His character. With the inheritance of Mabel and William Talvas, their son and grandson was believed to have succeeded in full measure to the hereditary wickedness of their house. That house is spoken of as one at whose deeds dæmons themselves might shudder,[487] His surname. and Robert himself bears in the traditions of his Cenomannian enemies the frightful surname which has been so unfairly transferred to the father of the Conqueror. His name lives in proverbs. In the land of Maine his abiding works are pointed to as the works of Robert the Devil. Elsewhere the “wonders of Robert of Bellême” became a familiar saying.[488] That Robert was a man of no small natural gifts is plain; to the ordinary accomplishments of the Norman warrior he added a mastery of the more intellectual branches of the art of warfare. His skill in engineering. As the Cenomannian legend shows, he stood at the head of his age in the skill of the military engineer.[489] Firm and daring, ready of wit and ready of speech, he had in him most of the qualities which might have made him great in that or in any other age. His special and wanton cruelty. But, even in that age, he held a place by himself as a kind of incarnation of evil. Restless ambition, reckless contempt of the rights of others, were common to him with many of his neighbours and contemporaries. But he stands almost alone in his habitual delight in the infliction of human suffering. The recklessness which lays waste houses and fields, the cruelty of passion or of policy which slays or mutilates an enemy, were common in his day. But even then we find only a few men of whom it was believed that the pangs of other men were to them a direct source of enjoyment. In Robert sheer love of cruelty displaced even greediness; he refused ransom for his prisoners that he might have the pleasure of putting them to lingering deaths.[490] The received forms of cruelty blinding and mutilation, were not enough for him; he brought the horrors of the East into Western Europe; men, and women too, were left at his bidding to writhe on the sharp stake.[491] Distrustful of all men, artful, flattering, courteous of speech, his profession of friendship was the sure path to destruction.[492] The special vices of William Rufus are not laid to his charge; it is at least to the credit of Latin Christendom in the eleventh century that it needs the union of its two worst sinners to form the likeness of an Ottoman Majesty, Excellency, or Highness in the nineteenth. But his domestic life was hardly happy. His treatment of his wife His wife Agnes, the heiress of Ponthieu, the mother of his one child William Talvas, was long kept by him in bonds in the dungeons of Bellême.[493] and his godson. And, more piteous than all, we read how a little boy, his own godchild, drew near to him in all loving trust. Some say, in the sheer wantonness of cruelty, some say, to avenge some slight fault of the child’s father, the monster drew the boy under his cloak and tore out his eyes with his own hands.[494]
The list of the men, great and small, who were simply wronged and dispossessed by Robert of Bellême, is long indeed.[495] Some of them, it is true, were now and then able to revenge their wrongs with their own arms. His enmity to the men of Domfront; He seems, as might have been expected, to have been the special enemy of all that was specially good in individuals or in communities. He was the bitter foe of the valiant and faithful men of Domfront.[496] to Helias; He was before all things the enemy of Helias of La Flèche. to Rotrou of Perche; He was the enemy of his neighbour Count Rotrou of Perche, who also bears a good character among the princes of his day.[497] to the prelates of Seez. As temporal lord of Seez, he was the enemy of its churches, episcopal and abbatial; he had not that reverence for the foundation of his father which is one of the redeeming features in the character of the Red King. Abbot Ralph, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. He underwent excommunication from the zeal of Bishop Serlo, and by the wrongs done by him to Abbot Ralph of Seez, which drove that prelate to seek shelter in England, he unwittingly gave England a worthy primate and Anselm a worthy successor.[498] One is inclined to wonder how such a man gained the special favour of the Conqueror, whose politic sternness had nothing in common with the fiendish brutality of Robert.[499] Perhaps, as in William Rufus, the worst features of his character may for a while have been hidden. It is less surprising that, in the days of William’s sons, we find him in honour at the courts of England, Normandy, and France. But at last vengeance came upon him. His imprisonment by Henry. 1110. When King Henry sent him to spend his days in prison, it was in a prison so strait and darksome that the outer world knew not whether he were dead or alive, nor was the time of his death set down in any record.[500]
Robert Count of Meulan and Earl of Leicester. The other Robert, the son of the other Roger, was a man of a different mould, a man who would perhaps seem more in place in some other age than in that in which he lived. He was the son of the old and worthy Roger of Beaumont, the faithful counsellor of princes, His father Roger of Beaumont. who, like Gulbert of Hugleville, refused to share in the spoils of England.[501] Great, like his namesake, in France, Normandy, and England, Robert passed through a long life unstained by any remarkable crime, though it was hinted that, of his vast possessions on both sides of the sea, some were not fairly come by.[502] He inherits Meulan from his uncle, He is known in history by the name of his French county of Meulan, which he inherited from his mother’s brother, Count Hugh, son of Count Waleran, who withdrew to become a monk of Bec.[503] and Beaumont from his father. From his father, when he too had gone to end his days in his father’s monastery of Preaux, Robert inherited the lordship of Beaumont, called, from his father’s name, Beaumont-le-Roger.