disturbed the two countries for so many years was solved. England and Normandy were again under the same

crown.

小

In the distribution of rewards and punishments we see a fearful picture of the time. Robert was imprisoned, and when he tried to escape he was blinded, as some authorities state, by his brother's orders, and groped his way round his prison walls for eight-and-twenty years. Banishment, impoverish

ment, and degradation were the sentences on others. But to Belesme, the double traitor, and Ralph the Firebrand, the treasonable bishop, were assigned the disgraceful honours of re-instatement in wealth and grandeur. Belesme was again the powerful Earl of Shrewsbury and Arundel; and Ralph oppressed his priests, and neglected his people, as the restored Lord Bishop of Durham.

§ 5. At the time of Henry's virtual conquest of Normandy, the only son of Robert and Sibylla was five years old. In a fit of temporary generosity the triumphant uncle committed the child to the guardianship of the noble-minded Sir Helie de St. Saen, a knight so brave, and guardian so honourable, that when the king repented of his compassion, and demanded the surrender of the young prince into his hands, he refused the application, and fled from court to court, exciting the commiseration of princes and peoples by the helplessness and beauty of his youthful charge. Louis VI. of France, and Fulk, Earl of Anjou, professed themselves the protectors of the Conqueror's eldest grandson; the first, as a means of keeping his dangerous vassal in order by threats of supporting the pretensions of a rival; the other, to use the rights of William Clito (or illustrious, the usual title of the Norman heir) as a defence against the claims of the ambitious Henry. Alas! for the romance and truthfulness of the feudal mind! Henry silenced the reclamations of France by promises of submission, and bought over the friendship of Fulk of Anjou, by confiscating in his favour the estates of the

A.D. 1118.] PRINCE WILLIAM ACKNOWLEDGED.

147

gallant Sir Helie of St. Saen. But this was not enough. A marriage had been agreed upon between the unlucky FitzRobert, as William Clito was called, and the earl's fair daughter, Sibylla of Anjou; and Henry, as he had torn from his nephew every acre of land, did not hesitate to wrest his bride from him also. The generous Fulk, on the other hand, was overwhelmed with gratitude and pride, when Henry offered his son William, the heir of England and Normandy, to take the place of the poorest and now most deserted prince in Christendom.

6. Preparations were apparently made for the honourable fulfilment of all these agreements. Prince William was acknowledged as future king by a formal homage rendered to him by the nobles of Normandy and England. Everything promised a long course of prosperity. The arts of peace were encouraged, and colonies of industrious workmen from foreign countries were granted lands on the borders of Wales. It seemed even an additional reason for maintaining tranquillity, when, in 1118, the good Queen Maud died, to the great sorrow of the English people, though with little sorrow on the part of the king; but at this very time it became known that the ever-active Henry had been engaged in secret plots and preparations against his paramount lord the King of France, and his unsuspecting nephew, Duke Robert's son. War was declared on both sides, and Normandy was again laid waste by contending armies. Henry was unfortunate at first. His barons deserted him, his finances ran short, other potentates, such as the Earl of Flanders, rose up against him, and William Clito was always at hand to maintain the cause of legitimate descent against usurpation. But Henry was one

of those natures

"Strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

With dogged perseverance he waited the turning of the tide. First the Earl of Flanders was slain; next he discovered that a good sum of money would be a wonderful peacemaker

It was

with the heroic Earl of Anjou, and that he was impatient for the marriage of his daughter. He sent him a large amount of gold, and a promise of immediate nuptials; whereupon Earl Fulk turned upon his allies without a moment's hesitation, and Henry found himself at the head of more numerous forces than his enemy the French king. The battle of Brenneville followed, where there was a great appearance of military ardour, but none of the real dangers of war. a tournament on a great scale, and the champions were the knights of highest rank in Europe. Kings of England and France, princes, dukes, and earls, all poured down in plumes and cuirasses from opposite sides, clashed for a minute or two against each other, and returned to their former stations in the midst of much shouting and no bloodshed. Some of the grandees, indeed, on both sides fell from their steeds, and not being able to rise again, from the heaviness of their armour, yielded themselves prisoners, and agreed for a ransom; but at the end of this exciting turmoil the French found it necessary to retreat. William Clito, in imitation of his father, was a bold knight, and carried his ducal crest into the front of battle. His horse was killed; the King of France also lost his horse; several other horses must have suffered on this great occasion, but only three men were slain. The manner of their death is not recorded, so it is just as likely they were smothered in their ill-ventilated head-pieces as that they perished by sword or spear. This chivalrous display put an end to the war, and in the following year, when Henry had pacified his Norman States, and France had deserted the cause of William Clito, and the Pope had failed to procure kinder treatment for the imprisoned Robert of Normandy, and Prince William of England had been betrothed to the young Princess of Anjou with a dowry of satisfactory amount, king and prince, and earls and barons, with princesses, countesses, and all the beauty and fashion of

