Measuring Monarchy E-Book

Tim Hames

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 376

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Since 1066, there have been more than forty kings and queens of Britain (give or take a Cromwell, Scotland not included). They are a dazzling cast of characters, and we routinely debate over who deserves the title of greatest ruler in our long history. From William the Conqueror to Henry V, Elizabeth I, Victoria and latterly Elizabeth II – their lives tell the story of our nation. But how exactly do you measure a monarch? Measuring Monarchy provides a completely original outlook as to how to analyse British kings and queens and throws a revisionist Molotov cocktail into our historical thinking. It puts forward and explains the case for five comparative metrics for all UK monarchs: their professional standing, their popular standing with the public, their impact on public finances, how they conducted foreign policy and their preparations for succession. Tim Hames casts a forensic eye over fifteen key kings and queens, determining whether their status has been overrated or underrated. What is revealed may surprise you, and some overlooked monarchs are returned to their rightful standing.

Leseprobe

For Julia, Edward, Tom and George

Jacket illustrations: Antique crown (ilbusca/iStock); measuring tape (mecalehaiStock); William of Normandy, as illustrated in the Bayeuz Tapestery (Myrabella/Wikimedia Commons); Elizabeth I, a 1575 painting by Johannes Corvus (Gwengoat/iStock); Queen Victoria (London Illustrated News).

Alexander Pope quote from The impertinent: or a visit to the court. A satyr. By an eminent hand, courtesy of University of Michigan Library Digital Collections https://name.umdl.umich.edu/004809270.0001.000.

First published 2025

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Tim Hames, 2025

The right of Tim Hames to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 894 7

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

The History Press proudly supports

www.treesforlife.org.uk

EU Authorised Representative: Easy Access System Europe

Mustamäe tee 50, 10621 Tallinn, Estonia

[email protected]

Contents

Introduction

William I (1066–87)

OVERRATED

Stephen (1135–54)

UNDERRATED

Henry II (1154–89)

UNDERRATED

Richard I (1189–99)

OVERRATED

Edward III (1327–77)

UNDERRATED

Henry V (1413–22)

OVERRATED

Henry VII (1485–1509)

UNDERRATED

Henry VIII (1509–47)

OVERRATED

Elizabeth I (1558–1603)

OVERRATED

William III (1689–1702)

OVERRATED

Anne (1702–14)

UNDERRATED

William IV (1830–37)

UNDERRATED

Victoria (1837–1901)

OVERRATED

Edward VII (1901–10)

UNDERRATED

Postscript: Elizabeth II (1952–2022)

Conclusions on Crowns

Further Reading

Introduction

This book, appropriately for the English monarchy perhaps, has something of a history to it. It started life in a small way as a response to an initiative of others. In the Christmas/New Year break of 2001/02, in anticipation of Queen Elizabeth’s Golden Jubilee which would occur shortly after, the Today programme on BBC Radio Four decided to run a poll among its listeners as to who was the ‘best’ monarch ever, with a shortlist of Alfred the Great, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Victoria (who would emerge as the ultimate victor in this contest) and Elizabeth II. It attracted a degree of attention.

I was the Chief Leader Writer and Comment Editor of The Times back then and wrote a weekly column in that newspaper. My fare normally consisted of domestic or international politics, but in this fallow period between the Christmas turkey and the New Year’s Eve champagne I was looking to write about something different. I offered a critique (published on 28 December 2001) of the Today survey because it confused fame (or even notoriety) with success, had no objective criteria for how such an assessment should be made and the five selected names excluded at least one whom I felt firmly should be there instead (Henry VII). It was an enjoyable piece to write, and it stirred up some interest among the readers. For more than two decades after that, it remained the germ of an idea for a much longer argument, one that I only turned to again in the early months of 2024.

The study of leadership, especially in the context of business and management, has become quite an industry. There are literally hundreds, quite possibly thousands, of tomes that have been published which claim to be able to separate the qualities of those who have proved highly effective leaders from others who have been either relatively inconsequential while at the helm, or outright failures.

When it comes to both monarchy and political leadership more broadly, there seems to be far less interest in what makes for an exceptional figure. There are, of course, many accounts of individuals, be they kings or queens in many countries, presidents or prime ministers, dictators or tyrants, which ask searching questions of their subject matter. There is no shortage of personality analysis.

