King William III of England

“ William I., King of England, surnamed the Conqueror, was born in 1027 or 1028. He was the son of Robert, Duke of Normandy and Herleva, daughter of Fulbert, a tanner of Falaise. When he was about seven years old his father, intending to go on pilgrimage and having no legitimate sons, proposed him as his heir. The great men of the duchy did homage to the child, and a year later (1035) his father's death left him to make good his claim. Anarchy was the natural result of a minority. William's life was on more than one occasion in danger, and several of his guardians perished in his service. ”

“ The point is that William required the personal presence of every man whose personal allegiance he thought worth having. Every man in the mixed assembly, mixed indeed in race and speech, the King’s own men and the men of other lords, took the oath and became the man of King William. On that day England became for ever a kingdom one and indivisible, which since that day no man has dreamed of parting asunder. ”

“ The popularity of William throughout the Protestant world was great; and in England, as the terror of a Popish king increased, men remembered that were James and his house excluded from the throne William as the king's nephew, the son of his sister Mary and the grandson of Charles the First, stood next in succession to the Crown. The Prince was drawn by his desire to detach England from the French alliance into close connexion with Shaftesbury and the leaders of the Country party, and already pledges from this quarter had reached him that he should be declared heir to the throne. ”

“ None save Duke William could bend Duke William's bow, and while these glowing accounts of him were written from a later standpoint, and his story might easily be read backward, as a fulfilment of prophecy, we can be sure, at least, that his power asserted itself in a marked way, and that he soon gained importance and mustered a respectable company of followers as the beginning of a brilliant and almost irresistible court and army. Even King Henry of France was jealous of his vassal's rising fame and popularity, and felt obliged to pay William a deference that his years did not merit. ”

“ Now King William knew that kings are only to be better loved and obeyed than other men when they obey God themselves, and love mercy, and do right and justice to their subjects; and that men and countries have a right to be free, and to worship God as they please: and it was because King William knew this that the English chose him to be king when they sent away James the Second, because he wished to be like Louis the Fourteenth in most things. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Most surely William himself would have been greatly amazed if a man of the Duke of the Normans had refused to go against the King of the French. But he took care that there should at least be no such questions in the kingdom of England. Every man in William’s kingdom became the King’s man first of all, and was to obey him against all other men. There never was any one law made in England of greater moment than this. England for a long time had been getting more united, when the coming of William brought in two sets of tendencies. ”

“ This King William that we speak about was a very wise man and very rich; more worshipped, and stronger than any of his foregangers were. He was mild to the good men that loved God, and beyond all metes stark to those who withsaid his will. On that same ground where God gave him that he should win England, he reared a noble minster and set monks there and well endowed it. ”

“ The Regency of Bishop Odo and Earl William.—The rule of those whom King William left in England to govern in his name was not of a kind to win much love from the English people. William himself seems to have done all that he could to gain the good will of his new subjects, consistently with firmly establishing his own power. He could be harsh, and even cruel, when it served his purpose; but at no time does he seem to have been guilty of mere wanton oppression for oppression’s sake. He was always strict in punishing open wrong-doers of any kind, of whatever nation. ”

“ It appeared doubtful and dangerous in the eyes of mankind, for to mere superficial observers it seemed simply an aggressive war waged by a duke of Normandy, the ruler of a comparatively small and insignificant province, against a king of England, the monarch of one of the greatest and most powerful realms in the world. William, on the other hand, regarded it as an effort on the part of the rightful heir to a throne to dispossess a usurper. ”

“ It is surely not unjust to a man of William's antecedents to believe that from the hour that he learned the strength of his party in England, down to the hour when he was presented with the crown in the banqueting chamber at Whitehall, he had eyes for little else than the great European future which would open before him as King of England ”

“ He gave fiefs liberally to his followers; but he took care that the gifts should be in small and scattered parcels. No one man controlled any region sufficiently extensive to give him the faintest chance of defying the King. William had the famous Domesday Book [14] compiled, that he might know just what every freeman in his dominions owned and for what he could be held accountable. The England of the later days of the Conqueror seemed far advanced upon our modern ways. ”

“ He saw also over the carved upright piano, life-sized portraits of William of Orange and his English queen, a sight that, for a time, brought England and Holland side by side in his heart. William and Mary have left a halo round the English throne to this day, he the truest patriot that ever served an adopted country, she the noblest wife that ever sat upon a British throne, up to the time of Victoria and Albert the Good. As Ben looked at the pictures he remembered accounts he had read of King William's visit to The Hague in the winter of 1691. ”

“ William secured the benevolent neutrality of the emperor Henry IV.; the influence of the archdeacon Hildebrand obtained for the expedition the solemn approval of Pope Alexander II. Philip I. of France was a minor under the guardianship of William's father-in-law, the count of Flanders. With Tostig, the banished brother of Harold, William formed an alliance which proved of the utmost service. The duke and his Normans were enabled, by Tostig's invasion of northern England, to land unmolested at Pevensey on the 28th of September 1066. ”

