xert themselves, they appeared virtuous and princely; but the lust
to reign, which often attends great virtues, was fatal to his,
frequently hid them, and always rendered them suspected.

CHAPTER VI.

REIGN OF HENRY II.

[Sidenote: A.D. 1154.]

[Sidenote: A.D. 1158.]

The death of Stephen left an undisputed succession for the first time
since the death of Edward the Confessor. Henry, descended equally from
the Norman Conqueror and the old English kings, adopted by Stephen,
acknowledged by the barons, united in himself every kind of title. It
was grown into a custom for the king to grant a charter of liberties on
his accession to the crown. Henry also granted a charter of that kind,
confirming that of his grandfather; but as his situation was very
different from that of his predecessors, his charter was
different,--reserved, short, dry, conceived in general terms,--a gift,
not a bargain. And, indeed, there seems to have been at that juncture
but little occasion to limit a power which seemed not more than
sufficient to correct all the evils of an unlimited liberty. Henry spent
the beginning of his reign in repairing the ruins of the royal
authority, and in restoring to the kingdom peace and order, along with
its ancient limits; and he may well be considered as the restorer of the
English monarchy. Stephen had sacrificed the demesne of the crown, and
many of its rights, to his subjects; and the necessity of the times
obliged both that prince and the Empress Matilda to purchase, in their
turns, the precarious friendship of the King of Scotland by a cession of
almost all the country north of the Humber. But Henry obliged the King
of Scotland to restore his acquisitions, and to renew his homage. He
took the same methods with his barons. Not sparing the grants of his
mother, he resumed what had been so lavishly squandered by both of the
contending parties, who, to establish their claims, had given away
almost everything that made them valuable. There never was a prince in
Europe who better understood the advantages to be derived from its
peculiar constitution, in which greater acquisitions of dominion are
made by judicious marriages than by success in war: for, having added to
his patrimonial territories of Anjou and Normandy the Duchy of Guienne
by his own marriage, the male issue of the Dukes of Brittany failing, he
took the opportunity of marrying his third son, Geoffrey, then an
infant, to the heiress of that