Читать книгу The Conquerors: The Pageant of England - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 20

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The thirteen years of the Red King’s rule produced two figures worth telling about, the one a saint, the other a clever and sly villain.

The saint came into prominence through a happy chance. William had acquired the habit of not filling the ecclesiastical posts which fell vacant and of coolly scooping in the revenue to fatten his own purse. At this time there were two claimants to the Holy See, each proclaiming the other anti-Christ, and so the greedy king had a ready-made excuse. If he allowed English gold to go to one of the contenders, how could he be sure he had sent it to the right one, the real Vicar of God?

After the death of Lanfranc, the Norman who had been made Archbishop of Canterbury by the Conqueror, William Rufus allowed the see to remain vacant for four years and, of course, appropriated its huge revenues to himself. An Italian named Anselm, who had given up a good station in life and the prospects of substantial inheritance to become a monk at the famed Norman abbey of Bec and had risen to be abbot, paid a visit to England. He was a gentle, pious, learned man and he made a deep impression wherever he went. The feeling became general that here was a God-sent candidate for the vacant see. William heard what was being said and declared flatly, “Other archbishop than me, there shall be none!” The pressure continued, nevertheless, and the kingly temper flared. “No man’s prayer,” he shouted, “will do anything to shake my will!”

But a way was found to shake his will. The Red King became ill, so ill that he feared he was going to die. As he tossed feverishly on his couch the first hint of remorse entered his mind. What could he do to show repentance before the dread summons came? Perhaps if he appointed an archbishop the Lord would look more leniently on him. Anselm was still in the country, fortunately, and a hasty call was sent for him to attend the royal sickbed.

When Anselm heard he was to be given the pastoral staff of Canterbury he had deep misgivings. He was sure he lacked the physical stamina and perhaps the resolution to carry such a responsibility. “The plow of England should be drawn by a team of equal strength,” he said piteously to the churchmen who had come to escort him into the royal presence. “Would you yoke a feeble old sheep with a wild young bull?”

The wild young bull was so tamed by his illness, however, that he begged Anselm to accept. “My salvation is in your hands,” he said weakly.

The abbot’s pleas to be spared were not heeded and so, most reluctantly and with a conviction that trouble would come of it, Anselm agreed. The churchmen who were present, overjoyed at having the matter settled, hurried the new archbishop out of the room and to the nearest shrine, where the Te Deum was chanted.

Trouble did come of it, and William was the chief sufferer. The gentle old man he had compelled to accept this onerous post became as strong and as bold as a lion in opposing the King’s exactions. He refused to allow the head of the state to touch church funds and he lectured him on the sad condition into which the land had fallen since he took the throne. They quarreled sharply and bitterly over which of the two popes should give the pallium to Anselm. This was a scarf made from the wool of the lambs the Pope blessed on St. Agnes’s Day and always sent to a new archbishop. Anselm wanted it from the hands of Urban II, who had been elected by the cardinals in the traditional manner. William stood out for Guibert, perhaps because the latter had been selected by the German emperor, the Red King being a believer in royal power in all things. When the archbishop refused to give in, the ruddy-faced occupant of the throne fell into the most violent tantrum of his whole bad-tempered life. “Tell him,” he cried, “that as I hated him yesterday I hate him more today, and will hate him more and more with every day we both shall live!”

The kingly hatred did not swerve Anselm as much as an inch from the path of duty. He had Urban send a papal legate with the pallium in spite of the blustering of William. The latter tried to appropriate the scarf for himself and, when the Pope’s representative refused, he endeavored to persuade the legate that he should depose Anselm. The legate, apprehensive of the royal temper, did not dare proceed with the customary ceremony. Instead he laid the pallium on the altar at Canterbury and left it to Anselm to drape it about his own neck.

The stage was reached finally where the King could no longer brook the presence of the archbishop in England. Anselm was banished. He left England with his pilgrim’s staff and, when he was searched for gold on going aboard ship, it was found that he had no money. He went to Rome and begged Urban to allow him to resign. The Pope refused, and so Canterbury was again without an occupant. It remained vacant until William’s death, after which Anselm, tired and feeble but as stoutly resolved in his duty as ever, returned to England and occupied the post until his death.

The record of this splendid old man does not contain any special achievements. His greatness lay in the attitude he adopted, in his unbending resistance to the encroachments of royal power. He became before his death, and increasingly so as time rolled on, the symbol of hope to the downtrodden people. Before Anselm, there had been no one to curb the bitter Norman tyranny. The stand of the gentle old priest who dared to say NO was as welcome to the English as the sight of the dove to the despairing eyes at the rail of the Ark. Small wonder that even to this day the memory of a kind Italian monk is kept green and that he is generally acclaimed the leader of the long muster roll of those who have held the pastoral staff.

