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William the Conqueror

<h2>CHAPTER VI. THE NEGOTIATIONS OF DUKE WILLIAM. January-October 1066.</h2> If the time that has been suggested was the real time of Harold’s oath to William, its fulfilment became a practical question in little more than a year.  How the year 1065 passed in Normandy we have no record; in England its later months saw the revolt of Northumberland against Harold’s brother Tostig, and the reconciliation which Harold made between the revolters and the king to the damage of his brother’s interests.  Then came Edward’s sickness, of which he died on January 5, 1066.  He had on his deathbed recommended Harold to the assembled Witan as his successor in the kingdom.  The candidate was at once elected.  Whether William, Edgar, or any other, was spoken of we know not; but as to the recommendation of Edward and the consequent election of Harold the English writers are express.  The next day Edward was buried, and Harold was crowned in regular form by Ealdred Archbishop of York in Edward’s new church at Westminster.  Northumberland refused to acknowledge him; but the malcontents were won over by the coming of the king and his friend Saint Wulfstan Bishop of Worcester.  It was most likely now, as a seal of this reconciliation, that Harold married Ealdgyth, the sister of the two northern earls Edwin and Morkere, and the widow of the Welsh king Gruffydd.  He doubtless hoped in this way to win the loyalty of the earls and their followers. The accession of Harold was perfectly regular according to English law.  In later times endless fables arose; but the Norman writers of the time do not deny the facts of the recommendation, election, and coronation.  They slur them over, or, while admitting the mere facts, they represent each act as in some way invalid.  No writer near the time asserts a deathbed nomination of William; they speak only of a nomination at some earlier time.  But some Norman writers represent Harold as crowned by Stigand Archbishop of Canterbury.  This was not, in the ideas of those times, a trifling question.  A coronation was then not a mere pageant; it was the actual admission to the kingly office.  Till his crowning and anointing, the claimant of the crown was like a bishop-elect before his consecration.  He had, by birth or election, the sole right to become king; it was the coronation that made him king.  And as the ceremony took the form of an ecclesiastical sacrament, its validity might seem to depend on the lawful position of the officiating bishop.  In England to perform that ceremony was the right and duty of the Archbishop of Canterbury; but the canonical position of Stigand was doubtful.  He had been appointed on the flight of Robert; he had received the pallium, the badge of arch-episcopal rank, only from the usurping Benedict the Tenth.  It was therefore good policy in Harold to be crowned by Ealdred, to whose position there was no objection.  This is the only difference of fact between the English and Norman versions at this stage.  And the difference is easily explained.  At William’s coronation the king walked to the altar between the two archbishops, but it was Ealdred who actually performed the ceremony.  Harold’s coronation doubtless followed the same order.  But if Stigand took any part in that coronation, it was easy to give out that he took that special part on which the validity of the rite depended. Still, if Harold’s accession was perfectly lawful, it was none the less strange and unusual.  Except the Danish kings chosen under more or less of compulsion, he was the first king who did not belong to the West-Saxon kingly house.  Such a choice could be justified only on the ground that that house contained no qualified candidate.  Its only known members were the children of the Ætheling Edward, young Edgar and his sisters.  Now Edgar would certainly have been passed by in favour of any better qualified member of the kingly house, as his father had been passed by in favour of King Edward.  And the same principle would, as things stood, justify passing him by in favour of a qualified candidate not of the kingly house.  But Edgar’s right to the crown is never spoken of till a generation or two later, when the doctrines of hereditary right had gained much greater strength, and when Henry the Second, great-grandson through his mother of Edgar’s sister Margaret, insisted on his descent from the old kings.  This distinction is important, because Harold is often called an usurper, as keeping out Edgar the heir by birth.  But those who called him an usurper at the time called him so as keeping out William the heir by bequest.  William’s own election was out of the question.  He was no more of the English kingly house than Harold; he was a foreigner and an utter stranger.  Had Englishmen been minded to choose a foreigner, they doubtless would have chosen Swegen of Denmark.  He had found supporters when Edward was chosen; he was afterwards appealed to to deliver England from William.  He was no more of the English kingly house than Harold or William; but he was grandson of a man who had reigned over England, Northumberland might have preferred him to Harold; any part of England would have preferred him to William.  