[In considering the reigning Kings in order, I have found it necessary to reserve for the chapters on the Mediæval Government of the City the Charters successively granted to the Citizens, and their meaning.] [Illustration: HENRY II. (1133-1189) From his effigy at Fontevrault.] The accession of the young King, then only three-and-twenty years of age, brought to the City as well as to the Country, a welcome period of rest and peace and prosperity. These precious gifts were secured by the ceaseless watchfulness of the King, whose itinerary shows that he was a most unwearied traveller, with a determined purpose and a bulldog tenacity. From the outset he gave the whole nation, barons and burgesses, to understand that he meant to be King. To begin with, he ordered all aliens to depart. The land and the City were full of them; they were known by their gait as well as their speech; the good people of London looked about the streets, the day after the proclamation of exile, for these unwelcome guests, whose violence they had endured so long. They were gone “as though they had been phantoms,” Holinshed writes. During his long reign, 1154-1189, Henry, who seldom stayed in one place more than a few days, was in London or Westminster on twenty-seven occasions, but in many of them for a day or two only. These occasions were in March 1155; in April 1157; in March, July, and October 1163; in April and September 1164; in September and October 1165; in April and June 1170; in July 1174; in May, August, and October 1175; in March and May 1176; in March and April 1177; in July 1178; in August, November, and December 1186; in March 1185; in June 1186, and in June 1188. And all these visits together amounted to less than three months in thirty-five years. We may note that Henry held his first Christmas at Bermondsey, not at Westminster. One asks in vain what reason there was for holding the Court at a monastic house in the middle of a marsh, much more difficult of access than that of Westminster. It was here that it was decided that the Flemings, who had flocked over during the last reign, should leave the country. Among them was William of Ypres whom Stephen had made Earl of Kent. We hear very little of the King’s personal relations with the citizens, by whom he was respected as befits one of whom it is written that he was “pitiful to the poor, liberal to all men, that he took of his subjects but seldom times any great tributes, and, further, that he was careful above all things to have the laws duly executed and justice uprightly administered on all hands.” In the year 1170 Henry II. had his eldest son Henry crowned King; but the “Young King,” as he was called, never lived to occupy his father’s place; after a career of rebellion he died of a fever in 1183. Henry’s Charter gave the citizens privileges and liberties as large as those granted by Henry I.—with one or two important exceptions. The opening clause in the former Charter was as follows:—