William and his companions go to the hunt. In the version which records this speech the sneer at the English regard for omens are the Red King’s last recorded words. He now mounted his horse and rode into a wooded part of the forest to seek his sport, the sport of those to whom the sufferings of the wearied, wounded, weeping, beast are a source of joy. Count Henry the King’s brother,[809] William of Breteuil, and other nobles, went forth to the hunt, and were scattered about towards different points. The King and Walter Tirel. The King and the lord of Poix kept together, with a few companions, some say; others say that they two only kept together.[810] The King shot by an arrow. The sun was sinking towards the west when an arrow struck the King; he fell, and his reign and life were ended. This is all that we can say with positive certainty. That the arrow came from the bow of Walter Tirel is a feature common to nearly every account; but all the details differ. Various versions. In one highly picturesque version, not only the King and Walter Tirel,[811] but a company of barons are in a thickly wooded part of the forest near a marsh. The herd of deer comes near; the King gets down from his horse to take better aim; the barons get down also, Walter Tirel among them. Walter places himself near an elder-tree, behind an aspen. A great stag passes by; an arrow badly aimed pierces the King; by whose hand it was sent the teller of the tale knew not; but the archers who were there said that the shaft came from the bow of Walter Tirel. Walter fled at once; the King fell. He thrice cried for the Lord’s body. Alleged devotion of the King at the last moment. But there was none to give it to him; the place was a wilderness far from any church. But a hunter took herbs and flowers and made the King eat, deeming this to be a communion. Such a strange kind of figure of the most solemn act of Christian worship was not unknown.[812] Our author charitably hopes that it might be accepted in the case of the Red King, especially as he had received holy bread—itself a substitute of the same kind—the Sunday before.
In this version there is no mention of the warning dreams either of the King or of any other person. The scene in the wood follows at once on the boasting discourse with Walter Tirel. Another version; In another version the King has the frightful dream; he receives, and receives in a good spirit, the warning interpretation of the Bishop.[813] His companions, knights and valets, make ready for the chase; they are mounted on their horses; the bows are ready; the dogs are following; the dogs bark; the horns blow; all is ready that could stir up the soul of the hunter. William unwilling to go to the hunt. The King is unwilling to stir; his companions tempt him, entreat him, jeer at him; it is time to set out; he is afraid. He tells them solemnly that he is sick and sad a hundredfold more than they wot of. The end is come; he will not go to the forest. They think that he is mocking, and at last constrain him to come. The chase is described; the King seems to be alone with one unnamed companion. He is shot by accident by a knight unnamed. The King calls on his comrade to shoot; he is frightened as being too near the King. He shoots; the devil guides the barbed arrow so that it glances from a bough, and pierces the King near the heart. He dies penitent. He has just strength enough to bid the knight to flee for his own life, and to pray to God for him who has lost his life by his own folly, and who has been so great a sinner against God. The knight rides off in bitter grief, wishing a hundred times that he had himself been killed instead of the King.
