The years which saw the settlement of England, though not years of constant fighting like the two years between the march to Exeter and the fall of Chester, were not years of perfect peace.  William had to withstand foes on both sides of the sea, to withstand foes in his own household, to undergo his first defeat, to receive his first wound in personal conflict.  Nothing shook his firm hold either on duchy or kingdom; but in his later years his good luck forsook him.  And men did not fail to connect this change in his future with a change in himself, above all with one deed of blood which stands out as utterly unlike all his other recorded acts.

But the amount of warfare which William had to go through in these later years was small compared with the great struggles of his earlier days.  There is no tale to tell like the war of Val-ès-dunes, like the French invasions of Normandy, like the campaigns that won England.  One event only of the earlier time is repeated almost as exactly as an event can be repeated.  William had won Maine once; he had now to win it again, and less thoroughly.  As Conqueror his work is done; a single expedition into Wales is the only campaign of this part of his life that led to any increase of territory.

When William sat down to the settlement of his kingdom after the fall of Chester, he was in the strictest sense full king over all England.  For the moment the whole land obeyed him; at no later moment did any large part of the land fail to obey him.  All opposition was now revolt.  Men were no longer keeping out an invader; when they rose, they rose against a power which, however wrongfully, was the established government of the land.  Two such movements took place.  One was a real revolt of Englishmen against foreign rule.  The other was a rebellion of William’s own earls in their own interests, in which English feeling went with the King.  Both were short sharp struggles which stand out boldly in the tale.  More important in the general story, though less striking in detail, are the relations of William to the other powers in and near the isle of Britain.  With the crown of the West-Saxon kings, he had taken up their claims to supremacy over the whole island, and probably beyond it.  And even without such claims, border warfare with his Welsh and Scottish neighbours could not be avoided.  Counting from the completion of the real conquest of England in 1070, there were in William’s reign three distinct sources of disturbance.  There were revolts within the kingdom of England.  There was border warfare in Britain.  There were revolts in William’s continental dominions.  And we may add actual foreign warfare or threats of foreign warfare, affecting William, sometimes in his Norman, sometimes in his English character.

With the affairs of Wales William had little personally to do.  In this he is unlike those who came immediately before and after him.  In the lives of Harold and of William Rufus personal warfare against the Welsh forms an important part.  William the Great commonly left this kind of work to the earls of the frontier, to Hugh of Chester, Roger of Shrewsbury, and to his early friend William of Hereford, so long as that fierce warrior’s life lasted.  These earls were ever at war with the Welsh princes, and they extended the English kingdom at their cost.  Once only did the King take a personal share in the work, when he entered South Wales, in 1081.  We hear vaguely of his subduing the land and founding castles; we see more distinctly that he released many subjects who were in British bondage, and that he went on a religious pilgrimage to Saint David’s.  This last journey is in some accounts connected with schemes for the conquest of Ireland.  And in one most remarkable passage of the English Chronicle, the writer for once speculates as to what might have happened but did not.  Had William lived two years longer, he would have won Ireland by his wisdom without weapons.  And if William had won Ireland either by wisdom or by weapons, he would assuredly have known better how to deal with it than most of those who have come after him.  If any man could have joined together the lands which God has put asunder, surely it was he.  This mysterious saying must have a reference to some definite act or plan of which we have no other record.  And some slight approach to the process of winning Ireland without weapons does appear in the ecclesiastical intercourse between England and Ireland which now begins.  Both the native Irish princes and the Danes of the east coast begin to treat Lanfranc as their metropolitan, and to send bishops to him for consecration.  The name of the King of the English is never mentioned in the letters which passed between the English primate and the kings and bishops of Ireland.  It may be that William was biding his time for some act of special wisdom; but our speculations cannot go any further than those of the Peterborough Chronicler.

