customed to send to the Roman Church, I should take better order. The one claim I have admitted, and the other I have not admitted. Fealty I neither have been willing to do, nor will I do it now, for I never promised it; and I find not that my predecessors did it to yours. The money, for three years while I have been in Gaul, has been carelessly collected; now, however, that by the Divine mercy I am returned to my realm, what has been gathered is forwarded by the aforesaid legate, and the remainder, as soon as there is an opportunity, shall be sent by the envoys of Lanfranc, our faithful Archbishop. Pray for us and for the state of our realm; because we have loved your predecessors, and you above all we desire to love sincerely, and listen to obediently." And Gregory, though angry and contemptuous about the money, had to let the matter pass. Lanfranc himself, who probably was the actual writer of the king's letter, took the same tone of guarded respect, but resolute assertion of rights, to the great and terrible Pope. Gregory wrote to him by the same legate, charging him with having cooled in his. regard and duty to the Roman Church since his promotion. Lanfranc “neither wishes nor sought to find fault with the Pope's words," but in his conscience he does not understand how absence or promotion can make him less hearty in his submission to the Pope's commands in all things, "according to the command of the canons ;" and insinuates that it is really the Pope who has become cool to him. "The words of your message," he adds, "I, with your legate, to the best of my power, recommended to my lord the king. I urged, but could not persuade. How far he in all points has not assented to your wish, he himself makes known to you both by word and letter." In the great contest between the Pope and the Empire, William, and Lanfranc with him, though far from withdrawing their recognition of Gregory, and refusing to give any countenance to his rival, spoke of him in terms which implied the king's right to form his own judgment and take his own line, if necessary, in the quarrel which had thrown Gregory's claims into dispute. There is a curious letter of Lanfranc's to the representative of the Antipope Guibert, Cardinal Hugo, who had tried to get England on his master's side. "I have received and read your letter, and some things in it have displeased me. I do not approve of your vituperating Pope Gregory, and calling him Hildebrand, and that you give bad names to his legates, and that you praise up Clement so extravagantly. For it is written, that in a man's lifetime he ought not to be praised, nor his neighbour disparaged. It is as yet unknown to mankind what they are now, and what they are to be in the sight of God. Yet I do not believe that the Emperor, without great reason, would have ventured to take so grave a step, nor that without great help from God he could have achieved so great a victory. I do not recommend your coming to England, unless you first receive the king's leave. For our island has not yet disowned the former Pope (Gregory), nor declared its judgment whether it ought to obey the latter. When we have heard the reasons on both sides, if it so happen, we shall be able to see more clearly what ought to be done.” CHAPTER VII. CHANGES AT WILLIAM'S DEATH. "So fails, so languishes, grows dim, and dies Princes and emperors, and the crowns and palms WORDSWORTH, Excursion, b. vii. WHILE the Conqueror lived there was government in the State and the Church. There was the strong love of order, the purpose of improvement, the sense of the value of law, the hatred of anarchy and misrule, and the firm mind to put them down. William, with his tender and true heart for his wife, and recognizing with the deference of a great mind and spirit the combination of knowledge and power with nobleness of character in men like Lanfranc and Anselm, had little respect and little patience for the people of his time. His own ambition, unscrupulous and selfish as it was, was of a higher order than theirs; it was combined with a consciousness of his fitness for the first place, and the desire of an adequate field for the exercise of his power to rule. To those who put their own ends or their own wishes in the way of his, he was without pity. His great men he would exalt and enrich, and secure to every man his place; for the little folk, he would maintain a due measure of peace and order; bishops and religious men he wished to see zealous for their great objects, and true to their high profession, and there were no limits to his help and countenance when he thought they were fulfilling their calling. Narrow conceptions of government, we may think; but it was much, in those days of beginnings, to have them. But woe to those who thought of thwarting him, or having their own way against his ! He knew that he lived in a turbulent and dangerous time, and that there were few to trust; and his hand, to crush or to punish, was swift, heavy, and, in England, relentless. Governing an alien race is the trial and, for the most part, the failure of civilized times; and it was not likely to be easy or successful in his day, and after a great wrong such as he had committed against Englishmen. Hard and stern at all periods of his life, he was cruel and oppressive towards its end, when he became embittered by finding that the race which he had ill-treated, and which he could so little understand, sullenly hated while it feared him. Yet the tyranny of William the king was a light matter to England, if set against the furious insolence of his foreign military lords, which he alone could keep in some order. It was something for the country, vexed as it was by the king's demands for money, and by the greediness of his unscrupulous administration, that these men at least had some one to be afraid of. As his life drew to its close his temper waxed harsher, his yoke heavier, his craving for money more insatiable. An old man's value for a hoard was joined with an old man's increased care lessness for suffering, and the disgust of a conqueror whose ends were but half won and whom success had not made happy. England had become to him what the Indies were afterwards to Spain, a convenient source of wealth to be drawn upon without conscience or mercy. No one can doubt that in the years, dreary and miserable from tempest, murrain and fever, from dearth and, famine, just before his death, his inexorable demands for money, searching the country in every corner and racking it to the utmost, made England most miserable. Yet the English writer who with incomparable vigour and pathos describes the wretchedness and humiliation of his country and the fiscal exactions and injustice of her foreign king, is the witness also of the order which he kept; and records, in the form which had become proverbial, that the traveller could pass secure and unharmed through the land with his bosom full of gold, and that no man might raise his hand against his neighbour or harm a woman, without suffering speedy vengeance. On Thursday, September 9, 1087, William, the "famous Baron," died at Rouen. The impression produced by his death, by the retrospect which it invited of his character and wonderful fortunes, by the contrast between what he had been and what was the end of his greatness, was something deeper and more solemn than that produced by the spectacle of mortality in an ordinary king. In England and in Normandy, it found expression by the pens of contemporary writers, who enable us to understand with more than ordinary distinctness the overpowering feeling of awe and amazement,-partly at his dreadful strength, so irresistible, yet so controlled |