to her former husband, whom he considered as his
greatest rival and enemy, and he determined that she should have no
opportunity to make another such attempt; so he kept a very strict
watch over her, and subjected her to so much restraint that she
considered herself a prisoner.
The king had a quarrel also at this time with one of his
daughters-in-law, and he made her a prisoner too. Soon after this he
went back to England, taking these two captives in his train. In a
short time he sent the queen to a certain palace which he had in
Winchester, and there he kept her confined for sixteen years. It was
during this period of their mother's captivity that the wars between
the father and his sons was waged most fiercely.
At length, in the year eleven hundred and eighty-two, in the midst of
one of the most violent wars that had raged between the king and his
sons, a message came to the king that his son Henry was very
dangerously sick, and that he wished his father to come and see him.
The king was greatly at a loss what to do on receiving this
communication. His counselors advised him not to go. It was only a
stratagem, they said, on the part of the young prince, to get his
father into his camp, and so take him prisoner. So the king concluded
not to go. He had, however, some misgivings that his son might be
really sick, and accordingly dispatched an archbishop to him with a
ring, which he said he sent to him as a token of his forgiveness and
of his paternal affection. Very soon, however, a second messenger came
to the king to say that Prince Henry had died. These sad tidings
overwhelmed the heart of the king with the most poignant grief. He at
once forgot all the undutiful and disobedient conduct of his son, and
remembered him only as his dearly-beloved child. He became almost
broken-hearted.
The prince himself, on his death-bed, was borne down with remorse and
anguish in thinking of the crimes that he had committed against his
father. He longed to have his father come and see him before he died.
The ring which the archbishop was sent to bring to him arrived just in
time, and the prince pressed it to his lips, and blessed it with tears
of frantic grief. As the hour of death approached his remorse became
dreadful. All the attempts made by the priests around his bed to
soothe and quiet him were unavailing, and at last his agony became so
great that he compelled them to put a rope around him and drag him
from his bed to a
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