[11] This lady was a natural daughter of the king, and not his legitimate issue by Queen Matilda. [12] One of the late king's illegitimate sons, to whom he had given the earldom of Gloucester. [13] See p. 77. CHAPTER VIII. HENRY II. 1154-1189. When Henry of Anjou, now a young man of twenty-one years, succeeded to Stephen's crown, he found the country in a most deplorable condition. The regular administration of justice had ceased, many of the counties had no sheriffs or other royal officers, the revenue had fallen off by a half, and the barons were exercising all the prerogatives of the king, even to the extent of coining money in their own names. A weak man would have found the position hopeless; a strong man, like Henry, saw that it required instant and unflinching energy, but that it was not beyond repair. [Sidenote: =Undisputed accession of Henry.--His continental dominions.=] Henry started with the advantage of an undisputed title; his mother, Matilda, had ceded all her rights to him, and Stephen's surviving son, William of Boulogne, never attempted to lay any claim to the crown. Moreover, the king had enormous resources from abroad to aid him. His father was long dead, so that he was himself Count of Anjou and Touraine. He had his mother's lands of Normandy and Maine already in his hands. But he had become the ruler of a still larger realm by his marriage. He had taken to wife Eleanor, the Duchess of Aquitaine, whose enormous inheritance stretched from the Loire to the Pyrenees. This was a marriage of pure policy; Eleanor was an ill-conditioned, unprincipled woman, the divorced wife of King Lewis VII. of France, and she gave her second husband almost as much trouble as she had given her first. But by aid of her possessions Henry dominated the whole of France; indeed, he held much more French territory under him than did King Lewis VII. himself, and for the political gain he was prepared to endure the domestic trouble. [Illustration: FRANCE, SHOWING HENRY II'{S}. CONTINENTAL DOMINIONS.] The continental dominions of Henry were, indeed, so large that they quite outweighed England in his estimation. He was himself Angevin born and bred, and looked upon his position more as that of a French prince who owned a great dependency beyond sea, than as that of an English king who had possessions in France. He spent the greater part of his time on the continent, so that England was generally governed by the successive _Justiciars_, or prime ministers, who acted as regents while he was abroad. Henry's absence and his absorption in foreign politics were perhaps not a very grave misfortune for England; he was such a strong and able ruler, that when he had once put the realm to rights in the early part of his reign, the danger to be feared was no longer feudal anarchy, but royal despotism. [Sidenote: =Feudal anarchy put down.--Northumberland and Cumberland recovered.=]