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He bestowed on him six earldoms, and gave him in marriage the Lady Avisa, sole heiress of the great house of Gloucester; but as he gave him no share in the regency, he increased his power, and left him discontented in a kingdom committed to the care of new men, who had merited their places by their money.

Julian, founded about the same time, which ultimately took its name from the captured fortress of Alcantara, were amenable to the complete monastic rule; while the Portuguese Order of Evora or Avisa, founded a few years later, was assimilated rather to the lay brethren of the Cistercians, and its members could marry and hold property.

Besides bestowing on him the county of Mortaigne, in Normandy, granting him a pension of four thousand marks a year, and marrying him to Avisa, the daughter of the Earl of Gloucester, by whom he inherited all the possessions of that opulent family, he increased his appanage, which the late king had destined him, by other extensive grants and concessions.

Grosart could find the means to put a crown upon the achievements of his learning and a seal upon the obligations of our gratitude by the one inestimable boon long hoped for against hoping, and as yet but "a vision in a dream" to the most learned and most loving of true Shakespearean students; by the issue or reissue in its full and perfect likeness, collated at last and complete, of Willobie his Avisa.

Yet one of his first steps, whilst his power still remained dubious and unsettled, was, on pretence of consanguinity, to divorce his wife Avisa, with whom he had lived many years, and to marry Isabella of Angoulême, a woman of extraordinary beauty, but who had been betrothed to Hugh, Count of Marche: thus disgusting at once the powerful friends of his divorced wife, and those of the Earl of Marche, whom he had so sensibly wronged.