in organizing a party of wild and
desperate young men from among the nobles of the court, with a view of
raising a rebellion against his father, and getting possession of
Normandy by force. They kept their designs profoundly secret, but
prepared to leave L'Aigle that night, to go and seize Rouen, the
capital, which they hoped to surprise into a surrender. Accordingly, in
the middle of the night, the desperate troop mounted their horses and
rode away. In the morning the king found that they were gone, and he
sent an armed force after them. Their plan of surprising Rouen failed.
The king's detachment overtook them, and, after a sharp contest,
succeeded in capturing a few of the rebels, though Robert himself,
accompanied by some of the more desperate of his followers, escaped over
the frontier into a neighboring province, where he sought refuge in the
castle of one of his father's enemies.

This result, as might have been expected, filled the mind of Matilda
with anxiety and distress. A civil war between her husband and her son
was now inevitable; and while every consideration of prudence and of
duty required her to espouse the father's cause, her maternal love, a
principle stronger far, in most cases, than prudence and duty combined,
drew her irresistibly toward her son. Robert collected around him all
the discontented and desperate spirits of the realm, and for a long
time continued to make his father infinite trouble. Matilda, while she
forbore to advocate his cause openly in the presence of the king, kept
up a secret communication with him. She sent him information and advice
from time to time, and sometimes supplies, and was thus, technically,
guilty of a great crime--the crime of maintaining a treasonable
correspondence with a rebel. In a moral point of view, however, her
conduct may have been entirely right; at any rate, its influence was
very salutary, for she did all in her power to restrain both the father
and the son; and by the influence which she thus exerted, she doubtless
mitigated very much the fierceness of the struggle.

Of course, the advantage, in such a civil war as this, would be wholly
on the side of the sovereign. William had all the power and resources of
the kingdom in his own hands--the army, the towns, the castles, the
treasures. Robert had a troop of wild, desperate, and unmanageable
outlaws, without authority, without money, without a sense of justice on
their side. He gradually became satisf