GERMANS AT COURT. [VI. 144 Alexander III so nearly coincided, that there was always a prospect that the two great sovereigns might make common cause against Lewis VII. Hence in 1165 there was a German embassy under the Archbishop of Cologne in London, and the English lords showed their orthodoxy by refusing to meet the schismatic prelate at dinner, although Henry's own envoys at Wtirtzburg were credibly reported to have given in the national adhesion to the antipope. The marriage of Matilda with duke Henry, his subsequent quarrel with the emperor, Henry's negotiations for the support and restoration of his son-in-law, the long exile of Henry the Lion and his stay in England, gave English society much interest in German politics ; so much so, that it is from the English Chroniclers of this period that much of the German history of the time has to be written ; and English writers took sides in the Welf and Hohenstaufen quarrel, describing both events and characters with partisan colouring that is rare even in their pictures of home politics. Thus, too, copies of important documents came to be preserved in the English Annals, and we are so led to infer that the relations of the Court, to whose hands primarily these documents must have come, with the recording annalists, were of the closest description; and we understand how the great Longchamp or Walter of Coutances could send down important dispatches to be copied into the historical collections of Ralph de Diceto. For when we talk of the public and of the court of Henry II, we are not talking of such a vague and abstract idealism as the court and public of the reign of Victoria, made up of society at large at one end and the press and newspaper correspondents at the other, with all that lies between ; the Court is a small body of well-known men, and the public is the aggregate of the clergy and knights who know foreign lands, can speak foreign tongues, and take an intelligent interest in European politics. Not