Henry II. was a very great sovereign in many ways: he was an admirable soldier, most careful in forming plans, wonderfully rapid in the execution of them; he was at once cautious and adventurous, sparing of human life and moderate in the use of victory. Yet he was far from being a mild or gentle enemy; and he was economical of human life rather because of its cost in money than from any pitifulness. If he spared an enemy it was only when he had entirely disabled him from doing harm, or when he was fully assured of his power to turn him into a friend. His foes accused him of being treacherous, but his treachery mainly consisted in letting them deceive themselves. Thus he was no hero of probity, and his craft may have gone farther in the direction of cunning than was approved by the rough diplomacy of his time. He is said to have had a maxim, that it is easier to repent of words than of deeds, and therefore wiser to break your word than to fulfil an inconvenient obligation; but it cannot be said that the facts of history show him to have acted upon this shameless avowal, captious and unscrupulous as his policy more than once appears. He had no doubt a difficult part to play. His dominions brought him into close contact with all the great sovereigns of Europe. He had considerable ambitions--for himself, to hold fast all that he had acquired by inheritance and marriage; for his sons to obtain by marriage or other settlement provinces which, united to their hereditary provision, might make them either a family of allied sovereigns or an imperial federation under himself, and in each form the mightiest house in Christendom. Such a network of design was spread before him from the first. As the head of the house of Anjou the kings and princes of Palestine regarded him as their family representative, the grandson of King Fulk, and the man created for the re-conquest of the East. To him in their utmost need they sent the offer of their crown, the keys of the Holy Sepulchre and of the Tower of David. As the head of the Normans he was looked up to by the Sicilian king as the presumptive successor, and had the strange fortune and self-restraint to decline the offer of a second crown. The Italians thought him a likely competitor for the empire when they saw him negotiating for his son John a marriage with the heiress of Savoy, which would give him the command of the passes of the Alps; Spain saw in him the leader of a new crusade against the Moors when he sought for his son Richard a bribe in the Princess of Aragon, whose portion would give him the passes of the Pyrenees. Frederick Barbarossa might well feel suspicious when he heard that English gold was given to build the walls of Milan, and when he remembered that Henry the Lion, the great Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, the head of the Welfic house, his cousin and friend, whom with heavy heart he had sacrificed to the necessities of state, was also son-in-law of the king of the English.