Page:William of Malmesbury's Chronicle.djvu/502

 lest she should be perpetually childless, with well-founded anxiety, he turned his thoughts on a successor to the kingdom. On which subject, having held much previous and long-continued deliberation, he now at this council compelled all the nobility of England, as well as the bishops and abbats, to make oath, that, if he should die without male issue, they would, without delay or hesitation, accept his daughter Matilda, the late empress, as their sovereign: observing, how prejudicially to the country fate had snatched away his son William, to whom the kingdom by right had pertained: and, that his daughter still survived, to whom alone the legitimate succession belonged, from her grandfather, uncle, and father, who were kings; as well as from her maternal descent for many ages back: inasmuch as from Egbert, king of the West Saxons, who first subdued or expelled the other kings of the island, in the year of the incarnation 800, through a line of fourteen kings, down to 1043, in which king Edward, who lies at Westminster, was elevated to the throne, the line of royal blood did never fail, nor falter in the succession. Moreover, Edward, the last, and at the same time the most noble, of that stock, had united Margaret, his grand-niece by his brother Edmund Ironside, to Malcolm, king of Scotland, whose daughter Matilda, as was well known, was the empress's mother. All therefore, in this council, who were considered as persons of any note, took the oath: and first of all William, archbishop of Canterbury; next the other bishops, and the abbats in like manner. The first of the laity, who swore, was David, king of Scotland, uncle of the empress; then Stephen, earl of Moreton and Boulogne, nephew of king Henry by his sister Adala; then Robert, the king's son, who was born to him before he came to the throne, and whom he had created earl of Gloucester, bestowing on him