Читать книгу The Conquerors: The Pageant of England - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 30

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Henry I was not a great man, but he was in many respects a great king. As a man he was selfish, unscrupulous, revengeful. He did not hesitate to break his word. He was a promiscuous lover. As a king he had some of the genius of his father; he was a careful planner, a keen judge, a capable general. But he fell short of the Conqueror’s mark, lacking the violent ambition and the astonishing capacity for invention of that remarkable man. Henry’s record as King shows that he possessed a quite extraordinary gift for administration, a will which could not be bent, and a determination to keep the peace. He fought when he had to, and fought well, but he was always happy to sheathe the sword. As a result the English people enjoyed a quarter century of peace. Bells tolled mournfully in London when news came from the Continent that he had died. In spite of his faults he was called the Lion of Justice.

He has carried a reputation as a scholar down the centuries, the nickname of Beauclerc being given him by all historians. In the chronicles of William of Malmesbury he is compared to Plato—and it is then naïvely stated that he could not read aloud! It is recorded that he was the author of a poem entitled Le Dictie d’Urbain which deals with polite behavior. He has been called the equal of great scholars such as Adelard of Bath, who was a visitor at his court, and William of the White Hands, the famous Archbishop of Reims, who came at a slightly later date.

The truth of the matter was that, coming after the kind of kings the world was accustomed to, Henry looked like a veritable oracle, a prodigy of learning. He had no desire for bookish knowledge, but he had the common sense to believe a saying of the period that “an unlettered king is no better than a donkey with a crown.” Not for him the boorish ignorance of his brother William Rufus. Having a quick and agile mind, he made himself master of the French language. He could read, but not write, Latin. He could even stumble through a little English. But that was all. He never read books, and his handsome dark face would have been wreathed with astonishment if a seer had told him that future ages would think of him as a scholar and writer.

Historians have used the term Beauclerc as though it had been applied to him during his lifetime. One would think it had been bandied about the courts of Europe and that his own courtiers had whispered it behind his back. As a matter of fact, it was coined by a writer two hundred years after Henry’s death and was pounced upon avidly by historians who followed.

Henry ruled well, not because he believed it his duty, but because it was his nature to do so. He saw to it that the laws were obeyed and he punished offenders with a heavy hand. When he ascended the throne he found such legal machinery as existed insufficient and creaky. One of his first steps, therefore, was to set up a more suitable structure. He formed a royal council composed of barons of his household, with a justiciar or lieutenant general of the kingdom at its head. This body acted as a supreme court of appeals as well as a financial board. To handle detail and carry out the decisions of the Council, he organized the clerks of the royal chapel under a directing head who was called the chancellor. The Council held its deliberations around a table with a chequered top, and from this developed the word Exchequer.

Here was a solid and workable system, and soon order had been established out of the chaos into which the tyranny of the Red King had thrown the nation. Twice a year the sheriffs of the counties appeared before the Council, making their reports of what was due the Crown at one department, called Accounts, and then paying the amount at a second department, called Receipts. Sometimes the payments were made in produce—hogs, corn, honey, wax, wool, fowl. To settle disputes which could not be left to local authority, and to try cases, a selected number of the councilors made a yearly round of the shires to make decisions. This last feature was worthy of the inventive mind of the Conqueror. It proved so effective that it was continued thereafter and still exists in the system of judicial circuits. Henry’s reputation might rest securely on this one contribution.

The taxes laid by Henry on the backs of his subjects were heavy. The people groaned, but they were willing to swallow these exactions in return for the restoration of national order. Once again there was a legal way of doing things, once again an effective machine for the netting and punishment of wrongdoers. It was a fair exchange.

Henry was ruthless and unbending in carrying out his laws. One incident will serve to give an idea of how hard he struck at offenders.

He knew that the coinage of the realm was being tampered with and debased, and on several occasions he gave warning to the moneyers to amend their ways. It must be explained that the minting of money was then an industry and that between seventy and one hundred men in different parts of the country were licensed to make and circulate coins. Many of them had fallen into the practice of making money which lacked the proper percentage of silver, despite the fact that they were compelled to put their names on all pieces which went out from their shops. Even after the stern King’s sharp demands for reform, the situation grew worse and worse. Things finally reached the stage where a man might have twenty coins, which he had received for labor or for goods, and find that only one of them could be used as legal tender.

A report on these bad conditions was sent to Henry when he was in Normandy. Back came one of the most harsh orders ever issued by an English sovereign. Every moneyer who could not establish his innocence was to be subjected to the penalty fixed by law for this offense—the cutting off of the right hand! This was to be done immediately and without regard to rank, caste, or connection.

It was early in December when this royal order reached the chancellery. The horrified crown officers hesitated to obey, but finally, seeing no way of evading the responsibility, they summoned all the moneyers to appear at Winchester. It took twelve days to hear the cases. Comparatively few of the unfortunate men were able to prove that they had been innocent of fraud, and through all those twelve grim days the executioner was at work cutting off the right hands of the guilty, and through all those days the nauseating smell of burning flesh pervaded the royal buildings; for it was part of the penalty to have the severed member burned by the common hangman.

