in general and specially for his own successors.  One man in Western Europe could see further than William, perhaps even further than Lanfranc.  The chief counsellor of Pope Alexander the Second was the Archdeacon Hildebrand, the future Gregory the Seventh.  If William outwitted the world, Hildebrand outwitted William.  William’s appeal to the Pope to decide between two claimants for the English crown strengthened Gregory not a little in his daring claim to dispose of the crowns of Rome, of Italy, and of Germany.  Still this recognition of Roman claims led more directly to the humiliation of William’s successor in his own kingdom.  Moreover William’s successful attempt to represent his enterprise as a holy war, a crusade before crusades were heard of, did much to suggest and to make ready the way for the real crusades a generation later.  It was not till after William’s death that Urban preached the crusade, but it was during William’s life that Gregory planned it.

The appeal was strangely successful.  William convinced, or seemed to convince, all men out of England and Scandinavia that his claim to the English crown was just and holy, and that it was a good work to help him to assert it in arms.  He persuaded his own subjects; he certainly did not constrain them.  He persuaded some foreign princes to give him actual help, some to join his muster in person; he persuaded all to help him so far as not to hinder their subjects from joining him as volunteers.  And all this was done by sheer persuasion, by argument good or bad.  In adapting of means to ends, in applying to each class of men that kind of argument which best suited it, the diplomacy, the statesmanship, of William was perfect.  Again we ask, How far was it the statesmanship of William, how far of Lanfranc?  But a prince need not do everything with his own hands and say everything with his own tongue.  It was no small part of the statesmanship of William to find out Lanfranc, to appreciate him and to trust him.  And when two subtle brains were at work, more could be done by the two working in partnership than by either working alone.

By what arguments did the Duke of the Normans and the Prior of Bec convince mankind that the worse cause was the better?  We must always remember the transitional character of the age.  England was in political matters in advance of other Western lands; that is, it lagged behind other Western lands.  It had not gone so far on the downward course.  It kept far more than Gaul or even Germany of the old Teutonic institutions, the substance of which later ages have won back under new shapes.  Many things were understood in England which are now again understood everywhere, but which were no longer understood in France or in the lands held of the French crown.  The popular election of kings comes foremost.  Hugh Capet was an elective king as much as Harold; but the French kings had made their crown the most strictly hereditary of all crowns.  They avoided