the king promised, "I will work by the counsel of the duke; but in the whole realm of England, as well in the duke's part as my own, I will exercise royal justice." Henry did homage and swore fealty to Stephen, while, as they embraced, "the bystanders burst into tears of joy," and the nobles, who had stood sullenly aloof from counsel and consent, took oaths of allegiance to both princes. For a few months Henry remained in England, months marked by suspicions and treacheries on all sides. Stephen was helpless, the nobles defiant, their strongholds were untouched, and the treaty remained practically a dead letter. After the discovery of a conspiracy against his life supported by Stephen's second son and the Flemish troops, Henry gave up for the moment the hopeless task, and left England. But before long Stephen's death gave the full lordship into his hands. On the 19th of December 1154 he was crowned at Winchester King of England, amid the acclamations of crowds who had already learned "to bear him great love and fear."

King of England, Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine, Count of Poitou, Duke of Aquitaine, suzerain lord of Britanny, Henry found himself at twenty-one ruler of dominions such as no king before him had ever dreamed of uniting. He was master of both sides of the English Channel, and by his alliance with his uncle, the Count of Flanders, he had command of the French coast from the Scheldt to the Pyrenees, while his claims on Toulouse would carry him to the shores of the Mediterranean. His subjects told with pride how "his empire reached from the Arctic Ocean to the Pyrenees;" there was no monarch save the Emperor himself who ruled over such vast domains. But even the Emperor did not gather under his sway a grouping of peoples so strangely divided in race, in tongue, in aims, in history. No common tie of custom or of sympathy united the unwieldy bundle of states bound together in a common subjection; the men of Aquitaine hated Anjou with as intense a bitterness as they hated France; Angevin and Norman had been parted for generations by traditional feuds; the Breton was at war with both; to all England was "another world"—strange in speech, in law, and in custom. And to all the subjects of his heterogeneous empire Henry himself was a mere foreigner. To Gascon or to Breton he was a man of hated race and alien speech, just as much as he was to Scot or Welshman; he seemed a stranger alike to Angevin and Norman, and to Englishmen he came as a ruler with foreign tastes and foreign aims as well as a foreign tongue.

We see in descriptions of the time the strange rough figure of the new king, "Henry Curtmantel," as he was nicknamed from the short Angevin cape which hung on his shoulders, and marked him out oddly as a foreigner amid the English and Norman knights, with their long fur-lined cloaks hanging to the ground. The square stout form, the bull-neck and broad shoulders, the powerful arms and coarse rough hands, the legs bowed from incessant riding, showed a frame fashioned to an extraordinary strength. His head was large and round; his hair red, close-cut for fear of baldness; his fiery face much freckled; his voice harsh and cracked. Those about him saw something "lion-like" in his face; his gray eyes, clear and soft in his peaceful moments, shone like fire when he was moved, and few men were brave enough to confront him when his face was lighted up by rising wrath, and when his eyes rolled and became bloodshot in a paroxysm of passion. His overpowering energy found an outlet in violent physical exertion. "With an immoderate love of hunting he led unquiet days," following the chase over waste and wood and mountain; and when he came home at night he was never seen to sit down save for supper, but wore out his court with walking or standing till after nightfall, even when his own feet and legs were covered with sores from incessant exertion. Bitter were the complaints of his courtiers that there was never any moment of rest for himself or his servants; in war time indeed, they grumbled, excessive toil was natural, but time of peace was ill-consumed in continual vigils and labours and in incessant travel—one day following another in merciless and intolerable journeyings. Henry had inherited the qualities of the Angevin race—its tenacity, its courage, its endurance, the sagacity that was without impatience, and the craft that was never at fault. With the ruddy face and unwieldy frame of the Normans other gifts had come to him; he had their sense of strong government and their wisdom; he was laborious, patient, industrious, politic. He never forgot a face he had once seen, nor anything that he heard which he deemed worthy of remembering; where he once loved he never turned to hate, and where he once hated he was never brought to love. Sparing in diet, wasting little care on his dress—perhaps the plainest in his court,—frugal, "so much as was lawful to a prince," he was lavish in matters of State or in public affairs. A great soldier and general, he was yet an earnest striver after peace, hating to refer to the doubtful decision of battle that which might be settled by any other means, and stirred always by a great pity, strange in such an age and in such a man, for lives poured out in war. "He was more tender to dead soldiers than to the living," says a chronicler querulously; "and found far more sorrow in the loss of those who were slain than comfort in the love of those who remained." His pitiful temper was early shown in his determination to put down the barbarous treatment of shipwrecked sailors. He abolished the traditions of the civil war by forbidding plunder, and by a resolute fidelity to his plighted word. In political craft he was matchless; in great perils none was gentler than he, but when the danger was past none was harsher; and common talk hinted that he was a willing breaker of his word, deeming that in the pressure of difficulty it was easier to repent of word than deed, and to render vain a saying than a fact. "His mother's teaching, as we have heard, was this: That he should delay all the business of all men; that whatever fell into his hands he should retain along while and enjoy the fruit of it, and keep suspended in hope those who aspired to it; confirming her sentences with this cruel parable, 'Glut a hawk with his quarry and he will hunt no more; show it him and then draw it back and you will ever keep him tractable and obedient.' She taught him also that he should be frequently in his chamber, rarely in public; that he should give nothing to any one upon any testimony but what he had seen and known; and many other evil things of the same kind. We, indeed," adds this good hater of Matilda, "confidently attributed to her teaching everything in which he displeased us."

A king of those days, indeed, was not shielded from criticism. He lived altogether in public, with scarcely a trace of etiquette or ceremony. When a bishop of Lincoln kept Henry waiting for dinner while he performed a service, the king's only remedy was to send messenger after messenger to urge him to hurry in pity to the royal hunger. The first-comer seems to have been able to go straight to his presence at any hour, whether in hall or chapel or sleeping-chamber; and the king was soundly rated by every one who had seen a vision, or desired a favour, or felt himself aggrieved in any way, with a rude plainness of speech which made sorely necessary his proverbial patience under such harangues. "Our king," says Walter Map, "whose power all the world fears, … does not presume to be haughty, nor speak with a proud tongue, nor exalt himself over any man." The feudal barons of medieval times had, indeed, few of the qualities that made the courtiers of later days, and Henry, violent as he was, could bear much rough counsel and plain reproof. No flatterer found favour at his court. His special friends were men of learning or of saintly life. Eager and eloquent in talk, his curiosity was boundless. He is said to have known all languages from Gaul to the Jordan,