 VII England under Harold the Second and conquered by the Normans. Harold was crowned King of England on the very day of the Maudland Confessor's funeral. He had good need to be quick about it. When the news reached Norman William, hunting in his park at Rouen, he dropped his bow, returned to his palace, called his nobles to counsel, and presently sent ambassadors to Harold, calling on him to keep his oath and resign the crown. Harold would do no such thing. The barons of France leaned together round Duke William for the invasion of England. Duke William promised freely to distribute English wealth and English lands among them. The Pope sent to Normandy a consecrated banner, and a ring containing a hair, which he warranted to have grown on the head of St. Peter. He blessed the enterprise and cursed Harold, and requested that the Normans would pay Peter's pence, or a tax to himself, of a penny a year on every house, a little more regularly in future, if they could make it convenient. King Harold had a rebel brother in Flanders, who was a vassal of Harold Hardrada, King of Norway. This brother and this Norwegian king, joining their forces against England with Duke William's help, won a fight in which the English were commanded by two nobles, and then besieged York. Harold, who was waiting for the Normans on the coast at Hastings, with his army, marched to Stamford Bridge upon the River Derwent to give them instant battle. He found them drawn up in a hollow circle, marked out by their shining spears. Standing round this circle at a distance to survey it, he saw a brave figure on horseback, in a blue mantle and a bright helmet, whose horse suddenly stumbled and threw him. "'Who is that man who has fallen?' Harold asked of one of his captains. "'The King of Norway,' he replied. "'He is a tall and stately king,' said Harold, but his end is nearer. He added, in a little while, "'Go yonder to my brother and tell him, if he withdraw his troops, he shall be Earl of Northumberland and rich and powerful in England.' The captain rode away and gave the message. "'What will he give to my friend, the King of Norway?' asked the brother. "'Seven feet of earth for a grave,' replied the captain. "'No more,' returned the brother with a smile. "'The King of Norway, being a tall man, perhaps a little more,' replied the captain. "'Ride back,' said the brother, and tell King Harold to make ready for the fight.' He did so very soon. And such a fight King Harold led against that force, that his brother and the Norwegian King, and every chief of note in all their host, except the Norwegian King's son, Olaf, to whom he gave honorable dismissal, were left dead upon the field. The victorious army marched to York. As King Harold sat there, at the feast, in the midst of all his company, a stir was heard at the doors, and messengers, all covered with mire, from riding far and fast through broken ground, came hurrying in to report that the Normans had landed in England. The intelligence was true. They had been tossed about by contrary winds, and some of their ships had been wrecked. A part of their own shore, to which they had been driven back, was strewn with Norman bodies. But they had once more made sail, led by the Duke's own galley, a present from his wife, upon the prow whereof the figure of a golden boy stood pointing towards England. By day the banner of the three lions of Normandy, the diverse-colored sails, the gilded vans, the many decorations of this gorgeous ship, had glittered in the sun and sunny water. By night a light had sparkled like a star at her mast-head, and now encamped near Hastings, with their leader lying in the old Roman castle of Pevensey, the English retiring in all directions, the land for miles around scorched and smoking, fired and pillaged, was the whole Norman power, hopeful and strong on English ground. Harold broke up the feast and hurried to London. Within a week his army was ready. He sent out spies to ascertain the Norman strength. William took them, caused them to be led through his whole camp, and then dismissed. The Normans, said these spies to Harold, are not bearded on the upper lip as we English are but are shorn. They are priests. My men, replied Harold with a laugh, will find those priests good soldiers. The Saxons reported Duke William's outposts of Norman soldiers, who were instructed to retire as King Harold's army advanced, rush on us, through their pillaged country with the fury of madmen. Let them come, and come soon, said Duke William. Some proposals for a reconciliation were made, but were soon abandoned. In the middle of the month of October, in the year 1066, the Normans and the English came front to front. All night the armies lay encamped before each other, in a part of the country then called Sennlach, now called in remembrance of them, Battle. With the first dawn of the day they arose. There in the faint light were the English on a hill, a wood behind them, in their midst the royal banner, representing a fighting warrior woven in gold thread, adorned with precious stones. With the banner, as it rustled in the wind, stood King Harold on foot, with two of his remaining brothers by his side. Around them, still and silent as the dead, clustered the whole English army. Every soldier covered by his shield, and bearing in his hand his dreaded English battle-axe. On an opposite hill, in three lines, archers, foot soldiers, horsemen, was the Norman force. Of a sudden a great battle cry, God help us, burst from the Norman lines. The English answered with their own battle cry, God's rude, holy rude. The Normans then came sweeping down the hill to attack the English. There was one tall Norman knight who rode before the Norman army on a prancing horse, throwing up his heavy sword and catching it, and singing of the bravery of his countrymen. An English knight, who rode out from the English force to meet him, fell by this knight's hand. Another English knight rode out, and he fell too. But then a third rode out, and killed the Norman. This was in the first beginning of the fight. It soon raged everywhere. The English, keeping side by side in a great mass, cared no more for the showers of Norman arrows than if they had been showers of Norman rain. When the Norman horsemen rode against them, with their battle-axes they cut men and horses down. The Normans gave way. The English pressed forward. A cry went forth among the Norman troops that Duke William was killed. Duke William took off his helmet, in order that his face might be distinctly seen, and rode along the line before his men. This gave them courage. As they turned again to face the English, some of their Norman horse divided the pursuing body of the English from the rest, and thus all that foremost portion of the English army fell, fighting bravely. The main body still remaining firm, heedless of the Norman arrows, and with their battle-axes cutting down the crowds of horsemen when they rode up, like forests of young trees, Duke William pretended to retreat. The eager English followed. The Norman army closed again, and fell upon them with great slaughter. "'Still,' said Duke William, there are thousands of the English, firm as rocks around their king. Shoot upward, Norman archers, that your arrows may fall down upon their faces. The sun rose high, and sank, and the battle still raged. Through all, the wild October day, the clash and din resounded in the air. In the red sunset, and in the white moonlight, heaps upon heaps of dead men lay strewn, a dreadful spectacle, all over the ground. King Harold, wounded with an arrow in the eye, was nearly blind. His brothers were already killed. Twenty Norman knights, whose battered armor had flashed fiery and golden in the sunshine all day long, and now looked silvery in the moonlight, dashed forward to seize the royal banner from the English knights and soldiers, still faithfully collected round their blinded king. The king received a mortal wound, and dropped. The English broke and fled. The Normans rallied, and the day was lost. Oh, what a sight beneath the moon and stars! When lights were shining in the tent of the victorious Duke William, which was pitched near the spot where Harold fell, and he and his knights were carousing within, and soldiers with torches, going slowly to and fro without, sought for the corpse of Harold among piles of dead, and the warrior, worked in golden thread and precious stones, lay low, all torn and soiled with blood, and the three Norman lions kept watch over the field. End of Chapter 7. Chapter 8 of A Child's History of England. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Sarah Jennings. A Child's History of England by Charles Dickens. Chapter 8. England under William I. The Norman Conqueror. On the ground where brave Harold fell, William the Norman afterwards founded an abbey, which under the name of Battle Abbey was a rich and splendid place through many a troubled year, though now it is a grey ruin overgrown with ivy. But the first work he had to do was to conquer the English thoroughly, and that, as you know by this time, was hard work for any man. He ravaged several counties. He burned and plundered many towns. He laid waste scores upon scores of miles of pleasant country. He destroyed innumerable lives. At length, Stigend, Archbishop of Canterbury, with other representatives of the clergy and people, went to his camp and submitted to him. Edgar, the insignificant son of Edmund Ironside, was proclaimed king by others, but nothing came of it. He fled to Scotland afterwards, where his sister, who was young and beautiful, married the Scottish king. Edgar himself was not important enough for anybody to care much about him. On Christmas Day, William was crowned in Westminster Abbey, under the title of William the First, but he is best known as William the Conqueror. It was a strange coronation. One of the bishops who performed the ceremony asked the Normans in French if they would have Duke William for their king. They answered yes. Another of the bishops put the same question to the Saxons in English. They too answered yes with a loud shout. The noise being heard by a guard of Norman horse soldiers outside was mistaken for resistance on the part of the English. The guard instantly set fire to the neighbouring houses, and a tumult ensued, in the midst of which the king, being left alone in the Abbey with a few priests, and they all being in a terrible fright together, was hurriedly crowned. When the crown was placed upon his head, he swore to govern the English as well as the best of their own monarchs. I dare say you think, as I do, that if we accept the great Alfred, he might pretty easily have done that. There are states, and the estates of all the nobles who had fought against him there, King William seized upon, and gave to his own Norman knights and nobles. Many great English families of the present time acquired their English lands in this way, and are very proud of it. But what is got by force must be maintained by force. These nobles were obliged to build castles all over England to defend their new property, and do what he would the king could neither soothe nor quell the nation as he wished. He gradually introduced the Norman language and the Norman customs, yet for a long time the great body of the English remained sullen and revengeful. When he's going over to Normandy to visit his subjects there, the oppressions of his half-brother Odo, whom he left in charge of his English kingdom, drove the people mad. The men of Kent even invited over to take possession of Dover their old enemy Count Eustace of Balone, who had led the fray when the Doverman was slain at his own fireside. The men of Hereford, aided by the Welsh, and commanded by a chief named Edric the Wild, drove the Normans out of their country. Some of those who had been dispossessed for their lands banded together in the north of England, some in Scotland, some in the thick woods and marshes, and when so ever they could fall upon the Normans, or upon the English who had submitted to the Normans, they fought, despoiled, and murdered like the desperate outlaws that they were. Conspiracies were set on foot for a general massacre of the Normans, like the old massacre of the Danes. In short, the English were in a murderous mood all through the kingdom. King William, fearing he might lose his conquest, came back and tried to pacify the London people by soft words. He then set forth to repress the country people by stern deeds, among the towns which he besieged, and where he killed and maimed the inhabitants without any distinction, sparing none, young or old, armed or unarmed, were Oxford, Warwick, Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, Lincoln, York. In all these places, and in many others, fire and sword worked their utmost horrors, and made the land dreadful to behold. The streams and rivers were discoloured with blood, the sky was blackened with smoke, the fields were wastes of ashes, the waysides were heaped up with dead. Such are the fatal results of conquest and ambition. Although William was a harsh and angry man, I do not suppose that he deliberately meant to work this shocking ruin when he invaded England, but what he had got by the strong hand he could only keep by the strong hand, and in so doing he made England a great grave. Two sons of Harold by the name Edmund and Godwin came over from Ireland, with some ships against the Normans, but were defeated. This was scarcely done when the outlaws in the woods so harassed York that the governor sent to the king for help. The king dispatched a general in a large force to occupy the town of Durham. The bishop of that place met the general outside the town and warned him not to enter as he would be in danger there. The general cared nothing for the warning and went in with all his men. That night on every hill within sight of Durham, signal fires were seen to