William King

“ William broke out into a sudden, deep passion.
"Is this the Prince of Orange"—he cried, striking his breast—"who was something in Europe? Is this he, the sport of such as Harley, and insulted by those who loved him once?"
"My lord must be out of his wits," replied Sunderland. "I could have struck him."
"This is too much—this is indeed the end," said the King. "He leaves the Court. By God, I was Nassau once, if I am only King of England now!"
"He must still love Your Majesty——" urged the Lord Chamberlain.
"Love!" echoed William. "Doth love inspire such cruelty?" ”

“ William gave a short laugh.
"I suppose that you will be the next, my lord?" he said shrewdly.
The Earl went rather pale.
"I will hold office as long as I can, Your Majesty," he answered. "But it is a hard thing to maintain my position in the face of all England. But whether I am in office or no, I shall, sir, always serve you."
The King lifted his dark eyes.
"I believe you will, my lord," he said simply; "we are old allies now. Well—we have not either of us much more to do—the people have their peace, and we have our positions, and may grow roses, and build villas, and wait for death." ”

“ 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. ”

“ William drew a deep breath.
"You should know better than to seek to frighten me, M. D'Avaux. I am not by nature timorous."
"I warn Your Highness," repeated the Ambassador. "I remind you that you are not a sovereign Prince."
"I rule a sovereign state, Monsieur."
"The first magistrate of a republic, Monseigneur, cannot behave as a king. Since Your Highness will give me no satisfaction, I shall go to the States."
"You will do as you wish," answered William; "but you are, nevertheless, perfectly well aware that I rule the States." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yet one is a little surprised to find William, at this stage of the year, sitting quietly at Rouen, holding a council, and presently sending forth orders for the levying of a great army, as if two wars were not already waging. His speech. In his council of the Norman barons the Red King is made to express himself in a humane and devout strain. Hitherto he had been careless about winning back the heritage of his father; he had been unwilling, for the mere sake of enlarging his dominions, to trouble a peaceful population or to cause the death of human beings. ”

“ 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. ”

“ William had sailed for England, ere the king had well breathed his last; thinking it more advantageous to look to his future benefit, than to be present at the funeral of his father. Moreover, in the dispersion of money, neither slow, nor sparing, he brought forth from its secret hoard, all that treasure which had been accumulated at Winchester, during a reign of so many years: to the monasteries he gave a piece of gold; to each parish church five shillings in silver: to every county a hundred pounds to be divided to each poor man severally. ”

“ But I cannot make a hero out of stout King William, although he has bravery enough of the common, military kind, to suit any of the heroes of the "Nibelungen Lied." He never would, if he could, render any service to liberty; he cannot understand the elements and first principles of popular freedom; to him the people is always, as a child, to be kept in leading strings and guided, and, if at all boisterous or naughty, smartly birched and put in a dark corner. There is nothing cruel about King William ”

“ Should any stranger now see it, he laments over the once-magnificent cities; the towers threatening heaven itself with their loftiness; the fields abundant in pasturage, and watered with rivers: and, if any ancient inhabitant remains, he knows it no longer.
Malcolm surrendered himself, without coming to an engagement, and for the whole of William's time passed his life under treaties, uncertain, and frequently broken. But when in the reign of William, the son of William, he was attacked in a similar manner, he diverted the king from pursuing him by a false oath. ”

“ Perhaps there were few men in England of whatever class, high or low, who had less of the quality of personal greatness than William the Fourth. He had greatness thrust upon him by the mere fact that fate would have him King. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Late in life King separated himself from the high church party as a whole by sanctioning the remarriage of the innocent party in a divorce suit. In politics he was a staunch tory: 'I have been voting against Gladstone all my life,' he said, 'and now he makes me a bishop.' Yet he favoured the franchise bill of 1884, on the ground that the agricultural labourers must be taught to be citizens of the kingdom of God by being citizens of the kingdom of England. King's character and career manifested with peculiar clearness the power of purely moral qualities. ”

“ William's claims to the English throne. It is not to be supposed that, even in the warlike times of which we are writing, such a potentate as a duke of Normandy would invade a country like England, so large and powerful in comparison to his own, without some pretext. William's pretext was, that he himself was the legitimate successor to the English crown, and that the English king who possessed it at the time of his invasion was a usurper. In order that the reader may understand the nature and origin of this his claim, it is necessary to relate somewhat in full the story of the Lady Emma. ”

