The quarrel had now assumed an aspect far more threatening to Henry; but it was not till the middle of the following summer that the war began in earnest. Its first honours were won by the count of Anjou, in the capture of La Motte-Gautier, a fortress on the Cenomannian border.[576] In September the count of Flanders was mortally wounded in a skirmish near Eu;[577] Louis and Fulk had however more useful allies in the Norman baronage, whose chiefs were nearly all either openly or secretly in league with them. Almeric of Montfort, who claimed the county of Evreux, was the life and soul of all their schemes. In October the city of Evreux was betrayed into his hands;[578] and this disaster was followed by another at Alençon. Henry had granted the lands of Robert of Bellême to Theobald of Blois; Theobald, with his uncle’s permission, made them over to his brother Stephen; and Stephen at once began to shew in his small dominions the same incapacity for keeping order which he shewed afterwards on a larger scale in England. His negligence brought matters at Alençon to such a pass that the outraged citizens called in the help of the count of Anjou, admitted him and his troops by night into the town, and joined with him in blockading the castle.[579] Stephen meanwhile had joined his uncle and brother at Séez. On receipt of the evil tidings, the two young counts hurried back to Alençon, made an unsuccessful attempt to revictual the garrison, and then tried to surround the Angevin camp, which had been pitched in a place called “the Park.” A long day’s fighting, in which the tide seems to have been turned at last chiefly by the valour of Fulk himself, ended in an Angevin victory and won him the surrender of Alençon.[580]

The following year was for Henry an almost unbroken series of reverses and misfortunes, and in 1119 he was compelled to seek peace with Fulk. Their treaty was ratified in June by the marriage of William the Ætheling and Matilda of Anjou; Fulk made an attempt to end the Cenomannian difficulty by settling Maine upon his daughter as a marriage-portion,[581] and gave up Alençon on condition that Henry should restore it to the dispossessed heir, William Talvas.[582] Henry had now to face only the French king and the traitor barons. With the latter he began at once by firing the town of Evreux.[583] Louis, on receiving these tidings from Almeric of Montfort, assembled his troops at Etampes and marched upon Normandy. In the plain of Brenneville, between Noyon and Andely, he was met by Henry with the flower of his English and Norman forces. Louis, in the insane bravado of chivalry, disdained to get his men into order before beginning the attack, and he thereby lost the day. The first charge, made by eighty French knights under a Norman traitor, William Crispin, broke against the serried ranks of the English fighting on foot around their king; all the eighty were surrounded and made prisoners; and the rest of the French army was put to such headlong flight that, if the Norman tale can be true, out of nine hundred knights only three were found dead on the field. Louis himself, unhorsed in the confusion, escaped alone into a wood where he lost his way, and was finally led back to Andely by a peasant ignorant of his rank.[584] In bitter shame he went home to Paris to seek comfort and counsel of Almeric, who, luckily for both, had had no share in this disastrous expedition. By Almeric’s advice a summons was issued to all bishops, counts, and other persons in authority throughout the realm, bidding them stir up their people, on pain of anathema, to come and help the king. The plan seems to have had much the same result as a calling-out of the “fyrd” in England, and the host which it brought together inflicted terrible ravages upon Normandy. In October Louis sought help in another quarter. Pope Calixtus had come to hold a council at Reims; the ecclesiastical business ended, he had to listen to a string of appeals in all sorts of causes, and the first appellant was the king of France, who came before the Pope in person and set forth a detailed list of complaints against Henry. The archbishop of Rouen rose to defend his sovereign, but the council refused to hear him. Calixtus, however, was on too dangerous terms with Henry of Germany to venture upon anathematizing his father-in-law, Henry of England; and in a personal interview at Gisors, in November, the English king vindicated himself to the Pope’s complete satisfaction. The tide had turned once more. Almeric had been won over by a grant of the coveted honour of Evreux; and his defection from Louis was followed by that of all the other rebel Normans in rapid succession. William the Clito—as Duke Robert’s son is called, to distinguish him from his cousin William the Ætheling—was again driven into exile, with his faithful brother-in-law still at his side; a treaty was arranged between Henry and Louis; all castles were to be restored, all captives freed, and all wrongs forgiven and forgotten.[585]

We seem to be reading the story of Fulk Nerra over again as we are told how his great-grandson, as soon as peace seemed assured and he was reconciled to all his neighbours, desired also by penance for his sins to become reconciled to God, and leaving his dominions in charge of his wife and their two little sons, set out on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.[586] The “lord of three cities,”[587] however, could not leave his territories to take care of themselves as the Black Count seems to have done; the regency of his boys was merely nominal, for the eldest of them was but seven years old; and though their mother, the daughter of Elias, may well have been a wise and courageous woman, it was no light matter thus to leave her alone with the rival kings on each side of her. To guard against all dangers, therefore, Fulk again formally commended the county of Maine to King Henry as overlord during his own life, and bequeathed it to his son-in-law the Ætheling in case he should not return.[588] Two months before his departure, the cathedral of Le Mans, which had just been rebuilt, was consecrated in his presence and that of his wife. At the close of the ceremony he took up his little son Geoffrey in his arms and placed him on the altar, saying with tears: “O holy Julian, to thee I commend my child and my land, that thou mayest be the defender and protector of both!”[589] The yearning which drew him literally to tread in his great-grandfather’s steps was too strong to be repressed; but he went,[590] it is clear, with anxious and gloomy forebodings; and before he reached his home again those forebodings were fulfilled. The treaty that had promised so well was scattered to the winds on November 25, 1120, by the death of William the Ætheling in the wreck of the White Ship.[591]