blaze. When the morning dawned, the English, who had assembled in great strength, forced the gates, rushed into the town, and slew the Normans every one. The English afterwards besought the Danes to come and help them. The Danes came with 240 ships. The outlawed nobles joined them. They captured York and drove the Normans out of that city. Then William bribed the Danes to go away, and took such vengeance on the English that all the former fire and swords, smoke and ashes, death and ruin, were nothing compared with it. In melancholy songs and doleful stories, it was still sung and told by cottage fires on winter evenings. A hundred years afterwards, how, in those dreadful days of the Normans, there was not, from the river Humber to the river Tyne, one inhabited village left, nor one cultivated field, how there was nothing but a dismal ruin, where the human creatures and the beasts lay dead together. The outlaws had at this time what they called a camp of refuge, in the midst of the fends of Cambridgeshire. Protected by those marshy grounds which were difficult of approach, they lay among the reeds and rushes, and were hidden by the mists that rose up from the watery earth. Now there was also at that time, over the sea in Flanders, an Englishman named Harroward, whose father had died in his absence, and whose property had been given to a Norman. When he heard of this wrong that had been done him, from such of the exiled English as chance to wander into that country, he longed for revenge. And joining the outlaws in their camp of refuge became their commander. He was so good a soldier that the Normans supposed him to be aided by enchantment. William, even after he had made a road three miles in length across the Cambridgeshire marshes, on purpose to attack this supposed enchanter, thought it necessary to engage an old lady who pretended to be a sorceress, to come and do a little enchantment in the royal cause. For this purpose she was pushed on before the troops in a wooden tower. But Harroward very soon disposed of this unfortunate sorceress by burning her tower and all. The monks of the convent of Eli near at hand, however, were fond of good timing, and who found it very uncomfortable to have the country blockaded and their supplies of meat and drink cut off, showed the king a secret way of surprising the camp. So Harroward was soon defeated. Whether he afterwards died quietly, or whether he was killed after killing sixteen of the men who attacked him, as some old rhymes relate that he did, I cannot say. His defeat put an end to the camp of refuge, and very soon afterwards the king, victorious both in Scotland and in England, quelled a last rebellious English noble. He then surrounded himself with Norman lords, enriched by the property of the English nobles, had a great survey made of all the land in England which was entered as the property of its new owners, on a roll called the Doomsday Book, obliged the people to put out their fires and candles at a certain hour every night, on the ringing of a bell which was called the curfew, introduced the Norman dresses and manners, made the Normans masters everywhere and the English servants, turned out the English bishops, and put Normans in their places, and showed himself to be the conqueror indeed. But even with his own Normans he had a restless life. They were always hungering and thirsting for the riches of the English, and the more he gave the more they wanted. His priests were as greedy as his soldiers. We know of only one Norman who plainly told his master the king, that he had come with him to England to do his duty as a faithful servant, and that property taken by force from other men had no charms for him. His name was Guibert. We should not forget his name, for it is good to remember and to honour honest men. Besides all these troubles William the Conqueror was troubled by quarrels among his sons. He had three living. Robert called curt-hose because of his short legs. William called Rufus, or the red, from the colour of his hair, and Henry, fond of learning, and called in the Norman language bow-clerk, or fine scholar. When Robert grew up he asked of his father the government of Normandy, which he had nominally possessed as a child under his mother Matilda. The king refusing to grant it Robert became jealous and discontented, and happening one day well in this temper to be ridiculed by his brothers, who threw water on him from a balcony as he was walking before the door, he drew his sword, rushed upstairs, and was only prevented by the king himself from putting them to death. That same night he hotly departed with some followers from his father's court, and endeavoured to take the castle of Rouen by surprise. Failing in this he shut himself up in another castle in Normandy, which the king besieged, and where Robert one day unhorsed and nearly killed him without knowing who he was. His submission when he discovered his father, and the intercession of the queen and others, reconciled them. But not soundly, for Robert soon strayed abroad and went from court to court with his complaints. He was a gay, careless, thoughtless fellow, spending all he got on musicians and dancers. But his mother loved him, and often against the king's command, supplied him with money through a messenger named Samson. At length the incensed kings swore he would tear out Samson's eyes, and Samson, thinking that his only hope of safety was in becoming a monk, became one, and went on such errands no more, and kept his eyes in his head. All this time from the turbulent day of his strange coronation, the conqueror had been struggling, you see, at any cost of cruelty and bloodshed to maintain what he had seized. All his reign he struggled still with the same object ever before him. He was a stern, bold man, and he succeeded in it. He loved money, and was particular in his eating. But he had only leisure to indulge one other passion, and that was his love of hunting. He carried it to such a height that he ordered whole villages and towns to be swept away to make forests for the deer. Not satisfied with sixty-eight royal forests, he laid ways to an immense district to form another in Hampshire called the New Forest. The many thousands of miserable peasants who saw their little houses pulled down and themselves and children turned into the open country without a shelter detested him for his merciless addition to their many sufferings. And when in the twenty-first year of his reign, which proved to be the last, he went over to ruin England was as full of hatred against him as if every leaf on every tree in all his royal forests had been a curse upon his head. In the New Forest his son Richard, for he had four sons, had been gored to death by a stag, and the people said that this cruelly made forest would yet be fatal to others of the conqueror's race. He was engaged in a dispute with the King of France about some territory. While he stayed at Rouen negotiating with that King, he kept his bed and took medicines, being advised by his physicians to do so on account of having grown to an unwieldy size. Word being brought to him that the King of France made light of this, joked about it, he swore on a great rage that he should rue his jests. He assembled his army, marched into the disputed territory, burnt his old way, the vines, the crops, and fruit, and set the town of Mantis on fire. But in an evil hour, for as he rode over the hot ruins, his horse, setting his hoofs upon some burning embers, started, threw him forward against the pommel of the saddle, and gave him a mortal hurt. For six weeks he lay dying in a monastery near Rouen, and then made his will, giving England to William, Normandy to Robert, and 5,000 pounds to Henry. And now his violent deeds lay heavy on his mind. He ordered money to be given to many English churches and monasteries, and which was much better repentance, released his prisoners of state, some of whom had been confined in his dungeons twenty years. It was a September morning, and the sun was rising, when the King was awakened from slumber by the sound of a church bell. What bell is that, he faintly asked. They told him it was the bell of the Chapel of St. Mary. I commend my soul, said he, to Mary, and died. Think of his name, the Conqueror, and then consider how he lay in death. The moment he was dead, his physicians, priests, and nobles, not knowing what contest for the throne might now take place, or what might happen in it, hastened away each man for himself and his own property. The mercenary servants of the court began to rob and plunder. The body of the King, in the indecent strife, was rolled from the bed, and lay alone for hours upon the ground. O Conqueror, of whom so many great names are proud now, of whom so many great names thought nothing then, it were better to have conquered one true heart than England. By and by the priests came creeping in with prayers and candles, and a good night, named Heryun, undertook, which no one else would do, to convey the body to Cain, in Normandy, in order that it might be buried in St. Stephen's church there, which the Conqueror had founded. But fire, of which he had made such bad use in his life, seemed to follow him of itself in death. A great conflagration broke out in the town when the body was placed in the church, and those present running out to extinguish the flames, it was once again left alone. It was not even buried in peace. It was about to be let down in its royal robes into a tomb near the High Altar, in presence of a great concourse of people. When a loud voice in the crowd cried out, this ground is mine. Upon it stood my father's house. This king disfoiled me of both ground and house to build this church. In the great name of God, I here forbid his body to be covered with the earth that is my right. The priests and bishops present, knowing the speaker's right, and knowing that the king had often denied him justice, paid him down 60 shillings for the grave. Even then the corpse was not at rest. The tomb was too small, and they tried to force it in. It broke, a dreadful smell arose, and the people hurried out into the air, and for the third time it was left alone. Where were the conqueror's three sons that they were not at their father's burial? Robert was lounging among minstrel's dancers and gamesters in France or Germany. Henry was carrying his 5,000 pounds safely away in a convenient test he had got made. William the Red was hurrying to England to lay hands upon the royal treasure and the crown. End of Chapter 8. Chapter 9 of A Child's History of England. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Sarah Jennings. A Child's History of England by Charles Dickens. Chapter 9, England under William II, called Rufus. William the Red, in breathless haste, secured the three great forts of Dover, Pevensey, and Hastings, and made with hot speed for Winchester, where the royal treasure was kept. The treasurer delivering him the keys, he found that it amounted to 60,000 pounds in silver, besides gold and jewels. Possessed of this wealth, he soon persuaded the archbishop of Canterbury to crown him, and became William II, King of England. Rufus was no sooner on the throne than he ordered into prison again the unhappy state captives whom his father had set free, and directed a goldsmith to ornament his father's tomb profusely with gold and silver. It would have been more dutiful in him to have attended the sick conqueror when he was dying, but England itself, like this red king who once governed it, has sometimes made expensive tombs for dead men whom it treated shabbily when they were alive. The king's brother, Robert of Normandy, seemed quite content to be only duke of that country, and the king's other brother, fine scholar, being quiet enough with his 5,000 pounds in a chest, the king flattered himself, we may suppose, with the hope of an easy reign. But easy reigns were difficult to have in those days. The turbulent bishop Odo, who had blessed the Norman army at the Battle of Hastings, and who I daresay took all the credit of the victory to himself, soon began in concert with some powerful Norman nobles to trouble the red king. The truth seems to be that this bishop and his friends, who had land in England and lands in Normandy, wished to hold both under one sovereign, and greatly preferred a thoughtless, good-natured person such as Robert was, to Rufus, who, though being far from an amiable man in any respect, was keen and not to be imposed upon. They declared in Robert's favour and retired to their castles, those castles were very troublesome to kings, in a silent humor. The red king, seeing the Normans thus falling from him, revenged himself upon them by appealing to the English, to whom he made a variety of promises which he never meant to perform, in particular promises to soften the cruelty of the forest laws, and who in return so aided him with their valour, that Odo was besieged in the castle of Rochester and forced to abandon it, and to depart from England forever, whereupon the other rebellious Norman nobles were soon reduced and shattered. Then the red king went over to Normandy, where the people suffered greatly under the loose rule of Duke Robert. The king's object was to seize upon the duke's dominions. This the duke, of course, prepared to resist, and miserable war between the two brothers seemed inevitable, when the powerful nobles on both sides who had seen so much of war interfered to prevent it. A treaty was made, each of the two brothers agreed to give up something of his claims, and that the longer liver of the two should inherit all the dominions of the other. When they had come to this loving understanding, they embraced and joined their forces against fine scholar, who had bought some territory of Robert with a part of his five thousand pounds, and was considered a dangerous individual in consequence. St. Michael's