rest were either taken prisoners or slain, she made her way, attended by a single follower, to Luggershall, and thence, after a rest of a few hours, by getting again upon horseback and continuing her rapid flight, to the castle of Devizes. She was now shut up in the castle of Oxford, which Stephen besieged with his whole army, disregarding in the meantime every other object, and determined to effect its reduction either by force or famine. All hope seemed to be gone; but, after she had endured the greatest privations, on the night of the 20th of December, she left the castle by a postern gate, with four knights, crossed the Thames, which was frozen over, and reached Abingdon on foot, having walked all the way through a deep snow, and having been enabled to escape the notice of the enemy, some accounts say, in part by herself and her attendants having clothed themselves in white linen. At Abingdon she took horse, and rode to Wallingford Castle. Hither a few days after the Earl of Glocester, having started as soon as he heard the news, brought her her son. The sight of the boy, says an old chronicler, made her forget all her toils and dangers, and think all she had suffered nothing. Matilda, with all her haughtiness of temper, was not without other good qualities, besides her share in the intrepidity and tough invincible spirit of her race; if prosperity made her insolent and tyrannical, she bore adversity admirably; and to her son she was from the first to the last the best of mothers, not only in the affection she bore him, but in all other respects. Henry was soon after this carried to Bristol, and "continued there four years," says Lord Lyttelton, "under the care of his uncle, who trained him up in such exercises as were most proper to form his body for war, and in those studies which might embellish and strengthen his mind. The Earl of Glocester himself had no inconsiderable tincture of learning, and was the patron of all who excelled in it; qualities rare at all times in a nobleman of his high rank, but particularly in an age when knowledge and valour were thought incompatible, and not to be able to read was a mark of nobility. This truly great man broke through that cloud of barbarous ignorance, and, after the example of his father King Henry, enlarged his understanding and humanized his mind by a commerce with the muses, which he assiduously cultivated, even in courts and camps, showing by his conduct how useful it was both to the statesman and general. The same love of science and literature he likewise infused into his nephew, who under his influence began to acquire what he never afterwards lost, an ardour for study and a knowledge of books not to be found in any other prince of those times. Indeed the four years he now passed in England laid the foundation of all that was afterwards most excellent in him; for his earliest impressions were taken from his uncle, who, not only in learning but in all other perfections—in magnanimity, valour, prudence, and all moral virtues,—was the best example that could be proposed to his imitation."[1] Henry's father, who after a long contest had now acquired complete possession of Normandy, recalled his son from England in the latter part of the year 1146; and in the beginning of November of that year, very soon after he had parted with his nephew, the Earl of Glocester was carried off by a fever. This was to his sister the empress the loss of her right hand. "Courage and resentment," we quote again Lord Lyttelton's account, "still combated in her heart with despair; nor was it without the greatest and most painful reluctance that she gave way to the necessity of leaving a country over which she had so long expected to reign. But, in less than four months after the death of her brother, seeing no possibility of supporting her party, and fearing to fall into the hands of her enemy, she was constrained to abandon England and go into Normandy, to live with a husband whom she never had loved, and who did not love her, but was generous or prudent enough to receive her with kindness in this decline of her fortune, when her pride was humbled by her sorrow. Nevertheless, he retained to himself the dominion of that duchy, as he had held it in her absence; that is, without any dependence upon her. Instead of submitting to this, she would perhaps have stayed in England, and buried herself under the ruins of her own greatness, if the anguish of her mind had not been soothed by the hope that Prince Henry, her son, might, when he should attain to an age of maturity, be able to revenge her on Stephen, and recover the crown which she had lost. Her whole care was therefore employed upon his education. She laboured to inspire him with thoughts as high as her own; to give him an ardour for glory, an ambition for empire, and a spirit of conquest. His genius was very suitable for such instructions; but the fire he drew from her was happily tempered with the lessons of prudence and humanity which he had been taught in England by his uncle; and which his father, a prince of great discretion and judgment, continued to fix in his mind."[2]

Henry remained in Normandy till the year 1149. Meanwhile his friends in England had been gradually recovering heart and strength; and it was arranged that the young prince, whom, although as yet only sixteen, they now looked to as their head, should show himself among them. From this time his mother may be regarded as having withdrawn her pretensions in his favour; no express act of resignation ever took place, but both she and her husband (for Geoffrey also gave up something in abandoning the hope of a crown for his wife) were too much attached to their son, and too sensible, besides, of the present state of circumstances, and of what the exigency demanded, to stand in his way. He landed early in the year at the head of a considerable force, probably at Wareham, marched through the western counties, where he was joined by the Earl of Chester, the Earl of Hereford, and other barons; and made his way to his great-uncle King David of Scotland, who had been for some time in possession of the three northern counties of Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmoreland, and whom he found at the head of an army in the town of Carlisle. During the festivities of Whitsuntide, which were distinguished on this occasion by extraordinary magnificence, Henry received the honour of knighthood from his uncle; but he had no opportunity of gaining his spurs, a disappointment which vexed him the more that Stephen's son Eustace, who had been knighted about the same time, had been already put by his father in command of a military force, with which he was ravaging the lands of some of the very barons who were now lying in idleness with their retainers at Carlisle.

It must apparently have been during this visit that Henry met with his first mistress, so famous in song and story, the beautiful Rosamund de Clifford. Of the two sons which she bore to him it is known that the younger, Geoffrey, was older than Henry, his first-born by his queen, and also that he was nearly twenty when he was made Bishop of Lincoln in 1173; he was therefore probably born in 1153; and his elder brother William, surnamed Long-sword, who, having married the daughter and heiress of the Earl of Salisbury, succeeded to the estates and title of his father-in-law, may have been born in 1150. Both of them were educated along with Henry's legitimate sons: William survived till 1226; and Geoffrey, who resigned his bishopric in