it is to-day. The difference of race between Norman and Englishman was being forgotten. We were growing into one ‘people’. The worst followers of the worst barons had killed each other off during the war, or gone away to the Crusades. Henry had little difficulty in getting rid of those that remained, and knocking down their ramshackle castles.
Character of Henry Il.But great as the opportunity was, it would have been of no use if Henry had not been a very great man—one of the greatest kings who ever lived. His power of work, and of making other people work, was amazing; he seemed to have a hundred pairs of eyes. Laziness was to him the one unpardonable crime. For pomp, even for dignity, he cared nothing. He was cursed, as all kings of his race were, with the most frightful temper; but he was merciful and forgiving when his rage was over. Norman on the mothers side, English on the grandmother’s, he was the most French of Frenchmen by his father's family, the House of Anjou. He had just married Eleanor of Aquitaine, the greatest heiress in Europe, who owned all South-Western France, from the River Loire to the Pyrenees.
His foreign possessions really a burden to him.Aquitaine, or ‘Gascony’, or ‘Guienne’, as the southern part of it is called, was a land of small and very turbulent nobles, who could never get enough fighting. Even Henry never succeeded in keeping them in order. But of course, with all this land, and with the riches of England at his back, Henry ought to have been a much more powerful man than his ‘overlord’, the King of France. Yet the truth is, that all these different French provinces, Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, Aquitaine, were rather a trouble than an advantage to him. They cost more to keep in order than they brought in
