but master of a hoard of silver, there is no reason to doubt.  English feeling, which welcomed Henry thirteen years later, would doubtless have gladly seen his immediate accession; but it might have been hard, in dividing William’s dominions, to have shut out the second son in favour of the third.  And in the scheme of events by which conquered England was to rise again, the reign of Rufus, at the moment the darkest time of all, had its appointed share.

That England could rise again, that she could rise with a new life, strengthened by her momentary overthrow, was before all things owing to the lucky destiny which, if she was to be conquered, gave her William the Great as her Conqueror.  It is as it is in all human affairs.  William himself could not have done all that he did, wittingly and unwittingly, unless circumstances had been favourable to him; but favourable circumstances would have been useless, unless there had been a man like William to take advantage of them.  What he did, wittingly or unwittingly, he did by virtue of his special position, the position of a foreign conqueror veiling his conquest under a legal claim.  The hour and the man were alike needed.  The man in his own hour wrought a work, partly conscious, partly unconscious.  The more clearly any man understands his conscious work, the more sure is that conscious work to lead to further results of which he dreams not.  So it was with the Conqueror of England.  His purpose was to win and to keep the kingdom of England, and to hand it on to those who should come after him more firmly united than it had ever been before.  In this work his spirit of formal legality, his shrinking from needless change, stood him in good stead.  He saw that as the kingdom of England could best be won by putting forth a legal claim to it, so it could best be kept by putting on the character of a legal ruler, and reigning as the successor of the old kings seeking the unity of the kingdom; he saw, from the example both of England and of other lands, the dangers which threatened that unity; he saw what measures were needed to preserve it in his own day, measures which have preserved it ever since.  Here is a work, a conscious work, which entitles the foreign Conqueror to a place among English statesmen, and to a place in their highest rank.  Further than this we cannot conceive William himself to have looked.  All that was to come of his work in future ages was of necessity hidden from his eyes, no less than from the eyes of smaller men.  He had assuredly no formal purpose to make England Norman; but still less had he any thought that the final outcome of his work would make England on one side more truly English than if he had never crossed the sea.  In his ecclesiastical work he saw the future still less clearly.  He designed to reform what he deemed abuses, to bring the English Church into closer conformity with the other Churches of the West; he assuredly never dreamed that the issue