CHAP. VIII. peace of the world. Life, property, female honour, stood indeed but a small chance while the process of Conquest was going on, but, when William's work was fully accomplished, they were safer under him than they had ever been under England's native Kings. As the stern avenger of crime, even the conquered learned to bless him, and to crown his good deeds with a tribute of praise hardly inferior to that which waits on the name of his illustrious rival.1 Here then was a career through which none but one his charac- of the greatest of mankind could have passed successfully. ter brought But it was a career which brought out into full play The worst features of out in England. itself, and led him to oppression. all those darker features of his character which found but little room for their developement during his earlier His false reign in his native Duchy. There is no reason to believe position gradually that William came into England with any fixed determideveloped nation to rule otherwise in England than he had already ruled in Normandy. Cnut can hardly fail to have been his model, and William's earliest days in England were far more promising than the earliest days of Cnut. At no time of his life does William appear as one of those tyrants who actually delight in oppression, to whom the infliction of human suffering is really a source of morbid pleasure. But, if he took no pleasure in the infliction of suffering, it was at least a matter about which he was utterly reckless; he stuck at no injustice which was needed to carry out his purpose. His will was fixed, to win and to keep the Crown of England at all hazards. We may well believe that he would have been well pleased could he have 1 Chron. Petrib. 1087. 'Betwyx oðrum þingum nis na to forgytane þæt gode frið þe he macode on þisan lande, swa þæt án man þe himsylf aht wære mihte faran ofer his rice mid his bosum full goldes ungederad." This last is of course the same traditional formula which is used to set forth the good government of Eadwine, Ælfred, and others. The writer carries out the panegyric on William's strict police at some length. All this is of course praise of exactly the same kind as that bestowed on Godwine and Harold. See above, pp. 34, 40, and the passages there referred to. HIS FALSE POSITION IN ENGLAND. 173 won that Crown without bloodshed. But, rather than not CHAP. VIII. win it, he did not shrink from the guilt of carrying on a desolating war against a people who had never wronged him. We may well believe that, when he swore to govern his new subjects as well as they had been governed by their own Kings, it was his full purpose to keep his oath. That he acted on any settled scheme of uprooting the nationality, the laws, or the language of England is an exploded fable.' But he could not govern England as he had governed Normandy; he could not govern England as Cnut had governed England; he could not himself be as Cnut, neither could his Normans be as Cnut's Danes. He gradually found that there was no way for him to govern England save by oppressions, exactions, and confiscations, by the bondage or the death of the noblest of the land. He made the discovery, and he shrank not from its practical consequences. A reign which had begun with as good hopes as the reign of a foreign conqueror could begin with gradually changed into one of the most tremendous tyrannies on record. Northumberland was hard to be kept in order, and Northumberland was made a desert. This was the dictate of a relentless policy; but when General William had once set forth on the downward course of evil, he soon showed that he could do when no wrong policy commanded it, merely to supply means for his personal gratification. To lay waste Hampshire merely Formato make a hunting-ground was a blacker crime than to New lay waste Northumberland to rid himself of a political Forest. danger. He could still be merciful when mercy was not dangerous, but he had now learned to shed innocent blood without remorse, if its shedding seemed to add safety to his throne. The repeated revolts of Eadgar were for 1 I conceive that this idea owes its prevalence mainly to the false Ingulf; still we have to account for the notion presenting itself to the mind of the forger. change for the worse in his character tion of the Death of tunes of his last CHAP. VIII. given as often as they occurred; but Waltheof, caressed, flattered, promoted, was sent to the scaffold on the first convenient pretext. It is hardly superstitious to point out, alike with ancient and with modern authorities,1 that the New Forest became a spot fatal to William's house, and that, after the death of Waltheof, his old prosperity Crimes and forsook him. Nothing indeed occurred to loosen his hold misfor- on England; but his last years were spent in bickerings with his unworthy son, and in a petty border warfare, in which the Conqueror had, for the first time, to undergo defeat. At last he found his death-wound in an inglorious quarrel, in the personal commission of cruelties which aroused the indignation of his own age; and the mighty King and Conqueror, forsaken by his servants and children, had to owe his funeral rites to the voluntary charity of a loyal vassal, and within the walls of his own minster he could not find an undisputed grave. years. William's surnames: Such was William the Great, a title which, in the the Great, mouths of his contemporaries, he shared with Alexander and with Charles, but which in later times has been Bastard. displaced by the misunderstood description of Conqueror. But, before he had won any right to either of those lofty the Conqueror, the the Nor titles, William was already known by another surname Laxity of drawn from the circumstances of his birth. Of all princely man Dukes lines the ducal house of Normandy was that which paid as to mar- least regard to the canonical laws of marriage or to the riage and legitimacy. special claims of legitimate birth.3 The Duchy had been 1 See Palgrave, iii. 522. 