William Rufus was ready now to return to the subject of Normandy. He had parted from his brother on bad terms in 1091, and Norman envoys reached him at his Christmas court at Gloucester in 1093 informing him that Duke Robert had renounced their agreement. Count William of Eu, his cousin, also came to England at that time to confirm the arrangement that Rufus had entered into with his father in 1090, and perhaps also to update the king on Norman affairs. In February 1094 Rufus crossed once again to Normandy seeking a meeting to Re-establish his dominance over Duke Robert’s council. Rufus met his brother the duke near Rouen, but found him unforthcoming. He also discovered that the neutral guarantors of their 1091 agreement took Robert’s part, and laid the blame for the failure wholly on Rufus’s shoulders. As a result the king dropped diplomacy, rallied his party and took the castle of Bures from the duke’s son-in-law. Count Elias of Arques, as a pragmatic warning to his brother as to where power actually resided in their relationship. Ranulf Flambard sent huge amounts of provisions and cash from England to support his master; necessarily so, because King Philip of France again took the field to assist Duke Robert, although he did not attempt to confront Rufus directly. Philip joined with Duke Robert in a menacing march on Eu during the summer of 1094, but when the time came to commit himself to military action, he found excuses to return to Paris. Rufus stayed put in upper Normandy until the end of the year, secure in the region but perhaps a little unsure of what to do next. Unexpectedly, he found that his brother’s fortunes were on the rise. A measure of his bafflement may be that he sent messages to his youngest brother, Henry, then sheltering in Domfront, to join his party. He needed Henry’s family support and perhaps also his cunning to pursue his Norman objective; Count Henry was in fact named as Rufus’s Norman lieutenant in February 1095, and Henry’s rightful possession of the Cotentin was recognised.
On 29 December 1094, Rufus returned to England. There were troubles in the Church, where Archbishop Anselm was agitating for the king to recognise Urban II as pope rather than his rival, Clement III. There had been more serious troubles in Wales after the previous year’s campaigns, and it was necessary for Rufus to reassert his military power within the March, which he did early in 1095 in a campaign which was set back by the weather. It was at this point that - most unexpectedly - conspiracy once again appeared amongst the Anglo-Norman aristocracy. The principal conspirators are named in the sources as Earl Robert de Mowbray of Northumbria, a rebel of 1088, and Count William of Eu, who, before he succeeded his father in 1094 had been lord of Chepstow in the Welsh March. Associated with them in the plot were Eudes of Champagne, lord of Holderness, Roger de Lacy of Weobley and Philip de Montgomery. The alleged plan of these men was to murder Rufus and set up as king in his place Count Stephen of Aumale, a nephew of the Conqueror. No source suggests that Count Stephen knew of the plot, but he may well have been nominated by his father, Eudes of Champagne. Unlike the conspiracy of 1088, the conspiracy of 1095 was not devised in the interests of Duke Robert. The only convincing explanation of the conspiracy is given by Robert de Torigny,Io Who says that Earl Robert had a grievance against King William over lands and castles he claimed to be under his authority as earl of Northumbria, and which he had been denied. The Anglo-Saxon chronicle tells us that Earl Robert was already at odds with Rufus at Whitsun (13 May 1095), when he refused to come to court since the king would give him no assurance of safe conduct. The fact that northern and marcher lords were prominent in the conspiracy perhaps confirms that Earl Robert was at the centre of it all; these were men who would sympathise with his grievance against royal high-handedness. Eor the king’s part, the enormous wealth and renowned savagery and aggression of Earl Robert would have been enough to bring him under suspicion.
