and had been subjected to so many exposures, that the bloom of
her early beauty was in a great measure gone. She was now nearly
thirty years old, having been married twelve or thirteen years. She,
however, made eager advances to Henry, and finally gave him to
understand, that if he would consent to marry her, she would obtain a
divorce from King Louis, and then endow him with all her dominions.

Now there was a strong reason operating upon Henry's mind to accept
this proposal. He claimed to be entitled to the crown of England. King
Stephen was at this time reigning in England, but Henry maintained
that he was a usurper, and he was eager to dispossess him. Eleanora
represented to Henry that, with all the forces of her dominions, she
could easily enable him to do that, and so at length the idea of
making himself a king overcame his natural repugnance to take a wife
almost twice as old as he was himself, and she, too, the divorced and
discarded wife of another man. So he agreed to Eleanora's proposal,
and measures were soon taken to effect the divorce.

There is some dispute among the ancient historians in respect to this
divorce. Some say that it was the king that originated it, and that
the cause which he alleged was the freedom of the queen in her love
for other men, and that Eleanora, when she found that the divorce was
resolved upon, formed the plan of beguiling young Henry into a
marriage with her, to save her fall. Others say that the divorce was
her plan alone, and that the pretext for it was the relationship that
existed between her and King Louis, for they were in some degree
related to each other; and the rules of the Church of Rome were very
strict against such marriages. It is not improbable, however, that the
real reason of the divorce was that the king desired it on account of
his wife's loose and irregular character, while Eleanora wished for it
in order to have a more agreeable husband. She never had liked Louis.
He was a very grave and even gloomy man, who thought of nothing but
the Church, and his penances and prayers, so that Eleanora said he was
more of a monk than a king. This monkish turn of mind had increased
upon the king since his return from the Crusades. He made it a matter
of conscience to wear coarse and plain clothes instead of dressing
handsomely like a king, and he cut off the curls of his hair, which
had been very beautiful, and shaved his head and his mustaches. This
procedure disgusted