In the morning the great Assembly met.[994] The great city and its coasts were now clear of strangers, save such as had come in the train of the deliverers.[995] The people of England—for such a gathering may well deserve that name—came together to welcome its friends and to pronounce sentence upon its enemies. The two armies and the citizens of London formed a multitude which no building could |It meets in the open air.| contain. That Mickle Gemót, whose memory long lived in the minds of Englishmen, came together, in old Teutonic fashion, in the open air without the walls of London.[996] The scene was pictured ages before by the pencil of Tacitus and sung in yet earlier days by the voice of Homer. It may still be seen, year by year, among the |Its popular character.| mountains of Uri and in the open market-place of Trogen. Other Assemblies of those times may have shrunk up into Councils of a small body of Thegns and Prelates; but on that great day the English people appeared, in all the fulness of its ancient rights, as a coordinate authority with the English King.[997] Men came armed to the place of meeting;[998] our fathers did so in their old homes beyond the sea, and our distant kinsmen still preserve the same immemorial use in the free assemblies of Appenzell.[999] But the enemy was no longer at hand; in that great gathering of liberated and rejoicing Englishmen sword and axe were needed only as parts of a solemn pageant, or to give further effect to the harangue of a practised orator. There, girt with warlike weapons, but shorn of the help and countenance of Norman knights and Norman churchmen,[1000] sat the King of the English, driven at last to meet face to face with a free assembly of his people. There were all the Earls and all the best men that were in this land;[1001] there was the mighty multitude of English freemen, gathered to hail the return of the worthiest of their own blood. And |Godwine at the Gemót.| there, surrounded by his four valiant sons, stood the great deliverer, the man who had set the King upon his throne, the man who had refused to obey his unlawful orders, who had cleared the land of his unworthy favourites, but who had never swerved in his true loyalty to the King and his Kingdom. The man at whose mere approach the foreign knights and Prelates had fled for their lives,[1002] could now |He supplicates the King;| afford to assume the guise of humble supplication towards the sovereign who had received his Crown at his hands. Godwine stood forth; he laid his axe at the foot of the throne, and knelt, as in the act of homage, before his Lord the King.[1003] By the Crown upon his brow, whose highest and brightest ornament was the cross of Christ, he conjured his sovereign to allow him to clear himself |he speaks to the people.| before the King and his people of all the crimes which had been laid against him and his house.[1004] The demand could not be refused, and the voice which had so often swayed assemblies of Englishmen, was heard once more, in all the fulness of its eloquence, setting forth the innocence of Godwine himself and of Harold and all his sons.[1005] Few[1006] and weighty were the words which the great Earl spoke that day before the King and all the people of the land.[1007] But they were words which at once carried the whole Assembly with them. Those who have heard the most spirit-stirring of earthly sounds, when a sovereign people binds itself to observe the laws which it has itself decreed, when thousands of voices join as one man in the repetition of one solemn formula,[1008] can conceive the shout of assent with which the assembled multitude agreed to the proposal that Godwine should be deemed to have cleared himself of |The Assembly decrees his acquittal and restoration.| every charge. The voice of that great Assembly, the voice of the English nation, at once declared him guiltless, at once decreed the restoration of himself, his sons, and all his followers, to all the lands, offices, and honours which they had held in the days before his outlawry. The old charges were thus again solemnly set aside, and an amnesty was proclaimed for all the irregular acts of the last three months of revolution. The last year was as it were wiped out; Godwine was once more Earl of the West-Saxons, Harold was once more Earl of the East-Angles, as if Eustace and Robert had never led astray the simplicity |It decrees the outlawry and deprivation of Archbishop Robert and many other Normans.| of the royal saint. And yet more; it was not enough merely to put England again into the state in which she stood at the moment of the banishment of Godwine. It was needful to punish the authors of all the evils that had happened, and to guard against the possible recurrence of such evils in days to come. The deepest in guilt of all the royal favourites was felt to be the Norman Archbishop. He had taken himself beyond the reach of justice; but, had he been present, the mildness of English political warfare would have hindered any severer sentence than that which was actually pronounced. “He had done most to cause the strife between Earl Godwine and the King”[1009]—the words of the formal resolution peep out, as they so often do, in the words of the Chronicler—and, on this charge, Robert was deprived of his see, and was solemnly declared an outlaw. The like sentence was pronounced against “all the Frenchmen”—we are again reading the words of the sentence—“who had reared up bad law, and judged unjust judgements, and counselled evil |Normans excepted from the sentence.