suitors of the Court for fifteen years, and fined and taxed and forfeited as seemed good to him, suddenly, without a moment’s warning, saw his place filled by a stranger, a mere clerk trained in the Court among the royal servants, a simple nominee of the king; he could no longer doubt that the royal supremacy was now without rival, without limit, irresistible, complete.  Such an act of absolute authority had indeed, as Dr. Stubbs says, “no example in the history of Europe since the time of the Roman Empire, except possibly in the power wielded by Charles the Great.”

Nor was this Henry’s only act of high-handed government.  On the 10th of April he called a council to London to consult about the coronation of his son.  It was a dangerous innovation, against all custom and tradition, for no such coronation of the heir in his father’s lifetime had ever taken place in England.  But Henry was no mere king of England, nor did he greatly heed barbaric or insular prejudice when he had even before his eyes the example not only of the French Court, but of the Holy Roman Empire.  The coronation was a necessary step in the completion of the plan unfolded at Montmirail for the ordering of the second empire of the West.  Moreover, the settlement probably seemed to him more imperative than ever from the restlessness and discontent of the land.  No king of England since the Conquest had succeeded peaceably to his father.  The reign of Stephen had abundantly proved how vain were oaths of homage to secure the succession; and the sacred anointing, which in those days carried with it an inalienable consecration, was perhaps the only certain way of securing his son’s right.  It may well be, too, that, threatened as he was with interdict, he saw the advantage of providing for the peace and security of England by crowning as her king an innocent boy with whom the Church had no quarrel.  The actual ceremony of consecration raised, indeed, an immediate and formidable difficulty.  A king of England could be legally consecrated only by the Archbishop of Canterbury.  Three years before Henry had forced the Pope, then in extreme peril, to grant special powers to the Archbishop of York to perform the rite, but he had not yet ventured to make use of the brief.  Now, however, whether the case seemed to him more urgent, or whether his temper had grown more imperious, he cast aside his former prudence.  On the 14th of June the lords and prelates were gathered together “in fear, none knowing what the king was about to decree.”  The younger Henry, a boy of fifteen, was brought before them; he was anointed and crowned by Roger of York.  From this moment a new era opened in Henry’s reign.  The young king was now lord of England, in the view of the whole medieval world, by a right as absolute and sacred as that of his father.  All who were discontented and restless had henceforth a leader ordained by law, consecrated by the Church, round whom they might rally.  Delicate questions had to be solved as to the claims