Edward, son of Ethelred, last visible scion of the old royal West Saxon stock, seems to have succeeded, on Harthacnut’s death, without opposition, to the throne of his forefathers. If the most powerful man in the kingdom, Earl Godwine, had any reason to fear the accession of the brother of the murdered Alfred, he determined to run all risks, and by actively co-operating in the new king’s election to establish a claim on his gratitude which might outweigh the remembrance of the deeds done by the zealous adherent of Harold Harefoot. The large influence of Godwine in the king’s counsels did not imply, as it would have done some years before, the continuance in power of the king’s mother. On the contrary, in the very next year after Edward’s accession, and seven months after his coronation at Winchester, the king, with his three most powerful subjects, Godwine, Leofric and Siward, rode from Gloucester to Winchester (November 16, 1043), and coming suddenly upon “the Lady” Emma, deprived her of all the vast treasures that she had accumulated, “her lands, her gold, her silver and her precious things untellable,” and ordained that she should live thereafter, unimprisoned indeed, but deprived of all her ancient state, in the royal city of Winchester. Thus she lived on for eight years longer, till her death on March 14, 1052; but in all the stirring scenes which preceded that event the busy, managing “Old Lady”238 seems to have taken no part. Her party, if she had one, struck down by that hasty ride of the king and his three nobles, never after raised its head. The reason assigned by the chronicler for this harsh procedure toward the widow and mother of two kings, seems to bear the stamp of truth. “This was done,” he says, “because she was, before, very hard on the king her son, and she did less for him than he would, both before he was king and afterward,” meaning no doubt both before and after his association with Harthacnut. In other words, the queen-dowager, who evidently disliked her first husband and gave all her pent-up love to her second, had become so complete a Dane at heart that she would not lift a finger to help the surviving son of Ethelred, and for this unfriendliness she was sorely punished when he had power to avenge his wrongs.

Soon after Emma’s downfall, the place of “Lady” in the palace of Winchester was again filled, by the marriage of Edward to Edith, daughter of Earl Godwine (January 23, 1045). It was a marriage only in name; for the king, to the admiration of his monastic biographers, retained through life the virgin purity of his saintliness; but the daughter of Godwine undoubtedly exercised some influence on the counsels of her royal spouse, though in what direction that influence was exerted is one of the not fully solved riddles of this difficult reign. The reign is difficult, chiefly because of the singular nullity of the sovereign’s character. Religious and kindly natured, Edward (who received after his death the half canonisation conveyed in the title of “Confessor”) seems to have had scarcely a will or mind of his own. He is always under the dominion of some stronger nature, Saxon earl, or Norman bishop, or wedded queen: and it is rarely possible to discover what were his own true sympathies and antipathies. We have constantly to guess to which of his councillors we must attribute the praise or the blame of the actions which were nominally his own.

To avoid confusion, it will be well to describe the events of this reign under four heads: foreign relations; internal troubles; wars with the Scots; and wars with the Welsh.

To us, who judge after the event, the dissolution of the splendid Anglo-Scandinavian Empire of Canute seems a natural and inevitable consequence of the death of its founder; but in all likelihood it was not so regarded by contemporary observers. Both Magnus of Norway and Sweyn of Denmark may well have aspired to rule England as heirs or quasi-heirs of Canute the Rich, and in order to guard against their attacks, the new King of England was compelled to keep a large fleet in readiness, which was generally assembled at Sandwich.

Magnus of Norway was a bastard son of St. Olaf’s, whose very name bore witness to the irritable temper of his father. His mother, Alfhild, when in travail, was brought nigh unto death, and when the child was born the by-standers were for long in doubt whether it were alive. But the king was asleep, had given strict orders that he should never be roused from his slumbers, and none, not even his favourite minstrel Sigvat, dared to disobey. Fearing lest the child, dying unbaptised, should become “the devil’s man,” a priest hastily baptised it, the minstrel standing god-father, and giving it the name Magnus in honour of Carolus Magnus, “the king whom he knew to be the best man in all the world”. (And this was full two centuries after the death of Charlemagne.) The anger of the awakened king, when he learned what had happened during his slumbers, was charmed away by the smooth-tongued Sigvat. Thus did the name Magnus enter not only into the dynastic lists, but into the common family nomenclature of Norway and Iceland.

The child Magnus, grown to man’s estate and succeeding to his father’s kingdom, vindicated the unconscious prophecy of his name, and was for a time the greatest monarch of the North. Whereas in the previous generation, Denmark had conquered Norway, it now seemed probable that Norway would conquer Denmark, so hard was the king of the latter country pressed by Magnus. This Danish king was Sweyn, not, of course, the son of Canute, who had died some years before, but Sweyn Estrithson, son of the murdered Ulf (of the overthrown chess-board) and of Canute’s sister, Estrith. As Ulf’s sister was Gytha, wife of Earl Godwine, Godwine’s many sons and daughters were of course first cousins to the King of Denmark.

