Henry the Second

								


E-text prepared by Ted Garvin, Bonny Fafard, and Project Gutenberg
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HENRY THE SECOND
BY
MRS. J. R. GREEN

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
HENRY PLANTAGENET

CHAPTER II
THE ANGEVIN EMPIRE

CHAPTER III
THE GOVERNMENT OF ENGLAND

CHAPTER IV
THE FIRST REFORMS

CHAPTER V
THE CONSTITUTIONS OF CLARENDON

CHAPTER VI
THE ASSIZE OF CLARENDON

CHAPTER VII
THE STRIFE WITH THE CHURCH

CHAPTER VIII
THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND

CHAPTER IX
REVOLT OF THE BARONAGE

CHAPTER X
THE COURT OF HENRY

CHAPTER XI
THE DEATH OF HENRY

CHAPTER I

HENRY PLANTAGENET
The history of the English people would have been a great and a noble
history whatever king had ruled over the land seven hundred years ago.
But the history as we know it, and the mode of government which has
actually grown up among us is in fact due to the genius of the great king
by whose will England was guided from 1154 to 1189. He was a foreign king
who never spoke the English tongue, who lived and moved for the most part
in a foreign camp, surrounded with a motley host of Braban�ons and
hirelings; and who in intervals snatched from foreign wars hurried for a
few months to his island-kingdom to carry out a policy which took little
heed of the great moral forces that were at work among the people. It was
under the rule of a foreigner such as this, however, that the races of
conquerors and conquered in England first learnt to feel that they were
one. It was by his power that England, Scotland, and Ireland were
brought to some vague acknowledgment of a common suzerain lord, and the
foundations laid of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It
was he who abolished feudalism as a system of government, and left it
little more than a system of land-tenure. It was he who defined the
relations established between Church and State, and decreed that in
England churchman as well as baron was to be held under the Common law. It
was he who preserved the traditions of self-government which had been
handed down in borough and shire-moot from the earliest times of English
history. His reforms established the judicial system whose main outlines
have been preserved to our own day. It was through his "Constitutions"
and his "Assizes" that it came to pass that over all the world the
English-speaking races are governed by English and not by Roman law. It
was by his genius for government that the servants of the royal household
became transformed into Ministers of State. It was he who gave England a
foreign policy which decided our continental relations for seven hundred
years. The impress which the personality of Henry II. left upon his time
meets us wherever we turn. The more clearly we understand his work, the
more enduring does his influence display itself even upon the political
conflicts and political action of our own days.
For seventy years three Norman kings had held England in subjection