hings--though
they had hated him very cordially when he was alive.

The Earl of Flanders, who was at the head of the base conspiracy of the
King's undutiful sons and their foreign friends, took the opportunity of
the King being thus employed at home, to lay siege to Rouen, the capital
of Normandy. But the King, who was extraordinarily quick and active in
all his movements, was at Rouen, too, before it was supposed possible
that he could have left England; and there he so defeated the said Earl
of Flanders, that the conspirators proposed peace, and his bad sons Henry
and Geoffrey submitted. Richard resisted for six weeks; but, being
beaten out of castle after castle, he at last submitted too, and his
father forgave him.

To forgive these unworthy princes was only to afford them breathing-time
for new faithlessness. They were so false, disloyal, and dishonourable,
that they were no more to be trusted than common thieves. In the very
next year, Prince Henry rebelled again, and was again forgiven. In eight
years more, Prince Richard rebelled against his elder brother; and Prince
Geoffrey infamously said that the brothers could never agree well
together, unless they were united against their father. In the very next
year after their reconciliation by the King, Prince Henry again rebelled
against his father; and again submitted, swearing to be true; and was
again forgiven; and again rebelled with Geoffrey.

But the end of this perfidious Prince was come. He fell sick at a French
town; and his conscience terribly reproaching him with his baseness, he
sent messengers to the King his father, imploring him to come and see
him, and to forgive him for the last time on his bed of death. The
generous King, who had a royal and forgiving mind towards his children
always, would have gone; but this Prince had been so unnatural, that the
noblemen about the King suspected treachery, and represented to him that
he could not safely trust his life with such a traitor, though his own
eldest son. Therefore the King sent him a ring from off his finger as a
token of forgiveness; and when the Prince had kissed it, with much grief
and many tears, and had confessed to those around him how bad, and
wicked, and undutiful a son he had been; he said to the attendant
Priests: 'O, tie a rope about my body, and draw me out of bed, and lay me
down upon a bed of ashes, that I may die with prayers to God in a
repentant manner!' And so he died, at