Mount in Normandy. There is another St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall wonderfully like it. It was, then, as it is now, a strong place perched upon the top of a high rock, a round which, when the tide is in, the sea flows, leaving no road to the mainland. In this place fine scholar shut himself up with his soldiers, and here he was closely besieged by his two brothers. At one time, when he was reduced to great distress for want of water, the generous Robert not only permitted his men to get water, but sent fine scholar wine from his own table. And on being remonstrated with by the Red King, said, What? Shall we let our own brother die of thirst? Or shall we get another when he is gone? At another time the Red King, riding alone on the shore of the bay, looking up at the castle, was taken by two of fine scholar's men, one of whom was about to kill him when he cried out, Hold, Nave, I am the king of England! The story says that the soldier raised him from the ground respectfully and humbly, and that the king took him into his service. The story may or may not be true, but at any rate it is true that fine scholar could not hold out against his united brothers, and that he abandoned Mount St. Michael, and wandered about, as poor and forlorn as other scholars have been sometimes known to be. The Scotch became unquiet in the Red King's time, and were twice defeated, the second time with the loss of their king Malcolm and his son. The Welsh became unquiet too. Against them Rufus was less successful, for they fought among their native mountains, and did great execution on the king's troops. Lord of Normandy became unquiet too, and complaining that his brother the king did not faithfully perform his part of their agreement, took up arms, and obtained assistance from the king of France, whom Rufus in the end bought off with vast sums of money. England became unquiet too. Lord More, the powerful Earl of Northumberland, headed a great conspiracy to depose the king, and to place upon the throne Stephen, the conqueror's near relative. The plot was discovered. All the chief conspirators were seized, some were fined, some were put in prison, and some were put to death. The Earl of Northumberland himself was shut up in a dungeon beneath Windsor Castle, where he died an old man, thirty long years afterwards. The priests in England were more unquiet than any other class or power, for the Red King treated them with such small ceremony that he refused to appoint new bishops or arch-bishops when the old ones died, but kept all the wealth belonging to those offices in his own hands. In return for this, the priests wrote his life when he was dead, and abused him well. I am inclined to think, myself, that there was little to choose between the priests and the Red King, that both sides were greedy and designing, and that they were fairly matched. The Red King was false of heart, selfish, covetous, and mean. He had a worthy minister in his favorite, Ralph, nicknamed for almost every famous person had a nickname in those rough days, flambard, or the firebrand. Once the king being ill became penitent, and made Anselm, a foreign priest and a good man, arch-bishop of Canterbury. But he no sooner got well again than he repented of his repentance, and persisted in wrongfully keeping to himself some of the wealth belonging to the arch-bishopric. This led to violent disputes, which were aggravated by their being in Rome at that time to rival popes, each of whom declared he was the only real, original, infallible pope who couldn't make a mistake. At last, Anselm, knowing the Red King's character, and not feeling himself safe in England, asked to leave to return abroad. The Red King gladly gave it, for he knew that as soon as Anselm was gone, he could begin to store up all the Canterbury money again for his own use. By such means, and by taxing and oppressing the English people in every possible way, the Red King became very rich. When he wanted money for any purpose, he raised it by some means or other, and cared nothing for the injustice he did, or the misery he caused. Having the opportunity of buying from Robert the whole Duchy of Normandy for five years, he taxed the English people more than ever, and made the very contents seller played in valuables to supply him with the means to make the purchase. But he was as quick and eager in putting down revolts as he was in raising money. For a part of the Norman people objecting, very naturally, I think, to being sold in this way, he headed an army against them with all the speed and energy of his father. He was so impatient that he embarked for Normandy in a great gale of wind, and when the sailors told him it was dangerous to go to sea in such angry weather, he replied, hoist and sail away! Did you ever hear of a king who was drowned? He will wonder how it was that even the careless Robert came to sell his dominions. It happened thus. It had long been the custom for many English people to make journeys to Jerusalem, which were called pilgrimages, in order that they might pray beside the tomb of our savior there. Jerusalem belonging to the Turks and the Turks hating Christianity, these Christian travelers were often insulted and ill-used. The pilgrims wore it patiently for some time, but at length a remarkable man of great earnestness and eloquence, called Peter the Hermit, began to preach in various places against the Turks, and to declare that it was the duty of good Christians to drive away those unbelievers from the tomb of our savior and to take possession of it and protect it. An excitement such as the world had never known before was created. Thousands and thousands of men of all ranks and conditions departed for Jerusalem to make war against the Turks. This war is called in history the first crusade, and every crusader wore a cross marked on his right shoulder. All the crusaders were not cellist Christians. Among them were vast numbers of the restless, idle, profligate, and adventurous spirit of the time. Some became crusaders for the love of change, some in hope of plunder, some because they had nothing to do at home, some because they did what the priests told them, some because they liked to see foreign countries, some because they were fond of knocking men about and would as soon knock a turk about as a Christian. Robert of Normandy may have been influenced by all these motives and by a kind desire besides to save the Christian pilgrims from bad treatment in the future. He wanted to raise a number of armed men and to go to the crusade. He could not do so without money. He had no money and he sold his dominions to his brother, the Red King, for five years. With the large sum he thus obtained he fitted out his crusaders gallantly and went away to Jerusalem in Marshall State. The Red King, who made money out of everything, stayed at home, busily squeezing more money out of Normans and English. After three years of great hardship and suffering, from shipwreck at sea, from travel in strange lands, from hunger, thirst, and fever upon the burning sands of the desert, and from the fury of the turks, the valiant crusaders got possession of our saviour's tomb. The turks were still resisting and fighting bravely, but this success increased the general desire in Europe to join the crusade. Another great French duke was proposing to sell his dominions for a term to the rich Red King, when the Red King's reign came to a sudden and violent end. You have not forgotten the new forest which the conqueror made, and which the miserable people whose homes he laid waste so hated. The cruelty of the forest laws and the torture and death they brought upon the peasantry increased this hatred. The poor persecuted country people believed that the new forest was enchanted. They said that in thunderstorms and on dark nights demons appeared, moving beneath the branches of the gloomy trees. They said that a terrible specter had foretold to Norman hunters that the Red King should be punished there. And now in the pleasant season of May when the Red King had reigned almost thirteen years, and a second prince of the conqueror's blood, another Richard, the son of Duke Robert, was killed by an arrow in this dreaded forest. The people said that the second time was not the last, and that there was another death to come. It was a lonely forest accursed in the people's hearts for the wicked deeds that had been done to make it, and no man saved the king and his courtiers and huntsmen liked to stray there. But in reality it was like any other forest. In the spring the green leaves broke out of the buds. In the summer flourished heartily and made deep shades. In the winter shrivelled and blew down, and lay in brown heaps on the moss. Some trees were stately and grew high and strong. Some had fallen of themselves. Some were felled by the forester's axe. Some were hollow, and the rabbits burrowed at their roots. Some few were struck by lightning and stood white and bare. There were hillsides covered with rich fern, on which the morning dew so beautifully sparkled. There were brooks where the deer went down to drink, or over which the whole herd bounded flying from the arrows of the huntsmen. There were sunny glades and solemn places where but little light came through the rustling leaves. The songs of the birds in the new forest were pleasanter to hear than the shouts of fighting men outside. And even when the red king and his court came hunting through its solitudes, cursing loud and riding hard with a jingling of stirrups and bridles and knives and daggers, they did much less harm there than among the English or Normans. And the stags died, as they lived, far easier than the people. On a day in August the red king, now reconciled to his brother, Fine Scholar, came with a great train to hunt in the new forest. Fine Scholar was of the party. They were a merry party, and had lain all night at Melwood Keep, a hunting lodge in the forest, where they had made good cheer both at supper and breakfast, and had drunk a deal of wine. The party dispersed in various directions, as the custom of the hunters then was. The king took with him only Sir Walter Tyrell, who was a famous sportsman, and to whom he had given before they mounted horse that morning, two fine arrows. The last time the king was ever seen alive, he was riding with Sir Walter Tyrell, and their dogs were hunting together. It was almost night when a poor charcoal burner passing through the forest with his cart came upon the solitary body of a dead man, shot with an arrow in the breast, and still bleeding. He got it into his cart. It was the body of the king, shaken and tumbled with its red beard, all whitened with lime and clotted with blood. It was driven in the cart by the charcoal burner next day to Winchester Cathedral, where it was received and buried. Sir Walter Tyrell, who escaped to Normandy, and claimed the protection of the king of France, swore in France that the red king was suddenly shot dead by an arrow from an unseen hand while they were hunting together, that he was fearful of being suspected as the king's murderer, and that he instantly set spurs to horse and fled to the seashore. Others declared that the king and Sir Walter Tyrell were hunting in company, a little before sunset, standing in Bush's opposite one another when a stag came between them, that the king drew his bow and took aim, but the string broke, that the king then cried, shoot Walter in the devil's name, that Sir Walter shot, that the arrow glanced against a tree, was turned aside from the stag, and struck the king from his horse dead. By whose hand the red king really fell, and whether that hand dispatched the arrow to his breast by accident or by design, is only known to God. Some think his brother may have caused him to be killed, but the red king had made so many enemies, both among priests and people, that suspicion may reasonably rest upon a less unnatural murderer. Men know no more than that he was found dead in the new forest, which the suffering people had regarded as a doomed ground for his race. CHAPTER X England under Henry I. Fine Scholar On hearing of the red king's death, hurried to Winchester with as much speed as Rufus himself had made to seize the royal treasure, but the keeper of the treasure who had been one of the hunting party in the forest made haste to Winchester too, and arriving there at about the same time refused to yield it up. Upon this, Fine Scholar drew his sword and threatened to kill the treasurer, who might have paid for his fidelity with his life, but that he knew longer resistance to be useless when he found the prince supported by a company of powerful barons who declared they were determined to make him king. The treasurer, therefore, gave up the money and jewels of the crown, and on the third day after the death of the red king, being a Sunday, Fine Scholar stood before the high altar in Westminster Abbey, and made a solemn declaration that he would resign the church property which his brother had seized, that he would do no wrong to the nobles, and that he would restore to the people the laws of Edward the Confessor, with all the improvements of William the Conqueror. So began the reign of King Henry I. The people were attached to their new king, both because he had known distresses, and because he was an Englishman by birth, and not a Norman. To strengthen this last hold upon them, the king wished to marry an English lady, and could think of no other wife than Maude the Good, the daughter of the King of Scotland. Although this good princess did not love the king, she was so affected by the representations the nobles made to her of the great charity it would be in her to unite the Norman and Saxon races, and prevent hatred and bloodshed between them for the future, that she consented to be his wife. After some disputing among the priests who said that as she had been