Both as a man and as a ruler, the figure of Henry II has come down to us distorted by the loves and hates of an age of the most violent and bitter controversy. Brilliant though scarcely heroic to his friends, to his enemies he was a veritable demon of tyranny and crime, whose lurid end pointed many a moral respecting the sins of princes and the vengeance of the Most High. Eminently a strong man, he was not regarded as in any sense superhuman, but rather as an intensely human figure, tempted in all points like as other men and yielding where they yielded. Heavy, bull-necked, sensual, with a square jaw, freckled face, reddish hair, and fiery eyes that blazed in sudden paroxysms of anger, he must, in Bishop Stubbs’s phrase, “have looked generally like a rough, passionate, uneasy man.”[29] The dominant impression is one of exhaustless energy accompanied by a physical restlessness which kept him whispering and scribbling during mass, hunting and hawking from morning to night, and riding constantly from place to place throughout his vast dominions with a rapidity that always took his enemies by surprise. On one occasion he covered one hundred and seventy miles in two days. Well-educated for a prince of his time and able to hold his own in ready converse with the clerks of his court, his tastes were neither speculative nor romantic, but were early turned toward practical life. He was primarily “an able, plausible, astute, cautious, unprincipled man of business,”[30] fond of work and delighting in detail, with a distinct gift for organization and a mastery of diplomacy, wise in the selection of his subordinates, skilful in evasion, but quick and sure in action. Strong, clear-headed, and tenacious, Henry represents the type of the man of large affairs, and in another age might have amassed a large private fortune as a successful business man. In the twelfth century the chief opportunity for talent of this sort was in public life, where the king’s household was also the government of the state, the strengthening of royal authority was the surest means of attaining national unity and security, and the interest of the king coincided with the interest of the state. To the present day, with its cry for business men in public office, this seems natural enough; but we must remember that feudalism meant exactly the opposite of business efficiency, and that the problem of creating an effective government in the midst of a feudal society turned largely on the maintenance of a businesslike administration of justice, finance, and the army. By his success in these fields Henry went a long way toward creating a modern state, and did, as a matter of fact, establish the most highly organized and effective government of its time in western Europe.