William the Conqueror | Page 2

a moment when our national destiny might be said to hang on
the will of a single man, and that that man was William, surnamed at
different stages of his life and memory, the Bastard, the Conqueror, and
the Great.
With perfect fitness then does William the Norman, William the
Norman Conqueror of England, take his place in a series of English
statesmen. That so it should be is characteristic of English history. Our
history has been largely wrought for us by men who have come in from
without, sometimes as conquerors, sometimes as the opposite of

conquerors; but in whatever character they came, they had to put on the
character of Englishmen, and to make their work an English work.
From whatever land they came, on whatever mission they came, as
statesmen they were English. William, the greatest of his class, is still
but a member of a class. Along with him we must reckon a crowd of
kings, bishops, and high officials in many ages of our history. Theodore
of Tarsus and Cnut of Denmark, Lanfranc of Pavia and Anselm of
Aosta, Randolf Flambard and Roger of Salisbury, Henry of Anjou and
Simon of Montfort, are all written on a list of which William is but the
foremost. The largest number come in William's own generation and in
the generations just before and after it. But the breed of England's
adopted children and rulers never died out. The name of William the
Deliverer stands, if not beside that of his namesake the Conqueror, yet
surely alongside of the lawgiver from Anjou. And we count among the
later worthies of England not a few men sprung from other lands, who
did and are doing their work among us, and who, as statesmen at least,
must count as English. As we look along the whole line, even among
the conquering kings and their immediate instruments, their work never
takes the shape of the rooting up of the earlier institutions of the land.
Those institutions are modified, sometimes silently by the mere growth
of events, sometimes formally and of set purpose. Old institutions get
new names; new institutions are set up alongside of them. But the old
ones are never swept away; they sometimes die out; they are never
abolished. This comes largely of the absorbing and assimilating power
of the island world. But it comes no less of personal character and
personal circumstances, and pre-eminently of the personal character of
the Norman Conqueror and of the circumstances in which he found
himself.
Our special business now is with the personal acts and character of
William, and above all with his acts and character as an English
statesman. But the English reign of William followed on his earlier
Norman reign, and its character was largely the result of his earlier
Norman reign. A man of the highest natural gifts, he had gone through
such a schooling from his childhood upwards as falls to the lot of few
princes. Before he undertook the conquest of England, he had in some
sort to work the conquest of Normandy. Of the ordinary work of a
sovereign in a warlike age, the defence of his own land, the annexation

of other lands, William had his full share. With the land of his overlord
he had dealings of the most opposite kinds. He had to call in the help of
the French king to put down rebellion in the Norman duchy, and he had
to drive back more than one invasion of the French king at the head of
an united Norman people. He added Domfront and Maine to his
dominions, and the conquest of Maine, the work as much of
statesmanship as of warfare, was the rehearsal of the conquest of
England. There, under circumstances strangely like those of England,
he learned his trade as conqueror, he learned to practise on a narrower
field the same arts which he afterwards practised on a wider. But after
all, William's own duchy was his special school; it was his life in his
own duchy which specially helped to make him what he was.
Surrounded by trials and difficulties almost from his cradle, he early
learned the art of enduring trials and overcoming difficulties; he
learned how to deal with men; he learned when to smite and when to
spare; and it is not a little to his honour that, in the long course of such
a reign as his, he almost always showed himself far more ready to spare
than to smite.
Before then we can look at William as an English statesman, we must
first look on him in the land in which he learned the art of
statesmanship. We must see how one who started with all the
disadvantages which are implied in his earlier surname of