Revolt within the kingdom and invasion from without both began in the year in which the Conquest was brought to an end.  William’s ecclesiastical reforms were interrupted by the revolt of the Fenland.  William’s authority had never been fully acknowledged in that corner of England, while he wore his crown and held his councils elsewhere.  But the place where disturbances began, the abbey of Peterborough, was certainly in William’s obedience.  The warfare made memorable by the name of Hereward began in June 1070, and a Scottish harrying of Northern England, the second of five which are laid to the charge of Malcolm, took place in the same year, and most likely about the same time.  The English movement is connected alike with the course of the Danish fleet and with the appointment of Turold to the abbey of Peterborough.  William had bribed the Danish commanders to forsake their English allies, and he allowed them to ravage the coast.  A later bribe took them back to Denmark; but not till they had shown themselves in the waters of Ely.  The people, largely of Danish descent, flocked to them, thinking, as the Chronicler says, that they would win the whole land.  The movement was doubtless in favour of the kingship of Swegen.  But nothing was done by Danes and English together save to plunder Peterborough abbey.  Hereward, said to have been the nephew of Turold’s English predecessor, doubtless looked on the holy place, under a Norman abbot, as part of the enemy’s country.

The name of Hereward has gathered round it such a mass of fiction, old and new, that it is hard to disentangle the few details of his real history.  His descent and birth-place are uncertain; but he was assuredly a man of Lincolnshire, and assuredly not the son of Earl Leofric.  For some unknown cause, he had been banished in the days of Edward or of Harold.  He now came back to lead his countrymen against William.  He was the soul of the movement of which the abbey of Ely became the centre.  The isle, then easily defensible, was the last English ground on which the Conqueror was defied by Englishmen fighting for England.  The men of the Fenland were zealous; the monks of Ely were zealous; helpers came in from other parts of England.  English leaders left their shelter in Scotland to share the dangers of their countrymen; even Edwin and Morkere at last plucked up heart to leave William’s court and join the patriotic movement.  Edwin was pursued; he was betrayed by traitors; he was overtaken and slain, to William’s deep grief, we are told.  His brother reached the isle, and helped in its defence.  William now felt that the revolt called for his own presence and his full energies.  The isle was stoutly attacked and stoutly defended, till, according to one version, the monks betrayed the stronghold to the King.  According to another, Morkere was induced to surrender by promises of mercy which William failed to fulfil.  In any case, before the year 1071 was ended, the isle of Ely was in William’s hands.  Hereward alone with a few companions made their way out by sea.  William was less merciful than usual; still no man was put to death.  Some were mutilated, some imprisoned; Morkere and other chief men spent the rest of their days in bonds.  The temper of the Conqueror had now fearfully hardened.  Still he could honour a valiant enemy; those who resisted to the last fared best.  All the legends of Hereward’s later days speak of him as admitted to William’s peace and favour.  One makes him die quietly, another kills him at the hands of Norman enemies, but not at William’s bidding or with William’s knowledge.  Evidence a little better suggests that he bore arms for his new sovereign beyond the sea; and an entry in Domesday also suggests that he held lands under Count Robert of Mortain in Warwickshire.  It would suit William’s policy, when he received Hereward to his favour, to make him exchange lands near to the scene of his exploits for lands in a distant shire held under the lordship of the King’s brother.

Meanwhile, most likely in the summer months of 1070, Malcolm ravaged Cleveland, Durham, and other districts where there must have been little left to ravage.  Meanwhile the Ætheling Edgar and his sisters, with other English exiles, sought shelter in Scotland, and were hospitably received.  At the same time Gospatric, now William’s earl in Northumberland, retaliated by a harrying of Scottish Cumberland, which provoked Malcolm to greater cruelties.  It was said that there was no house in Scotland so poor that it had not an English bondman.  Presently some of Malcolm’s English guests joined the defenders of Ely; those of highest birth stayed in Scotland, and Malcolm, after much striving, persuaded Margaret the sister of Edgar to become his wife.  Her praises are written in Scottish history, and the marriage had no small share in the process which made the Scottish kings and the lands which formed their real kingdom practically English.  The sons and grandsons of Margaret, sprung of the Old-English kingly house, were far more English within their own realm than the Norman and Angevin kings of Southern England.  But within the English border men looked at things with other eyes.  Thrice again did Malcolm ravage England; two and twenty years later he was slain in his last visit of havoc.  William meanwhile and his earls at least drew to themselves some measure of loyalty from the men of Northern England as the guardians of the land against the Scot.