2 On the surnames of William, see Appendix M. 3 Rod. Glab. iv. 6. "Fuit enim usui a primo adventu ipsius gentis in Gallias, ut superiùs pernotavimus, ex hujusmodi concubinarum commixtione illorum Principes exstitisse." He goes on, if not to justify, at least to palliate, the practice, by the examples of the patriarch Jacob and the Emperor Constantius. British patriotism would perhaps not have endured that the mother of Constantine should be dragged down to the level of the mother of William. HIS ILLEGITIMATE BIRTH. illegiti 175 ruled by a whole succession of princes who either were CHAP. VIII. sprung from that irregular kind of union which was known as the Danish marriage,' or else were the sons of concubines raised to the rank of wives after the birth of their children. But, among all this brood of spurious or irregular heirs, the greatest of the whole line was the one to whom the reproach, if reproach it was deemed, of illegitimate birth clave the most abidingly. William Special the son of Robert was emphatically William the Bastard, macy of and the name clave to him through life, on the Im- William. perial throne of Britain no less than on the ducal chair of Normandy. For, of all the whole line, William was the one whose bastardy was the most undoubted, the least capable of being veiled under ambiguous and euphemistic phrases. The position of Popa and Sprota was a doubtful one; it may, according to Danish ideas, have been perfectly honourable. The children of Richard and Gunnor were, according to the law recognized everywhere but in our own country, legitimated by the subsequent marriage of their parents. But we may doubt whether the notion of the Danish marriage survived as late as the days of Robert, and it is certain that no ecclesiastical sacrament ever gave William a right, according to the law of the Church, to rank as the lawful son of his father. The mother of William is never spoken of in the respectful terms which we find applied to the mother of Richard the Fearless. Throughout the whole of Duke Robert's life, she remained in the position of an acknowledged mistress, and her illustrious son came forth before the world with no other description than the Bastard. William's The irregular birth of one so renowned naturally became Story of the subject of romance and legend. And the spot on birth. which William first saw the light is one which seems to See vol. i. p. 203. 2 See vol. i. p. 232. Falaise. CHAP. VIII, call for the tribute of the legend-maker as its natural due. Position of The town of Falaise, in the Diocese of Seez, is one of the most famous spots both in the earlier and in the later history of Normandy, and none assuredly surpasses it in the striking character of its natural position. Lying on the edge of the great forest of Gouffer, the spot had its natural attractions for a line of princes renowned, even above others of their time, for their devotion to the sports of the field. The town itself lies in a sort of valley between two eminences. The great Abbey, a foundation of a later date than the times which we are concerned with, has utterly vanished; but two stately parish churches, one of them dating from the days of Norman independence, bear witness to the ecclesiastical splendour of the place. Passing Historical by them, the traveller gradually ascends to the gate of tions of the the Castle, renowned alike in the wars of the twelfth, the fifteenth, and the sixteenth centuries. A tall round tower still bears the name of the great Talbot, the guardian of 1417-1450. the castle in the great English war, and who afterwards won a still higher fame as the last champion of the ancient freedom of Aquitaine against the encroachments of the Kings of Paris.1 But this witness of comparatively recent strife is but an excrescence on the original structure. It is the addition made by an English King to one of the noblest works of his Norman forefathers. The Castle where legend fixes the birth of William of Normandy, and where history fixes the famous homage of William of Scotland, is a vast donjon of the eleventh or twelfth century.2 One of associa Castle. 1453. 1175. 1 For the sieges of Falaise in 1417 and 1450, see Monstrelet, i. 263 and iii. 30 b (ed. Paris 1595). Talbot was not actually present during the defence against the French King. * More probably, I think, of the twelfth than of the eleventh. Not that I at all think the building of such a castle to have been impossible in the eleventh century, but because it seems likely that Falaise was one of the castles which were destroyed and rebuilt in the wars of William and his successors. This point is well put by M. Ruprich-Robert, the architect |