minded to choose a foreigner, they doubtless would have chosen
Swegen of Denmark. He had found supporters when Edward was chosen;
he was afterwards appealed to to deliver England from William. He
was no more of the English kingly house than Harold or William; but
he was grandson of a man who had reigned over England,
Northumberland might have preferred him to Harold; any part of
England would have preferred him to William. In fact any choice
that could have been made must have had something strange about it.
Edgar himself, the one surviving male of the old stock, besides his
youth, was neither born in the land nor the son of a crowned king.
Those two qualifications had always been deemed of great moment; an
elaborate pedigree went for little; actual royal birth went for a
great deal. There was now no son of a king to choose. Had there
been even a child who was at once a son of Edward and a sister's
son of Harold, he might have reigned with his uncle as his guardian
and counsellor. As it was, there was nothing to do but to choose
the man who, though not of kingly blood, had ruled England well for
thirteen years.

The case thus put seemed plain to every Englishman, at all events
to every man in Wessex, East-Anglia, and southern Mercia. But it
would not seem so plain in OTHER lands. To the greater part of
Western Europe William's claim might really seem the better.
William himself doubtless thought his own claim the better; he
deluded himself as he deluded others. But we are more concerned
with William as a statesman; and if it be statesmanship to adapt
means to ends, whatever the ends may be, if it be statesmanship to
make men believe that the worse cause is the better, then no man
ever showed higher statesmanship than William showed in his great
pleading before all Western Christendom. It is a sign of the times