Kate Norgate

“ How many of his earlier projects of going on crusade—now to Spain, now to Holy Land, now alone, now with the king of France—had been mere political expedients, we cannot tell; there may have been more sincerity in them than one is at first disposed to imagine. Little as Henry cared for either war or adventure merely for its own sake, still there flowed in his veins, no less than in those of his young cousin Baldwin, the blood of Angevin pilgrims and crusaders. ”

“ The new count of Anjou began his reign in circumstances very unlike those of his father half a century before. Not only had Fulk wholly changed the political position of Anjou, but Geoffrey’s own position as an individual was totally different. He was no untried boy, left to fight his own way with no weapons save the endowments which nature had given him; he was a full-grown man, trained in the school of Fulk Nerra, and already experienced in politics and war. In his own day Geoffrey Martel was looked up to with as much respect as his father, and with even more dread. ”

“ As he was keen in exacting, so he was prodigal in distributing his ill-gotten gains; displaying the claws of a harpy, the extravagance of a Cleopatra, and the shamelessness of both.’ ‘He was very stern and cruel over his land and his men, and with all his neighbours, and very terrible; and through evil men's counsels, which were ever pleasing to him, and through his own covetousness, he was ever tormenting the people with soldiering and with ungelds, forasmuch as in his days all right fell down and all unright, for God and for the world, uprose.’ Of his private life it is impossible to speak. ”

“ Philip answered at once: “The realm of England never was S. Peter’s patrimony; it is not so now, and never shall be. John was convicted long ago of treason against his brother Richard, and condemned by the judgement of Richard’s court; therefore John was never rightfully king, and had no power to surrender the kingdom. Moreover, if he ever was rightfully king, he afterwards forfeited his right to the crown by the murder of Arthur, for which he was condemned in our court. And in any case no king or prince can give away his realm without the consent of his barons, who are bound to defend it.” ”

“ If our Angevin king sometimes looks like a stranger amongst us, he was never anything but a stranger among the fellow-countrymen of his wife. Nowhere throughout his whole dominions was a spirit of revolt and insubordination so rife as among the nobles of Poitou and its dependencies; but it was a spirit utterly unlike the feudal pride of the Norman baronage. The endless strife of the Aquitanian nobles with their foreign duke and with each other sprang less from political motives than from a love of strife for its own sake ”

“ He is the only one of the whole line of Angevin counts, till we reach the last and worst of all, whose ruling passion seems to have been not ambition but self-indulgence. Every former count of Anjou, from Fulk the Red to Geoffrey Martel, had toiled and striven, and sinned upon occasion, quite as much for his heirs as for himself: Fulk Rechin toiled and sinned for himself alone. All the thoroughness which they threw into the pursuit of their house’s greatness he threw simply into the pursuit of his own selfish desires. ”

“ If, instead of the metropolitan church of Normandy, a lay baron had owned the soil of Andely, we may be sure that long ago that lofty brow would have received its fitting crown; if the power of Fulk the Builder had reached to the banks of the Seine, we may doubt whether the anathemas of the Norman primate would not have availed as little to wrest such a spot from his grasp as those of the archbishop of Tours had availed to wrest from him the site of Montrichard. But a greater castle-builder than Fulk Nerra himself was the architect of Château-Gaillard. ”

“ Guided by a common instinct, all the little company around the King turned, as John had turned many a time, to William the Marshal as their one hope, and before they separated for the night they went to him with the same request which had already been made to him by John and by little Henry himself: “You have made our young lord a knight; he owes his crown to you; we all of us together pray you to take him into your keeping.” “I cannot,” answered William, “I am old; the task is too heavy for me. Leave the matter till the Earl of Chester comes.” ”

“ The new king was of middle height, square-built and strong, with a broad forehead, eyes of varying colour and marked with white specks, yellowish hair, and a complexion so ruddy that the nickname derived from it—‘Rufus,’ ‘the Red’—is used by contemporaries not only as an epithet to distinguish him from his father, but even as a substitute for his real name. Immediately after his coronation he returned to Winchester, to make from the treasury there a lavish distribution of gifts to the churches and alms to the poor of his realm for the good of his father's soul. ”

“ While he seemed to be throwing his whole energies into the occupation of the moment—whether it were the building or the besieging of a fortress, the browbeating of bishop or king, the cajoling of an ally or the crushing of a rival on the battle-field—that work was in reality only a part of a much greater work. Every town mirrored in the clear streams that water the “garden of France”—as the people of Touraine call their beautiful country—has its tale of the Black Count, the “great builder” beneath whose hands the whole lower course of the Loire gradually came to bristle with fortresses ”

“ Whatever he touches—history, archæology, geography, natural science, politics, the social life and thought of the day, the physical peculiarities of Ireland and the manners and customs of its people, the picturesque scenery and traditions of his own native land, the scandals of the court and of the cloister, the petty struggle for the primacy of Wales and the great tragedy of the fall of the Angevin empire—is all alike dealt with in the bold, dashing, offhand style of a modern newspaper or magazine-article. ”

“ Intellectually, a mind thus constituted must needs provoke and deserve the impatient scorn of a cool clear brain such as Gilbert Foliot’s; but its very intellectual weakness was the source of its true strength. It is this dogged adherence to one fixed idea, this simplicity of aim, which appeals to the average crowd of mankind far more strongly than the larger and more statesmanlike temper of men like Foliot, or like Henry himself. Whether or no the cause be worthy—whether or no the zeal be according to knowledge—it is the zealot, not the philosopher, who becomes the popular hero and martyr. ”