which were telling on men about him was simply to let
them alone. Religion grew more and more identified with patriotism under
the eyes of a king who whispered, and scribbled, and looked at
picture-books during mass, who never confessed, and cursed God in wild
frenzies of blasphemy. Great peoples formed themselves on both sides of
the sea round a sovereign who bent the whole force of his mind to hold
together an Empire which the growth of nationality must inevitably
destroy. There is throughout a tragic grandeur in the irony of Henry's
position, that of a Sforza of the fifteenth century set in the midst of
the twelfth, building up by patience and policy and craft a dominion
alien to the deepest sympathies of his age and fated to be swept away in
the end by popular forces to whose existence his very cleverness and
activity blinded him. But whether by the anti-national temper of his
general system or by the administrative reforms of his English rule his
policy did more than that of all his predecessors to prepare England for
the unity and freedom which the fall of his house was to reveal.

[Sidenote: The Great Scutage]

He had been placed on the throne, as we have seen, by the Church. His
first work was to repair the evils which England had endured till his
accession by the restoration of the system of Henry the First; and it was
with the aid and counsel of Theobald that the foreign marauders were
driven from the realm, the new castles demolished in spite of the
opposition of the baronage, the King's Court and Exchequer restored. Age
and infirmity however warned the Primate to retire from the post of
minister, and his power fell into the younger and more vigorous hands of
Thomas Beket, who had long acted as his confidential adviser and was now
made Chancellor. Thomas won the personal favour of the king. The two
young men had, in Theobald's words, "but one heart and mind"; Henry
jested in the Chancellor's hall, or tore his cloak from his shoulders in
rough horse-play as they rode through the streets. He loaded his
favourite with riches and honours, but there is no ground for thinking
that Thomas in any degree influenced his system of rule. Henry's policy
seems for good or evil to have been throughout his own. His work of
reorganization went steadily on amidst troubles at home and abroad. Welsh
outbreaks forced him in 1157 to lead an army over the border; and a
crushing repulse showed that he was less skilful as a general t