In the year 1047 Sweyn Estrithson, vigorously attacked by Magnus, sent an earnest petition to England that fifty ships might be despatched to his succour. “But this seemed an ill counsel to all people, because Magnus had great sea-power, nor was it adopted.” Unhelped, Sweyn was expelled from his kingdom. The Danes had to pay money to their conquerors—a new and bitter experience for them—and to own Magnus for their king. There, however, the career of Norwegian conquest stopped. In that very year, Magnus, when riding through the forest, was thrown violently by his shying steed against the trunk of a tree and received an injury from which he died. His uncle, Harold Hardrada, who succeeded him, and who will be heard of again in the history of England, could not prevent Denmark from reverting to its former ruler, Sweyn Estrithson, who founded there a dynasty which endured for 300 years.

Though schemes of conquest, such as are attributed to Magnus, died with him, there was some renewal of the old piratical raids. In 1048 two Norse buccaneers came with twenty-five ships to Sandwich, were repelled from Thanet, but successfully raided Essex, and sailing thence to “Baldwin’s land” (Flanders), found there a ready market for the fruits of their cruel industry. The shelter given by Flanders to these and other depredators, induced Edward to acquiesce the more willingly in a proposal made to him by his kinsman, the Emperor Henry III., that he should help to guard the narrow seas against Baldwin, who had broken out into rebellion against the empire, had demolished the palace reared by Charlemagne at Nimeguen, and had done many other ill turns to his sovereign lord. To punish these despites Henry had gathered a large army, and Edward helped him by keeping guard with a fleet at Sandwich. No naval engagement followed, but the pressure thus effected by land and sea was effectual, and before long “the emperor had of Baldwin all that he would”.

The Emperor Henry III., who thus drew Edward into the circle of European politics, was chiefly memorable for the beneficial influence which he exerted on the papal court, procuring the election of bishops of high character, generally Germans, instead of the dissolute lads who had been too often of late intruded into the papacy. One of the best of Henry’s German popes was Bruno of Toul, who ruled as Leo IX. from 1048 to 1054. To him in the year 1049 Edward, by the advice of his witan, sent as ambassadors the Bishops of Sherborne and Worcester, to pray for absolution from a vow of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, which he had made in his years of poverty and apparently hopeless exile. The Witenagemot represented to him with good reason that the fulfilment of such a vow would now be inconsistent with his higher duties to his country and his subjects; and the aid of the pope was sought to cut the casuistic knot. In the following year the two bishops returned, bringing the papal absolution from the vow of pilgrimage, coupled, it is said, with an injunction to build or restore a monastery in honour of St. Peter, and fill it with monks who should spend their days in prayer and psalmody. The condition was one in itself delightful to the heart of the pious king. From the unfulfilled vow of pilgrimage, from the journey of the two bishops to Rome, and from the reply of the venerable Leo, sprang that noble sanctuary, the name of which will endure as long as men speak the English language, the great Abbey of Westminster.

The internal history of England during the twenty-two years of Edward’s reign is chiefly a record of the struggles of two or three great nobles for supremacy in his councils. It is true that some measures were taken for lightening the burdens of the people. “In the year 1049,” says the Abingdon chronicler, “King Edward paid off nine ships and they went away with their ships and all: and five ships remained, and the king promised them twelve months’ pay. In the next year he paid off all the shipmen.” The result is told us by his brother chronicler: “In 1052 [1051] King Edward took off the army tax (here-gyld) which King Ethelred formerly instituted. It was thirty-nine years since he began it: and this gyld oppressed the English people during all that time. This tax ever claimed priority over all the other gylds by which the people were in various ways oppressed.” As has been pointed out,239 the tax here spoken of is not the Danegeld, a levy of money to be paid as blackmail to foreign invaders, but it is here-gyld, “army tax,” or rather, in strictness, “navy tax,” a levy of money to be paid to the naval defenders of the country, an imposition therefore which may be fittingly compared to the ship money of the Middle Ages. But the previously quoted entry concerning the exactions in the reign of Harthacnut shows how easily the here-gyld might be increased till it became an intolerable burden, and we can thus the better understand the joy of the nation at its removal.

The position of Edward appears during the whole of his reign to have been not unlike that of the later kings of the two first Frankish dynasties. If he were not a mere roi fainéant, a puppet in the hands of an all-powerful Mayor of the Palace, he was at any rate like a Carolingian Louis or Lothair, with large theoretical claims, with little real power, and quite overshadowed by a few great earls, who had not indeed yet made their offices hereditary; who were still in theory removable officers of the crown; but who ruled wide provinces, raised considerable armies among their own house-carls, and above all, possessed wealth probably much exceeding any that could be found in the treasure-house of the king. One of these great French nobles, Hugh the Great, had so played his cards as to prepare the way for the elevation of his own son to the actual seat of royalty, when the time should come for its relinquishment by the descendants of Charlemagne. It seems not improbable that the example of Hugh the Great was much before the eyes of Godwine, and that through life he kept steadily in view the possibility that sons issuing from his loins might one day sit upon the English throne, now after five centuries about to be left vacant by the dying dynasty of Cerdic.

Godwine, Leofric and Siward: these were the three greatest names in the English Witan when Edward came to the throne, and all three should be still memorable to Englishmen; Godwine, by reason of his great place in history, and the other two by reason of their renown in English poetry; Leofric being commemorated in the Godiva of Tennyson, and Siward in the Macbeth of Shakespeare.

