The next rebel was William’s own uncle, of the same name as himself, his father’s half-brother. He trusted to the strength of the castle of Arques, near Dieppe, which had been given him by his nephew. But the young duke was in the heyday of his vigour. The news was brought to him at Valognes at midday one Thursday, and by Friday evening he was before the gates of Arques, having come by way of Bayeux, Caen, and Pont-Audemer. The castle was stoutly defended, and so impregnable by position, that the only method was to sit down before it and wait; a method adopted with complete success, though the arch-traitor himself managed to escape and fly. Many other smaller risings occurred which kept the great Conqueror in practice, and then came the second great battle in Normandy, that of Mortèmer, at which he was not present himself. He had shown his diplomacy in using the King of France as an ally against the men of the Côtentin, now it was the same King of France, Henry, who, being jealous of the power of this great vassal, fomented insurrection among his subjects and entered that part of the duchy known as the Vexin, in a hostile spirit. To the French, the Normans were even yet pirates, and pirates they continued to be called until the end. Wace says that the Frenchmen would call the Normans “Bigoz,” a corruption of their war-cry, “By God,” from which comes our word bigot; and they would ask the king, “Sire, why do you not chase the Bigoz out of the country? Their ancestors were robbers, who came by sea, and stole the land from our forefathers and us.”
So the French marched as far as Mortèmer, and began to pillage. But after pillage came revelry, as it so frequently does, and the Normans, who had been watchful but unseen, fell upon the French and routed them hip and thigh. With the blithe exaggeration of days before statistics were known, the old chronicler says, “nor was there a prison in all Normandy which was not full of the Frenchmen. They were to be seen fleeing around, skulking in the woods and bushes, and the dead and wounded lay amid the burning ruins, and upon the dunghills, and about the fields, and in the bye-paths.”
As we have said, at this battle William personally was not present, and the French king was not taken prisoner.
Record states that William broke into poetry, apparently the only time he was so seized: the very words of his poem are preserved; here is a verse of it:—
“Réveillez vous et vous levez
Guerriers qui trop dormi avez
Allez bientôt voir vos amys
Que les Normands ont à mort mys
Entre Ecouys et Mortèmer
Là les vous convient les inhumer.”
After this, negotiations were concluded, and the French prisoners restored; nevertheless the French again soon after entered Normandy, and ravaged the country, even so far as the coast. The River Dive, lying to the east of Caen, is considered the dividing line between Upper and Lower Normandy, and it was at this river that William came up with the main body of the French, including the king himself. William’s strokes generally owed as much to their policy as their strength, and this time was no exception. He waited in ambush until half the French had crossed the stream, and then falling suddenly on the remainder, cut them off, and totally routed them. Those in advance, taken in the rear, fled in confusion, and vast quantities of spoil fell into the duke’s hands, though the French king himself escaped. After this, peace was concluded at Fécamp.
But still fighting did not cease. The Counts of Anjou had been a perpetual thorn in William’s side, and the most formidable of all was Geoffrey Martel, who seized Maine, and held it as well as his own territory; but buoyant with victory, the Norman troops advanced upon the principal city, Le Mans, and took it without difficulty, and Geoffrey Martel was quieted for a while; he died four years before the Conquest of England.
But now we must turn for a moment from William’s battles to his domestic life. His romantic marriage is an outstanding incident in his career. He did not marry until he was twenty-six, a considerable age for a king. But in that as in other matters he had a mind of his own, and one lady and one only would satisfy him, and she kept him waiting for seven years. She was his own first cousin, Matilda of Flanders, daughter of Baldwin V., Earl of Flanders, but neither she nor her relatives cared for the match. There are various tales concerning her, one of which says she was already a widow when William expressed his preference, and had two children of her own. Another story says she favoured another suitor, who, however, was perhaps well advised in declining the perilous position of husband to the lady of William’s choice, however flattering that lady’s preference for himself. After waiting with more or less patience for seven years, William took summary methods. He went to Bruges, where his ladylove lived, and meeting her as she returned from church, rolled her in the mud of the street, humiliating her in the eyes of all, and ruining her gay and beautiful clothes. This Petruchio-like method served the purpose. In a very short time Matilda consented to marry the man who had shown her his determination in so unequivocal a manner. This particular marriage seems to have been a brilliant exception in an age when marriage vows were held in scant respect. Yet, when he won Matilda’s consent, all William’s troubles, in regard to the alliance, were by no means at an end. By the tenets of the Church to which he and his bride belonged, they were within the prohibited degree of consanguinity. This difficulty was surmounted by their gaining absolution on the condition that they erected two religious houses at Caen, houses which stand to this day, and are mentioned more particularly in the chapter on that city.
