Events were now steadily moving in favour of Henry. At the close of 1151, the death of his father added the county of Anjou to his duchy of Normandy. Early in 1152 a larger possession than these together, and a most brilliant promise of future power, came to him through no effort of his own. We have seen how at the beginning of the reign of Stephen, when Henry himself was not yet five years old, Eleanor, heiress of Aquitaine, had been married to young Louis of France, who became in a few weeks, by the death of his father, King Louis VII. Half a lifetime, as men lived in those days, they had spent together as man and wife, with no serious lack of harmony. The marriage, however, could never have been a very happy one. Incompatibility of temper and tastes must long have made itself felt before the determination to dissolve the marriage was reached. Masculine in character, strong and full of spirit, Eleanor must have looked with some contempt on her husband, who was losing the energy of his younger days and passing more and more under the influence of the darker and more superstitious elements in the religion of the time, and she probably did not hesitate to let her opinion be known. She said he was a monk and not a king. To this, it is likely, was added the fact--it may very possibly have been the deciding consideration--that during the more than fourteen years of the marriage but two daughters had been born, and the Capetian house still lacked an heir. Whatever may have been the reason, a divorce was resolved upon not long after their return in 1149 from the second crusade. The death in January, 1152, of Louis VI's great minister, Suger, whose still powerful influence, for obvious political reasons, had hindered the final steps, made the way clear. In March an assembly of clergy, with many barons in attendance, declared the marriage void on the convenient and easily adjustable principle of too near relationship, and Eleanor received back her great inheritance.