in a convent in her youth, and had worn the veil of a nun, she could not lawfully be married, against which the princess stated that her aunt, with whom she had lived in her youth, had indeed sometimes thrown a piece of black stuff over her, but for no other reason than because the nun's veil was the only dress the conquering Normans respected in girl or woman, and not because she had taken the vows of a nun, which she never had. She was declared free to marry, and was made King Henry's queen. A good queen she was, beautiful, kind-hearted, and worthy of a better husband than the king. For he was a cunning and unscrupulous man, though firm and clever. He cared very little for his word, and took any means to gain his ends. All this is shown in his treatment of his brother, Robert. Who had suffered him to be refreshed with water, and who had sent him the wine from his own table, when he was shut up with the crows flying below him, parched with thirst in the castle on the top of St. Michael's Mount, where his red brother would have let him die. Before the king began to deal with Robert, he removed and disgraced all the favourites of the late king, who were for the most part base characters much detested by the people. Flambard, or firebrand, whom the late king had made bishop of Durham of all things in the world, Henry imprisoned in the tower. But firebrand was a great joker and a jolly companion, and made himself so popular with the guards that they pretended to know nothing about a long rope that was sent into his prison at the bottom of a deep flag and of wine. The guards took the wine, and firebrand took the rope, with which, when they were fast asleep, he let himself down from a window in the night, and so got cleverly aboard ship and away to Normandy. Now Robert, when his brother Fine Scholar came to the throne, was still absent in the Holy Land. Henry pretended that Robert had been made sovereign of that country, and he had been away so long that the ignorant people believed it. But behold, when Henry had been some time king of England, Robert came home to Normandy, having leisurely returned from Jerusalem through Italy, in which beautiful country he had enjoyed himself very much, and had married a lady as beautiful as itself. In Normandy he found firebrand waiting to urge him to a search his claim to the English crown, and declare war against King Henry. This after great loss of time in feasting and dancing with his beautiful Italian wife among his Normans friends, he at last did. The English in general were on King Henry's side, though many of the Normans were on Robert's. But the English sailors deserted the king, and took a great part of the English fleet over to Normandy, so that Robert came to invade this country in no foreign vessels but in English ships. The virtuous Anselm, however, whom Henry had invited back from abroad, and made Archbishop of Canterbury, was steadfast in the king's cause, and it was so well supported that the two armies instead of fighting, made a peace. Poor Robert, who trusted anybody and everybody, readily trusted his brother the king, and agreed to go home and receive a pension from England, on condition that all his followers were fully pardoned. This the king very faithfully promised, but Robert was no sooner gone than he began to punish them. Among them was the Earl of Shrewsbury, who, on being summoned by the king to answer to five and forty accusations, rode away to one of his strong castles, shut himself up therein, called around him his tenants and vassals, and fought for his liberty, but was defeated and banished. Robert, with all his faults, was so true to his word that when he first heard of this nobleman having risen against his brother, he laid waste the Earl of Shrewsbury's estates in Normandy, to show the king that he would favor no breach of their treaty. Finding on better information afterwards, that the Earl's only crime was having been his friend, he came over to England in his old thoughtless warm-hearted way to intercede with the king, and remind him of the solemn promise to pardon all his followers. This confidence might have put the false king to the blush, but it did not. Pretending to be very friendly, he so surrounded his brother with spies and traps, that Robert, who was quite in his power, had nothing for it but to renounce his penchant and escape while he could. Getting home to Normandy, and understanding the king better now, he naturally allied himself with his old friend, the Earl of Shrewsbury, who still had thirty castles in that country. This was exactly what Henry wanted. He immediately declared that Robert had broken the treaty, and next year invaded Normandy. He pretended that he came to deliver the Normans at their own request, from his brother's misrule. There is reason to fear that his misrule was bad enough, for his beautiful wife had died, leaving him with an infant son, and his court was again so careless, dissipated, and ill-regulated, that it was said he sometimes lay in bed for a day for want of clothes to put on, his attendants having stolen all his dresses. But he headed his army like a brave prince and a gallant soldier, though he had the misfortune to be taken prisoner by King Henry, with four hundred of his knights. Among them was poor, harmless Edgar Atheling, whom Robert loved well. Edgar was not important enough to be severe with. The king afterwards gave him a small pension, which he lived upon, and died upon, in peace, among the quiet woods and fields of England. And Robert, poor, kind, generous, wasteful, heedless Robert, with so many faults, and yet with virtues that might have made a better and a happier man. What was the end of him? If the king had had the magnanimity to say with a kind air, brother, tell me, before these noblemen, that from this time you will be my faithful follower and friend, and never raise your hand against me or my forces more. He might have trusted Robert to the death. But the king was not a magnanimous man. He sentenced his brother to be confined for life in one of the royal castles. In the beginning of his imprisonment, he was allowed to ride out, guarded. But he one day broke away from his guard and galloped off. He had the evil fortune to ride into a swamp where his horse stuck fast and he was taken. When the king heard of it, he ordered him to be blinded, which was done by putting a red-hot metal basin on his eyes. And so, in darkness and in prison, many years, he thought of all his past life, of the time he had wasted, of the treasure he had squandered, of the opportunities he had lost, of the youth he had thrown away, of the talents he had neglected. Sometimes on fine autumn mornings he would sit and think of the old hunting parties in the free forest, where he had been the foremost and the gayest. Sometimes in the still nights he would wake, and mourn for the many nights that had stolen past him at the gaming table, sometimes would seem to hear upon the melancholy wind the old songs of the minstrels, sometimes would dream in his blindness of the light and glitter of the Norman court. Many and many a time he groped back in his fancy to Jerusalem, where he had fought so well, or at the head of his brave companions bowed his feathered helmet to the shouts of welcome greeting him in Italy, and seemed again to walk among the sunny vineyards, or on the shore of the blue sea with his lovely wife. And then, thinking of her grave and of his fatherless boy, he would stretch out his solitary arms and weep. At length one day there lay in prison, dead, with cruel and disfiguring scars upon his eyelids, bandaged from his jailer's sight, but on which the eternal heavens looked down, a worn old man of eighty. He had once been Robert of Normandy. Pity him. At the time when Robert of Normandy was taken prisoner by his brother, Robert's little son was only five years old. This child was taken, too, and carried before the king, sobbing and crying, for young as he was he knew he had good reason to be afraid of his royal uncle. The king was not much accustomed to pity those who were in his power, but his cold heart seemed for the moment to soften towards the boy. He was observed to make a great effort as if to prevent himself from being cruel, and ordered the child to be taken away, whereupon a certain baron, who had married a daughter of Duke Roberts, by name Hellie of Saint-Saint, took charge of him tenderly. The king's gentleness did not last long. Before two years were over he sent messengers to this Lord's castle to seize the child and bring him away. The baron was not there at the time, but his servants were faithful, and carried the boy off in his sleep and hid him. When the baron came home, and was told what the king had done, he took the child abroad, and leading him by the hand went from king to king, and from court to court, relating how the child had a claim to the throne of England, and how his uncle the king, knowing that he had that claim, would have murdered him, perhaps, but for his escape. The youth and innocence of the pretty little William Fitz Robert, for that was his name, made him many friends at that time. When he became a young man, the king of France, uniting with the French Counts of Anjou and Flanders, supported his cause against the king of England, and took many of the king's towns and castles in Normandy. But King Henry, artful and cunning always, bribed some of William's friends with money, some with promises, some with power. He bought off the Count of Anjou by promising to marry his eldest son, also named William, to the Count's daughter. And indeed the whole trust of this king's life was such in bargains, and he believed as many another king has done since, and as one king did in France very little time ago, that every man's truth and honour can be bought at some price. For all this he was so afraid of William Fitz Robert and his friends that for a long time he believed his life to be in danger, and never lay down to sleep, even in his palace surrounded by his guards without having a sword and buckler at his bedside. To strengthen his power the king with great ceremony betrothed his eldest daughter Matilda, then a child only eight years old, to be the wife of Henry V, the Emperor of Germany. To raise her marriage portion he taxed the English people in a most oppressive manner, then treated them to a great procession to restore their great humour, and sent Matilda away in fine state with the German ambassadors. To be educated in the country of her future husband. And now his queen, maud the good, unhappily died. It was a sad thought for that gentle lady, that the only hope with which she had married a man whom she had never loved, the hope of reconciling the Norman and English races, had failed. At the very time of her death Normandy and all France was in arms against England, for so soon as his last danger was over King Henry had been false to all the French powers he had promised, bribed, and bought, and they had naturally united against him. After some fighting however, in which few suffered but the unhappy common people, who always suffered whatsoever was the matter, he began to promise bribe and buy again, and by those means, and by the help of the Pope, who exerted himself to save more bloodshed, and by solemnly declaring over and over again that he really was in earnest to this time, and would keep his word, the king made peace. One of the first consequences of this peace was that the king went over to Normandy with his son Prince William and a great retinue to have the prince acknowledged as a successor by the Norman nobles, and to contract the promised marriage. This was one of the many promises the king had broken between him and the daughter of the Count of Anjou. Both these things were triumphantly done, with great show and rejoicing, and on the 25th of November in the year 1120, the whole retinue prepared to embark at the port of Barfleux for the voyage home. On that day, and at that place, there came to the king Fitz Stephen, a sea captain, and said, My liege, my father served your father all his life upon the sea. He steered the ship with the golden boy upon the prow in which your father sailed to conquer England. I beseech you to grant me the same office. I have a fair vessel in the harbour here called the White Ship, manned by fifty sailors of renown. I pray you, Sire, to let your servant have the honour of steering you in the White Ship to England. I am sorry, friend, replied the king, that my vessel is already chosen, and that I cannot therefore sail with the son of the man who served my father. But the prince and all his company shall go along with you in the fair White Ship, manned by the fifty sailors of renown. An hour or two afterwards the king set sail in the vessel he had chosen, accompanied by other vessels, and sailing all night with a fair and gentle wind, arrived upon the coast of England in the morning. While it was yet night, the people in some of those ships heard a faint, wild cry come over the sea, and wondered what it was. Now the prince was a dissolute debauched young man of eighteen who bore no love to the English, and had declared that when he came to the throne he would yoke them to the plough like oxen. He went aboard the White Ship, and with one hundred and forty youthful nobles like himself, among whom were eighteen noble ladies of the highest rank. All this gay company with their servants and the fifty sailors made three hundred souls aboard the fair White Ship. Give three casks of wine, fit Stephen, said the prince, to the fifty sailors of renown. My father the king has sailed out of the harbor. What time is there to make merry here, and yet reach England with the rest? Prince said, fit Stephen, before morning my fifty and the White Ship shall overtake the swiftest vessel in attendance on your father the king, if we sail at midnight. Then the prince commanded to