in all things for his lord. Perhaps he was more; perhaps he had
directly sworn to receive William as king. Perhaps he had promised
all this with an oath of special solemnity. It would be easy to
enlarge on all these further counts as making up an amount of guilt
which William not only had the right to chastise, but which he
would be lacking in duty if he failed to chastise. He had to
punish the perjurer, to avenge the wrongs of the saints. Surely
all who should help him in so doing would be helping in a righteous
work.

The answer to all this was obvious. Putting the case at the very
worst, assuming that Harold had sworn all that he is ever said to
have sworn, assuming that he swore it in the most solemn way in
which he is ever said to have sworn it, William's claim was not
thereby made one whit better. Whatever Harold's own guilt might
be, the people of England had no share in it. Nothing that Harold
had done could bar their right to choose their king freely. Even
if Harold declined the crown, that would not bind the electors to
choose William. But when the notion of choosing kings had begun to
sound strange, all this would go for nothing. There would be no
need even to urge that in any case the wrong done by Harold to
William gave William a casus belli against Harold, and that
William, if victorious, might claim the crown of England, as a
possession of Harold's, by right of conquest. In fact William
never claimed the crown by conquest, as conquest is commonly
understood. He always represented himself as the lawful heir,
unhappily driven to use force to obtain his rights. The other
pleas were quite enough to satisfy most men out of England and
Scandinavia. William's work was to claim the crown of which he was
unjustly deprived, and withal to deal out a righteous chastisement