The kingdom of England, imperfectly welded together by Egbert and Alfred, and since then modified by the large infusion of Scandinavian blood into its northern and eastern districts, showed throughout this period a strong tendency to split up again into its three old divisions, Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex. Northumbria, as we have seen, was reconstituted as one earldom by the bloody deed of Siward the Strong, who slew his uncle Eadwulf, and so joined Bernicia to Deira. A strong, stern, unscrupulous Dane, whose martial character is attested by the well-known story of his death (hereafter to be related), he nevertheless seems to have ruled well his great province and was apparently a loyal subject of King Edward.240

Leofric, son of Leofwine, was sprung, as has been said, from a family which for more than two centuries had been eminent in Mercia, and it is probable that he and his offspring bore with unconcealed dislike the overshadowing competition of the great upstart house of Godwine. He is often spoken of as Earl of Mercia, and perhaps had some sort of pre-eminence over other earls in that district, but his immediate jurisdiction seems to have been confined to the three counties of Cheshire, Shropshire and Staffordshire. Godwine’s nephew by marriage, Beorn, son of Ulf and Estrith, was quartered on his eastern flank in Derby, Nottingham, Leicester and Lincoln. Sweyn, Godwine’s eldest son, ruled the Mercian counties of Hereford, Gloucester and Oxford, besides a part of Wessex. Well might the proud Mercian noble feel that his title was but a mockery, while such large slices of Mercia were given to his rivals. Both Leofric and his wife Godiva were munificent benefactors to the Church. Whatever may be the foundation for the beautiful legend of Godiva’s absolute surrender of herself for the lightening of her people’s burdens, we certainly should not, from his record in history, have inferred that her husband Leofric was an avaricious or close-fisted lord.

We turn to the earldoms which throughout the greater part of Edward’s reign were subject to the family of Godwine. He himself held, of course, that great and enriching office, the earldom of Wessex, which had been long ago conferred upon him by Canute, and which practically included all the lands south of the Thames; excepting that Somerset and Berkshire appear to have been carved out of them, to form what in later times would have been called an appanage for his eldest son, Sweyn, in addition to the three Mercian counties which, as we have already seen, were included in his earldom. His second son, Harold, called Earl of the East Angles, ruled not only the two strictly East Anglian shires, but also Huntingdon, Cambridge and Essex, which probably included Middlesex.241 The three sons who came next in order, Tostig, Gyrth and Leofwine, were but boys at the time of Edward’s accession and were as yet unprovided with earldoms; but even so, it is evident if we look at the map, that more than half, and that the fairest half, of England was subject to Earl Godwine and his family.

Of the character of this man, certainly the most powerful and probably the ablest Englishman of his time, very varying judgments were formed, even in his lifetime; and after his death the antipathy of the Norman and the regretful sympathy of the Saxon writers, naturally led to very divergent estimates concerning it. Nor is the controversy even yet ended; for the enthusiastic championship of the great historian of the Norman Conquest has not unnaturally provoked an equally vigorous storm of censure. To the present writer he does not appear a high-minded patriot, nor yet, considering the age in which he lived, a detestable villain. Hard, grasping, capable, remorseless, intent on the aggrandisement of his family, and by no means successful in forming their characters, he nevertheless may be credited with a certain amount of love for his country, and for the Anglo-Danish race which now peopled it. Himself English by birth and Danish by marriage and by all his early official training, he was determined that, if he could help it, no third element should be imported by the Norman sympathies of the king, to oppress the common people and to snatch away the prizes of government from the nobles. It is when he risks life and dearly loved treasure in maintaining this contention, that he seems to us almost a patriot.

The first shock to the stately edifice of Godwine’s power was given by the disordered passions of his eldest son. In 1046, after a successful campaign in Wales, “when Sweyn was on his homeward journey, he ordered that the Abbess of Leominster [named Edgiva] should be fetched unto him, and he had her as long as he pleased and afterwards let her go home”. Such is the short dry record by the chronicler, of a deed which shocked the not too sensitive conscience of the eleventh century, and which appears to have led to the dissolution of the nunnery of Leominster, the outlawry of Sweyn and the allotment of his earldom to others. It seems, however, from later allusions to the matter, that it was not the forcible abduction but the lascivious seduction of a consecrated virgin of which the son of Godwine was guilty. Sweyn betook himself in 1047 to that refuge of all English outlaws, “Baldwin’s land,” and from thence after a time went to Denmark, where by some crime or immorality of the nature of which we are not informed, he “ruined himself with the Danes”. In 1049 he returned to England, and began to hover about the coasts of Kent and Sussex, off which the king was lying with a fleet, operating against Baldwin of Flanders and watching the proceedings of another outlaw, Osgod Clapa. This man, who had once been in high favour at the English court, had held the office of Staller or Chamberlain, and had been honoured by the presence, the ill-omened presence, of Harthacnut, at his daughter’s marriage feast, but had now fallen into disgrace, and led for some years the life of a buccaneer, imitating the ravages of the old Vikings and requiring the manœuvres of a royal fleet to keep him at bay. The Chronicle has much to tell us about Osgod Clapa’s and his wife’s movements, but he possesses for us no political significance, and we have only to note his death which happened “suddenly in his bed,” as the chronicler tells us, in the year 1054.

