Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II Part 16

Sigurd continued: "I was in many a battle in the Saracens' land, and always came off conqueror; I won many precious goods, the like of which were never seen here before; and I was always the most highly esteemed where brave men met: while yours is but a home-bred renown. I went to Palestine, I came to Apulia; but I did not see you there, brother. I gave Roger the Great the t.i.tle of King. I won seven battles; but you were in none of them. I was at our Lord's grave; but I did not see you there, brother. I went to Jordan, where our Lord was baptized. I swam across the river; but I did not see you there. A willow grew on the bank, and I twisted the boughs into a knot, which is waiting there for you; for I said that you should untie it, and fulfil the vow that is bound up in it."

"I have little to set against this," said Eystein; "but if you fought abroad, I strove to be of use at home. In the north of Vaage I built fish-houses, so as to enable the poor people there to earn a livelihood.

I built a priest's house, and endowed a Church, where before all the people were heathen; and therefore I think they will recollect that Eystein was once King of Norway. The road from Drontheim goes over the Dofrefield, and often travellers had to sleep in the open air; but I built inns, and supported them with money, and thus wayfarers may remember that Eystein has been King of Norway. Agdaness was a bare waste, and no harbor, and many a s.h.i.+p was lost. Now, there is a good harbor, and a Church. I raised beacons on the high ground; I built a royal hall in Bergen, and the Church of the Apostles; I built Michael's Church, and a Convent beside. I settled the laws, so that all may obtain justice. The Jemteland people are again joined to our realm, and more by kind words than by war. Now, though all these are but small doings, yet I am not sure if the people of our land have not been better served by them than by your killing blue men in the land of the Saracens. Your deeds were great; yet I hope what I have done for the servants of G.o.d may serve me no less for my soul's salvation. So, if you did tie a knot for me, I will not go to untie it; and if I had been tying a knot for you, you would not have been King of Norway, when with a single s.h.i.+p you came into my fleet."

Eystein conferred many more benefits on his country, and on individuals many acts of kindness--such as his undertaking by his conversation to cheer and console one of his friends who had been disappointed in love.

This excellent King died at thirty-five, and it was said that there was never so much mourning in Norway. Sigurd's fate was sad; the shadow predicted in his dream fell on him. His moodiness increased to distraction, and nothing could be more wretched in those early times than the condition of an insane king or of his country. He grew extremely violent, and often did fearful mischief; but he still preserved his generous spirit, and could always, even at the worst, be tamed by any one who would boldly resist his fury. Happily, this only lasted six years, for he died in 1330, at the age of forty.

This has been a long digression; but as Sigurd was the last of our Northern visitors, we hope it may be pardoned for the sake of its interest.

Henry I. gave his only daughter Maude in marriage to Henry V., Emperor of Germany, a rebellious son, who had taken advantage of the sentence of excommunication on his father, to strip him of his domains, and absolutely reduce him to beggary. Maude was married to Henry V. at eleven years old, when she was so small that she could not stand under the weight of her robes, and the Archbishop of Cologne was obliged to hold her in his arms during the celebration of the wedding. The princ.i.p.al favorites of the King of England were at this time the sons of his sister Adela, three in number: Theobald, Count de Blois and Champagne; Stephen, Count de Mortagne, whom the King married to Matilda, heiress, of Boulogne, the niece of good Queen Maude, and Henry, whom he made Bishop of Winchester.

Henry was persuaded to marry again, and his queen was the beautiful and gracious Alice of Louvaine, a fair young girl of eighteen. His daughter Maude returned from Germany in 1125; but there were strange stories that her husband, the Emperor, was not dead, but had fled in secret from his court, to dwell as a hermit in penance for his crimes. His funeral had, however, been performed with full solemnity. King Henry regarded her as in truth a widow, and was very anxious to bestow her a second time in marriage. He caused his va.s.sals to take an oath of fealty to her as his heiress, and foremost in making this promise were David, King of Scotland--as Earl of Huntingdon, in right of his wife, Waltheof's daughter--and Stephen de Blois, Count de Mortagne and Boulogne; while Henry engaged at the same time that she should not be married without the consent of the Barons.