| counsel in this land.”[1010] But the sentence did not extend to all the men of Norman birth or of French speech who were settled in the country. It was intended only to strike actual offenders. By an exception capable of indefinite and dangerous extension, those were excepted “whom the King liked, and who were true to him and all his folk.”[1011] Lastly, in the old formula which we have so often already |“Good law” decreed.| come across—“Good law was decreed for all folk.”[1012] As in other cases, the expression refers far more to administration than to legislation, to the observance of old laws rather than to the enactment of new. The Frenchmen had reared up bad law; that is, they had been guilty of corrupt and unjust administration; the good law, that is, the good government of former times, was now to be restored. There was no need to renew the Law of Eadgar or of Cnut or of any other King of past times. The “good state,” as an Italian patriot might have called it, was not, in the eyes of that Assembly, a vision of past times, a tradition of the days of their fathers or of the old time before them. It was simply what every man could remember for himself, in the days before Robert, and men like Robert, had obtained exclusive possession of the royal ear. There was no need to go back to any more distant standard than the earliest years of the reigning King. Good Law was decreed for all folk. Things were to be once more as they had been in the days when Earl Godwine had been the chief adviser of the King on whom he had himself bestowed the Crown.
The work of the Assembly was done; the innocent had been restored, the guilty had been punished; the nation had bound itself to the maintenance of law and right. Godwine was again the foremost man in the realm. But though the political restoration was perfect, the personal reconciliation seems still to have cost the King a struggle.[1013] It required the counsel of wise men, and a full conviction that all resistance was hopeless, before Eadward again received his injured father-in-law to his personal friendship. At last he yielded; King and Earl walked unarmed to the Palace of Westminster, and there, on his own hearth, Eadward again admitted Godwine to the kiss of peace. To receive again to his friendship the wife and sons of Godwine, Gytha, Harold, Tostig, Gyrth, and Leofwine, probably cost him no special struggle. They had never personally offended him, and they seem, even before their outlawry, to have won his personal affection. But the complete restoration of the family to its former honours required another step which |Restoration of the Lady Eadgyth.| may perhaps have caused Eadward a pang. When Godwine, his wife and his sons, were restored to their old honours, it was impossible to refuse the like restitution to his daughter. The Lady Eadgyth was brought back with all royal pomp from her cloister at Wherwell; she received again all the lands and goods of which she had been deprived, and was restored to the place, whatever that place may have been, which she had before held in the court and household of Eadward.[1014]
The restoration of the house of Godwine to its rank and honours was thus complete, so far as the members of that house had appeared in person to claim again that which they had lost. But in the glories of that day the eldest born of Godwine and Gytha had no part. Swegen had shared his father’s banishment; he had not shared his father’s return. His guilty, but not hardened, soul had been stricken to the earth by the memory of his crimes. |his pilgrimage to Jerusalem,| The blood of Beorn, the wrongs of Eadgifu, lay heavy upon his spirit. At the bidding of his own remorse, he had left his father and brothers behind in Flanders, and had gone, barefooted, on a pilgrimage to the Holy Tomb. He fulfilled his vow, but he lived not to return to his Earldom or to his native land. While his father and brothers were making their triumphant defence before their assembled countrymen, Swegen was toiling back, slowly and wearily, through the dwelling-places of men of other tongues and of other creeds. The toil was too great for a frame no doubt already bowed down by remorse and penance. Cold, |and death in Lykia. September 29, 1052.| exposure, and weariness were too much for him, and fourteen days after Godwine’s solemn restoration in London, the eldest son of Godwine breathed his last in some unknown spot of the distant land of Lykia.[1015]