Rufus took the plot very seriously. Agents had passed information to him about the conspiracy, and indeed contemporary sources tell us that informers were given an all-too-ready hearing by the alarmed king. At the end of May he marched an army rapidly north and took Earl Robert by surprise, trapping his men in various castles in Northumberland. After a close two-month blockade, the king ordered the earl’s principal castle of Newcastle to be stormed. Earl Robert meanwhile was besieged further north in his powerful fortress of Hamburgh, which the king did not attempt to attack directly but blockaded with siege works. Probably at some time in August, the earl attempted a break out in the king’s absence in the direction of Newcastle, which he hoped to recapture. But he underestimated the strength of the besieging army. He narrowly escaped capture and was pursued as far as Tynemouth priory, which he garrisoned and held desperately for a week, until wounds and lack of men allowed the royalist troops to force an entry. They caught the cornered earl in the priory church and dragged him out. He was sent south to the dungeon of Windsor castle to await the king’s justice.
Something of a witch-hunt followed the defeat of Earl Robert, in which a variety of aristocratic scores were paid off. The king was prepared to be brutal. He would have had Robert blinded after his capture had his wife and nephew not surrendered Bamburgh. This Nephew, Morel, then turned informer and gave the king the names of those who had sympathised with the revolt; Orderic says that Gilbert de Clare was another plotter who turned on his co-conspirators. Many barons had already been seized, the most significant being Eudes of Champagne. The Anglo-French barons, William of Eu and Ernulf de Hesdin (both formerly powerful in Gloucestershire and the March), were charged at court in the autumn of 1095 with treason and were obliged to defend themselves in a duel. Orderic later tells us that William of Eu’s accuser was his own brother-in-law, the earl of Chester, who hated William because he had flaunted his extramarital affairs and completely ignored his sister. The royal officer Geoffrey Baynard, perhaps another conspirator who saved himself by shopping others, was set to fight Count William of Eu, and defeated him in a duel in January 1096 at Salisbury. Rufus ordered his cousin to be blinded and castrated and the count died soon after his mutilation. The count’s steward and kinsman, William d’Audrey, was executed by hanging at the same time on the word of an informer. Ernulf de Hesdin’s champion was able to defeat his lord’s accuser, but Ernulf quit England in disgust at the barbaric and tyrannical proceedings he had witnessed, and joined the Crusade to witness a different sort of barbarism. Earl Robert and Count Eudes were dispossessed of their lands and spent the rest of their lives in prison. Earl Robert survived as a prisoner until around 1125, according to Orderic: he was not released by King Henry on his accession in 1100. The rest of the alleged conspirators were forced to clear themselves by the payment of huge fines.
The year 1095 shows William Rufus in a bad light. The querulous and vengeful part of his nature has been seen earlier in his shabby treatment of his brother Henry in 1087-88 and again in 1091. His treatment of Edgar atheling is also in marked contrast to the more tolerant and friendly way the English prince was tolerated and supported by Robert Curthose and Henry I. The way Rufus terrorised his aristocracy in the summer and autumn of 1095 is a different order of reaction to that of his father over a similar conspiracy twenty years before. His father’s strategy had been to identify the principal conspirator and deal with him with severity, but to allow the rest of the main rebels to get off with banishment and confiscation. Rufus was not so moderate and considered. His personal insecurity was the trigger for widespread and vicious terror at court, where he was willing to suspect almost anyone. The trend amongst historians lately has been to rehabilitate Rufus from what is seen as the unreasonable strictures on him by clerical writers annoyed at his unrepentant secularity. He is seen as a secular, chivalrous hero at odds with a narrow-minded Church establishment. What may have been forgotten is that his critics may have had other reasons to attack his moral reputation than those which they openly gave. Rufus had a dark and dangerous side, and it is clear that his clergy were intimidated by him: it was not for nothing that Anselm compared him famously to a rampaging bull. The abbess of Romsey, talking of her feelings about him in 1093, said she feared to meet Rufus, ‘who was a young king and untamed and wanted to do immediately whatever came into his head’.'* The merciless and harrowing scene as William d’Audrey was dragged off protesting his innocence through shocked courtiers to execution was the principal memory of most people of Rufus’s court - not its gaiety and luxury. When William of Malmesbury talked of Rufus’s resemblance to a Roman emperor, Nero might have been a better comparison than Augustus.
