nor her brother,
nor any one of all the brave three hundred, noble or commoner, except we
three, has risen above the water!' Fitz-Stephen, with a ghastly face,
cried, 'Woe! woe, to me!' and sunk to the bottom.

The other two clung to the yard for some hours. At length the young
noble said faintly, 'I am exhausted, and chilled with the cold, and can
hold no longer. Farewell, good friend! God preserve you!' So, he
dropped and sunk; and of all the brilliant crowd, the poor Butcher of
Rouen alone was saved. In the morning, some fishermen saw him floating
in his sheep-skin coat, and got him into their boat--the sole relater of
the dismal tale.

For three days, no one dared to carry the intelligence to the King. At
length, they sent into his presence a little boy, who, weeping bitterly,
and kneeling at his feet, told him that The White Ship was lost with all
on board. The King fell to the ground like a dead man, and never, never
afterwards, was seen to smile.

But he plotted again, and promised again, and bribed and bought again, in
his old deceitful way. Having no son to succeed him, after all his pains
('The Prince will never yoke us to the plough, now!' said the English
people), he took a second wife--ADELAIS or ALICE, a duke's daughter, and
the Pope's niece. Having no more children, however, he proposed to the
Barons to swear that they would recognise as his successor, his daughter
Matilda, whom, as she was now a widow, he married to the eldest son of
the Count of Anjou, GEOFFREY, surnamed PLANTAGENET, from a custom he had
of wearing a sprig of flowering broom (called Genet in French) in his cap
for a feather. As one false man usually makes many, and as a false King,
in particular, is pretty certain to make a false Court, the Barons took
the oath about the succession of Matilda (and her children after her),
twice over, without in the least intending to keep it. The King was now
relieved from any remaining fears of William Fitz-Robert, by his death in
the Monastery of St. Omer, in France, at twenty-six years old, of a pike-
wound in the hand. And as Matilda gave birth to three sons, he thought
the succession to the throne secure.

He spent most of the latter part of his life, which was troubled by
family quarrels, in Normandy, to be near Matilda. When he had reigned
upward of thirty-five years, and was sixty-seven years old, he died of an
indigestion and fever, brought on by eating, when he was far from we