Much the same, it will be contended here, can be said about the treatment of the monarchy in the United Kingdom. Enormous attention is devoted to character traits with the consequence that it becomes far harder to make comparisons between those who have sat on the throne than it really should be. Is Alfred the Great to be understood better because ‘he burnt the cakes’ or Henry VIII to be placed on some peculiar pedestal because he had six wives, or what made Queen Victoria gain the reputation that she was not amused? All of this seems to be a doubtful basis on which to look at kings or queens on their own terms, never mind seek to create a framework in which they can be compared to one another, and a reasonable judgement of their relative merits be realised. What is about to be attempted here – measuring monarchy – demands a completely different mindset.

How Can You Measure Monarchy?

There are, of course, constraints on comparison which make any such study incomplete or imperfect.

The first lies in what is and is not included. This book is essentially about English monarchs, until the point where James I unites the Crowns of the two countries in 1603, to be followed a century later by the formal amalgamation of England and Scotland through the Act of Union (1707). This places an array of very interesting historical figures from Macbeth through William the Lion (a king totally unknown to the English, despite having reigned north of the border for almost fifty years) to Robert the Bruce out of scope. This is a decision taken not out of nationalism but because the management of the monarchy in England and Scotland would have been very different for most of the admittedly sizeable time between the Norman Conquest and 1603 or 1707. A more informed person than I might chance their arm in another book at measuring the Scottish monarchies over the centuries.

The second is that we are dealing with an extremely lengthy stretch of history during which the expectations of monarchy have changed enormously. William the Conqueror and Charles III (only one of whom is placed under the microscope in these pages) are hardly chips off the same block. In the earlier part of the history examined, the conduct of war on the battlefield itself was a crucial element in the reputation of those who wore the crown. As time moved on, a monarch was expected to be the master of domestic policy, relations with the established Church and foreign affairs, but it was not assumed that they would don a suit of armour at short notice themselves.

This book is not, though, an endeavour which aspires to construct some sort of league table in which every monarch who fits in the frame of England to 1603 and England and Scotland from that date is listed. The aim instead is to establish some general but enduring rules for deciding on relative merit, then to offer a series of case studies of who appear to be underrated and overrated respectively, and then to draw some threads together in concluding what it is that the underrated have in common.

The task is not as taxing as it might seem to be anyway. Comparing William I (the Conqueror) (1066–87) with Stephen (1135–54) is not an impossible aim as Norman England (once the invaders had become a fully occupying force) did not change that dramatically between the dates concerned. Henry II (1154–89) was succeeded by Richard I or Lionheart (1189–99). It is not that hard to draw a comparison between Edward III (1327–77) and Henry V (1413 –22), where there is not a chasm in their timespans. The monarchs Henry VII (1485–1509), Henry VIII (1509–47) and Elizabeth I (1558–1603) are Tudor family. William III (1689–1702) is followed by Anne (1702–14). William IV (1830–37), Victoria (1837–1901) and Edward VII (1901–10) come after one another. These fourteen kings and queens comprise those who are to be awarded either an ‘underrated’ or an ‘overrated’ designation.

The Ratings

The use of terms like ‘underrated’ and ‘overrated’ only makes sense if there is some degree of consensus about those who are either ‘accurately rated’ or ‘fairly rated’. To a perhaps rather surprising extent, this writer believes that most historical observers would not have that much difficulty determining who should be rated ‘good’, ‘average’, ‘poor’, ‘terrible’ or ‘not rateable’.

THE GOOD

The ‘good’ (excluding, as will be the case uniformly here, the fourteen monarchs scheduled for a closer inspection) include Henry I, Edward I, Henry IV (a slightly edgy choice, some would assert) and (on balance) Edward IV. As will be outlined at the end of this book, Elizabeth II may well fit here too.

THE AVERAGE

The ‘average’ (in chronological order) would include William II, James I (possibly at the top of this division), Charles II, George II (perhaps close to the relegation zone), George V and George VI.

THE POOR

The ‘poor’ (in order of their reign) contains John, Henry III, Mary Tudor, George I (although it is a judgement call between the first two Hanoverians as to who is the less appealing), George III (it was not his fault that he was consumed by insanity, but a device should have been found for abdication in these conditions) and George IV. They tainted the monarchy to a degree but were not overthrown.

THE TERRIBLE

The ‘terrible’ were actually thrown out. They number Edward II (removed by his wife, her lover and his own heir), Richard II (deposed by Henry IV), Henry VI (ejected by Edward IV), Richard III (although he has his defenders, who would not be pleased to see him placed in this company), Charles I (not a smart king even if the royalists were ‘wrong but romantic’) and his son James II (forced to flee).

