Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/201

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anecdote, mainly of a general kind. Those pictures, those anecdotes, leave no room to doubt that the reign of Rufus was a reign of fearful oppression; but his oppression seems to have consisted more in the unrestrained licence which he allowed to his followers than in any special deeds of personal cruelty done by his own hands or by his immediate orders. Rufus certainly did not share his father's life-long shrinking from taking human life anywhere but in battle; but his brother Henry, the model ruler of his time, the king who made peace for man and deer, is really chargeable with uglier deeds in his own person than any that can be distinctly proved against the Red King. We are driven back to our old distinction. The excesses of the followers of Rufus, the reign of unright and unlaw which they brought with them, did or threatened harm to every man in his dominions; the occasional cruelties of Henry hurt only a few people, while the general strictness of his rule profited every one. What makes William Rufus stand out personally in so specially hateful a light is not so much deeds of personal cruelty, as indulgence in the foulest forms of vice, combined with a form of irreligion which startled not only saints but ordinary sinners. And the point is that, hateful as these features in his character were, they did not hinder the presence of other features which were not hateful in the view of his own age, of some indeed which are not hateful in the view of any age.

The marked personality of William Rufus, the way in which that personality stamped itself on the memory of his age, is shown by the elaborate pictures which we have of his character, and by the crowd of personal anecdotes by which those pictures are illustrated. Allowing for the sure tendency of such a character to get worse, we may take our survey of the Red King as he seemed in men's eyes when the restraints of his earlier life were