Taillebois's warning about Ralph Guader and Waltheof had not been
needless. Ralph, as the most influential of the Bretons, was on no good
terms with the Normans, save with one, and that one of the most
powerful,--Fitz-Osbern, Earl of Hereford. His sister Ralph was to have
married; but William, for reasons unknown, forbade the match. The two
great earls celebrated the wedding in spite of William, and asked Waltheof
as a guest. And at Exning, between the fen and Newmarket Heath,--
"Was that bride-ale
Which was man's bale."
For there was matured the plot which Ivo and others had long seen brewing.
William had made himself hateful to all men by his cruelties and
tyrannies; and indeed his government was growing more unrighteous day by
day. Let them drive him out of England, and part the land between them.
Two should be dukes, the third king paramount.
"Waltheof, I presume, plotted drunk, and repented sober, when too late.
The wittol! He should have been a monk."
"Repented he has, if ever he was guilty. For he fled to Archbishop
Lanfranc, and confessed to him so much, that Lanfranc declares him
innocent, and has sent him on to William in Normandy."
"O kind priest! true priest! To send his sheep into the wolf's mouth."
"You forget, dear sire, that William is our king.
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