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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.
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