though one which was to be fought, not with bow and spear, but with the weapons of legal and canonical disputation. Whether he had already begun to lift up his eyes to the succession of his childless cousin, whether he had already formed the hope that the grandson of the despised Tanner might fill, not only the ducal chair of Normandy, but the Imperial throne of Britain, is a question to which we can give no certain answer. But there can be little doubt that, soon after this time, the idea was forcibly brought before his mind. And, with characteristic pertinacity, when he had once dreamed of the prize, he never slackened in its pursuit till he could at last call it his own. Normandy was now at rest, enjoying the rest of hard-won' peace and prosperity. England was also at rest, if we may call it rest to lie prostrate in a state of feverish stillness. She rested as a nation rests whose hopes are crushed, whose leaders are torn from her, which sees for the moment no chance of any doom but hopeless submission to the stranger. It was at this crisis in the history of the two lands (1051) that the Duke of the Normans appeared as a guest at the court of England. Visits of mere friendship and courtesy among sovereign princes were rare in those days. The rulers of the earth seldom met, save when a superior lord required the homage of a princely vassal, or when Princes came together, at the summons of the temporal or the spiritual chief of Christendom, to discuss the common affairs of nations and churches. Such visits as those which William and Eustace of Boulogne paid at this time to Eadward were, in England at least, altogether novelties. And they were novelties which were not likely to be acceptable to the national English mind. We may be sure that every patriotic Englishman looked with an evil eye on any French-speaking prince who made his way to the English court. Men would hardly be inclined to draw the distinction which justice required to be drawn between Eustace of Boulogne and William of Rouen. And yet, under any other circumstances, England, or any other land, might have been proud to welcome such a guest as the already illustrious Duke. Under unparalleled difficulties he had displayed unrivalled powers; he had shone alike in camp and in council; he had triumphed over every enemy; he had used victory with moderation; he was fast raising his Duchy to a high place among European states, and he was fast winning for himself the highest personal place among European Princes. Already, at the age of twentythree, the Duke of the Normans might have disputed the palm of personal merit even with the great prince who then filled the throne of the world. He had, on a narrower field, displayed qualities which fairly put him on a level with Henry himself. But in English eyes William was simply the most powerful, and therefore the most dangerous, of the greedy Frenchmen who every WILLIAM'S VISit to ́england. 195 day flocked in greater numbers to the court of the English King. William came with a great following; he tarried awhile in his cousin's company; he went away loaded with gifts and honours.1 And we can hardly doubt that he also went away encouraged by some kind of promise, or at any rate by some kind of implied hope, of succeeding to the Kingdom which he now visited as a stranger. There was indeed everything to raise the hope in his breast. He landed in England; he journeyed to the court of England; his course lay through what were in truth the most purely English parts of England; but the sons of the soil lay crushed without a chief. On the throne sat a King of his own kin, English in nothing but in the long succession of glorious ancestors of whom he showed himself so unworthy. His heart was Norman; his speech was French; men of foreign birth alone were welcome at his court; men of foreign birth were predominant in his councils. The highest places of the Church were already filled by Norman Prelates. The Norman Primate of all England, the choicest favourite of the King, the man at whose bidding he was ready to believe that black was white, would doubtless be the first to welcome his native sovereign to his province and diocese. The great city which was fast becoming the capital of England, the city beneath whose walls Eadward had fixed his chosen dwelling, had been made to own the spiritual rule of another Norman priest. A short journey, a hunting-party or a pilgrimage, would bring King and Duke within the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of a third Norman, the unworthy stranger who disgraced the episcopal throne of Dorchester. Among the temporal chiefs of the Kingdom there was already one French Earl, kinsman alike of William and of Eadward, who would not fail in showing honour to the most renowned of his speech and kindred. Norman Stallers, Treasurers, personal officers of every kind, swarmed around the person of the King. Norman Thegns were already scattered through the land, and were already