The villain was also a priest, a Norman named Ralph or Randulph, who was made Bishop of Durham and who soon won for himself the nickname of Flambard (the Torch) or, as it was sometimes spelled, Passemflambard. There is considerable mystery as to the antecedents of Ralph Flambard. He is variously said to have been a footman in the service of the Norman ducal family, the son of a poor priest of the Bessin and a woman who was given to witchcraft and had lost an eye through a mischievous poke of the satanic forefinger, and an adventurer who had arrived in England in the early days when Edward the Confessor was inviting Normans to come over and help themselves. There is doubt also as to how he attracted the attention of William Rufus, but on this point it may safely be assumed that the King, his head crammed with greed and the determination to make himself master of everything, was looking for an instrument and found the perfect one in the suave, handsome, genial, and diabolically clever Ralph. A prominent historian has written of this early exponent of machiavellian principles as “a subtle and malignant brain” and also as “the lawgiver of feudalism.” These phrases are quoted because they describe William’s minister perfectly.

Ralph Flambard was clever enough to find ways in which William could disregard the laws and flout tradition without seeming to do so. So ingenious was he, in fact, that it was made to appear as though the covetous King was always within the law. What a picture they conjure up, William and his familiar spirit, the puffy, ruddy King, the suave Ralph whispering in the royal ear of the devices he had found in moldy statutes!

Consider now some of the things which Ralph proposed and which William acted upon with invariable success. First, it was declared that the King was the heir of every man. This meant that the ownership of land was a privilege granted by the King in return for military service and that, on the death of the holder, the land reverted to the Crown to be reassigned on the same understanding. In other words, all land was loanland (a term coined perhaps by the ingenious Flambard) and could not be willed to the members of a man’s family. Inheritance on this basis could be ratified only by the King; with, no doubt, the payment of a substantial share into the royal treasury.

In the light of present-day tendencies it will be seen that the unholy team had hit upon a principle which could be applied in a socialistic state. All it did in that distant day, however, was to increase the power of the throne and fatten the royal treasury. It was, in fact, one of the most effective aids to tyranny ever devised.

Less sweeping in its implications but actually more productive was Flambard’s theory of wardship. When the heir to an estate was a minor, the control of the property was vested in the King and all revenue came to him. When a daughter was left to succeed, the King had the right of selling her hand to the highest bidder or, at any rate, of bestowing it on any suitor he might prefer.

Thus for the first time was introduced the principle which for many centuries thereafter resulted in the gutting of estates, the robbery of widows and orphans by officers of the ruler sworn to protect their interests, the unhappiness of children left to the neglect of crown officials, the heartbreaks of heiresses sold into matrimonial slavery.

When Rufus gave royal authority to the theory that the King was the heir of every man, he had no thought of exempting the clergy. The heads of the Church were among the largest landowners and so were ripe for plucking. The new scheme was made to apply even more damagingly to the bishop and the abbot than to the baron and the alderman. It was postulated that when a bishop died, or any lesser church appointee, it was the same as when a landholder left heirs below the legal age. As there was no successor ready to step into the shoes of the deceased churchman, all properties and revenues of the see or abbey reverted to the Crown until such time as the King was ready to sanction the appointment of a successor. Flambard applied this startling rule, which set all Christendom by the ears, with such efficiency and dispatch that as soon as a lord of the Church passed away a royal clerk was sent in to make an inventory of all the worldly possessions of the dead man. The highwayman with mask and pistol was no more dishonest than the minister who conceived this method of wholesale robbery or the King who backed him in the execution thereof. When William died in his turn there were three bishoprics without incumbents (Canterbury, Winchester, and Salisbury) and eleven abbeys; and the revenues of all of them were pouring, flowing, jingling, into the royal pockets!

But Ralph the Torch did not confine himself to laying down the principles of systematic looting. He was full of ingenious tricks for special occasions. Whenever he sat by the King and whispered into the reddish porcine ear, it could be taken for granted that he had thought of something choice to please his master and plague everyone else. One instance of his ingenuity will suffice. During the second war that William waged against the King of France and his brother Robert of Normandy, he sent back word that he needed reinforcements. An army of twenty thousand was recruited, each earl and baron and lord of manor sending a specified number of fighting men. This large army had assembled back of Hastings and was waiting to sail for France. They were all willing enough to go, for the whisper had spread that there would be plenty of booty and that even the lowliest foot soldier or archer would come back with gold and rich tapestries and silver vessels and French feather beds on his back. Each man had in his pocket while he waited ten shillings which, on orders direct from the King, had been given to him by his liege lord or by the shire from which he hailed to pay for his maintenance abroad.

The ships were lying in the roadstead and ready to take the troops aboard when the smiling Flambard arrived with what looked like an army of clerks. They went down the ranks and took from every reluctant recruit the ten shillings. Then the King’s order was given to disband and go home! The King, by this almost unbelievable ruse, took ten thousand pounds out of the pockets of his subjects!

Master Ralph the Torch was full of tricks like this.