turns, the precarious friendship of the King of Scotland by a cession of
almost all the country north of the Humber. But Henry obliged the King
of Scotland to restore his acquisitions, and to renew his homage. He
took the same methods with his barons. Not sparing the grants of his
mother, he resumed what had been so lavishly squandered by both of the
contending parties, who, to establish their claims, had given away
almost everything that made them valuable. There never was a prince in
Europe who better understood the advantages to be derived from its
peculiar constitution, in which greater acquisitions of dominion are
made by judicious marriages than by success in war: for, having added to
his patrimonial territories of Anjou and Normandy the Duchy of Guienne
by his own marriage, the male issue of the Dukes of Brittany failing, he
took the opportunity of marrying his third son, Geoffrey, then an
infant, to the heiress of that important province, an infant also; and
thus uniting by so strong a link his northern to his southern dominions,
he possessed in his own name, or in those of his wife and son, all that
fine and extensive country that is washed by the Atlantic Ocean, from
Picardy quite to the foot of the Pyrenees.

Henry, possessed of such extensive territories, and aiming at further
acquisitions, saw with indignation that the sovereign authority in all
of them, especially in England, had been greatly diminished. By his
resumptions he had, indeed, lessened the greatness of several of the
nobility. He had by force of arms reduced those who forcibly held the
crown lands, and deprived them of their own estates for their
rebellion. He demolished many castles, those perpetual resources of
rebellion and disorder. But the great aim of his policy was to break the
power of the clergy, which each of his predecessors, since Edward, had
alternately strove to raise and to depress,--at first in order to gain
that potent body to their interests, and then to preserve them in