Yet Swegen, the near kinsman of Harold, was a friend of England, and the same writer who puts this promise into his mouth makes him send troops to help his English cousin.Young Henry or his advisers could have no motive for helping William; but subjects of the Empire were at least not hindered from joining his banner.To the French king William perhaps offered the bait of holding the crown of England of him; but Philip is said to have discouraged William's enterprise as much as he could.Still he did not hinder French subjects from taking a part in it.Of the princes who held of the French crown, Eustace of Boulogne, who joined the muster in person, and Guy of Ponthieu, William's own vassal, who sent his son, seem to have been the only ones who did more than allow the levying of volunteers in their dominions.A strange tale is told that Conan of Britanny took this moment for bringing up his own forgotten pretensions to the Norman duchy.If William was going to win England, let him give up Normandy to him.He presently, the tale goes, died of a strange form of poisoning, in which it is implied that William had a hand.This is the story of Walter and Biota over again.It is perhaps enough to say that the Breton writers know nothing of the tale.
But the great negotiation of all was with the Papal court.We might have thought that the envoy would be Lanfranc, so well skilled in Roman ways; but William perhaps needed him as a constant adviser by his own person.Gilbert, Archdeacon of Lisieux, was sent to Pope Alexander.No application could better suit papal interests than the one that was now made; but there were some moral difficulties.
Not a few of the cardinals, Hildebrand tells us himself, argued, not without strong language towards Hildebrand, that the Church had nothing to do with such matters, and that it was sinful to encourage a claim which could not be enforced without bloodshed.But with many, with Hildebrand among them, the notion of the Church as a party or a power came before all thoughts of its higher duties.One side was carefully heard; the other seems not to have been heard at all.We hear of no summons to Harold, and the King of the English could not have pleaded at the Pope's bar without acknowledging that his case was at least doubtful.The judgement of Alexander or of Hildebrand was given for William.Harold was declared to be an usurper, perhaps declared excommunicated.The right to the English crown was declared to be in the Duke of the Normans, and William was solemnly blessed in the enterprise in which he was at once to win his own rights, to chastise the wrong-doer, to reform the spiritual state of the misguided islanders, to teach them fuller obedience to the Roman See and more regular payment of its temporal dues.
William gained his immediate point; but his successors on the English throne paid the penalty.Hildebrand gained his point for ever, or for as long a time as men might be willing to accept the Bishop of Rome as a judge in any matters.The precedent by which Hildebrand, under another name, took on him to dispose of a higher crown than that of England was now fully established.
As an outward sign of papal favour, William received a consecrated banner and a ring containing a hair of Saint Peter.Here was something for men to fight for.The war was now a holy one.All who were ready to promote their souls' health by slaughter and plunder might flock to William's standard, to the standard of Saint Peter.Men came from most French-speaking lands, the Normans of Apulia and Sicily being of course not slow to take up the quarrel of their kinsfolk.But, next to his own Normandy, the lands which sent most help were Flanders, the land of Matilda, and Britanny, where the name of the Saxon might still be hateful.We must never forget that the host of William, the men who won England, the men who settled in England, were not an exclusively Norman body.Not Norman, but FRENCH, is the name most commonly opposed to ENGLISH, as the name of the conquering people.Each Norman severally would have scorned that name for himself personally; but it was the only name that could mark the whole of which he and his countrymen formed a part.Yet, if the Normans were but a part, they were the greatest and the noblest part; their presence alone redeemed the enterprise from being a simple enterprise of brigandage.The Norman Conquest was after all a Norman Conquest; men of other lands were merely helpers.So far as it was not Norman, it was Italian; the subtle wit of Lombard Lanfranc and Tuscan Hildebrand did as much to overthrow us as the lance and bow of Normandy.
