertainty exposed the nation, at the death of every king, to all the calamities of a civil war; but it was a circumstance favorable to the designs of Stephen, Earl of Boulogne, who was son of Stephen, Earl of Blois, by a daughter of the Conqueror. The late king had raised him to great employments, and enriched him by the grant of several lordships. His brother had been made Bishop of Winchester; and by adding to it the place of his chief justiciary, the king gave him an opportunity of becoming one of the richest subjects in Europe, and of extending an unlimited influence over the clergy and the people. Henry trusted, by the promotion of two persons so near him in blood, and so bound by benefits, that he had formed an impenetrable fence about the succession; but he only inspired into Stephen the design of seizing on the crown by bringing him so near it. The opportunity was favorable. The king died abroad; Matilda was absent with her husband; and the Bishop of Winchester, by his universal credit, disposed the churchmen to elect his brother, with the concurrence of the greatest part of the nobility, who forgot their oaths, and vainly hoped that a bad title would necessarily produce a good government. Stephen, in the flower of youth, bold, active, and courageous, full of generosity and a noble affability, that seemed to reproach the state and avarice of the preceding kings, was not wanting to his fortune. He seized immediately the immense treasures of Henry, and by distributing them with a judicious profusion removed all doubts concerning his title to them. He did not spare even the royal demesne, but secured himself a vast number of adherents by involving their guilt and interest in his own. He raised a considerable army of Flemings, in order to strengthen himself against another turn of the same instability which had raised him to the throne; and, in imitation of the measures of the late king, he concluded all by giving a charter of liberties as ample as the people at that time aspired to. This charter contained a renunciation of the forests made by his predecessor, a grant to the ecclesiastics of a jurisdiction over their own vassals, and to the people in general an immunity from unjust tallages and exactions. It is remarkable, that the oath of allegiance taken by the nobility on this occasion was conditional: it was to be observed so long as the king observed the terms of his charter, — a condition which added no real security to the rights of the subject, but which proved a fruitful source of dissension, tumult, and civil violence.
The measures which the king hitherto pursued were dictated by sound policy; but he took another step to secure his throne, which in fact took away all its security, and at the same time brought the country to extreme misery, and to the brink of utter ruin.
At the Conquest there were very few fortifications in the kingdom. William found it necessary for his security to erect several. During the struggles of the English, the Norman nobility were permitted (as in reason it could not be refused) to fortify their own houses. It was, however, still understood that no new fortress could be erected without the king’s special license. These private castles began very early to embarrass the government. The royal castles were scarcely less troublesome: for, as everything was then in tenure, the governor held his place by the tenure of castle-guard; and thus, instead of a simple officer, subject to his pleasure, the king had to deal with a feudal tenant, secure against him by law, if he performed his services, and by force, if he was unwilling to perform them. Every resolution of government required a sort of civil war to put it in execution. The two last kings had taken, and demolished several of these castles; but when they found the reduction, of any of them difficult, their custom frequently was, to erect another close by it, tower against tower, ditch against ditch: these were called Malvoisins, from their purpose and situation. Thus, instead of removing, they in fact doubled the mischief. Stephen, perceiving the passion of the barons for these castles, among other popular acts in the beginning of his reign, gave a general license for erecting them. Then was seen to arise in every corner of the kingdom, in every petty seigniory, an inconceivable multitude of strongholds, the seats of violence, and the receptacles of murderers, felons, debasers of the coin, and all manner of desperate and abandoned villains. Eleven hundred and fifteen of these castles were built in this single reign. The barons, having thus shut out the law, made continual inroads upon each other, and spread war, rapine, burning, and desolation throughout the whole kingdom. They infested the highroads, and put a stop to all trade by plundering the merchants and travellers. Those who dwelt in the open country they forced into their castles, and after pillaging them of all their visible substance, these tyrants held them in dungeons, and tortured them with a thousand cruel inventions to extort a discovery of their hidden wealth. The lamentable representation given by history of those barbarous times justifies the pictures in the old romances of the castles of giants and magicians. A great part of Europe was in the same deplorable condition. It was then that some gallant spirits, struck with a generous indignation at the tyranny of these miscreants, blessed solemnly by the bishop, and followed by the praises and vows of the people, sallied forth to vindicate the chastity of women and to redress the wrongs of travellers and peaceable men. The adventurous humor inspired by the Crusade heightened and extended this spirit; and thus the idea of knight-errantry was formed.
A.D. 1138.
A.D. 1139.
