posing ceremony, “most reverently" holding the little empress in his arms. After the coronation young Maude was consigned to the care of the archbishop who had taken such reverend care of her, in order that her education might be completed; and, especially, "that she might be taught the Teutonic tongue, and to comport herself according to Teutonic usages." Nearly five years after, on the feast of Epiphany, 1115, the young empress was again conducted to Mentz, when the ceremony of marriage took place, and when a second time she was solemnly crowned.

Subsequently to this period, for a space of twelve years, we find no notice of her whatever from an answer sent to her by her father many years after, we learn that she accompanied her husband in his journeys to Rome, and, "once and again," was crowned by the pontiff himself. From an incidental notice, too, in Simeon of Durham, it appears that the emperor was much attached to his youthful bride; but these two slight notices comprize the whole of the information which can now be obtained. Enough, however, regarding her earlier life is recorded, to palliate very greatly those charges of indomitable pride, and impetuous self-will, which have been brought against the empress by every historian. Creatures of circumstances, as the very best and wisest of human beings in a great measure are, some excuse may surely be found for her who was emancipated from all controul of parents and teachers, at an age when education had scarcely commenced, and who was placed in the very centre

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of regal splendor, at the most susceptible period of life; for her, on whose infant finger the first potentate of Europe had placed the marriage-ring, and whose infant brow had been spanned by the diadem of the Cæsars.

Indeed, when we contemplate the injurious influences to which the empress Maude, during the first twenty-three years of her life, was subjected, although we may not be able wholly to vindicate her conduct, we shall be inclined rather to admire the good qualities which remained undestroyed, than to severely censure those evil ones, which, surrounded by such strong temptations to make self the centre, she could not but inevitably contract.

Even at the period when the imperial court shone in its most imposing splendor, men looked with undefined feelings of horror upon the emperor; for they remembered the perjury of the son, and his perfidious counsel to his too confiding father, and the mock judgment of the dignitaries of the Teutonic church, which wrested the sceptre from the grasp of that father to place it in the hands of the unnatural son. And popular recollection dwelt on each circumstance of the forced abdication of the hapless Henry IV.; on the feeling of imperial dignity which made him array himself in the proud insignia of his office, and dare the commissioners to deprive him of them; and on that passionate appeal to Heaven, when crown and mantle were alike torn away by the archbishops of Mayence and Cologne, "God all powerful, God of vengeance! do Thou avenge my cause." Surely, in the court of such a

monarch—one on whom each eye was fixed in anticipation of the just retribution of Heaven, and against whom the premature grave, to which grief had consigned the heart-broken father, sent up a voiceless but powerful cry for vengeance * ;-surely, in such a court, and in such companionship, ill could those lessons of moderation, and justice, and mercy be learnt which in after years Maude the empress so greatly needed.

At length, after nineteen years, the long delayed vengeance of Heaven overtook the parricide emperor; civil war broke out in the land—a war which, with all his resources, he was unable to quell. Still little might he have heeded outward troubles, had his mind been at ease; but conscience had resumed her long-forsaken empire, and, torn with remorse and unavailing sorrow for the part he had taken against his father, he expired at Utrecht on July 1st, 1125. This simple tale of retribution was not, however, sufficient for the marvel-loving chronicler; and therefore the wild and awful story was told, how one night, "the lights being extinguished, and the attendants away, the emperor arose from the imperial bed, and casting aside the royal garments, and clothing himself in woollen, quitted for ever his treasures, his empress, his empire, and departing barefooted from the palace, was never after seen."t

*The account of the infamous deposition of the emperor Henry V., as it is to be found in all the histories of Germany, needs not to be given here.

+ Iloveden.

As the emperor, Henry the Fifth, left no heir, he was succeeded by his nephew, Lotharius; and the empress, unable to gain possession of those fortresses which had been awarded to her as her dower, returned to her father, who was then in Normandy, bringing with her some portion of the late emperor's treasure, among which is particularly noticed the imperial crown, and "the incorrupted hand of James the apostle." This "incorrupted" relic Henry devoutly consigned to the convent of Reading; the crown he placed in his own treasury of Winchester. In Normandy the empress seems to have continued the part of the year 1125, and during the following until the close of August, when she accompanied her father to England. About this period we find Hildebert addressing to her some very graceful Latin verses, which may be found in his works.* In them, he eulogizes her person and manners, and exults that although one Maude, "the glory of womanhood" had been consigned to the grave, yet that her illustrious train of virtues survives in the daughter,-a poetical illusion, which succeeding events soon dispelled.

On the 1st of January of the subsequent year, Henry, disappointed in his hopes of a male heir to the crown, summoned a cour plenière at London, and caused all his lords, lay and spiritual, to take an oath of allegiance to his daughter, "unless he should have a son." This object being effected, the king, soon after, set sail to Normandy with his daughter and a few chosen lords; where he immediately commenced negotiations with Fulke, count * Page 1334.

of Anjou, for the marriage of the empress with his eldest son. An alliance with the daughter of Fulke, it will be remembered, had been formed by Henry's only son, William the Adeling, who had been lost in that disastrous wreck of the "White ship;" and the king, anxious to secure the friendly aid of so powerful a neighbour for his Norman possessions, determined, without loss of time, ere Fulke should return to Palestine to receive the hand of the princess Millicent and the reversionary right to the crown of Jerusalem, to complete his daughter's marriage with young Geoffrey Plantagenet. both her marriages, Maude the empress was considered by her father as the mere passive instrument for advancing his ambitious views. All considerations of suitability of age were therefore cast aside; and, as in the first instance the child of seven was betrothed to the husband of thirty, in her second marriage the woman of twenty-four was wedded to the boy of fifteen.

In

Ere this ill-assorted union took place, an agreement seems to have been entered into between the king and the count, that young Geoffrey, to whom his father had made over the county of Anjou, should have some share in the government of Normandy immediately upon his marriage with the empress. This agreement, however, was never fulfilled on the part of Henry, and thus foundation. was laid for those jealousies and hostilities on the part of Geoffrey, which embittered the old king's last days.

But no sad anticipations of future ill, or of future