A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 1 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 499 pages of information about A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 1.

A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 1 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 499 pages of information about A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 1.

Though not so pious or so good as Robert, his son, Henry I., and his grandson, Philip I., were neither more energetic nor more glorious kings.  During their long reigns (the former from 1031 to 1060, and the latter from 1060 to 1108) no important and well-prosecuted design distinguished their government.  Their public life was passed at one time in petty warfare, without decisive results, against such and such vassals; at another in acts of capricious intervention in the quarrels of their vassals amongst themselves.  Their home-life was neither less irregular nor conducted with more wisdom and regard for the public interest.  King Robert had not succeeded in keeping his first wife, Bertha of Burgundy; and his second, Constance of Aquitaine, with her imperious, malevolent, avaricious, meddlesome disposition, reduced him to so abject a state that he never gave a gratuity to any of his servants without saying, “Take care that Constance know nought of it.”  After Robert’s death, Constance, having become regent for her eldest son, Henry I., forthwith conspired to dethrone him, and to put in his place her second son, Robert, who was her favorite.  Henry, on being delivered by his mother’s death from her tyranny and intrigues, was thrice married; but his first two marriages with two German princesses, one the daughter of the Emperor Conrad the Salic, the other of the Emperor Henry III., were so far from happy that in 1051 he sent into Russia, to Kieff, in search of his third wife, Anne, daughter of the Czar Yaroslaff the Halt.  She was a modest creature who lived quietly up to the death of her husband in 1060, and, two years afterwards, in the reign of her son Philip I., rather than return to her own country, married Raoul, count of Valois, who put away, to marry her, his second wife, Haqueney, called Eleonore.  The divorce was opposed at Rome before Pope Alexander II., to whom the archbishop of Rheims wrote upon the subject, “Our kingdom is the scene of great troubles.  The queen-mother has espoused Count Raoul, which has mightily displeased the king.  As for the lady whom Raoul has put away, we have recognized the justice of the complaints she has preferred before you, and the falsity of the pre-texts on which he put her away.”  The Pope ordered the count to take back his wife; Raoul would not obey, and was excommunicated; but he made light of it, and the Princess Anne of Russia, actually reconciled, apparently, to Philip I., lived tranquilly in France, where, in 1075, shortly after the death of her second husband, Count Raoul her signature was still attached to a charter side by side with that of the king her son.

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A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 1 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.