In fact any choice that could have been made must have had something strange about it.  Edgar himself, the one surviving male of the old stock, besides his youth, was neither born in the land nor the son of a crowned king.  Those two qualifications had always been deemed of great moment; an elaborate pedigree went for little; actual royal birth went for a great deal.  There was now no son of a king to choose.  Had there been even a child who was at once a son of Edward and a sister’s son of Harold, he might have reigned with his uncle as his guardian and counsellor.  As it was, there was nothing to do but to choose the man who, though not of kingly blood, had ruled England well for thirteen years. The case thus put seemed plain to every Englishman, at all events to every man in Wessex, East-Anglia, and southern Mercia.  But it would not seem so plain in other lands.  To the greater part of Western Europe William’s claim might really seem the better.  William himself doubtless thought his own claim the better; he deluded himself as he deluded others.  But we are more concerned with William as a statesman; and if it be statesmanship to adapt means to ends, whatever the ends may be, if it be statesmanship to make men believe that the worse cause is the better, then no man ever showed higher statesmanship than William showed in his great pleading before all Western Christendom.  It is a sign of the times that it was a pleading before all Western Christendom.  Others had claimed crowns; none had taken such pains to convince all mankind that the claim was a good one.  Such an appeal to public opinion marks on one side a great advance.  It was a great step towards the ideas of International Law and even of European concert.  It showed that the days of mere force were over, that the days of subtle diplomacy had begun.  Possibly the change was not without its dark side; it may be doubted whether a change from force to fraud is wholly a gain.  Still it was an appeal from the mere argument of the sword to something which at least professed to be right and reason.  William does not draw the sword till he has convinced himself and everybody else that he is drawing it in a just cause.  In that age the appeal naturally took a religious shape.  Herein lay its immediate strength; herein lay its weakness as regarded the times to come.  William appealed to Emperor, kings, princes, Christian men great and small, in every Christian land.  He would persuade all; he would ask help of all.  But above all he appealed to the head of Christendom, the Bishop of Rome.  William in his own person could afford to do so; where he reigned, in Normandy or in England, there was no fear of Roman encroachments; he was fully minded to be in all causes and over all persons within his dominions supreme.  While he lived, no Pope ventured to dispute his right.  But by acknowledging the right of the Pope to dispose of crowns, or at least to judge as to the right to crowns, he prepared many days of humiliation for kings in general and specially for his own successors.  One man in Western Europe could see further than William, perhaps even further than Lanfranc.  The chief counsellor of Pope Alexander the Second was the Archdeacon Hildebrand, the future Gregory the Seventh.  If William outwitted the world, Hildebrand outwitted William.  William’s appeal to the Pope to decide between two claimants for the English crown strengthened Gregory not a little in his daring claim to dispose of the crowns of Rome, of Italy, and of Germany.  Still this recognition of Roman claims led more directly to the humiliation of William’s successor in his own kingdom.  Moreover William’s successful attempt to represent his enterprise as a holy war, a crusade before crusades were heard of, did much to suggest and to make ready the way for the real crusades a generation later.  It was not till after William’s death that Urban preached the crusade, but it was during William’s life that Gregory planned it. The appeal was strangely successful.  William convinced, or seemed to convince, all men out of England and Scandinavia that his claim to the English crown was just and holy, and that it was a good work to help him to assert it in arms.  He persuaded his own subjects; he certainly did not constrain them.  He persuaded some foreign princes to give him actual help, some to join his muster in person; he persuaded all to help him so far as not to hinder their subjects from joining him as volunteers.  And all this was done by sheer persuasion, by argument good or bad.  In adapting of means to ends, in applying to each class of men that kind of argument which best suited it, the diplomacy, the statesmanship, of William was perfect.  Again we ask, How far was it the statesmanship of William, how far of Lanfranc?  But a prince need not do everything with his own hands and say everything with his own tongue.  It was no small part of the statesmanship of William to find out Lanfranc, to appreciate him and to trust him.  