With him expired the last hope of carrying on the work of national development at which he had so long laboured. To the first great error of the Crusade Louis now added his second mistake of repudiating his wife. In both cases the king put his personal feeling above the interest of his house and realm. As his absence on crusade led to a new wave of feudal anarchy, so his divorce helped on the growth of the great Angevin power, which was, for the rest of his life, to put an insurmountable obstacle in the way of the development of the French monarchy. [Sidenote: Divorce of Louis VII. and Eleanor of Aquitaine, 1152.] The relations between Louis and Eleanor had long been strained. After many years of barrenness, the two children which, as it was believed, came to the pair as the result of the prayers of St. Bernard, were both girls, and Louis ardently desired a son and successor. There was, moreover, a strange contrast of character between the weak, pious, and shifty king and the fierce, imperious, and ambitious queen. New grounds of dispute arose during the Crusade, when Eleanor strove to divert the French host from their projected march to Jerusalem in order that its presence might support her uncle Raymond of Antioch in his schemes for the aggrandisement of his principality. The relations of husband and wife became so bad that Suger wrote imploring the king to conceal his anger against the queen. After their return to France nothing but the influence of Suger prevented a breach. Soon after his death, the question of divorce was formally raised. St. Bernard, still omnipotent over Louis’ mind, approved the step. In March 1152 a church council held at Beaugency annulled the marriage on the ground of consanguinity. Eleanor withdrew to her own dominions, which were now again separated from the French crown. Anxious to do all in her power to spite her former husband, she offered herself in marriage to young Henry of Anjou. At Whitsuntide their marriage at Poitiers exposed the French monarchy to the gravest danger. [Sidenote: The rise of the House of Blois.] So long as the chief fiefs were held by separate and rival houses it was not impossible for the crown to hold its own against them, but an aggregation of several great fiefs into the same hands might easily set up a rival power whose forces could overbalance the scanty strength of the king. The union of Chartres, Blois, and Champagne under Theobald the Great had been the gravest obstacle to the plans of Louis VI. The establishment of Theobald’s younger brother in Boulogne, Normandy, and England would have been even more dangerous but for the incompetence of Stephen. Side by side with the union of several fiefs under the house of Blois, was the union of Anjou, Maine, and Normandy, brought about by the policy of Henry I. in marrying his daughter, the Empress Matilda, to Geoffrey, the son of Fulk of Anjou. These two amalgamations neutralised