William the Conqueror / Makers of History

by Jacob Abbott

The king himself, who happened to be in that part of the castle at the time, was one of the number. He reached the apartment just in time to interpose between his sons, and prevent the commission of the awful crime of fratricide. As it was, he found it extremely difficult to part the ferocious combatants. It required all his paternal authority, and not a little actual force, to arrest the affray. He succeeded, however, at length, with the help of the by-standers, in parting his sons, and Robert, out of breath, and pale with impotent rage, was led away.

Robert's rage.
Robert's rebellion.

Robert considered his father as taking sides against him in this quarrel, and he declared that he could not, and would not, endure such treatment any longer. He found some sympathy in the conversation of his mother, to whom he went immediately with bitter complainings. She tried to soothe and quiet his wounded spirit, but he would not be pacified. He spent the afternoon and evening 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.

Anxiety and distress of Matilda.
Measures of Matilda.

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.

Advantages of William.
Robert lays down his arms.

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 satisfied that the contest was vain. In proportion as the activity of the hostilities diminished, Matilda became more and more open in her efforts to restrain it, and to allay the animosity on either side. She succeeded, finally, in inducing Robert to lay down his arms, and then brought about an interview between the parties, in hopes of a peaceful settlement of the quarrel.

Interview with his father.

It appeared very soon, however, at this interview, that there was no hope of any thing like a real and cordial reconciliation. Though both the father and son had become weary of the unnatural war which they had waged against each other, yet the ambitious and selfish desires on both sides, in which the contest had originated, remained unchanged. Robert began the conference by imperiously demanding of his father the fulfillment of his promise to give him the government of Normandy. His father replied by reproaching him with his unnatural and wicked rebellion, and warned him of the danger he incurred, in imitating the example of Absalom, of sharing that wretched rebel's fate. Robert rejoined that he did not come to meet his father for the sake of hearing a sermon preached. He had had enough of sermons, he said, when he was a boy, studying grammar. He wanted his father to do him justice, not preach to him. The king said that he should never divide his dominions, while he lived, with any one; and added, notwithstanding what Robert had contemptuously said about sermons, that the Scripture declared that a house divided against itself could not stand. He then proceeded to reproach and incriminate the prince in the severest manner for his disloyalty as a subject, and his undutifulness and ingratitude as a son. It was intolerable, he said, that a son should become the rival and bitterest enemy of his father, when it was to him that he owed, not merely all that he enjoyed, but his very existence itself.

Recriminations.