The work was done; the host of victorious Englishmen marched back to their homes.[1162] Joy at Robert’s overthrow. The joy of the land at the great deliverance was beyond words. The tyrant was overthrown, the King was now king indeed. The national joy is set before us as bursting forth in a kind of rhythmical song, which reminds us of those fragments of primæval poetry which remain imbedded in the history of the Hebrews. We hear the same strain as that which denounced woe to Moab and rejoiced in the undoing of the people of Chemosh,[1163] when Englishmen are described as gathering round their King, and shouting the hymn of victory. The song of deliverance. “Rejoice, King Henry, and give thanks to the Lord God, now that thou hast overthrown Robert of Bellême and hast driven him from the borders of thy kingdom.”[1164] Banishment of Arnulf and Roger. Nor was he driven forth alone. The King had good grounds for the banishment of his chief accomplices, his two brothers Arnulf and Roger, and for the seizure of their lands.[1165] The King’s hatred towards the whole family. His hatred towards the whole house of Montgomery, or rather towards the whole house of Talvas, had become so great that he would not endure that any member of it should hold lands or honours in his kingdom. Later history of Robert of Bellême. Robert of Bellême himself went over to Normandy, to raise new disturbances there. At a later time he was again twice to visit England, once as an ambassador, and again as a prisoner, a prisoner in a prison so strait that no man knew whether he lived or died.[1166] But his part, a part only of four years, as an English earl and perhaps the greatest of English land-owners, was played out for ever.
Death of Magnus. 1103. Of the other chief actors in the events of those four years, King Magnus died the year after the fall of Robert of Bellême, in his last and greatest attack on Ireland.[1167] A Giffard in his fleet. It awakens some interest when we read that he had in his host a stranger who bore the great Norman name of Giffard.[1168] Was he an accomplice, was he a messenger, of Earl Robert of Shropshire? Later history of Jorwerth. Towards the Welsh prince Jorwerth, who had done so much on both sides in the course of the rebellion, Henry was, according to the Welsh writers, far from keeping his word. War between Jorwerth and his brothers. It is not wonderful that enmity arose between Jorwerth and his brothers after his conduct during the siege of Bridgenorth. He seems to have waged open war with them in the King’s name. Meredydd imprisoned. For we are told that he seized his brother Meredydd and handed him over to the King or imprisoned him in a royal prison.[1169] Jorwerth cedes Ceredigion to Cadwgan. But with Cadwgan he made peace, giving up to him a large share of his promised dominions, namely the lands which Cadwgan had before held of Robert of Bellême, Ceredigion and part of Powys. It was perhaps this agreement with an enemy which offended Henry. The King does not fulfil his promises to Jorwerth. When Jorwerth came, seemingly to receive his grant from the King’s hands, he received nothing. Dyfed and the castle of Pembroke, far too precious a stronghold to be left in the hands of any Briton, was entrusted to a knight named Saer, from whom it afterwards passed to Gerald of Windsor, a man who had already bravely defended it, and whom the King had his own reasons for promoting.[1170] Grant of Gower and other lands to Howel. But the remainder of the promised possessions of Jorwerth, the vale of Teifi, Gower, and Kidwelly, were, by a breach of promise which must have been yet more galling, granted to another Welsh lord, Howel son of Goronwy.[1171] Jorwerth tried at Shrewsbury and imprisoned. 1103. The next year Jorwerth was summoned before an assembly at Shrewsbury, the place renowned for the trial of a more famous Welsh prince of later days. The choice of the place is characteristic of the reign of Henry, Gemóts held in various places under Henry. under whom national assemblies were held in various parts of the kingdom, and were no longer confined to the three places to which custom had confined them under Eadward, Harold, and the two Williams.[1172] Shrewsbury a former place of meeting. It was but a return to older custom; Shrewsbury had been the seat of more than one memorable assembly in earlier times;[1173] but this was the first time that Shrewsbury in its new form had seen a great national gathering; The earldom of Shrewsbury. it was the first assembly that had been held since the English mound had become the kernel of Earl Roger’s castle, and since Earl Roger’s abbey had arisen beyond the river. Earls had now passed away from Shrewsbury; no such title was heard again till the days of the famous Talbot, when it was in French and not in English ears that the name was terrible. After the four years’ rule of Robert of Bellême, there was doubtless much to settle in his former earldom and along the whole Welsh border. Trial of Jorwerth. In the assembly held for that end Jorwerth appeared and was put upon his trial. We should be well pleased to have as full an account of the proceedings against the British prince as we have of the proceedings against Bishop William of Durham. His conviction and imprisonment. But the story was not deemed worth recording by any English writer; the Welsh, who bitterly complain of the injustice of the court, tell us how, after a day’s pleading, Jorwerth was declared guilty and committed to prison.[1174] He was afterwards set free, and again played a part among his own people; His later history. but a patriotic Welsh chronicler laments that the hope, the fortitude, the strength, and the happiness of all the Britons failed them when Jorwerth was put in bonds.[1175]
