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was got rid of, the process of their insinuation was continually going on. In the disordered reign of Richard Cœur de Lion, and still more so in that of the detestable John, they swarmed like beasts over the devoted island. Especially after the barons had compelled John to sign the Charter, did he send out and collect to his standard troops of such adventurers from France and Flanders. At the head of a host of these base fellows, Poictavins, Gascons, Flemings, Brabanters, &c., did this vile king traverse his kingdom, now here, now there, like a fury or a murderer, burning, destroying, and plundering, as if in a foreign country which he doomed to destruction. The very names of his leaders and companions strike one with horror. "Falco without Bowels ;" "Manleon, the Bloody ;" "Walter Buch, the Murderer;" "Sottim, the Merciless ;" and "Godeschal, the Iron-hearted." To such men were his subjects given up, who tortured them to make them show where they had concealed their property, burned down their villages and towns, and the horrid monarch himself often setting them example by burning the house where he had lodged with his own hands, when he quitted it the next morning. Yet to these fellows did he give the towns and lands of such nobles as they destroyed, and they became part of the aristocracy, and transmitters of the proud blood of the English nobility.

To rid themselves of this nuisance, the barons in opposition to John committed a worse error, and created a nuisance still greater. They invited over Louis, the son of the French king, offering him the crown, and thus was the kingdom put in danger of becoming a province of France; and the strange spectacle was beheld of a French prince and army fighting on the fair soil of England. Happily, in the following reign, Louis was compelled to retire; but in the mean time many of his followers had got possession of castles and lands, and also became part and parcel of the aristocracy of England, and the progenitors of pure blood. Again, the great evil of the reign of the weak Henry III. was the inviting in and employment of these foreign adventurers. This was the perpetual source of his quarrels with the elder barons. At one time Hugh de Burgh succeeded in taking Bedford Castle, and hanging eighty of these foreigners, knights and others, who had been guilty of the greatest excesses. But still later we read that Peter des Roches, a Poictavin, bishop of Winchester, taught the king to detest the older race of barons, to undermine Magna Charta, and to rely on foreigners, with whom he filled up every office in the court, the church, the army, and government. These hungry knaves, Poictavins, Gascons, and

French of every description, revelled in the national revenues, grasped at estates, and insulted the people in the most audacious

manner.

Such is the state of things down to the year 1270, and we might pursue the matter further; but here is surely enough to demonstrate in what manner the oldest and best blood of English aristocracy has been compounded. It is the product of successive herds of the most miscellaneous and most bloody-minded adventurers which ever disgraced history.

Such was the Norman Conquest, achieved in robbery, rapine, and every crime at which humanity shudders, and succeeded by men and scenes equally revolting. Such was the monarch, and such the followers, who laid the foundations of the Norman power, and built up the fabric of pure blood in England. It is difficult to say which are the more revolting subjects of contemplation, the bastard king who led the way, the ready tools who deluged a whole land with innocent blood at his command, or the reptile swarms who, in the following age, stole in after them to deeds and usurpations equally detestable. Let the English people, when they hear of high blood, recollect the innocent blood of their fathers on which it fattened, and the spawn of miscellaneous, nameless, and lawless adventurers, from whom it really flows.

CHAPTER III.

"Not all the gentle blood of all the Howards

Can e'er ennoble fools, or knaves, or cowards."-POPE.

IN our last chapter we have made an analysis of the famous Norman Conquest and conquerors, which is by no means flattering to what is called good blood; but before proceeding with our theme, we must pause a moment to give another glance at this thing entitled high descent-at this pride of ancestry. We will take up the subject here, for an instant, that we may contemplate it with all its advantages, that is, at its fountain-head, as it relates to this country, and in its highest pride of place.

It is an old saying that it is a wise child that knows its own father. We may rather call that a happy child that scarcely can tell who his own father is. So far from regarding a clearly trace

* Math. Paris; Wykes; Rymer; Holinshed; Matt. Westminster, &c.

able descent as a blessing, we look upon it as one of the greatest curses. What a throng of fools, villains, and spotted characters is heaped on that devoted head, which can count up a long string of ancestors! What a real blessing it would be not even to have known one's own grandfather! for then all the horrors and shames of the past are buried in oblivion, and no one could upbraid us with the crimes of our ancestry. To take the highest family in these kingdoms for an example-Who would have dared to tell our present amiable queen, if history had not preserved the names and deeds of her forefathers, what a race she is sprung from? What mad head would have dared to assert that her family annals present such a precious set of thieves, murderers-ay, murderers of their own kith and kin, quarrelsome savages, unnatural monsters, smotherers of innocent children, tearers out of eyes, burners of people alive, killers of wives, and perpetrators of offences that cannot be named; a catalogue of characters so leprous with crime and disreputable, that no honest sweep would care to own kinship with them? But history and a thousand pens have blazoned this everlastingly abroad, and has thereby, if we will but look sensibly at it, for ever unweaved all the mischievous mystery and proud pretences of pure blood; and satisfied us that if any man has an advantage in this respect, it is he who possesses the benefit of want of evidence against him, and, be his blood what it may, can boldly say-" Let him who can charge my ancestors with wrong, do it; but I myself can charge the ancestors of the highest boasters of high blood with crimes which ought to have been visited by the hangman or the axe."

