1066 - Andrew Bridgeford [92]
By the early 1080s Odo was at the height of his power and wealth. He would have done well to follow the example of his brother, Robert of Mortain. Robert contented himself with the role of an unimaginative servant in the shadow of William's triumph, and he benefited enormously in the process, with almost 800 manors to his name, from the moors of Yorkshire to the meadows of Cornwall, and a string of valuable castles to boot. One later account called Robert 'dense and slow-witted'8 but he was evidently shrewd enough to keep on the right side of the king. Odo, however, was not Robert. Greedy and energetic, arrogant and irrepressible, and with a thoroughly misplaced sense of his own importance, he forgot that he owed his position solely to William's grace and favour, and his downfall, when it came, was dramatic.
The precise cause can only be gleaned from later accounts;the matter was passed over circumspectly by contemporary chroniclers.9 It seems that Odo heard that a soothsayer in Rome had predicted that the next pope would be called 'Odo'. It did not take much to spark the flames of new ambition in Odo's heart. Thus he set about bribing his way to succeed the reformist and altogether more spiritually minded Pope Gregory VII, stuffing the wallets of pilgrims with letters and coins in order to smooth the way for a grand arrival at the papal see. Through agents, he acquired a splendid palace in Rome, furnishing it at great expense; and with lavish gifts and promises he secured the alliance of the leading Roman families. In England he assembled a large body of knights, and by 1082 they had moved with him to the Isle of Wight in readiness to depart. None of this seems to have had William's foreknowledge, and certainly not his approval. Gathering such a private army and removing it from the country was both a threat to the security of the land and an affront to William's authority. Odo, in any event, was meant to be one of those responsible for the government of England in William's absence. It was the final straw. The king was in Normandy when he learnt of Odo's plans. He raced back across the Channel and arrested Odo without warning on the Isle of Wight. The bishop'sunderlings were compelled to reveal the whereabouts of his treasure. Hidden in various secret places, wrote William of Malmesbury in about 1125, was such a quantity of gold that it 'surpassed anything that our age could imagine'. Many sacks of beaten gold were hauled out of rivers, where they had been secretly stashed away; and apparently those who already knew the whereabouts of Odo's secret hoards were able to make off with much of the treasure before the king's men arrived.
Odo protested that he was a clerk and a priest of God and that William had no right to condemn a bishop without papal authority. To this William replied, on the advice of Archbishop Lanfranc, that he was arresting not the Bishop of Bayeux but the Earl of Kent, subtly turning Odo's hitherto successful duality firmly against him. Wace, writing in the second half of the twelfth century, tells us that at times Odo had even coveted the throne of England, making discreet enquiries as to whether there was any precedent for a bishop to succeed to a kingdom.10 Whatever the truth in this, William now conceived an utter hatred for his half-brother. The arrogant and over-mighty Odo languished as William's prisoner in the dungeon of Rouen for the next four years.
In July 1087 King William was fatally injured while fighting at Mantes. His last years had not matched the achievements that preceded them; it would have been remarkable if they had. In the period between 1068 and 1075 William ruthlessly suppressed a series of revolts in England, of which the cruel harrying of the north in 1070 was the most notorious example, and he saw off the threat of invasion from abroad. By the mid-1070s Norman rule was firmly established across the country and William increasingly turned his attention to safeguarding his continental interests. The last