[504] His earldom of Leicester. He shared in the Conqueror’s distribution of lands in England, and in after days he received the earldom of Leicester from King Henry, as his less stirring brother Henry had already received that of Warwick from the Red King. His exploits at Senlac. That he was a brave and skilful soldier we cannot doubt; his establishment in England was the reward of good service done at one of the most critical moments of the most terrible of battles.[505] But the warrior of Senlac hardly appears again in the character of a warrior; he His fame for wisdom. lives on for many years as a cold and crafty statesman, the counsellor of successive kings, whose wisdom, surpassing that of all men between Huntingdon and Jerusalem, was deemed, like that of Ahithophel, to be like the oracle of God.[506] His counsels were not always of an amiable kind. Character of his influence with Rufus and Henry. Under Rufus, without, as far as we can see, sharing in his crimes, he checked those chivalrous instincts which were the King’s nearest approach to virtue.[507] Under Henry his influence was used to hinder the promotion of Englishmen in their own land.[508] Yet on the whole his character stands fair. He discouraged foppery and extravagance by precept and example; he was the right-hand man of King Henry in maintaining the peace of the land, and he seems to have shared the higher tastes of the clerkly monarch.[509] Of Anselm he was sometimes the enemy, sometimes the friend.[510] His sons. His sons were well taught, and they could win the admiration of Pope and cardinals by their skill in disputation.[511] The eldest, Waleran, his Norman heir, plays an unlucky part in the reign of Henry;[512] his English heir Robert continued the line of the Earls of Leicester.[513] His last days. His last days were clouded by domestic troubles;[514] and he is said to have formally perilled his own soul in his zeal for the temporal welfare of his sons. His death. 1118. On his death-bed, so the story runs, Archbishop Ralph and other clergy bade him, for his soul’s health, to restore whatever lands he had gained unjustly.[515] Story of his death-bed.What then, he asked, should he leave to his sons? “Your old inheritance,” answered Ralph, “and whatever you have acquired justly. Give up the rest, or you devote your soul to hell.” The fond father answered that he would leave all to them, and would trust to their filial piety to make atonement for his sins.[516] But we are told that Waleran and Robert were too busy increasing by wrong what had been won by wrong to do anything for the soul of their father.[517]
These are the two men who, of secondary importance in the tale of the Conquest and of the reign of the first William, become the most prominent laymen of the reign of the second. The churchmen of the time who stand forth conspicuously for good and for evil will have their place in another chapter. Prominence of the two Roberts. But the two Roberts will, next to the King and the Ætheling, hold the first place in the tale which we have immediately to tell, as they held it still in days of which we shall not have the telling, long after the Ætheling had changed into the King. The force of him of Bellême, the wit of him of Meulan, had their full place in the affairs both of Normandy and of England, and both were brought to bear against the prince and people of Maine.
§ 1. Normandy under Robert.
1087–1090.
Temptations to the invasion of Normandy. That the thought of an invasion of his elder brother’s duchy should present itself to the mind of William Rufus was not very wonderful. The fact that it was his elder brother’s duchy might perhaps be of itself enough to suggest the thought. The dutiful son of his father, whom alone his father had called to rule of his own free will, might feel himself in some sort defrauded, if any part of his father’s dominions was held by a brother whose only claim was the accident of his elder birth, and whose personal unfitness for the rule of men his father had emphatically set forth. Indeed, without seeking for any special motive at all, mere ambition, mere love of enterprise, might be motive enough to lead a prince like Rufus to a campaign beyond the sea, a campaign which might make him master of the native dominion of his father, the land of his own birth. Interest of those who held land in both countries. And such schemes would be supported on grounds of reasonable policy by a large part of the Norman possessors of the soil of England. Holding, many of them, lands on both sides of the sea, it was their interest that the same prince should reign on both sides of the sea, and that they themselves should not be left open to the dangers of a divided allegiance. They had failed to carry out this purpose by putting Robert in possession of England; they might now carry it out by putting William in possession of Normandy. And the attempt might even be made with some show of justice. Provocation given by Robert. The help which Robert had given to the rebellion against Rufus might, in the eyes of Rufus, or of a much more scrupulous prince than Rufus, have been held to justify reprisals. State of Normandy. And to a prince seeking occasions or excuses for an invasion of Normandy the actual condition of that duchy might seem directly to invite the coming of an invader. The invader might almost comfort himself with the belief that his invasion was a charitable work. Any kind of rule, almost any kind of tyranny, might seem an improvement on the state of things which was now rife through the whole length and breadth of the Norman land. His invasion likely to be largely welcome. William Rufus might reasonably think that no small part of the inhabitants of Normandy would welcome invasion from an invader of their own blood, the son of their greatest ruler. And the event showed that he was by no means mistaken in so thinking.
