Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/340

 *







to his dominions. I have spoken elsewhere of the constitutional aspect of this agreement. It was an attempt to barter away beforehand the right of the Witan of England to bestow the crown of a deceased king on whatever successor they thought good. And, like all such attempts, before and after, till the great act of settlement which put an end to the nineteen years' anarchy, it came to nothing. But that such an agreement should have been made shows what fresh strength had been given by the Norman Conquest to the whole class of ideas of which the doctrine of hereditary succession to kingdoms forms a part. But, putting this view of the matter aside, the objects of the provision, as a family compact, were obvious. It was William's manifest interest to shut out Robert's sons from any share in the inheritance of their father. This was easily done. The stricter doctrine of legitimacy of birth was fast growing. It was but unwillingly that Normandy had, sixty years earlier, acknowledged the bastard of an earlier Robert; it was most unlikely that Normandy would submit to a bastard of the present Robert, while there yet lived lawful sons of him who had made the name of Bastard glorious. Robert, on the other hand, might not be unwilling to give up so faint a chance on the part of his own children, in order to be himself declared presumptive heir to the crown of England. But there were others to be shut out, one of whom at least was far more dangerous than the natural sons of Robert. There were then in Normandy two men who bore the English title of Ætheling, one of the old race, one of the new; one whom Englishmen had once chosen as the last of the old race, another to whom Englishmen looked