There is no doubt that the three great decrees, for the restoration of Godwine and his family, for the outlawry of the Archbishop and the other Normans, and for the renewal of the good laws, were all passed in the great Gemót of this memorable Tuesday.[1016] Other measures which were their natural complement may well have been dealt with in later, perhaps in less crowded and excited, |Disposition of Earldoms; Ælfgar gives way to Harold.| assemblies. Some of the greatest offices in Church and State had to be disposed of. Godwine and Harold received their old Earldoms back again. The restoration of Harold implied the deposition of Ælfgar. It is singular that we find no distinct mention either of him or of his father, or yet of Siward, through the whole history of the revolution. The only hint which we have on the subject seems to imply that they at least acquiesced in the changes which were made, and even that Ælfgar cheerfully submitted to the loss |Ralph.| of his Earldom.[1017] As Swegen did not return, there was no need to disturb Ralph in his Earldom of the Magesætas. |Odda.| Odda must have given up that portion of Godwine’s Earldom which had been entrusted to him,[1018] but he seems to have been indemnified by the Earldom of the Hwiccas, held most probably with the reservation of a superiority on the part of Leofric.[1019]
The disposal of the Bishopricks which had become vacant by the flight of their foreign occupants was a more important matter, at least it led to more important consequences in the long run. At the moment of Godwine’s restoration, it probably did not occur to any Englishman to doubt that they were vacant both in fact and in law. Robert and Ulf had fled from their sees; they had been declared outlaws by the highest authority of the nation, or rather by the nation itself. Our forefathers most likely thought very little about canonical subtleties. They would hardly argue the point whether the Bishops had resigned or had been deprived, nor would they doubt that the nation had full power to deprive them. In whatever way the vacancies had occurred, the sees were in fact vacant; there was no Archbishop at Canterbury and no Bishop at Dorchester. That the King and his Witan would be stepping beyond their powers in filling those sees was not likely to come into |Relation of Church and State at the time. Identity of the two bodies.| any man’s head. We must remember how thoroughly the English nation and the English Church were then identified. No broad line was drawn between ecclesiastical and temporal causes, between ecclesiastical and temporal offices. The immediate personal duties of an Earl and of a Bishop were undoubtedly different; but the two dignitaries acted within their shire with a joint authority in many matters which, a hundred years later, would have been divided between a distinct civil and a distinct ecclesiastical tribunal. In appointing a Bishop, though we have seen that canonical election was not shut out, we have also seen that the Witan of the land had their share in the matter, and that it was by the King’s writ that the Bishoprick was formally bestowed.[1020] What the King and his Witan gave, the King and his Witan could doubtless take away, and they accordingly proceeded to deal with the sees of the outlawed Bishops exactly as they would have dealt |Vacancy of Canterbury filled by Stigand. 1052.| with the Earldoms of outlawed Earls. It might almost seem that the see of the chief offender, the Norman Primate, was at once bestowed by the voice of the great Assembly which restored Godwine.[1021] It was at all events bestowed within the year, while the Bishopricks of London and Dorchester were allowed to remain vacant some time longer. It may perhaps be thought that the appointment which was actually made to the see of Canterbury bears signs of being an act of the joyous fervour with which the nation welcomed its deliverance. It might have been expected that the claims of Ælfric to the Primacy would have revived on the expulsion of Robert. Ælfric had been canonically elected by the monks of Christ Church; no one seems to have objected to him except the King and his Frenchmen; he possessed all possible virtues, and he was moreover a kinsman of Earl Godwine. But, in the enthusiasm of the moment, there was one name which would attract more suffrages than that of any other Prelate or Priest in England. On that great Holy Cross Day the services of Stigand to the national cause had been second only to those of Godwine himself. As Robert had been the first to make strife, so Stigand had been the first to make peace, between the King and the great Earl. For such a service the highest place in the national Church would not, at the moment, seem too splendid a reward. Ælfric was accordingly forgotten, and Stigand was, either in the great Gemót of September or in the regular Gemót of the following Christmas, appointed to the Archbishoprick of Canterbury. With the Primacy, according to a practice vicious enough in itself, but which might have been defended by abundance of precedents, he continued to hold the see of Winchester in plurality.
