170

RETURN OF GODWIN.

[A.D. 1052. man," said one who knew him-that is, he was a man of inflexible purpose. There can be little doubt that his purpose was to possess England. Ingulphus says that he kept his views perfectly secret. Such men never make false confidences. His work was in great part done. Godwin and his sons, who represented the nationality of England, were banished. The king had a Norman court about him. Most of the few strongholds had Norman governors, and were garrisoned by Norman men-at-arms. The honest policy of the Anglo-Saxons did not repress foreign settlers, and there were Normans in every town. The nobles and the franklins, the burghers and the churls, were full feeders and late wassailers. They were a people to be first conquered, and then plundered.

The subjection of England was not quite so near its accomplishment as the condition of the country, in 1051, might have led William to expect. Godwin and his sons were banished. The old earl's domains were in the hands of the king, and of Odda the Norman; and Harold's earldom was bestowed upon Algar, the son of Leofric. But banishment and confiscation were of little avail, as long as those bold men could command the sympathies of their countrymen. In 1052, Harold and Leofwine sailed from Ireland, and entered the Severn. They landed, and defeated the opposing thanes, whose districts they ravaged. Godwin, in the meantime, had fitted out a fleet from Flanders, and found all the mariners of the coast, and all the people of his old earldom, ready to follow his bidding. Harold came round the coast, and joined his father at Portland. They seized upon the king's ships; they received hostages; they obtained supplies wherever they touched. At length they sailed up the Thames, and found the people of Southwark favourable to their cause. The king had ships in the river, and an army near at hand. But the disposition of the people was too manifest to permit him now to resist the demand that Godwin and his sons should be restored to their possessions and their dignities. Where the great thoroughfare from the west to the east of the most populous city of the earth-a road all too narrow for the daily crush of the thousands who pour along it is now deafening with the din of never-resting wheels, then, upon that pebbly Strand, with field and forest behind, broke the silent wave of the tidal river; and there, were drawn up, in order of battle, the forces of the insurgent chiefs. Their demand was not unreasonable, on the part of men who had a superiority of physical force, and whose cause was so popular. The king at length yielded. Then the Normans, who were with the army and the king, hastily fled. The witan was assembled; and decreed the restoration of the earls, and held them innocent of the acts and designs which had been imputed to them. The greater number of the foreign advisers of Edward were declared outlaws. The joy of the Anglo-Saxon race was unbounded. They had achieved a great triumph with little bloodshed.

Within a year after his restoration the energetic and sagacious Godwin died. The circumstances of his death have been related by the Norman historians, so as to revive the old imputation that he was the murderer of Prince Alfred. The king was banqueting at Windsor. This was not the Windsor which is now so rich with historical associations-not "the proud keep," which looks down upon the valley of the Thames, with "its kindred and coeval towers"-but the present Old Windsor, a royal house, in the

A.D. 1052.]

DEATH OF GODWIN.

171

fertile plain skirted by the river, where the Saxon kings went forth to meet their people in Runemed, the Council-meadow. At the king's banquet sat Godwin, in the house where his daughter was again the queen. Edward, in a dispute, hinted that the earl was accessary to the death of his brother Alfred. He stood up to aver his innocence, and fell speechless to the earth. Other writers say, that he invoked Heaven to choke him by the bread which he was about to swallow, if that guilt were his; and that he was choked.

The death of Godwin was, we may believe, a public calamity. There was wanting a strong hand to direct the central power in its due control of separate authorities. The great earls were bringing back the country to that condition of misrule which existed before the days of Egbert and Alfred. The earls were no longer the ministers of the king. The Danish "jarl” had superseded the Saxon "ealdorman ;" and the wearers of the new title were really district kings. The quarrel between Saxon and Norman had been laid. aside for a season; but the ambitious chieftains were quarrelling amongst themselves. We cannot follow the minute historians in their narratives of the contests between the house of Leofric and the house of Godwin. When Harold vacated the earldom of East Anglia it was bestowed upon Algar, the son of Leofric. He was soon expelled upon a charge of treason. He fled to Griffith, king of Wales, and their united forces ravaged Herefordshire. Harold drove them back. Without any ostensible cause the outlawry of Algar was reversed. He was a second time banished, but he then recovered his possessions by force of arms. Tostig, the brother of Harold, had obtained Northumbria, upon the death of Siward. But he was too violent an oppressor, and his land was not tranquil. Edward might well look with dismay to the time when he should no longer be a barrier, however feeble, to the ruin which would come out of rival factions. There was a legitimate heir to the throne in Hungary-Edward, the son of the brave Ironside. He was induced to come to England, and he came with a wife and three children. His death very soon followed his arrival. His child, Edgar, was now the last male of the race of Cerdic. There was little hope of a legitimate

succession.

