England under the Angevin Kings, Volume IINorgate, Kate
History
England under the Angevin Kings, Volume II
Norgate, Kate
Anjou, House of; England -- Civilization -- 1066-1485; Great Britain -- History -- Angevin period, 1154-1216
One other rebel there was who stood indeed on a different footing from
all the rest, and whose defection had a wider political significance.
The king of Scots--William the Lion, brother and successor of Malcolm
IV.--had long been suspected of a secret alliance with France against
his English cousin and overlord. The younger Henry now offered him
the cession of all Northumberland as far as the Tyne for himself, and
for his brother David confirmation in the earldom of Huntingdon,[676]
with a grant of the earldom of Cambridge in addition, in return for
the homage and services of both brothers:--offers which the king of
Scots accepted.[677] Only three prelates, on either side of the sea,
shewed any disposition to countenance the rebellion; in the south,
William, the new-made archbishop of Bordeaux;[678] in the north, Arnulf
of Lisieux[679] and Hugh of Durham. Arnulf’s influence at court had
long been on the wane; all his diplomacy had failed, as far as his
personal interest with King Henry was concerned; but he possessed the
temporal as well as the spiritual lordship of his see; and the man’s
true character now shewed itself at last, justifying all Henry’s
suspicions, in an attempt to play the part of a great baron rather
than of a bishop--to use his diplomatic gifts in temporizing between
the two parties, instead of seeking to make peace between them or
to keep his straying flock in the path of loyalty as a true pastor
should. He did but imitate on a smaller scale and under less favourable
conditions the example set by Hugh of Puiset in his palatine bishopric
of Durham, where he had been throughout his career simply a great
temporal ruler, whose ecclesiastical character only served to render
almost unassailable the independence of his political position. It
was the pride of the feudal noble, not the personal sympathies of the
churchman, that stirred up both Hugh and Arnulf to their intrigues
against Henry. Personal sympathies indeed had as yet little share
in drawing any of the barons to the side of the boy-king. What they
saw in his claims was simply a pretext and a watchword which might
serve them to unite against his father. Young Henry himself evidently
relied chiefly on his foreign allies--his father-in-law, the counts
of Flanders and Boulogne, and the count of Blois, the last of whom
was bribed by a promise of an annual pension and the restitution of
Château-Renaud and Amboise; while to Philip of Flanders was promised
the earldom of Kent with a pension in English gold, and to Matthew
of Boulogne the soke of Kirton-in-Lindsey and the Norman county of
Mortain.[680]
[676] To which, as will be seen later, there was a rival
claimant who adhered to Henry II.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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