nd seductive as he was,
he won neither confidence nor love; wife and barons alike feared the
silence with which he listened unmoved to the bitterest taunts, but kept
them treasured and unforgotten for some sure hour of revenge; the fierce
Angevin temper turned in him to restlessness and petulance in the long
series of revolts which filled his reign with wearisome monotony from
the moment when he first rode out to claim his duchy of Normandy, and
along its southern frontier peasant and churl turned out at the sound of
the tocsin, and with fork and flail drove the hated "Guirribecs" back
over the border. Five years after his marriage, in 1133, his first child
was born at Le Mans. Englishmen saw in the grandson of "good Queen Maud"
the direct descendant of the old English line of kings of Alfred and of
Cerdic. The name Henry which the boy bore after his grandfather marked
him as lawful inheritor of the broad dominions of Henry I., "the
greatest of all kings in the memory of ourselves and our fathers." From
his father he received, with the surname of Plantagenet by which he was
known in later times, the inheritance of the Counts of Anjou. Through
his mother Matilda he claimed all rights and honours that pertained to
the Norman dukes.

Heir of three ruling houses, Henry was brought up wherever the chances of
war or rebellion gave opportunity. He was to know neither home nor
country. His infancy was spent at Rouen "in the home," as Henry I. said,
"of his forefather Rollo." In 1135 his grandfather died, and left him,
before he was yet three years old, the succession to the English throne.
But Geoffrey and Matilda were at the moment hard pressed by one of their
ceaseless wars. The Church was openly opposed to the rule of the House of
Anjou; the Norman baronage on either side of the water inherited a long
tradition of hatred to the Angevin. Stephen of Blois, a son of the
Conqueror's daughter Adela, seized the English throne, and claimed the
dukedom of Normandy. Henry was driven from Rouen to take refuge in
Angers, in the great palace of the counts, overlooking the river
and the vine-covered hills beyond. There he lived in one of the most
ecclesiastical cities of the day, already famous for its shrines, its
colleges, the saints whose tombs lay within its walls, and the ring of
priories and churches and abbeys that circled it about.

The policy of the Norman kings was rudely interrupted by the reign of
Stephen of Blois. Trembling