Establishment of Henry’s power. King Henry had at last done his work. When Robert of Bellême was cast out, his throne remained safe and his kingdom peaceful. Two years later indeed there was another enemy to cast out; but the ease with which the work was now done showed how thoroughly the harder work had been done before Bridgenorth and Shrewsbury. Banishment of William of Mortain, 1104. When the King’s near kinsman and bitter enemy, Count William of Mortain, would fain have had the earldom of Kent and have been another Odo in it, there was no need of a siege of Pevensey or of Montacute. His imprisonment after Tinchebrai. 1106. A simple legal process was enough to send him out of the land without slash or blow.[1176] He lived to try the chance of slash and blow at Tinchebrai, and to meet with a heavy doom, live-long bonds, perhaps borne in blindness, His alleged blinding. at the hands of his offended cousin and sovereign.[1177] His ambition could not disturb the peace of the land for a single day; the might of armed unlaw had been broken when the gates of Shrewsbury opened to receive King Henry. Peace of Henry’s reign. 1102–1135. From that day for three-and-thirty years, a wonder in those days, a whole kingdom saw neither civil war nor foreign invasion. As Italy rested of old under Theodoric, as Sicily rested under his contemporary Roger, so England rested under Henry. Henry and Roger of Sicily. The two Norman and insular kings, lords of the great island of the Mediterranean and of the great island of the Ocean, had each his wars to wage. But each kept his battle-ground on the mainland, while his island realm abode in peace. Character of Henry’s reign. The bright promises with which the reign of Henry opened, the dreams of an English king reigning over an English people, were not wholly fulfilled. Its promises how far fulfilled. The fair dawn was in some measure clouded over; the winning promises were not in everything carried out. Still things were not under Henry as they had been under his brother. The dawn was never changed into the blackness of darkness; the promises of righteous and national rule were never utterly trampled under foot. Under the strong hand of the Lion of Justice such deeds as those of Robert of Bellême became impossible. The complaints of exactions in money go on throughout his reign. The more grievous complaints of the wrongs done by his immediate followers are not heard of after the stern statute by which Henry and Anselm joined together to check their misdoings. The reign of law. Under Henry law did not always put on a winning shape; but it was felt that the reign of law in any shape was better than the reign of unlaw. Effects of Henry’s reign. It may be that the very restraint under which the powers of evil were kept down during the reign of Henry led to a fiercer outbreak when they were set free at his death. Henry the Second. But the same process had given the nation life and strength to bear up through the frightful years of anarchy, and to be ready at their close to welcome another Henry again to do justice and make peace. Fusion of Normans and English under Henry. But above all, the rule of Henry wiped out the distinction which, at his accession, had divided the conquerors and the conquered. Under him Normans born on English ground grew up as Englishmen. They felt as Englishmen, when the second restoration of the reign of law brought with it, as its dark side, the preference of men from beyond the sea to the sons of the soil of either race. Henry the refounder of the English nation. With all his faults, his vices, his occasional crimes, Henry the Clerk, the first of the new line who was truly an English Ætheling, must rank before all other kings as the refounder of the English nation. He embodies the process of fusion. He is himself the embodiment of the process by which the Norman on English soil washed off the varnish of his two centuries’ sojourn by the Seine, and came back to his true place in the older Teutonic fellowship of Angle, Saxon, and Dane. When Henry gave back to his people the laws of King Eadward with the amendments of King William, he wrote in advance the whole later history of England. The old stock was neither cut down nor withered away; but a new stock was grafted upon it. And it was no unworthy fruit that it bore in the person of the King in whose days none durst misdo with other.
