"Glory of going on and still to be——"
The conjunction of Norman and Saxon elements has made England the great nation that she is.
It is too easy as we draw near the end of this story of the Normans to wander into talk about the lessons of Norman history and to fall into endless generalizations. Let us look a little longer at Henry Beauclerc's time while Robert, under the shadow of his name of duke, spends enough dreary blinded years in prison to give him space to remember again and again the misspent years of his youth and his freedom; while Henry plots and plans carefully for the continuance of his family upon the throne of England and Normandy, only to be disappointed at every turn. His son is coming from France with a gay company and is lost in the White Ship with all his lords and ladies, and the people who hear the news do not dare to tell the king, and at last send a weeping little lad into the royal presence to falter out the story of the shipwreck. What a touch of humanity is there! The king never smiled afterward, but he plotted on and went his kingly ways, "the last of those great Norman kings who, with all their vices, their cruelty, and their lust, displayed great talents of organization and adaptation, guided England with a wise, if a strong, hand through the days of her youth, and by their instinctive, though selfish, love of order paved the way for the ultimate rise of a more stable, yet a freer government."
The last Norman Duke of Normandy was really [Pg358] that young Prince William, who was drowned in the White Ship off the port of Barfleur, whom Henry had invested with the duchy and to whom the nobility had just done homage. After his death, the son of Robert made claim to the succession, and the greater proportion of the Normans upheld his claim, and the king of France openly favored him, but he died of a wound received in battle, and again Henry, rid of this competitor, built an elaborate scheme upon the succession of his daughter Matilda, whom he married to Geoffrey Plantagenet, son of the Count of Anjou. But for all this, after the king's death, the law of succession was too unsettled to give his daughter an unquestioned claim. Hereditary title was not independent yet of election by the nobles, and Matilda's claims were by many people set aside. There were wars and disorders too intricate and dreary to repeat. Stephen, Count of Boulogne, son of that Count Stephen of Blois who married the Conqueror's daughter Adela, usurped the throne of England, and there was a miserable time of anarchy in both England and Normandy. And as the government passed away in this apparently profitless interregnum to the houses of Blois and of Anjou, so Normandy seems like Normandy no longer. Her vitality is turned into different channels, and it is in the history of England and of France and of the Low Countries that we must trace the further effect of Norman influence. [Pg359]
XVIII.
CONCLUSION.
"I looked: aside the dust-cloud rolled,—
The Waster seemed the Builder too;
Upspringing from the ruined Old I saw the New." —Whittier.
[TOC], [INDX] It will be clearly seen that there is great apparent disproportion between certain parts of this sketch of the rise and growth of the Norman people. I have not set aside the truth that Normandy was not reunited to France until 1204, and I do not forget that many years lie between that date and the time when I close my account of the famous duchy. But the story of the growth of the Normans gives one the key to any later part of their history, and I have contented myself with describing the characters of the first seven dukes and Eadward the Confessor, who were men typical of their time and representative of the various types of national character. Of the complex questions in civic and legal history I am not competent to speak, nor does it seem to me that they properly enter into such a book as this. With Mr. Freeman's learned and exhaustive work at hand as a book of reference, the readers of this story of Normandy will find all their puzzles solved. [Pg360]
But I hope that I have made others see the Normans as I have seen them, and grow as interested in their fortunes as I have been. They were the foremost people of their time, being most thoroughly alive and quickest to see where advances might be made in government, in architecture, in social life. They were gifted with sentiment and with good taste, together with fine physical strength and intellectual cleverness. In the first hundred years of the duchy they made perhaps as rapid progress in every way, and had as signal influence among their contemporaries, as any people of any age,—unless it is ourselves, the people of the young republic of the United States, who might be called the Normans of modern times. For with many of the gifts and many of the weaknesses (and dangers, too) of our viking ancestry, we have repeated the rapid increase of power which was a characteristic of our Norman kindred; we have conquered in many fights with the natural forces of the universe where they fought, humanity against humanity. Much of what marked the Northman and the Norman marks us still.