knighted by the Scot king, and made a compact to yield up to David the
land beyond the Tyne when he should himself have won the English throne.
But he found England cold, indifferent, without courage; his most
powerful friends were dead, and he returned to Normandy to wait for
better days. Geoffrey was still carrying on the defence of the duchy
against Stephen's son Eustace, and his ally, the King of France; and
Henry joined his father's army till peace was made in 1151. In that year
he was invested with his mother's heritage and became at eighteen Duke of
Normandy; at nineteen his father's death made him Count of Anjou,
Lorraine, and Maine.

The young Count had visited the court of Paris to do homage for Normandy
and Anjou, and there he first saw the French queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Her marriage with Louis VII. had been the crowning success of the astute
and far-sighted policy of Louis VI.; for the dowry Eleanor had brought to
the French crown, the great province of the South, had doubled the
territories and the wealth of the struggling little kingdom of France.
In the Crusade of 1147 she had accompanied king and nobles to the Holy
Land as feudal head of the forces of Aquitaine; and had there baffled
the temper and sagacity of Louis by her political intrigues. Sprung of
a house which represented to the full the licentious temper of the South,
she scornfully rejected a husband indifferent to love, and ineffective in
war as in politics. She had "married a monk and not a king," she said,
wearied with a superstition that showed itself in long fasts of more
than monkish austerity, and in the humiliating reverence with which
the king would wait for the meanest clerk to pass before him. In the
square-shouldered ruddy youth who came to receive his fiefs, with
his "countenance of fire," his vivacious talk and overwhelming energy
and scant ceremoniousness at mass, she saw a man destined by fate and
character to be in truth a "king." Her decision was as swift and