ad reached but his twenty-first year when he
returned to England as its king, Henry mounted the throne with a purpose
of government which his reign carried steadily out. His practical,
serviceable frame suited the hardest worker of his time. There was
something in his build and look, in the square stout form, the fiery
face, the close-cropped hair, the prominent eyes, the bull neck, the
coarse strong hands, the bowed legs, that marked out the keen, stirring,
coarse-fibred man of business. "He never sits down," said one who
observed him closely; "he is always on his legs from morning till night."
Orderly in business, careless of appearance, sparing in diet, never
resting or giving his servants rest, chatty, inquisitive, endowed with a
singular charm of address and strength of memory, obstinate in love or
hatred, a fair scholar, a great hunter, his general air that of a rough,
passionate, busy man, Henry's personal character told directly on the
character of his reign. His accession marks the period of amalgamation
when neighbourhood and traffic and intermarriage drew Englishmen and
Normans into a single people. A national feeling was thus springing up
before which the barriers of the older feudalism were to be swept away.
Henry had even less reverence for the feudal past than the men of his
day: he was indeed utterly without the imagination and reverence which
enable men to sympathize with any past at all. He had a practical man's
impatience of the obstacles thrown in the way of his reforms by the older
constitution of the realm, nor could he understand other men's reluctance
to purchase undoubted improvements by the sacrifice of customs and
traditions of bygone days. Without any theoretical hostility to the
co-ordinate powers of the state, it seemed to him a perfectly reasonable
and natural course to trample either baronage or Church under foot to
gain his end of good government. He saw clearly that the remedy for such
anarchy as England had endured under Stephen lay in the establishment of
a kingly rule unembarrassed by any privileges of order or class,
administered by royal servants, and in whose public administration the
nobles acted simply as delegates of the sovereign. His work was to lie in
the organization of judicial and administrative reforms which realized
this idea. But of the currents of thought and feeling which were tending
in the same direction he knew nothing. What he did for the moral and
social impulses