Page:A Dictionary of Saintly Women Volume 1.djvu/43

Rh On Christmas Day, 1040, Henry and Agnes were crowned Emperor and Empress, by Clement II., in St. Peter's Church at Rome.

Both as a man and as a king Henry III. was of "the salt of the earth." He ruled with a strong hand, and under his sway the empire attained its highest greatness. In 1048, Leo IX. became Pope, and in him Henry found a hearty fellow-worker in the field of reform. Had Leo and Henry lived for ever, or had they even reigned 30 years, what might not such a Pope and such an Emperor have effected! They did accomplish and reform a great deal in the nearly five years of their contemporary reigns.

One of the dangers to the peace of Europe was the power of the Countess Beatrice of Tuscany, whose second husband, the duke of Lorraine, was a somewhat troublesome vassal of the empire. It was partly to set a balance to the power of Beatrice, that Henry sought a new alliance with another powerful woman, B. of Susa. She was already connected with the imperial house by her first marriage, and in 1055 Henry betrothed his son Henry, aged five, to Bertha, her daughter by her third husband, Odo, margrave of Turin and count of Savoy. The next year, Victor II., another reforming Pope, came to pay a visit to the Emperor at Goslar, and went with him to Bodfeld, his hunting- castle in the Hartz. There, to the grief of the world, Henry, not yet in his 40th year, left all his good deeds and great projects unfulfilled and unfinished: he died Oct. 5, 105G, and was buried at Speier, beside his father and mother. Pope Victor took the child Henry immediately to Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), and crowned him. Agnes was regent. Probably no woman could have taken firm hold of the reins laid down by Henry III. The widowed empress was quite unfit for the task; she had neither the energy nor the ability to rule a great empire consisting of separate states and powerful vassals, always rivals to each other and sometimes to the supreme power. She had not the discernment to choose her friends and ministers wisely; she listened now to one adviser and now to another. She had no ambition for herself, and only longed to escape from the cares and pomps of the world and retire to a monastery. She tried to bring up her son properly, but it was the interest of some unprincipled persons to deprave his tastes and frustrate her good intentions towards him, as well as to stultify her efforts for the government of the country. Anno, archbishop of Cologne, was one of the most powerful and unscrupulous of the many troublesome magnates who strove for the chief power in the empire; he determined to further his own importance and influence by obtaining the custody of the young king. He went to pay his respects to the empress and her son at a place now called Kaiserswerth on the Rhine, where they were staying with a small retinue. He was hospitably welcomed and entertained, and spared no effort to make himself agreeable to the young king; he told him he had come down the river in his new barge, which was beautifully fitted up for a pleasure trip, and suggested that Henry should come and see it where it lay below the palace. The boy gladly went. He was no sooner on board than the rowers, who had been well instructed in the plot, struck the water with their oars and pulled with all their strength and speed up the stream. Henry was dismayed and angry. He threw himself into the river, but one of the bishop's men jumped into the water and rescued him at the risk of his own life. The people on shore were very indignant at Anno's treachery. The empress wept and wrung her hands, but did not know what to do, and after a time acquiesced in the state of things. Anno shamefully neglected the education of the boy, furnished him with frivolous and debasing amusements, allowed his abilities to run to waste, and suffered him to acquire habits of self-indulgence, and to give way to bursts of fury. In 1065, when Henry was 15, the ceremony of girding him with a sword was held at Worms. That sword he would have used for the first time to kill his detested guardian, had not his mother restrained him. Some other incidents of his life