Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1101 page)

As regards his army of freeholders, he compelled every man to keep arms in his house, to be used when the sheriff called him to battle.
A rich landowner had to be armed in complete chain mail, to provide his own horses and to serve in the cavalry, and was called a “knight.”
But even a man who possessed the small sum of £6 13^. M. had to provide himself with a steel cap, a neck-piece of mail, and a spear; while every free man, in town or country, had to have a leather jacket, a steel cap, and a spear.
And this “territorial army” was not only tofight, but to keep the peace also, to chase rogues and thieves, to watch at night at the town gates;
in fact, as we should now say, to “assist the police.”

As regards taxes, Henry did not demand huge sums from all his subjects without distinction of wealth, but he sent officials round the country,
who called together the principal inhabitants of each village and town, and got them to say what their neighbours as well as themselves could afford to pay. So you see, by all these measures, King Henry
interested his subjects in the government.
He made them see that they had duties as well as rights, a fact which the poorer classes of Englishmen have almost wholly forgotten to-day.

But for one frightful stroke of ill-luck Henry might have left an England completely united.
Hear the story of St. Thomas Becket.

The twelfth century was the “golden age”
of the Church. The aims of the popes, even of those popes who were most hostile to the growth of nations, were not entirely selfish.
Christendom was to them one family which God had given them to rule. Kings were to be the earthly instruments of their will, to be petted as long as they obeyed, but scolded and even deposed when they did not. No king and no lay court of justice was to dare to touch a priest,much less to hang him if he committed murder or theft, which too many priests still did. Henry wanted to hang such priests. He was told of a hundred murders committed by priests in the first ten years of his reign which had gone unpunished, because the Church said all priests were “sacred.” So he chose his favourite minister, Thomas Becket, already Chancellor of
England, to be Archbishop of Canterbury. He believed that Thomas would help him to make one law for clergymen and laymen alike; but
Thomas, as proud and hot-tempered a man as the King, had no sooner become Archbishop than he turned right round and supported the most extreme claims of the Church. He even went farther than the Pope, who was most anxious not to quarrel with Henry. “The
Church lands,” he said, “should pay no taxes;
as for hanging priests, he would not hear of it.”
Henry was naturally furious, especially when
Thomas went abroad and stirred up the King of France and the Pope against him. After a long and weary quarrel Henry, in a fit of passion,
used some rash words which some wicked courtiers interpreted to mean that they were to kill
Thomas. They slipped away secretly from the
King’s court and murdered the Archbishop in his own cathedral.

Such a deed of horror was unknown since the

days of the heathen Danes. Thomas at once became both martyr and saint, even in the eyes of those who had hated his pride while he lived.
Men believed that miracles were worked at his tomb, that a touch of his bones would restore the dead to life. A pilgrimage to his shrine at Canterbury became before long the duty of every pious Englishman.

But the worst result was that all the King’s attempts to bring the Churchmen under the law utterly failed; and the claims of the Church to be independent of the State actually increased for a century to come. All Henry’s enemies also took the opportunity to jump on him at once. A fearful outbreak of the barons
(who had been quiet for twenty years), both in England and Normandy, came to a head in
1174, and was supported by both the French and Scottish kings, by Henry’s own eldest son
(a vain young fool), and by Queen Eleanor herself. Henry’s throne rocked and tottered;
but, of course, all good Englishmen stood stiffly for their King, and, when he had knelt in penitence at Becket’s tomb, and allowed the Canterbury monks to give him a sound flogging there, he triumphed over his enemies. He took the King of Scots prisoner, and compelled the rest of the barons to sue for mercy. This mercy he freely gave them. No one was hanged for therebellion, and most people concerned got off with a fine.

His last six years were again disturbed by revolts, but not in England. Philip II was the first of the really great French kings bent on uniting all Frenchmen; and he easily enticed,
not only Henry’s barons, but his three younger sons, Richard, Geoffrey and John, into rebellion.
Henry died of a broken heart at their ingratitude in 1189.

One event of his reign must not be forgotten,
his visit to Ireland in 1171-2. St. Patrick, you may have heard, had banished the snakes from that island, but had not succeeded in banishing the murderers and thieves, who were worse than many snakes. In spite of some few settlements of Danish pirates and traders on the eastern coast, Ireland had remained purely Celtic and purely a pasture country. All wealth was reck,
oned in cows; Rome had never set foot there,
so there was a king for every day in the week,
and the sole amusement of such persons was to drive off each other’s cows, and to kill all who resisted. In Henry II’s time this had been going on for at least 700 years, and during the
700 that have followed much the same thing would have been going on if the English government had not occasionally interfered.

