court.

In this uncertain balance of forces in the State order rested ultimately
on the personal character of the king; no sooner did a ruler appear who
was without the sense of government than the whole administration was at
once shattered to pieces. The only son of Henry I. had perished in the
wreck of the _White Ship_; and his daughter Matilda had been sent to
Germany as a child of eight years old, to become the wife of the Emperor
Henry V. On his death in 1125 her father summoned her back to receive
the homage of the English people as heiress of the kingdom. The homage
was given with as little warmth as it was received. Matilda was a mere
stranger and a foreigner in England, and the rule of a woman was
resented by the baronage. Two years later, in 1128, Henry sought by
means of a marriage between the Empress Matilda and Geoffrey, the son of
Count Fulk of Anjou, to secure the peace of Normandy, and provide an
heir for the English throne; and Matilda unwillingly bent once more to
her father's will. A year after the marriage Count Fulk left his
European dominions for the throne of Jerusalem; and Geoffrey entered on
the great inheritance which had been slowly built up in three hundred
years, since the days of the legendary Tortulf the Forester. Anjou,
Maine, and Touraine already formed a state whose power equaled that of
the French kingdom; to north and south successive counts had made
advances towards winning fragments of Britanny and Poitou; the Norman
marriage was the triumphant close of a long struggle with Normandy; but
to Fulk was reserved the greatest triumph of all, when he saw his son
heir, not only of the Norman duchy, but of the great realm which
Normandy had won.

But, for all this glory, the match was an ill-assorted one, and from
first to last circumstances dealt hardly with the poor young Count.
Matilda was twenty-six, a proud ambitious woman "with the nature of a
man in the frame of a woman." Her husband was a boy of fifteen. Geoffrey
the Handsome, called Plantagenet from his love of hunting over heath and
broom, inherited few of the great qualities which had made his race
powerful. Like his son Henry II. he was always on horseback; he had his
son's wonderful memory, his son's love of disputations and law-suits; we
catch a glimpse of him studying beneath the walls of a beleaguered town
the art of siege in Vegetius. But the darker sides of Henry's character
might also be discerned in his father; genial a