The two or three years that followed the rebellion were the period of Henry’s longest stay in England. He came in April 1175, and stayed until August 1177 after a year spent in Normandy and Anjou he returned in 1178, and stayed until the end of June 1180; after which, although he paid several long visits to England, his absences were much longer. These years were periods of great activity in political matters. The number of councils that he held, the variety of public business that he despatched in them, the series of changes intended to promote the speedy attainment of justice, the unfailing purpose which he showed of fulfilling the pledge which in his early days he had given to his people, all these come out in the simple details of the historian with remarkable fulness. Henry was not at this time, or ever after, a happy man; his son Henry, nominally reconciled, was constantly intriguing against him with his father-in-law, Lewis, and the discontented lords of the foreign dominion. He took up the part of an advocate of local rights and privileges, and headed confederations against his father, and against his brother Richard as the oppressor of the barons of Poictou. He complained that his father treated him meanly, not giving enough money, and jealously refusing him his share of power. The father treated him generously and patiently, but he could not trust him, and did not pretend to do so. [Sidenote: Queen Eleanor. ] Queen Eleanor, too, was now imprisoned, or sequestered from her husband in honorable captivity. This great lady, who deserves to be treated with more honor and respect than she has generally met with, had behaved very ill to her husband in the matter of the rebellion; and, although he occasionally indulged her with the show of royal pomp and power, he never released her from confinement or forgave her. She was a very able woman, of great tact and experience, and still greater ambition; a most important adviser whilst she continued to support her husband, a most dangerous enemy when in opposition. Her political intrigues in the East, when she accompanied her first husband on the Crusade, had made him contemptible, and that Lewis never forgave her. But her second husband was made of sterner stuff. He took and kept the upper hand; it was only after his death that Eleanor’s real powers found room for play; and had it not been for her governing skill while Richard was in Palestine, and her influence on the Continent during the early years of John, England would have been a prey to anarchy, and Normandy lost to the house of Anjou long before it was.