Returning to the tempestuous career of the outlawed Sweyn, we find that his petition for forgiveness was at first rejected by the king, influenced as it was supposed by the criminal’s brother and cousin, Harold and Beorn, who were averse to surrendering his forfeited earldom. Then some change seems to have come over the more generous Beorn, who, on Sweyn’s entreaty that he would intercede for him to the king, consented to do so, and set off with him to march along the Sussex shore, making for the king’s station at Sandwich (1049). Many were the oaths which Sweyn had sworn to him, and “he thought that for his kinship’s sake he would not deceive him.” Thus beguiled he fared forward, putting himself ever more completely in the outlaw’s power; and even when his cousin proposed that instead of journeying eastwards to Sandwich, they should go westwards to the little town of Bosham, a favourite haunt of the Godwine tribe, off which his ships were lying at anchor, the unsuspecting earl consented. “For my sailors,” said Sweyn, “will desert me, unless I show myself speedily among them.” But when they had reached the place and Sweyn proposed that they should go together on board of his ship, Beorn, whose suspicions were by this time aroused, stoutly refused to do so. Resistance was now too late. Sweyn’s sailors forcibly laid hold of Beorn, threw him into the boat, and tightly bound him. They then rowed him to the ship, spread sail, and ran before the wind to Exmouth, where the prisoner was slain and buried in a deep grave, from which his friends afterwards lifted his body, that they might carry him to Winchester and bury him beside his uncle, King Canute. After such an atrocious and dastardly crime, one would have expected that Sweyn, if he could not be laid hold of and brought to justice, would at least have been banished from the society of all honourable men. And for the moment, though he escaped as usual to Baldwin’s land and dwelt at Bruges, he was solemnly proclaimed a nithing or vile person (the most ignominious term in the Teutonic vocabulary) by the whole host, with the king, his brother-in-law, at their head. Yet with that fatuous facility in wrong-doing which seems to mark the conduct of all leading Englishmen in this bewildering century, by the mediation of Ealdred, Bishop of Worcester (afterwards Archbishop of York, and by no means the worst of the ecclesiastics of the period), Sweyn was brought back from his exile in 1050, his outlawry reversed, and his old earldom, which involved the rule over five counties, restored once more to his own keeping. The only thing that can be said in his favour is that he does seem to have felt some remorse for his many crimes. When next year he shared the general downfall of his house and was once more driven into banishment, instead of scheming for his return and restoration to power, he went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, visited the sacred shrines, and died on his homeward journey at Constantinople (Michaelmas, 1052).

The history of the Godwine family is now modified by events at King Edward’s court, which gave them the opportunity of assuming the character of national champions against the dominion of foreigners. We hear a good deal about the Norman favourites who flocked to Edward’s court, but it is not easy to ascertain how numerous these were, or how far a king, all whose nearest relations were Normans, and who had spent the best years of his life in a foreign land, exceeded the limits of moderation and good policy in bestowing lands and offices on his friends of foreign birth. Among these were the kinsfolk of his own sister, Godiva, whom it would be hard to blame him for having invited to his court, though one of them, her second husband, Eustace, Count of Boulogne, when he came sorely offended the Saxons by his insolent demeanour. Another, Ralph, sometimes called Ralph the Timid, Godiva’s son by her first husband, was entrusted by his uncle with the earldom of the Magasaetas, corresponding to the modern county of Hereford. A feebly arrogant man, he too probably added not a little to Edward’s unpopularity, and he appears to have gathered round him a number of his countrymen, whom the Chronicle calls sometimes Frenchmen (Frencysce) and sometimes Welshmen.242 These men seem to have been already anticipating the baronial oppressions of a later century, and building their strongholds to overawe the common folk. Of one such fortress the patriotic chronicler writes that the foreigners had erected a castle in Herefordshire in the district of Earl Sweyn, and there wrought all the harm and disgrace that they could do to the king’s men.

The ecclesiastically minded Edward, however, seems to have chosen his chief friends from among the Franco-Norman churchmen whom he had known in his youth. Chief among these was Robert Champart, formerly Abbot of Jumièges on the Lower Seine, whom Edward made Bishop of London near the beginning of his reign, and who, according to an often-quoted story, obtained such an ascendency over the feeble mind of his patron that “if he said that a black crow was white, the king would rather trust his mouth than his own eyes”. Owing to the feeble health of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert of London probably had from the first a controlling voice in the affairs of the southern province, and when at last, in October, 1050, the aged Eadsige was gathered to his fathers, Edward desired to make his favourite ecclesiastic archbishop. There was, however, an undercurrent of opposition; the chapter met in haste without the royal mandate and elected one of their number, Aelfric, archbishop. The monastic candidate was a relation of Earl Godwine’s, who put forth all his influence to procure the confirmation of his election, but in vain. The Norman’s power over the king was too great; at the Witenagemot held in London at Midlent, 1051, Robert Champart was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. He went speedily to Rome and returned with the indispensable pallium. This rebuff to Earl Godwine was perhaps the first indication of the precarious tenure of his power. At any rate from this time onward, if not before, the influence of the king’s clerical master was thrown heavily into the scale against him.

