716 



WILLIAM II. (OP ENGLAND). 



WILLIAM II. (OF ENGLAND). 



71C 



the courts of law or in the ordinary intercourse of life, rests upon no 

 good authority, and is irreconcilable with well-ascertained facts. The 

 memorable survey of the kingdom completed by order of William in 



1086, and known as the Domesday-Book, need only be mentioned 

 here. 



The wife of William the Conqueror was Matilda, daughter of 

 Baldwin V., earl of Flanders, surnamed the Gentle. He married her 

 before he acquired the crown of England, and she died on the 2nd of 

 November 1083. Their children were, Robert, -whom his father called 

 Gambaron (Roundlegs), and Courthose (Shorthose), who died a prisoner 

 in the castle of Cardiff in 1134 ; Richard, who was gored to death by 

 a stag in the New Forest ; William, by whom he was succeeded on the 

 English throne ; Henry, who succeeded William ; Cecilia, who became 

 abbess of the monastery of the Holy Trinity at Caen, and died there 

 on the 13th of July 1126; Constance, who was married to Alan, earl 

 of Brctagne and Richmond, but died without issue ; Adeliza, who 

 died young before the Conquest ; Adela, who married Stephen, earl of 

 Blois, by whom she became the mother of Stephen, king of England, 

 and who afterwards took the veil, and died in the nunnery of Mareigny 

 in France about 1137 ; Gundred, who married William de Warrenue, 

 earl of Surrey, and died in childbed at Castleacre in Norfolk, May 27, 

 1085 ; and Agatha, who was contracted to Alphonso, king of Leon and 

 Castile, but died before her marriage. He had also a natural son, 

 William de Peveril, by Maud, daughter of Ingelric, a Saxon nobleman, 

 who afterwards married Ranulph de Peveril. 



WILLIAM II., King of England, surnamed by his French and 

 Norman contemporaries Le Rouge, and by the English The Red 

 (meaning the Ruddy-faced), which epithets the Latin chroniclers have 

 inaccurately translated not by the proper term Ruber, but by Rufus 

 (which means the Red-haired), was the second of the three surviving 

 sons of William the Conqueror, and was born in Normandy in 1056. 

 He was educated under the care of the celebrated Laufranc, whom, in 

 1063, his father had called from his retirement at Bee to preside over 

 the newly-founded monastery of St. Stephen, at Caen, and whom he 

 afterwards, in 1070, made archbishop of Canterbury. Lanfranc was 

 the young prince's instructor not only in learning and piety, but iu the 

 art of war, and it was from Lanfranc that Rufus received his knight- 

 hood. He appears to have been from his boyhood a favourite of his 

 father, who saw reflected in him much more of his own character 

 than in his eldest son, the thoughtless and indolent Robert. A few 

 days before his death, the Conqueror, having assembled around his 

 bed those of his prelates and barons who were with him at Rouen, 

 declared to them that ho was willing to leave the dukedom of Nor- 

 mandy, which he had received from his ancestors, to his first-born; 

 but that as for the succession to the kingdom of England, which lie 

 had acquired by his own good sword, he would leave that to the deci- 

 sion of God. He added however that he earnestly hoped it might fall 

 to William ; and he advised that prince, who was present (Robert was 

 not), to repair immediately to England, giving him at the same time 

 a recommendatory letter to Archbishop Lanfranc. William lost no 

 time in setting out for the sea-coast ; he heard of his father having 

 breathed his last as he was about to embark at Wicsant, near Calais, 

 having probably waited till he should be able to carry over that news; 

 he concealed it however after he had landed till he had obtained pos- 

 session of the fortresses of Dover, Pevensey, and Hastings, on pre- 

 tended orders from his father ; he then hastened to Winchester, where 

 he easily induced the master of the royal treasury, William de Pont 

 de 1'Arche, to give him his keys ; and finally he presented himself 

 before Lanfranc, to whom he had already forwarded his father's letter 

 by a confidential messenger. Laufranc a few days after assembled a 

 council of the prelates and barons ; no one opposed his proposition 

 that William should be declared king, and he was accordingly crowned 

 by the Archbishop of Westminster, on Sunday the 26th of September 



1087. The commencement of his reign is dated from that day. 



The first business to which the Red King had to address himself 

 was to defend the throne which he had thus mounted against his elder 

 brother. Robert, who at the time of his father's death had been living 

 in exile and poverty at Abbeville in the dominions of the King of 

 France, soon made his appearance at Rouen, and was at once acknow- 

 ledged as Duke of Normandy. It may be doubted whether he would 

 not have been satisfied with this ancestral inheritance if he had been 

 left to himself ; but this, in the circumstances, could hardly be. His 

 chief imtigator was- Odo, the bishop of Bayeux, who, in the latter 

 years of the preceding reign, had fallen under the displeasure of his 

 half-brother the Conqueror, and was now eager to avenge himself by 

 the dethronement of Rufus. Many others of the English barons also 

 who held possessions in both countries were strongly averse to their 

 separation, as involving the inconveniences and risks of a divided 

 allegiance. Odo is said to have arranged his plans with his friends at 

 the festival of Easter 1088, which was kept by William at Winchester 

 with great state. The insurrection broke out immediately after in all 

 parts of the kingdom. But no efficient assistance came from Robert. 

