ers.

This confidence might have put the false King to the blush, but it did
not. Pretending to be very friendly, he so surrounded his brother with
spies and traps, that Robert, who was quite in his power, had nothing for
it but to renounce his pension and escape while he could. Getting home
to Normandy, and understanding the King better now, he naturally allied
himself with his old friend the Earl of Shrewsbury, who had still thirty
castles in that country. This was exactly what Henry wanted. He
immediately declared that Robert had broken the treaty, and next year
invaded Normandy.

He pretended that he came to deliver the Normans, at their own request,
from his brother's misrule. There is reason to fear that his misrule was
bad enough; for his beautiful wife had died, leaving him with an infant
son, and his court was again so careless, dissipated, and ill-regulated,
that it was said he sometimes lay in bed of a day for want of clothes to
put on--his attendants having stolen all his dresses. But he headed his
army like a brave prince and a gallant soldier, though he had the
misfortune to be taken prisoner by King Henry, with four hundred of his
Knights. Among them was poor harmless Edgar Atheling, who loved Robert
well. Edgar was not important enough to be severe with. The King
afterwards gave him a small pension, which he lived upon and died upon,
in peace, among the quiet woods and fields of England.

And Robert--poor, kind, generous, wasteful, heedless Robert, with so many
faults, and yet with virtues that might have made a better and a happier
man--what was the end of him? If the King had had the magnanimity to say
with a kind air, 'Brother, tell me, before these noblemen, that from this
time you will be my faithful follower and friend, and never raise your
hand against me or my forces more!' he might have trusted Robert to the
death. But the King was not a magnanimous man. He sentenced his brother
to be confined for life in one of the Royal Castles. In the beginning of
his imprisonment, he was allowed to ride out, guarded; but he one day
broke away from his guard and galloped of. He had the evil fortune to
ride into a swamp, where his horse stuck fast and he was taken. When the
King heard of it he ordered him to be blinded, which was done by putting
a red-hot metal basin on his eyes.

And so, in darkness and in prison, many years, he thought of all his past
life, of the time he had wasted, of the