This appointment of Stigand was one of great moment in many ways. Amongst other things, it gave an |Handle given to the Normans by Robert’s expulsion.| excellent handle to the wily Duke of the Normans, and thus became one of the collateral causes of the Norman Conquest. The outlawed Robert retired in the end to his own monastery of Jumièges, and there died and was buried. But he did not die till he had made Europe resound with the tale of his wrongs. The world soon heard how a Norman Primate had been expelled from his see, how an Englishman had been enthroned in his place, by sheer secular violence, without the slightest pretence of canonical form. Robert told his tale at Rome;[1022] we may be sure that he also told it at Rouen. William treasured it up, and knew how to use it when the time came. In his bill of indictment against England, the expulsion of Archbishop Robert appears as a prominent count.[1023] It is bracketted with the massacre of Saint Brice, with the murder of Ælfred, and with all the other stories which, though they could not make William’s claim to the Crown one whit stronger, yet served admirably to discredit the cause of England in men’s minds. No one knew better than William how to make everything of this sort tell. The restoration of Godwine was an immediate check to all his plans; it rendered his hopes of a peaceful succession far less probable. But the expulsion of Robert and the other Normans was a little sweet in the cup of bitterness. The English, and Earl Godwine himself, in their insular recklessness of canonical niceties, had unwittingly put another weapon into the hands of the foe who was carefully biding his time.
Even in England the position of Stigand was a very doubtful one.[1024] He was de facto Archbishop, he acted as such in all political matters, and was addressed as such in royal writs. We hear of no opposition to him, of no attempt at his removal, till William himself was King. He was undoubtedly an able and patriotic statesman, and his merits in this way doubtless prevented any direct move against him. And yet even Englishmen, and patriotic Englishmen, seem to have been uneasy as to his ecclesiastical position. For six years he was an Archbishop without a pallium; it was one of the charges against him |He receives the pallium from the Antipope Benedict. 1058.| that he used the pallium of his predecessor Robert. At last he obtained the coveted ornament from Rome, but it was from the hands of a Pontiff whose occupation of the Holy See was short, and who, as his cause was unsuccessful, was not looked on by the Church as a canonical Pope. In fact, in strict ecclesiastical eyes, Stigand’s reception of the pallium from Benedict the Tenth seems only to have |His ministrations commonly avoided.| made matters worse than they were before. At any rate, both before and after this irregular investiture, men seem to have avoided recourse to his hands for any great ecclesiastical rite. Most of the Bishops of his province were, during his incumbency, consecrated by other hands.[1025] Even Harold himself, politically his firm friend, preferred the ministry of other Prelates in the two great ecclesiastical ceremonies of his life, the consecration of Waltham and his own coronation. One of our Chroniclers, not indeed the most patriotic of their number, distinctly and significantly denies Stigand’s right to be called Archbishop.[1026] One cannot help thinking that all this canonical precision must have arisen among the foreign ecclesiastics who held English preferment, among the Lotharingians favoured by Godwine and Harold, no less than among the King’s own Normans. But at all events the scruple soon became prevalent among Englishmen of all classes. An ecclesiastical punctilio which led Harold himself, on the occasion of two of the most solemn events of his life, to offer a distinct slight to a political friend of the highest rank, must have obtained a very firm possession of the national mind.
