This story illustrates many points in the character of William and of his time.  His will is not to be thwarted, whether in a matter of marriage or of any other.  But he does not hurry matters; he waits for a favourable opportunity.  Something, we know not what, must have made the year 1053 more favourable than the year 1049.  We mark also William’s relations to the Church.  He is at no time disposed to submit quietly to the bidding of the spiritual power, when it interferes with his rights or even when it crosses his will.  Yet he is really anxious for ecclesiastical reform; he promotes men like Maurilius and Lanfranc; perhaps he is not displeased when the exercise of ecclesiastical discipline, in the case of Malger, frees him from a troublesome censor.  But the worse side of him also comes out.  William could forgive rebels, but he could not bear the personal rebuke even of his friend.  Under this feeling he punishes a whole body of men for the offence of one.  To lay waste the lands of Bec for the rebuke of Lanfranc was like an ordinary prince of the time; it was unlike William, if he had not been stirred up by a censure which touched his wife as well as himself.  But above all, the bargain between William and Lanfranc is characteristic of the man and the age.  Lanfranc goes to Rome to support a marriage which he had censured in Normandy.  But there is no formal inconsistency, no forsaking of any principle.  Lanfranc holds an uncanonical marriage to be a sin, and he denounces it.  He does not withdraw his judgement as to its sinfulness.  He simply uses his influence with a power that can forgive the sin to get it forgiven.

While William’s marriage was debated at Rome, he had to fight hard in Normandy.  His warfare and his negotiations ended about the same time, and the two things may have had their bearing on one another.  William had now to undergo a new form of trial.  The King of the French had never put forth his full strength when he was simply backing Norman rebels.  William had now, in two successive invasions, to withstand the whole power of the King, and of as many of his vassals as the King could bring to his standard.  In the first invasion, in 1054, the Norman writers speak rhetorically of warriors from Burgundy, Auvergne, and Gascony; but it is hard to see any troops from a greater distance than Bourges.  The princes who followed Henry seem to have been only the nearer vassals of the Crown.  Chief among them are Theobald Count of Chartres, of a house of old hostile to Normandy, and Guy the new Count of Ponthieu, to be often heard of again.  If not Geoffrey of Anjou himself, his subjects from Tours were also there.  Normandy was to be invaded on two sides, on both banks of the Seine.  The King and his allies sought to wrest from William the western part of Normandy, the older and the more thoroughly French part.  No attack seems to have been designed on the Bessin or the Cotentin.  William was to be allowed to keep those parts of his duchy, against which he had to fight when the King was his ally at Val-es-dunes.