THE REMAINDER

There is then a small set of kings and queens who for diverse reasons are hard to categorise at all. Edward V disappeared from the Tower of London, assumed murdered as a child. Edward VI was a boy king under the control of first the Duke of Somerset, then the Duke of Northumberland. Mary II, in theory the joint monarch with her husband William III, was plainly the inferior party in that contract and died after just over five years on the throne. Edward VIII abdicated within a year so that he could marry Wallis Simpson (although there is a plausible lobby that would mark him down as ‘terrible’ for that decision and his liaisons with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis). Charles III is too new to judge.

THE EVALUATION HERE

The central premise of this book is that a series of monarchs whom many would automatically list as ‘good’, even ‘great’, should not have that status and that a series of other figures (some of whom are well known but have been burdened by an unfair assessment) should be elevated from an ‘average’ ranking, which most of them would conventionally have, and now be evaluated as ‘good’ rulers.

There is, nonetheless, one final constraint that should be conceded at the outset of the operation. It is surely unavoidable even if strenuous efforts are made to minimise it. It cannot be obliterated.

It is subjectivity. Even if there were to be a universal consensus that the five measures which are about to be outlined are indeed the ideal means by which monarchs should be evaluated (and it would be a miracle on the scale of the loaves and the fishes if that were to come to pass), then that still leaves an immense amount to disagree about in how those measures should be utilised. At the extremes, there are occasions where it is absolutely clear whether a monarch did or did not leave the public finances in a better or worse state than they inherited, or engaged in wars which either did or did not make England, or England and Scotland, a bigger player on the European (later global) stage and whether the succession which would follow their deaths would be smooth or contested.

There are other instances, though, when it is not as clear-cut how to validate a verdict. There may be a case that the strength or weakness of the coffers was not a direct reflection on the monarch of the day, or that their options in the exercise of foreign policy were either wider or narrower, or that the succession question arose in circumstances which it was unreasonable for them to have expected.

There will doubtless be observers of certain figures, whom I believe can be dispassionately assigned as ‘underrated’ or ‘overrated’, who will examine the same acts or events in history and come to an entirely different conclusion as to how they should be interpreted. Subjectivity is destined never to be removed from historical deliberation altogether. In truth, it is the blood flowing in its veins.

Without an element of structure, and one which is not too open-ended or ambiguous, the aspiration to measure monarchy is lost before it has even started in earnest. We need some rules, or we have little chance of reaching findings, even if they will still prompt dissent thereafter. What are set out now are the five measures by which, it will be asserted here, we can examine the record of monarchs not only in terms of what their contemporaries might have thought, but more widely.

Metrics for Monarchy

The first of these metrics is the standing of the monarch in relation to other institutions of the state (such as the nobility, Parliament and the Church, with the balance across them evolving over time).

Professional reputation is in many regards the spine of leadership. It is not a formal requirement for legitimacy, but there is no doubt that it can render stronger a monarch whose initial claim to the throne was based on a bloodline that was more than capable of dispute, and, in equal spirit, it can lead a monarch whose standing at the time they acquired the Crown was solid into disrepute if others who have influence over the direction of the country come to lose confidence in their abilities. In the most dire of conditions, a monarch whose share price among the very small number of stakeholders who count sinks to an unacceptable low will find themselves heading for the exit by one means or another, as in different ways was true for Edward II (deposed and then disposed of), Richard II (ditto), Henry III (whose grip on his title was frequently threatened), Henry VI (forced out between 1461 and 1470, briefly restored as a titular ruler from 1470 to 1471, before returning to the Tower of London once more), Richard III (killed in battle), Charles I (through the mechanism of a civil war and the indignity of capture, execution and displacement by an entirely new constitutional order) and his son James II (enforced abdication, although religion mattered here more than perceived ineptitude).

The need to command the respect of others within the national elite extends to others whose fate was not as spectacular in their demise. Richard III was held responsible for the death of the boy king Edward V, which hardly assisted in his own acceptability as king to others. George III was in the thrall of madness but there was no mechanism for removing him into retirement. Edward VIII was not mad but might have had more chance of engineering a compromise over his marriage had his behaviour not convinced leading Conservative and Labour figures alike that abdication was the least bad option.

