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AMONG the histories of eminent kings, that of our Henry II. is one of the most remarkable both in its beginning and its end, both in the character of the man and in his fortunes; and, mostly tragic as the annals of human ambition are, there are few such histories that exemplify more impressively the instability and vanity of all earthly greatness.

Nature and fortune joined to make him great. The son of Matilda, daughter of the English king Henry I., he was through that descent, after the death of his grandfather, the undoubted male representative of Wil

VOL. I.

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liam the Conqueror, the founder of the reigning English dynasty, and as such the legitimate heir, at least after his mother, both of the crown of England and of the dukedom of Normandy, the older acquisition of his heroic race. His grandmother, the wife of Henry I., was Matilda, daughter of Queen Margaret of Scotland, herself the daughter of Edward the Outlaw, in the veins of whose descendants now flowed the main stream of the blood of Egbert and Alfred and the old Saxon royal line. His father, whom his mother had married in 1127, two years after the death of her first husband, the Emperor Henry V., by whom she had no issue, was Geoffrey Earl of Anjou, surnamed Plantagenet, from his assuming as his ensign, and wearing on the crest of his helmet, a sprig of broom (in French plante genêt); whose father, Earl Fulk, had immediately before this marriage resigned to him all his French possessions and honours, upon being himself elected to the throne of Jerusalem, in which he was succeeded, on his death in 1143, by Baldwin III., his son by a second marriage. Henry was the eldest son of Geoffrey and the empress, and was born at Le Mans, the capital of his father's county of Maine, in March 1133, about two years and nine months before the death of his grandfather King Henry.

Yet it is remarkable that each of these several advantages of descent which were thus united in his person was accompanied by some defect or drawback, as if in order that there might remain as much for him to do for himself as had been done for him by the accident of his birth. His Saxon lineage gave him no claim to call himself the heir of the old race of English kings while there existed male descendants of his great-grandmother, Queen Margaret of Scotland, whose son David the First was now seated on the throne of that country, and was undoubtedly the true representative of King Edmund Ironside and the Saxon royal line. Even between him and his legal right by inheritance to the English sceptre of the Conqueror there stood his mother, to whom and not to her son it was that Henry I. had made his barons swear fealty as his successor. Nor did he on the death

of his father obtain more than a qualified right to the earldom of Anjou, Geoffrey having directed in his will that he should resign it to his next brother Geoffrey if he should ever come into the possession of the English crown, and having also made his bishops and barons take an oath that they would not suffer his body to be buried till Henry should have sworn to perform whatever the will might be found to enjoin; which, accordingly, though with much reluctance, he did. Geoffrey died on the 10th of September, 1151, in his forty-first year, being younger than his wife the empress, who had long ceased to be an object of his affections, by seven or eight years. Ere this, however, his son, styled by the French, Henry Fitz-Empress (that is, son of the empress), had passed through other changes of position and fortune. On the death of his grandfather, in December 1135, the English throne had been usurped by Stephen of Blois, whose mother Adela was a daughter of the Conqueror : she had been married to the Earl of Blois, by whom she had four sons, of whom Stephen was the third. In the course of the contest that ensued between Stephen and Matilda, young Henry was in the latter part of the year 1142 entrusted by his father to Robert, Earl of Glocester, his mother's illegitimate brother and faithful partisan, and was by him brought over to England. They landed, the boy and his uncle, about the middle of November, at Wareham in Dorsetshire, a town and castle belonging to the earl, but now held by the king's troops. The garriis son, however, agreed to surrender to Glocester, who had brought with him from the continent a force of three e or four hundred knights, if they should not be relieved within three weeks; and soon after, upon being informed 5 from Stephen that he had no intention of relieving them, they gave up the place. Matilda had never, since she landed in England three years before, been in such peril as she was in at this moment-not even when, in the summer of the preceding year, she was surprised in London by Stephen's queen, and only saved herself by springing into her saddle from the table at which she was dining-nor a few weeks after when flying from Win

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chester, early on a Sunday morning, she and her escort were overtaken by the enemy at Stourbridge, and, while the Earl of Glocester and all the rest were either taken prisoners or slain, she made her way, attended by a single follower, to Luggershall, and thence, after a rest of a few hours, by getting again upon horseback and continuing her rapid flight, to the castle of Devizes. She was now shut up in the castle of Oxford, which Stephen besieged with his whole army, disregarding in the meantime every other object, and determined to effect its reduction either by force or famine. All hope seemed to be gone; but, after she had endured the greatest privations, on the night of the 20th of December, she left the castle by a postern gate, with four knights, crossed the Thames, which was frozen over, and reached Abingdon on foot, having walked all the way through a deep snow, and having been enabled to escape the notice of the enemy, some accounts say, in part by herself and her attendants having clothed themselves in white linen. At Abingdon she took horse, and rode to Wallingford Castle. Hither a few days after the Earl of Glocester, having started as soon as he heard the news, brought her her son. The sight of the boy, says an old chronicler, made her forget all her toils and dangers, and think all she had suffered nothing. Matilda, with all her haughtiness of temper, was not without other good qualities, besides her share in the intrepidity and tough invincible spirit of her race; if prosperity made her insolent and tyrannical, she bore adversity admirably; and to her son she was from the first to the last the best of mothers, not only in the affection she bore him, but in all other respects. Henry was soon after this carried to Bristol, and " continued there four years," says Lord Lyttelton, "under the care of his uncle, who trained him up in such exercises as were most proper to form his body for war, and in those studies which might embellish and strengthen his mind. The Earl of Glocester himself had no inconsiderable tincture of learning, and was the patron of all who excelled in it; qualities rare at all times in a nobleman of his high rank, but particularly in an age when

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