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William the Conqueror

E >> E. A. Freeman >> William the Conqueror





There is no need to doubt the striking details of the death and
burial of the Conqueror. We shrink from giving the same trust to
the long tale of penitence which is put into the mouth of the dying
King. He may, in that awful hour, have seen the wrong-doing of the
last one-and-twenty years of his life; he hardly threw his
repentance into the shape of a detailed autobiographical
confession. But the more authentic sayings and doings of William's
death-bed enable us to follow his course as an English statesman
almost to his last moments. His end was one of devotion, of
prayers and almsgiving, and of opening of the prison to them that
were bound. All save one of his political prisoners, English and
Norman, he willingly set free. Morkere and his companions from
Ely, Walfnoth son of Godwine, hostage for Harold's faith, Wulf son
of Harold and Ealdgyth, taken, we can hardly doubt, as a babe when
Chester opened its gates to William, were all set free; some indeed
were put in bonds again by the King's successor. But Ode William
would not set free; he knew too well how many would suffer if he
were again let loose upon the world. But love of kindred was still
strong; at last he yielded, sorely against his will, to the prayers
and pledges of his other brother. Ode went forth from his prison,
again Bishop of Bayeux, soon again to be Earl of Kent, and soon to
prove William's foresight by his deeds.

William's disposal of his dominions on his death-bed carries on his
political history almost to his last breath. Robert, the banished
rebel, might seem to have forfeited all claims to the succession.
But the doctrine of hereditary right had strengthened during the
sixty years of William's life. He is made to say that, though he
foresees the wretchedness of any land over which Robert should be
the ruler, still he cannot keep him out of the duchy of Normandy
which is his birthright. Of England he will not dare to dispose;
he leaves the decision to God, seemingly to Archbishop Lanfranc as
the vicar of God. He will only say that his wish is for his son
William to succeed him in his kingdom, and he prays Lanfranc to
crown him king, if he deem such a course to be right. Such a
message was a virtual nomination, and William the Red succeeded his
father in England, but kept his crown only by the help of loyal
Englishmen against Norman rebels. William Rufus, it must be
remembered, still under the tutelage of his father and Lanfranc,
had not yet shown his bad qualities; he was known as yet only as
the dutiful son who fought for his father against the rebel Robert.
By ancient English law, that strong preference which was all that
any man could claim of right belonged beyond doubt to the youngest
of William's sons, the English AEtheling Henry. He alone was born
in the land; he alone was the son of a crowned King and his Lady.
It is perhaps with a knowledge of what followed that William is
made to bid his youngest son wait while his eldest go before him;
that he left him landless, but master of a hoard of silver, there
is no reason to doubt. English feeling, which welcomed Henry
thirteen years later, would doubtless have gladly seen his
immediate accession; but it might have been hard, in dividing
William's dominions, to have shut out the second son in favour of
the third. And in the scheme of events by which conquered England
was to rise again, the reign of Rufus, at the moment the darkest
time of all, had its appointed share.


