a shrine, with scourgings and fastings and tears.  His steady sense of order, justice, and government, broken as it was by fits of violent passion, resumed its sway as soon as the storm was over; but the awful wrath which would suddenly break forth, when the king’s face changed, and he rolled on the ground in a paroxysm of madness, seemed to have something of diabolic origin.  A story was told of a demon ancestress of the Angevin princes:  “From the devil they came, and to the devil they will go,” said the grim fatalism of the day.

CHAPTER II

THE ANGEVIN EMPIRE

The new kingdom which Henry had added to his dominions in France might well seem to a man of less inexhaustible energy to make the task of government impossible.  The imperial system of his dreams was as recklessly defiant of physical difficulties as it was heedless of all the sentiments of national tradition.  In the two halves of his empire no common political interest and no common peril could arise; the histories of north and south were carried on apart, as completely as the histories of America and England when they were apparently united under one king, and were in fact utterly severed by the ocean which defined the limits of two worlds.  England had little part or lot in the history of Europe.  Foreign policy it had none; when its kings passed to Normandy, English chroniclers knew nothing of their doings or their wars.  Some little trade was carried on with the nearest lands across the sea,—­with Normandy, with Flanders, or with Scandinavia,—­but the country was almost wholly agricultural.  Feudal in its social structure, governed by tradition, with little movement of inner life or contact with the world about it, its people had remained jealous of strangers, and as yet distinguished from the nations of Europe by a strange immobility and want of sympathy with the intellectual and moral movements around them.  Sometimes strangers visited its kings; sometimes English pilgrims made their way to Rome by a dangerous and troublesome journey.  But even the connection with the Papacy was slight.  A foreign legate had scarcely ever landed on its shores; hardly any appeals were carried to the Roman Curia; the Church managed its own business after a customary fashion which was in harmony with English traditions, which had grown up during centuries of undisturbed and separate life.

On the other side of the Channel Henry ruled over a straggling line of loosely compacted states equal in extent to almost half of the present France.  His long line of ill-defended frontier brought him in contact with the lands of the Count of Flanders, one of the chief military powers of the day; with the kingdom of France, which, after two hundred years of insignificance, was beginning to assert its sway over the great feudal vassals, and preparing to build up a powerful monarchy; and with the Spanish kingdoms which were emerging from the first successful effort