The second is the popular standing of the monarch with broader public opinion in so far as this can be divined and in so far as it was important to their authority on the throne. This is admittedly much easier to come to an opinion about in later times than earlier ones. Public sentiment did not count for much under the Plantagenets or explain the ebb and flow of what would come to be known as the War of the Roses. It did, however, probably aid Henry IV’s cause that he was the first monarch since the Norman Conquest to have English as his native tongue. The Duke of Northumberland’s scheme to ensure that Lady Jane Grey came after the sickly Edward VI fell apart because of a mass instinct that Mary Tudor held the legitimacy card in proceedings (although if there had been a half-viable male contender for the Tudor Crown, they might have had a shot at it). In more recent times, the consistent and intense unpopularity of George IV can hardly have been an asset to him. This was a king whose obituary in The Times opened with the sentence, ‘There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures than this deceased King’ and did not improve much thereafter. 1

A mastery of the popular touch became vital from the early twentieth century onwards. Sympathy towards George VI allowed him to overcome concerns at the pinnacle of the Establishment as to whether he was physically capable of fulfilling his functions (a fear which his own wife and consort may have shared) and enabled him to escape what turned out to be the horror show of a crass miscalculation in inviting Neville Chamberlain to share the balcony of Buckingham Palace in the immediate aftermath of the Munich Agreement, which within months would prove a failure. The extraordinary scenes after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales led to open deliberation as to whether her ex-husband had become too tarnished to be king once Elizabeth II had passed on. This dimension is today arguably the most important aspect in deciding the survival of the monarchy.

The third component is the skill or not of a monarch in their handling of the public finances. This was of sizeable importance when the monarch was the active de facto chief executive of the country. No one in the twenty-first century, by contrast, would hold the House of Windsor to account for the votes of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England or the musings of the Office for Budget Responsibility, but in a previous era fiscal competence would have been essential. Those who had to resort to the sale of land and titles within the nobility would be more likely to make enemies than friends, while any additional taxation on the peasant class was rarely a winning strategy either. Monarchs who were either excessive with the extravagance at their own court or inclined to fight expensive wars where victory brought few spoils and defeat meant more financial sacrifice were not rated highly by their contemporaries (or many historians for that matter). Those who could deliver prosperity were likely to find that they had more latitude in their other dealings as the monarch.

The fourth element is the conduct of foreign policy, be that in matters of war or in diplomacy. The balance between the two is seminal to the standing of those who occupied the throne. Before 1066, this meant the ability to handle what we would now call Denmark, Norway and Sweden. For almost 500 years after that, England was a force of its own in France (and, indeed, France in England as the heirs to William the Conqueror remained very French indeed for centuries afterwards). It fell to the Tudors to deal with the sudden rise of Spain, although that country declined not long after. Even after the Restoration and the ‘Glorious Revolution’ which had demonstrated the command of Parliament, the monarch was allowed the dominant role in foreign policy and national security, with France restored as the primary concern at court and in Westminster. Matters became more awkward when the House of Hanover (briefly Saxe-Coburg-Gotha) found itself in apposition to Germany, even if by the twentieth century this was largely symbolic with the prime minister the commander-in-chef to all intents and purposes. Diplomacy still remains within the orbit of the monarchy, as was illustrated by Elizabeth II’s dogged support for the Commonwealth as an organisation of meaning and the extent to which Charles III can highlight his own not inconsiderable international environmental role. Monarchs have varied hugely in their ability to ‘make the weather’ with diplomatic engagement.

The final aspect is among the most sensitive (at times, the most unspeakable subject in public), namely succession. This is not only about whether a monarch has a direct heir – an adult child (very much ideally) of his or her own to pass the throne on to – although this has usually proved more stable than more distant bloodlines, but also about the character of their relationship and their willingness to concede their own mortality and actively educate and train that heir in statecraft.

There have been a host of examples of catastrophic human relationships among monarchs. Edward I had all but given up on Edward II long before the transfer of power happened. Mary was deeply reluctant to signal that her younger sister, Elizabeth, would be her rightful successor as she suspected (correctly) that the renewed authority of the Bishop of Rome which she had engineered would be in peril. Probably the most toxic dynamic of the lot (although competition for this is hot) is that between George I and George II. Well before he had become King of England and Scotland, George I had dispensed of his wife Sophia Dorothea. Although his fondness for mistresses was legendary, the then aspiring Elector of Hanover was incensed by Sophia Dorothea’s liaison with a Swedish count, Philip Christoph von Königsmarck, who was mysteriously murdered in 1694 and in a gruesome fashion (in one account, hacked to pieces on the direct order of the enraged husband before being thrown into a river).