For the present however Malcolm’s invasion was only avenged by Gospatric’s harrying in Cumberland.  The year 1071 called William to Ely; in the early part of 1072 his presence was still needed on the mainland; in August he found leisure for a march against Scotland.  He went as an English king, to assert the rights of the English crown, to avenge wrongs done to the English land; and on such an errand Englishmen followed him gladly.  Eadric, the defender of Herefordshire, had made his peace with the King, and he now held a place of high honour in his army.  But if William met with any armed resistance on his Scottish expedition, it did not amount to a pitched battle.  He passed through Lothian into Scotland; he crossed Forth and drew near to Tay, and there, by the round tower of Abernethy, the King of Scots swore oaths and gave hostages and became the man of the King of the English.  William might now call himself, like his West-Saxon predecessors, Bretwalda and Basileus of the isle of Britain.  This was the highest point of his fortune.  Duke of the Normans, King of the English, he was undisputed lord from the march of Anjou to the narrow sea between Caithness and Orkney.

The exact terms of the treaty between William’s royal vassal and his overlord are unknown.  But one of them was clearly the removal of Edgar from Scotland.  Before long he was on the continent.  William had not yet learned that Edgar was less dangerous in Britain than in any other part of the world, and that he was safest of all in William’s own court.  Homage done and hostages received, the Lord of all Britain returned to his immediate kingdom.  His march is connected with many legendary stories.  In real history it is marked by the foundation of the castle of Durham, and by the Conqueror’s confirmation of the privileges of the palatine bishops.  If all the earls of England had been like the earls of Chester, and all the bishops like the bishops of Durham, England would assuredly have split up, like Germany, into a loose federation of temporal and spiritual princes.  This it was William’s special work to hinder; but he doubtless saw that the exceptional privileges of one or two favoured lordships, standing in marked contrast to the rest, would not really interfere with his great plan of union.  And William would hardly have confirmed the sees of London or Winchester in the privileges which he allowed to the distant see of Durham.  He now also made a grant of earldoms, the object of which is less clear than that of most of his actions.  It is not easy to say why Gospatric was deprived of his earldom.  His former acts of hostility to William had been covered by his pardon and reappointment in 1069; and since then he had acted as a loyal, if perhaps an indiscreet, guardian of the land.  Two greater earldoms than his had become vacant by the revolt, the death, the imprisonment, of Edwin and Morkere.  But these William had no intention of filling.  He would not have in his realm anything so dangerous as an earl of the Mercian’s or the Northumbrians in the old sense, whether English or Norman.  But the defence of the northern frontier needed an earl to rule Northumberland in the later sense, the land north of the Tyne.  And after the fate of Robert of Comines, William could not as yet put a Norman earl in so perilous a post.  But the Englishman whom he chose was open to the same charges as the deposed Gospatric.  For he was Waltheof the son of Siward, the hero of the storm of York in 1069.  Already Earl of Northampton and Huntingdon, he was at this time high in the King’s personal favour, perhaps already the husband of the King’s niece.  One side of William’s policy comes out here.  Union was sometimes helped by division.  There were men whom William loved to make great, but whom he had no mind to make dangerous.  He gave them vast estates, but estates for the most part scattered over different parts of the kingdom.  It was only in the border earldoms and in Cornwall that he allowed anything at all near to the lordship of a whole shire to be put in the hands of a single man.  One Norman and one Englishman held two earldoms together; but they were earldoms far apart.  Roger of Montgomery held the earldoms of Shrewsbury and Sussex, and Waltheof to his midland earldom of Northampton and Huntingdon now added the rule of distant Northumberland.  The men who had fought most stoutly against William were the men whom he most willingly received to favour.  Eadric and Hereward were honoured; Waltheof was honoured more highly.  He ranked along with the greatest Normans; his position was perhaps higher than any but the King’s born kinsmen.  But the whole tale of Waltheof is a problem that touches the character of the king under whom he rose and fell.  Lifted up higher than any other man among the conquered, he was the one man whom William put to death on a political charge.  It is hard to see the reasons for either his rise or his fall.  It was doubtless mainly his end which won him the abiding reverence of his countrymen.  His valour and his piety are loudly praised.  But his valour we know only from his one personal exploit at York; his piety was consistent with a base murder.  In other matters, he seems amiable, irresolute, and of a scrupulous conscience, and Northumbrian morality perhaps saw no great crime in a murder committed under the traditions of a Northumbrian deadly feud.  Long before Waltheof was born, his grandfather Earl Ealdred had been killed by a certain Carl.  The sons of Carl had fought by his side at York; but, notwithstanding this comradeship, the first act of Waltheof’s rule in Northumberland was to send men to slay them beyond the bounds of his earldom.  A crime that was perhaps admired in Northumberland and unheard of elsewhere did not lose him either the favour of the King or the friendship of his neighbour Bishop Walcher, a reforming prelate with whom Waltheof acted in concert.  And when he was chosen as the single exception to William’s merciful rule, it was not for this undoubted crime, but on charges of which, even if guilty, he might well have been forgiven.