filling the land with those threatening castles, of which the wise policy of William had destroyed so many within his own dominions. Robert the son of Wymarc, Richard the son of Scrob, and the whole herd of strangers who were fattening on English soil, would flock to pay their duty to a more exalted countryman who came on the same errand as themselves. They would tell him with delight and pride how the insolence of the natives had been crushed, how the wrongs of Count Eustace had been avenged, and how the rebel leaders had been driven to flee 1 Chron. Wig. 1052; Flor. Wig. 1051. "His gestis Nortmannicus Comes Willelmus cum multitudine Nortmannorum Angliam venit, quem Rex Eadwardus et socios ejus honorifice suscepit, et magnis multisque donatum muneribus ad Nortmanniam remisit." So Roman de Rou, 10548; "Et Ewart forment l'énora ; Mult li dona chiens è oisels Ki à haut hom cunveneit." from justice. They would speak of England as a land which Norman influences had already conquered, and which needed only one effort of the strong will and the strong hand to enable the Norman to take formal possession. The land was fast becoming their own. Some wild tribes, in parts of the island to which William's journey was not likely to extend, might still remain under aged chieftains of English or Danish birth. But even these rude men had been found, whether through fear or policy, ready to fall in with the plans of the Norman faction, and to range themselves against the champions of the national cause. And the richest and most civilized parts of the land, the very parts which had been so lately held by the sturdiest champions of Norman innovations, had now become one great field for Normans of every class to settle in. From Kent to Hereford they might enrich themselves with the lands and largesses which a gracious King was never weary of showering upon them. That King was childless; he had no heir apparent or presumptive near to him; he had once had a brother, but that brother had been done to death by English traitors, with the fallen captain of traitors at their head. Not a single near kinsman of the royal house could be found in England. The only surviving male descendant of Ethelred was the banished son of Eadmund, who, far away in his Hungarian refuge, was perhaps hardly remembered in the minds of Norman courtiers. William was Eadward's kinsman; it was convenient to forget that, though he was Eadward's kinsman, yet not a single drop of royal or English blood flowed in his veins. It was convenient to forget that, even among men of foreign birth, there were those who were sprung, by female descent at least, from the kingly stock of England.1 Ralph of Hereford was the undoubted grandson of Ethelred, but the claims of the timid Earl of the Magesætas could hardly be pressed against those of the renowned Duke of the Normans. It was convenient to forget that, by English Law, mere descent gave no right, and that, if it had given any right, William had no claim by descent to plead. It was easy to dwell simply on the nearness by blood, on the nearness by mutual good offices, which existed between the English King and the Norman Duke. There was everything to suggest the thought of the succession to William's own mind; there was everything to suggest it to the foreign counsellors who stood around the throne of Eadward. 1 According to modern laws of succession, the heir of Eadward was undoubtedly Walter of Mantes, the son of his sister Godgifu, and elder brother of Ralph of Hereford. The Ætheling Eadward, it must always be remembered, was not, according to our notions, the heir of the King, but the King was the heir of the Ætheling. But, as female descent had never been recognized, one can hardly suppose that the children of Godgifu were looked on as Æthelings, or as at all entitled to any preference in disposing of the Crown. I am therefore justified in saying that Eadward had neither apparent nor presumptive heir. This is a principle to which I shall have again to refer to. NORMAN PREDOMINANCE IN ENGLAND. 197 Probably William, Eadward, and Eadward's counsellors were alike. ignorant or careless of the English Constitution. They did not, or they would not, remember that the Kingdom was not a private estate, to be passed from man to man either according to the caprice of a testator or according to the laws of strict descent. They did not remember that no man could hold the English Crown in any way but as the free gift of the English people. The English people would seem to them to be a conquered race, whose formal consent, if it needed to be asked at all, could be as easily wrung from them as it had been wrung from them by Swegen and Cnut. If they dared to refuse, they might surely be overcome by the Norman no less easily than they had been overcome by the Dane. It would probably seem to them that the chances were all in favour of William's being able to succeed quietly as the heir or legatee of Eadward. If those chances failed, it