We do not mean to assert this melancholy truth, and one which, for the happiness and dignity of humanity, has been too much overlooked, as affecting only our royal race, but as affecting all royal and all noble races (so called) whatever. You have only to look through the most authentic records of any nation, or of any family, to convince yourself that there is not a descent of a thousand, no, nor one of five hundred years, which is not crowded with such a throng of cruel, bloody, unprincipled, unnatural, murderous, covetous, lustful, traitorous, and godless monsters, as put the bare fiction of pure blood to the utmost shame, and teach us that it is not in the past that we are to seek for the honour of ourselves or human nature, but in the present. It is not from savage and ignorant antiquity, but from the civilised and christianised present, that we must win genuine distinction, if we are to have it: it is not from others, but from ourselves. The course of true glory, like the course of population and refinement, turns not backward on the rising, but towards the setting sun. It travels not eastward, but westward.

It rises not out of the blood-bedimmed shadows of the bygone, but travels onward into futurity, clad in christian knowledge, and filled with christian love, to establish, in deeds of true daring for general liberty, and in works of beneficence to our kind, the glory of true family renown. It is in personal merit that the genuine personal distinction lies. He who works God-like works for his brethren and his age; purifies his own blood beyond all the factitious quackery of heralds, and the lies of fashion; he makes it a foundation of honour to himself and his children, if they follow in his steps;—of shame to them, if they depart from them. He, and he alone, is the Noble. He alone carries God's patent in his hand, the star of unflecked honour in his heart; and all besides, number they ancestors by thousands, are but wretched impostors, and presumers on a lie.

To see with what a shameless front we have been imposed on by heralds and by aristocratic pride and self-interest, let us now take our proposed view of this royal Norman family which is the fountain of all aristocratic honour in this country. What the tools were with which they worked, and whom our aristocrats claim as their progenitors we have already seen.

The Conqueror himself, then, as we have observed, was the bastard of a tanner's daughter:-a strange fountain of ancestral glory! Who is, indeed, to assure us that he was the son of the Duke of Normandy at all?-that this Harlotta, the tanner's daughter, had not, as many of her tribe have done since, fathered the child where she saw the greatest hope of benefit and honour? Who shall guarantee us that the Conqueror was not altogether the plebeian offspring of plebeian parents? Be that as it may, it had been well if this was the worst thing about him. Had he proved himself a just and good man, his birth would have signified nothing. He would have been just as well the son of Gaston, the tanner's apprentice, as of a duke. No man is accountable for his origin, which is not within his own power or volition; nor properly an object of honour or dishonour on that account. As we have remarked, a man must make himself his own fountain of honour. He can no more wrap himself in the glory of his ancestors than he can in the sunbeams of yesterday's sun, which departed with the sun itself. The sun sets, and our forefathers set, and they carry remorselessly and irresistibly their own light of glory with them. If we will not create light for ourselves in the night of our earthly sojourn, we must walk in darkness. What we merely mean to point out, in referring to William's birth, is the singular inconsistency with which the sticklers for pure blood leap over such plebeian blotches. But the pure blood is at every step found to be full of these damning impurities, and

William's birth was the least objectionable thing about him. He was a hard, merciless, and monstrous man. Before he came into this country he was already blackened with the charge of murder. Conan, the reigning Duke of Brittany, had demanded that William should, as he was intending to take possession of England, restore to him Normandy, which he claimed in right of ancestry. Conan speedily was taken off by poison; and the universal belief of that age, and especially of Brittany, was, that William was the guilty instigator of the deed.

His proceedings in this country we have already seen the cool plan and purpose with which he massacred almost a whole people who showed every disposition to submit to him if he would rule them mildly. Such was his heartless rigour that even his own vulture followers were at length disgusted with it, and many of them joined with the oppressed English in a conspiracy against him, at the famous wedding of Norwich, of the Earl of Norfolk with Emma, the sister of Fitzosborn, the Earl of Hereford; where this grand conspiracy showed itself under these Earls of Norfolk and Hereford, and all parties joined in a general curse against the Conqueror. "He is a bastard, a man of base extraction," said the Normans. "It is in vain he calls himself a king; it is easy to see he was never made to be one; and God has him not in his grace.' "He poisoned our Conan, that brave Count of Britanny," cried the Bretons.

"He has invaded our

noble kingdom, and massacred the legitimate heirs to it, or driven them into exile," cried the English. The guests shouted tumultuously that all this was true; that William the Bastard was detested by all men, and that his death would gladden the hearts of thousands.*

In the affections of his own family William was not more happy than in those of his people. He was obliged to arrest his turbulent half-brother Odo, and imprison him during the remainder of his reign. His eldest son, Robert, was almost continually in rebellion against him for possession of Normandy, and showed more disposition for a dissolute life, and for the company of guzzlers, jugglers, dancers, lewd women, and gamblers, than for any rational pursuit. His second son, Richard, was gored to death with a stag in the New Forest, where afterwards a son of Robert also was killed, and his third son, William Rufus,-a judgment, as the people believed, from God for his atrocities there. His latter days were embittered by the wranglings and jealousies of his two youngest sons, William and Henry, which showed him horrors in perspective and in his last moments

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* Will. Malmsbury; Orderic Vital: Matt. Paris.

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