Eleanor, six weeks after her repudiation, married Henry, count of Anjou and duke of Normandy, who was afterwards Henry II. king of England. The French king saw with chagrin this new monarch, his vassal, in possession of his wife and the provinces which composed her dowry; he declared war against him; and this is the foundation of that destructive rivality which has so long troubled England and France. Who would have thought that the cutting off of a beard, six hundred years since, should have been the cause of a war the flames of which are scarcely extinguished, and which not long since set a great part of our globe in blaze.[31] Footnote 31: “This woman (Eleanor)” says Mezerai, “consummate in all sorts of wickedness, lived more than eighty years, kept up a war for more than sixty years, and left a hatred, between France and England, which has lasted more than three centuries.” The Templars, that order of monks and soldiers, who had the faults of both, wore their beards like the Orientals. Philip the Handsome, king of France, thought it advisable to destroy these religious soldiers, and to have a great number of them burnt. Their execution was preceded by cutting off their beards, either to disgrace them more, or to deprive them of that grave imposing air which it gave them. Soldiers and princes were not the only ones for whom a shaved chin was a mark of infamy: philosophers and learned men have always abhorred these naked faces. Paul Jove, in his elogy of Francis Filelfo, relates a trifling event which proves how much the learned of those days valued their beards. A violent dispute arose between the Italian, Filelfo, and a Greek professor called Timothy; the question was, whether a certain Greek syllable were long or short. Things were carried to such a height, that Filelfo waged a considerable sum, and Timothy his long beard. The affair was at length decided. Timothy was declared vanquished; and, to save his beard, which he had just lost, he made Filelfo very advantageous offers; but the latter, inexorable, would have nothing but the beard he had won: he insisted on having the unfortunate Timothy shaved, and retained the spoils of his adversary’s chin as a monument of his victory. When, by an event which has been already related, Francis I. introduced the mode of long beards into France, the parliaments and all the lawyers stood up against this ornament so suitable to the gravity of their functions: all the magistrates shaved, while the young men of fashion, and all the court, appeared with a venerable beard. This contrast in dress lasted longer than it ought to, through the obstinacy of the lawyers. The self-importance which they shewed in this sort of contest, is one of those lineaments of character which the philosophical observer should not let escape him.