Her father, Malcolm Canmore, was King of Scots: her mother was a sister of Edgar Atheling, the heir of the Anglo-Saxon kings, but set aside by the unscrupulous family of Godwin; and her grandmother was the daughter of a German Emperor, whom a son of Edmund Ironside had wedded when an exile in Hungary. This damsel, known by the name of Edith, was learned, accomplished, and so captivating that several Normans had sought her in marriage. Among her suitors it appears that Beauclerc had, in the days of his adversity, been the most successful; yet, when he proposed to make her queen, the royal maiden was with difficulty prevailed on to consent. Then a more serious obstacle was presented. Many argued that Edith had been reared in a convent, that she had worn the veil, and that an earthly husband could not receive the hand of one who had been dedicated to Heaven. The matter

must certainly have looked awkward. But a man of Beauclerc's intellect, with the Confessor's crown on his head and the Conqueror's sceptre in his hand, was not likely to forego the fair prize on which he had set his heart. A great assembly was convoked at Rochester, and it soon appeared that Edith had never taken monastic vows, though she had sometimes worn the veil, by way of protection, in days when the Norman adventurers, flushed with recent success, paid little respect to female honour. The evidence proved satisfactory, and a few days later the Anglo-Saxon princess, on being united to the Norman king, abandoned her

name of Edith for that of Maude, as being more agreeable to Norman ears.

At Winchester, which had been the capital of the Anglo-Saxon Empire, and which in Beauclerc's reign reached its highest point of splendour, Queen Maude, in 1102, became mother of an heir to the crown. The boy was baptized by the name of William, after his grandsire, the conqueror of Hastings. But what was doubtless much more pleasing to his mother, he was surnamed "The Atheling," in allusion to his AngloSaxon descent, and regarded with hopes, never to be realised, by those who, for their conquerors, tilled the ground, and hewed the wood, and drew the water. The oppressed islanders naturally indulged in anticipation of a bright future; but as young Atheling grew up such delusions were dissipated. The boy's position was favourable to the development of any good qualities which nature might have implanted in his heart or mind. Beauclerc, who, like his grim sire, was in the habit of saying that a king without learning resembled a crowned ass, was not guilty of neglect in educating his heir. Maude, who had ever been distinguished by Christian devotion, proved the most tender and loving of mothers. But whatever William Atheling profited by the intellectual superiority of Beauclerc, it appears too clear that he had no sympathies with the Anglo-Saxon Queen. He inherited none of her piety; and ill did he repay her maternal care. Among the Norman barons he constantly heard

the race from which his mother derived descent spoken of with scorn; nay, more-the courtiers even affected to regard the King's marriage as a mésalliance. In Henry's presence, indeed, they preserved a decorous silence on the subject; but, whenever his back was turned, they amused themselves by nicknaming the royal pair Leofric and Godiva.

William Atheling very soon gave indications of a resolution to share the antipathies of the foreign seigneurs among whom he had been educated. This son of the Saxon Maude was also grandson of William the Norman, and had about him a good deal of the tanner of Falaise. He became rather more of a Norman than the Normans themselves had been in their most lawless days, and expressed himself in language which Hugh le Loup or Ivo Taillebois would have been almost ashamed to use. "When I come to reign over the miserable English," he was heard openly to say, "I will make them draw the plough like oxen." So far as men could judge from appearances, there was every probability of this precocious tyrant having an opportunity of executing his threat; and the people, forgetting in their despair that the Prince was young, and might attain to wisdom with years, retaliated with bitterness, and accused him of every evil propensity.

While such was the feeling of the English people towards the prince whose mother had the blood of Alfred in her veins, and while the States of Normandy were swearing fealty to William Atheling in his

fourteenth year, Beauclerc became nervously anxious to have the boy recognised as heir to the crown of England. With the idea of thus securing the succession, he called together the chief men of the realm; and on the 20th of March, 1116, they assembled at Salisbury. The Prince having been invested with the symbols of knighthood, the grand ceremony was enacted with the wonted forms. The barons placed young Atheling's hand in theirs, and did homage to him as the King's heir; the Archbishop of Canterbury, with other prelates and abbots, swore that if the Prince should outlive his royal sire, they would, without fail, put him in possession of the kingdom's crown; and the heart of Arlette's grandson, doubtless, beat high at this feudal spectacle, so grateful to his vanity as a father, and to his pride as a king; for though gifted with that quality called worldly wisdom, and wise in his generation, he was in the habit of forgetting that however man may propose, it is God who disposes.

While pursuing his ambitious career, Beauclerc, with whom no tie was so binding that he would not break it for his selfish purposes, invaded Normandy, forcibly deprived his brother of the dukedom, and brought him to England. About 1118, when Queen Maude died, Duke Robert had for years been in the dungeons of Cardiff Castle; but the unhappy captive had a son alive and at large. On behalf of William Clito—for so the son of Robert was named-confederacy after confederacy was formed on the Continent; and of these

the Count of Anjou was one of the most formidable members. To allure Anjou to his side, and thus break up the confederacy, was Beauclerc's game. With this idea, when war broke out in 1119, he took young Atheling to the Continent, and proposed a union between that Prince and the Count's second daughter, a girl who had scarcely reached her twelfth year.

Anjou, albeit not without sparks of honour in his breast, appears to have been far from proof against temptation; and, being flesh and blood, the prospect of a throne for one of his daughters was more than he had strength of mind to resist. In any case he played the traitor; and the confederacy having been dissolved, the King of France was under the necessity of acknowledging the English Prince as Duke of Normandy, and receiving the royal youth's homage in that capacity.

Elate with triumph, and ambitious that a long line of descendants should flourish as kings, Henry Beauclerc celebrated the marriage of his heir; William Atheling being then in his eighteenth, Matilda of Anjou, the bride, in her twelfth, year. Lisieux was the scene of this wedding. A splendid affair, of course, it was; and the youthful pair remained on the Continent, passing twelve months merrily at feasts and pageants. About the end of that time, Beauclerc, impatient to visit in triumph the land of which he was an unworthy native, gave the word of command for a return to England