Well, in 1168, one of these wild kings, beingin more than usual trouble, came to Henry and asked for help. Henry said, “Oh, go and try some of my barons on the Welsh border; they are fine fighting-men. I have no objection to their going to help you.” The Welsh border barons promptly went, and, of course, being well armed and trained, a few hundred of their soldiers simply drove everything before them in Ireland, and won, as their reward, enormous estates there. The King began to be anxious about the business, and so, in 1171, he sailed over to Waterford and spent half a year in Ireland. The Irish kings hastened, one after another, to make complete submission to him;
he confirmed his English subjects in their new possessions; he divided the island into counties,
appointed sheriffs and judges for it — and then he went home. He had made only a halfconquest, which is always a bad business, and the English he left behind him soon became as wild and barbarous as the Irishmen themselves.

Henry was succeeded in all his vast dominions by his eldest surviving son, Richard I, “Richard the Lion Heart,” “Richard Yea and Nay,” so called because he spoke the truth. He found
England at profound peace; his father’s great lawyers and ministers continued to govern it for him until his death ten years later. He himself cared little for it, except for the moneyhe could squeeze out of it to serve the two objects which really interested him. These were to deliver Jerusalem, which had again been taken by the Saracens, and to save his foreign provinces from being swallowed by the French
King.

Richard was a most gallant soldier and a born leader of men in war; he was generous and forgiving; but of his father’s really great qualities he had very few. He had been spoiled as a child,
and he remained a great, jolly, impatient child till his death. He and his rival, King Philip,
at once set out on the Crusade in 1190, and quarrelled continually. Philip soon slipped off home, and began to grab Richard’s French provinces, with the aid of the treacherous John,
Richard’s youngest brother, who had stayed in England. John was the one unmitigated scoundrel in the whole family; and he rejoiced greatly when he heard that his brother, who had failed to deliver Jerusalem, had been taken captive on his way home from Palestine, by the unscrupulous German Emperor, Henry VI.
This royal brigand demanded an enormous ransom for Richard, and of course heavy taxes had to be raised in England to pay him. But it did not interrupt the good peace, and Richard,
who forgave his wicked brother directly he was free, spent the rest of his short reign in France

fighting King Philip, not altogether without success. He was killed at the siege of a small
French castle in 1199.

The proper heir to the throne was Arthur of Brittany, a mere boy, son of Henry II’s third son Geoffrey, who had died in 1186. But John was in England and seized the crown without much difficulty. Of course he quarrelled at once with his old friend Philip, and Philip knew that his own time and that of France had now come.
John did, indeed, get hold of little Arthur and had him murdered; but then dawdled away his time in small sieges and useless raids in France,
while Philip overran all John’s French dominions except Aquitaine with perfect ease.

By 1205, Normandy, Maine, Touraine, Anjou,
the inheritance of the mighty Norman and
Angevin races, had gone to France for good.
And of the French possessions of England only the far South-west remained.

The English barons, most of whom had owned lands in Normandy ever since 1066, were of course furious with their King, especially when he kept on screwing enormous sums of money from them, calling out large armies to fight, and then running away without fighting. As for
Aquitaine, none of them owned lands there, and they refused to defend it. John raved and cursed,-and practised horrible cruelties on anyenemies he could catch, and generally behaved in a most unkingly fashion. But in 1206 he began quite a new quarrel with the English
Church and the Pope. His cause was at first a good one, for it was about the appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Both the
Pope and the monks at Canterbury had refused to accept the man whom John named as Archbishop; and the Pope had even appointed one
Stephen Langton in his place. John swore
“by God’s teeth” that he would never receive
Langton as Archbishop; and for five years he held his own. The Pope tried every weapon at his command; he “excommunicated” John, that is to say, he cut him off from all Christian rites;
he put England under an “interdict,” which meant that no one could be buried with the full burial service, no one married in church, no church bells rung, and in fact all the best religious services and sacraments were suspended.
Finally, the Pope declared John deposed and told Philip to go and depose him.

Now, much as Englishmen hated their tyrannical King, they hated still more the idea of an Italian priest dealing thus with the crown and liberty of England; and most honest men were prepared to support even John against
Philip and the Pope.

John, for his part, confiscated all Churchproperty in England and bestowed it on a set of foreign favourites and parasites, mostly mercenary soldiers from Flanders. Then suddenly he gave away his own cause. In 1213 he became frightened, made the most abject submission to the Pope, and promised to hold his crown and country for the future as the Pope’s “vassal,”
and to pay tribute for it. This was too much for all Englishmen, and the country fairly boiled over with rage.

Yet “rebellion” was a dreadful thing. John was rich, powerful, and held all the important castles of England in his own hands. The man who gave the English barons courage to resist was the very man over whom all this fuss had begun — Stephen Langton. He called meetings of the leading barons, and either drew up or got them to draw up a list of their grievances and those of other classes of Englishmen. This document was to be taken to the King and, if he refused to listen, the barons were to rebel.
Nearly all the towns and most of the churchmen were on their side; yet they were only able to raise a little army of 2,000 men. Luckily
John again lost his head and agreed to all their demands. The document which they presented to him at Runnymede, near Windsor, in June,
1215, and which he signed, was called “Magna
Charta” — the “Great Charter of Liberties.”