Crown and Country: A History of England through the Monarchy. David Starkey

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СКАЧАТЬ was a conventional beginning to a highly unconventional reign. For, in contrast to the older William with his piety and uxoriousness, the younger set himself to flout all contemporary norms of behaviour. Not only did he plunder the Church, he was actively irreligious. He never married or fathered children; instead, he had male ‘favourites’ and was almost certainly homosexual. Still worse, he made no bones about the fact.

      This flamboyantly un-Christian mode of life led churchmen both to loathe him and to underestimate him. We should not make the same mistake. For, despite the great differences in their moral character, William also inherited many of his father’s most impressive qualities. Like the Conqueror, Rufus was a skilled soldier and a natural leader of men. He was similarly strong-willed and determined to enforce his authority. And he went about it more imaginatively: he showed an occasional flair for public relations, while his building works transformed the physical setting of the monarchy.

      All this made William II a powerful and effective king. But that very fact meant that much of the Norman baronage looked with envy across the Channel at the laxer rule of Duke Robert. They correctly saw Robert as one of themselves and longed to have him for their lord in England. The lead was taken by Bishop Odo, whom William had been persuaded, against his better judgement, to include in his deathbed amnesty for political prisoners. Odo was duly released and returned to his earldom of Kent, whence he plotted with his fellow malcontents. During Lent 1088, a formidable coalition was assembled and at Easter, 16 April, a coordinated series of provincial revolts broke out: in East Anglia, Durham, the Midlands, the Welsh Borders, the West Country and, above all, in Odo’s territories of Kent.

      The rebellion polarized opinion – and the races – in England. The rebels, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle noted, were ‘all French’, or rather they were the crème de la crème: ‘the richest French men that were in this land’. And the chronicler castigates their behaviour severely: their purpose was to ‘betray their lord the king’; they were guilty of ‘great treachery’. But his harshest words are reserved for Odo: he was a veritable ‘Judas’, who planned ‘to do by [William] as … Iscariot did by Our Lord’.

      In contrast, English sentiment seems to have been solidly royalist. Bishop Wulfstan stood firm in Worcester and, with a comparatively small force, put the rebels to flight there. But the situation in Kent, where Odo had retreated with his spoil to his near-impregnable castle of Rochester, demanded sterner measures. The result was an appeal by William to his English subjects:

      He then sent after Englishmen, described to them his need, earnestly requested their support, and promised them the best laws that ever were in this land; each unright geld he forbade and restored to the men their woods and chases [that is, their hunting rights].

      The promised abolition of the Forest Laws (of which more later) was, like the Laws themselves, an innovation. Otherwise, both the form and the content of William’s appeal are remarkably similar to the compact hammered out between king and people as a condition of Æthelred II’s restoration to the throne in 1014.

      And it was equally effective. Thanks to the forces raised, William was able to bottle Odo up in Rochester. Finally, after inordinate wriggling on Odo’s part, an agreement was reached: Odo would surrender all his offices and possessions in England, in return for which William would allow him to return unharmed to Normandy. The English troops, however, thought this more than Odo deserved and, as he emerged from the castle, cried out:

      Halters, bring halters, and hang this traitor bishop and his accomplices from the gallows!

      A similar punishment awaited William of St Calais, who as bishop of Durham had begun the building of the mighty cathedral and castle. He had joined Odo and ‘did all the harm that he could all over the north’. William Rufus besieged him and the bishop was forced to come to terms: he ‘gave up the castle, and relinquished his bishopric, and went to Normandy’. This, as the Anglo-Saxon chronicler notes with satisfaction, was the common fate of most of the leaders of the revolt: ‘many Frenchmen also abandoned their lands and went overseas; and the king gave many of their lands to the men that were faithful to him’.

      The crisis over, William’s promises to the English were forgotten. When he was taxed with this by Archbishop Lanfranc, the king smoothly retorted: ‘who can be expected to keep all his promises?’

      Despite his broken word, William was able to deploy the men and money of England to re-create and even to extend the Conqueror’s empire. He first forced an effective division of Normandy, by taking the east of the duchy and leaving Robert with only the west. Finally, in 1096, Robert mortgaged him the whole of Normandy to finance his participation in the First Crusade. The price was 10,000 marks of silver. And it was raised, needless to say, by an English geld at the rate of four shillings per hide.

      Even more remarkable was the fate of Scotland. As we have seen, Malcolm III had married Margaret, sister of Edgar the Æthling. The hope must have been to exploit Margaret’s Anglo-Saxon royal blood to make England Scottish. The result instead was to make Scotland English or, at any rate, Anglo-Norman. In part, this was the work of Margaret herself. She was passionately Anglo-Norman, in both culture and church-manship, and imposed these values when and where she could in Scotland. This inevitably led to a native Gaelic backlash and King Malcolm found himself caught in the middle. A complicating factor was Edgar the Æthling’s reconciliation with William the Conqueror, which led, in effect, to his becoming an honorary member of the Norman dynasty.

      With both his wife and his brother-in-law as Anglo-Norman agents, the pressure on Malcolm was intense. And it was not made any easier by William II’s high-handed approach to his northern neighbour.

      In the event, however, it was Malcolm who threw the first stone by taking advantage of William’s absence in Normandy in 1091 to launch an invasion of England, which, after making considerable headway, was repulsed by William’s regents. But then, as Malcolm’s ill-luck would have it, William and Robert sank their differences and decided to celebrate their new-found friendship by joining in a punitive expedition to Scotland. The English fleet was destroyed in September. But the army swept into south-eastern Scotland and it was clear that Malcolm would have to submit. Duke Robert and Edgar the Æthling acted as intermediaries and it was agreed to renew the Peace of Abernethy, in return for which Malcolm performed homage to William on the same terms that he had done to his father.

      But William, probably sensing Scottish weakness, had no intention of keeping his side of the bargain. Next year he came north with a large army; captured Carlisle and built and garrisoned the castle. He also rebuilt the town and planted an English colony around it: sending ‘a vast number of rustic people with wives and with cattle … thither, to dwell there in order to till the land’.

      The establishment of Carlisle as a fortified outpost of England altered the whole balance of power along the vague and unstable Anglo-Scottish border. Malcolm had to respond. But, having learned the lesson of Anglo-Norman power, he tried negotiation and came under safe-conduct to the crown-wearing at Gloucester. There, however, William chose to inflict deliberate humiliation on him. ‘But when he came to the king, he could not’, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reported, ‘be considered worthy either of our king’s speech, or of the conditions that were formerly promised him.’

      Malcolm returned to Scotland and, intent on revenge, launched a destructive raid on England. But the raid ended disastrously. Malcolm was entrapped near Alnwick and killed by Morel of Bamborough, the steward and kinsman of the earl of Northumberland and Malcolm’s own intimate friend. Malcolm’s son and nominated heir, Edward, was killed at the same time. The death of both her husband and son was too much for Margaret, who, almost maddened with grief, died a few days later. There followed a powerful Gaelic reaction in which Donald III Bane (White- or Fair-haired), Malcolm’s backwoodsman brother, was made king and ‘drove out all the English’. A counter-blow was struck when Duncan II, Malcolm’s son by his СКАЧАТЬ