Let us call to mind how the empire of Henry II was formed. At the death of the Conqueror in 1087 the lands which he had brought together and ruled with such good peace were divided between his two eldest sons, Robert receiving Normandy and William the Red, England. Save for William’s regency over Normandy during his brother’s absence on the Crusade, the two countries remained separate during his reign, and were united once more only in 1106 when William’s successor, his younger brother Henry I, after defeating and deposing Robert at Tinchebrai, ruled as duke of Normandy and king of England. This was the inheritance which, after the death of Prince William in the White Ship, Henry sought to hand down to his daughter Matilda, but which passed for the most part to his nephew Stephen of Blois. Stephen, however, never gained a firm hold in England and soon lost Normandy to Matilda’s husband, Count Geoffrey of Anjou, by whom it was conquered and ruled in the name of his son Henry, later Henry II. Crowned duke of Normandy in 1150, Henry succeeded his father as count of Anjou in the following year, and at Stephen’s death in 1154 became king of England. Meanwhile, in 1152, he had contracted a marriage of the greatest political importance with Eleanor, duchess of Aquitaine, whose union with the French king Louis VII had just been annulled by the Pope; an alliance which made him master of Poitou, Aquitaine, and Gascony and therewith of two-thirds of France. Apart from certain adjustments in central France, the only addition to these territories made during Henry’s reign was the conquest of eastern Ireland in the years following 1169. Into these Irish campaigns and their consequences for the whole later history of the island we cannot attempt to go. Let me only point out that the leading spirits were Norman, except so far as they were Irish exiles, and that the names which now make their appearance in Irish annals are Norman names--the Lacys and the Clares, the Fitzgeralds and the de Courcys, as Irish before long as the Irish themselves.