R

RE

K

朵

NIN

Silver Penny of Edward the Confessor.

We are now reaching a point of history in which the narratives greatly vary, according to the national prejudices of the relators. The story, as it is told by the Norman chroniclers, has a coherence which gives it the semblance, if not the reality, of truth. There is, moreover, a picture-history of the events which we are about to relate. The famous Bayeux Tapestry, a roll of brownish linen-cloth worked with coloured thread, with figures and letters perfectly bright and distinct, is a roll twenty inches broad and two hundred and fourteen feet in length. The various figures have no perspective; but it has the artistical merit of constantly preserving the resemblance of individuals and classes. The same figure always represents Duke William; and the same moustached warriors always represent the Saxons. Of the antiquity of this remarkable record there is little doubt; and it has been said of it, “If the Bayeux Tapestry be not history of the first class, it is perhaps something

172

HAROLD.

[A.D. 1065. better." It is, however, a Norman history; and illustrates the circumstances of the most important period of our annals as they presented themselves to the Norman mind. We must receive these relations, whether of chronicle or picture, with due caution. In the year 1065 Harold is practically the foremost man of England. He has won the king to the endurance of his power, and has almost commanded his confidence and affection. That he was ambitious, to the utmost reach of ambition, is sufficiently manifest. His bravery and military talent were undoubted. He was the idol of the Saxon race. He had subdued the British people to his fealty by the terror of his arms. The Northumbrians were, he might believe, unequal to contend with him in any great contest for supremacy. That he looked to the crown of England on the death of Edward was a natural result of his character and his position. He had the energy of the warrior, but he had also the forethought of the politician. It is said that he kept Edward the Atheling from the presence of his uncle; that he procured the banishment of Algar. We would not speak unkindly of Harold. He had great and noble qualities. He was formed for the re-regeneration of his countrymen, by upholding them against a foreign yoke, and by defending them against domestic oppression. We hear of the licentiousness of his brother Sweyn, and the tyranny of his brother Tostig, but no voice is lifted against Harold. To be merely brave and generous; to assert his pre-eminence over brute courage and sordid craft by the impulses of his own nature, was to put himself in danger. He became, at the court of Edward, the supple friend. He was gentle and submissive to the weak master over whom his father held a stern government. When Wales was at his mercy in 1065, “he ordered a great building to be erected in the country of the Welsh, at a place which is called Portaseith [near Chepstow]; and many things for eating and drinking to be there collected, that his lord, King Edward, might be enabled to stay there sometimes for the sake of hunting." * It is tolerably clear that he was cautiously working upon the mind of the king to make him his successor. Edward, even with his infirmity of purpose, would see the danger of bringing a ruler upon England, who would be as hateful to them as the courtiers he had been compelled to drive away. He would see the almost equal danger of raising up one great noble to the sovereign dignity, whilst others, almost as powerful, were passed by. But the last thing he would do, would be to send a message to William of Normandy, by Harold of Wessex, that William was to fill the throne of England. Yet this message, some of the Norman chroniclers say, he so sent. The Anglo-Saxon authorities are silent in the matter. Other authorities state that Edward warned Harold of the danger of putting himself into the power of the Norman duke. Harold's ostensible reason for going, was to redeem his young brother Ulnoth, and his nephew, who had both been confided to William, when Godwin gave them as hostages upon the conclusion of his revolt. They had been detained in Normandy, though not ill-treated. The motive for Harold's journey was natural and honourable; and he might not be unwilling to measure his intellectual strength with one who was marked as his rival. Fear was unknown to him. The ingenious historian of the Bayeux Tapestry had as much adroitness in the exhibition of minute circumstances, as have the picture

* Roger de Hoveden.

4.D. 1065.]

HAROLD IN NORMANDY.

173

chroniclers of our own times. We see in that lady's work, whether of palace or monastery, a king sitting in a chair of state, over whose head is written, "Edwardus Rex." He is addressing two persons. This is Harold, it is held, with a companion, taking leave of the king. We next see Harold, as the inscription testifies, on the road to his manor of Bosham, in Sussex. He rides, as becomes a great duke, with his falcon on his hand, and his dogs leaping before him, and horse

men in his train. He next enters a church, not unmindful of one great duty. But the manners would not be Saxon, if a picture did not show him, or his followers, at a banquet. He goes on ship-board; but his dog is under his arm, and his hawk is on his wrist. His ship is then coming to anchor. The crew are impatiently gazing, and a sailor is on the

mast. They have been driven by a tempest on the coast near the mouth of the Somme.

