Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/224

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He has his arbitrary code of honour to supplant alike the law of God and the law of the land. That code teaches the duties of good faith, courtesy, mercy—under certain circumstances and towards certain people. Was William Rufus a man of his word? His subjects as a body had no reason to think so; the princes of other lands had no reason to think so. His promises to his people went for nothing; his treaties with other princes went for nothing. To observe both of these was the dull everyday duty of a Christian man whom it had pleased God to call to a particular state of life, that namely of a king. Holding, as Rufus did, that no man could keep all his promises,[2] these were the class of promises that he thought it needless to try to keep. But when William plighted his word in the character of the ''probus miles, the preux chevalier'', in modern phrase, as "an officer and a gentleman," no man kept it more strictly. No man cared less for the justice of his wars; no man cared less for the wrong and suffering which his warfare caused. But no man ever more scrupulously observed all the mere courtesies of warfare. He was not like Robert of Bellême. The life and limb of the prisoner of knightly rank were safe in his hands. Indeed any man of any rank who appealed to his personal generosity was always safe. Under the influence of the law of honour, the tyrant, the blasphemer, the extortioner, the oppressor who neither feared God nor regarded man, puts on an air of unselfishness, of unworldliness. Strict in the observance of his own knightly word, he places unbounded confidence in the knightly word of others. He thrusts indignantly aside the suggestion of colder spirits that a captive knight