The importance of this latter marriage lay in the fact that Prince William had died in the intervening space, and that Matilda--a widowed princess whose first husband had been the Emperor Henry V.--was now the King of England's sole heiress. The end of her brother had been strange and tragic: he was following his father from Normandy to England, when a drunken skipper ran his vessel upon the reef of Catteville, only five miles from the Norman shore. The prince was hurried by his followers into the only boat that the ship possessed, and might have escaped, had he not seen that his half-sister, the Countess of Perche,[11] had been left behind. He bade the oarsmen put back, but when they reached the ship, a crowd of panic-stricken passengers sprang down into the boat and swamped it. The prince was drowned, and with him his half-brother Richard, his half-sister the Countess of Perche, the Earl of Chester, and many of the chief persons of the realm. Only one sailor-lad survived to tell the sad tale of the White Ship. When the news of the death of his only legitimate son reached the king, he was prostrated by it for many days, and it was said that he was never seen to smile again, though he lived for fifteen years after the disaster. But, if the chronicles speak true, the death of William was more of a loss to his father than to the realm, for they report him to have been a proud and cruel youth, who bid fair to reproduce some of the evil qualities of his uncle William Rufus. Henry was determined that his realm should pass at his death to his daughter Matilda, and not to any of his nephews, the sons of William the Conqueror's daughters. But he knew that it would be a hard matter to secure her succession, for England had never been ruled by a queen-regnant, and it was very doubtful if the Great Council would elect a woman. Moreover, the barons grudged that she should have been married to a foreign count, for they had hoped that the king would have given her hand to one of his own earls. Henry endeavoured to support Matilda's cause by constraining all the chief men of the realm, and his own kinsfolk, to take an oath to choose her as queen after his death. But he well knew that oaths sworn under compulsion are lightly esteemed, and must have foreseen that on his death his daughter would have great difficulty in asserting her claims. [Sidenote: =Complete conquest of South Wales.--Scotland.=]