Cabinet Portrait Gallery of British Worthies. Volume IAnonymous
History
Cabinet Portrait Gallery of British Worthies. Volume I
Anonymous
Great Britain -- Biography
It must apparently have been during this visit that Henry met with his
first mistress, so famous in song and story, the beautiful Rosamund de
Clifford. Of the two sons which she bore to him it is known that the
younger, Geoffrey, was older than Henry, his first-born by his queen,
and also that he was nearly twenty when he was made Bishop of Lincoln in
1173; he was therefore probably born in 1153; and his elder brother
William, surnamed Long-sword, who, having married the daughter and
heiress of the Earl of Salisbury, succeeded to the estates and title of
his father-in-law, may have been born in 1150. Both of them were
educated along with Henry's legitimate sons: William survived till 1226;
and Geoffrey, who resigned his bishopric in 1182, and was then made Lord
Chancellor by his father, to whom he steadily adhered in all fortunes,
became in the next reign Archbishop of York, but resigned that see also
in 1207, after holding it for about six years, and died in 1212. As for
their mother, who was daughter of Walter de Clifford, a baron of
Herefordshire, it is hardly necessary to say that there is no foundation
for the story of the labyrinth in which she was concealed by her royal
lover at Woodstock, and of her being discovered and forced to drink
poison by Queen Eleanor, which has made her so renowned in popular
romance. It is known that she spent her last years in the nunnery of
Godstow, near Oxford, which she was probably induced to select for her
retreat from her father having been a benefactor to that house: there
she is said to have lived a life of devotion and penitence; but all that
is known as to the time of her death is, that it took place before that
of her father, and he was still alive in 1165.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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