make merry, and the sailors drank out the three casks of wine, and the prince and all the noble company danced in the moonlight on the deck of the White Ship. When at last she shot out of the harbor of Barfleur, there was not a sober seaman on board, but the sails were all set and the oars all going merrily. Fit Stephen had the helm. The gay young nobles and the beautiful ladies wrapped in mantles of various bright colors to protect them from the cold. Talked, laughed, and sang. The prince encouraged the fifty sailors to row harder yet for the honor of the White Ship. Crash! A terrific cry broke from three hundred hearts. It was the cry of the people in the distant vessels of the king heard faintly on the water. The White Ship had struck a rock, was filling, going down. Fit Stephen hurried the prince into a boat with some few nobles. Push off, he whispered, and wrote in land, it is not far on the sea as smooth, the rest of us must die. But as they rowed away fast from the sinking ship, the prince heard the voice of his sister Marie, the Countess of Piersch, calling for help. He never in his life had been so good as he was then. He cried in an agony, row back at any risk. I cannot bear to leave her. They rowed back. As the prince held out his arms to catch his sister, such numbers leaped in that the boat was over set. And in the same instant the White Ship went down. Only two men floated. They both clung to the main yard of the ship, which had broken from the mast, and now supported them. One asked the other who he was. He said, I am a nobleman, Godfrey by name, the son of Gilbert de Ligel. And you, said he, I am Birold, a poor butcher of Ruin, was the answer. Then they said together, Lord be merciful to us both, and try to encourage one another, as they drifted in the cold, benumbing sea on that unfortunate November night. By and by another man came swimming towards them, whom they knew, when he pushed aside his long wet hair, to be fit Stephen. Where is the prince, said he? Gone, gone, the two cried together, neither he, nor his brother, nor his sister, nor the king's niece, nor her brother, nor any of all the brave three hundred noble or commoner, except we three, has risen above the water. Fits Stephen with a ghastly face, cried, woe, woe to me, and sunk to the bottom. The other two clung to the yard for some hours. At length the young noble said faintly, I am exhausted and chilled with the cold, and can hold no longer. Farewell, good friend, God preserve you. So he dropped and sunk. And of all the brilliant crowd, the poor butcher of Ruen alone was saved. In the morning some fishermen saw him floating in his sheepskin coat and got him into their boat, the sole relator of the dismal tale. For three days no one dared to carry the intelligence to the king. At length they sent into his presence a little boy, who weeping bitterly and kneeling at his feet, told him that the white ship was lost with all on board. The king fell to the ground like a dead man, and never, never afterwards was seen to smile. But he plotted again, and he promised again, and bribed and bought again in his old deceitful way. Having no son to succeed him after all his pains, the prince will never yoke us to the plow now, said the English people. He took a second wife, Adelaide, or Alice, a Duke's daughter, and the Pope's niece. Having no more children, however, he proposed to the barons to swear that they would recognize as his successor his daughter Matilda, whom, as she was now a widow, he had married to the eldest son of the Count of Anjou, Geoffrey, surnamed Plantagenet, from a custom he had of wearing a sprig of flowering broom, called Genet, in French, in his cap for a feather. As one false man usually makes many, and as a false king in particular is pretty certain to make a false court, the barons took the oath about the succession of Matilda and her children after her, twice over, without in the least intending to keep it. The king was now relieved from any remaining fears of William Fitzrobert, by his death in the monastery of St. Ober, in France, at 26 years old, of a pike wound in the hand. And as Matilda gave birth to three sons, he thought the succession to the throne secure. He spent most of the latter part of his life, which was troubled by family quarrels, in Normandy, to be near Matilda. When he had reigned upward of thirty-five years and was sixty-seven years old, he died of an indigestion and fever, brought on by eating, when he was far from well, of a fish called lamprey, against which he had often been cautioned by his physicians. His remains were brought over to Reading Abbey to be buried. You may perhaps hear the cunning and promised breaking of King Henry I called policy by some people, and diplomacy by others. Neither of these fine words will in the least mean that it was true, and nothing that is not true can possibly be good. His greatest merit, than I know of, was his love of learning. I should have given him greater credit, even for that, if it had been strong enough to induce him to spare the eyes of a certain poet he once took prisoner, who was a knight besides. But he ordered the poet's eyes to be torn from his head, as he had laughed at him in his verses. And the poet, in the pain of that torture, dashed out his own brains against his prison wall. King Henry I was avaricious, revengeful, and so false, that I suppose a man never lived whose word was less to be relied upon. End of chapter 10 CHAPTER 11 OF A CHILD'S HISTORY OF INGLAND This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A CHILD'S HISTORY OF INGLAND By Charles Dickens CHAPTER 11 England under Matilda and Stephen The king was no sooner dead than all the plans and schemes he had laboured at so long and lied so much for, crumbled away like a hollow heap of sand, Stephen, whom he had never mistrusted or suspected, started up to claim the throne. Stephen was the son of Adela, the conqueror's daughter, married to the kind of Blois. To Stephen, and to his brother Henry, the late king had been liberal, making Henry Bishop of Winchester, and finding a good marriage for Stephen, and much enriching him. This did not prevent Stephen from hastily producing a false witness, a servant of the late king, to swear that the king had named him for his heir upon his deathbed. On this evidence the Archbishop of Canterbury crowned him. The new king, so suddenly made, lost not a moment in seizing the royal treasure, and hiring foreign soldiers with some of it to protect his throne. If the dead king had even done, as the false witness said, he would have had small right to willow away the English people like so many sheep or oxen without their consent, but he had, in fact, bequeathed all his territory to Matilda, who, supported by Robert Earl of Gloucester, soon began to dispute the crown. Some of the powerful barons and priests took her side, some took steemans, all fortified their castles, and again the miserable English people were involved in war, from which they could never derive advantage, whosoever was victorious, and in which all parties plundered, tortured, starved, and ruined them. Five years had passed since the death of Henry I, and during those five years there had been two terrible invasions by the people of Scotland under their king, David, who was at last defeated with all his army, when Matilda, attended by her brother Robert, and a large force appeared in England to maintain her claim. A battle was fought between her troops and King Stevens at Lincoln, in which the king himself was taken prisoner after bravely fighting until his battle-axe and sword were broken, and was carried into strict confinement at Gloucester. Matilda then submitted herself to the priests, and the priests crowned her Queen of England. She did not long enjoy this dignity. The people of London had a great affection for Stephen. Many of the barons considered it degrading to be ruled by a woman, and the Queen's temper was so haughty that she made innumerable enemies. The people of London revolted, and in alliance with the troops of Stephen besieged her at Winchester, where they took her brother Robert, prisoner, whom, as her best soldier and chief general, she was glad to exchange for Stephen himself, who thus regained his liberty. Then the long war went on afresh. Once she was pressed so hard in the castle of Oxford, in the winter weather, when the snow lay thick upon the ground, that her only chance of escape was to dress herself all in white, and, accompanied by no more than three faithful knights, dressed in like manner that their figures should not be seen from Stephen's camp as they passed over the snow, to steal away on foot, cross the frozen Thames, walk a long distance, and at last gallop away on horseback. All this she did, but to no great purpose then. For her brother, dying while the struggle was yet going on, she at last withdrew to Normandy. In two or three years after her withdrawal her cause appeared in England afresh in the person of her son Henry, young plan Tajemite, who, at only eighteen years of age, was very powerful, not only on account of his mother having resigned all Normandy to him, but also from his having married Eleanor, the divorced wife of the French king, a bad woman, who had great possessions in France. Louis, the French king not relishing this arrangement, helped Eustice, King Stephen's son, to invade Normandy, but Henry drove their united forces out of that country, and then returned here to assist his partisans, whom the king was then besieging at Wallingford upon the Thames. Here for two days divided only by the river, the two armies lay and camped opposite to one another, on the eve, as it seemed to all men, of another desperate fight, when the Earl of Arundel took heart, and said that it was not reasonable to prolong the unspeakable miseries of two kingdoms to minister to the ambition of two princes. In the other noblemen, repeating and supporting this when it was once uttered, Stephen and young Plantagenet went down each to his own bank of the river, and held a conversation across it, in which they arranged a truce, very much to the dissatisfaction of Eustice, who swaggered away with some followers and laid violent hands on the abbey of St Edmondsbury, where he presently died, mad. The truce led to a solemn council at Winchester, in which it was agreed that Stephen should retain the crown, on condition of his declaring Henry his successor, that William, another son of the kings, should inherit his father's rightful possessions, and that all the crown lands which Stephen had given away should be recalled, and all the castles he had permitted to be built demolished. Thus terminated the bitter war, which had now lasted fifteen years, and had again laid England waste. In the next year Stephen died, after a troubled reign of nineteen years. Although King Stephen was, for the time in which he lived, a humane and moderate man, with many excellent qualities, and although nothing worse is known of him than his usurpation of the crown, which he probably excused to himself by the consideration that King Henry I was a usurper too, which was no excuse at all, the people of England suffered more in these dread nineteen years than at any former period even of their suffering history. In the division of the nobility between the two rival claimants of the crown, and in the growth of what is called the feudal system, which made the peasants, the born vassals, and the slaves of the barons, every noble had his strong castle, where he reigned the cruel king of all the neighbouring people, accordingly he perpetrated whatever cruelty he chose, and never were worse cruelties committed upon earth than in wretched England in those nineteen years. The writers who were living then described them fearfully. They say that the castles were filled with devils rather than with men, that the peasants, men and women were put into dungeons for their golden silver, were tortured with fire and smoke, were hung up by the thumbs, were hung up by the heels with great weight to their heads, were torn with jagged irons, killed with hunger, broken to death in narrow chests filled with sharp pointed stones, murdered in countless fiendish ways. In England there was no corn, no meat, no cheese, no butter, there were no tilled lands, no harvests. Ashes of burnt tarnes, and dreary wastes were all that the traveller, fearful of the robbers who prowled abroad at all hours, would see in a long day's journey, and from sunrise until night he would not come upon a home. The clergy sometimes suffered, and heavily too, from pillage, but many of them had castles of their own, and fought in helmet and armour like the barons, and drew lots with other fighting men for their share of booty. The Pope, or Bishop of Rome, on King Stephen's resisting his ambition, laid England under an interdict at one period of this reign, which meant that he allowed no service to be performed in the churches, no couples to be married, no bells to be rung, no dead bodies to be buried, any man having the power to refuse these things, no matter whether he were called a pope, or a polterer, would, of course, have the power of afflicting numbers of innocent people. That nothing might be wanting to the miseries of King Stephen's time the pope threw in this contribution to the public store. Not very like the widow's contribution, as I think when our Saviour sat in Jerusalem over against the Treasury. And she threw in two mites, which make a farthing. Henry Plantagenet, when he was about twenty-one years old, quietly succeeded to the throne of England, according to his agreement made with the late King at Winchester. Six weeks after Stephen's death, he and his queen Eleanor were crowned in that city, into which they rode on horseback in great state, side by side, amidst much shouting and rejoicing and clashing of music and strewing of flowers. The reign of