The case of Stigand is the more remarkable, because no such difficulties are spoken of as arising with regard to the position of another Prelate whose case seems at first sight to have been just the same as his own. If Robert was irregularly deprived, Ulf was equally so. Yet no objection seems to have been made to the canonical character of Wulfwig, who, in the course of the next year, succeeded Ulf in the see of Dorchester.[1027] It is possible that the key to the difference may be found in the fact of the long vacancy of Dorchester. This suggests the idea of some application to Rome, which was successful in the case of Wulfwig and unsuccessful in the case of Stigand. We can well conceive that the deprivation of Ulf may have been confirmed, and that of Robert, as far as the Papal power could annul it, annulled. It must be remembered that Ulf, on account of his utter lack of learning, had found great difficulty in obtaining the Papal approval of his first nomination. The sins of Robert, on the other hand, seem to have been only sins against England, which would pass for very venial errors at Rome. This difference may perhaps account for the different treatment of their two successors. At any rate, Wulfwig seems to have found no opposition in any quarter to his occupancy of the great Mid-English Bishoprick. And he seems to have himself set the example of the scruple which has been just mentioned against recognizing Stigand in any |Leofwine Bishop of Lichfield. 1053–1067.| purely spiritual matter. Along with Leofwine, who in the same year became Bishop of Lichfield, he went beyond sea to receive consecration, and the way in which this journey is mentioned seems to imply that their motive was a dislike to be consecrated by the hands of the new Metropolitan.[1028]
The see of London was treated in a different way from those of Canterbury and Dorchester, and a way certainly most honourable to its Norman occupant. We have seen that it is not certain whether Bishop William accompanied Robert and Ulf in their escape from England.[1029] It is certain that, if he left England, he was before long invited to return and to reoccupy his see. This may have been the act of Harold after the death of his father. It is an obvious conjecture that Harold would be somewhat less strict in such matters than his wary and experienced parent, and that he would listen with somewhat more favour to the King’s requests for the retention or restoration of some of his favourites.[1030] But it is certain that a Norman whom either Godwine or Harold allowed either to retain, or to return to, the great see of London must have been a man of a very different kind from Robert and Ulf. We are expressly told that William’s Bishoprick was restored to him on account of his good character.[1031] Indeed the character which could obtain such forbearance for a Norman at such a moment must have been unusually good, when we remember that he actually had an English competitor for the see. Spearhafoc, it will not be forgotten, had been regularly nominated to the Bishoprick, and though refused consecration, had held its temporalities till the outlawry of Godwine allowed a Norman to be put in his place.[1032] But the claims of Spearhafoc on the see of London seem to have been as wholly forgotten as the claims of Ælfric on the see of Canterbury. William retained the Bishoprick throughout the reigns of Eadward and Harold, and he died, deeply honoured by the city over which he |1070.| ruled, four years after the accession of his namesake.
