Such stories as these, while they help us to form some picture of the manner of man that Geoffrey was, set him before us in the romantic light in which he appears to the best advantage. When one turns from them to a survey of his life as a whole, one is struck with a sense of something wanting in him. The deficiency was in truth a very serious one; it was a lack of steady principle and of genuine feeling. The imaginative and impulsive vein which ran through all the more refined characters of his race lay in him very near the surface, but it did not go very deep. His imagination was sensitive, but his heart was cold; his impulses sprang from the play of a quick fancy, not from the passion of an ardent soul. One more story may furnish a slight, but significant, illustration of his temper. For some wrong done to the see of Tours Geoffrey was once threatened by the archbishop with excommunication. Either the earlier or the later Fulk of Jerusalem would have almost certainly begun by a reckless defiance of the threat, and the later one, at least, would almost as surely have ended by hearty penance. Geoffrey began and ended with a jest: “Your threats are vain, most reverend father; you know that the archbishop of Tours has no jurisdiction over the patrimony of S. Martin, and that I am one of his canons!”[639] In all the sterling qualities of a ruler and a man, the hasty, restless, downright Fulk V. was as superior to his clever charming son as Fulk the Black was superior to Geoffrey Martel. But it is only fair to bear in mind that Geoffrey Plantagenet’s life was to a great extent spoilt by his marriage. The yoke which bound together a lad of fifteen and a woman of twenty-five--especially such a woman as the Empress Matilda--could not fail to press heavily on both parties; but the one most seriously injured by it was probably the young husband. Even in a political point of view, to him personally his marriage was more of a hindrance than an advantage; it cut him off from all chance of striking out an independent career. The man himself was in fact sacrificed to his posterity. Chained down while his character was yet undeveloped to the irksome position of a mere appendage to King Henry’s heiress;--plunged suddenly, and for life, into a sphere of interests and duties alien from his own natural temper and inclinations:--weak, selfish, unprincipled as Geoffrey too plainly shewed himself to be, still it was well not only for him but for others that he had enough of the dogged Angevin thoroughness to carry him safely and successfully, if not always gloriously, through his somewhat dreary task till he could make it over to the freer, as well as stronger, hands of his son. [639] _Hist. Gaufr. Ducis_ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 252.