However, on his arrival, he at first only amused himself with conducting his bride through his dukedom, and being feasted at every castle. When two knights of Maine came to tell him that Helie de la Flèche was besieging their castles, he carelessly thanked them for their fidelity, but told them he had rather gain a kingdom, than a county, and so that they should make the best terms they could. Sybilla’s dowry enabled Robert to raise a considerable army, and he had likewise the support of most of the barons whose estates lay both in Normandy and England, and who therefore preferred that the two states should be united; whereas those who had only domains in England held with Henry, wishing to be free from the elder and more powerful nobility of Normandy. The Anglo-Saxons were for Henry, who had relieved them from some of their sufferings, and had won their favor by his marriage, which connected him with the Etheling. Edith, the eldest daughter of the good Queen Margaret, had remained with her aunt Christina in the Abbey of Wilton, after her brother had been made King of Scotland. She was like her mother in many respects; and her aunt wished to devote her to the cloister, and secure her from the cruel sorrows her mother had endured, under the black veil that she already wore, like the professed nuns, to shield her from the insults of the Norman knights, or their attempts to secure a princess as a bride. But Edith remembered that her father had once said that he destined her to be a queen, and not a nun. She recollected how her mother had moulded her court, and been loved and honored there, and her temper rebelled against the secluded life in the convent, so much that, in a girlish fit of impatience, she would, when her aunt was out of sight, tear off her veil and trample upon it. At length the tidings came that Henry, the new King of England, wooed the Princess of Scotland for his bride. A marriage of policy it evidently was; for, unlike the generous love that had caused Malcolm to espouse the friendless exile Margaret, Henry was a perjured usurper, and dark stories were told of his conduct in Normandy. Christina strongly and vehemently opposed the marriage, as the greatest calamity that could befall her niece: she predicted that, if Edith persisted in it, only misery could arise from it; and when she found her determined, tried to prove her to be already bound by the promises of a nun.