Two years after this Henry came of age, and then begins not only his dangerous and unbusinesslike meddling with foreign politics but the gradual revelation of the fact that he was not more willing than his father had been to act and reign as a constitutional king. From this point date the constant demands of the Pope on the one hand, and the king on the other, for money to be spent on purposes which called forth little sympathy in England, or which were opposed to the national instincts; constant difficulties with the administration, and, consequent upon those difficulties, that alienation of popular affection from the person of the young sovereign whose growth had been intently and hopefully watched--an alienation which grew from year to year, as the conviction gained ground that he was not to be trusted, any more than he could be honored or admired. But for this conviction that serious attack on his authority, which amounted in the end to an absolute superseding or deposition, could have been neither contemplated nor carried into effect. This was not the mere result of a mismanaged minority. No doubt the possession or even the anticipation of the possession of great power is a dangerous obstacle to education; and in every case of a royal minority which we have in English history we find the same miserable story of a most important charge neglected, and the most important of all possible trusts unfulfilled. It may be that Hubert de Burgh and Peter des Roches had to work on an unkindly soil. In the child of John and Isabella we should not look for much inherited goodness; yet Richard of Cornwall, Henry’s brother, was a very different man from Henry himself. Still the fault cannot be ascribed altogether to education. It would have been a sore discipline for a noble mind, but to Henry it was fatal. He learned nothing great; what was good in him was dwarfed and warped. The history of the thirty-one years, 1227 to 1258, which form the period of his personal administration, is one long series of impolitic and unprincipled acts. These acts may, it is true, be arranged under certain distinct heads, but it is not to be forgotten that they were at the time the successive expressions of one weak, headstrong mind, and as such have a unity and a bearing upon one another, creating as they proceed a tide of hostile feeling in the nation that becomes at last overwhelming. It would be an unprofitable exercise of ingenuity and patience to detail these acts in order of time, and to point out how one led to another. They may be divided into the three heads of internal misgovernment, a mischievous foreign policy pursued under the guidance of the popes, and the unfortunate line adopted with regard to the French provinces on which the king still retained his hold. [Sidenote: Internal misgovernment.] [Sidenote: Papal demands.] [Sidenote: Foreign affairs. ] [Sidenote: Crisis of 1258.]