 William, with prompt sagacity, appealed to his Saxon subjects to 

 stand by him against their hated Norman lords ; the castles of Peven- 

 sey and Rochester, with Odo in the former, and Eustace, earl of 

 Boulogne, in the latter, were both compelled to surrender ; and the 

 rebels, after some further ineffectual resistance, soon everywhere threw 

 down their arms. This unsuccessful attempt to make a revolution in 



England was speedily followed by a revolt of many of the Norman 

 barons against Duke Robert, who with difiiculty was able to maintain 

 his ground, even with the assistance of his brother Henry, to whom 

 in his necessity he parted with about a third of his dominions for the 

 sum of 3000J. [HENRY I., vol. iii., 352.) After this civil war had 

 gone on for some time, and Normandy had been reduced to a state of 

 almost complete anarchy, William landed in that country at the head 

 of an army, in January 1091. But the two brothers did not try their 

 strength in battle : Robert applied for protection to his feudal lord, 

 Philip I., king of France, and by his mediation a peace was concluded 

 between them at Caen: By this treaty William retained possession of 

 all the Norman fortresses of which his partisans had already made 

 themselves masters, and that was the only actual result of the paci- 

 fication. It was also indeed agreed that Robert should have compen- 

 sation in England for the territory thus taken from him, and that, 

 whichever of the two brothers should survive the other should inherit 

 both countries ; but these engagements, which cost William nothing 

 at the time of making them, were certainly never looked upon by him, 

 nor perhaps even by Philip (whose desertion of his brother at a critical 

 juncture he had already, some time before this, obtained by a judi- 

 ciously administered bribe), as good for anything except to serve the 

 purpose of the moment. Robert and William, now converted from 

 enemies into allies, next turned their united arms against their 

 remaining brother, and Henry was in his turn driven into exile. 

 When Rufus returned to England, Robert accompanied him ; but he 

 soon found that hia promised indemnity was not to be obtained, and 

 he returned to Normandy in disgust. Meanwhile the Red King, in 

 the latter part of 1091, had marched an army into Scotland to avenge 

 himself on Malcolm Canmore, who had taken advantage of his absence 

 in Normandy to invade Northumberland. The two kings settled their 

 differences without fighting, by a treaty, iu which Malcolm consented 

 to do homage to Wiliiam whether for his kingdom of Scotland or 

 for his English possessions is, as in other like cases, matter of dispute. 

 This Scottish war broke out again two years after ; Malcolm made 

 another furious inroad into Northumberland in the winter of 1093, 

 and, in an attempt to make himself master of Alnwick Castle, he was 

 slain, on the 13th of November in that year, with his eldest son. In 

 the spring of 1094, Rufus again passed over into Normandy, where his 

 brother had once more called to his assistance the French king, and 

 the war between the two recommenced. Finding it to be going rather 

 against him, Rufus had recourse to his old policy, in the conduct of 

 which however he introduced a new stroke of ingenuity : having sent 

 his commission over to England for an immediate levy of 20,000 men, 

 when that force had assembled for embarkation at Hastings, an order 

 suddenly came that they should all return home, each man merely 

 leaving behind him, in lieu of his services in the field, the sum of ten 

 shillings, which is supposed to have been what each had receivpd from 

 his lord to maintain him during the campaign ; the money thus pro- 

 cured William handed over to Philip, who thereupon withdrew from 

 the war. Rufus was prevented from immediately taking full advantage 

 of this arrangement by being recalled to England by a rising iu Wales, 

 and being alter wards, further detained by a conspiracy of his Norman 

 subjects in the northern counties, at the head of which was Robert 

 Mowbray, earl of Northumberland, one of the most powerful of his 

 barons. He made two campaigns, with little success, against the 

 Welsh in the summers of 1094 and 1095, and was at last obliged to 

 rest satisfied with curbing them, and guarding the western counties 

 from their incursions, by a chain of fortresses ; but Mowbray and his 

 adherents were, after a short contest of arms, effectually put down. 

 Soon after this, in 1096, Robert, seized with the new spirit of taking 

 the cross and setting out to fight the infidels in Palestine, freed William 

 from all further trouble about Normandy by characteristically offering 

 to put him in immediate possession of the whole duchy for 10,000. The 

 terms appear to have included a right of redemption by Robert either 

 within or after five years; but the transaction could not have appeared 

 to anybody to amount really to anything else than a complete and final 

 surrender. Such at any rate we may be certain that William deter- 

 mined it should be, whatever were the precise terms of the conveyance. 

 Rufus at this moment had no more money than his needy brother; 

 but by the instrumentality of the famous Ralph Flambard, who ever 

 since the death of Archbishop Laufranc, in 1089, had been at once his 

 prime minister and chief agent of his oppressions, and the favourite 

 companion of his debaucheries, he soon managed to raise the required 

 sum, not, as an old writer expresses it, by merely fleecing his jaoor 

 subjects, but rather, as it wete, by liaying off their skins. The people 

 of Normandy in general submitted quietly enough to this transference 

 of themselves and their country to a new lord ; but the Mangeaux, or 

 inhabitants of the district of Maine, Robert's right to which was dis- 

 puted, rallied around his rival claimant, Helie de la Floche, and 

 attempted to set William's authority at defiance. This opposition 

 called over the English king once more to the Continent in 1100 : he 

 was hunting in the New Forest when a messenger arrived with the 

 news that Helie had surprised the town of Mans, and was besieging 

 the Norman ' garrison in the castle. Rufus instantly rode to the 

 nearest seaport, and, stepping on board the first vessel he found, 

 directed the crew to hoist sail and begone, asking them, in answer to 

 their entreaties that he would wait till the weather was calmer, if they 

 had ever heard of a king that was drowned. " If I understand," he 