The sojourn of William on the continent in 1072 carries us out of England and Normandy into the general affairs of Europe.  Signs may have already showed themselves of what was coming to the south of Normandy; but the interest of the moment lay in the country of Matilda.  Flanders, long the firm ally of Normandy, was now to change into a bitter enemy.  Count Baldwin died in 1067; his successor of the same name died three years later, and a war followed between his widow Richildis, the guardian of his young son Arnulf, and his brother Robert the Frisian.  Robert had won fame in the East; he had received the sovereignty of Friesland—a name which takes in Holland and Zealand—and he was now invited to deliver Flanders from the oppressions of Richildis.  Meanwhile, Matilda was acting as regent of Normandy, with Earl William of Hereford as her counsellor.  Richildis sought help of her son’s two overlords, King Henry of Germany and King Philip of France.  Philip came in person; the German succours were too late.  From Normandy came Earl William with a small party of knights.  The kings had been asked for armies; to the Earl she offered herself, and he came to fight for his bride.  But early in 1071 Philip, Arnulf, and William, were all overthrown by Robert the Frisian in the battle of Cassel.  Arnulf and Earl William were killed; Philip made peace with Robert, henceforth undisputed Count of Flanders.

All this brought King William to the continent, while the invasion of Malcolm was still unavenged.  No open war followed between Normandy and Flanders; but for the rest of their lives Robert and William were enemies, and each helped the enemies of the other.  William gave his support to Baldwin brother of the slain Arnulf, who strove to win Flanders from Robert.  But the real interest of this episode lies in the impression which was made in the lands east of Flanders.  In the troubled state of Germany, when Henry the Fourth was striving with the Saxons, both sides seem to have looked to the Conqueror of England with hope and with fear.  On this matter our English and Norman authorities are silent, and the notices in the contemporary German writers are strangely unlike one another.  But they show at least that the prince who ruled on both sides of the sea was largely in men’s thoughts.  The Saxon enemy of Henry describes him in his despair as seeking help in Denmark, France, Aquitaine, and also of the King of the English, promising him the like help, if he should ever need it.  William and Henry had both to guard against Saxon enmity, but the throne at Winchester stood firmer than the throne at Goslar.  But the historian of the continental Saxons puts into William’s mouth an answer utterly unsuited to his position.  He is made, when in Normandy, to answer that, having won his kingdom by force, he fears to leave it, lest he might not find his way back again.  Far more striking is the story told three years later by Lambert of Herzfeld.  Henry, when engaged in an Hungarian war, heard that the famous Archbishop Hanno of Köln had leagued with William Bostar—so is his earliest surname written—King of the English, and that a vast army was coming to set the island monarch on the German throne.  The host never came; but Henry hastened back to guard his frontier against barbarians.  By that phrase a Teutonic writer can hardly mean the insular part of William’s subjects.