Very soon, however, he broke his word, with the desire of conciliating those troublesome neighbors of Normandy, the counts of Anjou. Foulques V. showed himself so much inclined to befriend the son of Robert, that Henry resolved to attach him to his own party, and proposed to him to give Maude to his son Geoffrey, whom he desired should be sent at once to Rouen, that he might see him, and confer on him the order of knighthood.

Young Geoffrey was only fifteen, but, unlike his ancestors, was very tall, and had also inherited the beauty and grace of his grandmother Bertrade. King Henry was delighted with him, and after examining him closely on all the rules of chivalry, as well as on other points, to which Geoffrey replied with much acuteness, showing himself a good scholar even in Latin, resolved to make him his son-in-law. His knighthood was conferred with the greatest splendor and all the formalities of the time. The first day he entered the bath, the emblem of purity, and then was arrayed in fine linen, a robe woven with gold, and a purple mantle. A Spanish horse was presented to him, and he was armed in polished steel, and with a helmet covered with precious stones; his gilded spurs were buckled on, and his sword and lance given to him.

He sprung on horseback without putting his foot in the stirrup, and six days were spent in jousting with twenty-nine young n.o.bles, who were knighted at the same time. At the close of the tourney, Henry conferred on him the accolade, or sword-blow, which was the chief part of the ceremony.

Henry had great difficulty in making his daughter consent to the marriage. Whether she believed her husband to be alive, or whether it was from pride, or dislike to take so mere a boy as her bridegroom, her resistance was long; and it was not till 1127 that she was brought by her father to Mans, where the wedding took place, just before Geoffrey's father departed for Palestine.

Maude was proud and disdainful, and treated her young husband in the most contemptuous way; and Geoffrey avoided her in return, spending most of his time in hunting in the woods, where he used to wear the spray of broom that became the cognizance of his house, and caused their surname of Plantagenet. Perhaps it was in contrast to his wife's haughtiness that he chose to adopt this plant, considered as the emblem of humility, and reminding her that she had married the descendant of the woodman Torquatus.

Geoffrey seems to have been of a gay, lively temper, a.s.sociating freely with all who came in his way, and often doing kind actions. Once, as on Christmas-day he was entering the Church of St. Julian at Mans, he met a poor priest, meanly clad.

"What tidings?" said the Count.

"Glad tidings," returned the priest.

"What are they?"

"'To us a Child is born, to us a Son is given,'" the clerk made answer; and Geoffrey was so struck with his appropriate manner, that he gave him a valuable canonry.

Geoffrey was hunting in a forest, when he lost his way, and was benighted; and, meeting a charcoal-burner, asked the road to Loches. The man offered to become his guide, and accordingly the Count took him up on his horse, talking gayly, and asking what people said of the Count.

The peasant answered that the Count himself was said to be friendly and free-spoken, but his provost committed terrible exactions, of which he gave a full account. Geoffrey listened, and in the morning rode into the town of Loches with the charcoal-burner still _en croupe_ (if his haughty empress was there, he must have enjoyed provoking her), and there he summoned all his provosts, himself examined their accounts, put an end to their exactions, and ended by making the charcoal-burner a free man instead of a serf.

There is a report that Maude's first husband came to Angers in his penance-garb, and on his death-bed told his confessor who he was; that the confessor fetched the empress; and that she attended him in secret till his death; but the truth of this tale is very uncertain. Maude had been six years married to Geoffrey when her first child was born, Henry, called by the Normans Fitz-Empress.