Tenderness towards Rufus in these two versions. In these versions, both written in the Red King’s own tongue, the details are very remarkable. They seem to come from a kind of wish, like the feeling which strewed flowers on the grave of Nero, to make the end of the oppressor and blasphemer one degree less frightful. Other versions know nothing of this conversion at the last moment. In one of them, the two, the King and Walter, are alone; the King shoots at a stag; he hits the beast, but only with a slight wound. Other versions mention Walter Tirel. The stag flies; the King follows him with his eyes, sheltering them with his hand from the sun’s rays. Walter Tirel meanwhile aims at another stag, misses him, and strikes the King. Rufus utters no word; like Harold, he breaks off the shaft of the arrow; he falls on the ground, and dies. Walter comes up, finds him lifeless, and takes to flight.[814] Or again, the stag comes between his two enemies; Walter shoots; the King at the same moment shifts his place; Walter’s arrow flies over the stag’s back, and pierces the King.[815] In another version the arrow, as we have already heard, glances from a tree;[816] in another the King stumbles and falls upon it.[817] In later but not less graphic accounts the string of the King’s bow breaks; the stag stands still in amazement; the King calls to Walter, “Shoot, you devil,” “Shoot, in the devil’s name; shoot, or it will be the worse for you.” Walter shoots; his arrow, perhaps by a straight course, perhaps by glancing against a tree, strikes the King to the heart.[818]
In all these versions the arrow comes from the bow of a known companion, and in all but one that companion is said to be Walter Tirel. In another form of the story the general outline is the same, but the persons are different. Dunstable version. The vision which in the other version is seen at Gloucester is moved to Dunstable, and is seen there by the prior of that house. The change of place is unlucky, as the priory of Dunstable was not yet founded.[819] The dream with new details. The Prince on his throne, and the fair woman complaining of the deeds of William Rufus, are seen, with some differences of detail, but quite a new element is brought in. A man all black and hairy offers five arrows to the Prince on the throne, who gives them back again to him, saying that on the morrow the wrongs of the suppliant woman shall be avenged by one of them. The Prior has the vision explained to him much as in the other versions of the story, but with the addition that, unless the King repented, the woman—the Church—would be avenged by one of the arrows on the morrow. The prior of Dunstable warns the King. The Prior starts from his sleep, and midnight as it was, he sets out at once on a journey to the New Forest, as swift and headlong as the King’s own ride to Southampton the year before. He reaches the place at one in the afternoon, and finds the King going forth to hunt. As soon as William sees him, he says that he knows why he is come, and orders forty marks to be given to him. For, it is added, the King, who destroyed other churches throughout all England, had a love for the church of Dunstable and its prior, and had even built the minster there at his own cost. The Prior says that he has come on much greater and weightier matters; he takes the King aside; he tells him his dream, and warns him on no account to go into the forest, but at once to begin to repent and amend his ways. The Prior has hardly ended his discourse when a man, like the man whom he had seen in his dream, comes and offers the King five arrows, like the arrows of the dream. The King shot by Ralph of Aix. The King gives them—not to Walter Tirol, who is not mentioned, but to Ralph of Aix, to take with him into the forest. The Prior meanwhile prays him not to go, but in vain. He goes into the wood, and is presently shot with one of those arrows by the hand of Ralph. No details are given, nor is it implied whether the King’s death was an act of murder or of chance-medley.
Impression made at the time by the death of Rufus. These varying tales, whose very variety shows the impression which the event made upon men’s minds, may make us glad to come back to the safe statement of the Chronicler, that the Red King was shot from his own men. The place and circumstances of the death of Rufus were such as could not fail to stamp themselves upon men’s minds. We see the proud and godless King, in the height of his pride and godlessness, with his heart puffed up with wilder plans and more swelling boasts than any of his plans and boasts in former years. He goes forth, in defiance of all warning—for some kernel of truth there must surely be in so many tales of warning—to take his pleasure in the place which men had already learned to look on as fatal to his house, the place where his brother had died by a mysterious death, where his nephew had died only a few weeks before his own end. He goes forth, after striving first to quiet his restless soul with business, and then to quench all thoughts and all warnings in the wine-cup. In the midst of his sport, he falls, by what hand no man knows for certain. One writer rejoices to tell us how the oppressor of the Church died on the site of one of the churches which had been uprooted to make way for his pleasures.[820] Others rejoice to tell how the King whose life and reign had been that of a wild beast, perished like a beast among the beasts.