Such apparently was the state of affairs at the English court, and such the smouldering fires of jealousy and distrust, when in the summer of 1051 Eustace of Boulogne came on a visit to his brother-in-law. The visit paid, he and his retinue took the homeward road through Kent, and after baiting at Canterbury, made for Dover as their resting-place for the night. When the little troop were still some miles short of Dover, he and his men dismounted, put on their coats of mail and thus rode on, martial and menacing. When they reached Dover they showed at once their intention to take up their quarters wherever it pleased them. They were probably not without some legal justification for what seems to us a somewhat high-handed procedure, for Count Eustace was son-in-law and brother-in-law of English kings, and royal personages in the west of Europe seem to have possessed in the eleventh century some rights of compulsory hospitality similar to those of which we hear so much in later centuries under the name of “purveyance”. It was therefore probably not so much the claim itself as the insolent manner in which it was urged by armed foreigners, which exasperated the citizens of Dover. A quarrel arose between one of the Frenchmen and the householder upon whom he was quartered. The householder received a wound which he repaid by a mortal blow. Thereupon the count and his men mounted their horses, and attacked the householder, whom they slew on his own hearthstone. A general mêlée followed, the result of which was that twenty of the citizens were slain, and nineteen of the strangers, many of whom were also wounded. Count Eustace, with the survivors of his train, made his way back to the king, and in angry tones, concealing his own followers’ misconduct, called for vengeance on the men of Dover. Hereupon Earl Godwine was summoned to the royal presence and ordered to execute the king’s wrath against the citizens. This command he absolutely refused to obey. The men of Dover belonged to the county which he had longest ruled and with which he was most closely connected,243 and he would have nothing to do with that which he considered to be their unjust chastisement. It was then decided (apparently under the Norman archbishop’s influence) that a Witenagemot should be held at Gloucester, at which the old charge of complicity in the death of the Etheling Alfred was to be brought against Godwine. The great earl, moreover, had at this time on foot an expedition against the “Wealas” (that is Frenchmen), who were distressing the inhabitants of Herefordshire, from the castle which they had there erected. That matter, and the counter-accusations brought by the “Wealas” against Godwine, were apparently to be also discussed at the Gloucester meeting of the witan.

Things seemed to be gathering up towards a civil war, in which Godwine and his sons would have had against them, not only the king and his French favourites, men like Robert of Jumièges and Ralph the Timid, but also Siward of Northumberland and Leofric of Mercia, who were hastening with their armies to the help of the king. This last fact seems to show that the tyrannical conduct of Edward’s Norman kinsmen was not the sole question at issue in this summer of 1051. Jealousy and dread of the overmastering power of the house of Godwine also had their share in the great debate, nor perhaps were the old rivalries between the one southern and the two northern kingdoms altogether absent. It seemed as though a collision between the fyrds of Northumbria and Mercia, and those of Wessex and East Anglia was inevitable; but even at the eleventh hour wiser counsels prevailed. To some of the leaders on the king’s side the thought occurred, that the impending battle would be a grievous mistake, “inasmuch as almost all that England had of noblest was in the two armies, and a battle between them would but bring one common ruin and leave the land open to invasion by the enemies of both”. On Godwine’s side also there was great unwillingness “to be compelled to stand against their royal lord”. Thus a peace—as it proved only a precarious peace—was patched up, and all subjects in dispute were referred to a great national meeting of the witan, which was to be held in London at Michaelmas.

By consenting to this delay, and by changing the venue from Gloucester to London, the Godwine party seem to have thrown away their chances. The earl and his sons came to his dwelling at Southwark with a great multitude of West Saxons, “but his army ever waned, and all the more the longer he stayed”. The magic of the king’s name was still too mighty to be resisted. The thegns who were in subjection to Harold were told to transfer their allegiance to the king himself; Sweyn the seducer was once more outlawed; the negotiations soon became a mere desperate appeal from the Godwine party for hostages and safe conduct, and at last they received the royal ultimatum: “Five days in which to clear out of the country, or judgment against you,” probably on the old charge of complicity in the murder of Alfred, combined with new charges of treachery against the king. Hereupon the whole family took their departure. Godwine with his wife and three of his sons, Sweyn, Tostig and Gyrth, went to the patrimonial Bosham, “shoved out their ships, betook them beyond sea, and sought the protection of Baldwin, with whom they abode the whole winter”. There was especial fitness in those exiles seeking shelter in “Baldwin’s land,” for immediately before the downfall of the Godwine family Tostig had become the bridegroom of Judith, sister of Baldwin V., the reigning Count of Flanders. The other two sons, Harold and Leofwine, rode hard to Bristol, vainly pursued by Ealdred, Bishop of Worcester, whom the king had ordered to capture them. Much buffeted by storms, they beat out from Avonmouth, and at last arrived on the coast of Ireland, where they spent the winter as guests of Diarmid, King of Leinster. To complete the ruin of the family, Godwine’s daughter Edith, “who had been hallowed to Edward as queen, was forsaken by him; all her property in land, in gold, in silver and in all things was taken from her,” and she was committed to the care of her husband’s half-sister, the Abbess of Wherwell in Hampshire. Well may the chronicler who records these events say: “It must have seemed a wonderful thing to any man that was in England, if any man had said beforehand that so it should happen, inasmuch as he was so high uplifted that he ruled the king and all England, and his sons were earls and the king’s darlings, and his daughter [now sent to a nunnery] was wedded and married to the king”.

