HIS SKILL IN ACQUIRING THE ENGLISH CROWN.

We

169

Skill dis

played in

on the

Crown;

trived to put himself forward in the eyes of the world as OHAP. VIII. a legal claimant and not as an unprovoked invader. must condemn the fraud, but we cannot help admiring the his claim skill, by which he made men believe that he was the lawful English heir of England, shut out from his inheritance by a perjured usurper. Never was a more subtle web of fallacy woven by the craft of man; never did diplomatic ingenuity more triumphantly obtain its end. He contrived to make an utterly unjust aggression bear the aspect, not only of righteous, but almost of holy, warfare. The wholesale spoiler of a Christian people contrived to win for himself something very like the position of a Crusader. And, landed on English ground, with no rights but those in his acquisition of his own sword, with no supporters but his own foreign of it; army, he yet contrived to win the English Crown with every circumstance of formal legality. He was elected, crowned, and anointed like his native predecessors, and he swore at the hands of an English Primate to observe the ancient laws of England. By force and by craft, but and in his subsequent with the outward pretext of law always put prominently governforward, he won, step by step, full possession of the whole ment. land; he deprived the nation one by one of its native leaders, and put in their places men of foreign birth and wholly dependent on himself. No prince ever more richly rewarded those to whom he owed his Crown, but no prince ever took more jealous care that they should never be able to bring his Crown into jeopardy. None but a man like him could have held down both conquerors and conquered, and have made his will the only law for Norman and Englishman alike. His consummate policy guarded against the dangers which he saw rife in every other country; he put the finishing stroke to the work of Ecgberht, and made England the most united kingdom in Western Christendom. Normans and Englishmen conspired against him, and called the fleets and hosts of Denmark to their

CHAP. VIII. help. But William held his own alike against revolters at home and against invaders from abroad. Norman and English rebels were alike crushed; sometimes the Dane was bought off, sometimes he shrank from the firm array Severity of with which the land was guarded. All opposition was his police. quelled by fire and sword; but when it was quelled, whenever and wherever William's rule was quietly accepted, his hand was heavy upon all smaller disturbers of the 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

The worst features of

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 England. all those darker features of his character which found

out in

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 pression. his model, and William's earliest days in England were far

itself, and

led him

into op

more promising than the earliest days of Cnut. At no time of his life does William appear as one of those tyrants who

1 Chron. Petrib. 1087. "Betwyx oðrum þingum nis na to forgytane þæt gode frið þe he macode on pisan 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, Elfred, 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.

171

actually delight in oppression, to whom the infliction of CHAP. VIII. 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 won that Crown without bloodshed. But, rather than not 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. 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 change for of the worse evil, he soon showed that he could do

He

when no wrong

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.

in his

character.

CHAP. VIII. policy commanded it, merely to supply means for his Formation personal pleasure. To lay waste Hampshire merely to of the New make a hunting-ground was a blacker crime than to

Forest.

Waltheof.

lay waste Northumberland to rid himself of a political 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 forDeath of 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,' 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 tunes of 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 loyal vassal, and within the walls of his own minster he could not find an undisputed grave.

misfor

his last

years.

William's

surnames :

the Great,

queror, the

Such was William the Great, a title which, in the mouths of his contemporaries, he shared with Alexander the Con- and with Charles, but which in later times has been Bastard. displaced by the misunderstood description of Conqueror.2 But before he had won any right to either of those lofty titles, William was already known by another surname drawn from the circumstances of his birth. Of all princely

1 See Palgrave, iii. 522.

2 On the surnames of William see Appendix T.

HIS ILLEGITIMATE BIRTH.

173

the Nor

as to mar

William.

lines the ducal house of Normandy was that which paid CHAP. VIII. least regard to the canonical laws of marriage or to the Laxity of special claims of legitimate birth.1 The Duchy had been man Dukes ruled by a whole succession of princes who either were riage and sprung from that irregular kind of union which was known legitimacy. as the Danish marriage,2 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 illegitithe son of Robert was emphatically William the Bastard, macy of and the name clave to him through life, on the Imperial throne of Britain no less than on the ducal chair of Normandy. For of 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

1 Rod. Glab. iv. 6. "Fuit enim usui a primo adventu ipsius gentis in Gallias, ut superius 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.

2 See vol. i. pp. 179, 205, 612.