re of the West, and to reign as an over-king, with
sub-kings of his various provinces, and England as one of them, around
him. He was connected with all the great ruling houses. His eldest son
was married to the daughter of the King of France; the baby Richard,
eighteen months old, was betrothed during the war of Toulouse to a
daughter of the King of Aragon. He was himself a distant kinsman of the
Emperor. He was head of the house of the Norman kings in Sicily. He was
nearest heir of the kings of Jerusalem. Through his wife he was head of
the house of Antioch, and claimed to be head of the house of Tripoli.
Already in these first years of his reign the glory of the English king
had been acknowledged by ambassadors from the Emperor, from the King of
Jerusalem, from Norway, from Sweden, from the Moorish kings of Valencia
and Murcia, bearing the gifts of an Eastern world--gold, silk, horses,
and camels. England was forced out of her old isolation; her interest in
the world without was suddenly awakened. English scholars thronged the
foreign universities; English chroniclers questioned travellers,
scholars, ambassadors, as to what was passing abroad. The influence of
English learning and English statecraft made itself felt all over
Europe. Never, perhaps, in all the history of England was there a time
when Englishmen played so great apart abroad. English statesmen and
bishops were set over the conduct of affairs in Provence, in Sicily, in
Gascony, in Britanny, in Normandy. English archbishops and bishops and
abbots held some of the highest posts in France, in Anjou, in Flanders,
in Portugal, in Italy, in Sicily. Henry himself welcomed trained men
from Normandy or Sicily or wherever he could find them, to help in his
work of administration; but in England foreigners were not greatly
welcomed in any place of power, and his court was, with but one or two
exceptions, made up of men who, of whatever descent they might be,
looked on themselves as Englishmen, and bore the impress of English
training. The mass of Englishmen meanwhile looked after their own
affairs and cared nothing about foreign wars fought by Brabancon
mercenaries, and paid for by foreign gold. But if they had nothing to
win from all these wars, they were none the less at last drawn into the
political alliances and sympathies of their master. Shut out as she was
by her narrow strip of sea from any real concern in the military
movements of the continental peoples, En