It was two years before his marriage that William had paid that celebrated visit to England in which had probably originated his intention to become lord of that country in due time. But it was not until he was thirty-six that he received the return visit from Harold, when he extorted from his unwilling guest the oath on which he based his right to the English throne. The story of Harold and of the Conquest is told in connection with the famous tapestry, one of the most marvellous contemporary records ever a nation possessed. We resume the narrative here when William, as King of England, in March 1067 returned to Normandy, bringing with him the harmless Edgar Atheling, also the earls Edwin and Morcar, and the archbishop Stigand, probably less with the intention of treating them as guests than with the idea of leaving no head for a revolt behind him in his new country. He held festivals at Rouen, Caen, Fécamp, and Falaise, a kind of triumphal progress in fact; and then returning to quell the revolts which had broken out in England in his absence, he took with him Matilda, and they were jointly crowned at Westminster. But his triumphs were soon to be dimmed by sore domestic worry. During his frequent absences in England he left Matilda in charge of Normandy, and with her he associated his son Robert. But Robert was rude and unfilial; he grasped at power on his own account, and his mother, with that weak affection so often shown in a mother toward her first-born son, aided and sympathised with him. One great source of quarrel between the young prince and his father was the government of the country of Maine. Robert had been affianced to the young Countess of Maine, who had died before the marriage; he held, therefore, that he ought now to rule there independently, while William, who had subdued the country by his sword before he took possession of the young heiress and betrothed her to his son, held it for himself, and the subject was the cause of endless recrimination between the king and his eldest son. Besides Robert, he had had three other sons, but the next, Richard, “had been killed in some mysterious manner, which seemed to make people loath to speak even of the circumstance” (Palgrave). He seems to have met his death in the New Forest, where also were killed William the Red and one of Robert’s sons. William, afterwards known as Rufus, was six years his eldest brother’s junior, and Henry was several years younger still. There were also, at ages varying between the brothers, five daughters. Cecily, of whom we hear at Caen, as first abbess of her mother’s foundation; she became eventually Abbess of Fécamp. Constance, married to the Duke of Brittany. Adeliza or Agatha, first betrothed to Harold, and afterwards, much against her will, to the King of Galicia; but she was never married to him, dying on the journey to Spain. Adela, who married Stephen of Blois, and whose son afterwards became king of England; and Alice, who died young. Others add Constance and Adelaide, but five daughters and four sons are enough for any man, and the existence of the other two seems mythical. Various insurrections and petty wars vexed William’s later days, but still his hand was strong, his courage unfailing. He forgave his eldest son’s disloyalty more than once, only to find it break out again. At last, after wandering in exile for several years, Robert fixed himself in the castle of Gerberoi, on French soil, whence William assailed him, having his two younger sons with him. In one of the desperate sallies of the besieged, father and son engaged in a hand-to-hand conflict, and being disguised by heavy armour, neither knew the other. At length William, being wounded, cried out, and in a moment his son, struck by remorse, raised his visor and fell on his knees asking forgiveness, sobered by the thought of the terrible crime of patricide of which he had nearly been guilty. Yet the reconciliation was hollow, and the father and son were never at heart friends. It was nine years after this that the end came. Philip, now King of France, seized an opportunity to make inroads on Normandy, and a mocking speech of his about William, who had grown corpulent and unwieldy, was repeated to the English king. But his spirit was the same; embittered by personal troubles, lonely in the estrangement and loss of her who had been his faithful companion through life, though not old in years—for he was only sixty—yet old with the turmoil of a fierce, hard life lived from the cradle, he still had the fire of youth, and he returned a furious answer to Philip’s taunt.
“The harvest was ripening, the grape swelling on the stem, the fruit reddening on the bough,” when William entered the fertile land where he was to meet with death. He seized the town of Mantes, belonging to the French king, and soon the place was in red ruin. A mass of flames mounted high in the sky, the inhabitants lay wounded to death or fled in terror, and the king himself, in spite of his great bulk and increasing infirmity, superintended the work of destruction; then suddenly—one has heard the story from earliest childhood—his fine charger, treading unexpectedly on a hot cinder, started violently, and flung its rider violently against the high-peaked saddle of the country—William had received his death-blow. There was little left to follow. He was carried by easy stages to his capital city, Rouen, and there laid in the abbey of St Gervais. And we may read of his lonely end in the account of the city of Rouen. But even after his death, the solitude which had attended the end did not desert him; of all historical funerals ever recorded, that of this great man is the most terrible.