[821] Its abiding memory. And the impression was not only at the time; it has been abiding. The death of William Rufus is one of those events in English history which are familiar to every memory and come readily to every mouth. His death lives in the thoughts of not a few who have no clear knowledge of his life. The arrow in the New Forest is well known to many who know nothing of the real position of the Red King’s reign in English history. The name of Walter Tirel springs readily to the lips of many on whose ears the names of Randolf Flambard and Robert of Bellême, of Helias of Maine and Malcolm of Scotland, nay the name of Anselm himself, would fall like unwonted sounds. Local traditions. No keener local remembrance can be found than that which binds together the name of Rufus and the name of the New Forest. At the scenes of the great events of his reign, at Rochester and Bamburgh and Le Mans, local memory has passed away, and the presence of the Red King has to be called up by book-learning only. In a word, in popular remembrance William Rufus lives, not in his life but in his death. Nor is this wonderful. Impressive character of the death of Rufus. In the widest survey of his reign, we can only say that his death was the fitting ending of his life; in a life full of striking incident, it is not amazing that the last and most striking incident of all should be the best remembered. Rufus and Charles the First. Of all the endings of kings in our long history, the two most impressive are surely the two that are most opposite. There is the death of the king who fell suddenly in the height of his power, by an unknown hand in the thickest depths of the forest; and there is the death of the king who, fallen from his power, was brought forth to die by the stroke of the headsman, before the windows of his own palace, in the sight of his people and of the sun. The striking nature of the tale is worthy of its long remembrance; but one could almost wish that the name of the supposed actor in the death of Rufus had never attached itself to the story. The words of the Chronicle. The dark words of the Chronicle are in truth more impressive than the tale, true or false, of Walter Tirel. Rufus was shot in his hunting from his own men. That is enough; his day was over. End and character of Rufus. A life was ended, stained with deeds which, in our history at least, stand out without fellow before or after, but a life in which we may here and there see signs of great powers wasted, even of momentary feelings which might have been trained into something nobler. As it is, the career of William the Red is one of which the kindest words that we can say are that he always kept his word when it was plighted in a certain form, and that he was less cruel in his own person than many men of his time, than some better men than himself. Judgement on the reign of Rufus. But, however we judge of the man, there is but one judgement to be passed on the reign. The arrow, by whomsoever shot, set England free from oppression such as she never felt before or after at the hand of a single man.
Alleged final penitence of Rufus. One tale of the death of Rufus, it will be remembered, charitably describes him as seeking at the last for the mercy of the God whom he had so often defied. Others paint him as stubborn to the end, and put the name of the fiend in his mouth as his last words. The other version prevails. The latter version is the one which left its abiding remembrance; it is the one which all men accepted at the time as the true picture of the oppressor whose yoke was broken at that memorable Lammas-tide. Accounts of William’s burial. But the versions which try to assert a repentance for William Rufus at the last moment try also to claim for him a solemn and honourable burial amid the tears of mourning friends. One story goes so far as to place at the head of the assembly the late Bishop of the diocese, Walkelin of Winchester, whose body was already resting in the Old Minster, while the revenues of his see were in the hands of the King. This version gives us a vivid picture of the scene which followed the King’s death.[822] A company of barons gather round the corpse. There were the sons of Richard of Bienfaite, pointedly distinguished, the one as Earl, the other only as Lord.[823] There were Gilbert of Laigle and Robert Fitz-hamon, names familiar to us, and William of Montfichet, a name afterwards well known, but which is not enrolled in Domesday. These lords weep and rend their hair; they beat themselves and wish they were dead; they could never have such another lord. Gilbert of Laigle at last bids them turn from vainly lamenting the lord who could not come back to them to paying the last honours to what was left of him. The huntsmen make a bier; they strew it with flowers and fern; they lay it on two palfreys; they place the corpse on the bier and cover it with the new mantles of Robert Fitz-hamon and William of Montfichet. Then they bear him to the minster of Saint Swithhun, where bishops, abbots, clerks, and monks, a goodly company, are come together. Bishop Walkelin, strange to say, watches by the body of the King till the morning. Then it is buried with such worship, such saying of masses, as no man had ever heard before, such as no man would hear again till the day of doom.
