material for moralizing, and in a period like the Middle Ages, given over as none other to moral lessons, it served to point many a tale of the crimes and fate of evil-doers. That vain and entertaining Welshman, Gerald de Barri, or Giraldus Cambrensis, in whom a recent writer thinks he has discovered the proto-journalist,[1] found in Henry's career the basis for a considerable book devoted to the Instruction of Princes. But whereas the ways of the gods are dark and unsearchable to the Greek tragedians, they have no mystery for Gerald. Henry's punishment was due to his violations of religion, first in his marriage with Eleanor, the divorced wife of his feudal lord Louis VII, second in his quarrel with Archbishop Becket and the oppression of the church which followed, and third and worst of all, in his failure to take part in a crusade. The hammer of the church, Henry was born for destruction. The modern world is more cautious in the matter of explaining the inexplicable, and more prone to seek human causes when they can be found, yet the collapse of the Plantagenet empire is not the hardest of the historian's problems. Something he will ascribe to larger forces of development, something he can hardly fail to attribute to the character of Henry's sons and to his policy in dealing with them.
Henry II is not the only case in history of a king who could rule every house but his own, of a father who was
- ↑ Salzmann, Henry II, p. 214.