Now assuredly William never cherished, as his successor probably did, so wild a dream as that of a kingly crowning at Aachen, to be followed perhaps by an imperial crowning at Rome.  But that such schemes were looked on as a practical danger against which the actual German King had to guard, at least shows the place which the Conqueror of England held in European imagination.

For the three or four years immediately following the surrender of Ely, William’s journeys to and fro between his kingdom and his duchy were specially frequent.  Matilda seems to have always stayed in Normandy; she is never mentioned in England after the year of her coronation and the birth of her youngest son, and she commonly acted as regent of the duchy.  In the course of 1072 we see William in England, in Normandy, again in England, and in Scotland.  In 1073 he was called beyond sea by a formidable movement.  His great continental conquest had risen against him; Le Mans and all Maine were again independent.  City and land chose for them a prince who came by female descent from the stock of their ancient counts.  This was Hugh the son of Azo Marquess of Liguria and of Gersendis the sister of the last Count Herbert.  The Normans were driven out of Le Mans; Azo came to take possession in the name of his son, but he and the citizens did not long agree.  He went back, leaving his wife and son under the guardianship of Geoffrey of Mayenne.  Presently the men of Le Mans threw off princely rule altogether and proclaimed the earliest commune in Northern Gaul.  Here then, as at Exeter, William had to strive against an armed commonwealth, and, as at Exeter, we specially wish to know what were to be the relations between the capital and the county at large.  The mass of the people throughout Maine threw themselves zealously into the cause of the commonwealth.  But their zeal might not have lasted long, if, according to the usual run of things in such cases, they had simply exchanged the lordship of their hereditary masters for the corporate lordship of the citizens of Le Mans.  To the nobles the change was naturally distasteful.  They had to swear to the commune, but many of them, Geoffrey for one, had no thought of keeping their oaths.  Dissensions arose; Hugh went back to Italy; Geoffrey occupied the castle of Le Mans, and the citizens dislodged him only by the dangerous help of the other prince who claimed the overlordship of Maine, Count Fulk of Anjou.

If Maine was to have a master from outside, the lord of Anjou hardly promised better than the lord of Normandy.  But men in despair grasp at anything.  The strange thing is that Fulk disappears now from the story; William steps in instead.  And it was at least as much in his English as in his Norman character that the Duke and King won back the revolted land.  A place in his army was held by English warriors, seemingly under the command of Hereward himself.  Men who had fought for freedom in their own land now fought at the bidding of their Conqueror to put down freedom in another land.  They went willingly; the English Chronicler describes the campaign with glee, and breaks into verse—or incorporates a contemporary ballad—at the tale of English victory.  Few men of that day would see that the cause of Maine was in truth the cause of England.  If York and Exeter could not act in concert with one another, still less could either act in concert with Le Mans.  Englishmen serving in Maine would fancy that they were avenging their own wrongs by laying waste the lands of any man who spoke the French tongue.  On William’s part, the employment of Englishmen, the employment of Hereward, was another stroke of policy.  It was more fully following out the system which led Englishmen against Exeter, which led Eadric and his comrades into Scotland.  For in every English soldier whom William carried into Maine he won a loyal English subject.  To men who had fought under his banners beyond the sea he would be no longer the Conqueror but the victorious captain; they would need some very special oppression at home to make them revolt against the chief whose laurels they had helped to win.  As our own gleeman tells the tale, they did little beyond harrying the helpless land; but in continental writers we can trace a regular campaign, in which we hear of no battles, but of many sieges.  William, as before, subdued the land piecemeal, keeping the city for the last.  When he drew near to Le Mans, its defenders surrendered at his summons, to escape fire and slaughter by speedy submission.  The new commune was abolished, but the Conqueror swore to observe all the ancient rights of the city.

