The Conquering Family (51 page)

To complete the division, news traveled slowly, and the echo of events on one side of the water was faint when it reached the other. Take a case in point. After John’s death his widow returned to Angoulême, where her daughter Joan was being brought up as the future bride of the man she had jilted herself, Hugh the Brown of Lusignan. Isabella was in her early thirties and at the very peak of her dazzling beauty. Hugh saw her and declared fervently that she must be his bride and not the little Joan. Isabella was happy enough to make the change (probably she had it in mind in going over), they were married forthwith, and Joan Makepeace was sent back to England. Isabella had involved her new husband in trouble with the King of France by her plotting to create an English confederacy, and with his neighbors by her queenly ways, before the news reached England that the old romance had blossomed again.

Thus quickly the two divisions of the once extensive Angevin empire drew apart; and in that drawing apart a great nation was born.

The second change was Magna Charta, which gave back the Saxon conceptions and laws. The Conquest had interrupted the development of the English idea of justice and the emergence of a workable parliamentary system. By his oppressive rule John brought the Norman part of the population to a realization of the need for the ancient checks and safeguards, for the personal liberties and privileges toward which the English had been working. Not until the Saxon conception had been carried forward so far and so vigorously by Magna Charta could the effects of the Conquest be considered at an end.

It is easy now to see that the defeat at Hastings was in the long run a great benefit for the English people. Generations of readers, identifying themselves with the gallant Saxons, have suffered with Harold in his death throes on the spur of land, and with his lovely mistress, Edytha Swannes-hals (the Swan-necked) when she came at night to the battlefield, her fair hair wrapped in a black
couvre-chef
and a lantern in her hand, searching through the piles of dead for his body, and finding it at last, mangled almost beyond recognition, with the head and one leg severed from the trunk. Inevitably they had speculated on what the history of England would have been if right had triumphed at Hastings.

If Harold had won, the English people would have been spared a long period of suffering and oppression at the hands of cruel masters. But there would have been a great loss. The Anglo-Saxons had an instinct for self-government, a willingness to struggle on toward a distantly glimpsed
goal. Left to themselves, would they have achieved in time all the objectives which have been reached? Perhaps: but it is impossible to avoid doubts. The Saxons had certain racial weaknesses which would have held them back in other respects. Could they have advanced to greatness in one direction while lagging in so many others?

They were a gross people, dull, sensual, inclined to a degree of drunkenness which the Normans called
a tirelarigot
. They were lacking in ambition, in dispatch, in commercial instincts. These lacks would have handicapped them, particularly as they lived in the racial privacy, amounting almost to a vacuum, which island existence supplies. It is futile to speculate on what the future of England would have been if the Norman invasion had been a failure. This much is certain, however: the city of London would never have been the capital of a great empire. Would the people have been happier in the semi-obscurity of insular life? Would they have achieved sufficient strength to maintain their independence through centuries of pressure from without?

As it fell out, the Normans possessed the qualities lacking in the Anglo-Saxon. They had drive, an instinct for mastery, a never idle ambition. Without the Saxon instinct for political progress, they were as incomplete in their way as the English were in other directions. The mingling of Saxon and Norman blood produced a great race.

If Harold had not lost, there would never have been the opportunities which sent Drake around the world and Wolfe to the Plains of Abraham. If the smoldering Tostig had not been willing to betray his country to avenge himself on his brother, there would not have been a race of shopkeepers which could lead the world at the same time in political and scientific advance and produce a glittering roster of great names—Roger Bacon, Francis Bacon, Wycliff, Shakespeare, Cromwell, Darwin, Winston Churchill. If the men who died on the ridge had been allowed a glimpse into the mists of the future and had seen great continents reclaimed, an empire built around their little island, the path of freedom won, they might have counted their lives well lost.