The Conqueror foretells the character of Robert’s reign. No words of man were ever more truly spoken than the words in which William the Great, constrained, as he deemed himself, to leave Normandy in the hands of Robert, was believed to have foretold the fate of the land which should be under his rule. Robert was, so his father is made to call him, proud and foolish, doomed to misfortune; the land would be wretched where he was master.[518] The Conqueror was a true prophet; Utter anarchy of the duchy. when Robert stepped into his father’s place, the work of the fifty years’ rule of his father was undone in a moment. Normandy at once fell back into the state of anarchy from which William had saved it, the state into which it fell when the elder Robert set forth for Jerusalem.[519] Once more every man did what was right in his own eyes. And the Duke did nothing to hinder them. Again we are brought to that standard of the duties of a sovereign of which we have heard so often, that standard which was reached by the Conqueror and by his younger son, but which neither Robert in this generation nor Stephen in the next strove to reach. Character of Robert. Robert, it must always be noticed, is never charged with cruelty or oppression of any kind in his own person. His weak good-nature. His fault was exactly of the opposite kind. He was so mild and good-natured, so ready to listen to every suppliant, to give to every petitioner, to show mercy to every offender, that he utterly neglected the discharge of the first duty of his office, that which the men of his time called doing justice.[520] William the Great had done justice and made peace. Revival of brigandage and private war. The smaller brood of thieves and murderers had been brought to feel the avenging arm of the law. Thieves and murderers on a greater scale, the unruly nobles of the duchy, had been forced to keep back their hands from that form of brigandage which they dignified with the name of private war. Under Robert both classes of offenders found full scope for their energies. He did nothing to restrain either. He neither made peace nor did justice. Lack of “justice.” Brave, liberal, ready of speech, ready of wit and keen of sight in supporting the cause of another, Robert undoubtedly could be. But stronger qualities were needed, and those qualities Robert had not. Sunk in sloth and dissipation, no man heeded him; the land was without a ruler. Forgetful alike of injuries and of benefits, Robert, from the first moment of his reign, tamely endured the most flagrant outrages to the ducal authority, without doing anything to hinder or to avenge.[521]
Spread of vice and evil fashions. In other respects also Normandy suddenly changed from what it had been under the great King-duke. William the Great, strict to austerity in his private life, careful in the observance of all religious duties, a zealous supporter of ecclesiastical discipline, had made his duchy into a kind of paradise in ecclesiastical eyes. All this was now swept away. The same flood of foolish and vicious fashions which overspread England overspread Normandy also. There is nothing to convict Robert personally of the special vices of Rufus; but the life of the unmarried Duke was very unlike the life of his father. And vice of the grossest kind, the vices of Rufus himself, stalked forth into broad daylight, unabashed and unpunished.[522] Weakness of the spiritual power. The ecclesiastical power, no longer supported by the secular arm, was too weak to restrain or to chastise.[523] As every form of violence, so every form of licentiousness, had its full swing in the Normandy of Robert Curthose.
