important province, an infant also; and
thus uniting by so strong a link his northern to his southern dominions,
he possessed in his own name, or in those of his wife and son, all that
fine and extensive country that is washed by the Atlantic Ocean, from
Picardy quite to the foot of the Pyrenees.

Henry, possessed of such extensive territories, and aiming at further
acquisitions, saw with indignation that the sovereign authority in all
of them, especially in England, had been greatly diminished. By his
resumptions he had, indeed, lessened the greatness of several of the
nobility. He had by force of arms reduced those who forcibly held the
crown lands, and deprived them of their own estates for their
rebellion. He demolished many castles, those perpetual resources of
rebellion and disorder. But the great aim of his policy was to break the
power of the clergy, which each of his predecessors, since Edward, had
alternately strove to raise and to depress,--at first in order to gain
that potent body to their interests, and then to preserve them in
subjection to the authority which they had conferred. The clergy had
elected Stephen; they had deposed Stephen, and elected Matilda; and in
the instruments which they used on these occasions they affirmed in
themselves a general right of electing the kings of England. Their share
both in the elevation and depression of that prince showed that they
possessed a power inconsistent with the safety and dignity of the state.
The immunities which they enjoyed seemed no less prejudicial to the
civil economy,--and the rather, as, in the confusion of Stephen's reign,
many, to protect themselves from the prevailing violence of the time, or
to sanctify their own disorders, had taken refuge in the clerical
character. The Church was never so full of scandalous persons, who,
being accountable only in the ecclesiastical courts, where no crime is
punished with death, were guilty of every crime. A priest had about this
time committed a murder attended with very aggravating circumstances.
The king, willing at once to restore order and to depress the clergy,
laid hold of this favorable opportunity to convoke the cause to his own
court, when the atrociousness of the crime made all men look with an
evil eye upon the claim of any privilege which might prevent the
severest justice. The nation in general seemed but little inclined to
controvert so useful a regulation with so potent a prince.

[Sidenote: A