And when two subtle brains were at work, more could be done by the two working in partnership than by either working alone. By what arguments did the Duke of the Normans and the Prior of Bec convince mankind that the worse cause was the better?  We must always remember the transitional character of the age.  England was in political matters in advance of other Western lands; that is, it lagged behind other Western lands.  It had not gone so far on the downward course.  It kept far more than Gaul or even Germany of the old Teutonic institutions, the substance of which later ages have won back under new shapes.  Many things were understood in England which are now again understood everywhere, but which were no longer understood in France or in the lands held of the French crown.  The popular election of kings comes foremost.  Hugh Capet was an elective king as much as Harold; but the French kings had made their crown the most strictly hereditary of all crowns.  They avoided any interregnum by having their sons crowned in their lifetime.  So with the great fiefs of the crown.  The notion of kingship as an office conferred by the nation, of a duchy or county as an office held under the king, was still fully alive in England; in Gaul it was forgotten.  Kingdom, duchies, counties, had all become possessions instead of offices, possessions passing by hereditary succession of some kind.  But no rule of hereditary succession was universally or generally accepted.  To this day the kingdoms of Europe differ as to the question of female succession, and it is but slowly that the doctrine of representation has ousted the more obvious doctrine of nearness of kin.  All these points were then utterly unsettled; crowns, save of course that of the Empire, were to pass by hereditary right; only what was hereditary right?  At such a time claims would be pressed which would have seemed absurd either earlier or later.  To Englishmen, if it seemed strange to elect one who was not of the stock of Cerdic, it seemed much more strange to be called on to accept without election, or to elect as a matter of course, one who was not of the stock of Cerdic and who was a stranger into the bargain.  Out of England it would not seem strange when William set forth that Edward, having no direct heirs, had chosen his near kinsman William as his successor.  Put by itself, that statement had a plausible sound.  The transmission of a crown by bequest belongs to the same range of ideas as its transmission by hereditary right; both assume the crown to be a property and not an office.  Edward’s nomination of Harold, the election of Harold, the fact that William’s kindred to Edward lay outside the royal line of England, the fact that there was, in the person of Edgar, a nearer kinsman within that royal line, could all be slurred over or explained away or even turned to William’s profit.  Let it be that Edward on his death-bed had recommended Harold, and that the Witan had elected Harold.  The recommendation was wrung from a dying man in opposition to an earlier act done when he was able to act freely.  The election was brought about by force or fraud; if it was free, it was of no force against William’s earlier claim of kindred and bequest.  As for Edgar, as few people in England thought of him, still fewer out of England would have ever heard of him.  It is more strange that the bastardy of William did not tell against him, as it had once told in his own duchy.  But this fact again marks the transitional age.  Altogether the tale that a man who was no kinsman of the late king had taken to himself the crown which the king had bequeathed to a kinsman, might, even without further aggravation, be easily made to sound like a tale of wrong. But the case gained tenfold strength when William added that the doer of the wrong was of all men the one most specially bound not to do it.  The usurper was in any case William’s man, bound to act in all things for his lord.  Perhaps he was more; perhaps he had directly sworn to receive William as king.  Perhaps he had promised all this with an oath of special solemnity.  It would be easy to enlarge on all these further counts as making up an amount of guilt which William not only had the right to chastise, but which he would be lacking in duty if he failed to chastise.  He had to punish the perjurer, to avenge the wrongs of the saints.  Surely all who should help him in so doing would be helping in a righteous work. The answer to all this was obvious.  Putting the case at the very worst, assuming that Harold had sworn all that he is ever said to have sworn, assuming that he swore it in the most solemn way in which he is ever said to have sworn it, William’s claim was not thereby made one whit better.  Whatever Harold’s own guilt might be, the people of England had no share in it.  Nothing that Harold had done could bar their right to choose their king freely.  Even if Harold declined the crown, that would not bind the electors to choose William.  But when the notion of choosing kings had begun to sound strange, all this would go for nothing.  There would be no need even to urge that in any case the wrong done by Harold to William gave William a casus belli against Harold, and that William, if victorious, might claim the crown of England, as a possession of Harold’s, by right of conquest.  