This event in some degree cheered the latter years of his grandfather, King Henry, whose sin had found him out, in bitter remorse and fearful dreams. n.o.bles, peasants, and clergy seemed in turn to be standing round his bed, calling him to account for his misdeeds toward them. Many other victims of his ambition might have been conjured up by his remorse--such as the citizen of Rouen, spared by Robert, whom Henry threw from the top of a high tower, whither he had treacherously invited him; the Norman barons, with whom he had broken his faith; his gallant, generous brother, so cruelly betrayed and imprisoned; his persecuted nephew, William c.l.i.to; the unhappy troubadour, Lucas de Barre, whom he had blinded, for writing a satire on him, and who dashed out his brains in despair on the prison wall; and--almost the worst of all--the poor children of his illegitimate daughter Juliana, left to the ferocious revenge of Raoul de Harenc, by whom their eyes were put out and their noses cut off. With such recollections as these to haunt his later years, no wonder Henry's nights were times of agony and wakefulness.

He tried to lose the thought of these horrors in activity, and was constantly pa.s.sing between England and Normandy. It was in the latter country that he made his fatal supper of lampreys, after he had been fatigued with hunting all day. A violent fever came on at night, and he died on the 1st of December, 1135.

The court of Scotland presented a far different scene. David, the youngest of the children of St. Margaret, inherited the crown in 1124, on the death of his brother Alexander, and was treading in the same course as his mother, his sister Maude, and his brethren. He belonged, indeed, to a family of saints, and brought piety, firmness, cultivation, and a merciful temper to improve his rugged country. He was a brave warrior: but he loved the arts of peace, and one of his favorite amus.e.m.e.nts was gardening, budding and grafting trees.

He administered strict justice, but shed tears as he ordered an execution; and was so tender-hearted and ready to hear the poor, that he would take his foot out of the stirrup when just ready for the chase, to listen to the humblest complaint. Though lively and social in temper, he spent some hours every evening alone, in prayer and meditation.

His wife was Matilda, daughter of that Earl Waltheof who was executed by William I. She had previously been married to a Norman knight, Simon de St. Liz, who died on pilgrimage, leaving her with two sons, Simon and Waltheof. Two sons were likewise born to David; but the eldest was killed in his infancy by an accident: and shortly after David took home as a companion to the little Henry, Aelred, the son of a Saxon priest at Hexham.

These four boys were brought up "in the nurture of good learning," and in G.o.dliness; but their different tempers soon showed themselves. Simon, the little Earl of Northampton, while a child, was always playing at building castles, and bestriding the "truncheon of a spear," as a war-horse. Waltheof was a builder, too, but his were churches, and his delight was in making the sign of the Cross and singing chants. It was still the same as they grew older; Waltheof ever drew more apart, and spent more time in reading and prayer. His stepfather, the King, would take him to the chase, and tell him to bear his bow; but he often found his bow in the hands of another, and, after a search, discovered Waltheof reading or praying in a secret glade, or under a tree. "Your boy," he said to the Queen, "will either die young, or leave us for the cloister."

Aelred was Waltheof's chief friend; but, though very pious, he was more of a scholar, and read both romances of King Arthur and such works of Cicero as had found their way to Scotland. He was lively in conversation; David was fond of him, and used to tell him stories of his own younger days; and Aelred became the loving chronicler of this happy court.

Prince Henry had the same holy temper, coupled with a bold spirit, that was needed by the heir of Scotland, and showed himself full of the n.o.ble qualities of his father and uncles. He was the true knight of the party, as bold as a lion, yet as strict and devout as a monk, even in the camp.

Simon was no more than a rough, bold, tyrannical earl, and soon took up his abode in England.

Ere long Aelred became a monk, and Waltheof was not slow in following his example. Both entered the Cistercian order, and led holy lives, avoiding all preferment--a difficult matter for Waltheof, stepson to one king and cousin to another. His brother Simon took such offence at his lowliness, that he actually threatened to burn down the convent of Waldon, where Waltheof was living, because he thought it shame to see a descendant of Siward a common monk in a poor monastery.