Immediately following this scandalous event, George arranged for his divorce from Sophia Dorothea on the basis that she had abandoned him, and he had her incarcerated in Ahlden House where she was to stay for more than thirty years before she died. The future George II had rather more loyalty to his mother than to his father and they were thus barely on speaking terms.

Succession does not have to be as sensational as that to be a vital test of monarchical aptitude. If it is not addressed, then it can haunt an entire reign with courtiers endlessly engaged in whispers as to what would happen if the incumbent monarch were to meet with an unfortunately timed demise.

These five factors – personal standing with other institutions of the national body politic, public popularity (for later figures at any rate), financial aptitude, foreign and diplomatic policy, and the preparations for succession – are as compelling a collection of criteria for assessing the merit of a monarch across the ages as any other yardsticks might prove to be. They also largely endure across time. Comparison, although never straightforward, is not a fanciful endeavour. It allows for certain kings and queens to be regarded afresh and placed in ‘underrated’ and ‘overrated’ compartments.

_________

1The Times, 15 July 1830.

William I (1066–87)

The English have a strange relationship with their history. No more extreme example of this is where they choose to start it. Most accounts begin with the Battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest. History kicks off in 1066; everything before that is somewhat murky and only real enthusiasts even attempt to remember the names of monarchs before that point, except for Alfred the Great (who allegedly burnt the cakes) and possibly Cnut (who supposedly issued instructions to the tide, but this was an attempt to demonstrate the limitations of his authority). Edward the Confessor may receive an honourable mention, but only in the context of preparing the ground for the arrival of William I.

If you take a step back, this is a very odd way of looking at things indeed. What happened in 1066 was a massive defeat. Harold Godwinson (who took an arrow in the eye, it is suggested, but that is not certain) was very much the (relatively speaking) English contender to the throne. The aftermath of his death and the triumph of the Normans was utterly catastrophic not only to the English nobility but to Englishness all round. The country was a victim of a form of ethnic cleansing and to an extent rarely seen anywhere else in Europe for a very long period before or since. Yet our history skirts over that. William somehow becomes an honorary Englishman from the moment that he takes the Crown, the Norman takeover of England is portrayed as a castle-building exercise, the Bayeaux Tapestry is regarded as gospel truth and not a piece of propaganda, and Domesday Book, probably the most recalled element of William’s tenure, is treated as an advanced form of accounting to be applauded.

There is, to put mildly, another way of looking at matters. It is that if English history is to be awarded a starting date at all, it should not be in 1066 but either much earlier or after the alien Normans left. William I (the Conqueror) should not be seen in any positive light at all but as a very bad experience.

William’s heritage sheds light on an era in which violence was the norm in politics. What came to be called the ‘Normans’ were a set of Vikings who marched on Paris in 911 and would not leave until the King of France, then Charles III or Charles ‘the Simple’, handed over territory to them. He held a meeting with the leader of this band of outlaws and eventually decided to offer them land which the chroniclers described as ‘Normandie’, if their chief (who was dubbed ‘Rollo’ in Latin, but that was not his name) agreed to be the king’s notional vassal and to convert to Christianity. That exchange done, the ‘Normans’ became part of the extremely complicated French patchwork quilt.

William himself was born more than a century after that bargain. His father, Robert, was the Duke of Normandy but had achieved that status by murdering his uncle and possibly an older brother too. His mother, Herleva, was the daughter of a strikingly wealthy family. They were an admirable match but with one issue of some importance. They were not married. William was therefore illegitimate, and this was not a particular secret. His father wanted to depart for what would inevitably be a long pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1034 and needed his domestic affairs in order in advance of leaving. He persuaded, probably by sheer force, the nobility of Normandy to accept William as his heir (although this was hardly par for the course, allowing for the fact that he was clearly born out of wedlock) and headed east, only to die on his travels a year later. William, aged about 7, became Duke of Normandy.