The genuine story. Such is the tale of those who would soften down the story; but the version which bears on it the stamp of truth gives us quite another picture. The King, forsaken by his nobles and companions, lay dead in the forest, as little cared for as his father had been when he lay dead in his chamber at Saint Gervase. Those who had been his comrades in sport hastened hither and thither to their own homes, to guard them against troubles that might arise, now that the land had no longer a ruler. Only a few churls of the neighbourhood, men of the race at whom Rufus had sneered for heeding omens and warnings, were, now that omens and warnings had proved too true, ready to do the last corporal work of mercy to the oppressor. They laid the bleeding body on a rustic wain; they covered it as they could, with coarse cloths, and then took it, dripping blood as it went, to the gates of Winchester. He who had so dearly loved the sports of the woods was himself borne from the woods to the city, like a savage boar pierced through by the hunting-spear.[824] And now took place one of the most wonderful scenes that our history records.[825] Popular canonizations. That history records not a few cases of popular canonization; neither pope nor king could hinder Earl Waltheof and Earl Simon from working signs and wonders on behalf of the folk for whom they had died.[826] Popular excommunication of Rufus. But nowhere else do we read of a popular excommunication. William Rufus, as I have more than once remarked, had never been openly cut off from the communion of the Church. He had died indeed unshriven and unabsolved, but so had many a better man in the endless struggles of those rough days. There was no formal ground for refusing to his corpse or to his soul the rites, the prayers, the offerings, which were the portion of the meanest of the faithful. But a common thought came on the minds of all men that for William Rufus those charitable rites could be of none avail. His foul life, his awful death, was taken as a sign that he was smitten by a higher judgement than that of Popes and Councils. A crowd of all orders, ranks, and sexes, brought together by wonder or pity—we will not deem that they came in scorn or triumph—met the humble funeral procession, and followed the royal corpse to the Old Minster. He is buried in the Old Minster without religious rites. The dead man had been a king; the consecrating oil had been poured on his head; his body was therefore allowed to pass within the hallowed walls, and was laid with all speed in a grave beneath the central tower. But in those rites, at once sad and cheerful, which accompany the burial of the lowliest of baptized men, the lord of England and Normandy had no share. No bell was rung; no mass was said; no offerings were made for the soul which was deemed to have passed beyond the reach even of eternal mercy. No man took from the hoard which Rufus had filled by wrong to win the prayers of the poor for him by almsgiving. Men deemed that for him prayer was too late; no scattering abroad of the treasure by the hands of others could atone for the wrong by which the treasure had first been brought together. Many looked on; but few mourned. None wept for him but the mercenaries who received his pay, and the baser partners of his foul vices. They would gladly have torn his slayer in pieces, but he was already far away out of their reach. Thus unwept, unprayed for, a byeword, an astonishment, and a hissing, the Red King lay beneath the pavement of the minster of St. Swithhun. Fall of the tower. 1107. A few years later the tower under which he lay crumbled and fell. Men said that it fell because so foul a corpse lay beneath it.[827]
Portents at William’s death. But as portents had gone before the fall of the Red King, so portents did not wait for the crumbling of Walkelin’s tower to startle men in strange ways with the news that he had fallen. That news, so say the legends of the time, was known in strange ways in far-off places, long before the tidings could have been brought by the utmost speed of man; sooner, it would seem, than the moment when the arrow hit its designed or unwitting mark. Dream of Abbot Hugh of Clugny. July 31, 1100. Already on the last day of July, the holy abbot Hugh of Clugny was able to tell Anselm that he had seen in a dream the King of the English brought before the throne of God, accused, judged, and condemned to eternal damnation.[828] Vision of Anselm’s doorkeeper. August 1. The next day, the night of the kalends of August, a bright youth stood before Anselm’s door-keeper at Lyons, as he strove to sleep, and asked if he wished to hear the news. The news was that the strife between King William and Archbishop Anselm was over.[829] News brought to Anselm’s clerk. August 2. The next day, the day of the King’s death, one of the Archbishop’s clerks was at the matin service, singing with his eyes shut. He felt a small paper put into his hand and a voice bade him read. He looked up; the bearer of the paper was gone; but he read the words, “King William is dead.”[830] Within our own island the news was said to have been spread abroad in yet stranger ways. Vision of Count William of Mortain. August 2. At the same hour when King William went forth to hunt in the New Forest, his cousin Count William of Mortain went forth for his sport also in some of his hunting-grounds in Cornwall. He too found himself by chance alone, apart from any of his comrades. No archer from Poix crossed his path, but a sight far more fearful. A huge goat, shaggy and black, met him, bearing on his back a king—how was his kingship marked?--black and naked, and wounded in the midst of his breast. The Count adjured the beast in the holiest name to say what all this meant.[831] The power of speech was not lacking to the monster. “I bear,” he answered, “your king, rather your tyrant, William the Red, to his doom. For I am the evil spirit, I am the avenger of the wickedness with which he raged against the Church of Christ, and I brought about his death, at the bidding of the blessed Alban, protomartyr of England, who made his moan to the Lord, because this man sinned beyond measure in the island which he had been the first to hallow.”[832] From what mint this wild tale comes it is needless to add. The house of Saint Alban was only one of thirteen abbeys which the King had kept vacant to receive their revenues.[833] But the other twelve were less rich in that special growth both of legend and of genuine history which adorns the house of the protomartyr.
