A.D. 1130.]

WILLIAM CLITO, OF NORMANDY.

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of a kingdom, to whom already the feudal barons of both her future States had sworn truth and fealty; and the wedding which turned the whole course of English history into other channels, and so diverged from the direct line of the Conquest that in a short time little of the Norman sentiment was left in the gentry of England, was celebrated with great rejoicings in the city of Rouen. A beauty of twenty-six years old, with the hereditary pride of her Norman family aggravated by her past empire and approaching reign, was not a very submissive or devoted bride to the third-rate potentate of Anjou. Intimations are conveyed to us that their domestic arrangements were not of the most amicable kind; and Geoffrey perhaps sometimes envied his father the precarious and stormy grandeurs of the Jerusalem crown, since it would remove him far away from the exactions of his selfish and unprincipled fatherin-law, and the outbursts of temper and caprice of his imperious wife.

§ 9. Having secured the assistance of Anjou against the claims of William Clito on Normandy, it was now Henry's policy to reduce that unfortunate rival to a condition of utter dependence, and for this purpose he stirred up enmity against him among the inhabitants of Pontoise, Chaumont, and other places in which he had been installed by Louis of France, who had further granted him the hand of his queen's sister. We may observe the moves of these two sovereigns, which follow each other with the skill and regularity of a game at chess. Henry makes an attack on William Clito by encouraging the animosity of his subjects. Louis marries him to his sister-in-law. Henry attacks him with the detachment of Fulk and Geoffrey from his cause. Louis makes him Earl of Flanders on the murder of Charles the Good. After a little pause to consider the board, Henry advances a certain half savage, Theodorich of Alsace, to assault the new-made earl; and, finally, William Clito, placing himself at the head of his French allies, and caring little for a life which had been so

filled with struggle and disappointment, threw himself headlong among the crowded ranks of his enemies at Alost, and received a wound of which he died. This was a settlement of the match in favour of the English king; for William left no son; Robert, the weary prisoner, died; and there seemed no probability of a competitor for the crown against his daughter, the Empress Maud.

§ 10. The cares of the English king, however, were devoted to securing her the succession. If he was still more engaged in the inglorious employment of patching up quarrels between man and wife, occasionally persuading his heiress to return to her husband, and sometimes inviting Geoffrey to visit her when she had taken up her residence in England, his labours were crowned, in the year 1133, by the birth of an heir to the ill-assorted pair, with whom we shall soon make acquaintance under the name of Henry II.; and now the proud grandfather, seeing before him a glorious vision of lineal descendants-for Matilda gave birth to two other sons-determined to enjoy the happiness he thought he had deserved. He therefore punished his rebellious vassals, and over-taxed his tenants, and hunted the deer to raise his spirits. One day when he had acquired a fresh appetite, by chasing in the woods of Lions-la-forêt, he partook largely of his favourite food, consisting of stewed lampreys; and the wisdom of his physicians, who had warned him against this dangerous dish, was proved by the event; for the ruler of England and Normandy, the supplanter of his brother, the destroyer of his nephew, the father-in-law of an emperor, and ancestor of many kings, died by over-eating himself at supper.

It is curious, considering the nature of his illness and the hatred that surrounded him, that we find no insinuation of poison in this case. Yet who was to profit by his demise? We shall see how rapidly all his natural anticipations were disappointed, and what wonderful changes had taken place within a month of his death, when his body was brought over in state, and

A.D. 1135.]

DEATH OF HENRY.

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deposited with regal ceremonies in the great abbey at Reading, which he had lately built. Superstition or hatred saw strange evidences of the Divine wrath in the circumstances of his death; and the common people, when they heard that the embalmer had been suffocated by the poisonous exhalations of the body, only added him to the long list of the victims of the royal cruelty. "He was the last man," says the chronicler, "whom King Henry put to death."