In fact William never claimed the crown by conquest, as conquest is commonly understood.  He always represented himself as the lawful heir, unhappily driven to use force to obtain his rights.  The other pleas were quite enough to satisfy most men out of England and Scandinavia.  William’s work was to claim the crown of which he was unjustly deprived, and withal to deal out a righteous chastisement on the unrighteous and ungodly man by whom he had been deprived of it. In the hands of diplomatists like William and Lanfranc, all these arguments, none of which had in itself the slightest strength, were enough to turn the great mass of continental opinion in William’s favour.  But he could add further arguments specially adapted to different classes of minds.  He could hold out the prospect of plunder, the prospect of lands and honours in a land whose wealth was already proverbial.  It might of course be answered that the enterprise against England was hazardous and its success unlikely.  But in such matters, men listen rather to their hopes than to their fears.  To the Normans it would be easy, not only to make out a case against Harold, but to rake up old grudges against the English nation.  Under Harold the son of Cnut, Alfred, a prince half Norman by birth, wholly Norman by education, the brother of the late king, the lawful heir to the crown, had been betrayed and murdered by somebody.  A widespread belief laid the deed to the charge of the father of the new king.  This story might easily be made a ground of national complaint by Normandy against England, and it was easy to infer that Harold had some share in the alleged crime of Godwine.  It was easy to dwell on later events, on the driving of so many Normans out of England, with Archbishop Robert at their head.  Nay, not only had the lawful primate been driven out, but an usurper had been set in his place, and this usurping archbishop had been made to bestow a mockery of consecration on the usurping king.  The proposed aggression on England was even represented as a missionary work, undertaken for the good of the souls of the benighted islanders.  For, though the English were undoubtedly devout after their own fashion, there was much in the ecclesiastical state of England which displeased strict churchmen beyond sea, much that William, when he had the power, deemed it his duty to reform.  The insular position of England naturally parted it in many things from the usages and feelings of the mainland, and it was not hard to get up a feeling against the nation as well as against its king.  All this could not really strengthen William’s claim; but it made men look more favourably on his enterprise. <div class="gapspace"> </div> The fact that the Witan were actually in session at Edward’s death had made it possible to carry out Harold’s election and coronation with extreme speed.  The electors had made their choice before William had any opportunity of formally laying his claim before them.  This was really an advantage to him; he could the better represent the election and coronation as invalid.  His first step was of course to send an embassy to Harold to call on him even now to fulfil his oath.  The accounts of this embassy, of which we have no English account, differ as much as the different accounts of the oath.  Each version of course makes William demand and Harold refuse whatever it had made Harold swear.  These demands and refusals range from the resignation of the kingdom to a marriage with William’s daughter.  And it is hard to separate this embassy from later messages between the rivals.  In all William demands, Harold refuses; the arguments on each side are likely to be genuine.  Harold is called on to give up the crown to William, to hold it of William, to hold part of the kingdom of William, to submit the question to the judgement of the Pope, lastly, if he will do nothing else, at least to marry William’s daughter.  Different writers place these demands at different times, immediately after Harold’s election or immediately before the battle.  The last challenge to a single combat between Harold and William of course appears only on the eve of the battle.  Now none of these accounts come from contemporary partisans of Harold; every one is touched by hostile feeling towards him.  Thus the constitutional language that is put into his mouth, almost startling from its modern sound, has greater value.  A King of the English can do nothing without the consent of his Witan.  They gave him the kingdom; without their consent, he cannot resign it or dismember it or agree to hold it of any man; without their consent, he cannot even marry a foreign wife.  Or he answers that the daughter of William whom he promised to marry is dead, and that the sister whom he promised to give to a Norman is dead also.  Harold does not deny the fact of his oath—whatever its nature; he justifies its breach because it was taken against is will, and because it was in itself of no strength, as binding him to do impossible things.  