After this there was peace for the rest of Charles’s life between him and the Danes. Hemming, the nephew and successor of Godofrid, was not strong enough to continue the aggressive policy of his uncle, and on Hemming’s death (812) there was a bloody civil war between his family and the rival dynasty of Harald. However, Charles wisely did not relax his naval preparations, but in the year 811 repaired to Boulogne in order to review the fleet which he had commanded to be assembled there from the various estuaries of his kingdom. Was it partly in remembrance of this event, that nearly a thousand years later, Napoleon, that great imitator of Charlemagne, caused his flotilla to assemble at Boulogne[66] for the long meditated, never accomplished, invasion of Britain? The last years of the great emperor’s life were saddened by a succession of domestic afflictions: but before describing them it will be well to give a glance at his family life in his happier middle age before these troubles fell upon him. As we have seen, Charles was five times married. Of his first wife Himiltrud, mother of the hunchback Pippin, we know nothing, save that, according to Pope Stephen’s account, she was “sprung from the very noble race of the Franks,” and that she must have either died or been divorced before 770, when he married the daughter of the Lombard king, who is by one writer called Desiderata, and by another Bertrada. She bore him no children, and on her divorce after something less than a year of matrimony, Charles married Hildegard, a noble Swabian lady, the best beloved of all his wives. Her life, though splendid, was not an easy one. She was only thirteen years old when she married the Frankish hero who was verging on thirty: she accompanied him on his campaigns and pilgrimages: she bore him nine children, and after twelve or thirteen years of wedlock she died on the 30th of April 783, and was buried at Metz in the chapel of St. Arnulf, her husband’s revered ancestor. From this marriage sprang all the three sons, Charles, Pippin, Louis, among whom Charlemagne hoped to divide his kingdom, also another son who died in infancy, and five daughters. The eldest of these daughters was that princess Hrotrud who learned Greek of Elissæus, and who so narrowly missed sharing the Byzantine throne. A few months after the death of Hildegard, Charles married (about October, 783) Fastrada, daughter of the Austrasian count Radolf, with whom he shared eleven years of married life, and whose baneful influence on his character and conduct is described to us by Einhard. She bore him two daughters (both of whom eventually became abbesses) but no son, and died on the 10th of August, 794, shortly after the great council of Frankfurt.