quarrel, and to make it up again for
some years. First, Robert and Rufus combine against Henry. Then Robert
sends over troops to help the barons who were rebelling against his
brother in England. Finally he went off with his Uncle Odo on the
first crusade in 1096, pledging the Duchy in his absence to his
brother the Red King, who, of course, seized it, and the real quarrel
between England and France began. For when Normandy had been
independent, Rouen blocked the road from Winchester to Paris. But as
soon as it belonged outright either to one or to the other, the
ancestral strife of French against English was certain to begin, and
to go on. The revolt of Elias, Count of Maine, against the English
King was repressed by his imprisonment--by Robert of Bellesme
again--in the same Tour de Rouen that had seen the death of Conan. But
Rufus never used his great gifts and power of ruling for anything but
evil, and his brother Henry followed him, the husband of that
descendant of Edmund and of Alfred who called herself Matilda at his
coronation.

When the weak and incompetent Robert Short Hose returned from his
crusading, he had the temerity to lay claim not merely to his Duchy
but to the throne of England with it. He naturally lost both, at the
battle of Tinchebray, where Henri Beauclerc won Normandy, and beat the
Normans with his English soldiers. For many years Robert languished in
English prisons until he died at Gloucester. And the Duchy he had lost
throve infinitely under his brother's wise and prosperous rule, which
gradually repressed more and more of the remnants of feudal anarchy
and misrule. In 1114, his daughter Matilda gained her title of
Empress by marriage with Henry V., but won her greatest fame by her
second match--after this first husband's death with Geoffrey
Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, in 1125, from which Henry II. of England
was to be born. But Henri Beauclerc was unfortunate in his other
children. For in 1119 his sons, William and Richard, were drowned in
the White Ship on their way to England. The occurrence caused a very
painful and widespread sensation, for besides the brilliant young
nobles of the suite, eighteen high-born ladies, many of them of royal
blood, perished in the wreck. In Orderic Vital, in William of
Malmesbury, in Henry of Huntingdon, the story is fully set forth. The
captain was the son of that pilot who had steered William the
Conqueror to Pevensey in the good ship "Mora" built at Rouen