“ As to whether King William knew the full significance of the order which he signed, and what was the extent of his knowledge of the circumstances, are points which can never be ascertained. It is mere meaningless declamation to talk of it as a foul and indelible blot on his character and reign. “The best that can be done for the cause of truth, is to give the facts abundantly and accurately. The character of the revolution king is one of the questions which political passion and partizanship have not yet let go, so that reason may take it up. ”

“ Men were no longer keeping out an invader; when they rose, they rose against a power which, however wrongfully, was the established government of the land. Two such movements took place. One was a real revolt of Englishmen against foreign rule. The other was a rebellion of William’s own earls in their own interests, in which English feeling went with the King. Both were short sharp struggles which stand out boldly in the tale. More important in the general story, though less striking in detail, are the relations of William to the other powers in and near the isle of Britain. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All the wrongs of the days of William the Elder were to be put an end to in the days of William the Younger. The English folk should have again the best laws that ever before were in this land. King William would reign over his people like Eadward or Cnut or Ælfred. The two great grievances of his father’s days were to cease; the King’s coffers were no longer to be filled by money wrung from his people; the King’s hunting-grounds were no longer to be fenced in by the savage code which had guarded the Conqueror’s pleasures. ”

“ He is brought before the King, to whom he says that he is much beloved in his land, and that, if he were only able to assemble his men, no king could subdue him in it. William lets him go to see what he can do, and gives up to him Le Mans and all the castles of the country ”

“ Thus, though he had been faithful and serviceable to either brother, they, vouchsafing no establishment to the young man, trained him up, as he grew in years, to greater prudence, from the scantiness of his means. But on the violent death of king William, as before related, after the solemnization of the royal funeral, he was elected king; though some trifling dissensions had first arisen among the nobility which were allayed chiefly through the exertions of Henry earl of Warwick, a man of unblemished integrity, with whom he had long been in the strictest intimacy. ”

“ A crowd of complaints followed from all manner of injured persons and bodies, great and small, French and English, lay and clerical. The Commissioners seem to have fairly heard all, and to have fairly reported all for the King to judge of. It is their care to do right to all men which has given us such strange glimpses of the inner life of an age which had none like it before or after.
The general Survey followed by the general homage might seem to mark William’s work in England, his work as an English statesman, as done. ”

“ When the tenant was invested with possession of his feud or fief, he paid homage to his lord, that is, he proclaimed himself the “man” to help and to serve his master. Kneeling humbly before the baron, he took oath of fealty, and practically enslaved himself. It was here that King William showed his wisdom by ordaining that the oath of allegiance should be not only to the feudal superior, but to the monarch as the head of all, and thus he secured the ultimate service of all vassals to the crown, and deprived the barons of autocratic power. ”

“ Emaciated in person, austere in life and manners, and sparing in expenditure, William had a high reputation for sanctity, took as little part as possible in civil affairs, and was industrious and strict in his administration of his province and of his diocese, in which he consecrated many new churches. Miracles, and specially cures of fever, are said to have been wrought at his tomb. He made a beneficial rule, confirmed by the king in 1283, that each archbishop of York should leave a certain amount of stock on the estates of the see. ”

“ The King is the doer of everything; but he can do nothing of moment without the consent of his Witan. They can say Yea or Nay to every proposal of the King. An energetic and popular king would get no answer but Yea to whatever he chose to ask. A king who often got the answer of Nay, Nay, was in great danger of losing his kingdom. The statesmanship of William knew how to turn this constitutional system, without making any change in the letter, into a despotism like that of Constantinople or Cordova. ”

“ Now, king William conducting himself with mildness towards the obedient but with severity to the rebellious, possessed the whole of England in tranquillity, holding all the Welsh tributary to him. At this time too, beyond sea, being never unemployed, he nearly annihilated the county of Maine, leading thither an expedition composed of English; who, though they had been easily conquered in their own, yet always appeared invincible in a foreign country. He lost multitudes of his men at Dol, [28] a town of Brittany, whither, irritated by some broil, he had led a military force. ”

“ Age and infirmities of Edward.
He commenced immediately an energetic system of measures to strengthen his own cause, and prepare the way for his own accession. He organized his party, collected arms and munitions of war, and did all that he could to ingratiate himself with the most powerful and wealthy nobles. He sought the favor of the king, too, and endeavored to persuade him to discard William. The king was now old and infirm, and was growing more and more inert and gloomy as he advanced in age. ”