William was the only Norman who retained a Bishoprick, as Ralph was the only stranger of any nation—for we can hardly count Siward as a stranger—who retained an Earldom, after the restoration of Godwine. But, under the terms of the exception to the general outlawry of Normans, a good many men of that nation retained or recovered inferior, though still considerable, offices. We have a list of those who were thus excepted, which contains some names which we are surprised to find there. The exception was to apply to those only who had been true to the King and his people. Yet among the Normans who remained we find Richard the son of Scrob,[1033] |Osbern of Richard’s castle.| and among those who returned we find his son Osbern. These two men were among the chief authors of all evil. Osbern was so conscious of guilt, or so fearful of popular vengeance, that, in company with a comrade named Hugh, he threw himself on the mercy of Earl Leofric. Osbern and Hugh surrendered their castles, and passed with the Earl’s safe-conduct into Scotland, where, along with other exiles, they were favourably received by the reigning King Macbeth.[1034] Yet it is certain that Osbern afterwards returned, and held both lands and offices in Herefordshire.[1035] Others mentioned are Robert the Deacon, described as the father-in-law of Richard, and who must therefore have been an old man,[1036] Humphrey Cocksfoot, whom I cannot further identify, and Ælfred the King’s stirrup-holder.[1037] The list might be largely extended on the evidence of Domesday and the Charters. Some of the most remarkable names are those of the Stallers, Robert the son of Wymarc and Ralph,[1038] and the King’s Chamberlain, Hugh or Hugolin, a person who has found his way from the dry entries in the Survey and the Charters into the legend of his sainted master.[1039] Altogether the number of Normans who remained in England during the later days of |Some of them probably restored after Godwine’s death.| Eadward was clearly not small. And, as some at least were evidently restored after flight or banishment, the suggestion again presents itself that their restoration was owing to special entreaties of the King after the death of Godwine. Harold, in the first days of his administration, may hardly have been in a position to refuse such entreaties. And, in any case, though we may call it a weakness to allow men, some of whom at least were dangerous, to remain in, or return to, the country, yet for a subject newly exalted to give too willing an ear to the prayers of his sovereign, is a weakness which may easily be forgiven.
The revolution was thus accomplished, a revolution of |Estimate of Godwine’s conduct.| which England may well be proud. In the words of a contemporary writer, the wisdom of Godwine had redressed all the evils of the country without shedding a drop of blood.[1040] The moderation of the Earl, the way in which he kept back his ardent followers, the way in which he preserved his personal loyalty to the King,[1041] are beyond all praise. He had delivered his country, he and his had been restored to the favour of their prince, and he now again entered on his old duties as Earl of the West-Saxons and virtual ruler of the Kingdom of England. We may be sure that his popularity had never been so high, or his general authority so boundless, as it was during the short remainder of his life. For Godwine was not destined to any long enjoyment of his renewed honour and prosperity; England was not destined to look much longer |Godwine’s illness.| upon the champion who had saved her. Soon after his restoration the Earl began to sicken;[1042] but he still continued his attention to public affairs, and we can see the working of his vigorous hand in the energetic way in |Christmas Gemót at Gloucester. 1052–1053.| which a Welsh marauder was dealt with at the Christmas Gemót of this year, held as usual at Gloucester. Rhys, the brother of Gruffydd King of the South-Welsh, had been guilty of many plundering expeditions at a place called Bulendún, the position of which seems to be unknown. Early in the year the Northern Gruffydd had ravaged the border at pleasure; now we read, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, that a decree of the Witan—a bill of attainder we may call it—was passed for the |Rhys beheaded and his head brought to Eadward. January 5, 1053.| execution of the Welsh prince.[1043] The decree was duly carried out, and the Christmas festivities were not over, when the head of Rhys was brought to King Eadward, on the vigil of the Epiphany, exactly thirteen years before his |Arnwig resigns the Abbey of Peterborough. Leofric succeeds.| own death.[1044] It was seemingly in the same Gemót that Arnwig, Abbot of Peterborough, resigned his abbey, “and gave it to Leofric the monk by the King’s leave and that of the monks.”[1045] This expression is remarkable, as illustrating that union of royal, capitular, and we may add parliamentary, action, which we have already noticed as prevailing in the appointment of English Prelates in those days.