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the fair means of war, and had set fire to the town. When Henry approached, the French thought best to withdraw from it; while doing so, they were assailed by Henry, and put to the rout. Equal success attended the British king in his own island, where the King of Scotland had joined the combatants against him, and where the Earl of Leicester landed at the head of an army of Flemings; the Scottish king was taken prisoner, Leicester repulsed and captured. On Henry's departure for England, Louis had rallied and conducted an army of French and Flemings, with a large body of those Normans who had rebelled against Henry. He invested Rouen, and attempted to get possession of the city by the same perfidy which had won Verneuil. The French proclaimed a truce during the festival of St. Lawrence, and when the besieged citizens, trusting to the declaration of the pious monarch, abandoned their arms for festivity, Robert of Flanders marshalled the besiegers to the attack, and commenced it. This act of treachery was perceived in time by the Rouennese, and the Flemish count suffered a severe repulse. Henry entered Rouen the next day, and immediately opened the gates, preparatory to attacking the besiegers. They did not wait for it. Louis demanded a fresh suspension of hostilities, and withdrew his army in haste. The war thus ended in peace, the English princes submitting, and Louis at once abandoning them and his projects for humbling his rival.

Henry retained all the advantages of victory, and made use of them to extend his sway over the province of Berry, hoping thereby to cut off the King of France altogether from the south; but Louis soon after was struck by paralysis, and, enfeebled in mind and body, looked towards his successor's reign. In 1179 he summoned an assembly of prelates and barons, and ordained the coronation of his son Philip at the approaching parliament at Rheims. This ceremony, willingly agreed to

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IV.

CHAP. by all present, was obliged to be postponed by the illness of the young prince. He was benighted whilst hunting in the forest of Compiegne, brought home by a peasant, but so terrified that a long illness was the consequence. Louis undertook a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury, whither Henry courteously conducted him; and young Philip recovered.

He was crowned with great solemnity at Rheims on All Saints' Day, 1179, young Henry of England acting as seneschal, and the Count of Flanders holding the drawn sword before the newly-crowned sovereign. Philip began at once to exercise the functions of royalty, although his father survived in a paralytic state until the autumn of 1180.

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CHAP. V.

PHILIP AUGUSTUS.

1180-1223.

V.

NOTHING could be more noble than the conduct of Henry CHAP. the Second of England, when the demise of the French monarch left the throne to a boy of sixteen. As usual at courts, two factions disputed the possession of power. The Queen Mother, Alix of Champagne, with her four brothers, claimed it as a natural right; but Philip, Count of Flanders, who had borne the drawn sword at the young king's coronation, and was his military guardian, emancipated him from his mother's influence. This he accomplished by bringing the young king northwards, and causing a marriage to be solemnised between him and the count's niece of Hainault. This princess was descended from Charlemagne, and brought her rights into the house of Capet. The Count of Flanders and his brothers being without male heirs, offered rich chances of succession. But the marriage settlement of Margaret of Hainault only made over to the King of France, after Philip's death, that portion of his territories known subsequently as Artois.* A second coronation was ordained for the royal spouses at Sens, but the Champagners threatening, Philip had it celebrated at St. Denis.

* Quidquid terræ et juris habebat ipse ultra magnum fossatum, which was drawn from St. Omers

to the Lys.
Genealogia Comitum
Flandrensium, in Pertz.

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It was a tempting opportunity for the English monarch to intervene and support one rival faction against another. The Queen Alix even besought his aid against her son, who refused to give up the castles and domains of her dowry. Henry came to France, but it was to reconcile the contending factions, to persuade Philip to behave generously to his mother, and to conclude a treaty of alliance and friendship, stipulating that one king should make no demands of the other, except as regarded Auvergne, the fief of Chatellerault, and some portion of Berry, the rival claims to which were difficult at the moment to decide.

French historians profess astonishment at the noble disinterestedness of Henry, so contrary to what they consider his usual policy. But Henry had no policy. Though anxious to maintain and extend his possessions, he never was animated by hostility or jealousy towards the monarch or monarchy of France, which it was rather his anxiety to respect and preserve. The truth is, that the French had awakened in the twelfth century, and from its very commencement, to a feeling of patriotism and of pride in their country, whilst the English awoke to the corresponding feeling much later. Such a sense of insular patriotism inspired neither Henry the Second nor his sons. The heroic Richard had but little English sentiment; John none. In the wide extent of their dominions England was but a province, and in maintaining the house of Anjou against that of Capet, the princes of the former seemed actuated by no higher motive than defending their private property and family possessions, without casting a thought on the position or the prospects of England as a country. This patriotic, distinct, and rival feeling scarcely became the sentiment of the English till the time of the Edwards. And much as the quarrels of Richard and Philip Augustus in the Holy Land tended to excite it, and did indeed excite it in the French mind, the English shared it so little that

we shall find Louis, the son of Philip Augustus, at the head of a large party in England against the native king.

During these times France, as then constituted, was not even a neighbour of England. Its frontier was remote from English shores, as were its policy or its rivalry. What animated the population of England at this epoch was not warlike hostility to any country, but an eagerness in each class to defend its rights and develope its interests,-nobles, citizens, and clergy struggling for immunities, and obtaining them even from the most powerful kings.

The great difference between the Angevin and Capetian monarchs was, that the former had nothing of what moderns designate by the name of foreign policy. They had indeed the Norman propensities of acquiring, but it was less to extend an empire, than to add estate to estate. They had, moreover, the Norman characteristic of taxing and levying money, and converting their judicial rights and institutions into fiscal machines. It was this that alienated the provinces of the south o. France, which infinitely preferred that absence of legislation and consequently of extortion, which then distinguished the Capets. But the kings of England were at the same time chivalrous and generous, and for that reason shine far above their brethren and contemporaries of France, who were all, until the days of St. Louis, more or less actuated by those mean motives of policy, to which their feudal superiority of rank, joined to their great inferiority of substantial power and wealth, gave strenuous impulse.

Another characteristic of the age was the low state of military science, and the consequent inefficiency of warlike efforts. Before or at the birth of feudalism, princes raised large armies, won battles and effected conquests. Now that feudalism had grown up, the mailed warrior seemed to go to the encounter in no very serious anta

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