so many difficulties. For difficult as his position was in England, his earlier position in Normandy was in some respects more difficult still. He had almost as many enemies to struggle with, and he had not the same force at his command to subdue them. Coming to the duchy under every disadvantage, at once bastard and minor, with competitors for the crown constantly arising, with a turbulent people to govern and envious neighbours to guard against, with a jealous overlord, who, if he sometimes acted as a protector, acted far more commonly as an enemy-William was, thus, through the whole of his early life, beset by troubles, none of which were of his own making, and he came honourably out of all of them. His duchy, from a divided state open to the attacks of every enemy, became under him a loyal and well-ordered land, respected by all its neighbours, and putting most of them to shame by its prosperity. And these great successes were accomplished, as far as we can see, with much less of cruelty or oppression than we might have looked for in so ruthless an age. As a man, his character was singularly stainless; in a most profligate generation he was a model of conjugal fidelity; he was an affectionate brother, and a perhaps too indulgent father. One dark cloud of suspicion is the only shade over so bright a picture. He was accused, in more than one case, of resorting to the poisoned bowl to get rid of those whose life was inconvenient to him. The charge has never been clearly made out, but of such a crime the mere suspicion tells against a man. On the other hand, his piety was loudly extolled, and there is reason to believe that his piety was not the mere conventional piety of lavish grants to monasteries. We have seen that in his own person he practised some most unusual virtues, and it is clear that in his ecclesiastical government he was actuated by a real desire for reformation. He was almost the only prince of the time free from the guilt of simony, and most of his ecclesiastical appointments do him high honour. The patron of Lanfranc and Anselm cannot be spoken of without respect, and nothing can be more unfair than the way in which Thierry dismisses the bishops and abbots whom William appointed in England. Undoubtedly, there were some black sheep among them, like Thurstan of Glastonbury; but the general unfavourable impression which Thierry gives is produced by mixing up the prelates appointed by the Conqueror with the rascals who bought bishopricks of William Rufus, or who were promoted by him as the reward of their partnership in his iniquities. Altogether the reign of William as Duke of

the Normans was alike prosperous and honourable; he fairly won for himself the high position which he held among the Princes of Europe.

If we turn from William Duke of the Normans to William King of the English, we shall indeed in a moral sense see the fine gold become dim, but our admiration for mere greatness, for the highest craft of the statesman and the soldier, will rise higher than ever. No doubt he was highly favoured by fortune: nothing but a combination of extraordinary circumstances could have made the conquest of England possible; but then it is the true art of statesmanship to grasp every favourable moment, to perceive what can be done and what cannot, to see, in a word, what to do and how and when to do it. Undoubtedly William could never have conquered England except under peculiarly favourable circumstances, but then it needed a man of William's greatness to conquer England under any circumstances. He conquered and retained a land far greater than his paternal duchy, and a land in which he had not a single native partisan. Formally a legal claimant, but in truth a foreign invader, he 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 with the outward pretext of law always put prominently forward, he gradually obtained full possession of the whole land; he deprived the people one by one of their native leaders, and put in their places men wholly dependent on himself. None but a man like him could have held down both conquerors and conquered, and have made his will the only law for Englishman and Norman alike. He richly rewarded those to whom he owed his crown, but he took care that they should never be able to bring his crown into jeopardy. By two consummate strokes of policy, he guarded against the dangers which he saw rife in every other country, and made England the most united kingdom in Western Christendom. The manors granted to his great barons were carefully scattered through different counties, and the vassals of his vassals were made to swear allegiance to the King as their common master. Normans and Englishmen conspired and rebelled against him, and called in the fleets and hosts of Denmark to their aid; 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 by which the land was guarded. All opposition was quelled by fire and sword; but when it was quelled, wherever and whenever 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 lasted, but, when the conquest was fully accomplished, they were safer than they had been under England's native Kings. The English annalist himself records with thankfulness the good frith' which he made in this land; a merit which always covered a multitude of sins. To chastise the robber, by any means, by any punishment however merciless, was then held to be the first duty of the ruler. To have accomplished this duty is the praise which sounds highest in the panegyrics of Godwine, of Harold, of William, of Henry I.; to have neglected it stands out foremost in the dark indictment against the ruffian Rufus and the heedless Robert. We may be sure that William's English subjects did not love him, but they may well have felt a sort of sullen respect for the King who was richer and mightier than all the Kings that were before him. And under the scorpions of his hateful son, they might well regret the whips of a tyrant who at least had somewhat of the fear of God before his eyes.