That England could rise again, that she could rise with a new life,
strengthened by her momentary overthrow, was before all things
owing to the lucky destiny which, if she was to be conquered, gave
her William the Great as her Conqueror. It is as it is in all
human affairs. William himself could not have done all that he
did, wittingly and unwittingly, unless circumstances had been
favourable to him; but favourable circumstances would have been
useless, unless there had been a man like William to take advantage
of them. What he did, wittingly or unwittingly, he did by virtue
of his special position, the position of a foreign conqueror
veiling his conquest under a legal claim. The hour and the man
were alike needed. The man in his own hour wrought a work, partly
conscious, partly unconscious. The more clearly any man
understands his conscious work, the more sure is that conscious
work to lead to further results of which he dreams not. So it was
with the Conqueror of England. His purpose was to win and to keep
the kingdom of England, and to hand it on to those who should come
after him more firmly united than it had ever been before. In this
work his spirit of formal legality, his shrinking from needless
change, stood him in good stead. He saw that as the kingdom of
England could best be won by putting forth a legal claim to it, so
it could best be kept by putting on the character of a legal ruler,
and reigning as the successor of the old kings seeking the unity of
the kingdom; he saw, from the example both of England and of other
lands, the dangers which threatened that unity; he saw what
measures were needed to preserve it in his own day, measures which
have preserved it ever since. Here is a work, a conscious work,
which entitles the foreign Conqueror to a place among English
statesmen, and to a place in their highest rank. Further than this
we cannot conceive William himself to have looked. All that was to
come of his work in future ages was of necessity hidden from his
eyes, no less than from the eyes of smaller men. He had assuredly
no formal purpose to make England Norman; but still less had he any
thought that the final outcome of his work would make England on
one side more truly English than if he had never crossed the sea.
In his ecclesiastical work he saw the future still less clearly.
He designed to reform what he deemed abuses, to bring the English
Church into closer conformity with the other Churches of the West;
he assuredly never dreamed that the issue of his reform would be
the strife between Henry and Thomas and the humiliation of John.
His error was that of forgetting that he himself could wield
powers, that he could hold forces in check, which would be too
strong for those who should come after him. At his purposes with
regard to the relations of England and Normandy it would be vain to
guess. The mere leaving of kingdom and duchy to different sons
would not necessarily imply that he designed a complete or lasting
separation. But assuredly William did not foresee that England,
dragged into wars with France as the ally of Normandy, would remain
the lasting rival of France after Normandy had been swallowed up in
the French kingdom. If rivalry between England and France had not
come in this way, it would doubtless have come in some other way;
but this is the way in which it did come about. As a result of the
union of Normandy and England under one ruler, it was part of
William's work, but a work of which William had no thought. So it
was with the increased connexion of every kind between England and
the continent of Europe which followed on William's coming. With
one part of Europe indeed the connexion of England was lessened.
For three centuries before William's coming, dealings in war and
peace with the Scandinavian kingdoms had made up a large part of
English history. Since the baffled enterprise of the holy Cnut,
our dealings with that part of Europe have been of only secondary
account.

But in our view of William as an English statesman, the main
feature of all is that spirit of formal legality of which we have
so often spoken. Its direct effects, partly designed, partly
undesigned, have affected our whole history to this day. It was
his policy to disguise the fact of conquest, to cause all the
spoils of conquest to be held, in outward form, according to the
ancient law of England. The fiction became a fact, and the fact
greatly helped in the process of fusion between Normans and
English. The conquering race could not keep itself distinct from
the conquered, and the form which the fusion took was for the
conquerors to be lost in the greater mass of the conquered.
William founded no new state, no new nation, no new constitution;
he simply kept what he found, with such modifications as his
position made needful. But without any formal change in the nature
of English kingship, his position enabled him to clothe the crown
with a practical power such as it had never held before, to make
his rule, in short, a virtual despotism. These two facts
determined the later course of English history, and they determined
it to the lasting good of the English nation. The conservative
instincts of William allowed our national life and our national
institutions to live on unbroken through his conquest. But it was
before all things the despotism of William, his despotism under
legal forms, which preserved our national institutions to all time.
As a less discerning conqueror might have swept our ancient laws
and liberties away, so under a series of native kings those laws
and liberties might have died out, as they died out in so many
continental lands. But the despotism of the crown called forth the
national spirit in a conscious and antagonistic shape; it called
forth that spirit in men of both races alike, and made Normans and
English one people. The old institutions lived on, to be clothed
with a fresh life, to be modified as changed circumstances might
make needful. The despotism of the Norman kings, the peculiar
character of that despotism, enabled the great revolution of the
thirteenth century to take the forms, which it took, at once
conservative and progressive. So it was when, more than four
centuries after William's day, England again saw a despotism
carried on under the forms of law. Henry the Eighth reigned as
William had reigned; he did not reign like his brother despots on
the continent; the forms of law and freedom lived on. In the
seventeenth century therefore, as in the thirteenth, the forms
stood ready to be again clothed with a new life, to supply the
means for another revolution, again at once conservative and
progressive. It has been remarked a thousand times that, while
other nations have been driven to destroy and to rebuild the
political fabric, in England we have never had to destroy and to
rebuild, but have found it enough to repair, to enlarge, and to
improve. This characteristic of English history is mainly owing to
the events of the eleventh century, and owing above all to the
personal agency of William. As far as mortal man can guide the
course of things when he is gone, the course of our national
history since William's day has been the result of William's
character and of William's acts. Well may we restore to him the
surname that men gave him in his own day. He may worthily take his
place as William the Great alongside of Alexander, Constantine, and
Charles. They may have wrought in some sort a greater work,
because they had a wider stage to work it on. But no man ever
wrought a greater and more abiding work on the stage that fortune
gave him than he


"Qui dux Normannis, qui Caesar praefuit Anglis."


Stranger and conqueror, his deeds won him a right to a place on the
roll of English statesmen, and no man that came after him has won a
right to a higher place.

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