[1046] The process was no doubt the same as that by which it had been attempted to raise Ælfric to the see of Canterbury. The monks, at the suggestion of Arnwig, elected Leofric as his successor. They petitioned the King and his Witan to confirm the election. In this case the |Leofric Abbot of Peterborough. 1053–1066.| confirmation was granted, whereas in the case of Ælfric it had been refused. Abbot Leofric, a nephew of his namesake the Earl, was a man of high birth and of high spirit.[1047] He ruled the great house of Saint Peter with all honour for thirteen years; he enriched the monastery with lands and ornaments of all kinds, and won for it the favour of the King and all the great men of the land. Peterborough, under his rule, became so rich in the precious metals that men called the house Gildenborough.[1048] But, in the eyes of English patriots, Abbot Leofric has won a still higher fame by an act less clearly coming within the range of his ecclesiastical duties. He was one of those great Lords of the Church who did not feel that they were hindered by their monastic vows from marching by the side of Harold to the great battle.[1049]
The next great festival of the Church, the next great assembly of the English Witan, beheld the death of the most renowned Englishman of that generation. The King kept the Easter festival at Winchester, and on the Monday of that week of rejoicing, the Earl of the West-Saxons, with his sons Harold, Tostig, and Gyrth, were admitted |Godwine’s illness, April 12,| to the royal table. During the meal Godwine fell from his seat speechless and powerless. His sons lifted him from the ground, and carried him to the King’s own bower, in hopes of his recovery. Their hopes were in vain; the Earl |and death, April 15.| never spoke again, and, after lying insensible for three days, he died on the following Thursday. Such is the simple, yet detailed, account which a contemporary writer gives us of an event which has, perhaps even more than any other event of these times, been seized upon as a subject for Norman romance and calumny. There was undoubtedly something striking and awful in the sight of the first man in England, in all the full glory of his recovered power, thus suddenly smitten with his death-blow. He had been, as we have seen, ailing for some months, but the actual stroke, when it came, seems to have been quite unlooked for. It is not wonderful that, in such a death at such a moment, men saw a |Norman fictions about the death of Godwine.| special work of divine judgement. It is not wonderful that Norman enemies brought the old scandals up again, and decked out the tale of the death of the murderer of Ælfred with the most appalling details of God’s vengeance upon the hardened and presumptuous sinner. I shall elsewhere discuss their romantic inventions, which in truth belong less to the province of the historian than to that of the comparative mythologist.[1050] It is more important to note here that one English writer seems to see in Godwine’s death the punishment of his real or supposed |Bounty of Gytha.| aggressions on the property of the Church.[1051] On this last score however the bounty of his widow did all that she could to make atonement for any wrongdoings on the part of the deceased. The pious munificence of Gytha is acknowledged even by those who are most bitter against her husband, and it now showed itself in lavish offerings for the repose of the soul of Godwine.[1052] His place of burial |Godwine buried in the Old Minster.| need hardly be mentioned. The man who was greater than a King, the maker and the father of Kings, found his last resting-place among Kings. His corpse was laid by that of the King under whom he had risen to greatness, by that of the Lady whose rights he had so stoutly defended, by that of the first King whom he had placed on the West-Saxon throne, by that of the murdered nephew whose death had cast the first shade of gloom upon his house. The Earl of the West-Saxons, dying in the West-Saxon capital, was buried with all pomp in the greatest of West-Saxon sanctuaries, in the Old Minster of Winchester.[1053] That renowned church was enriched with lands |General grief of the nation.| and ornaments in memory of the dead. But the noblest offering of all was the grief of the nation which he had saved. His real faults, his imaginary crimes, were all forgotten. Men remembered only that the greatest man of their blood and speech was taken from them. They thought of the long years of peace and righteous government which they had enjoyed under his rule; they thought of the last and greatest of his great deeds, how he had chased the stranger from the land, and had made England England once again. Around the bier of Godwine men wept as for a father; they wept for the man whose hand had guided England and her people through all the storms of so many years of doubt and danger.[1054] They little deemed that, ages after his death, calumnies would still be heaped upon his name. They deemed not that the lies of the stranger would take such root that the deliverer for whom they mourned would live in the pages of pretended history as Godwine the traitor. The time is now come to redress the wrong, and to do tardy justice to the fair fame of one of the greatest of England’s worthies. |True estimate of Godwine’s character.