but no considerable action; and, after the principal impediment in the way of an accommodation had been removed by the death of Stephen's son Eustace by a fever, the effect in all probability of the agitation and rage into which he was thrown by the pending negotiation in which he was about to be sacrificed, an agreement was made on the 7th of November, by which Stephen adopted Henry for his son and successor, giving the kingdom of England, as it was expressed, after his own death, to him and his heirs for ever. Stephen did not survive this treaty quite a year; he died at Canterbury on the 25th of October, 1154; and Henry became king. He was in Normandy when Stephen's death occurred; and he was detained at Barfleur for some weeks by adverse weather; but he set sail at last while the storm still raged with little abatement, and after a dangerous passage he landed in the New Forest, not far from Hurst Castle, on the 7th of December. He was crowned, with his queen, at Westminster, on Sunday the 19th; and the commencement of his reign, according to what was then the custom, is reckoned from that day. Of course, in the circumstances, Henry did not now think of resigning Anjou to his brother Geoffrey, whose late confederacy with the French king and attack upon Normandy, an act amounting to rebellion in him, could not but be considered as depriving him of any claim he might have under his father's will and Henry's forced engagement to fulfil its provisions. To obviate all objections, however, Henry obtained from the pope a dispensation releasing him from that compulsory oath. A few years after this he recovered the ceded district of the Vexin for Normandy by the arrangement of marriage between his eldest son and a daughter of King Louis; and he subsequently acquired what amounted to the actual possession of Bretagne by the negotiation of another marriage between his third son, Geoffrey, and the Lady Constantia, or Constance, daughter and heiress of Conan, prince of that country. The extent of territory subject to the English king even in France was now greater than that which acknowledged the sway of Louis. If a line had been drawn from north to south only a few miles to the west of Paris, or nearly about the meridian of Boulogne, all to west of it would have been found to belong to Henry, from the English sea to the Spanish mountains; while the dominion of Louis on the other side of Gaul scarcely extended farther south than to the Loire, all the region beyond that river being in possession of the Earls of Toulouse. Henry, besides, almost as soon as he came to the throne, had recovered the three northern counties of England from the Scottish king, and even compelled him to do homage for the whole of Scotland to the south of the Forth; he soon after reduced Wales; and finally, in 1172, he effected the conquest of Ireland. The details of the valour and policy by which all this was done, of the