something strange about it.  Edgar himself, the one surviving male of the old stock, besides his youth, was neither born in the land nor the son of a crowned king.  Those two qualifications had always been deemed of great moment; an elaborate pedigree went for little; actual royal birth went for a great deal.  There was now no son of a king to choose.  Had there been even a child who was at once a son of Edward and a sister’s son of Harold, he might have reigned with his uncle as his guardian and counsellor.  As it was, there was nothing to do but to choose the man who, though not of kingly blood, had ruled England well for thirteen years.

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