King Henry II began well. The King had great possessions, and what with his own rights, and what with those of his wife, was lord of one third part of France. He was a young man of vigour, ability, and resolution, and immediately applied himself to remove some of the evils which had arisen in the last unhappy reign. He revoked all the grants of land that had been hastily made on either side during the later struggles. He obliged numbers of disorderly soldiers to depart from England. He reclaimed all the castles belonging to the crown, and he forced the wicked nobles to pull down their own castles to the number of eleven hundred, in which such dismal cruelties had been inflicted on the people. The King's brother, Geoffrey, rose against him in France, while he was so well employed, and rendered it necessary for him to repair to that country, where, after he had subdued and made a friendly arrangement with his brother, who did not live long, his ambition to increase his possessions involved him in a war with the French King Louis, with whom he had been on such friendly terms just before that, to the French King's infant daughter than a baby in the cradle, he had promised one of his little sons in marriage, who was a child of five years old. However the war came to nothing at last, and the Pope made the two kings friends again. Now the clergy in the troubles of the last reign had gone on very ill indeed. There were all kinds of criminals among them, murderers, thieves, and vagabonds, and the worst of the matter was that the good priests would not give up the bad priests to justice when they committed crimes, but persisted in sheltering and defending them. The King, well knowing that there could be no peace or rest in England while such things lasted, resolved to reduce the power of the clergy, and, when he had reigned seven years, found, as he considered, a good opportunity for doing so in the death of the Archbishop of Canterbury. I will have, for the new Archbishop thought the King, a friend in whom I can trust, who will help me to humble these rebellious priests and to have them dealt with when they go wrong, as other men who do wrong are dealt with, so he resolved to make his favourite the new Archbishop. And this favourite was so extraordinary a man, and his story is so curious, that I must tell you all about him. Once upon a time a worthy merchant of London named Gilbert Becket made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and was taken prisoner by a Saracen Lord. This Lord, who treated him kindly and not like a slave, had one fair daughter, who fell in love with the merchant, and who told him that she wanted to become a Christian, and was willing to marry him if they could fly to a Christian country. The merchant returned her love, until he found an opportunity to escape, when he did not trouble himself about the Saracen lady, but escaped with his servant Richard, who had been taken prisoner along with him, and arrived in England and forgot her. The Saracen lady, who was more loving than the merchant, left her father's house in disguise to follow him, and made her way under many hardships to the seashore. The merchant had taught her only two English words, for I suppose he must have learnt the Saracen tongue himself, and made love in that language, of which London was one, and his own name Gilbert the other. She went among the ships, saying, London, London, over and over again, until the sailors understood that she wanted to find an English vessel that would carry her there. So they showed her such a ship, and she paid for her passage with some of her jewels, and sailed away. Well, the merchant was sitting in his counting-house in London one day, when he heard a great noise in the street, and presently Richard came running in from the warehouse, with his eyes wide open, and his breath almost gone, saying, Master, Master, here is the Saracen lady. The merchant thought Richard was mad. But Richard said, No, Master, as I live, the Saracen lady is going up and down the city, calling Gilbert, Gilbert. Then he took the merchant by the sleeve, and pointed out of the window, and there they saw her, among the gables and waterspites of the dark, dirty street in her foreign dress, so forlorn, surrounded by a wandering crowd, and passing slowly along, calling, Gilbert, Gilbert! When the merchant saw her, and thought of the tenderness she had shown him in his captivity, and of her constancy his heart was moved, and he ran down into the street, and she saw him coming, and with a great cry fainted in his arms. They were married, without loss of time, and Richard, who was an excellent man, danced with joy the whole day of the wedding, and they all lived happily ever afterwards. This merchant, and this Saracen lady, had one son, Thomas Becket. He it was, who became the favorite of King Henry II. He had become chancellor when the king thought of making him archbishop. He was clever, gay, well educated, brave, had fought in several battles in France, had defeated a French knight in single combat, and brought his horse away as token of the victory. He lived in a noble palace. He was tutor of the young Prince Henry. He was served by one hundred and forty knights. His riches were immense. The king once sent him as his ambassador to France, and the French people, beholding in what state he travelled, cried out in the streets. How splendid must the king of England be when this is only the chancellor! They had good reason to wonder at the magnificence of Thomas Becket, for when he entered a French town, his procession was headed by two hundred and fifty singing boys. Then came his hounds and couples, then eight wagons, each drawn by five horses driven by five drivers, two of the wagons filled with strong ale to be given away to the people, four with his golden silver plate and stately clothes, two with the dresses of his numerous servants. Then came twelve horses, each with a monkey on his back. Then a train of people bearing shields and leading fine war horses, splendidly equipped. Then, fulconers with hawks upon their wrists, then a host of knights and gentlemen and priests, then the chancellor, with his brilliant garments flashing in the sun, and all the people capering and shouting with delight. The king was well pleased with all this, thinking that he'd only made himself the more magnificent to have so magnificent to favour it, but he sometimes gested with the chancellor upon his splendour too. Once when they were riding together through the streets of London in hard winter weather, they saw a shivering old man in rags. Look at the poor objects of the king. Would it not be a charitable act to give that aged man a comfortable warm cloak? Undoubtedly it would, said Thomas Ebeckett. And you do well, sir, to think of such Christian duties. Come, cried the king. Then give him your cloak. It was made of rich crimson, trimmed with ermine. The king tried to pull it off. The chancellor tried to keep it on. Both were near rolling from their saddles in the mud when the chancellor submitted, and the king gave the cloak to the old beggar—much to the beggar's astonishment and much to the merriment of all the courtiers in attendance, for courtiers are not only eager to laugh when the king laughs, but they really do enjoy a laugh against to favour it. I will make, thought Henry II, this chancellor of mine, Thomas Ebeckett, Archbishop of Canterbury. He will then be the head of the church, and, being devoted to me, will help me to correct the church. He has always upheld my power against the power of the clergy, and once publicly told some bishops I remember that men of the church were equally bound to me with men of the sword. Thomas Ebeckett is the man of all other men in England to help me in my great design. Say the king, regardless of all objection, either that he was a fighting man, or a lavish man, or a courtly man, or a man of pleasure, or anything but a likely man for the office, made him Archbishop accordingly. Now Thomas Ebeckett was proud and loved to be famous. He was already famous for the pomp of his life, for his riches, his golden silver plate, his wagons, horses, and attendants. He could do no more in that way than he had done, and being tired of that kind of fame, which is a very poor one, he longed to have his name celebrated for something else. Anything, he knew, would render him so famous in the world as the setting of his utmost power and ability against the utmost power and ability of the king. He resolved with the whole strength of his mind to do it. He may have had some secret grudge against the king besides, but the king may have offended his proud humor at some time or other for anything I know. I think it likely because it is a common thing for kings, princes, and other great people to try the tempers of their favourites rather severely. Even the little affair of the crimson cloak must have been anything but a pleasant one to a haughty man. Thomas Ebeckett knew better than anyone in England what the king expected of him. In all his sumptuous life he had never yet been in a position to disappoint the king. He could take up that proud stand now as head of the church, and he determined that it should be written in history, either that he subdued the king or that the kings subdued him. So all of a sudden he completely altered the whole manner of his life. He turned off all his brilliant followers, ate coarse food, drank bitter water, wore next his skin, sack cloth covered with dirt and vermin, for it was then thought very religious to be dirty, flogged his back to punish himself, lived chiefly in a little cell, washed the feet of thirteen poor people every day and looked as miserable as he possibly could. If he had put twelve hundred monkeys on horseback instead of twelve and gone in procession with eight thousand wagons instead of eight, he could not have half astonished the people by so much as this great change. It soon caused him to be more talked about as an archbishop than he had been as a chancellor. The king was very angry and was made still more so when the new archbishop, claiming various estates from the nobles as being rightfully church property, required the king himself for the same reason to give up Rochester Castle and Rochester City too. Not satisfied with this, he declared that no power but himself should appoint a priest to any church in the part of England over which he was archbishop, and when a certain gentleman of Kent made such an appointment as he claimed to have the right to do, Thomas A. Beckett excommunicated him. Excommunication was, next to the interdict, I told you of at the close of the last chapter, the great weapon of the clergy. It consisted in declaring the person who was excommunicated an outcast from the church and from all religious offices, and in cursing him all over from the top of his head to the sole of his foot, whether he was standing up, lying down, sitting, kneeling, walking, running, hopping, jumping, gaping, coughing, sneezing, or whatever else he was doing. This uncristian nonsense would of course have made no sort of difference to the person cursed, who could say his prayers at home if he was shut out of church, and whom none but God could judge, but for the fears and superstitions of the people who avoided excommunicated persons and made their lives unhappy. So the king said to the new archbishop, take off this excommunication from this gentleman of Kent, to which the archbishop replied, I shall do no such thing. The quarrel went on. A priest in Worcestershire committed a most dreadful murder that aroused the horror of the whole nation. The king demanded to have this wretch delivered up, to be tried in the same court, and in the same way as any other murderer. The archbishop refused and kept him in the bishop's prison. The king, holding a solemn assembly in Westminster Hall, demanded that in future all priests found guilty before their bishops of crimes against the law of the land, should be considered priests no longer, and should be delivered over to the law of the land for punishment. The archbishop again refused. The king required to know whether the clergy would obey the ancient customs of the country. Every priest there but one said after Thomas Becket, saving my order. This really meant that they would obey only those customs when they did not interfere with their own claims, and the king went out of the hall in great wrath. Some of the clergy began to be afraid now that they were going too far. Though Thomas Becket was otherwise as unmoved as Westminster Hall, they prevailed upon him for the sake of their fears to go to the king at Woodstock, and promised to observe the ancient customs of the country without saying anything about his order. The king received this submission favourably, and summoned a great council of the clergy to meet at the castle of Clarendon by Salisbury. But when the council met, the archbishop again insisted on the words, saving my order. And he still insisted, though the lords entreated him, and priests wept before him and knelt to him, and an adjoining room was thrown open, filled with armed soldiers of the king to threaten him. At length he gave way for that time, and the ancient customs, which included what the king had demanded in vain, were stated in writing, and were signed and sealed by the chief of the clergy, and were called the Constitutions of Clarendon. The quarrel went on for all that. The archbishop tried to see the king. The king would not see him. The archbishop tried to escape from England. The sailors on the coast would launch no boat to take him away. Then he again resolved to do his worst in opposition to the king, and began openly to set the ancient customs at defiance. The king summoned him before a great council at Northampton, where he accused him of high treason and made a claim against him, which was not a just one, for an enormous sum