“ The King took to himself the estates of the house of Godwine, save those of Edith, the widow of his revered predecessor, whom it was his policy to treat with all honour. The lands too of those who had died on Senlac were granted back to their heirs only of special favour, sometimes under the name of alms. Thus, from the beginning of his reign, William began to make himself richer than any king that had been before him in England or than any other Western king of his day. He could both punish his enemies and reward his friends. ”

“ William was, as we have said, the centre of opposition to Louis, and that began to mean to Catholicism as well. Also, William had married a daughter of King James and had thus some claim to interfere in the family domains. And, most important of all, as chief ruler of Holland, William had an army at command. With a portion of that army he set sail late in 1688 and landed in England. Englishmen of all ranks flocked to join him. King James fled to France, and a Parliament, hastily assembled in 1689, declared him no longer king and placed William and his wife Mary on the throne as joint rulers. ”

“ Eadgar, the rival king, with Ealdred, the archbishop, and all the chief men of London, came out to meet William, and "bowed to him for need." The Chronicler can only say that it was very foolish they had not done so before. A people so helpless, so utterly anarchic, so incapable of united action, deserved to undergo a severe training from the hard taskmasters of Romance civilisation. The nation remained, but it remained as a conquered race, to be drilled in the stern school of the conquerors. For awhile, it is true, William governed England like an English king ”

“ A rope fastened to a wall, which had borne 3,500 lbs. weight, without giving way, is broke asunder by his amazing strength. The celebrity of this man attracted the curiosity of King William III., before whom he exhibited at Kensington Palace; likewise before George, Prince of Denmark, and his royal consort, the Princess, afterwards Queen Anne, and their son William, Duke of Gloucester, called the Hope of England. He also went through a regular course of performances at the Duke's Theatre, in Dorset-gardens, Salisbury-square, which was attended by the first nobility and gentry in the kingdom. ”

“ Besides, William was a very brave prince, and had defended his own country against that grasping man, Louis the Fourteenth, King of France, who called himself Great because his army had won a great many battles and killed thousands of people.
William and Mary agreed to govern always by means of the parliament; to do equal justice to all their subjects; to listen to their complaints; and never to let the Pope have anything to do with the government of England. ”

“ All present at the assembly, ‘whose men soever they were,’ did so. The doctrine thus established, that the fealty owed to the king could not be overridden by an obligation to any inferior lord, saved England from the worst evils of feudalism. William heavily fined all against whom he could bring any charge, true or false; stayed in the Isle of Wight while the money was being collected, and then sailed off with it to Normandy.
A long-standing dispute as to the right to the French Vexin came to a head in 1087, when the French garrison in Mantes committed some ravages in the duke's dominions. ”

“ William’s power was now, in spite of this repulse, very great, and the King of France, with whom he became involved in war in 1097 on the old subject of the Vexin, looked with anxiety at the growth of his great vassal, especially when a close friendship arose between him and the Duke of Poitiers and Guienne. This conjunction, giving the English King a grasp of France all round the seaboard, made men believe that his ambition reached to the throne of France, especially as Philip had but one son, Louis. ”

“ The coronation of William had its effect in a moment. It made him really king over part of England; it put him into a new position with regard to the rest. As soon as there was a king, men flocked to swear oaths to him and become his men. They came from shires where he had no real authority. It was most likely now, rather than at Berkhampstead, that Edwin and Morkere at last made up their minds to acknowledge some king. They became William’s men and received again their lands and earldoms as his grant. Other chief men from the North also submitted and received their lands and honours again. ”

“ No one now had a better claim to the throne of England than William; so, in the new Westminster Abbey, on Christmas Day, 1066, he was crowned, and took his proud{46} place in history as William the First of England. He had to fight four years longer to break down all opposition from the northern counties. In rewarding the Norman knights and nobles who had helped him gain possession of England, the king gave them great estates scattered over the kingdom. William brought to the island many scholars and bishops, and did much to establish the Church of England. ”

“ No ordinary standard should be used in judging of a man who was confronted with so many difficulties as King William the Third. His weak frame, the vast burden of his work in the department of foreign affairs, his failure to understand and his inability to sympathise with the English character, all these causes conspired to make the task of governing England and of commanding her Army too heavy for him. ”

“ In 1695 William's troops besieged and captured the town of Namur. At length Louis was moved by the exhaustion of his treasury, and the stagnation of industry in France, to conclude the Peace of Ryswick with England, Spain, and Holland (1697) . The Duke of Savoy had been detached from the alliance. Most of the conquests on both sides were restored. William III. was acknowledged to be king of England. In the treaty with the emperor, France retained Strasburg. William was a man of sterling worth, but he was a Dutchman, and was cold in his manners. ”

“ CHAPTER IX—ENGLAND UNDER WILLIAM THE SECOND, CALLED RUFUS
William the Red, in breathless haste, secured the three great forts of Dover, Pevensey, and Hastings, and made with hot speed for Winchester, where the Royal treasure was kept. The treasurer delivering him the keys, he found that it amounted to sixty thousand pounds in silver, besides gold and jewels. Possessed of this wealth, he soon persuaded the Archbishop of Canterbury to crown him, and became William the Second, King of England. ”