William the Conqueror | Page 5

seek for support of some kind. He got together the chief men of his duchy, and took a new guardian by their advice. But it marks the state of things that the new guardian was one of the murderers of those whom he succeeded. This was Ralph of Wacey, son of William's great-uncle, Archbishop Robert. Murderer as he was, he seems to have discharged his duty faithfully. There are men who are careless of general moral obligations, but who will strictly carry out any charge which appeals to personal honour. Anyhow Ralph's guardianship brought with it a certain amount of calm. But men, high in the young duke's favour, were still plotting against him, and they presently began to plot, not only against their prince but against their country. The disaffected nobles of Normandy sought for a helper against young William in his lord King Henry of Paris.
The art of diplomacy had never altogether slumbered since much earlier times. The king who owed his crown to William's father, and who could have no ground of offence against William himself, easily found good pretexts for meddling in Norman affairs. It was not unnatural in the King of the French to wish to win back a sea- board which had been given up more than a hundred years before to an alien power, even though that power had, for much more than half of that time, acted more than a friendly part towards France. It was not unnatural that the French people should cherish a strong national dislike to the Normans and a strong wish that Rouen should again be a French city. But such motives were not openly avowed then any more than now. The alleged ground was quite different. The counts of Chartres were troublesome neighbours to the duchy, and the castle of Tillieres had been built as a defence against them. An advance of the King's dominions had made Tillieres a neighbour of France, and, as a neighbour, it was said to be a standing menace. The King of the French, acting in concert with the disaffected party in Normandy, was a dangerous enemy, and the young Duke and his counsellors determined to give up Tillieres. Now comes the first distinct exercise of William's personal will. We are without exact dates, but the time can be hardly later than 1040, when William was from twelve to thirteen years old. At his special request, the defender of Tillieres, Gilbert Crispin, who at first held out against French and Normans alike, gave up the castle to Henry. The castle was burned; the King promised not to repair it for four years. Yet he is said to have entered Normandy, to have laid waste William's native district of Hiesmois, to have supplied a French garrison to a Norman rebel named Thurstan, who held the castle of Falaise against the Duke, and to have ended by restoring Tillieres as a menace against Normandy. And now the boy whose destiny had made him so early a leader of men had to bear his first arms against the fortress which looked down on his birth- place. Thurstan surrendered and went into banishment. William could set down his own Falaise as the first of a long list of towns and castles which he knew how to win without shedding of blood.
When we next see William's distinct personal action, he is still young, but no longer a child or even a boy. At nineteen or thereabouts he is a wise and valiant man, and his valour and wisdom are tried to the uttermost. A few years of comparative quiet were chiefly occupied, as a quiet time in those days commonly was, with ecclesiastical affairs. One of these specially illustrates the state of things with which William had to deal. In 1042, when the Duke was about fourteen, Normandy adopted the Truce of God in its later shape. It no longer attempted to establish universal peace; it satisfied itself with forbidding, under the strongest ecclesiastical censures, all private war and violence of any kind on certain days of the week. Legislation of this kind has two sides. It was an immediate gain if peace was really enforced for four days in the week; but that which was not forbidden on the other three could no longer be denounced as in itself evil. We are told that in no land was the Truce more strictly observed than in Normandy. But we may be sure that, when William was in the fulness of his power, the stern weight of the ducal arm was exerted to enforce peace on Mondays and Tuesdays as well as on Thursdays and Fridays.
It was in the year 1047 that William's authority was most dangerously threatened and that he was first called on to show in