The death of Sigibert changed the whole aspect of affairs in Gaul, and raised his assassin from the depth of despair to the height of fortune. The Austrasian army dispersed when its commander was slain, and the Neustrian counts flocked to Tournay to do homage again to Chilperich. Queen Brunhildis, who lay at Paris with Sigibert’s infant son and heir Childebert, was seized and imprisoned by the partisans of the Neustrian king. Her little four-year-old son only escaped from his uncle’s clutches by being let down in a basket from his mother’s prison window, and received by a faithful adherent, who rode away with him to Metz. If Chilperich had laid hands on the boy, the Austrasian royal house would have been ended in the promptest way. The East-Frankish counts and dukes, when the news of Sigibert’s death reached them, resolved not to submit to his murderer, but to take a step unheard of heretofore in the annals of the Merovings. When they found that the boy Childebert had escaped, they bound his father’s diadem about his brows, and saluted him as king. Hitherto the Franks had always lived under the strong hands of a grown man, and the provincial governors had been as powerless as the meaner people under the autocratic sway of the ruler; but in the long minority that would follow the accession of a four-year-old child, they found their opportunity for lowering the royal power, and dividing many of its privileges among themselves. From this point begins the degradation of the kingly office, which was to be the rule henceforth among them; and the counts and dukes, as well as the great officers of the palace, were destined to acquire, in the early years of Childebert, a control over the central power which they had never hitherto possessed. Meanwhile the fate of the little king’s mother, Brunhildis, had been a strange one. Chilperich had seized her treasures, and thrown her into prison at Rouen. [Sidenote: Adventures of Brunhildis.] There she caught the eye of Merovech, her captor’s eldest surviving son,[25] who was charged by his father with the command of an army destined to attack the Austrasian king’s dominions beyond the Loire. Merovech was so infatuated by the beauty of the captive queen that, braving his father’s displeasure, he delivered her from her dungeon, and induced Praetextatus, bishop of Rouen, to marry them in his cathedral. King Chilperich immediately flew to Rouen in great wrath, and at his approach the newly-married pair took sanctuary under the bishop’s protection. After some hesitation the king of Neustria promised to spare their lives, but, when his son surrendered himself, he took him away to Soissons, and shortly afterwards tonsured him, and compelled him to become a monk. Brunhildis escaped to Austrasia, whither her husband strove to follow her. He fled from his monastery, and had almost reached the frontier, when the emissaries of his stepmother, Fredegundis, caught him, and murdered him (577). Footnote 25: