The captive princes were forthwith conveyed to England. Curthose was committed as a prisoner to the castle at Cardiff. Atheling was allowed to go at large, having no longer sufficient influence to endanger the king's throne. The captors, meanwhile, were well rewarded--Nigel de Albini having a grant of the lands forfeited by the great Robert de Moubray; while Ealdric, the king's chaplain, was promoted to the bishopric of Llandaff. At first Curthose was indulged with some measure of freedom, and allowed to walk along the banks of the Severn. For a time he seemed content with his lot. One day, however, his old spirit of adventure seized him, and, leaping on a horse, he broke from his keepers, and rode off at full speed. Unfortunately for him, his horse floundered in a morass, and having been secured, he was subjected to a rigorous durance. Some even say his eyes were put out. But, however that may have been, he remained in his prison at Cardiff till 1135, and then dying, was laid at rest in the cathedral of Gloucester, where his tomb is still to be seen. Edgar Atheling long survived his comrade-in-arms. Indeed, the life of the Saxon prince far exceeded the term of years ordinarily allotted to mortal man. Well-nigh a century after the battle of Hastings, and his coronation as king, when the first of our Plantagenet sovereigns was on the English throne, Atheling was still alive in England, in full possession of his faculties, and probably telling old stories of the Norman Conquest, and the First Crusade, and of William the Norman, and Rufus, and Curthose, and Beauclerc, and a hundred other warriors and statesmen who had gone the way of all flesh, and who were known only by name to the generation amid which he found himself lingering out the last years of his strange and diversified career. [Illustration] LV. [Illustration: English Archers.] AFTER TINCHEBRAY. When Curthose was defeated at Tinchebray and carried captive to the castle of Cardiff, the son whom he had been left by Sybil of Conversano was a little boy, known as William Clito. Not relishing the spectacle of so ambitious a prince as Henry Beauclerc figuring at once as King of England and Duke of Normandy, Louis, King of France--he who, in his earlier years, had quarrelled with the Conqueror's sons over their game of chess at Conflans--supported the pretensions of the son of Robert, and formed a league, with the object of putting him in possession of the duchy which Rolfganger had wrested from Charles the Simple. This, however, proved a much more difficult matter than Louis had anticipated. In fact, Beauclerc exerted himself with such effect that all efforts to diminish his power proved vain; and when, in 1132, William Clito, who had been invested with the earldom of Flanders, died of a wound received while besieging Alost, Louis gave up the struggle in despair.