One chronicle declares that out of ninety-seven men tried only three failed to feel the sharp edge of King Henry’s justice. This, however, is an exaggeration, for all of the London moneyers operating at this time were still coining money in the years which followed.

For as long as men could remember, the Yuletide season of this year was called Bloody Christmas.

On the military side of the slate, Henry’s record was remarkably good. He quickly suppressed armed resistance on the part of Robert’s supporters in England and exiled their arrogant leader, Robert de Bellême, who had built for himself a powerful feudatory in the west shires. In Normandy the King was invariably successful against his brother and the French King, and later against William Clito, Robert’s illegitimate son. Poor Robert, whose shortness of stature had won him the nickname of Curthose (which might be translated literally as Low-Pockets), was one of those unfortunates who could never do anything right. In spite of a certain goodness of heart and more than a glimmer of honesty, he was a very bad ruler. He kept Normandy in a continual uproar, which subsided when he went to the Crusades but broke out again when he returned and took the reins into his own hands. He made efforts to take away the throne of England from Henry which were sorry failures; and when Henry turned the tables and decided to oust him from his duchy, the result was quick and complete defeat for thumb-fingered Robert. He and the French King were decisively beaten at the battle of Tenchebrai, where Henry’s army was largely made up of English levies. Robert was taken prisoner and brought to England, where Henry had him lodged in a gloomy castle on the borders of Wales. It is said he was punished for attempting to escape by having his eyes burned out, but there is no positive evidence that this happened. The general tendency of historical writers to accept it may be an injustice to Henry’s memory. This much is true: Henry took over Normandy and governed it sternly and well while ineffectual Robert lived out the rest of his days in his castle prison. Even allowing the story of the blinding to be untrue, Henry’s conduct to his older brother is a black mark on his record.

There was no sympathy for Robert among the common people. They had always feared his coming to power over them so much that he had symbolized the Norman menace. His defeat at Tenchebrai had been hailed with a deep sense of satisfaction. Tenchebrai, where four hundred knights and ten thousand French foot soldiers had been captured by English troops, was sweet revenge for the humiliation of Hastings.

Two years after the death of Matilda, Henry decided to go back to England for good. His law ran in Normandy, through the whole length and breadth of it, and there was peace at last in that much-fought-over country. His son William, variously called William Fitz-Roy (the term “prince” was not used by the Normans) or William Atheling, after the Saxon fashion, had been accepted as successor to Henry by the first real parliament summoned in England since the Conquest, which had met at Salisbury for the purpose. The young man had accompanied his father to the duchy and had remained there, taking as his wife Alice, daughter of Count Fulk of Anjou. When the old King made his decision to return, Normandy seems to have been full of members of the royal family. The second son, Richard, was there, several of the King’s natural children who were grown up and married, the Earl of Chester and his bride. It was decided they would all go back together.

The King was in a hurry and went on the first ship, but he agreed to let the heir to the throne and the rest of the royal party travel on the finest galley in the navy, La Blanche Nef. It was captained by one Fitz-Stephen, whose father had commanded the Mora on which the Conqueror had sailed to England for the great adventure and who claimed on that account the right of taking the future King with him. La Blanche Nef sailed at night to overtake the King’s ship, and this led to one of the greatest tragedies of English history. It was a fine evening and the young people decided to make a festive occasion of it. They congregated on deck and drank and danced and sang. William Atheling kept urging Fitz-Stephen to more speed, and the captain obliged by cracking on additional sail and sending orders for greater efforts to the men who strained at the double tier of oars below. All would still have been well if the prince had not instructed that three casks of wine be broached for the crew. The result of this ill-timed generosity was that the high spirits on deck were reflected soon among the yonkers in the rigging, while the sound of voices raised in song came up from the wooden benches where slaves labored at the oars.

The ship crashed headlong on a reef called Le Ras de Catte and began to sink at once. They were not far out, but there were one hundred and forty passengers of noble birth on board and not enough boats to take them all back to shore. Captain Fitz-Stephen saw to it that the heir was put into the largest of these and that it was sent off first. William Atheling would have reached safety without any difficulty if he had not heard the agonized plea of one of his natural sisters, Matilda, who had married the Count of Perche and who had been left behind. He was fond of her and could not bear to leave her to drown, so he ordered the boat back. When it reached the side of the sinking craft, so many frantic people jumped in that the boat turned over, spilling everyone into the sea. The heir to the throne went down with the rest. When the captain, swimming about vigorously and trying to bring some order out of the mad confusion, heard that William had drowned, he threw his arms into the air with a despairing cry and went down himself.

Of all on board, only one person survived to tell the story of the disaster, a butcher of Rouen who climbed to the head of the mast and clung there, just above water, until help came in the morning.

It was three days after the word reached England before anyone dared tell the King. A page was sent in to him finally, and Henry, gathering the truth from the distracted efforts of the boy to repeat what he had been instructed to say, fell from his chair in a swoon. It is said in all the chronicles that the bereaved monarch was never seen to smile again.