The hope which inspired both the king of England and the count of Anjou when they planned their children’s marriage can only have been the hope of a grandson in whom the blood of both would be united, who would gather into his own person all conflicting claims, and in whom all feuds would have an end. On this depended all King Henry’s schemes for the future; on this were concentrated all his desires, on this were founded all his plans and arrangements during the last seven years of his reign. In the internal history of England those years are an almost complete blank; they are in fact simply seven more years of the administration of Bishop Roger of Salisbury, for Henry himself spent almost the whole of them upon the continent. His work was finished, and all that remained to do was to maintain the order of things which he had established so as to hand it on in full working to his successor. He must, however, have begun to doubt the success of his schemes when Geoffrey and Matilda separated little more than twelve months after their marriage. At first, everything had seemed to be turning in favour of Henry’s arrangements. Six weeks after the wedding, the death of William the Clito, wounded in a skirmish with a rival claimant of the county of Flanders,[640] removed the only competitor whom the king could deem likely to stand in the way of his plans for the descent of the crown. In the spring Fulk’s departure for Holy Land left the young couple sole masters at Angers. All things looked tranquil and secure when Henry returned to England in July 1129. He had, however, been there only a few days when he learned, to his great indignation, that his daughter had been sent away with scorn by her husband, and had betaken herself with a few attendants to Rouen.[641] There she remained for nearly two years, while Geoffrey was busy with a general revolt among his barons. East and west and south and north had all risen at once; the list of rebels includes the chief landowners in all parts of the Angevin dominions, from the old eastern outpost Amboise to Laval on the Breton border, and from Sablé on the confines of Anjou and Maine to Montreuil-Bellay, Thouars and Mirebeau in the Aquitanian territory of Loudun, and the yet more remote fief of Parthenay in Poitou.[642] It seems as if the disaffected barons, worsted in their struggle with Fulk, had only been waiting till he was out of the country, and now, when Geoffrey by his quarrel with his wife had deprived himself of all chance of help from his father-in-law, they closed in upon the boy-count with one consent, thinking to get him into their power and wring from him any concessions they pleased. They unintentionally did him an immense service, for by thus suddenly throwing him upon his own resources they made a man of him at once. No one knew better than Geoffrey Plantagenet that he was not the first count of Anjou who had been left to shift for himself in difficult circumstances at the age