Thomas was now thirty-eight; Theobald, Nigel, and Leicester were all old men, and the young king of twenty-two must have seemed a mere boy to his new counsellors.  The Empress had been left in Normandy to avoid the revival of old quarrels.  Hated in England for her proud contempt of the burgher, her scorn of the churchman, her insolence to her adherents, she won in Normandy a fairer fame, as “a woman of excellent disposition, kind to all, bountiful in almsgiving, the friend of religion, of honest life.”  The political activity of Queen Eleanor was brought to an abrupt close by her marriage.  In Henry she found a master very different from Louis of France, and her enforced withdrawal from public affairs during her husband’s life contrasts strangely, not only with her former career, but with the energy which, when the heavy yoke was taken off her neck, she displayed as an old woman of nearly seventy during the reign of her son.  Henry, in fact, stood alone among his new people.  No debt of gratitude, no ties of friendship, bound the king to the lords whose aims he had first learned to know at Wallingford.  The great barons who thronged round him in his court had all been rebels; the younger among them had never known what order, government, or loyalty meant.  The Church was hesitating and timorous.  To the people he was an utter stranger, unable even to speak their tongue.  But from the first Henry took his place as absolute master and leader.  “A strict regard to justice was apparent in him, and at the very outset he bore the appearance of a great prince.”

The king at once put in force the scheme of reform which had been drawn up the year before at Wallingford, and of which the provisions have comedown to us in phrases drawn from the two sources which were most familiar to the learned and the vulgar of that day,—­the Bible, and the prophecies of Merlin, the seer of King Arthur.  The nobles were to give up all illegal rights and estates which they had usurped.  The castles built by the warring barons were to be destroyed.  The king was to bring back husbandmen to the desolate fields, and to stock pastures and forests and hillsides with cattle and deer and sheep.  The clergy were henceforth to live in quiet, not vexed by unaccustomed burdens.  Sheriffs were to be restored to the counties, who should do justice without corruption, nor persecute any for malice; thieves and robbers were to be hanged; the armed forces were to be disbanded; the knights were to beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; the hired Flemish soldiers were to turn from the camp to the plough, from tents to workshops, there to render as servants the obedience they had once demanded as masters.  The work which Stephen had failed to do was now swiftly accomplished.  The Flemish mercenaries vanished “like phantoms,” or “like wax before the fire,” and their leader, William of Ypres, the lord of Kent, turned with weeping to a monastery in his own land.  The feudal lords were forced to give up such castles and lands as they had wrongfully usurped; and the newly-created earls were deprived of titles which they had wrung from King or Empress in the civil wars.