Henry was persuaded to marry again, and his queen was the beautiful and gracious Alice of Louvaine, a fair young girl of eighteen. His daughter Maude returned from Germany in 1125; but there were strange stories that her husband, the Emperor, was not dead, but had fled in secret from his court, to dwell as a hermit in penance for his crimes. His funeral had, however, been performed with full solemnity. King Henry regarded her as in truth a widow, and was very anxious to bestow her a second time in marriage. He caused his vassals to take an oath of fealty to her as his heiress, and foremost in making this promise were David, King of Scotland-as Earl of Huntingdon, in right of his wife, Waltheof's daughter-and Stephen de Blois, Count de Mortagne and Boulogne; while Henry engaged at the same time that she should not be married without the consent of the Barons.
Very soon, however, he broke his word, with the desire of conciliating those troublesome neighbors of Normandy, the counts of Anjou. Foulques V. showed himself so much inclined to befriend the son of Robert, that Henry resolved to attach him to his own party, and proposed to him to give Maude to his son Geoffrey, whom he desired should be sent at once to Rouen, that he might see him, and confer on him the order of knighthood.
Young Geoffrey was only fifteen, but, unlike his ancestors, was very tall, and had also inherited the beauty and grace of his grandmother Bertrade. King Henry was delighted with him, and after examining him closely on all the rules of chivalry, as well as on other points, to which Geoffrey replied with much acuteness, showing himself a good scholar even in Latin, resolved to make him his son-in-law. His knighthood was conferred with the greatest splendor and all the formalities of the time. The first day he entered the bath, the emblem of purity, and then was arrayed in fine linen, a robe woven with gold, and a purple mantle. A Spanish horse was presented to him, and he was armed in polished steel, and with a helmet covered with precious stones; his gilded spurs were buckled on, and his sword and lance given to him. He sprung on horseback without putting his foot in the stirrup, and six days were spent in jousting with twenty-nine young nobles, who were knighted at the same time. At the close of the tourney, Henry conferred on him the accolade, or sword-blow, which was the chief part of the ceremony.
Henry had great difficulty in making his daughter consent to the marriage. Whether she believed her husband to be alive, or whether it was from pride, or dislike to take so mere a boy as her bridegroom, her resistance was long; and it was not till 1127 that she was brought by her father to Mans, where the wedding took place, just before Geoffrey's father departed for Palestine.
Maude was proud and disdainful, and treated her young husband in the most contemptuous way; and Geoffrey avoided her in return, spending most of his time in hunting in the woods, where he used to wear the spray of broom that became the cognizance of his house, and caused their surname of Plantagenet. Perhaps it was in contrast to his wife's haughtiness that he chose to adopt this plant, considered as the emblem of humility, and reminding her that she had married the descendant of the woodman Torquatus.
Geoffrey seems to have been of a gay, lively temper, associating freely with all who came in his way, and often doing kind actions. Once, as on Christmas-day he was entering the Church of St. Julian at Mans, he met a poor priest, meanly clad.
"What tidings?" said the Count.
"Glad tidings," returned the priest.
"What are they?"
"'To us a Child is born, to us a Son is given,'" the clerk made answer; and Geoffrey was so struck with his appropriate manner, that he gave him a valuable canonry.
Geoffrey was hunting in a forest, when he lost his way, and was benighted; and, meeting a charcoal-burner, asked the road to Loches. The man offered to become his guide, and accordingly the Count took him up on his horse, talking gayly, and asking what people said of the Count. The peasant answered that the Count himself was said to be friendly and free-spoken, but his provost committed terrible exactions, of which he gave a full account. Geoffrey listened, and in the morning rode into the town of Loches with the charcoal-burner still _en croupe_ (if his haughty empress was there, he must have enjoyed provoking her), and there he summoned all his provosts, himself examined their accounts, put an end to their exactions, and ended by making the charcoal-burner a free man instead of a serf.
There is a report that Maude's first husband came to Angers in his penance-garb, and on his death-bed told his confessor who he was; that the confessor fetched the empress; and that she attended him in secret till his death; but the truth of this tale is very uncertain. Maude had been six years married to Geoffrey when her first child was born, Henry, called by the Normans Fitz-Empress.
This event in some degree cheered the latter years of his grandfather, King Henry, whose sin had found him out, in bitter remorse and fearful dreams. Nobles, peasants, and clergy seemed in turn to be standing round his bed, calling him to account for his misdeeds toward them. Many other victims of his ambition might have been conjured up by his remorse-such as the citizen of Rouen, spared by Robert, whom Henry threw from the top of a high tower, whither he had treacherously invited him; the Norman barons, with whom he had broken his faith; his gallant, generous brother, so cruelly betrayed and imprisoned; his persecuted nephew, William Clito; the unhappy troubadour, Lucas de Barre, whom he had blinded, for writing a satire on him, and who dashed out his brains in despair on the prison wall; and-almost the worst of all-the poor children of his illegitimate daughter Juliana, left to the ferocious revenge of Raoul de Harenc, by whom their eyes were put out and their noses cut off. With such recollections as these to haunt his later years, no wonder Henry's nights were times of agony and wakefulness.
He tried to lose the thought of these horrors in activity, and was constantly passing between England and Normandy. It was in the latter country that he made his fatal supper of lampreys, after he had been fatigued with hunting all day. A violent fever came on at night, and he died on the 1st of December, 1135.
The court of Scotland presented a far different scene. David, the youngest of the children of St. Margaret, inherited the crown in 1124, on the death of his brother Alexander, and was treading in the same course as his mother, his sister Maude, and his brethren. He belonged, indeed, to a family of saints, and brought piety, firmness, cultivation, and a merciful temper to improve his rugged country. He was a brave warrior: but he loved the arts of peace, and one of his favorite amusements was gardening, budding and grafting trees.
He administered strict justice, but shed tears as he ordered an execution; and was so tender-hearted and ready to hear the poor, that he would take his foot out of the stirrup when just ready for the chase, to listen to the humblest complaint. Though lively and social in temper, he spent some hours every evening alone, in prayer and meditation.
His wife was Matilda, daughter of that Earl Waltheof who was executed by William I. She had previously been married to a Norman knight, Simon de St. Liz, who died on pilgrimage, leaving her with two sons, Simon and Waltheof. Two sons were likewise born to David; but the eldest was killed in his infancy by an accident: and shortly after David took home as a companion to the little Henry, Aelred, the son of a Saxon priest at Hexham.