Here was the end of a reign of thirty-five years; and if we consider some of the changes that occurred in it, we shall see the beneficial tendency of a lengthened tenure of power, in the firmness and permanency which it impresses on the acts of one mind. Steady and persevering in his great object of lowering the dangerous independence of the nobility, his policy had the effect of protecting the people. His declaration, or first charter, was a renewal of the laws which had been broken through or abrogated by his Norman predecessors. His second, or the charter of London, relieved commerce from many of its chains, gave self-government to the citizens, and placed them beyond the exactions or tyranny to which they had been exposed. Not that the worthy son of William and brother of Rufus cared much for the happiness of his subjects, but he would allow no man to trample on them but himself. Another gain was the perceptible separation which occurred in this reign between the interests of Normandy and England. Even though united under the same sceptre, it was soon very evident that Henry played one set of great feudatories against the other, and that properties on the Seine were held out as tempting baits to the English barons, while in the same way the rich possessions of Shrewsbury or Montgomery assured to the lord paramount the support of as many greedy warriors from Rouen as he required. Each revolting lord felt the frightful strictness of the feudal law while he raised the sword against his superior; whereas his position would have been more independent if

the crowns had been held by different persons. Opposition to the foreign ruler would not have been treason as well as war. But no one dared to whisper a doubt of the perfect justice and truth of the firm-willed and pitiless master who held Normandy in subjection with the aid of England, and trampled on the English peers with the aid of Normandy. The dominions, however, instead of being welded together by the weight that oppressed them, were ready to take separate and independent forms the moment the pressure was removed.

§ 11. And yet we cannot doubt that when the evil times which succeeded the Beauclerc's reign were upon them, nobles, and priests, and peasantry regretted the restraining rod from which they had all suffered so long. As this was the last of the legitimate Normans, he combined in his own person the good and bad qualities of his race. Cunning and revengeful as the Conqueror, he also possessed a certain magnificence of mind, which displayed itself in noble buildings and rich religious foundations. England copied from Normandy the majestic style of architecture, of which so many specimens still remain, reminding us of a time when cathedrals and abbeys and churches were a kind of devout conscience-money paid in acknowledgment of guilt and lowliness in the sight of heaven, at the very time that the sumptuous edifice spread over all the land the name and generosity of the founder. If these sacred monuments were indeed memorials of crime and violence, we need not wonder that the Normans were ecclesiastical architects on the largest scale. Henry, for instance, whose career we have sketched, had outraged every feeling of kindliness or compassion in his treatment of friend and foe. He had two grandchildren, the offspring of his illegitimate daughter Juliana, whom he had married to a certain barbarous feudatory called Eustace of Breteuil. Eustace and Juliana displeased him, and he exacted their little girls as pledges of their fidelity; but as a pledge also of his own he commanded a courtier of the name of Harenc to confide his son to the

A.D. 1135.]

CHARACTER OF HENRY.

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eare of the offended parents. Eustace with brutal fury plucked out the eyes of the youthful hostage, and Harenc appealed to the king. Was there no court before which so great a crime could be tried ?-was there no bishop or priest to inform the crowned scholar that the law of retaliation had been done away? Henry gave his hostages, the daughters of Juliana, into the hands of Harenc, and Harenc, with a thrill of gratified hate, mutilated their faces, and burnt out their eyes. Juliana heard of the deed, and when her father besieged the castle of Breteuil, demanded parley with him from the walls. When he appeared, she aimed an arrow from her crossbow at his breast, but missed. The siege, therefore, went OL, and when hunger, fever, and the usual concomitants of war in those ages compelled the guilty pair to surrender, Henry, with a grim humour, would not pardon his daughter till he had humiliated her in the sight of all the camp, and Juliana was forced to lower herself in a basket from the battlements, to wade up to her neck across the dirty moat, and, dripping and disgraced, was received in the royal tent, and admitted into her father's favour. Not all the churches and hospitals that give such holy beauty to the landscape of England could wash away the stain of such unforgivingness and crime, and Henry must be remembered as a successful wielder of authority, but unredeemed by a single social or christian virtue.