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 practical as that of the keen Angevin, who was doubtless looking to the southern lands so long coveted by his race.  A divorce from her husband was procured in March 1152; and two months after she was hastily, for fear of any hindrance, married to the young Count of Anjou, “without the pomp or ceremony which befitted their rank.”  At nineteen, therefore, Henry found himself the husband of a wife about twenty-seven years of age, and the lord, besides his own hereditary lands and his Norman duchy, of Poitou, Saintonge, Perigord, Limousin, Angoumois, and Gascony, with claims of suzerainty over Auvergne and Toulouse.  In a moment the whole balance of forces in France had changed; the French dominions were shorn to half their size; the most brilliant prospects that had ever opened before the monarchy were ruined; and the Count of Anjou at one bound became ruler of lands which in extent and wealth were more than double those of his suzerain lord.