To this end, supported by Louis, son of Charles the Bald, and by Judith, his beautiful and accomplished daughter, they called to their assistance the Flemish chief, Baldwin, son of Odoaker, a man of whose antecedents we know nothing. Judith was at this time one of the most remarkable women in Europe. Her career had been a strange and a stormy one. First married, in his old age and as his second wife, to our own King Ethelwolf of Wessex, it was to Judith, his step-mother, that Alfred the Great was indebted for his earliest training. When Ethelwolf died she had contracted an alliance with Ethelbald, a son of the old king by a former marriage, and upon his death in 860 she retired to Senlis, where she was living in queenly state under the sovereign protection of its bishops when Baldwin saw her, became enamoured of her beauty, and it would seem, with her own connivance, carried her off for his bride. King Charles was holding his Court at Soissons when the news of the abduction and of his son's confederacy with Guntfried and Gosfried reached his ears, and furious at the disregard shown to his parental authority, he acted, for once, with energy and decision. Summoning the nobles of his Court to his presence forthwith, he pronounced judgment against the culprits in accordance with civil law, next obtained from his complaisant bishops their excommunication, and marching in person against the two conspiring vassals, surprised them at Meaux, and forced them to lay down their arms. The plot then had for the moment failed. Baldwin and Judith fled to the Court of Lothaire, and from thence to Rome, where they sought the aid of that sturdy old Pontiff, Nicholas II. Nor did they seek in vain. 'Your liegeman Baldwin,' he wrote to the King of France, 'has taken refuge at the sacred threshold of the blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and with earnest prayers has approached our pontifical throne.