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advantage of every auspicious turn of events. Doubtless William could never have conquered England except under peculiarly favourable circumstances; but then none but such a man as William could have conquered England under any circumstances at all. He conquered and retained a land far greater than his paternal duchy, and a land in which he had not a single native partisan. Yet he contrived to put himself forward in the eyes of the world as a legal claimant, and not as an unprovoked invader. We must condemn the fraud, but we cannot help admiring the skill by which he made men believe that he was the true heir of England, shut out from his inheritance by a perjured usurper. Never was a more subtle web of fallacy woven by the craft of man; never did diplomatic ingenuity more triumphantly obtain its end. He contrived to make an utterly unjust aggression bear the aspect, not only of righteous, but almost of holy warfare. The wholesale spoiler of a Christian people contrived to win for himself something very like the position of a crusader. And landed on English ground with no rights but those of his own sword, with no supporters but his own foreign army, he yet 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 nation one by one of its native leaders, and put in their places men of foreign birth and wholly dependent on himself. No prince ever more richly rewarded those to whom he owed his crown, but no prince ever took more jealous care that they should never be able to bring his crown into jeopardy. None but a man like him could have held down both conquerors and conquered, and have made his will the only law for Norman and Englishman alike. His consummate policy guarded against the dangers which he saw rife in every other

country; he put the finishing stroke to the work of Ecgberght, and made England the most united kingdom in Western Christendom. Normans and Englishmen conspired against him, and called the fleets and hosts of Denmark to their help. But William held his own alike against revolters at home and against invaders from abroad. Norman and English rebels alike were crushed; sometimes the Dane was bought off, sometimes he shrank from the firm array with which the land was guarded. All opposition was quelled by fire and sword; but when it was quelled, whenever and wherever 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 was going on, but when William's work was fully accomplished, they were safer under him than they had ever been under England's native kings. As the stern avenger of crime, even the conquered learned to bless him, and to crown his good deeds with a tribute of praise hardly inferior to that which waits on the name of his illustrious rival.

Here, then, was a career through which none but one 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 found but little room for their development during his earlier reign in his native duchy. There is no reason to believe that William came into England with any fixed determination to rule otherwise in England than he had already ruled in Normandy. Cnut can hardly fail to have been his model, and William's earliest days in England were far more promising than the earliest days of Cnut. At no time of his life does William appear as one of those tyrants who actually delight in oppression, to whom the infliction of human suffering is really a source of morbid pleasure. But, if he took no pleasure in the infliction of suffering, it was at least a matter about which he was utterly reckless; he stuck at no injustice which was needed to carry

out his purpose. His will was fixed, to win and to keep the crown of England at all hazards. We may well believe that he would have been well pleased could he have won that crown without bloodshed. But, rather than not win it, 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, it was his full purpose to keep his oath. That he acted on any settled scheme of uprooting the nationality, the laws, or the language of England is an exploded fable. But he could not govern England as he had governed Normandy; he could not govern England as Cnut had governed England; he could not himself be as Cnut, neither could his Normans be as Cnut's Danes. He gradually found that there was no way for him to govern England save by oppressions, exactions, and confiscations, by the bondage or the death of the noblest in the land.

He made the discovery, and he shrank not from its practical consequences. A reign which had begun with as good hopes as the reign of a foreign conqueror could begin with, 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 when William had once set forth on the downward course of evil, he soon showed that he could do wrong when no policy demanded it, merely to supply means for his personal gratification. To lay waste Hampshire merely to make a hunting-ground was a blacker crime than to lay waste Northumberland to rid himself of a political danger. He could still be merciful when mercy was not dangerous, but he had now learned to shed innocent blood without remorse, if its shedding seemed to add safety to his throne. The repeated revolts of Eadgar 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

ancient and with modern authorities, that the New Forest became a spot fatal to William's 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. At last he found his deathwound in an inglorious quarrel, in the personal commission of cruelties which aroused the indignation of his own age; and the mighty king and conqueror, forsaken by his servants and children, had to owe his funeral rites to the voluntary charity of a royal vassal, and within the walls of his own minster he could not find an undisputed grave.

E. A. FREEMAN.

DEATH THE LEVELLER.

THE glories of our birth and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;

There is no armour against fate :
Death lays his icy hand on kings :
Sceptre and crown

Must tumble down,

And in the dust be equal made

With the poor crooked scythe and spade.

Some men with swords may reap the field,
And plant with laurels where they kill ;
But their strong nerves at last must yield;
They tame but one another still :
Early or late

They stoop to fate,

And must give up their murmuring breath
When they, pale captives, creep to death.

The garlands wither on your brow ;
Then boast no more your mighty deeds;
Upon Death's purple altar now

See where the victor-victim bleeds!

Your heads must come

To the cold tomb;

Only the actions of the just,

Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.

J. SHIRLEY.

THE DEATH-BED OF WILLIAM THE

CONQUEROR.

Faint

THE Conqueror had received his death-wound. It was an unworthy fate indeed for one who had so often braved death in so many nobler and more awful shapes, to fall at last by such an ignoble chance as the stumble of his horse among the burning embers of Mantes. And yet poetical justice itself might well be satisfied when the mighty warrior and ruler, who, with all his crimes, had never before stooped to mere useless and brutal havoc, had to pay his life as the penalty for thus lowering himself to the level of meaner men. and suffering from the shock and from the internal wound, William turned away from his schemes of vengeance, and instead of carrying his wasting arms any farther within the dominions of his overlord, he was himself borne, a sick or rather a dying man, to Rouen. There he first took up his quarters in the palace, but presently, finding the noise and bustle of the capital too much for his sinking frame, he caused himself to be moved out of the city to the Priory of Saint Gervase, which stands on the hill overlooking Rouen from the west. There William lay for several weeks of sickness and pain; but he never to the hour of his death lost either the possession of his senses or his full command of speech. We are told that, when the news of the blow which had

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