A.D. 1120.] PRINCE WILLIAM SHIPWRECKED.

149

the time, proceeded to Barfleur to take ship for England, and make a triumphal entry into the port of Dover.

§ 7. On the twenty-fifth of November, in the calmest possible weather, the king and his immediate suite put out to sea. He was to be followed by Prince William and the younger and gayer portion of the expedition as soon as possible, and must have looked anxiously back, as hour after hour the famous "White Ship," which had been left for their conveyance, did not make its appearance. He landed the next day, and waited a long time, and still no news of the dilatory vessel. The courtiers had learned the fatal truth, but kept it from the king. At length, on the third day, they sent a little boy into his room, who fell at his feet, and told him that the White Ship had struck upon a rock, and that Prince William, and Marie de la Perche (a daughter of Henry), and all the nobles had been drowned. The king fainted at the great calamity, and never recovered his usual spirits. It is even recorded that he never smiled again. There were but two survivors of the wreck, one of them a butcher of Rouen, and from him it was learnt that the crew and passengers had equally exceeded in wine and wassail, and that the blinded helmsman steered straight upon a rock. Fifty stout oars had given such impulse to the vessel that she split into fragments in a moment. There had only been time for William, who had stept into a boat and got off a few yards from the wreck, to put back to save his distracted sister the Countess de la Perche, who screamed to him to take her on board. The gallant effort was ineffectual, and all miserably perished. In spite of this act of apparent heroism at the end, and the sympathy which was naturally felt for the bereavement of the king, the English nation had no cause to regret the death of William. Brutal and dissolute as his uncle Rufus, he had determined to signalize his accession to the throne by fresh insults and exactions on the Anglo-Saxon race. He had

boasted he would make them draw the plough and treat them like beasts of burden. "But God said it shall not be thus, thou impious," says a chronicler of the time; "and so it fell out that his brow, instead of being girded with the crown of gold, was beaten against the rocks of the ocean."

§ 8. And now the sonless king was thrown back upon the only surviving child of his marriage with Maud, the Empress Matilda, who played a great part afterwards in English history. She had married Henry the Fifth of Germany in 1114, when she was but thirteen years of age, and when he died in 1124 the ambitious father determined to make her the heiress of both his crowns, and doubtless possessed, in the person of a princess of twenty-three, the widow of the highest potentate in the world, and the inheritor of the noblest patrimony in the west, an instrument for the furtherance of his designs such as he had never possessed before. We might suppose that nothing under a royal bridegroom would satisfy his demand. We find, on the contrary, that all his skill was directed to procure an alliance with the family of Anjou. We saw what competition there was for the hand of a princess of that house between William Clito and William of England. The death of the latter, who had been her affianced husband, left her disposal once more in her father's power; and in order effectually to prevent the success of that hated nephew in obtaining the assistance of so potent a neighbour, Henry bribed our old friend Fulk, who was always open to the highest bidder, with the hand, the rank, and great expectations of his daughter Matilda, whom he offered to bestow on Geoffrey his son and heir. Fulk, satisfied with this elevation of his family, resigned his coronet of Anjou, and set forth to the Holy Land, where his virtues and well-filled treasury had procured him the kingdom of Jerusalem.

The young Geoffrey, called Plantagenet from the bunch of broom (planta genista) he wore as the ornament of his helmet, was nothing loth to accept the relict of an emperor, and heiress