A.D. 1141.Stephen felt personally these inconveniences; but because the evil was too stubborn to be redressed at once, he resolved to proceed gradually, and to begin with the castles of the bishops, — as they evidently held them, not only against the interests of the crown, but against the canons of the Church. From the nobles he expected no opposition to this design: they beheld with envy the pride of these ecclesiastical fortresses, whose battlements seemed to insult the poverty of the lay barons. This disposition, and a want of unanimity among the clergy themselves, enabled Stephen to succeed in his attempt against the Bishop of Salisbury, one of the first whom he attacked, and whose castles, from their strength and situation, were of the greatest importance. But the affairs of this prince were so circumstanced that he could pursue no council that was not dangerous. His breach with the clergy let in the party of his rival, Matilda. This party was supported by Robert, Earl of Gloucester, natural son to the late king, — a man powerful by his vast possessions, but more formidable through his popularity, and the courage and abilities by which he had acquired it. Several other circumstances weakened the cause of Stephen. The charter, and the other favorable acts, the scaffolding of his ambition, when he saw the structure raised, he threw down and contemned. In order to maintain his troops, as well as to attach men to his cause, where no principle bound them, vast and continual largess
es became necessary: all his legal revenue had been dissipated; and he was therefore obliged to have recourse to such methods of raising money as were evidently illegal. These causes every day gave some accession of strength to the party against him; the friends of Matilda were encouraged to appear in arms; a civil war ensued, long and bloody, prosecuted as chance or a blind rage directed, by mutual acts of cruelty and treachery, by frequent surprisals and assaults of castles, and by a number of battles and skirmishes fought to no determinate end, and in which nothing of the military art appeared, but the destruction which it caused. Various, on this occasion, were the reverses of fortune, while Stephen, though embarrassed by the weakness of his title, by the scantiness of his finances, and all the disorders which arose from both, supported his tottering throne with wonderful activity and courage; but being at length defeated and made prisoner under the walls of Lincoln, the clergy openly declare for Matilda. The city of London, though unwillingly, follows the example of the clergy. The defection from Stephen was growing universal.
A.D. 1153.But Matilda, puffed up with a greatness which as yet had no solid foundation and stood merely in personal favor, shook it in the minds of all men by assuming, together with the insolence of conquest, the haughty rigor of an established dominion. Her title appeared but too good in the resemblance she bore to the pride of the former kings. This made the first ill success in her affairs fatal. Her great support, the Earl of Gloucester, was in his turn made prisoner. In exchange for his liberty that of Stephen was procured, who renewed the war with his usual vigor. As he apprehended an attempt from Scotland in favor of Matilda, descended from the blood royal of that nation, to balance this weight, he persuaded the King of France to declare in his favor, alarmed as he was by the progress of Henry, the son of Matilda, and Geoffrey, Count of Anjou. This prince, no more than sixteen years of age, after receiving knighthood from David, King of Scotland, began to display a courage and capacity destined to the greatest things. Of a complexion which strongly inclined to pleasure, he listened to nothing but ambition; at an age which is usually given up to passion, he submitted delicacy to politics, and even in his marriage only remembered the interests of a sovereign, — for, without examining too scrupulously into her character, he married Eleanor, the heiress of Guienne, though divorced from her husband for her supposed gallantries in the Holy Land. He made use of the accession of power which he acquired by this match to assert his birthright to Normandy. This he did with great success, because he was favored by the general inclination of the people for the blood of their ancient lords. Flushed with this prosperous beginning, he aspired to greater things; he obliged the King of France to submit to a truce; and then he turned his arms to support the rights of his family in England, from whence Matilda retired, unequal to the troublesome part she had long acted. Worn out with age, and the clashing of furious factions, she shut herself up in a monastery, and left to her son the succession of a civil war. Stephen was now pressed with renewed vigor. Henry had rather the advantage in the field; Stephen had the possession, of the government. Their fortunes appearing nearly balanced, and the fuel of dissension being consumed by a continual and bloody war of thirteen years, an accommodation was proposed and accepted. Henry found it dangerous to refuse his consent, as the bishops and barons, even of his own party, dreaded the consequences, if a prince, in the prime of an ambitious youth, should establish an hereditary title by the force of foreign arms. This treaty, signed at Wallingford, left the possession of the crown for his life to Stephen, but secured the succession to Henry, whom that prince adopted. The castles erected in this reign were to be demolished; the exorbitant grants of the royal demesne to be resumed. To the son of Stephen all his private possessions were secured.