would still be open to him to make his entry by arms as the avenger of the blood of Ælfred and his companions. The moment was thus in every way favourable for suggesting to William on the one hand, to Eadward on the other, the idea of an arrangement by which William should succeed to the English Crown on Eadward's death. We have no direct evidence that any such arrangement took place at this time, but all the probabilities of the story lead irresistibly to the belief that such was the case. The purely English writers are silent, but then they are silent as to any bequest or arrangement in William's favour at any time. They tell us nothing as to the nature of his claim to the Crown; they record his invasion, but they record nothing as to his motives.1 The Norman writers, on the other hand, so full of Eadward's promise to William, nowhere connect it with William's visit to England, which one only among them speaks of at all. But Norman writers, Norman records, the general consent of the age, confirmed rather than confuted by the significant silence of the English writers, all lead us to believe that, at some time or other, some kind of promise of the succession was made by Eadward to William. The case of Eadward's promise is like the case of Harold's oath. No English writer mentions either; but the silence of the English writers confirms rather than disproves the truth of both. All those Norman calumnies which they could deny, the English writers do most emphatically deny. The fact then that they never formally deny the reports, reports which they must have heard, that Harold 3 1 See the Abingdon and Worcester Chronicles and Florence of Worcester under 1066. 2 Namely Wace, quoted above, p. 195. He must have got his account from an English source. When we come to Florence's account of Harold's election and coronation, we shall see how carefully every word is weighed, with the obvious intention of excluding some Norman misrepresentation or other. The fables about Harold seizing the Crown, about his crowning himself, his being crowned by Stigand, and so swore an oath to William, that Eadward made a promise in favour of William, may be accepted as the strongest proof that some kind of oath was sworn, that some kind of promise was made. Had either Eadward's promise or Harold's oath been a pure Norman invention, William could never have paraded both in the way that he did in the eyes of Europe; he could never have turned both to the behoof of his cause in the way that he so successfully did. I admit then some promise of Eadward, some oath of Harold. But that is all. The details, as they are given by the various Norman writers, are so different, so utterly contradictory, that we can say nothing, on their showing, as to the time, place, or circumstances of either event. We are left with the bare fact, and for anything beyond it we must look to the probabilities of the case. The oath of Harold I shall discuss at the proper time; at present we are concerned with the bequest of the English Crown said to have been made by Eadward in favour of William. Every one who has grasped the true nature of the English Constitution, as it stood in the eleventh century, will fully understand that, strictly speaking, any bequest of the kind was altogether beyond the power of an English King. The Law of England gave the King no power to dispose of a Crown which he held solely by the free choice of the Witan of the land. All that Eadward could constitutionally do was to pledge himself to make in William's favour that recommendation to the Witan which the Witan were bound to consider, though not necessarily to consent to.1 That, when the time came, Eadward did make such a recommendation, and that he did not make it in favour of William, we know for certain. The last will of Eadward, so far as such an expression can be allowed, was undoubtedly in favour of Harold. We shall see as we go on that Eadward at one time designed his namesake the Ætheling as his successor. It is even possible that his thoughts were at one time directed towards his nephew Ralph of Hereford. In a weak prince like Eadward changes of purpose of this kind are in no way wonderful. And in truth the changes in the condition of the country were such that a wiser King than Eadward might well have changed his purpose more than once between the visit of William and his own death. Now there is not the slightest sign of any intention on behalf of William during the later years of Eadward; first the Ætheling, and then the great Earl, are the persons marked out in turn for the succession. And yet, as we have seen, it is impossible not to believe that some promise was, at some time or other, made in William's forth, are all implicitly denied; so is Eadward's alleged last bequest to William; but there is not a word to exclude either an earlier promise on the part of Eadward, or an oath on the part of Harold. Both these subjects are avoided. 1 See vol. i. pp. 73, 178, 322. |