All this time we have heard nothing of Count Fulk.  Presently we find him warring against nobles of Maine who had taken William’s part, and leaguing with the Bretons against William himself.  The King set forth with his whole force, Norman and English; but peace was made by the mediation of an unnamed Roman cardinal, abetted, we are told, by the chief Norman nobles.  Success against confederated Anjou and Britanny might be doubtful, with Maine and England wavering in their allegiance, and France, Scotland, and Flanders, possible enemies in the distance.  The rights of the Count of Anjou over Maine were formally acknowledged, and William’s eldest son Robert did homage to Fulk for the county.  Each prince stipulated for the safety and favour of all subjects of the other who had taken his side.  Between Normandy and Anjou there was peace during the rest of the days of William; in Maine we shall see yet another revolt, though only a partial one.

William went back to England in 1073.  In 1074 he went to the continent for a longer absence.  As the time just after the first completion of the Conquest is spoken of as a time when Normans and English were beginning to sit down side by side in peace, so the years which followed the submission of Ely are spoken of as a time of special oppression.  This fact is not unconnected with the King’s frequent absences from England.  Whatever we say of William’s own position, he was a check on smaller oppressors.  Things were always worse when the eye of the great master was no longer watching.  William’s one weakness was that of putting overmuch trust in his immediate kinsfolk and friends.  Of the two special oppressors, William Fitz-Osbern had thrown away his life in Flanders; but Bishop Ode was still at work, till several years later his king and brother struck him down with a truly righteous blow.

The year 1074, not a year of fighting, was pro-eminently a year of intrigue.  William’s enemies on the continent strove to turn the representative of the West-Saxon kings to help their ends.  Edgar flits to and fro between Scotland and Flanders, and the King of the French tempts him with the offer of a convenient settlement on the march of France, Normandy, and Flanders.  Edgar sets forth from Scotland, but is driven back by a storm; Malcolm and Margaret then change their minds, and bid him make his peace with King William.  William gladly accepts his submission; an embassy is sent to bring him with all worship to the King in Normandy.  He abides for several years in William’s court contented and despised, receiving a daily pension and the profits of estates in England of no great extent which the King of a moment held by the grant of a rival who could afford to be magnanimous.

Edgar’s after-life showed that he belonged to that class of men who, as a rule slothful and listless, can yet on occasion act with energy, and who act most creditably on behalf of others.  But William had no need to fear him, and he was easily turned into a friend and a dependant.  Edgar, first of Englishmen by descent, was hardly an Englishman by birth.  William had now to deal with the Englishman who stood next to Edgar in dignity and far above him in personal estimation.  We have reached the great turning-point in William’s reign and character, the black and mysterious tale of the fate of Waltheof.  The Earl of Northumberland, Northampton, and Huntingdon, was not the only earl in England of English birth.  The earldom of the East-Angles was held by a born Englishman who was more hateful than any stranger.  Ralph of Wader was the one Englishman who had fought at William’s side against England.  He often passes for a native of Britanny, and he certainly held lands and castles in that country; but he was Breton only by the mother’s side.  For Domesday and the Chronicles show that he was the son of an elder Earl Ralph, who had been staller or master of the horse in Edward’s days, and who is expressly said to have been born in Norfolk.  The unusual name suggests that the elder Ralph was not of English descent.  He survived the coming of William, and his son fought on Senlac among the countrymen of his mother.  This treason implies an unrecorded banishment in the days of Edward or Harold.  Already earl in 1069, he had in that year acted vigorously for William against the Danes.  But he now conspired against him along with Roger, the younger son of William Fitz-Osbern, who had succeeded his father in the earldom of Hereford, while his Norman estates had passed to his elder brother William.  What grounds of complaint either Ralph or Roger had against William we know not; but that the loyalty of the Earl of Hereford was doubtful throughout the year 1074 appears from several letters of rebuke and counsel sent to him by the Regent Lanfranc.  At last the wielder of both swords took to his spiritual arms, and pronounced the Earl excommunicate, till he should submit to the King’s mercy and make restitution to the King and to all men whom he had wronged.  Roger remained stiff-necked under the Primate’s censure, and presently committed an act of direct disobedience.  The next year, 1075, he gave his sister Emma in marriage to Earl Ralph.  This marriage the King had forbidden, on some unrecorded ground of state policy.  Most likely he already suspected both earls, and thought any tie between them dangerous.  The notice shows William stepping in to do, as an act of policy, what under his successors became a matter of course, done with the sole object of making money.  The bride-ale—the name that lurks in the modern shape of bridal—was held at Exning in Cambridgeshire; bishops and abbots were guests of the excommunicated Roger; Waltheof was there, and many Breton comrades of Ralph.  In their cups they began to plot how they might drive the King out of the kingdom.  Charges, both true and false, were brought against William; in a mixed gathering of Normans, English, and Bretons, almost every act of William’s life might pass as a wrong done to some part of the company, even though some others of the company were his accomplices.  Above all, the two earls Ralph and Roger made a distinct proposal to their fellow-earl Waltheof.  King William should be driven out of the land; one of the three should be King; the other two should remain earls, ruling each over a third of the kingdom.  Such a scheme might attract earls, but no one else; it would undo William’s best and greatest work; it would throw back the growing unity of the kingdom by all the steps that it had taken during several generations.