§ 2. The First Days of Henry.
August 2--November 11, 1100.
Vacancy of the throne. The throne was again vacant; and now came the question which Englishmen knew so well whenever the throne was vacant, Whom should they choose to fill it? Claims of Robert by the treaty of 1091. There was indeed an instrument in being, dated nine years before, by which it had been agreed that, if either Robert or William died without lawful issue, the survivor should succeed to the dominions of his brother.[834] Such claims little regarded. But Englishmen had never allowed their most precious birthright to be thus lightly signed away beforehand. And many men of Norman birth must by this time have put on the feelings of Englishmen on this point as on many others. With the great mass of both races there could have been no doubt at all as to the right man to place upon the vacant throne. Choice confined to the house of the Conqueror. By this time, we may be sure, all thought had passed away of choosing outside the line of the Conqueror; and if such a thought had come into the head of any man, there was no candidate who could have been brought forward. No thought of either Eadgar. The elder Eadgar was far away on his crusade, and no one was likely to think of sending to Scotland to offer the crown to his nephew. His nieces were near at hand; but the thought of a female ruler did not come into men’s minds till the next generation. Within the house of the Conqueror there were two claimants. Choice between Robert and Henry. Robert had whatever right the treaty could give him, a better right undoubtedly than any which he could put forward as the eldest son of his father. But a paper claim of this kind went for little when the man who asserted it was far away, and when, had he been at hand, everything except the letter of the treaty was against him. It went for naught when there, on the very spot, was the man whom every sign marked out for kingship. Claims of Henry; the only son of a king. There among them was the only man—unless indeed they had gone to Norway to seek for the younger Harold—who was the son of a crowned King of the English. There was the one man of the reigning house who, born on English soil of the Norman stock, could be looked on as a countryman by Normans and English alike. His personal merits. There was the man who, while his brothers had, in different ways, so deeply misgoverned on their several sides of the sea, had shown, by his wise rule of a small dominion, how far better suited he was than either of them to be entrusted with the rule of a mighty kingdom. The Count of the Côtentin, Henry the Ætheling, Henry the Clerk, was the man whose name spoke alike to English and to Norman hearts. To the Normans he was the son of their conquering Duke, the descendant of the dukes that had been before him, the man who had made one spot of Norman ground prosperous while anarchy tore the rest in pieces. To the English he was their own Ætheling, the one son of their king, their countryman, as they fondly deemed, speaking the tongue of Ælfred, sent to renew the law of Eadward. With such a candidate at their doors, the bit of diplomatic parchment was torn to the winds. No time was to be lost; the land could not go without a king. Speedy election of Henry. The work was done speedily and decisively. The record which tells how the late king died in the midst of his unright, without shrift, without atonement, goes on to say, “On the Thursday was he slain and on the morrow was he buried; and, after that he buried was, the Witan that nigh at hand were his brother Henry to king chose.”[835]