It was perhaps as well that other developments in 1095 overshadowed the dark and tyrannical deeds done at Rufus’s court. The West was being mobilised to ride to the aid of the Eastern emperor in his troubles with the Turks, and in November 1095 it was learned that one of the foremost of the campaign’s leaders was to be Duke Robert of Normandy. Robert needed a huge amount of money to finance his travels and his military retinue, and the willing supplier of his needs was William Rufus. The cost for the king was to be ?6666 13s. 4d. and the security he was offered and agreed in April 1096 was the duchy of Normandy itself until the duke should return, and its succession if he failed to come back. In the grim and fearful mood following the suppression of the Mowbray rebellion, bishops, abbots and nobility dug deep without protest to raise this great sum, passing on the cost to their dependants and peasants, themselves labouring under the difficulties of a bad harvest and fears of famine. In September 1096, the king crossed to Normandy with the barrels of silver pennies that contained the mortgage payment, and formally took control of the duchy from his brother, who left for the south of France and - as it turned out - eternal fame and glory. King and duke seem to have had an amicable meeting before they separated:
Duke Robert left his natural son Richard to his brother to take care of in his absence.
Seated in Rouen in state in September 1096, William Rufus found himself possessed of his father’s reunited realm. He stayed in the duchy until the beginning of April 1097, when he returned to England to lead another campaign against the Welsh. He was mostly to be found in Normandy for the remainder of his reign. Chronicles give little detail as to what he did in the duchy. The Norman nobility gave him little trouble, for in uniting kingdom and duchy he had removed a major source of internal problems. Most of the leaders of the aristocracy were already in his pocket before 1096 - notably the dynamic warriors Robert of Meulan and Robert de Belleme - and dangerous dissidents like Odo of Bayeux had left with the duke for Constantinople. Orderic tells us that Rufus occupied himself in reclaiming lands, rights and churches his brother had alienated. The king also allowed his officers to adopt the same harsh measures in pursuit of his advantage as they used in England. The king’s main task was to revive his father’s strategies for bolstering the frontiers of Normandy. This meant pursuing the Norman claim to control the whole Vexin, and labouring to regain control of Maine, which his brother had been unable to get back from the intruding Angevins and rebel Manceaux. In the case of the Vexin, liberal amounts of English money and fierce raiding convinced many of the local barons to favour Rufus over the now ageing and unpopular King Philip of France. Norman armies raided freely and almost unopposed in 1097 and 1098 into the regions of Paris and the forest of Rambouillet, much to Philip’s humiliation.
Rufus had less success in regaining influence in Maine. He was vigorously opposed by many of the Manceaux barons and their lord. Count Elias, none of whom were open to bribery. A major campaign, masterminded by Robert de Belleme, was mounted against Maine early in 1098, which succeeded in capturing Count Elias, who was put in prison at Bayeux. Moving an enormous host to take possession of Le Mans, Rufus was disconcerted to find that Fulk of Anjou had got there before him, with the connivance of the citizens, who wanted no Norman lord. The Angevin army was able to thwart Rufus’s attempt to take Le Mans, and the king had no choice but to withdraw, laying waste the county as he went. In the end Count Fulk of Anjou ironed out a deal in which Elias of Maine was released and restored to his castles, but Rufus was to be conceded Le Mans and the castles built in Maine by his father: a deal which the Norman chroniclers proclaimed to be a conquest of the county. Maine did not stay settled, and when Rufus returned to England at Easter (to April 1099) Count Elias once again took the field against the occupying Norman forces. He had sufficient success to bring the king back across the Channel to recover Le Mans and contain him. William did contain Elias, although he failed to defeat him, and was able to leave Maine to his lieutenants in July 1099. He was once again back in England by the end of September.
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