far from auspicious. Capgrave in describing the battle refers to a personal encounter of the king with a French knight, in which the former was wounded. The unpromising aspect of the struggle induced the king to essay the effect of negotiation; and he contrived to detach the count of Anjou, his most active opponent, by proposing a marriage between Prince William of England and Sybilla, the counts daughter. The contest was thus suspended for a time, but Henry was merely temporizing; and exhibiting no intention of fulfilling his engagement, war speedily recommenced, and Louis and Anjou were joined by Baldwin, count of Flanders. A fresh struggle of two years followed, in which fortune was variable; but at length the death of Count Baldwin, the flagging exertions of Anjou, who entertained hopes of an English marriage for Sybilla, the co-operation of the pope, and the intrigues of Henry with the disaffected Norman barons, gave the king the advantage, and a treaty highly favourable to his interests was concluded in 1120.
"Sone after the bataile (of Tenchebrai)," observes Capgrave, "deied Maute the good qween, of whos curtesie and humilitie, scilens, and othir good maneris the Englisch poetes at tho (s) dayes mad ful notabel vers." The loss of his son William on the 25th November, 1120, on his passage from Harfleur, was a catastrophe from which the agonized parent never rallied. By his second wife, Adelaide, daughter of Geoffrey, duke of Louvaine, he had no children. In 1128 his nephew, Fitzrobert, died at St. Omer. There being therefore no longer any direct male heir to the crown, the succession was secured to his daughter Matilda, consort of the Emperor Henry IV.
In 1131, England was sufficiently tranquil to tempt Henry to revisit Normandy, and it is a fact, creditable to the stability of his government, that he was able to remain on the continent till 1135, when an insurrection among the Welsh recalled him to England. A sudden fit of illness, however, prevented him from leaving Rouen. Capgrave's account is, that "as he (Henry) cam frō hunting, he desired gretely to ete a lamprey; for that mete loved he wel, and evir it did him harme. This mete caused him a fevyr, of which he deied, 1st December, 1135."
Henry I. was an able and accomplished prince; but if we may judge at so great a distance of time, he appears to have been a person of stern and remorseless temper, and the professor of a rather easy doctrine of political morality. Henry possessed a handsome and prepossessing exterior, and a cultivated mind; and it forms a redeeming point in his character and in the transactions of his reign, that he was fond of literature, and appreciated learning and intellectual culture in others.—(Capgrave's Chronicle of England, 1858, &c.)—W. C. H.
HENRY II., surnamed Fitz-Empress and Plantagenet (from planta genista, a sprig of broom), was the son of the Empress Matilda, daughter of Henry I. by her second husband, Geoffrey Plantagenet, earl of Anjou. He was born in 1133; and when he was nine years of age was brought over to England, and educated under the superintendence of his uncle Robert, the celebrated earl of Gloucester. He returned to Normandy in 1147. Two years later he was knighted at Carlisle by his uncle, David I., king of Scotland. In 1150 he was invested by Louis VII. with the duchy of Normandy, and on the death of his father, 10th September, 1151, he succeeded to the earldom of Anjou and Maine. In the following year he married Eleanor, the repudiated wife of Louis of France (only six weeks after her divorce), in her own right countess of Poitou and duchess of Guienne. Strengthened by this alliance, which made him master of a third part of France, Henry set sail for England for the purpose of making another attempt to eject the usurper Stephen from the throne. The armies of the two competitors came in sight of each other at Wallingford, and a bloody battle was expected; but the leaders on both sides were wearied of the protracted struggle, and a negotiation was set on foot which led to a truce, and ultimately to a permanent peace, which was concluded at Winchester on the 7th of November, 1153. It was agreed that Stephen should retain possession of the crown during his life, and that he should adopt Henry as his son, and appoint him his successor. They lived harmoniously together for nearly a year, when Stephen died, 25th October, 1154, and Henry ascended the throne without opposition. The new monarch devoted the first years of his reign to the removal of the numerous evils which the lengthened contest for the crown had inflicted on the country. He expelled the foreign mercenaries who had come over to England during the long civil war; he issued a new coinage of standard