This was an extremely exposed title to hold. There were outside interests circling his terrain (the King of France and others with substantial land who liked the notion of additional gains) as well as many within Normandy itself who saw him as an improper figure. He had a series of guardians who sought, with varying degrees of effort, to look after his interests and at least three of them died as they strived to do so. It was a small miracle that William made it to adulthood. Even when he did, his legitimacy (personal and political) remained dubious. In 1049, he sought out a marriage, to Matilda, who had a sizeable stake in Flanders which was of serious value, but the Pope forbade it. William waited a little while and then proceeded with the wedding anyway, irrespective of the Pope’s position. It turned out to a productive pairing as she bore him at least nine children (four of them sons), which as we believe that she was only 4ft 2in tall must have been difficult.

There are three factors to William’s rise which are worthy of attention and set the scene for how he should be looked at as a monarch. They are what happened in 1066, his approach to his new realm after becoming king and, briefly, how one should think of Domesday Book if that is his legacy.

William did not become an especially important actor outside of Normandy (where he struggled to impose himself anyway) until after 1060. That date marks the moment at which two major rivals (the King of France and the Count of Anjou) die and their successors have not yet established themselves. William invades the county of Matine and positions himself for obtaining England. The king there, Edward the Confessor, looks very likely to die childless. He was William’s cousin, once removed, as William’s grandmother had been Edward’s mother (she was an astonishing woman, daughter of the Norman ruler Richard the Fearless, married to not one but two English monarchs, and Queen Consort of Denmark and Norway too). Edward had, it was asserted, nominated William as his successor. This was a stretch in terms of the bloodline, but Edward’s court had a strong Norman influence over it (courtesy of his mother). The alternative option (arguably with a weaker blood claim but a domestic man of standing) was Harold Godwinson, Edward’s brother-in-law. He had, it was contended, sworn to support William as king, although this pledge, if made, occurred after he had been a virtual prisoner of the Duke of Normandy and so was not in the best place to assert his outlook. On his deathbed, Edward, it is said, switched his backing to Harold.

At a minimum this was not a clear-cut situation. There were others who could see themselves as the king as well. They included the de facto king of what we would now call Norway and another with a similar standing in Denmark. For the previous 100 years or more, the English had been open to attack from various subsections of the Vikings and more recently the likes of the Normans. There was no way in which the death of Edward the Confessor would simply usher in a peaceful change.

The duke was prepared, and it turned out that he was fortunate. He had a fleet ready to sail from Normandy in August 1066. If he had been able to leave when he wished, that might have been fatal. Harold, who had been crowned king, was aware of his intentions and even where he might disembark once he reached the south coast of England, and he was ready for him (the quality of intelligence and communications in what seems such a primitive age was actually staggering). If battle had taken place that summer, then not only might Harold have won, but William might also have died.

The weather had other ideas. This was not the best of summers to traverse the Channel. William had to wait for weeks on end for a favourable climate. In the meantime, word reached Harold that his other enemy, Harald Hardrada, King of Norway, had assembled a force and was in Yorkshire. Harold marched his men north, travelling at more than 25 miles a day on foot, encountered Harold at the Battle of Stamford Bridge and won a complete victory, killing the King of Norway as part of it. He then had to turn his troops around and head back south, with a slight detour to London.

William was thus able to land unopposed. He was not completely sure what to do next. Did he move inland towards either Winchester or London (the former being more the political capital, the latter the financial one and bigger city) and stretch his supply lines, or did he stay where he was and dig in?

Harold settled the matter for him by getting to Hastings at speed. The fight duly takes place. The (probably exhausted) native soldiers meet their match. Not only does Harold die but so do two of his brothers, so the rival line for the throne is more or less extinguished. However, the win does not wholly settle matters; it took William two more months to make it to London and be accepted and crowned king. Even then, there were many prominent personalities outside of the capital who did not bend to him.

That is why the second part of William’s record is so important. This really was a conquest. It was much more than that in many respects. Between 1066 and 1071 there were several revolts against someone who was seen as a foreign interloper. The one best cited in history is that of Hereward the Wake, but he was far from alone. William moved back and forth between Normandy and England depending on the urgency of the uprisings but otherwise relied on his brother-in-law, Odo of Bayeux, newly minted Earl of Kent, to oversee military matters. Rebellion was never totally wiped out, but it was contained.

This could only be managed by brute force. Foreign nobles and mercenaries had to be co-opted and they would all want something tangible for their trials and tribulations. What they got was England. The former ruling class was pushed to one side. Its lands were distributed to the agents of what was a new master. By the end of his reign, all but two of William’s tenants-in-chief were French in origin. A similar strategy was adopted for the Church, with the Pope accepting a massive purge of the bishops so that by the time that William died, the English element of the clergy had all but disappeared. This was critical because the men of the cloth were intermediaries between the ruler and the ruled. Their shift in composition was socially significant. The English peasantry found themselves with an entirely novel (and less benign) set of superiors. What is more, the invaders spoke French to one another and wrote in Latin. Traditional English was a second-class language. These were two very different worlds.

