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followers, refused further answer. Upon this Breteuil, seconded but feebly, withdrew.

With the next morning's sunrise, Henry was proclaimed king through the streets of Winchester, and, leaving the bishopric of the city with Henry Giffard, a strong adherent, mounted his horse for London. He found the Great Council in consultation on his arrival; and his claim encountered no opposition. The present providing of good swords, says an old writer, is more essential to a Norman coronation than the long preparing of fine clothes; and on the third day from the death of Rufus, Henry was crowned at Westminster. In the exile of Anselm, and the vacancy of the other archiepiscopal see, Bishop Maurice of London performed the ceremony; in strict accordance, we are carefully told by the chroniclers, with the usage observed at the crownings of AngloSaxon kings.

The words pass for mere words of course, beside the record of an act of usurpation; but in other circumstances, casually named by the same authorities, may be read what seems to throw a certain shadow of elective right around the coronation of Henry the Scholar.

Henry, now in his thirtieth year, had been born at Selby, in Yorkshire, in the fourth year of his father's reign; and it is stated by both Norman and Saxon chroniclers, that when he was proelaimed, in Winchester and in London, his friends took care to inform the assembled crowds that the new king was an Englishman, not a Norman; and some partizans had gone so far as to tell the citizens, that in the only son of the Conqueror born after the Conquest, in the land of his father's adoption, they should recognise the only legitimate heir to the English throne. There, as it seems to me, the Saxon jerkin is left to rub more freely against the Norman hauberk. There, it will not be too much to say, we have a wholesome glimpse of the People. Even the partizan statement of a contemporary writer, that it was but on the strict condition of Henry's oath (to God and the people, at the high altar at Westminster') to annul unrighteous laws, the crown had been placed upon his head,-is not unwarranted by the first act of the reign. Nor could Henry better have shown his so-called 'scholarship,' than by affecting to make his own interest, as early as was possible, the interest of the nation.

On the day after his coronation (so rapidly had the active Norman lawyers seconded his desire), there was issued to the various public places, and subsequently deposited in the principal monasteries of

the various counties, what was called his Charter of Liberties. The historians describe this charter from existing documents, which they suppose to embody its conditions; but it seems clear that they thus lose sight of provisions which certainly formed part of it, and made it chiefly welcome to the people. But before I refer to these, what remains of it may be briefly stated. It is not a little, though it is not all.

Representing himself crowned by the mercy of God and by the common consent of the barons of the kingdom, he proceeded to say that he would not, as his predecessors had done, sell the vacant benefices of the church, nor let them out to farm, nor retain them in his own possession for the benefit of his exchequer, nor raise taxes on their tenants. To all his barons and immediate vassals,-instructing and requiring them to make the same concession to the vassals that held of them,-he granted the power to dispose of their personal property by will; freed them from some of the most onerous and unreasonable burdens of Reliefs, Wardships, and Marriages; ordered that, in the case of breaches of the peace and other delinquencies, Anglo-Saxon laws and penalties should be restored and acted on; forgave fines due to the exchequer, and pecuniary mulets for murder committed before his coronation; and promised his military tenants exemption from taxes and burthens on their demesne lands. Then, in memorable phrase, which proves that the legislation of the Conqueror had not been that curse which it is called by many of the chroniclers, he gave a pledge to the nation at large that he would levy no moneyage which had not been paid in the Saxon times, and that he would put in force the laws of Edward the Confessor as his father had amended and published them. ( Legem regis Edvardi vobis reddo cum illis emendationibus quibus eam pater meus emendavit con'silio baronum suorum.') What those laws precisely were has. baffled antiquarians. Probably they were but that traditional sigh for the good old times' of the past, with which every age is apt to compare the burdens of the present.

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Suffice it they meant generally redress of grievances, and that, in this charter, redress was largely promised. More largely than may now be recorded, as I have said: for when the barons of a later age were in treaty for the Great Charter, Langton suddenly. unrolled before them this charter of Henry, and made it the basis of their claims. It was supposed to be the only copy then in existence; so assiduous Henry's officers had been, in the latter and more secure years of his reign, to obliterate his forced dependance

on the people at the outset of his usurpation. But he could not depress the people for his pleasure, as he had raised them for his gain. He could not grant such a charter as this, and resume it as a waste piece of parchment. The provisions of which men had lost the memory, and were thought to have lost the record, reappeared at the time of vital need; and, the theft of a people's liberties confessed, the prince into whose violent keeping they had fallen was made subject to a sharp responsibility. In truth, we read history as imperfectly as we write it. Beneath that surface to which we too commonly suffer ourselves to be restricted by the obscurity of imperfect records, there lies rich material to be yet brought to light, by patient thought and sound reflection. Conceding to the early chroniclers their particular cases of oppression, and subjection, and intolerable wrong,-let us well assure ourselves that these things will not be borne for any length of time by an entire and numerous people. If ever rulers might have hoped to measure their rights and immunities by the length and temper of their swords, it should have been these early Norman princes: yet. at every turn in their story, at every slight and varying casualty in their chequered fortunes, they owe their safety to the flinging down their spoil. A something, which under various names still seems to represent The People, is still and ever upon their track; and thus, over even our rudest and most unprofitable history, there lies at least the shadow of that substance which fills our later and nobler annals.