Soon after the expulsion of Godwine and his sons a memorable event occurred: the landing in England of William the Norman, who came on a visit to the king in 1051. In 1035, the year of the death of Canute, Robert Duke of Normandy, King Edward’s first cousin, had died at Nicæa in Bithynia on his way home from the Holy Land. Before starting on this pilgrimage he had presented to the nobles of Normandy his illegitimate son, William, child of Herleva, the daughter of a tanner of Falaise, and called upon them to recognise him as his successor. The child was only about seven years old, but as his father said, “He is little but he will grow, and if God please he will mend”. Moreover, his lord paramount, the King of France, had promised to maintain him in his duchy. The nobles were loath to accept as their future ruler one whose illegitimacy for various reasons was considered more disgraceful than that which tarnished the shield of many of his ancestors, but being in some degree constrained, perhaps surprised, by the sudden action of their masterful duke, they consented and acknowledged themselves the “men” of the little bastard. When the tidings of Duke Robert’s death in the distant Orient arrived, no rival candidate was set up, and the plighted faith of the Norman nobles was not formally violated, but there seems to have been a general relapse into anarchy. Private wars between noble and noble were waged continually. Three guardians of the boy-duke were slain, one after another, and two attempts were made to kidnap, perhaps to murder him. But out of this welter of warring ambitions and treasons sometimes fomented by the liege-lord in Paris who had sworn to protect him, the young duke gradually grew up a bold, athletic, soldierly man; chaste and clean-living, though himself the child of illicit love; devout, though when occasion arose he could defy the thunders of the Church; beyond everything self-centred and capable of holding on through long years to an ambitious project once formed with infinite patience, and of carrying it into bloody effect without a shadow of remorse. Four years before his visit to England, in 1047, William, with the help of his liege-lord, Henry of France, had defeated the rebellious nobles of his duchy in the great battle of Val-es-dunes, a few miles east of Caen. In 1048 he took the two strong castles of Domfront and Alençon on the frontier between Normandy and Maine, thus preparing the way for the conquest of the latter country which followed six years later (1054), and which made him without question the most powerful of all the vassals of the French king.

Even as it was, however, he was already a mighty prince when he came, probably in the autumn of 1051, to visit his elderly cousin, a man in all respects as utterly unlike himself as it is possible to imagine. A fateful visit indeed was that, though its details are passed over in provoking silence by all the chroniclers and biographers both of host and guest. When we remember that the man who thus came as a visitor to our land was he from whose loins have sprung all the sovereigns who have ruled over us for eight centuries, how gladly would we have heard some circumstances of this peaceful invasion: of his first sight of the white cliffs of Dover; his voyage up the Thames; his intercourse haply with some of the merchants of the rising city of London; his talks with his temporarily widowed cousin in his palace in the west of London, near the island of Thorney; but for all this we have only imagination to draw upon. The strangest thing is that though during this visit some promise was almost certainly made, or some expectation held out by Edward, that William should be the heir of his kingdom, even this though constantly alluded to by the Norman writers is never by them definitely connected with this visit. Of one thing we may be tolerably sure that the visit indicates the high-water mark of Norman influence at Edward’s court. Robert of Jumièges, the all-powerful archbishop of Canterbury; William, the king’s chaplain, bishop of London; Ulf, another chaplain, and a scandal to his profession, bishop of the vast diocese of Dorchester—all these were Normans, while Godwine, the Englishman, and his progeny of earls were all absent from the kingdom. Are we wrong in conjecturing that but for that absence the visit had never been paid? However, after a stay probably of a few weeks, William returned to his own land, and shortly after another member of his house, that one to whom all his claims to interfere in English politics were indirectly due, set forth on a longer journey. “On March 14, 1052, died, the Old Lady, mother of King Edward and Harthacnut, named Imme [Emma], and her body lies in the Old Minster [Winchester] with King Canute.”

There can be no doubt that dislike of the arrogance of Edward’s Norman favourites was one cause, though possibly not the sole cause, of the remarkable revolution which took place in the year 1052. All through the winter of 1051–52 Godwine in “Baldwin’s land” and Harold in Ireland were preparing their forces, in order to compel a reversal of the decree of exile against them. Edward’s counsellors were also on the alert, and prepared at Sandwich a fleet of such strength that when Godwine with his ships issued forth at midsummer from the neighbourhood of Ostend he found the royal armament too strong for him and declined battle. Then followed three months of indecisive action, in which, curiously enough, the chief events recorded are the raiding expeditions against certain districts of England, made by the men who professed to come as her deliverers. “Earl Godwine hoisted sail with all his fleet and went westwards right on to Wight and harried the country there so long until the people paid them as much as they ordered them to pay.” This sounds more like Vikings extorting gafol than like the patriot statesman coming to deliver his country from foreign oppression. “Then did Harold return from Ireland with nine ships and landed at Porlock, and much folk was there gathered against him, but he did not shrink from procuring him food. He landed and slew a good lot of people244 and helped himself to cattle and men and property as it came handy,” and then sailing round the Land’s End, joined his father at the Isle of Wight, and so they sailed together to Pevensey. Meantime the royal fleet was weakened by continual desertion. The old Kentish loyalty to Earl Godwine revived in full force, and “all the butse-carlas (common sailors) of Hastings and all along by that coast, all the east end of Sussex and Surrey and much else thereabouts came over to Godwine’s side and declared that they would live and die with him.”

