Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 1.djvu/163

A.D. 1100.] was necessary to obtain. So rapidly was all this accomplished, that on the 5th of August, three days after his brother's death, Henry was proclaimed king, and was crowned in Westminster Abbey by Maurice, Bishop of London.

At the death of Lanfranc, the see of Canterbury had been given to Anselm, a monk of the Abbey of Bec, in Normandy. When the privileges of the Church were infringed by the Exactions and persecutions of Rufus, Anselm made his escape from the country to lay his complaint before the Pope (A.D. 1098). He had travelled to Rome in the disguise of a pilgrim, with staff in his hand and scrip by his side, and was received with due honour by the Pope. At the time of the accession of Henry, he still remained absent. The archbishopric of York had been vacant for several years, and Maurice was therefore the highest ecclesiastic in the kingdom.

It will be remembered that, by the treaty signed at Caen between Robert of Normaudy and William Rufus, the crown of England devolved upon the survivor; but while Henry was obtaining possession of the throne, Robert was not yet returned from the Holy Land. Soon after the fall of Jerusalem, the Duke of Normandy had quitted Palestine and landed in Italy. Here he was received with high honour and welcome by the Norman barons who had conquered large possessions in that southern land. Passing through Apulia he was entertained at the castle of the Count of Conversano, who was a relation of Robert Guiscard. The count received his guest with the utmost hospitality, and all the resources of a princely establishment were placed at his command. Within the castle were troubadours and jongleurs, mirth and music; without were broad plains and forests stocked with game, horses, and hounds in abundance, a beautiful landscape, and a sunny sky. It is not surprising that all these pleasures should attract a man of the character of the Duke of Normandy, who had just escaped from the protracted hardships of the Crusade, and who was well disposed to enjoy that ease and self-indulgence which he believed himself to have earned. But the Count of Conversano had a daughter; she was young, accomplished, and of great beauty. Robert fell in love with the Lady Sibylla, and obtained her hand in marriage. Ignorant of the critical position of affairs in England, and probably troubling himself little about the future, the Duke of Normandy lingered among the pleasures of Italy, while his more ambitious brother was firmly securing himself in the sovereignty he had usurped.

The Anglo-Saxon people are said to have been inclined in favour of Henry, from the circumstance of his having been born and educated in England. The advantage he thus possessed was improved to the utmost, and the new king exerted himself to obtain the good-will of that portion of his subjects who, however trodden down and oppressed by the arrogant Norman barons, were, in fact, the strength and sinew of the nation. A charter of liberties was passed, in which Henry bound himself to restore the laws of Edward the Confessor, with such alterations as had been made by the Conqueror. This charter was the cause of great rejoicing among the people, and though the effects produced by it were less advantageous than was expected, the charter is remarkable as having supplied the groundwork for that more important concession which was afterwards obtained from King John. At a subsequent period Henry retracted the promises he had made, and the copies of the royal charter, which had been placed in many of the churches throughout the kingdom, were seized and destroyed by the officers of the Crown. Three copies, however, were by some accident overlooked, and were left, one at Canterbury, one at York, and one at St. Albans.

These measures gave to Beauclerk a greater popularity than had been enjoyed by either of his predecessors. The nation had no fears of foreign invasion. Some of the most pressing grievances had been redressed, and strong hopes given of the removal of others; and although several generations had to pass away before the distinction of Norman and Saxon was entirely to merge into the general name of Englishman, the process had already commenced—a process which, rousing the slumbering Saxon from the lethargy of years, and stimulating the energetic principles of the Norman character to their highest development, eventually gave birth to a series of events which placed England foremost in the rank of nations.

Such was the state of affairs when the new king, rejecting all thoughts of an alliance with any of the princely families of the Continent, as the crowning act of reconciliation with his Saxon subjects, offered his hand to the exiled and portionless daughter of Malcolm, a humble novice in the Abbey of Romsey, but the representative of a long and illustrious line of Saxon princes.

We have seen how, on the death of Edward the Confessor, Harold obtained possession of the crown; his defeat and death, and the ultimate flight of Edgar, "the noble child," as the Saxon chroniclers fondly term him, with his mother and sisters to Scotland. The results of his voyage, and the marriage of Margaret with the King of Scotland, have been already related.

Six children arrived at years of maturity. Edward, who was slain with his father at Alnwick; Edgar, Alexander, and David, who each in turn succeeded to the crown.

The daughters were named Mary, who married Eustace, Count of Boulogne; and Matilda, or Maud, afterwards queen of Henry Beauclerk.

The death of Malcolm and his eldest son, which occurred in 1093, was soon followed by that of Margaret. The brother of Malcolm assumed the crown, to the exclusion of his three nephews; and to this cause we may doubtless attribute Matilda being sent, together with her sister, to the care of their aunt Christina, who had taken the veil in 1086.

Contemporary historians agree in naming Wilton and Romsey as the abbeys in which the future Queen of England found an asylum. They were both of Saxon foundation.

Wilton claimed an origin as early as the year 800, when Wulston, Duke of Wiltshire, founded a chantry, which his widow Alburga converted into a nunnery, and which, in after years, became the residence of St. Editha, the fair and pious daughter of the profligate King Edgar.

Romsey Abbey, to which Christina, the aunt of Matilda, retired, and of which, according to some writers, she became abbess, was built by Edward the Elder, and dedicated to the Virgin and St. Elfleda. This convent possessed many extra-ordinary privileges, amongst others the rare and anomalous right of la haute justice, or gallows tree; a privilege of which the records do not mention any use ever having been made. To this already wealthy and powerful establishment the Norman conquest, instead of spoilation, appears to have brought additional wealth and dignity.

The abbess of this convent was one of the four lady abbesses