Now what amount of favour did Waltheof give to these schemes?  Weighing the accounts, it would seem that, in the excitement of the bride-ale, he consented to the treason, but that he thought better of it the next morning.  He went to Lanfranc, at once regent and ghostly father, and confessed to him whatever he had to confess.  The Primate assigned his penitent some ecclesiastical penances; the Regent bade the Earl go into Normandy and tell the whole tale to the King.  Waltheof went, with gifts in hand; he told his story and craved forgiveness.  William made light of the matter, and kept Waltheof with him, but seemingly not under restraint, till he came back to England.

Meanwhile the other two earls were in open rebellion.  Ralph, half Breton by birth and earl of a Danish land, asked help in Britanny and Denmark.  Bretons from Britanny and Bretons settled in England flocked to him.  King Swegen, now almost at the end of his reign and life, listened to the call of the rebels, and sent a fleet under the command of his son Cnut, the future saint, together with an earl named Hakon.  The revolt in England was soon put down, both in East and West.  The rebel earls met with no support save from those who were under their immediate influence.  The country acted zealously for the King.  Lanfranc could report that Earl Ralph and his army were fleeing, and that the King’s men, French and English, were chasing them.  In another letter he could add, with some strength of language, that the kingdom was cleansed from the filth of the Bretons.  At Norwich only the castle was valiantly defended by the newly married Countess Emma.  Roger was taken prisoner; Ralph fled to Britanny; their followers were punished with various mutilations, save the defenders of Norwich, who were admitted to terms.  The Countess joined her husband in Britanny, and in days to come Ralph did something to redeem so many treasons by dying as an armed pilgrim in the first crusade.

The main point of this story is that the revolt met with no English support whatever.  Not only did Bishop Wulfstan march along with his fierce Norman brethren Ode and Geoffrey; the English people everywhere were against the rebels.  For this revolt offered no attraction to English feeling; had the undertaking been less hopeless, nothing could have been gained by exchanging the rule of William for that of Ralph or Roger.  It might have been different if the Danes had played their part better.  The rebellion broke out while William was in Normandy; it was the sailing of the Danish fleet which brought him back to England.  But never did enterprise bring less honour on its leaders than this last Danish voyage up the Humber.  All that the holy Cnut did was to plunder the minster of Saint Peter at York and to sail away.

His coming however seems to have altogether changed the King’s feelings with regard to Waltheof.  As yet he had not been dealt with as a prisoner or an enemy.  He now came back to England with the King, and William’s first act was to imprison both Waltheof and Roger.  The imprisonment of Roger, a rebel taken in arms, was a matter of course.  As for Waltheof, whatever he had promised at the bride-ale, he had done no disloyal act; he had had no share in the rebellion, and he had told the King all that he knew.  But he had listened to traitors, and it might be dangerous to leave him at large when a Danish fleet, led by his old comrade Cnut, was actually afloat.  Still what followed is strange indeed, specially strange with William as its chief doer.