of money. Thomas Becket was alone against the whole assembly, and the very bishops advised him to resign his office. And abandon his contest with the king. His great anxiety and agitation stretched him on a sickbed for two days, but he was still undaunted. He went to the adjourned council, carrying a great cross in his right hand, and sat down, holding it erect before him. The king angrily retired into an inner room. The whole assembly angrily retired, and left him there. But there he sat. The bishops came out again in a body, and renounced him as a traitor. He only said, I hear, and sat there still. They retired again into the inner room, and his trial proceeded without him. By and by the Earl of Leicester, heading the barons, came out to read his sentence. He refused to hear it, denied the power of the court, and said he would refer his cause to the pope. As he walked out of the hall, with the cross in his hand, some of those present picked up rushes. Rushes were strewn on the floors in those days by way of carpet, and threw them at him. He proudly turned his head, and said that, were he not archbishop, he would chastise those cowards with the sword he had known how to use in bygone days. He then mounted his horse, and rode away, cheered and surrounded by the common people to whom he threw open his house that night, and gave a supper, supping with them himself. That same night he secretly departed from the town, and so, travelling by night and hiding by day, and calling himself Brother-Dear-Man, got away, not without difficulty, to Flanders. The struggle still went on. The angry king took possession of the revenues of the archbishopric, and banished all the relations and servants of Thomas Becket to the number of four hundred. The pope and the French king both protected him, and an abbey was assigned for his residence. Stimulated by this support, Thomas Becket, on a great festival day, formally proceeded to a great church crowded with people, and, going up into the pulpit, publicly cursed and excommunicated all who had supported the constitutions of Clarendon, mentioning many English noblemen by name, and not distantly hinting at the king of England himself. When intelligence of this new affront was carried to the king in his chamber, his passion was so furious that he tore his clothes, and rolled like a madman on his bed of straw and rushes. But he was soon up and doing. He ordered all the ports and coasts of England to be narrowly watched, that no letters of interdict might be brought into the kingdom, and sent messengers and bribes to the pope's palace at Rome. Meanwhile, Thomas Becket, for his part, was not idle at Rome, but constantly employed his utmost arts in his own behalf. Thus the contest stood until there was peace between France and England, which had been for some time at war, and until the two children of the two kings were married in celebration of it. Then the French king brought about a meeting between Henry and his old favorite so long his enemy. Even then, though Thomas Becket knelt before the king, he was obstinate and immovable as to those words about his order. King Louis of France was weak enough in his veneration for Thomas Becket and such men, but this was a little too much for him. He said that Becket wanted to be greater than the saints and better than Saint Peter, and rode away from him with the king of England. His poor French majesty asked Becket's pardon for so doing, however, soon afterwards, and cut a very pitiful figure. At last, and after a world of trouble, it came to this. There was another meeting on French ground between King Henry and Thomas Becket, and it was agreed that Thomas Becket should be Archbishop of Canterbury, according to the customs of former archbishops, and that the king should put him in possession of the revenues of that post. And now indeed you might suppose the struggle at an end, and Thomas Becket at rest. No, not even yet. For Thomas Becket, hearing by some means that King Henry, when he was in dread of his kingdom being placed under an interdict, had had his eldest son, Prince Henry, secretly crowned, not only persuaded the pope to suspend the Archbishop of York, who had performed that ceremony, and to excommunicate the bishops who had assisted at it, but sent a messenger of his own into England, in spite of all the king's precautions along the coast, who delivered the letters of excommunication into the bishop's own hands. Thomas Becket then came over to England himself, after an absence of seven years. He was privately warned that it was dangerous to come, and that an ireful night named ran after Brock, had threatened that he should not live to eat a loaf of bread in England. But he came. The common people received him well, and marched about with him in a soldierly way, armed with such rustic weapons as they could get. He tried to see the young prince, who had once spinned his pupil, but was prevented. He hoped for some little support among the nobles and priests, but found none. He made the most of the peasants who attended him, and feasted them, and went on from Canterbury to Harrow on the Hill, and from Harrow on the Hill back to Canterbury, and on Christmas Day preached in the cathedral there, and told the people in his sermon that he had come to die among them, and that it was likely he would be murdered. He had no fear, however. Or, if he had any, he had much more obstinacy. For he then and there excommunicated three of his enemies, of whom ran after Brock. The ireful night was one. As men in general had no fancy for being cursed in their sitting and walking, and gaping, and sneezing, and all the rest of it, it was very natural in the persons so freely excommunicated to complain to the king. It was equally natural in the king who had hoped to see this troublesome opponent was at last quieted, to fall into a mighty rage when he heard of these newer fronts, and, on the archbishop of York, telling him that he could never hope for rest while Thomas Sebeckid lived, to cry out hastily before his court, Have I no one here who will deliver me from this man? There were four knights present who, hearing the king's words, looked at one another, and went out. The names of these knights were Reginald Fitzers, William Tracy, Hugh de Morville, and Richard Brito, three of whom had been in the train of Thomas Sebeckid in the old days of his splendour. They rode away on horseback in a very secret manner, and on the third day after Christmas Day arrived at Saltwood House not far from Canterbury, which belonged to the family of Ranoff de Brock. They quietly collected some followers here, in case they should need any, and, proceeding to Canterbury, suddenly appeared the four knights and twelve men before the archbishop in his own house at two o'clock in the afternoon. They neither bowed nor spoke, but sat down on the floor in silence, staring at the archbishop. Thomas Sebeckid said at length, What do you want? We want, said Reginald Fitzers, the excommunication taken from the bishops, and you to answer for your offences to the king. Thomas Sebeckid defiantly replied that the power of the clergy was above the power of the king, that it was not for such men as they were to threaten him, that if he were threatened by all the swords in England he would never yield. Then we will do more than threaten, said the knights. And they went out with the twelve men, and put on their armor, and drew their shining swords, and came back. His servants in the meantime had shut up and barred the great gate of the palace. At first the knights tried to shatter it with their battle-axes, but, being shown a window by which they could enter, they let the gate alone, and climbed in that way. While they were battering at the door, the attendants of Thomas Sebeckid had implored him to take refuge in the cathedral, in which, as a sanctuary or sacred place, they thought the knights would dare to do no violent deed. He told them again and again that he would not stir. Hearing the distant voices of the monks singing the evening service, however, he said it was now his duty to attend, and therefore, and for no other reason, he would go. There was a near way between his palace and the cathedral by some beautiful old cloisters, which you may yet see. He went into the cathedral without any hurry, and having the cross carried before him as usual. When he was safely there, his servants would have fastened the door, but he said no. It was the house of God, and not a fortress. As he spoke, the shadow of Reginald Fitzers appeared in the cathedral doorway, darkening the little light there was outside on the dark winter evening. The knight said, in a strong voice, Follow me, loyal servants of the king! The rattle of the armour of the other knights echoed through the cathedral, as they came clashing in. It was so dark in the lofty aisles and among the stately pillars of the church, and there were so many hiding-places in the crypt below, and in the narrow passages above, that Thomas Sebeckid might even at that pass have saved himself, if he would. But he would not. He told the monks resolutely that he would not, and though they all dispersed, and left him there with no other follower than Edward Grimm, his faithful cross-bearer, he was as firm then as he had ever been in his life. The knights came on through the darkness, making a terrible noise with their armed tread upon the stained pavement of the church. Where is the traitor? they cried out. He made no answer. But when they cried, Where is the archbishop? he said proudly, I am here, and came out of the shade and stood before them. The knights had no desire to kill him, if they could rid the king and themselves of him by any other means. They told him he must either fly or go with them, he said he would do neither. And he threw William Tracy off with such force, when he took hold of his sleeve, that Tracy reeled again. By his reproaches and his steadiness he so incensed them and exasperated their fierce humour, that Reginald Fitzers, whom he called by an ill name, said, Then die! and struck at his head. But the faithful Edward Grimm put out his arm, and there received the main force of the blow, so that it only made his master bleed. Another voice from among the knights again called Thomas Becket to fly, but with his blood running down his face and his hands clasped, and his head bent, he commended himself to God, and stood firm. Then they cruelly killed him close to the altar of St. Bennett, and his body fell upon the pavement, which was dirtied with his blood and brains. It is an awful thing to think of the murdered mortal, who had so showered his curses about lying, all disfigured in the church, where a few lamps here and there were but red specks on a pall of darkness, and to think of the guilty knights riding away on horseback, looking over their shoulders at the dim cathedral, and remembering what they had left inside. Part II When the king heard how Thomas Becket had lost his life in Canterbury Cathedral through the ferocity of the four knights, he was filled with dismay. Some have supposed that when the king spoke those hasty words, have I no one here who will deliver me from this man, he wished and meant Becket to be slain, but few things are more unlikely. For besides that the king was not naturally cruel, though very passionate, he was wise, and must have known full well what any stupid man in his dominion must have known, namely that such a murder would rise the pope and the whole church against him. He sent respectful messengers to the pope to represent his innocence, except in having uttered the hasty words, and he swore solemnly and publicly to his innocence and contrived in time to make his peace. As to the four guilty knights who fled into Yorkshire and never again dared to show themselves at court, the pope excommunicated them, and they lived miserably for some time shunned by all their countrymen. At last they went humbly to Jerusalem as a pence, and there died and were buried. It happened, fortunately for the pacifying of the pope, that an opportunity arose very soon after the murder of Becket for the king to declare his power in Ireland, which was an acceptable undertaking to the pope, as the Irish, who had been converted to Christianity by one patricius, otherwise Saint Patrick, long ago before any pope existed, considered that the pope had nothing at all to do with them, or they with the pope had accordingly refused to pay him Peter's pence, or that tax of a penny a house which I have elsewhere mentioned. The king's opportunity arose in this way. The Irish were, at that time, as barbarous a people as you can well imagine. They were continually quarrelling and fighting, cutting one another's throats, slicing off one another's noses, burning one another's houses, carrying away one another's wives, and committing all sorts of violence. The country was divided into five kingdoms, Desmond, Thommond, Connott, Ulster, and Lentster, each governed by a separate king, of whom one claimed to be the chief of the rest. Now, one of these kings, named Dermot McMurray, a wild kind of name, spelled in more than one wild kind of way, had carried off the wife of a friend of his and concealed her on an island in a bog. The friend, resenting this, though it was quite the custom of the country, complained to the chief king, and with the chief king's help, drove Dermot McMurray out of his dominions. Dermot came over to England for revenge, and offered to hold his realm as a vassal of King Henry, if King Henry would help him to regain it. The king consented to these terms, but only assisted him, then, with what were called letters patent, authorizing any English subjects who were so disposed to enter into his service, and aid his cause. There was, at Bristol, a certain Earl Richard DeClaire called Strongbow, of no very good character, needy and desperate, and ready for anything that