s
rested in peace a terrible blow broke the fortunes of her king. In 1120
his son, William the "AEtheling," with a crowd of nobles accompanied Henry
on his return from Normandy; but the White Ship in which he embarked
lingered behind the rest of the royal fleet till the guards of the king's
treasure pressed its departure. It had hardly cleared the harbour when
the ship's side struck on a rock, and in an instant it sank beneath the
waves. One terrible cry, ringing through the silence of the night, was
heard by the royal fleet; but it was not till the morning that the fatal
news reached the king. Stern as he was, Henry fell senseless to the
ground, and rose never to smile again. He had no other son, and the
circle of his foreign foes closed round him the more fiercely that
William, the son of his captive brother Robert, was now his natural heir.
Henry hated William while he loved his own daughter Maud, who had been
married to the Emperor Henry the Fifth, but who had been restored by his
death to her father's court. The succession of a woman was new in English
history; it was strange to a feudal baronage. But when all hope of issue
from a second wife whom he wedded was over Henry forced priests and
nobles to swear allegiance to Maud as their future mistress, and
affianced her to Geoffry the Handsome, the son of the one foe whom he
dreaded, Count Fulk of Anjou.

[Sidenote: Anjou]

The marriage of Matilda was but a step in the wonderful history by which
the descendants of a Breton woodman became masters not of Anjou only, but
of Touraine, Maine, and Poitou, of Gascony and Auvergne, of Aquitaine and
Normandy, and sovereigns at last of the great realm which Normandy had
won. The legend of the father of their race carries us back to the times
of our own AElfred, when the Danes were ravaging along Loire as they
ravaged along Thames. In the heart of the Breton border, in the
debateable land between France and Britanny, dwelt Tortulf the Forester,
half-brigand, half-hunter as the gloomy days went, living in free
outlaw-fashion in the woods about Rennes. Tortulf had learned in his
rough forest school "how to strike the foe, to sleep on the bare ground,
to bear hunger and toil, summer's heat and winter's frost, how to fear
nothing save ill-fame." Following King Charles the Bald in his struggle
with the Danes, the woodman won broad lands along Loire, and his son
Ingelger, who had swept the northmen from Touraine and the land to the