However, in time, promotion was thrust on them. Aelred became Abbot of Rivaux, and Waltheof Abbot of Melrose.

Of the King and his son, more will be said in the next chapter.

CAMEO XVII. THE BATTLE OF THE STANDARD. (1135-1138.)

_King of England_.

1135. Stephen.

1137. Louis VII.

_King of Scotland_.

1124. David I.

_Kings of France_.

1107. Louis VI.

_Emperors of Germany_.

1125. Lothar II.

1138. Konrad II.

Earl Egbert of Gloucester was the son of Henry Beauclerc and of a beautiful Welsh princess named Nesta, who had fallen into his hands in the course of the war which he maintained for his brother William Rufus, on the borders of Wales. Henry was much attached to the boy, and gave him a princely education, by which he profited so as to become not only learned, but of a far purer and more chivalrous character than was often to be found among the great men of his time.

Henry I. provided for him, by giving to him the hand of the Lady Amabel Fitzaymon, heiress of Glamorgan, and a ward at the disposal of the crown, in whose right he became Earl of Gloucester.

Robert and his cousin, Stephen de Blois, both attended the death-bed of Henry I., and heard his dying words: "I leave to my children whatever I have gained. Let them do justice to those I have injured."

No sooner had the King expired, than Stephen set off for England, where he was already very popular, partly on account of his courteous manners and goodly person, partly for the sake of his wife, Matilda of Boulogne, who was treading in the steps of her aunt, the good Queen Maude. He landed at Dover in the midst of a frightful thunder-storm, and though he found that city and Canterbury closed against him, he met with a joyful reception in London and Winchester. He bribed Hugh BiG.o.d, the late King's seneschal, to swear that Henry had on his deathbed disinherited Maude, and left the kingdom to him; and the Archbishop, William de Corboil, was credulous enough to believe the tale, and crown the usurper; but discovery of the falsehood hastened the old man's death.

While this was pa.s.sing, Robert of Gloucester was conducting the funeral of his father; causing his body to be _salted_, instead of embalmed, and bringing it to England to be buried at Reading, an abbey that Henry had built and endowed for his burial-place. It is now completely ruined, and few vestiges remain to show what the buildings were, far less any trace of the tomb of the scholarly and cruel son of the Conqueror.

The Empress Maude was at the same time attending her husband, Geoffrey Plantagenet, in a dangerous illness; and thus Stephen was enabled to obtain possession of both England and Normandy, and received the submission of all the n.o.bles. The Earl of Gloucester, thinking resistance vain, took the oath of fealty; reserving, however, the right of recalling it if any injury was offered to him or to his property.

The next year Geoffrey de Bel raised an army, and entered Normandy; but was met there by Stephen, wounded, and forced to retreat, leaving only a few castles still holding out for the Empress. Stephen was besieging that of Bertran, with an army composed partly of Normans and partly of natives of his wife's county of Boulogne, when, while he was taking his mid-day sleep, a quarrel arose between the two brothers. Waking in haste, and alarmed for his Boulognais, he took part against the Normans, calling out, "Down with the traitors!" The Normans were greatly offended, and, having retired to their tents, they held a council together, and ended by making him the following plain-spoken address:

"Sir, a folly is better ended than continued. By ill advice, we took you for our lord for a little while. If you blame us for it, you will not be wrong. You have beaten our men, and called us traitors. Certes, we were traitors when we left our rightful lady for a stranger. We have held with you against our lady the Empress, and we repent, for we have sinned against G.o.d and man: but we will no longer continue in the sin; and therefore we bid you mount, and leave this host, for we will not suffer you to remain in this country, unless it be the will of our lady the Empress."

Stephen begged them to let him remain till the next day but they swore that, if he did, it should be the worse for him, and immediately escorted him beyond the bounds of Normandy. They then brought back Maude, with her husband and children; and the dukedom continued in the hands of Geoffrey as long as he lived.