Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/584

570 for the coldness of a father who did not love him, and who was not a kind husband.

On the wall of the chapel at Caen (the one erected by William) figures of himself and Matilda were painted. In 1700 the chapel was pulled down, but they had previously been engraved by Montfaucon. Letters on Norman Tiles, by Henniker Major, Esq.

mother Beatrice, sister of the emperor Henry III, after the death of Boniface, married Gazelo, duke of Lorrain, and contracted Matilda to Godfrey Gibbosus, or Crookback, duke of Spoleto and Tuscany, Gazelo's son by a former marriage. This formidable alliance, made without his consent, alarmed Henry, who marched into Italy, and made his sister prisoner; hoping that, by carrying her into Germany, he might dissolve the agreement, which gave him too powerful a rival in the government of that country. He died 1056, soon after his return; and the young Matilda's husband, in 1070. She was afterwards married to Azo V, marquis of Ferrara, from whom she was divorced by the pope, as she was also from her third husband Welpho V, duke of Bavaria, whom she married 1088. She parted from him 1095.

Dispossessed of her estates by the Emperor Henry III, she joined the popes, recovered all her own dominions, and dismembered from the empire many goodly territories, which, at her death, having had no issue, she gave for ever in fee to the see of Rome; which