The intensity of this change tends to be underplayed in conventional English history. It was rape and pillage (often literally but also metaphorically). A culture was being decimated. The construction of castles was not motivated by architectural innovation but to set up a base from which the country around it, and the people who lived there, could be terrorised into submission. William was not only a conqueror, he and his men ravaged and savaged what it meant to be English, draining hundreds of years of Anglo-Danish inheritance away. This was an occupation of a semi-totalitarian character.

Yet that is somehow set to one side and William is placed in memory as if the first ‘English’ king. One distinguished historian, Richard Southern, described what was witnessed in the two decades after Harold was slain at Hastings as ‘the single most radical change in European history between the fall of Rome and the twentieth century’. 2 If he is even half right, then William I was not merely a conqueror, he was Pol Pot with a palace. This was ‘Year Zero’ for Englishness. It would be more than three centuries before there was a king (Henry IV) born in England with English as his first tongue. One can debate whether this means William I was ‘overrated’, but he was no friend to England.

The last part for which he is hailed in folk memory is for Domesday Book. This was remarkable. It was an inventory of more than 45,000 land holdings in 14,000 locations. There had been nothing like it before in England (or, as far as it is possible to understand, Europe) before and it would be centuries before anything like it was produced again. It was also compiled in less than a year. It would form two enormous books which were kept at the royal treasury at Winchester and occasionally put on show.

The reason why the information could be collated at such a pace and with such detail is that those whom William had put in charge of England (almost every single man French) had such raw control over their jurisdictions. The data was sitting there waiting for someone to demand it. The purpose of Domesday Book was not to be a historical document or an economics textbook but to set out, at the behest of William I, who had what, what the value of land and other possessions had been thought to be before 1066 and what it was worth in 1086. By such means, the king and his successors, as William died only a year later, would know where they stood in terms of possible taxes.

Having placed William the Conqueror in the right context, how does he measure up as a monarch?

Professional Standing

The professional standing of William I would have depended almost entirely on whether one had been part of the historic English ruling elite before late 1066 or one of the new ruling class, who would come after the Conqueror had seized England and turned the nation upside down.

What is clear is that William’s rule never went uncontested. There were several revolts in the first five years of his tenure, a brief interlude of calm, and then a dangerous rebellion in 1075 (the Revolt of the Earls). Matters were not stable even a decade later when William had been the monarch for almost twenty years, as he had to gather a collection of mercenaries in 1085 to quash discontent (paying for these men was one of the motives behind the commissioning of Domesday Book). At least a section of the English never accepted that the Normans were entitled to control the country.

Running both Normandy and England was not a comfortable exercise. William crossed the Channel on twenty or more occasions in his attempt, as he might have seen it, to impose order on one or the other of his territories. There is no doubt as to what was his highest priority. It was Normandy, which was open to interference and more from either the King of France or the Count of Anjou (sometimes both of them with other more minor actors seeking to secure assets as well). For most of the stretch from 1071 to 1084, William was primarily in Normandy, not England, and he was there to defend it.

This meant that he was an absentee figure except when the English were engaged in insurrection to a degree that required his personal intervention. For most of this time, the man in charge on a day-to-day basis was Odo of Bayeux, William’s brother-in-law, sometimes assisted by William FitzOsbern. This arrangement was not always a happy one. William would have Odo arrested in 1082. Yet in practical terms it seems to have been effective, if not appealing if one were English in origins. Odo oversaw the total obliteration of English influence in the aristocracy, solicited the aid of the Pope in a complete transformation of the Church and drove the English language out of official favour.

This marginalisation of England was paradoxical. It was a much more impressive asset in terms of its size and status than Normandy, a neutral, rational assessment might have concluded, but it was not treated that way by William or those around him. Normandy was by far the more important. England existed to assist William in his command over Normandy and, as his reign went on, as part of his competition with the French king. William kept the administration of his domains distinct from one another. There was little thought about whether it might be smarter to combine them in some way. In terms of structure, the governance of England under the Anglo-Saxons had been relatively solid by continental standards, so William largely kept it intact, but he introduced Normans everywhere. How well they understood what they had under their authority is suspect. They probably did not care. These were the spoils of war, reinforced by repression; what had come before was of no relevance.

