"Yes, while on earth a thousand discords ring,
Man's senseless uproar mingling with his toil,
Still do thy quiet ministers move on." —Matthew Arnold.
[TOC], [INDX] William Rufus hurried away to claim the kingdom of England before his father died. Robert was at Abbeville, some say, with his singers and jesters, making merry over the prospect of getting the dukedom. Henry had put his five thousand pounds of silver into a strong box and gone his ways likewise. Normandy was in the confusion that always befell a country in those days while one master had put off his crown and the next had not put it on. There were masses being said in the Norman churches for the good of the Conqueror's soul, and presently, as the autumn days flew by and grew shorter and shorter, news was received that the English had received William Rufus and made him king with great rejoicing. There was always much to hope from the accession of a new monarch; he was sure to make many promises, and nobody knew that he would not keep every one of them.
But neither in England nor Normandy did the [Pg346] outlook promise great security. Robert was made duke, and Robert had plenty of friends, whose love and favor were sure to last as long as his money held out. He had a better heart than his brothers, but he was not fit for a governor. "Robert, my eldest-born, shall have Normandy and Maine," the Conqueror had told his barons on his death-bed. "He shall serve the king of France for the same. There are many brave men in Normandy; I know none equal to them. They are noble and valiant knights, conquering in all lands whither they go. If they have a good captain, a company of them is made to be dreaded, but if they have not a lord whom they fear, and who governs them severely, the service they render will soon be but poor. The Normans are worth little without strict justice; they must be bent and bowed to their ruler's will, and whoso holds them always under his foot and curbs them tightly, may get his business well done by them. Haughty are they and proud, boastful and arrogant; difficult to govern, and needing to be at all times kept under, so that Robert will have much to do and to provide in order to manage such a people."
The dying king may have smiled grimly at the thought that Robert's ambition knew not what it asked. The gay gentleman had given his father trouble enough, but the weight of Normandy should be his to carry. The red prince, William, had been a dutiful son, and he wished him joy of England. He was order-loving, and had a head for governing. "Poor lads!" the old father may have sighed more than once. It was all very well to be princes and [Pg347] knights and gay riders and courtiers, but the man who has a kingdom to govern must wend his ways alone, with much hindrance and little help.
The two courts bore little likeness to the Conqueror's as time went on, and there was endless dissension among the knights. In England the Normans complained greatly of the division of the kingdom and the duchy. Odo, who had regained his earldom of Kent, was full of mischievous, treacherous plans, and had no trouble in persuading other men that they stood no chance of holding their lands or keeping their rights under Rufus; it would be much better to overthrow him and to do homage to Robert of Normandy in the old fashion. Robert was careless and easy, and William was strong and self-willed. Robert was ready to favor this party at once, and after a while William discovered what was going on, and found the rebels under Odo were fortifying their castles and winning troops of followers to their side—in fact, England was all ready for civil war. The king besieged Odo forthwith in the city of Rochester, and there was a terrible end to the revolt. Robert had been too lazy or too inefficient to keep his promise of coming to the aid of his allies, and disease broke out in the garrison and raged until Odo sent messengers to ask forgiveness, and to promise all manner of loyalty and penitence. The king was in a state of fury, and meant to hang the leaders of the insurrection and put the rest to death by the most ingenious tortures that could be invented. At last, however, his own barons and officers made piteous pleas for the lives [Pg348] of their friends and relatives, and in the end they were driven out and deprived of their English estates, and Odo was altogether banished from the country. No longer an earl, he went back much humbled to his bishopric of Bayeux, which Robert had been foolish enough to restore to him. But the intrigues went on. The Norman barons in England were separated from their hereditary possessions in Normandy, and William Rufus owed the safety of his crown to the upholding of the English. Presently he went over to Normandy, where things were getting worse and worse under Robert's rule, and announced his intention of seizing the silly duke's dominions. Robert had already sold the Côtentin to Henry for a part of the five thousand pounds in the strong box, and after a good deal of dissension, and a prospect of a long and bloody war, which the nobles on both sides did every thing they could to prevent, the brothers made up their quarrel. They signed an agreement that the one who outlived the other should inherit all the lands and wealth, and then they made a league to go and fight Henry Beauclerc, who was living peaceably enough on his honestly-got Côtentin possessions. They chased him out of the country to the French Vexin, where he spent a forlorn year or two; but he could afford to wait for his inheritance, as the Conqueror had told him long before.
