In the seven years which followed the suppression of the barons’ revolt Henry’s prosperity reached its height. The rising in which all his enemies had united for his destruction had ended in leaving him seated more firmly than ever upon the most securely-established throne in Europe. Within the four seas of Britain he was master as no king had ever been master before him. The English people had been with him from the first, and was learning year by year to identify its interests more closely with his; the Church, alienated for nearly ten years, was reconciled by his penance; feudalism was beaten at last, and for ever. The Welsh princes were his obedient and serviceable vassals; the Scot king had been humbled to accept a like position; a new subject-realm was growing up on the coast of Ireland. The great external peril which had dogged Henry’s footsteps through life, the hostility of France, was for a while paralyzed by his success. Other external foes he had none; the kings of Spain and of Sicily, the princes of the Western and even of the Eastern Empire, vied with each other in seeking the friendship, one might almost say the patronage, of the one sovereign in Europe who, safe on his sea-girt throne, could afford to be independent of them all. Within and without, on either side of the sea, all hindrances to the full and free developement of Henry’s policy for the government of his whole dominions were thus completely removed. In England itself the succeeding period was one of unbroken tranquillity and steady prosperous growth, social, intellectual, political, constitutional. Henry used his opportunity to make a longer stay in the island than he had ever made there before, save at the very beginning of his reign. He was there from May 1175 to August 1177; in the following July he returned, and stayed till April 1180; he came back again in July 1181, and remained till March 1182. Each of these visits was marked by some further step towards the completion of his judicial and administrative reforms. Almost as soon as he set foot in the country, indeed, he took up his work as if it had never been interrupted. The king and his eldest son went to England together on May 9, 1175;[842] on Rogation Sunday they publicly sealed their reconciliation with each other and with the Church in a great council which met at Westminster[843] under the presidence of a new archbishop of Canterbury, Richard, formerly prior of Dover, who after countless troubles and delays had been chosen just before the outbreak of the rebellion to fill S. Thomas’s place,[844] and had come back from Rome in triumph, with his pallium and a commission as legate for all England, just as Henry was returning to Normandy from his success against Hugh Bigod.[845] From the council the two kings and the primate went all together on a pilgrimage to the martyr’s tomb at Canterbury;[846] at Whitsuntide the kings held a court at Reading,[847] and on S. Peter’s day they met the Welsh princes in a