ago sent back to the
Continent the mercenaries whom he had brought with him in the peril of
=1174=, and he now entrusted himself not to a paid standing army, but
to the whole body of English freemen. He was, in truth, king of the
English not merely because he ruled over them, but because they were
ready to rally round him in arms against those barons whose ancestors
had worked such evil in the days of Stephen. England was not to be
given over either to baronial anarchy or to military despotism.

24. =Henry II. and his Sons.=--In England Henry ruled as a national
king over a nation which, at least, preferred his government to that
of the barons. The old division between English and Norman was dying
out, and though the upper classes, for the most part, still spoke
French, intermarriages had been so frequent that there were few
amongst them who had not some English ancestress and who did not
understand the English language. Henry was even strong enough to
regain much that he had surrendered when he abandoned the
Constitutions of Clarendon. In his Continental possessions there was
no such unity. The inhabitants of each province were tenacious of
their own laws and customs, and this was especially the case with the
men of Aquitaine, the country south of the Loire, who differed in
habits, and even in language, from the Frenchmen of Normandy and
Anjou. They therefore found it difficult to give a share of the
allegiance which they owed to their own duchess, Eleanor, to her
Angevin husband, the king of England. Henry in =1172= having appointed
his eldest son, Henry, as the future ruler of Normandy and Anjou as
well as of England, thought it wise to recognise this feeling by
giving to his second son, Richard, the immediate possession of
Eleanor's duchy of Aquitaine. In =1181= he provided for his third son,
Geoffrey, by a marriage with Constance, the heiress of Brittany, over
which country he claimed a feudal superiority as Duke of the Normans.
Yet, though he gave away so much to his sons, he wished to keep the
actual control over them all. The arrangement did not turn out well.
He had set no good example of domestic peace. His sons knew that he
had married their mother for the sake of her lands, that he had
subsequently thrown her into prison and had been faithless to her with
a succession of mistresses. Besides this, they were torn away from
him by the influence of the men whom they were set to rule. Richard
was dragged away f