| To know what Godwine was, we have but to cast away the fables of later days, to turn to the records of his own time, to see how he looked in the eyes of men who had seen and heard him, of men who had felt the blessings of his rule and whose hearts had been stirred by the voice of his mighty eloquence. No man ever deserved a higher or a more lasting place in national gratitude than the first man who, being neither King nor Priest, stands forth in English history as endowed with all the highest attributes of the statesman. In him, in those distant times, we can revere the great minister, the unrivalled parliamentary leader, the man who could sway councils and assemblies at his will, and whose voice, during five and thirty years of political life, was never raised in any cause but that of the welfare of England. Side by side with all that is worthiest in our later history—side by side with his own counterpart two ages afterwards, the second deliverer from the yoke of the stranger, the victor of Lewes, the martyr of Evesham—side by side with all who, from his day to ours, have, in the field or in the senate, struggled or suffered in the cause of English freedom—side by side with the worthies of the thirteenth and the worthies of the seventeenth century—will the voice of truthful history, rising above the calumnies of ages, place the name of the great deliverer of the eleventh, the Earl of happy memory,[1055] whose greatness was ever the greatness of England, whose life was one long offering to her welfare, and whose death came fittingly as the crown of that glorious life, when he had once more given peace and freedom to the land which he loved so well.
The great Earl was dead, and the office which he had held, an office which no man had ever held before him,[1056] was again at the disposal of the King and his Witan. As Godwine’s death had happened at the Easter festival, the Great Council of the nation was doubtless still in session. We may therefore assume, with perfect safety, that the appointments which the Earl’s death rendered needful |Nature of the succession to Earldoms.| were made at once, before the Assembly dispersed. The nature of the succession to these great governments must by this time be perfectly well understood. The King and his Witan might nominate whom they would to a vacant Earldom; but there was a strong feeling, whenever there was no special reason to the contrary, in favour of appointing the son of a deceased Earl. In Earldoms, like those of Mercia and Northumberland, where an ancient house had been in possession for several generations, this sort of preference had grown into the same kind of imperfect hereditary right which existed in the case of the Crown itself. It would have required a very strong case indeed for King and Witan to feel themselves justified in appointing any one but a son of Leofric to succeed Leofric in the government of Mercia. But in the case of |Special position of East-Anglia.| Wessex and East-Anglia no such inchoate right could be put forward by any man. The old East-Anglian house had probably become extinct, either through the slaughter of Assandun, or through the executions in the early days of Cnut.[1057] If not extinct, it had, at all events, sunk into insignificance, and had become lost to history. The Danish Thurkill had founded no dynasty in his Earldom. We cannot even make out with certainty the succession of Earls between |and Wessex.| him and Harold. The Earldom of the West-Saxons was a mere creation of Cnut himself. It would have broken in upon no feeling of ancient tradition, if the office had been abolished, and if the King had taken into his own hands the immediate government of the old cradle of his |Reasons for retaining the West-Saxon Earldom.| house. But such a step would have been distinctly a backward step. The King of the English was now King in every part of his realm alike. Certain parts of his realm might enjoy more of his personal presence than others; certain parts might even be practically more amenable to his authority than others; each great division of the Kingdom might still retain its local laws and customs; but there was still only one English Kingdom; no part of that Kingdom was a dependency of any other part; the King was King of the West-Saxons in no other sense than that in which he was King of the Northumbrians. But, if the local West-Saxon Earldom had been abolished, instead of a King of the English, reigning over one united Kingdom, there would again have been a King of the West-Saxons, holding East-Anglia, Mercia, and Northumberland as dependent provinces. Here then were good political reasons for retaining the institution of the Great Cnut, and for again appointing an Earl of the West-Saxons. Reverence also for the memory of the great man who was gone pleaded equally for the same course. An Earl of the West-Saxons had done more for England than any other subject had ever done. With Godwine and his great deeds still living in the minds and on the tongues of men, there could be little doubt as to giving him a successor; there could be hardly more of doubt as to who that successor should be.