THE NEGOTIATIONS OF DUKE WILLIAM.
JANUARY-OCTOBER 1066.
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.
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
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.