Here then was a career through which none who was not of the greatest of mankind could have passed successfully. But it was a career which brought out into full play all those darker features of his character which had found but little scope for their development during his earlier rule in his native duchy. There is no reason to think that William came into England with any fixed determination to rule worse in England than he had ruled in Normandy. At no part of his life does he appear as one of those tyrants who delight in injustice and oppression for their own sakes. But he was a man who stuck at no injustice and no oppression which was needed to carry out his purpose. His will was fixed, to win and keep the crown of England at all hazards. He would have been well pleased, as he professed, to win that crown without bloodshed. But rather than not be a King 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, he had no fixed intention of doing otherwise. That he acted on any settled scheme of uprooting English nationality, English laws, or the English lan

guage is an exploded fable.* He re-enacted the ancient laws, and even strove to learn the language of the country that he might the better administer them. Had it been possible for him to govern England as well as he had governed Normandy, he would have been well pleased to do so. But to do so was beyond his power; he gradually found that there was no way for him to govern England save by oppressions, exactions, and confiscations at which humanity shudders. He made the discovery and he shrank not from the practical consequence. A reign which had begun with as good hopes as the reign of a foreign conqueror could begin 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 he showed that he could do equal wrong when no policy required it, simply to supply means for his personal gratification. To lay waste Hampshire for the mere formation of a hunting-ground was a blacker crime than to lay waste Northumberland in order to rid himself of a political danger. He could be merciful when mercy was not dangerous, but he could shed innocent blood without remorse if its shedding seemed to add safety to his throne. The repeated revolts of Eadgar Ætheling were forgiven 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 Sir Francis Palgrave and with his ancient authorities, that the New Forest, the scene of William's blackest inhumanity, became a spot fatal to his house, and that, after the death of Waltheof, his old prosperity forsook him. Nothing indeed occurred to loosen his hold 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. The victor of Valesdune and Senlac found his death-wound in an inglorious quarrel, in the very commission of the basest cruelty, and at last the mighty King and Conqueror had

This notion comes almost wholly from the false Ingulf, that pestilent imposition which Sir Francis Palgrave himself first exposed, and to which one would have thought that Mr. Stubbs and Mr. Riley had dealt the death-blow. But all the small fry of local antiquaries and the like still quote him as unsuspectingly as ever.

†The circumstances of the burning of Mantes, and the share in the devastation personally taken by the King himself, seem to have surpassed the ordinary cruelty of the age and to have aroused special indignation at the time. As the Chronicle says: 'Reowlic ping he

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.

Such was William the Great; a title which, in the mouths of his contemporaries, he shares with Alexander and with Charles, but which in later times has been displaced by the misunderstood description of Conqueror. And now as to the Conquest which he wrought. We have seen that he claimed the crown as his legal right. How far was such a claim to be justified on any recognised principle of law or morals? Let us hear how Sir Francis Palgrave states his case:

'Whatever aspects William's policy assumed, he never departed from the principle that he had placed himself in the position of a legitimate Sovereign, asserting legitimate rights. William did not present himself as a barbarian stranger, a Sweyne, or a Canute, wielding his battle-axe, slaying old and young, thirsting for blood, greedy of gold, seeking rapine, pursuing revenge; but as a lawful claimant, contesting the inheritance withheld by an unjust adversary; and, as will have appeared from the preceding transactions, it is hardly possible to deny but that, on constitutional grounds, he had a better-grounded title than he who was vanquished by the battle-trial of Hastings. When, therefore, William, as such lawful claimant, obtained the dominion, the reign of the usurper was entirely blotted out from the legal and constitutional annals of England. In the same manner as the ordinances of the Commonwealth have no place in our statute-books, and the patents of the Protector are expunged from our records, so was the reign of Harold passed over, and never recognised by law. Even as King de facto he was not acknowledged. Domesday, which was to establish the territorial rights of the Conqueror, the record by which he was willing to be concluded, that great memorial, not of an arbitrary power, but of the principle of establishing the rights of the crown, so far as property was concerned, by an immutable law, always dates them tempore Regis Edwardi." William wanted nothing more than what King Edward had; he would take nothing as from Harold; he ascended the throne not as the victor of the son of Godwin, but as succeeding the Confessor. Therefore, he was to be bound to the responsibility of the monarch of whom he claimed to be the adopted son, the constituted heir.' (Vol. iii. p. 622.).

Now, except the words which we have marked in Italics, this is a clear and accurate statement of William's case as William himself might have stated it, but we confess that those few

dyde, and reowlicor him gelamp.' But it should not be forgotten that in the war itself William was not the aggressor, nor was he merely provoked by the silly joke of King Philip. See Ord. Vit. p. 654 D.