The case thus put seemed plain to every Englishman, at all events to every man in Wessex, East-Anglia, and southern Mercia.But it would not seem so plain in OTHER lands.To the greater part of Western Europe William's claim might really seem the better.William himself doubtless thought his own claim the better; he deluded himself as he deluded others.But we are more concerned with William as a statesman; and if it be statesmanship to adapt means to ends, whatever the ends may be, if it be statesmanship to make men believe that the worse cause is the better, then no man ever showed higher statesmanship than William showed in his great pleading before all Western Christendom.It is a sign of the times that it was a pleading before all Western Christendom.Others had claimed crowns; none had taken such pains to convince all mankind that the claim was a good one.Such an appeal to public opinion marks on one side a great advance.It was a great step towards the ideas of International Law and even of European concert.It showed that the days of mere force were over, that the days of subtle diplomacy had begun.Possibly the change was not without its dark side; it may be doubted whether a change from force to fraud is wholly a gain.
Still it was an appeal from the mere argument of the sword to something which at least professed to be right and reason.William does not draw the sword till he has convinced himself and everybody else that he is drawing it in a just cause.In that age the appeal naturally took a religious shape.Herein lay its immediate strength; herein lay its weakness as regarded the times to come.
William appealed to Emperor, kings, princes, Christian men great and small, in every Christian land.He would persuade all; he would ask help of all.But above all he appealed to the head of Christendom, the Bishop of Rome.William in his own person could afford to do so; where he reigned, in Normandy or in England, there was no fear of Roman encroachments; he was fully minded to be in all causes and over all persons within his dominions supreme.While he lived, no Pope ventured to dispute his right.But by acknowledging the right of the Pope to dispose of crowns, or at least to judge as to the right to crowns, he prepared many days of humiliation for kings in general and specially for his own successors.One man in Western Europe could see further than William, perhaps even further than Lanfranc.The chief counsellor of Pope Alexander the Second was the Archdeacon Hildebrand, the future Gregory the Seventh.If William outwitted the world, Hildebrand outwitted William.William's appeal to the Pope to decide between two claimants for the English crown strengthened Gregory not a little in his daring claim to dispose of the crowns of Rome, of Italy, and of Germany.Still this recognition of Roman claims led more directly to the humiliation of William's successor in his own kingdom.Moreover William's successful attempt to represent his enterprise as a holy war, a crusade before crusades were heard of, did much to suggest and to make ready the way for the real crusades a generation later.It was not till after William's death that Urban preached the crusade, but it was during William's life that Gregory planned it.
The appeal was strangely successful.William convinced, or seemed to convince, all men out of England and Scandinavia that his claim to the English crown was just and holy, and that it was a good work to help him to assert it in arms.He persuaded his own subjects; he certainly did not constrain them.He persuaded some foreign princes to give him actual help, some to join his muster in person; he persuaded all to help him so far as not to hinder their subjects from joining him as volunteers.And all this was done by sheer persuasion, by argument good or bad.In adapting of means to ends, in applying to each class of men that kind of argument which best suited it, the diplomacy, the statesmanship, of William was perfect.
Again we ask, How far was it the statesmanship of William, how far of Lanfranc? But a prince need not do everything with his own hands and say everything with his own tongue.It was no small part of the statesmanship of William to find out Lanfranc, to appreciate him and to trust him.And when two subtle brains were at work, more could be done by the two working in partnership than by either working alone.
