Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/242

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William, become the most prominent laymen of the reign of the second. The churchmen of the time who stand forth conspicuously for good and for evil will have their place in another chapter. But the two Roberts will, next to the King and the Ætheling, hold the first place in the tale which we have immediately to tell, as they held it still in days of which we shall not have the telling, long after the Ætheling had changed into the King. The force of him of Bellême, the wit of him of Meulan, had their full place in the affairs both of Normandy and of England, and both were brought to bear against the prince and people of Maine.

§ 1. Normandy under Robert. 1087-1090.

That the thought of an invasion of his elder brother's duchy should present itself to the mind of William Rufus was not very wonderful. The fact that it was his elder brother's duchy might perhaps be of itself enough to suggest the thought. The dutiful son of his father, whom alone his father had called to rule of his own free will, might feel himself in some sort defrauded, if any part of his father's dominions was held by a brother whose only claim was the accident of his elder birth, and whose personal unfitness for the rule of men his father had emphatically set forth. Indeed, without seeking for any special motive at all, mere ambition, mere love of enterprise, might be motive enough to lead a prince like Rufus to a campaign beyond the sea, a campaign which might make him master of the native dominion of his father, the land of his own birth. And such schemes would be supported on grounds of reasonable policy by a large part of the Norman possessors of the soil of England. Holding, many of them, lands on both sides of the sea, it was their interest that the same prince