Guy, the Count of Ponthieu, is lord of that territory. He has no personal enmity to Harold; but he has a strong desire to possess himself of his equipments-his armour and his jewels, his embroidered mantles and his wellstocked purses. The count, too, will have ransom for his prisoner; and he shuts him up in a fortress near Montreuil. All this the lord of Ponthieu did, according to the feudal laws of hospitality. Harold had little hope of immediate escape; but he found a ransomer in Duke William. Upon his release from Montreuil, Harold goes on to Rouen. There he is welcomed with the most lavish generosity. The secret rivals become the warmest friends. Harold followed William to his war with Conan, a count of Brittany; and William honoured him with splendid gifts of arms and horses. These things the chronicles and the tapestry duly record. The duke frankly promised the surrender of Ulnoth and the son of Sweyn. It was a time of feasting and pageantry, of dangerous battle and more dangerous tranquillity. In that noble city, where the Englishman delights to gaze upon the quaint gables that have stood through many generations, and to believe that some of his Norman kings might have rested beneath these roofs, or worshipped in those churches, whose grandeur and beauty are scarcely surpassed by his own cathedrals-there, where the quays of the Seine are loaded with the cottonbags of America, and the chimneys of the factories send their heavy smoke over its green islets,-was Harold led by his host in stately procession with knight and bishop, or sailed with him in his pleasure-barge on the broad river to the sound of flute or sackbut. The brawling revel of the Saxon palaces was not there. Ladies sat not long, as at the coarse Saxon feasts, amidst the ribaldry of the drinking-horn. But when a temperate repast was quickly ended, in flower-garden or in tapestried hall the lute was heard; and the romancer sang of the deeds of Roland and Charlemagne, whilst warriors whispered of love to not unwilling ears. In such scenes, say the chroniclers,

174

HAROLD RETURNS TO ENGLAND.

(A.D. 1065.

and more emphatically the poets, was Harold subdued by the conqueror's fair daughter, Adeliza.*

Robert Brunne, in his Chronicle, says of William and Harold, "tales together they told, ilk on a good palfrey." William would tell of some knightly feat; and then compare it with the courage and humanity of the son of Godwin, who saved the lives of Norman soldiers, as they were sinking in the quicksands of the river of Couesnon, when they crossed together to fight in Brittany. Harold would speak of Norman chivalry; and of his own pride at having received his spurs from the hand of William. They talked of England; and the duke said that when he and Edward were living under the same roof in Normandy, Edward had affirmed that if ever he became king of England, William should be his successor. The timid man of forty was making this promise to the bold boy of fourteen, if we are to believe the Norman chronicles. William then asked whether Harold would support him in realising that promise. The Saxon was in his power. These were not

times when ambition was easily surrendered to conscientiousness. Harold assented. But his assent was to be more solemnly enforced. He was to swear. He did swear. But he swore with a mental reservation. The Bayeux Tapestry shows in what manner he did swear. The duke sits upon his chair of state, with his sword in his hand. Before him stands Harold, between two ornamental pedestals, upon the top of which he places his fingers. He is swearing upon common reliquaries, as he thought; such as parish priests in England kept upon their altars, to command the faith of ignorant boors. He swears. But under the reliquaries are hidden, by a cloth of gold, the bones of saints and holy martyrs. William then commands the cloth to be removed; and Harold turns pale when he knows the supersanctity of the oath which he had taken. This strange story is in perfect accordance with the character of the age in which these men lived. It argues nothing against the peculiar narrowness of his mind that could conceive of this method of making an oath sacred; or of his impiety who would shudder at the force of an obligation, in the presence of dust and ashes, which would sit lightly upon him if simply made in the presence of the Most High. But it shows how far true religion was separated from the superstitions that passed for religion; and how the strongest minds were then subjected to influences which still remain, in some modified form or other, to prostrate the weakest.

William of Normandy.

Harold, at length, returned to England. In that voyage across the narrow sea he had lost much. He had lost his future freedom of action. He would be false to his oath; or he would surrender his nationality to a crafty and "The Eve of

*The scene and its manners are beautifully set forth in Mr. Taylor's poem, the Conques!."