Henry added to his Charter (Lord Lyttelton had made close inquiry into it, I may add, and pronounced it 'more advantageous to liberty than Magna Charta itself') a kind of apology for his retention of the royal forest and the fierce forest laws. He kept them, he said, under guidance of the advice and with the consent of his barons: but he threw in, by way of additional boon, a valuable local charter for London, in which, among other privileges, was the liberty to hunt in Middlesex and Surrey. Nor did he hesitate to curtail, for public and politic considerations, privileges and enjoyments of his own. He had himself counted first. among the revellers at the court of Rufus. The worst effœminati' of them all had been outstripped by Henry, in the peak of his shoes, and the length of his hair; and tunic had never deeper sleeves than his, nor mantle a longer train. But grave alterations might now be observed. He put away from him the various mistresses who had already borne him fifteen natural

children, and announced to his prelates and barons that he thought it right to marry.

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Let the Saxon chronicler describe his popular choice. It was Maud, daughter of Malcolm, King of Scots, and of Margaret, the good Queen, the relative of King Edward, and of the right kingly heir of England;' and it was plainly the necessity to fortify his throne and his succession, which had turned the Norman's thoughts to this Saxon princess, the niece of the last legitimate heir to the native monarchy. Oh, most noble and 'fair among women,' said her Saxon counsellors, when she would have declined the suit of Henry, if thou wilt, thou canst restore the ancient honour of England, and be a pledge of recon⚫ciliation and friendship; but if thou art obstinate in this refusal, the enmity between the two races will be everlasting, and the shedding of human blood know no end.' She yielded.

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But other objections rose with the surrender of hers. Many a Norman captain had wistfully looked to this fair prize; already had her hand been solicited by Alan of Richmond and William Warrenne of Surrey; and what would have strengthened the baronage against the throne, was now to help the king to independence of the barons. They took objection through the church. The princess, they said, had worn the veil, and by the ecclesiastical canons was no longer at liberty to marry. A synod of prelates was called, and the case, after solemn argument, decided in favour of Henry, by the precedent of a former decision by Lanfranc. The princess had occasionally worn the veil, and frequented nuns' society; but always in strict obedience to her aunt the abbess of Wilton, never but against her own desire, and solely for protection of her chastity from the possibility of Norman outrage. Anselm reached England in time for the synod; explained the grounds of its judgment to several assemblages in the city; and afterwards married the Saxon to the Norman, amidst much popular rejoicing.

The marriage day was on the 11th of November, 1100; and its festive shouts might have mingled with the more elevated cries of welcome and enthusiasm, which just now rang throughout the continent on the return of celebrated crusaders. The First Crusade, begun three years before, had ended with the fall of Jerusalem, and the election of Godfrey of Bouillon to the crown of the Holy City.

It was a memorable incident in history, that First Crusade ; and though the scorn and laughter of Rufus had for a time checked its

growth in England, it imperceptibly won its way to recognition, and brought with it mighty influences for evil and for good. Where, indeed, in any such series of events or institutions as those it engendered, however rude their origin or fierce the temper of their exercise, may we not with diligent search find elements of good, and lessons applicable to better times? Voltaire's clear intellect had assuredly not penetrated all the truth, when he called the crusaders cut-throat vagabonds, animated but by the hope of plunder and the love of blood. What there was of merit in the feudal institutions, had here at any rate taken a higher and more spiritual character; and the fantastical chivalric exaggerations which were destined to spring out of it, abated the ferocity and lessened the injustice of mere military feudalism. A troubadour of the century now begun, called Jerusalem a fief of Jesus Christ; and in the expression may be traced the origin of the crusader's sense of his bond and his vassalage to the Son of God. To his fancy, he was now firmly establishing a reciprocity of Obedience and Protection between himself and heaven. Nor, judging him by the temper and resources of his time, will it be just to call this a fancy altogether vain. The fine-hearted old preacher may justly feel that to connect any special locality with religion is to lower it; and may tell us that the angel sent the women away from looking into the sepulchre, with the divine words He is risen, He is not here. But with even all her later advantages from progress and civilisation, has Religion yet shown the entirely gracious heart to which all places are alike Jerusalem? Has she yet declared, that wherever the spirit of Christ abides, God may as well and as acceptably be worshipped? And by her tender and mild example, may the fierce old crusader indeed stand finally rebuked?

He did not begin the offensive, it should in fairness be added. The struggle, which took the later form of a lust of conquest, had begun in a defensive effort to have free passage to the Holy Sepulchre. It was a right the Arabs had guaranteed to Europe, for the good Haroun Al Raschid had even forwarded to Charlemagne the keys of the Saviour's tomb. But with the conquest and dynasty of the Turks there began a general plunder of the caravans of pilgrims; and those Armies of the Lord, as they were called, were everywhere scattered and overthrown. Then at last broke forth the wild enthusiasm of the first crusade, and Peter the Hermit recited insults offered to the Saviour till the frantic shouts

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