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 THE GROWTH OF ROYAL POWER IN FRANCE 493 creased the royal power and territory was Philip II, or Augustus, during his long reign of forty-three Rei n f years from 1180 to 1223. Of his participation Philip in the Third Crusade, and his relations with Au s ustus Richard and John, Kings of England, and with Pope Inno- cent III, we have already spoken. At his accession "the feudal aristocracy was still the great territorial and political power on French soil. At his death the situation had been completely reversed" and the monarchy prevailed. The chronicler Rigord gave him the epithet "Augustus" of the old Roman emperors, partly because Philip was born in August, but more because he believed the word derived from the verb augeo and because Philip had so augmented the territory and power of the French monarchy. Another contemporary called him "Karolides," or "descendant of Charlemagne," and a fourteenth-century poet named him I Philip the Conqueror." For a long time it had seemed that his father, Louis VII, would leave no male heir to succeed him, and twenty-one years passed after he had first been married before his third wife bore an heir to the throne. Thomas Becket, then an exile under Louis VI Ts protection, tells how darkly Henry II of England scowled when he first saw this young prince — then aged four — who was des- tined to make himself and his sons so much trouble and to take from John most of the vast Plantagenet fiefs in France Little Philip showed his precocious ability by a speech whicl he made to the Plantagenet king on this occasion; but he had scant time to receive an ordinary education; his life from his early teens was absorbed in practical politics and wars. He turned out to be an able warrior and military engineer, especially in conducting sieges. Even more was he a wily diplomat, quite unscrupulous about breaking promises that were not to his advantage, and this in rela- tions with his own people as well as in foreign affairs. Philip added to the royal domain about Paris and the province of Berri, in which had consisted the pos- Territorial sessions of Louis VII, all the territory between acc i ulsltlons Flanders and Champagne on the north and east and Brit-