In answer to that appeal, the English people rallied around their Norman sovereign, and gained the day for him under the walls of Rochester Castle, Kent.  Of the two evils, the tyranny of one or the tyranny of many, he first seemed to them preferable.

131.  William’s Method of raising Money; he defrauds the Church.

If in some respects William the Conqueror had been a harsh ruler, his son was worse.  His brother Robert had mortgaged Normandy to him in order to get money to join the first crusade (S182).  William Rufus raised whatever funds he desired by the most oppressive and unscrupulous means.

William’s most trusted counselor was Ranulf Flambard.  Flambard had brains without principle.  He devised a system of plundering both Church and people in the King’s interest.  Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, died three years after William’s accession.  Through Flambard’s advice the King left the archbishopric vacant and appropriated its revenues to himself.  He practiced the same course with respect to every office of the Church.

132.  The King makes Anselm Archbishop (1093).

While this process of systematized robbery was going on, the King suddenly fell ill.  In his alarm lest death was at hand, he determined to make reparation to the defrauded and insulted priesthood.  He invited Anselm, the abbot of a famous monastery in Normandy, to accept the archbishopric.  Anselm, who was old and feeble, declined, saying that he and the King could not work together.  “It would be,” said he, “like yoking a sheep and a bull.”

But the king would take no refusal.  Calling Anselm to his bedside, he forced the staff of office into his hands.  Anselm became the champion of the freedom of the Church.  But when the King recovered, he resumed his old practices and treated the Archbishop with such insult that he left the country for a time.

133.  William’s Merit; his Death.

William II’s one merit was that he kept England from being devoured piecemeal by the Norman barons, who regarded her as a pack of hounds in full chase regard the hare that is on the point of falling into their rapacious jaws.

Like his father, he insisted on keeping the English Church independent of the ever-growing power of Rome (S118).  In both cases his motives were purely selfish, but the result to the country was good.

His power came suddenly to an end (1100).  He had gone in the morning to hunt in the New Forest (S119) with his brother Henry.  He was found lying dead among the bushes, pierced by an arrow shot by an unknown hand.

William’s character speaks in his deeds.  It was hard, cold, despotic, yet in judging it we should consider the woulds of that quaint old writer, Thomas Fuller, when he says, “No pen hath originally written the life of this King but what was made with a monkish penknife, and no wonder if his picture seems bad, which was thus drawn by his enemy.”