offered him a chance of improving his fortunes. There were, in South Wales, two other broken knights of the same good-for-nothing sort, called Robert Fitz Stephen and Maurice Fitzgerald. These three, which, with a small band of followers, took up Dermot's cause, and it was agreed that, if it proved successful, Strongbow should marry Dermot's daughter Eva, and be declared his heir. The trained English followers of these knights were so superior in all the discipline of battle to the Irish that they beat them against immense superiority of numbers. In one fight, early in the war, they cut off three hundred heads, and laid them before McMurrick, who turned them every one up with his hands rejoicing, and coming to one which was the head of a man whom he had much disliked, grasped it by the hair and ears, and tore off the nose and lips with his teeth. You may judge from this what kind of a gentleman an Irish king in those times was. The captives, all through this war, were horribly treated, the victorious party making nothing of breaking their limbs, and casting them into the sea from the tops of high rocks. It was in the midst of the miseries and cruelties attendant on the taking of Waterford, where the dead lay piled in the streets, and the filthy gutters ran with blood that Strongbow married Eva. An odious marriage company, those mounds and corpses must have made, I think, and one quite worthy of the young lady's father. He died after Waterford and Dublin had been taken and various successes achieved, and Strongbow became king of Lentster. Now came King Henry's opportunity. To restrain the growing power of Strongbow, he himself repaired to Dublin as Strongbow's royal master, and deprived him of his kingdom, but confirmed him in the enjoyment of great possessions. The king, then, holding state in Dublin, received the homage of nearly all the Irish kings and chiefs, and so came home again with a great addition to his reputation as Lord of Ireland, and with a new claim on the favour of the pope, and now their reconciliation was completed, more easily and mildly by the pope than the king might have expected, I think. At this period of his reign, when his troubles seemed so few and his prospects so bright, those domestic miseries began, which gradually made the king the most unhappy of men, reduced his great spirit, wore away his health, and broke his heart. He had four sons. Henry, now aged 18, his secret crowning of whom had given such a fence to Thomas a Becket, Richard, aged 16, Geoffrey, 15, and John his favourite, a young boy whom the courtiers named Lackland, because he had no inheritance, but to whom the king meant to give the lordship of Ireland. All these misguided boys in their turn were unnatural sons to him, and unnatural brothers to each other. Prince Henry, stimulated by the French king, and by his bad mother Queen Eleanor, began the undutiful history. First he demanded that his young wife Margaret, the king's daughter, should be crowned as well as he, his father the king consented, and it was done. It was no sooner done than he demanded to have a part of his father's dominions during his father's life. This being refused, he made off from his father in the night with his bad heart full of bitterness, and took refuge at the French king's court. Within a day or two his brothers Richard and Geoffrey followed. Their mother tried to join them, escaping in man's clothes, but she was seized by King Henry's men, and emurred in prison, where she lay deservedly for sixteen years. Every day, however, some grasping English nobleman to whom the king's protection of his people from their avarice and oppression had given offence, deserted him and joined the princes. Every day he heard some fresh intelligence of the prince's levying armies against him, of Prince Henry's wearing a crown before his own ambassadors at the French court, and being called the junior king of England. Of all the princes, swearing never to make peace with him their father without the consent and approval of the barons of France. But, with his fortitude and energy unshaken, King Henry met the shock of these disasters with a result and a cheerful face. He called upon all royal fathers who had sons to help him, for his cause was theirs. He hired out of his riches twenty thousand men to fight the false French king, who stirred his own blood against him. And he carried on the war with such vigor that Louis soon proposed a conference to treat for peace. The conference was held beneath an old, wide-spreading green elm tree upon a plain in France. It led to nothing. The war recommenced. Prince Richard began his fighting career by leading an army against his father, but his father beat him and his army back, and thousands of his men would have ruled the day in which they fought in such a wicked cause, had the king not received news of an invasion of England by the Scots, and promptly come home through a great storm to repress it. And whether he really began to fear that he suffered these troubles because Becket had been murdered, or whether he wished to rise in the favour of the Pope, who had now declared Becket to be a saint, or in the favour of his own people, of whom many believed that even Becket's senseless tomb could work miracles I don't know, but the king no sooner landed in England than he went straight to Canterbury, and when he came within sight of the distant cathedral he dismounted from his horse, took off his shoes, and walked with bare and bleeding feet to a Becket's grave. There he lay down on the ground, lamenting in the presence of many people, and by and by he went into the chapter-house, and, removing his clothes from his back and shoulders, submitted himself to be beaten with knotted cords. Not beaten very hard, I dare say, though, by eighty priests, one after another. It chanced that on the very day that the king made this curious exhibition of himself, a complete victory was obtained over the Scots, which very much delighted the priests, who said that it was won because of his great example of repentance, for the priests in general had found out since Becket's death that they admired him of all things, though they had hated him very cordially when he was alive. The Earl of Flanders, who was at the head of the base conspiracy of the king's undutiful sons and their foreign friends, took the opportunity of the king being thus employed at home to lay siege to Rouen, the capital of Normandy. But the king, who was extraordinarily quick and active in all his movements, was at Rouen, too, before it was supposed possible that he could have left England, and there he so defeated the said Earl of Flanders that the conspirators proposed peace and his bad sons Henry and Geoffrey submitted. Richard resisted for six weeks, but being beaten out of castle after castle he at last submitted to, and his father forgave him. To forgive these unworthy princes was only to afford them breathing time for new faithlessness. They were so false, disloyal, and dishonourable that they were no more to be trusted than common thieves. In the very next year Prince Henry rebelled again and was again forgiven. In eight years more Prince Richard rebelled against his elder brother, and Prince Geoffrey infamously said that the brothers could never agree well together unless they were united against their father. In the very next year, after their reconciliation by the king, Prince Henry again rebelled against his father, and again submitted, swearing to be true, and was again forgiven, and again rebelled with Geoffrey. But the end of this perfidious prince was calm. He fell sick at a French town, and his conscience terribly reproaching him with his baseness, he sent messengers to the king's father imploring him to come and see him, and to forgive him for one last time on his bed of death. The generous king, who had a royal and forgiving mind towards his children always, would have gone, but this prince had been so unnatural that the nobleman about the king suspected treachery and represented to him that he could not safely trust his life with such a traitor, though his own eldest son. Therefore the king sent him a ring from off his finger as a token of forgiveness, and when the prince had kissed it, with much grief and many tears, and had confessed to those around him how bad and wicked and undutiful a son he had been, he said to the attendant priests, oh, tire rope about my body and draw me out of bed and lay me down upon a bed of ashes, that I may die with prayers to God in a repentant manner. And so he died at twenty-seven years old. Three years afterwards Prince Jeffrey, being unhorsed at a tournament, had his brains trampled out by a crowd of horses passing over him. So there only remained Prince Richard and Prince John, who was grown to be a young man now, and had solemnly sworn to be faithful to his father. Richard soon rebelled again, encouraged by his friend the French king Philip II, son of Louis, who was dead. Soon submitted and was again forgiven, swearing on the New Testament never to rebel again, and, in another year or so, rebelled again, and, in the presence of his father, knelt down on his knee before the king of France, and did the French king homage, and declared that with his aid he would possess himself by force of all his father's French dominions. And yet this Richard called himself a soldier of our Saviour. And yet this Richard wore the cross which the kings of France and England had both taken in the previous year at a brotherly meeting underneath the old wide-spreading eontree on the plain, when they had sworn, like him, to devote themselves to a new crusade for the love and honour of the truth. Sick at heart, and wearied out by the falsehood of his sons, and almost ready to lie down and die, the unhappy king who had so long stood firm began to fail. But the pope, to his honour, supported him, and obliged the French king and Richard, though successful in fight to treat for peace. Richard wanted to be crowned king of England, and pretended that he wanted to be married, which he really did not, to the French king's sister, his promised wife, whom King Henry detained in England. King Henry wanted, on the other hand, that the French king's sister shall be married to his favourite son, John, the only one of his sons, he said, who had never rebelled against him. At last King Henry, deserted by his nobles one by one, distressed, exhausted, broken-hearted, consented to establish peace. One final heavy sorrow was reserved for him even yet. When they brought him the proposed Treaty of Peace in writing, as he lay very ill in bed, they brought him also the list of the deserters from their allegiance, whom he was required to pardon. The first name upon this list was John, his favourite son, in whom he had trusted to the last. Oh John! Child of my heart! exclaimed the king in a great agony of mind. Oh John, whom I love the best! Oh John, for whom I have contended through these many troubles, have you betrayed me too? And then he lay down with a heavy groan and said, Now let the world go as it will. I care for nothing more. After a time he told his attendants to take him to the French town of Chineau. A town he had been fond of during many years. But he was fond of no place now. It was too true that he could care for nothing more upon this earth. He wildly cursed the hour when he was born, and cursed the children whom he left behind him, and expired. As, one hundred years before, the servile followers of the court had abandoned the conqueror in the hour of his death. So they now abandoned his descendant. The very body was stripped, in the plunder of the royal chamber, and it was not easy to find the means of carrying it for burial to the Abbey-church of Fontreville. Richard was said, in after years, by way of flattery, to have the heart of a lion. It would have been far better, I think, to have had the heart of a man. His heart, whatever it was, had caused to beat remorsefully within his breast when he came, as he did into the solemn Abbey, and looked on his dead father's uncovered face. His heart, whatever it was, had been a black and perjured heart, in all its dealings with the deceased king, and more deficient in a single touch of tenderness than any wild beasts in the forest. There is a pretty story told of this rain called the Story of Fair Rosamond. It relates how the king doted on Fair Rosamond, who was the loveliest girl in all the world, and how he had a beautiful bower built for her in a park at Woodstock, and how it was erected in labyrinth, and could only be found by a clue of silk. How the bad Queen Eleanor, becoming jealous of Fair Rosamond, found out the secret of the clue, and one day appeared before her with a dagger and a cup of poison, and left her to the cruel choice between those deaths. How Fair Rosamond, after shedding many piteous tears, and offering many useless prayers to the cruel Queen, took the poison, and fell dead in the midst of the beautiful bower, while the unconscious birds sang gaily all round her. Now there was a Fair Rosamond, and she was, I dare say, the loveliest girl in all the world, and the king was certainly very fond of her, and the bad Queen Eleanor was certainly made jealous. But I am afraid. I say afraid, because I like the story so much, that there was no bower, no labyrinth, no silk and clue, no dagger, no poison. I am afraid Fair Rosamond retired to a nunnery near Oxford, and died there peaceably, her sister nuns hanging a silk and drapery over her tomb, and often dressing it with flowers, in remembrance of the youth and beauty that had enchanted the king when he too was young, and when his life lay fair before him. It was dark and ended now, faded and gone. Henry Plantagenet lay quiet in the Abbey Church of Fontreveau, in the fiftieth-seventh year of his age, never to be completed, after governing England well, for nearly thirty-five years.