despair. But my sympathy, I own, was more given to the prince
than to the lover. It was natural that I, priest and foreigner, should
obey at first the orders of Mauger, archprelate and spiritual chief, and
the more so as the law was with him; but when I resolved to stay despite
thy sentence which banished me, I resolved to aid thee; for if with
Mauger was the dead law, with thee was the living cause of man. Duke
William, on thy nuptials with Matilda of Flanders rests thy duchy--rest,
perchance, the mightier sceptres that are yet to come. Thy title
disputed, thy principality new and unestablished, thou, above all men,
must link thy new race with the ancient line of kings and kaisars.
Matilda is the descendant of Charlemagne and Alfred. Thy realm is
insecure as long as France undermines it with plots, and threatens it
with arms. Marry the daughter of Baldwin--and thy wife is the niece of
Henry of France--thine enemy becomes thy kinsman, and must, perforce, be
thine ally. This is not all; it were strange, looking round this
disordered royalty of England--a childless king, who loves thee better
than his own blood; a divided nobility, already adopting the fashions of
the stranger, and accustomed to shift their faith from Saxon to Dane, and
Dane to Saxon; a people that has respect indeed for brave chiefs, but,
seeing new men rise daily from new houses, has no reverence for ancient
lines and hereditary names; with a vast mass of villeins or slaves that
have no interest in the land or its rulers; strange, seeing all this, if
thy day-dreams have not also beheld a Norman sovereign on the throne of
Saxon England. And thy marriage with the descendant of the best and most
beloved prince that ever ruled these realms, if it does not give thee a
title to the land, may help to conciliate its affections, and to fix thy
posterity in the halls of their mother's kin. Have I said eno' to prove
why, for the sake of nations, it were wise for the pontiff to stretch the
harsh girths of the law? why I might be enabled to prove to the Court of
Rome the policy of conciliating the love, and strengthening the hands, of
the Norman Count, who may so become the main prop of Christendom? Yea,
have I said eno' to prove that the humble clerk can look on mundane
matters with the eye of a man who can make small states great?"

William remained speechless--his hot blood thrilled with a half
superstitious awe; so thoroughly had this obscure Lombard divi