Thus Godwine’s fleet rounded Kent, reached the northern mouth of the Stour and sailed up towards London; some of the ships, however, improving the occasion by sailing inside the Isle of Sheppey and burning the town of King’s Milton. On September 14 Godwine was at his old home at Southwark, his troops drawn up in array on the Surrey bank of the Thames, his ships waiting for a favourable tide to pass through the bridge and encompass the king’s dwindling fleet. Battle, however, between Englishmen and Englishmen, now as in the previous year, was felt to be a terrible thing. The men of London were decidedly favourable to the cause of the banished earls, and when their humble petition to the king for the renewal of his favour to them met with stern refusal, it was all that Godwine could do to prevent the popular discontent from breaking out into some sudden act of mutiny. This state of tension did not last long. The foreign favourites saw that their cause was lost; they scattered, some to the west, some to the north; Robert of Canterbury and Ulf of Dorchester rode out of the eastern gate of the city, and after slaying and otherwise maltreating many young men (who probably sought to stay their flight) reached the Naze in Essex and there got on board a crazy ship, which crazy as it was, seems to have borne them in safety over to Normandy. “Thus,” says the chronicler, “did he, according to the will of God, leave his pallium here in this land, and that archiepiscopal dignity which not according to God’s will he had here obtained.”

The Frenchmen gone, peace was easily negotiated between the cipher-king and his powerful ministers. To Earl Godwine, his wife, his sons and his daughter, full restitution was made of all the offices and all the property of which they had been deprived. “The Lady” was fetched back from her convent and again installed in the palace. “Friendship was made fast between Godwine’s family and the king; and to all men good laws were promised, and outlawed were all the Frenchmen who before perverted law and justice,245 and counselled ill-will against this land, save those (few) persons whom the king liked to keep about him, because they were loyal to him and to his people.” At a great meeting of the witan, held outside of London, Earl Godwine appeared and made his defence, clearing himself, we are told, before his lord King Edward and before all the people of the land, of all the things that were laid to his charge and to that of his sons.

The chief agent in these negotiations was Stigand, Bishop of Winchester, a very noticeable figure in the ecclesiastical history of the times, a busy, diplomatising person who had been a keen partisan of the Lady Emma’s; had shared her downfall and had afterwards been appointed to the bishopric of Winchester, which he now exchanged for the archiepiscopal see of Canterbury, practically, though not canonically, vacant by the flight of Robert of Jumièges. His position, which was already in the eyes of strict churchmen a doubtful one so long as his predecessor lived, was not improved by his tardy journey to Rome in the year 1058 in quest of his pallium, for he had the misfortune to receive it from the hands of a Pope, Benedict X., who, though apparently chosen in a regular manner, did not second Hildebrand’s reforms, and being deposed in favour of Nicholas II., bishop of Florence, figures in ecclesiastical history as an anti-pope. A pallium conferred by such hands was held to bring with it no blessing; on the contrary, by committing the English metropolitan to the losing party, which opposed the famous Gregory VII., it had a very important influence on subsequent events, and gave to the buccaneering expedition of William the Bastard something of the character of a religious crusade.

To the great earl himself the revolution of 1052 brought no long enjoyment of power. Godwine fell sick soon after his landing in England, and though he recovered for a time, his health was evidently much shaken. In the following year, when King Edward was keeping Easter at Winchester with Godwine, Harold and Tostig for his guests, as they sat at meat, the earl “suddenly sank down by the king’s footstool, bereft of speech and strength. They carried him into the king’s bower, hoping that the attack would pass off, but it was not so. He continued so, speechless and powerless, from Easter Monday till the following Thursday [April 15, 1053], when he died. He lieth there within the Old Minster; and his son Harold took to his earldom (Wessex), resigning that which he had hitherto held (East Anglia), which was given to Elfgar,” son of Leofric and Godiva. In the face of this perfectly straightforward and circumstantial account given by the Saxon chronicler, of the death of an elderly statesman, after a hard and laborious life, from a stroke of apoplexy or paralysis, it is unnecessary to reproduce the idle legends of Norman historians two generations later, who represented that death as the fulfilment of a blasphemous imprecation of the divine vengeance on himself if he had had part or lot in the murder of the Etheling Alfred.

Earl Harold succeeded not only to the earldom but also to the political predominance of his father, and for the remaining thirteen years of Edward’s reign we may safely consider him as the real ruler of the kingdom. Only it must be observed that though Harold was the king’s efficient man of business, the chosen companion of his sports and of his leisure was another brother, Tostig, who in the year 1055 received the earldom of Northumbria. This peculiar position of favour in the palace and absenteeism from his province led to complications which will be related hereafter. For the present our notice of the internal affairs of the kingdom may close with the fact that in the year 1057 the Etheling Edward, son of Edmund Ironside, came to England accompanied by his wife, Agatha, a kinswoman of the Emperor Henry III., and by what a Saxon ballad-maker quaintly calls “a goodly team of bairns”. Probably it was the intention of the older Edward that his namesake should succeed him on the throne, though he may have at times vacillated between the more remote but known kinsman in Normandy and the nearer stranger from Hungary. But whatever the king’s intentions may have been, they were foiled by sickness or some less innocent agency. “We know not,” says the chronicler, “for what cause that was done that he might not see his kinsman, King Edward. Woe was that wretched mishap, and harmful to all this people that he ended his life so soon after he came to England, for the unhappiness of this poor folk.” There is a mystery in all this which it is vain now to try to penetrate. Only one cannot help again remarking the lack of virility in these latest scions of the house of Cerdic. Assuredly neither William the Bastard nor Harold Godwineson, would have been content to linger out forty years of life in exile, nor when returned to their native land would have been so easily snuffed out of existence as was this prince, the descendant of fifteen generations of West Saxon kings.