Building of castles. But, above all, this time stood out, like all times of anarchy, as a time of building and strengthening of castles. One of the means by which the Conqueror had The Conqueror keeps garrisons in the castles of the nobles.maintained the peace of the land had been by keeping garrisons of his own in the castles of such of his nobles as were likely to be dangerous. He had followed this wise policy with the castle of Evreux, the stronghold of Instances at Evreux, and in the Bellême castles.his kinsman Count William. He had followed it with the crowd of castles which, as the inheritance of his mother, had passed to Robert of Bellême, the man who is to be the leading villain of our present drama. But the precautions of the Conqueror lasted no longer than his life; his successor might be defied without danger. At the moment of the King’s death, Robert of Bellême was on his way to the court to “speak with the King,” in the ordinary phrase,[524] on some affairs of his own. He had reached Brionne when he heard of the Conqueror’s death. Robert of Bellême drives out the ducal forces. Instead of going on to offer his homage or support to the new Duke, he turned back, gathered his own followers, marched on Alençon, and by a sudden attack drove the ducal garrison out of the fortress by the Sarthe, the southern bulwark of Normandy. He did the same with better right on his own hill of Bellême, which was not strictly Norman soil. He did so with all his other castles, and with as many of the castles of his neighbours as he could.[525] The lord of Bellême in short established himself as a prince who might well bear himself as independent of the lord of Rouen. The like done by the Count of Evreux and others. Count William of Evreux followed his example; the late King’s garrison was driven out of the fortress which had arisen within the walls of the Roman Mediolanum. William of Breteuil, Ralph of Toesny or of Conches, the nobles of Normandy in general wherever they had the power, all did the like.[526] They drove out the garrisons; they strengthened the old fortresses; they raised new ones, adulterine castles in the phrase of the day, built without the Duke’s licence and placed beyond his control. Those who were strong enough seized on the castles of weaker neighbours. The land was again filled with these robbers’ nests, within whose walls and circuit law was powerless, lairs, as men said, of grievous wolves, who entered in and spared not the flock.[527] Robert’s lavish grants. Some nobles indeed had the decency to go through the form of asking the Duke for gifts which they knew that he would not have strength of mind to refuse them. One of them was William of Breteuil, the son of the famous Earl William of Hereford, the brother of the rebel Roger,[528] and once a sharer in Robert’s rebellion against his father. Ivry. He asked and received the famous tower of Ivry, the tower of Albereda, the now vanished stronghold which once looked down on the plain where Henry of Navarre was in after ages to smite down the forces of the League. This gift involved a wrong to the old Roger of Beaumont, who had held that great fortress by the Conqueror’s commission. Brionne. Roger was accordingly recompensed by a grant of Brionne, the island stronghold in the heart of Normandy, which had played such a part in the early wars of the Conqueror.[529] Thus places specially connected with the memory of the great William, places like Alençon and Brionne, which had cost him no small pains to win or to recover, passed away from his son without a thought. Robert gave to every man everything that he asked for, to the impoverishment of himself and to the strengthening of every other man against him.[530]
The Ætheling Henry. In one corner only of the duchy was there a better state of things to be seen. The Ætheling Henry had received from his dying father a bequest in money, but no share in his territorial dominions.[531] He claims his mother’s lands. He claimed however the English lands which had been held by his mother Matilda, but which the late King had kept in his own hands after her death.[532] This claim had not as yet been made good, and Henry’s possessions still consisted only of his five thousand pounds in money. With part of this he was presently to make a splendid investment. Lavish waste of Robert. While Henry had money but no lands, Robert had wide domains, but his extravagance soon left him without money. The Norman portion of the Conqueror’s hoard was presently scattered broadcast among his mercenary soldiers and other followers. Of these he kept a vast number; men flocked eagerly to a prince who was so ready to give; but before long he was without the means of giving or paying any more. He asks a loan of Henry. He asked Henry for a gift or a loan. The scholar-prince was wary, and refused to throw his money away into the bottomless pit of Robert’s extravagance.[533] The Duke then proposed to sell him some part of his dominions. At this proposal Henry caught gladly, and a bargain was struck. Henry buys the Côtentin and Avranchin. For a payment of three thousand pounds, Henry became master of a noble principality in the western part of the Norman duchy. The conquest of William Longsword,[534] the colony of Harold Blaatand,[535] the whole land from the fortress of Saint James to the haven of Cherbourg, the land of Coutances and Avranches, the castle and abbey of Saint Saviour,[536] and the house that was castle and abbey in one, the house of Saint Michael in Peril of the Sea—all this became the dominion of Henry, now known as Count of the Côtentin. With these territories he received the superiority over a formidable vassal; he became lord over the Norman possessions of Earl Hugh of Chester.[537] Thus the English-born son of the Norman Conqueror held for his first dominion no contemptible portion of his father’s duchy, as ruler of the Danish land which in earlier days had beaten back an English invasion.[538] In that land, under Henry’s firm rule. the rule of him who was one day to be called the Lion of Justice, there was a nearer approach to peace and order than could be found in other parts of Normandy. The young Count governed his county well and firmly; no such doings went on in the lands of Coutances and Avranches as went on in the rest of the duchy under the no-rule of Duke Robert.[539]