Free The Magnificent Century by Thomas B. Costain Page B

approached Grosseteste, the Bishop of Lincoln, who was to play a remarkable part in his long reign, and asked for information as to the nature of the grace wrought in a king by the unction. The bishop replied that it conferred on kings the sevenfold gifts of the Spirit as in confirmation. The boy thanked him earnestly, and the story was passed along as an evidence of the serious turn of his mind and of his desire to acquire a true understanding. It seems more likely to have been a gesture, a deliberate effort to create that exact impression. He was already showing an inclination to win by persuasion the things his father had rudely grasped as his right. If the anointing at Westminster had conferred the sevenfold gifts on Henry, the effects, alas, soon wore off: for no king was more prone to disregard the obligations of his office, to break promises, to play fast and loose with the people whose welfare should have been his first consideration.
    Already it was clear enough that the boy’s charm was superficial and that he was going to prove, although in a far different way, as hard to hold in check as his father. There was none of the savagery of John in the new King; he would not be cruel or wantonly destructive, but he would be selfish and willful, and his hand on the rudder of state would be uncertain, unskilled, unpredictable.
    On the other side of the shield he was devout (all men were devout in this splendid century), he was generous, and with a real tendency to learning. He became well versed in poetry and he had a fine discrimination in matters of art, most especially in architecture, becoming known later as Henry the Builder. These qualities, admirable in themselves, were not of the kind most needed in a man called to kingship.
    It was natural for a boy of this disposition to weary of the restraints of tutelage and to develop impatience with those who exercised authority over him. Peter des Roches, suave, diplomatic, and ever watchful as he was, was unable to hold the King on leash. He fell out of favor suddenly. This was an excellent thing, for otherwise the Poitevin would have taken into his venal hands the administration of the kingdom. Henry at fourteen wanted to escape from his tutor, and it was at this stage that Hubert de Burgh took up where William the Marshal had left off.
    The question as to when Henry would come of age was causing much discussion. In France a king’s majority began legally when he was fourteen, that having been the age of Philip Augustus when his father gave him a share in the authority of kingship. In England the rule seems to have been to leave the decision to circumstances. For six years Hubert de Burgh was the real head of the state, and he governed with a firm hand in spite of the tides of opposition which surged about him. Peter des Roches had departed the kingdom and gone on a pilgrimage to Compostela as soon as he lost favor (he would come back when things were more propitious), but the foreign influence was still being exerted in insidious ways in the dark little offices at Westminster where the business of government was being carried out. In addition, the powerful barons of England were now openly resentful of the new head of the state and bitterly critical of the wealth he was acquiring for himself.
    The next years, in spite of this opposition, saw many forward steps taken. The administration of the realm was firm and consistent in the best traditions of Henry II.
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    The years of the minority were made difficult by a chronic lack of funds. It had been found hard, after the expulsion of the French, to get into operation the various processes of law by which money came to the offices of the Crown. Debts had been accumulating in the meantime, the greatest being the sums owed to the Vatican.
    The papacy had always taken an annual toll from England as a matter of course. Starting with the Rome penny, as it was called in Anglo-Saxon days, the yearly tribute took the form of Peter’s