of his reform would be the strife between Henry and Thomas and the humiliation of John.  His error was that of forgetting that he himself could wield powers, that he could hold forces in check, which would be too strong for those who should come after him.  At his purposes with regard to the relations of England and Normandy it would be vain to guess.  The mere leaving of kingdom and duchy to different sons would not necessarily imply that he designed a complete or lasting separation.  But assuredly William did not foresee that England, dragged into wars with France as the ally of Normandy, would remain the lasting rival of France after Normandy had been swallowed up in the French kingdom.  If rivalry between England and France had not come in this way, it would doubtless have come in some other way; but this is the way in which it did come about.  As a result of the union of Normandy and England under one ruler, it was part of William’s work, but a work of which William had no thought.  So it was with the increased connexion of every kind between England and the continent of Europe which followed on William’s coming.  With one part of Europe indeed the connexion of England was lessened.  For three centuries before William’s coming, dealings in war and peace with the Scandinavian kingdoms had made up a large part of English history.  Since the baffled enterprise of the holy Cnut, our dealings with that part of Europe have been of only secondary account.

But in our view of William as an English statesman, the main feature of all is that spirit of formal legality of which we have so often spoken.  Its direct effects, partly designed, partly undesigned, have affected our whole history to this day.  It was his policy to disguise the fact of conquest, to cause all the spoils of conquest to be held, in outward form, according to the ancient law of England.  The fiction became a fact, and the fact greatly helped in the process of fusion between Normans and English.  The conquering race could not keep itself distinct from the conquered, and the form which the fusion took was for the conquerors to be lost in the greater mass of the conquered.  William founded no new state, no new nation, no new constitution; he simply kept what he found, with such modifications as his position made needful.  But without any formal change in the nature of English kingship, his position enabled him to clothe the crown with a practical power such as it had never held before, to make his rule, in short, a virtual despotism.  These two facts determined the later course of English history, and they determined it to the lasting good of the English nation.  The conservative instincts of William allowed our national life and our national institutions to live on unbroken through his conquest.  But it was before all things the despotism of William, his despotism under legal forms, which preserved our national institutions to all time.  As a less discerning conqueror might have swept our ancient laws