In that wreck perished not merely Fulk’s hopes for the settlement of Maine, but Henry’s hopes for the settlement of England and Normandy. Setting aside the father’s personal grief for the loss of his favourite child, the Ætheling’s death was the most terrible political blow that could have fallen upon Henry. All his hopes for the continuance of his work were bound up in the life of his son. The toils and struggles of twenty years would be little more than lost labour unless he could guard against two dangers which had been the bane of both England and Normandy ever since the Conqueror’s death:—a disputed succession to the English throne, and a separation between the insular and the continental dominions of the ducal house. In the person of William the Ætheling both dangers seemed provided against; if Henry lived but a few years more, there was every reason to expect that William, and William alone among the Conqueror’s surviving descendants, would be able to mount the English throne without opposition. On any accepted principle, his only possible competitor would have been his cousin and namesake the Clito. Neither people nor barons would have been likely to think for a moment of setting aside the son of their crowned king and queen—a king born in the land and a queen who represented the ancient blood-royal of England—for a landless, homeless stranger whose sole claim rested on the fact that by strict rule of primogeniture he was the heir male of the Conqueror; and, once master of England, William might fairly be expected to keep his hold upon Normandy as his father had done. The shipwreck of November 1120, however, left Henry suddenly face to face with the almost certain prospect of being succeeded in all his dominions by his brother’s son, his enemy, the rival of his lost boy, the one person of all others whose succession would be most repugnant alike to his feelings and to his policy. As soon as Henry himself was gone, the Clito would have positively no competitor; for of all Henry’s surviving children, the only one who had any legal rights was a daughter. The future of Henry’s policy had hung upon the thread of a single life, and now the silver cord was loosed.

The Ætheling’s child-widow was in England: on that sad night she had crossed with her father-in-law instead of her husband, and thus escaped sharing the latter’s fate. Fulk at once sent to demand his daughter back;[592] but Henry was unwilling to part from her, and kept her constantly with him as if she were his own child, till the little girl herself begged to see her own parents again, and was allowed to return to Angers.[593] Henry seems really to have clung to her as a sort of legacy from his dead son; but, to Fulk’s great indignation, he kept her dowry as well as herself.[594] An embassy sent to England at Christmas 1122—apparently after her return to Anjou—came back without success after a delay of several months and a stormy parting from the king.[595] The most important part of the dowry however was still in Fulk’s own hands. His settlement of Maine upon William and Matilda and their possible posterity was annulled by William’s death; Fulk was once more free to dispose of the county as he would. Regarding all ties with Henry as broken, and urged at once by Almeric of Montfort and Louis of France, he offered it, with the hand of his second daughter Sibyl, to William the Clito.[596]

To the threatening attitude of France and Anjou was added, as a natural consequence, a conspiracy among the Norman barons, headed by the arch-plotter Almeric and the young Count Waleran of Meulan, a son of Henry’s own familiar friend. Their scheme, planned at a meeting held in September at the Croix-Saint-Leuffroy, was discovered by the king; he marched at once upon Waleran’s castle of Pontaudemer, and took it after a six weeks’ siege, during which he worked in the trenches as hard as any young soldier. This success was counterbalanced by the loss of Gisors, which was taken and sacked by Almeric; Henry retaliated by seizing Evreux. Advent and a stormy winter checked the strife; one battle in the spring put an end to it. On March 25, 1124, the rebels were met at Bourgthéroulde by Ralf of Bayeux, who commanded at Evreux for King Henry; despite their superior numbers, they were completely defeated, and Waleran was taken prisoner.[597] His capture was followed by the surrender of his castles; Almeric, who had as usual escaped, again made his peace with Henry; and the Clito’s cause, forsaken by his Norman partizans, was left almost wholly dependent on the support of Anjou.[598] Meanwhile Henry had found an ally in his son-in-law and namesake the Emperor, and in August France was threatened with a German invasion. Louis seized the consecrated banner—the famous Oriflamme—which hung above the high altar in the abbey of S. Denis, and hurried off with it, as Geoffrey Martel had once ridden forth with the standard of S. Martin of Tours, to meet the foe. But the invasion came to an unexpected end. For some reason which is not explained, the Emperor turned suddenly homeward without striking a blow.[599]

The English king found a more useful friend in the Pope than in the Emperor. By dint of threats, promises and bribes, he persuaded the court of Rome to annul the marriage of Sibyl and the Clito on the ground of consanguinity.[600] Of their kinship there is no doubt;[601] but it was in exactly the same degree as the kinship between Henry’s own son and Sibyl’s sister, to whose marriage no objection had ever been raised. The Clito refused to give up his bride, and was thereupon excommunicated by the Pope;[602] Fulk publicly burnt the letter in which the legate insisted upon the dissolution of the marriage, singed the beards of the envoys who carried it, and put them in prison for a fortnight. The consequence was an interdict[603] which compelled him to submit; the new-married couple parted, and William the Clito became a wanderer once more.[604]