Public Opinion

The state of opinion polling in late eleventh-century England was not well developed. What ordinary people probably thought is unavoidably a matter of speculation. It is not that hard, though, to guess.

The regime change which was pressed on England after 1066 is highly unlikely to have been loved. Life for the peasantry would not have been enchanting beforehand, but the new age would have been worse. For the bottom tier, it would have had no blessings to it at all (Domesday Book reveals that 10 per cent of the population were not just serfs but outright slaves). Whenever a local noble (or more probably a noble who had been displaced or was soon to be removed) rose up against the Normans, they do not seem to have had many difficulties rallying troops to their standard. They all failed, in large part because the Normans had totally rewritten the rulebook through their castles. Public opinion could be whatever it was. The Normans would be hard to throw out by the English alone. Their best hope was in an external invasion, with the King of Denmark (Sweyn II) a possibility. He would have been a foreigner too, but the Scandinavians were less ‘foreign’ than men of Normandy. If public opinion had counted for anything, William the Conqueror would have had a short tenure.

Financial Competence

England’s primary value to William was as a war chest. It had a respectably organised means of mass taxation. Its monarchs, unless inept or inclined to spend too much money on unrewarding fights, were usually well off by the conventions of the day. The Danegeld (essentially protection money presented as a tax to avoid raids on land and property by the Vikings) was well entrenched, so William retained it. Dispossessed nobles or senior men within the Church were a source of reward, so a cut was taken off their former terrain before it was handed on to (Norman) others. The royal estates and forest lands could also be turned into money-spinners. Funds became harder to tap towards what would be the final years of William’s reign (mainly because they had been exploited to the full earlier when Normandy was under threat), which made the creation of Domesday Book a worthwhile innovation. Overall, it would be unfair not to describe the new king and those who acted for him as financially competent, but it was a competence whose output was to bleed England dry. Once the full implications of Domesday Book had been digested, more taxation would be sought. The new ruling class would not want for luxury. The overthrown English nobility were worse off for it.

Foreign Policy

The politics of this period was predominantly about France, and it had some confusing features to it. The King of France was rather more than a first among equals, even when his own terrain and wealth were less in scale than those of the rulers of Aquitaine, Anjou and even Normandy, who were, strictly speaking, underlings who were obliged to pay tribute to him and salute him as their senior. William’s foreign policy consisted mostly of attempting to keep King Philip I of France at a distance. William met his death while in conflict with the French king’s armies (not aided, as the next section will illuminate, by his own eldest son being more than willing to conspire with the French monarch when that suited).

William was, nonetheless, a canny player in these matters. He used his large number of children as tools in dynastic activities conducted through marriage, and that applied to his grandchildren as well (it was perfectly common then for marriages to be agreed when those to be wed were very little). He did his best to ally with the Holy Roman Emperor as part of his containment of France. He was closely linked to Flanders through his own relatives, and Flanders was becoming a vital political actor. He courted the Pope, whose backing was essential if his drive to take over the English Church was to be as absolute as he wanted it to be. Yet try as he might, Normandy was hard to defend adequately. At no point could William, even with England as his backstop, be totally confident of his hold over it. This made England all the more useful, as it was, realistically, beyond the reach of the French king.

Succession

With four sons and five daughters (perhaps more), William might have deemed succession one of his less pressing problems. The truth was the opposite. Exactly how land was distributed after the death of a king was never a matter of consensus, and diplomacy was not the only method of deciding who would be left with what, especially as England as well as Normandy would be available for inheriting.

William had an extremely uneasy relationship with his eldest son, Robert. He suspected his motives and would not allow him access to either a sizeable amount of money, or titles, or any authority. The two men literally came to blows, such was the scale of their mutual animosity. Robert had colluded with the French king and made a bond with Odo of Bayeux, the individual with the most power in England when William was not there (which was much of the time), which made the king concerned about him as well. Nor was Robert close to either of his most important brothers, William and Henry.

So, the succession which William would settle on was imperfect and unstable. Robert was to be made the Duke of Normandy, the most prestigious of the old king’s domains, but would not be king in England. That honour was to fall to the next son in line (William II or William Rufus) with the faint assumption that were he to die childless then the next oldest brother, Henry, would come after him.

This was not a bargain which Robert would be content with. He wanted the lot. Between 1087 and 1096, the Duke of