Hugh Capet had taken the precaution to have his son crowned and consecrated during his own lifetime. Thus, on the demise of the former, Robert II found himself the undisputed king of France. The young monarch was one of those soft, domestic tempers which fate so often misplaces on a throne. He had married Bertha, the widow of the count of Blois, and was tenderly attached to her. The spouses had the misfortune to be distantly related, and Robert had been godfather to one of Bertha’s children by her former husband. The pope considered these circumstances sufficient to render the marriage incestuous; and he accordingly issued a command to Robert, desiring him to put away Bertha, under pain of excommunication. The popes had erected themselves into the censors of princes, and they were especially rigid in prohibiting the marriage of cousins. Such unions, they said, drew down divine vengeance, and were to be avoided, lest they should produce national calamities. Nor was this mere superstition on their part: it had its policy. It was chiefly by intermarriages that the great aristocracy at this time increased their territories and influence. Every obstacle thrown in the way of these alliances consequently checked the growth of their exorbitant might; every difficulty or scruple, being in the power of the pontiff alone to remove, brought considerable advantage, both in revenue and respect, to the holy see. Robert struggled for four or five years in behalf of his legitimate wife, against the terrors of excommunication; but he was at length compelled to yield, to chase poor Bertha from his presence, and to take another wife, Constance, the daughter of the count of Toulouse. With her, a woman of more spirit than her predecessor, Robert was less happy. The monarch dreaded her, and was even obliged to do his alms in secret for fear of her reproof. His chief amusement was the singing and composing of psalms, to which the musical taste of that age was confined. In a pilgrimage to Rome, Robert left a sealed paper on the altar of the apostles. The priesthood expected it to contain a magnificent donation, and were not little surprised and disappointed to find it to contain but a hymn of the monarch’s composition. The piety of Robert was most exemplary. He was anxious to save his subjects from the crime of perjury; the means he took were to abstract privately the holy relics from the cases which contained them, and on which people were sworn. He substituted an ostrich’s egg, as an innocent object, incapable of taking vengeance on the false swearer.