William Rufus went back to England, and in the course of time there was a war with the Scotch, who were defeated again and again and finally made quiet. Then the Welsh rebelled in their turn and [Pg349] were much harder to subdue. Robert got the king of France to join forces with him soon afterward, and that war was only avoided by the payment to France by Rufus of an enormous sum of money.
All this time William Rufus was doing some good things for his kingdom and a great many more bad ones that there is not time to describe. After Lanfranc's death the king grew worse and worse; he was apparently without any religious principle, and there was always a quarrel between him and the priests about the church money, which both of them wanted. When bishops and abbots died the king would not appoint their successors, and took all the tithes for himself. His chief favorite was a low-born, crafty, wicked man named Ralph Flambard, and the two were well matched. William Rufus had little of the gift for business that made his father such a practical statesman and organizer, and, in fact, his boisterous, lawless, indecent manner of living shocked even the less orderly of his subjects. He had the lower and less respectable of the Norman qualities, and something of the rudeness of the worst of his more remote ancestry crops out in his conduct. Once when he was very ill and was afraid that he was going to die with all his sins on his head, he sent for Anselm, the holy prior, his father's friend and counsellor, and appointed him to the archbishopric of Canterbury, which had been vacant ever since Lanfranc's death four years before. Rufus' guilty conscience was quieted, and the people of England were deeply thankful for such a prelate, but before long the king and Anselm naturally did not find [Pg350] each other harmonious, and after a brave fight for what he believed to be the right, Anselm appealed to Rome and left England with orders never to return.
Robert was the same careless man that he had been in his youth; through war and peace, danger and security, he lived as if there were no to-morrow to provide for and no future to be dreaded. I have sketched the course of affairs as briefly as possible in both England and Normandy, as if the only men within their borders were these two incompetent brothers who so ill became the Conqueror's "kingly helm," as Master Wace loves to call the crown. But the church builders were still at work like ants busy with their grains of sand, towers were rising, knights were fighting and parading, ladies were ordering their households, the country men and women were tilling the green fields of both countries and gathering in their harvests year by year. There had been trouble now and then, as we have just seen, between the kingdom and the duchy, between both of them and their border foes, but almost ten years went by, and the children who had played with their toys and sighed over their horn books the summer that William the Conqueror died were now men and women grown. It would not seem like the old Normandy if the news of some new great enterprise did not run like wildfire through the towns and country lanes. The blood of the Northmen was kindled with the blood of all Christendom at the story of the Turks' capture of the Holy Sepulchre and the blessed city of Jerusalem. The knights of Sicily were already on their journey by sea and shore; the mother church [Pg351] at Rome called to her children in every land to defend her holiest shrines against the insolence of the heathen.
Duke Robert was most zealous. To go on pilgrimage had been many a knight's ambition, but this was the greatest pilgrimage of all. Robert, as usual, had no money, but to his joy he succeeded in making a bargain with his more thrifty English brother, and pledged Normandy to William Rufus for five years for the sum of something less than seven thousand pounds. Away he went with his lords and gentlemen; they wore white crosses on their right shoulders, and sang hymns as they marched along. Not only lords and gentlemen made up this huge procession of thousands and thousands, but men of every station—from the poor cottages and stately halls alike. If any better persuasion had been needed than the simple announcement that the Turks had taken Jerusalem, it had come by way of Peter the Hermit's preaching. This had created a religious frenzy that the world had never known; from town to town the great preacher had gone with an inexhaustible living stream of persuasive eloquence always at his lips. Women wept and prayed and gave their jewels and rich garments, and men set their teeth and clenched their hands, armed themselves and followed him.
England did not listen at first, and William Rufus chuckled over his good bargain, and taxed his unwilling subjects more heavily than ever to get the money to pay his crusader brother. England would listen by and by, but in this first crusade she took [Pg352] little part, while the Normans and Frenchmen and all their neighbors spent three years of fearful suffering and hardship in the strange countries of the East; at last they won the Holy Sepulchre. The Turks were still fighting to win it back again; they were dangerous enemies, and the Christian host was dwindling fast. The cry was sent again through Europe for more soldiers of the Holy Cross.