Next Christmas Henry struck his final blow at his nephew’s hopes of the succession. An old tradition which declared that whatsoever disturber of the realm of France was brought face to face with the might of S. Denis would die within a twelvemonth was fulfilled in the person of the Emperor Henry V.[605] His widow, the only surviving child of Henry of England and the “Good Queen Maude,” was summoned back to her father’s court.[606] She came not without regret, for she had dwelt from childhood among her husband’s people, and was held by them in great esteem. The dying Emperor had no child to take his place. He had committed his sceptre to his consort;[607] and some of the princes of Lombardy and Lorraine took this symbolical bequest in such earnest that they actually followed Matilda over sea to demand her back as their sovereign.[608] But King Henry had other plans for his daughter. At the midwinter assembly of 1126–1127 he made the barons and prelates of England swear that in case of his death without lawful son they would acknowledge her as Lady of England and Normandy.[609]

The first result of this unprecedented step was that the king of France set himself to thwart it by again taking up the cause of William the Clito, offering him, as compensation for the loss of Sibyl and Maine, a grant of the French Vexin and a bride whom not even Rome could make out to be his cousin—Jane of Montferrat, half-sister to Louis’s own queen.[610] Two months later the count of Flanders was murdered at Bruges. He was childless; the king of France adjudged his fief to William the Clito as great-grandson of Count Baldwin V., and speedily put him in possession of the greater part of the county.[611] Henry’s daring scheme now seemed all but hopeless. His only chance was to make peace with some one at least of his adversaries; and the one whom he chose was not the king of France, but the count of Anjou. He saw—and Fulk saw it too—that until the question about Maine was settled there could be no lasting security, and that it could only be settled effectually by the union of all conflicting claims in a single hand. For such an union the way was now clear. The heir of Anjou was growing up to manhood; the chosen successor of Henry was a childless widow. Regardless of his promise not to give his daughter in marriage to any one out of the realm[612]—regardless of the scorn of both Normans and English,[613] of the Empress’s own reluctance,[614] and also of the kindred between the houses of Normandy and Anjou—Henry sent Matilda over sea shortly after Pentecost 1127 under the care of her half-brother Earl Robert of Gloucester and Count Brian of Britanny, who were charged with instructions to the archbishop of Rouen to make arrangements for her marriage with Geoffrey Plantagenet, eldest son of the count of Anjou. In the last week of August the king himself followed them;[615] at the following Whitsuntide he knighted Geoffrey at Rouen with his own hand;[616] and eight days later Geoffrey and Matilda were wedded by the bishop of Avranches in the cathedral church of S. Julian at Le Mans.[617]

It was a triumphant day for Fulk; but more triumphant still was the day when he and Geoffrey brought the new countess home to Angers. A large part of the barons and prelates who filled S. Julian’s minster on the wedding-day were Normans who in their inmost souls viewed with mingled rage and shame what they held to be the degradation of the Norman ducal house; a large part of the crowd who with their lips cheered the bridal procession as it passed through the streets of Le Mans were all the while cursing in their hearts the Angevin foe of Normandy.[618] But in Fulk’s own capital the rejoicings were universal and unalloyed. Many a brilliant match had been made by the house of Anjou, from that wedding with the heiress of Amboise which had been the beginning of its founder’s fortunes, down to Fulk’s own marriage, only seventeen years ago, with Aremburg of Maine; but never before had Black Angers welcomed such a bride as King Henry’s daughter. A writer of the next generation has left us a picture of Angers as it was in his days—days when the son of Geoffrey and Matilda was king of England and count of Anjou. In its main features that picture is almost as true a likeness now as it can have been seven hundred years ago, and by its help we can easily recall the scene of the bride’s homecoming. We can see the eager citizens swarming along the narrow, crooked streets that furrow the steep hill-side;—the clergy in their richest vestments assembling from every church in what is still, as it was then, emphatically a city of churches, and mustering probably on the very summit of the hill, in the open space before the cathedral—not the cathedral whose white twin spires now soar above all things around, the centre and the crown of Angers, but its Romanesque predecessor, crowned doubtless by a companion rather than a rival to the neighbouring dark tower of S. Aubin’s abbey, which now contrasts so vividly with the light pinnacles of S. Maurice. Thence, at a given signal, the procession streamed down with lighted tapers and waving banners to the northern gate of the city, and with psalms and hymns of rejoicing, half drowned in the shouting of the people and the clang of the bells overhead, led the new countess to her dwelling in the hall of Fulk the Black. It was Fulk who had made the first rude plans for the edifice of statesmanship which had now all but reached its last and loftiest stage. The unconscious praise of the Black Count was in every shout which beneath his palace-windows hailed in the person of his worthiest namesake and descendant the triumph of the house of Anjou.