He does not deny Edward’s earlier promise to William; but, as a testament is of no force while the testator liveth, he argues that it is cancelled by Edward’s later nomination of himself.  In truth there is hardly any difference between the disputants as to matters of fact.  One side admits at least a plighting of homage on the part of Harold; the other side admits Harold’s nomination and election.  The real difference is as to the legal effect of either.  Herein comes William’s policy.  The question was one of English law and of nothing else, a matter for the Witan of England and for no other judges.  William, by ingeniously mixing all kinds of irrelevant issues, contrived to remove the dispute from the region of municipal into that of international law, a law whose chief representative was the Bishop of Rome.  By winning the Pope to his side, William could give his aggression the air of a religious war; but in so doing, he unwittingly undermined the throne that he was seeking and the thrones of all other princes. The answers which Harold either made, or which writers of his time thought that he ought to have made, are of the greatest moment in our constitutional history.  The King is the doer of everything; but he can do nothing of moment without the consent of his Witan.  They can say Yea or Nay to every proposal of the King.  An energetic and popular king would get no answer but Yea to whatever he chose to ask.  A king who often got the answer of Nay, Nay, was in great danger of losing his kingdom.  The statesmanship of William knew how to turn this constitutional system, without making any change in the letter, into a despotism like that of Constantinople or Cordova.  But the letter lived, to come to light again on occasion.  The Revolution of 1399 was a falling back on the doctrines of 1066, and the Revolution of 1688 was a falling back on the doctrines of 1399.  The principle at all three periods is that the power of the King is strictly limited by law, but that, within the limits which the law sets to his power, he acts according to his own discretion.  King and Witan stand out as distinct powers, each of which needs the assent of the other to its acts, and which may always refuse that assent.  The political work of the last two hundred years has been to hinder these direct collisions between King and Parliament by the ingenious conventional device of a body of men who shall be in name the ministers of the Crown, but in truth the ministers of one House of Parliament.  We do not understand our own political history, still less can we understand the position and the statesmanship of the Conqueror, unless we fully take in what the English constitution in the eleventh century really was, how very modern-sounding are some of its doctrines, some of its forms.  Statesmen of our own day might do well to study the meagre records of the Gemót of 1047.  There is the earliest recorded instance of a debate on a question of foreign policy.  Earl Godwine proposes to give help to Denmark, then at war with Norway.  He is outvoted on the motion of Earl Leofric, the man of moderate politics, who appears as leader of the party of non-intervention.  It may be that in some things we have not always advanced in the space of eight hundred years. <div class="gapspace"> </div> The negotiations of William with his own subjects, with foreign powers, and with the Pope, are hard to arrange in order.  Several negotiations were doubtless going on at the same time.  The embassy to Harold would of course come first of all.  Till his demand had been made and refused, William could make no appeal elsewhere.  We know not whether the embassy was sent before or after Harold’s journey to Northumberland, before or after his marriage with Ealdgyth.  If Harold was already married, the demand that he should marry William’s daughter could have been meant only in mockery.  Indeed, the whole embassy was so far meant in mockery that it was sent without any expectation that its demands would be listened to.  It was sent to put Harold, from William’s point of view, more thoroughly in the wrong, and to strengthen William’s case against him.  It would therefore be sent at the first moment; the only statement, from a very poor authority certainly, makes the embassy come on the tenth day after Edward’s death.  Next after the embassy would come William’s appeal to his own subjects, though Lanfranc might well be pleading at Rome while William was pleading at Lillebonne.  The Duke first consulted a select company, who promised their own services, but declined to pledge any one else.  It was held that no Norman was bound to follow the Duke in an attempt to win for himself a crown beyond the sea.  But voluntary help was soon ready.  A meeting of the whole baronage of Normandy was held at Lillebonne.  The assembly declined any obligation which could be turned into a precedent, and passed no general vote at all.  But the barons were won over one by one, and each promised help in men and ships according to his means. William had thus, with some difficulty, gained the support of his own subjects; but when he had once gained it, it was a zealous support.  