By what arguments did the Duke of the Normans and the Prior of Bec convince mankind that the worse cause was the better? We must always remember the transitional character of the age.England was in political matters in advance of other Western lands; that is, it lagged behind other Western lands.It had not gone so far on the downward course.It kept far more than Gaul or even Germany of the old Teutonic institutions, the substance of which later ages have won back under new shapes.Many things were understood in England which are now again understood everywhere, but which were no longer understood in France or in the lands held of the French crown.The popular election of kings comes foremost.Hugh Capet was an elective king as much as Harold; but the French kings had made their crown the most strictly hereditary of all crowns.They avoided any interregnum by having their sons crowned in their lifetime.So with the great fiefs of the crown.The notion of kingship as an office conferred by the nation, of a duchy or county as an office held under the king, was still fully alive in England; in Gaul it was forgotten.Kingdom, duchies, counties, had all become possessions instead of offices, possessions passing by hereditary succession of some kind.But no rule of hereditary succession was universally or generally accepted.To this day the kingdoms of Europe differ as to the question of female succession, and it is but slowly that the doctrine of representation has ousted the more obvious doctrine of nearness of kin.All these points were then utterly unsettled;crowns, save of course that of the Empire, were to pass by hereditary right; only what was hereditary right? At such a time claims would be pressed which would have seemed absurd either earlier or later.To Englishmen, if it seemed strange to elect one who was not of the stock of Cerdic, it seemed much more strange to be called on to accept without election, or to elect as a matter of course, one who was not of the stock of Cerdic and who was a stranger into the bargain.Out of England it would not seem strange when William set forth that Edward, having no direct heirs, had chosen his near kinsman William as his successor.Put by itself, that statement had a plausible sound.The transmission of a crown by bequest belongs to the same range of ideas as its transmission by hereditary right; both assume the crown to be a property and not an office.Edward's nomination of Harold, the election of Harold, the fact that William's kindred to Edward lay outside the royal line of England, the fact that there was, in the person of Edgar, a nearer kinsman within that royal line, could all be slurred over or explained away or even turned to William's profit.Let it be that Edward on his death-bed had recommended Harold, and that the Witan had elected Harold.The recommendation was wrung from a dying man in opposition to an earlier act done when he was able to act freely.
The election was brought about by force or fraud; if it was free, it was of no force against William's earlier claim of kindred and bequest.As for Edgar, as few people in England thought of him, still fewer out of England would have ever heard of him.It is more strange that the bastardy of William did not tell against him, as it had once told in his own duchy.But this fact again marks the transitional age.Altogether the tale that a man who was no kinsman of the late king had taken to himself the crown which the king had bequeathed to a kinsman, might, even without further aggravation, be easily made to sound like a tale of wrong.
But the case gained tenfold strength when William added that the doer of the wrong was of all men the one most specially bound not to do it.The usurper was in any case William's man, bound to act in all things for his lord.Perhaps he was more; perhaps he had directly sworn to receive William as king.Perhaps he had promised all this with an oath of special solemnity.It would be easy to enlarge on all these further counts as making up an amount of guilt which William not only had the right to chastise, but which he would be lacking in duty if he failed to chastise.He had to punish the perjurer, to avenge the wrongs of the saints.Surely all who should help him in so doing would be helping in a righteous work.
The answer to all this was obvious.Putting the case at the very worst, assuming that Harold had sworn all that he is ever said to have sworn, assuming that he swore it in the most solemn way in which he is ever said to have sworn it, William's claim was not thereby made one whit better.Whatever Harold's own guilt might be, the people of England had no share in it.Nothing that Harold had done could bar their right to choose their king freely.Even if Harold declined the crown, that would not bind the electors to choose William.But when the notion of choosing kings had begun to sound strange, all this would go for nothing.There would be no need even to urge that in any case the wrong done by Harold to William gave William a CASUS BELLI against Harold, and that William, if victorious, might claim the crown of England, as a possession of Harold's, by right of conquest.In fact William never claimed the crown by conquest, as conquest is commonly understood.He always represented himself as the lawful heir, unhappily driven to use force to obtain his rights.The other pleas were quite enough to satisfy most men out of England and Scandinavia.William's work was to claim the crown of which he was unjustly deprived, and withal to deal out a righteous chastisement on the unrighteous and ungodly man by whom he had been deprived of it.