We pass from the internal affairs of England to the notices, scanty, but possessing for us a peculiar interest, concerning wars with Scotland in the reign of Edward. We have seen that in 1018 the Scottish king, Malcolm II., by his victory at Carham wrested from Northumbria all its territory north of the Tweed. This king died in 1034, the year before the death of Canute. His own death seems to have been a violent one, but he had certainly murdered the man who, according to the complicated law of succession then prevailing, had the best right to succeed him on the throne, and had thus secured the succession for his grandson, a lad named Duncan. The short reign of this young man—it lasted only six years—was marked by some exciting events. In the year 1035 he led “an immense army” across the Border and laid siege to the new city of Durham. The siege lasted a long time, but in a successful sally of the besiegers the greater part of the Scottish cavalry was destroyed, and in the disordered flight of the army the infantry were also cut to pieces, and their heads being collected and brought within the walls were stuck upon stakes to adorn the market place of the city of St. Cuthbert. Then followed war, on the whole unsuccessful war, between Duncan and his cousin Thorfinn, the Scandinavian earl of Orkney and Caithness. Duncan was driven southward, and in August, 1040, he was murdered by the general who had hitherto been fighting his battles, Macbeth, Mormaer or Earl of Moray. There was nothing in this event to take it out of the ordinary category of royal murders in Scotland at this time. It took place not under Macbeth’s own roof but on neutral ground, at a place called Bothgowanan or the Smith’s bothie; the victim was not the venerable greybeard whom Tragedy brings before us, but a young man still “of immature age,” whose grandfather had not many years before killed the brother of Macbeth’s wife and ousted her family from the royal succession. In fact, we may almost say, looking to the vicissitudes of the two families who at this time alternately ruled Scotland, that it was Duncan’s turn to be murdered. Macbeth, who reigned from 1040 to 1058, seems to have been on the whole a good king, though reigning by a more than doubtful title. It is possible that he imitated his contemporary Canute by going on pilgrimage, as a chronicler tells us that in the year 1050 Macbeth, king of Scotland, scattered silver broadcast among the poor of Rome.

Such was the man against whom, in 1054, Siward the Strong, earl of Northumbria, moved with a large army accompanied by a fleet. Siward being himself brother-in-law of the murdered Duncan was uncle of the young Malcolm Canmore, who was now seeking to recover his father’s throne. We have also a hint from a later historian that there were Normans in the Scottish army. It is suggested, on rather slender evidence, that these were some of Edward’s favourites, displaced by the revolution of 1052, who had taken refuge at the court of Macbeth; and it is possible that their presence there may have had something to do with Siward’s expedition. However this may be, it is clear that a battle was fought on July 27, in which the Northumbrian earl was victorious, but at a heavy cost. His own son, Osbeorn, was slain (“with all his wounds in front,” as his father rejoiced to hear), and his sister’s son, Siward, as well as many of his own and the king’s house-carls. Some of these house-carls, we are expressly told, were Danes as well as Englishmen. There was a great and unprecedented capture of booty, but Macbeth himself escaped. He reigned, though probably with broken power, for four years longer, till 1058, in which year he was finally defeated and slain by Malcolm III. This prince, who is generally known by his epithet of Canmore (the Large-headed), is he who by his marriage with Margaret, daughter of the Etheling Edward, brought the blood of the old Saxon kings into the veins of the royal family of Scotland and indirectly into that of England also. Matilda, wife of Henry Beauclerk, daughter of Malcolm Canmore and Margaret, is the link which connects the Saxon with the Norman dynasty, Alfred with Victoria.

The year after his invasion of Scotland (1055) old Siward the Strong died of dysentery. Of him is told the well-known story that when he found his death drawing nigh, he said: “What a shame it is that I, who could not find my death in so many battles, should now be reserved for an inglorious death like that of a cow. At least arm me with coat of mail, sword and helmet: place my shield on my left arm, my gilded battle-axe in my right hand, that I, who was strongest among soldiers, may die a soldier’s death.” His command was obeyed, and thus honourably clad in armour he breathed out his soul. The great earldom of Northumbria, made vacant by the death of Siward, was bestowed on the king’s favourite brother-in-law, Tostig, who, however, held it not for long. Siward’s son, Waltheof, seems to have been little more than a child at his father’s death, but, though now passed over in the distribution of earldoms, he received, ten years after, the earldom of two southern counties, Northampton and Huntingdon, which had once formed an outlying portion of his father’s dominions, and he had a great share in the events which followed the Norman Conquest.