And as the flame spread from one part of Europe to another, the zeal of Normandy would wax keener and keener.  The dealings of William with foreign powers are told us in a confused, piecemeal, and sometimes contradictory way.  We hear that embassies went to the young King Henry of Germany, son of the great Emperor, the friend of England, and also to Swegen of Denmark.  The Norman story runs that both princes promised William their active support.  Yet Swegen, the near kinsman of Harold, was a friend of England, and the same writer who puts this promise into his mouth makes him send troops to help his English cousin.  Young Henry or his advisers could have no motive for helping William; but subjects of the Empire were at least not hindered from joining his banner.  To the French king William perhaps offered the bait of holding the crown of England of him; but Philip is said to have discouraged William’s enterprise as much as he could.  Still he did not hinder French subjects from taking a part in it.  Of the princes who held of the French crown, Eustace of Boulogne, who joined the muster in person, and Guy of Ponthieu, William’s own vassal, who sent his son, seem to have been the only ones who did more than allow the levying of volunteers in their dominions.  A strange tale is told that Conan of Britanny took this moment for bringing up his own forgotten pretensions to the Norman duchy.  If William was going to win England, let him give up Normandy to him.  He presently, the tale goes, died of a strange form of poisoning, in which it is implied that William had a hand.  This is the story of Walter and Biota over again.  It is perhaps enough to say that the Breton writers know nothing of the tale. But the great negotiation of all was with the Papal court.  We might have thought that the envoy would be Lanfranc, so well skilled in Roman ways; but William perhaps needed him as a constant adviser by his own person.  Gilbert, Archdeacon of Lisieux, was sent to Pope Alexander.  No application could better suit papal interests than the one that was now made; but there were some moral difficulties.  Not a few of the cardinals, Hildebrand tells us himself, argued, not without strong language towards Hildebrand, that the Church had nothing to do with such matters, and that it was sinful to encourage a claim which could not be enforced without bloodshed.  But with many, with Hildebrand among them, the notion of the Church as a party or a power came before all thoughts of its higher duties.  One side was carefully heard; the other seems not to have been heard at all.  We hear of no summons to Harold, and the King of the English could not have pleaded at the Pope’s bar without acknowledging that his case was at least doubtful.  The judgement of Alexander or of Hildebrand was given for William.  Harold was declared to be an usurper, perhaps declared excommunicated.  The right to the English crown was declared to be in the Duke of the Normans, and William was solemnly blessed in the enterprise in which he was at once to win his own rights, to chastise the wrong-doer, to reform the spiritual state of the misguided islanders, to teach them fuller obedience to the Roman See and more regular payment of its temporal dues.  William gained his immediate point; but his successors on the English throne paid the penalty.  Hildebrand gained his point for ever, or for as long a time as men might be willing to accept the Bishop of Rome as a judge in any matters.  The precedent by which Hildebrand, under another name, took on him to dispose of a higher crown than that of England was now fully established. As an outward sign of papal favour, William received a consecrated banner and a ring containing a hair of Saint Peter.  Here was something for men to fight for.  The war was now a holy one.  All who were ready to promote their souls’ health by slaughter and plunder might flock to William’s standard, to the standard of Saint Peter.  Men came from most French-speaking lands, the Normans of Apulia and Sicily being of course not slow to take up the quarrel of their kinsfolk.  But, next to his own Normandy, the lands which sent most help were Flanders, the land of Matilda, and Britanny, where the name of the Saxon might still be hateful.  We must never forget that the host of William, the men who won England, the men who settled in England, were not an exclusively Norman body.  Not Norman, but French, is the name most commonly opposed to English, as the name of the conquering people.  Each Norman severally would have scorned that name for himself personally; but it was the only name that could mark the whole of which he and his countrymen formed a part.  Yet, if the Normans were but a part, they were the greatest and the noblest part; their presence alone redeemed the enterprise from being a simple enterprise of brigandage.  The Norman Conquest was after all a Norman Conquest; men of other lands were merely helpers.  So far as it was not Norman, it was Italian; the subtle wit of Lombard Lanfranc and Tuscan Hildebrand did as much to overthrow us as the lance and bow of Normandy. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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