At the Midwinter Gemót of 1075–1076 Roger and Waltheof were brought to trial.  Ralph was condemned in absence, like Eustace of Boulogne.  Roger was sentenced to forfeiture and imprisonment for life.  Waltheof made his defence; his sentence was deferred; he was kept at Winchester in a straiter imprisonment than before.  At the Pentecostal Gemót of 1076, held at Westminster, his case was again argued, and he was sentenced to death.  On the last day of May the last English earl was beheaded on the hills above Winchester.

Such a sentence and execution, strange at any time, is specially strange under William.  Whatever Waltheof had done, his offence was lighter than that of Roger; yet Waltheof has the heavier and Roger the lighter punishment.  With Scroggs or Jeffreys on the bench, it might have been argued that Waltheof’s confession to the King did not, in strictness of law, wipe out the guilt of his original promise to the conspirators; but William the Great did not commonly act after the fashion of Scroggs and Jeffreys.  To deprive Waltheof of his earldom might doubtless be prudent; a man who had even listened to traitors might be deemed unfit for such a trust.  It might be wise to keep him safe under the King’s eye, like Edwin, Morkere, and Edgar.  But why should he be picked out for death, when the far more guilty Roger was allowed to live?  Why should he be chosen as the one victim of a prince who never before or after, in Normandy or in England, doomed any man to die on a political charge?  These are questions hard to answer.  It is not enough to say that Waltheof was an Englishman, that it was William’s policy gradually to get rid of Englishmen in high places, and that the time was now come to get rid of the last.  For such a policy forfeiture, or at most imprisonment, would have been enough.  While other Englishmen lost lands, honours, at most liberty, Waltheof alone lost his life by a judicial sentence.  It is likely enough that many Normans hungered for the lands and honours of the one Englishman who still held the highest rank in England.  Still forfeiture without death might have satisfied even them.  But Waltheof was not only earl of three shires; he was husband of the King’s near kinswoman.  We are told that Judith was the enemy and accuser of her husband.  This may have touched William’s one weak point.  Yet he would hardly have swerved from the practice of his whole life to please the bloody caprice of a niece who longed for the death of her husband.  And if Judith longed for Waltheof’s death, it was not from a wish to supply his place with another.  Legend says that she refused a second husband offered her by the King; it is certain that she remained a widow.

Waltheof’s death must thus remain a mystery, an isolated deed of blood unlike anything else in William’s life.  It seems to have been impolitic; it led to no revolt, but it called forth a new burst of English feeling.  Waltheof was deemed the martyr of his people; he received the same popular canonization as more than one English patriot.  Signs and wonders were wrought at his tomb at Crowland, till displays of miraculous power which were so inconsistent with loyalty and good order were straitly forbidden.  The act itself marks a stage in the downward course of William’s character.  In itself, the harrying of Northumberland, the very invasion of England, with all the bloodshed that they caused, might be deemed blacker crimes than the unjust death of a single man.  But as human nature stands, the less crime needs a worse man to do it.  Crime, as ever, led to further crime and was itself the punishment of crime.  In the eyes of William’s contemporaries the death of Waltheof, the blackest act of William’s life, was also its turning-point.  From the day of the martyrdom on Saint Giles’ hill the magic of William’s name and William’s arms passed away.  Unfailing luck no longer waited on him; after Waltheof’s death he never, till his last campaign of all, won a battle or took a town.  In this change of William’s fortunes the men of his own day saw the judgement of God upon his crime.  And in the fact at least they were undoubtedly right.  Henceforth, though William’s real power abides unshaken, the tale of his warfare is chiefly a tale of petty defeats.  The last eleven years of his life would never have won him the name of Conqueror.  But in the higher walk of policy and legislation never was his nobler surname more truly deserved.  Never did William the Great show himself so truly great as in these later years.