But among all the pilgrims of those ages the supreme figure is that of Charlemagne, the giant in heart and mind and body who declared that he only ruled to extend the reign of Christ on earth, and in his will left to his successors, as the most precious part of their heritage, the privilege of defending and sustaining the Church. He had passed away forty years before Ethelwulf brought his little son to Rome, but his greatness lived after him and none can doubt that Alfred pondered his wise laws and strove to imitate the wonderful combination of strength and justice and mercy of which he set the example. I saw his crown, in the Ambras collection at Vienna, a huge straight band of gold, large enough to slip over an ordinary man’s head and rest on his shoulders, heavy with barbaric jewels, big as plover’s eggs, set in its circle. This was, I think, the one he brought to Rome, when having, as he put it, “with the help of God conquered the world,” he came to ask St. Leo III to crown him and confirm his dominions. The portraits of him show us a man indeed eight feet tall, with a long face, light brown beard, and big anxious eyes—eyes that give one a glimpse of the great mind behind, ever asking itself if there were any of all the things that Heaven had asked of him left undone. One fault of his early life has been so often cast up at his memory that it is but right to mention it. When he was twenty-eight or twenty-nine, his mother, Bertrade, a Greek, persuaded him, apparently on the grounds of some irregularity in the marriage, to repudiate his queen, Himiltrude, and espouse another, of her choosing, called Hermengarde. The reigning Pope, Stephen IV, on learning of this action, reprimanded Charlemagne sharply and commanded him to send away Hermengarde and recall Himiltrude, which command the monarch obeyed, the second wife having held her place barely a year. After Himiltrude’s death he made Liutgarde his queen; she also died, and Charlemagne married again, more than once, but never gave the state and title of queen to any woman after Liutgarde’s death. He has been accused of having more than one wife at a time, but the most profound and impartial students of history declare that the case of Himiltrude and Hermengarde does not constitute bigamy and that there is no shadow of support for the calumny in the contemporary chronicles.