Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/237

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to form the likeness of an Ottoman Majesty, Excellency, or Highness in the nineteenth. But his domestic life was hardly happy. His wife Agnes, the heiress of Ponthieu, the mother of his one child William Talvas, was long kept by him in bonds in the dungeons of Bellême. And, more piteous than all, we read how a little boy, his own godchild, drew near to him in all loving trust. Some say, in the sheer wantonness of cruelty, some say, to avenge some slight fault of the child's father, the monster drew the boy under his cloak and tore out his eyes with his own hands.

The list of the men, great and small, who were simply wronged and dispossessed by Robert of Bellême, is long indeed. Some of them, it is true, were now and then able to revenge their wrongs with their own arms. He seems, as might have been expected, to have been the special enemy of all that was specially good in individuals or in communities. He was the bitter foe of the valiant and faithful men of Domfront. He was before all things the enemy of Helias of La Flèche. He was the enemy of his neighbour Count Rotrou of Perche, who also bears a good character among the princes of his day. As temporal lord of Seez, he was the enemy of its churches, episcopal and abbatial; he had not that reverence for the foundation of his