Henry II., who came to the English throne on Stephen's death, was already, by the death of his father, Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, the head of the great house of Anjou, in France. From his father he inherited Anjou, Touraine and Maine; through his mother, Matilda, daughter of Henry I., he received the dukedom of Normandy as well as the kingdom of England; by marriage with Eleanor, of Aquitaine, or Guienne, he added to his empire the princely domain which included Gascony, Poitou, Saintonge, Perigord, Limousin, Angoumois, with claims of suzerainty over Auvergne and Toulouse. "Henry found himself at twenty-one ruler of dominions such as no king before him had ever dreamed of uniting. He was master of both sides of the English Channel, and by his alliance with his uncle, the Count of Flanders, he had command of the French coast from the Scheldt to the Pyrenees, while his claims on Toulouse would carry him to the shores of the Mediterranean. His subjects told with pride how 'his empire reached from the Arctic Ocean to the Pyrenees'; there was no monarch save the Emperor himself who ruled over such vast domains. ... His aim [a few years Inter] seems to have been to rival in some sort the Empire of the West, and to reign as an over-king, with sub-kings of his various provinces, and England as one of them, around him. He was connected with all the great ruling houses. ... England was forced out of her old isolation; her interest in the world without was suddenly awakened. English scholars thronged the foreign universities; English chroniclers questioned travellers, scholars, ambassadors, as to what was passing abroad.' The influence of English learning and English statecraft made itself felt all over Europe. Never, perhaps, in all the history of England was there a time when Englishmen played so great a part abroad." The king who gathered this wide, incongruous empire under his sceptre, by mere circumstances of birth and marriage, proved strangely equal, in many respects, to its greatness. "He was a foreign king who never spoke the English tongue, who lived and moved for the most part in a foreign camp, surrounded with a motley host of Brabançons and hirelings. ... It was under the rule of a foreigner such as this, however, that the races of conquerors and conquered in England first learnt to feel that they were one. It was by his power that England, Scotland and Ireland were brought to some vague acknowledgement of a common suzerain lord, and the foundations laid of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It was he who abolished feudalism as a system of government, and left it little more than a system of land tenure. It was he who defined the relations established between Church and State, and decreed that in England churchman as well as baron was to be held under the Common Law. ...