weight and purity, instead of the coin which had been debased by Stephen; he resumed the royal castles and lands which, during the reign of his predecessor, had been alienated to the nobles or usurped by them; and he demolished those fortresses which had been erected by the feudal barons, and foreign freebooters, for the purpose of oppressing and plundering the people. Having by these vigorous measures secured the tranquillity of his English dominions, Henry now turned his attention to the continent, and in 1156 crossed the sea for the purpose of suppressing the attempt of his brother Geoffrey to take possession of Anjou and Maine. On the first appearance of Henry in his paternal dominions, the people at once returned to their allegiance, and Geoffrey was fain to resign his claim in return for an annual pension. Henry returned to England the following year, and made an expedition into Wales, where he encountered great difficulties; but in the end compelled the natives to make their submission. In 1158 the king once more passed over to the continent and forcibly took possession of Nantes. He also negotiated a marriage between his third son, Geoffrey, and the infant daughter of Conan, duke of Brittany, and thus laid a foundation for the claim which he ultimately made good to that principality, the possession of which made him master of the whole western coast of France. A few months later he put forth pretensions in the name of his wife to the great earldom of Toulouse, which led to a brief war between France and England; but it produced no important results, and terminated in a peace in 1160, which, after another quarrel, was renewed in 1162 by the mediation of the pope.
A short period of tranquillity followed, which was broken by a violent conflict with the church, whose usurpations Henry strenuously resisted. In 1161 Theobald, the archbishop of Canterbury, died, and Thomas à Becket, the chancellor of England, and the king's favourite counsellor, was appointed his successor. If Henry expected that his schemes for diminishing ecclesiastical authority in England would be promoted by the elevation of his friend to the primacy of the church, he was miserably disappointed. A full account of the desperate contest between the king and his able but ambitious subject, has already been given (see Becket, Thomas à). Suffice it to say here, that the primate resolutely maintained the claims of his order; he refused to abate one tittle of his haughty pretensions, and in the end died a martyr to his zeal in preserving the immunities of the church. Henry, with difficulty, obtained the papal pardon for the encouragement he was alleged to have given to the foul murder of Becket, and only on the humiliating terms of abolishing all laws and customs unfavourable to the church which might have been introduced into England since the beginning of his reign.
Meanwhile the most important event in the reign of Henry II.—the annexation of Ireland to the English crown—had taken place. It would appear that such a project had been entertained by him from the commencement of his reign; for he succeeded in procuring from the pope in 1156 a bull granting full permission to the English king to invade Ireland, and charging the inhabitants of that country to receive him as their sovereign. The project, however, was for some time delayed, and it was not until 1169 that a favourable opportunity occurred, when a party of private adventurers, headed by Richard de Clare, earl of Pembroke, took possession of Leinster. Henry, on receiving information of these successes, resolved to invade Ireland in person; and on the 18th of October, 1171, he crossed over from Milford to Waterford at the head of five hundred knights and about four thousand common soldiers. The Irish were so dispirited, that Henry found nothing to do but to make a triumphant progress through the country, receiving everywhere, except in Ulster, the submission of the native princes. After making arrangements for the government of his new dominions, he returned home on the 11th April, 1172. But Ireland, though overrun, was not subdued. The native chieftains some time after recovered from their depression, and flew to arms in vindication of their national independence. A fierce and protracted struggle ensued, and it was not until 1175 that the conquest of the country was completed
The reign of Henry had hitherto been singularly fortunate, but the remainder of his life was rendered miserable by a succession of unnatural contests with his own children. He had always been a kind and indulgent father, and had made what appeared a judicious and splendid provision for his four surviving sons. When Prince Henry, the eldest son, who was betrothed
