Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/200

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but the one fact known of him in England before his father's death is that he had, like most men of his time who had the chance, possessed himself in some illegal way of a small amount of ecclesiastical land. It is quite possible that both his father and Lanfranc may have been deceived as to his real character. In the stormy times which followed his accession, he had shown the qualities of an able captain and something more. He had shown great readiness of spirit, great power of adapting himself to circumstances, great skill in keeping friends and in winning over enemies. No man could doubt that the new King of the English had in him the power, if he chose to use it, of becoming a great and a good ruler. And assuredly he could not be charged with anything like either cruelty or breach of faith at any stage of the warfare by which his crown was made fast to him. If he anywhere showed the cloven foot, it was in the matter of the Bishop of Durham. Even there we can have no doubt that he spared a traitor; but he may have been hasty in the earliest stage of the quarrel; he certainly, in its latter stages, showed signs of that small personal spite, that disposition to take mean personal advantages of an enemy, which was so common in the kings of those days. Still, whatever Lanfranc may have found to rebuke, whatever may have been the beginnings of evil while the Primate yet lived, no public act of the new king is as yet recorded which would lead us to pass any severe sentence upon him, if he is judged according to the measure of his own times.

It is indeed remarkable that the pictures of evil-doing which mark the reign of Rufus from the Chronicle onwards are, except when they take the form of personal