With the firm establishment of Henry’s rule by the fall of Robert of Bellême my immediate story ends. Of the memorable time which followed, a time memorable for many things, but memorable above all as being, within the English kingdom, a perfect blank in military history, I have sketched the outline in another volume. I there traced out the leading features of the reign and discussed its leading results. The compromise with Anselm. 1107. I there traced the later stages of the career of Anselm, his dispute with Henry, his second departure and second restoration, the final compromise which to the wisdom of Henry and the single-mindedness of Anselm was not impossible. The war with Robert. I traced out also the various matters in dispute between Henry and Robert till the time when, as men fondly deemed, England, after forty years, paid back the day of Senlac on the day of Tinchebrai. 1106. I could have been well pleased to carry on in detail to their end two stories of which I have had to tell so large a part. But my immediate subject ends when King Henry is made fast on his throne by the overthrow of the rebel Earl of Shrewsbury. Earlier than that point the tale could not stop. The reign of Rufus how far an episode. Deep as is the importance of the reign of William Rufus in so many ways, there is a certain way of looking at things in which the reign of William Rufus is a kind of episode. Or rather it is an attempt at a certain object which, when tried in the person of Rufus, failed, and which had to be again tried, with better luck, in the person of Henry. Problem of reconciling England to the Conquest. The problem was to reconcile the English nation to the Norman Conquest, to nationalize, so to speak, the Conquest and the dynasty which the Conquest had brought in. The means thereto was to find a prince of the foreign stock who should reign as an English king, with the good will of the English people, in the interest of the English people. Not solved under Rufus, William Rufus might have held that place, if he had been morally capable of it. His crown was won for him from Norman rebels by the valour and loyalty of Englishmen, when for the last time they met Normans on their own soil as enemies. But Rufus forsook his trust; he belied his promises; if he did not strictly become an oppressor of Englishmen as Englishmen, it was only because he became the common oppressor and enemy of mankind. but solved by Henry. Thirteen years later the same drama was acted over again. Henry, who reigned by a more direct choice of the English people than William, owed his crown also to the loyalty of Englishmen whose valour against Norman enemies it was found needless to test in the open field. This time the problem was solved; if Henry did not bring back the days of Ælfred or even the days of Cnut, he at least brought in a very different state of things from what men had seen in the days of his brother. England no longer a conquered land. After the election at Winchester, the conference at Alton, the fight at Tinchebrai, England could no longer be called a conquered land. The work of the Norman Conquest was from one side confirmed for ever, from another side it was undone for ever. The Conquest at once confirmed and undone. The last act of the struggle, an afterpiece more stirring than the main drama, was when Robert of Bellême came forth, shorn of his power to do evil, to surrender the stronghold of Shrewsbury to his sovereign. The surrender of Chester to the elder William marked that the first struggle was over, and that the Norman was to rule in England. Import of the surrender of Shrewsbury. The surrender of Shrewsbury to his youngest son marked that the second struggle was over, the struggle which ruled that, though the Norman was to reign in England, he was to reign only by putting on the character of an English king, called to his throne by the voice of Englishmen, and guarded there by their loyalty against the plots and assaults of Norman rebels.
APPENDIX.
The Accession of William Rufus.
The remarkable thing about the accession of William Rufus is that it is the one case in those days in which a king succeeds without any trace of regular election, whether by the nation at large or by any smaller body. The ecclesiastical election which formed part of the rite of coronation was doubtless not forgotten; but there is no sign of any earlier election by the Witan, or by any gathering which could call itself by their name. Lanfranc appears as the sole actor. One account, the Life of Lanfranc attached to the Winchester Chronicle, speaks of the archbishop in so many words as the one elector; “Mortuo rege Willielmo trans mare, filium ejus Willielmum, sicut pater constituit, Lanfrancus regem elegit, et in ecclesia beati Petri, in occidentali parte Lundoniæ sita, sacravit et coronavit.” The words of Eadmer (Hist. Nov. 13) are almost equally strong;