In person Eadward is described as being handsome, of moderate height, his face full and rosy, his hair and beard white as snow.[60] His beard he wore long, according to what seems to have been the older fashion both of England and of Normandy.[61] Among his younger contemporaries this fashion went out of use in both countries, and the Normans shaved the whole face, while the English left the hair on the upper lip only. He was remarkable for the length and whiteness of his hands. When not excited by passion, he was gentle and affable to all men; he was liberal both to the poor and to his friends; but he had also the special art of giving a graceful refusal, so that the rejection of a suit by him was almost as pleasing as its acceptance by another.[62] In public he preserved his kingly dignity intact; but he took little pleasure in the pomp of royalty or in wearing the gorgeous robes which were wrought for him by the industry and affection of his Lady.[63] In private company, though he never forgot his rank, he could unbend, and treat his familiar friends as an equal.[64] He avoided however one bad habit of his age, that of choosing the time of divine service as the time for private conversation. It is mentioned as a special mark of his devotion that he scarcely ever spoke during mass, except when he was interrupted by others.[65] The |His favourites at different periods of his reign.| mention of his friends and familiar companions leads us directly to his best and worst aspects as an English King. Like his father, he was constantly under the dominion of favourites. It was to the evil choice of his favourites during the early part of his reign that most of the misfortunes of his time were owing, and that a still more direct path was opened for the ambition of his Norman kinsman. In the latter part of his reign either happy accident, or returning good sense, or perhaps the sheer necessity of the case, led him to a better choice. Without a guide he could not reign, but the good fortune of his later years gave him the wisest and noblest of all guides. The most honourable feature in the whole life of Eadward is that the last thirteen years of his reign were virtually the reign of Harold.
But in the days before that great national reaction, in the period embraced in the present Chapter, it is the peculiar character of the favourites to whose influence Eadward was given up which sets its special mark on the time. The reign of Eadward in many respects forestalls the reign of Henry the Third. The part played by Earl Godwine in many respects forestalls the part played |His connexion with Normandy.| by Earl Simon of Montfort. Eadward was by birth an Englishman; but he was the son of a Norman mother; he had been carried to Normandy in his childhood; he had there spent the days of his youth and early manhood; England might be the land of his duty, but Normandy was ever the land of his affection. With the habits, the feelings, the language, of the people over whom he was called to rule he had absolutely no sympathy. His heart was French. His delight was to surround himself with companions who came from the beloved land and who spoke the beloved tongue, to enrich them with English estates, to invest them with the highest offices of the English Kingdom. Policy might make him the political ally of his Imperial brother-in-law, but a personal sentiment made him the personal friend of his Norman cousin. The needs of his royal position made him accept Godwine as his counsellor and the daughter of Godwine as his |Promotion of Normans to high office.| wife. But his real affections were lavished on the Norman priests[66] and gentlemen who flocked to his Court as to the land of promise. These strangers were placed in important offices about the royal person,[67] and before long they were set to rule as Earls and Bishops over the already half-conquered soil of England. Even when he came over as a private man in the days of Harthacnut, Eadward had brought with him his French nephew,[68] and Ralph the Timid Earl was but the precursor of the gang of foreigners who were soon to be quartered upon the country, as these were again only the first instalment of the larger gang who were to win for themselves a more lasting |The Norman Conquest begins under Eadward.| settlement four and twenty years later. In all this the seeds of the Conquest were sowing, or rather, as I once before put it,[69] it is now that the Conquest actually begins. The reign of Eadward is a period of struggle between natives and foreigners for dominion in England. The foreigners gradually win the upper hand, and for a time they are actually dominant. Then a national reaction overthrows their influence, and the noblest of living Englishmen becomes the virtual ruler. But this happy change did not take place till the strangers had become accustomed to look on English estates and honours as their right, a right which they soon learned to think they might one day assert by force of arms. The foreign favourites of Eadward were in truth the advanced guard of William. The conquests of England by Swend and Cnut, the wonderful exploits of his own countrymen in the South of Europe, no doubt helped to suggest to the Norman Duke that it was not impossible to win England for himself with his sword. But it must have been the feeling, on the part both of himself and of his subjects, that England was a land already half won over to Norman rule, which made the succession to the English Crown the cherished aim of the life of the mighty ruler who was now growing up to manhood and to greatness on the other side of the sea.
The elevation of Eadward to the throne of course involved the establishment in still greater honour and authority of the man to whom his elevation was mainly owing, the great Earl of the West-Saxons. I have already thrown out some hints as to what the real relations between |Norman calumnies against Godwine and his sons.| Eadward and Godwine probably were.[70] There is not a shadow of evidence for the calumnies of the Norman writers which represent Godwine and his sons as holding the King in a sort of bondage, as abusing his simplicity and confidence, sometimes as behaving to him with great personal insolence, sometimes, they even venture to add, practising all kinds of injustice and oppression throughout the Kingdom. The English writers tell a widely different tale. The contrast between the two accounts is well set forth by a writer whose sympathies lie wholly on the Norman side, but who makes at least an effort to deal fairly between the two. In the English version Godwine and his sons appear as high-minded and faithful counsellors of the King, who stood forward as the leaders of the national feeling against his foreign favourites, but who were never guilty of any undutiful word or deed towards the prince whom they had themselves raised to power.[71] Eadward probably both feared and suspected Godwine. But there is nothing to show that, up to the final outbreak between Godwine and the foreigners, the great Earl had ever deviated from even formal loyalty to his sovereign. There is distinct evidence that more than one of his sons had gained Eadward’s warmest personal affection. From |Character of Godwine.| all that we can see, Godwine was not a man likely to win the same sort of personal affection from Eadward, perhaps not even from the nation at large, which was afterwards won by Harold. That Godwine was the representative of all English feeling, that he was the leader of every national movement, that he was the object of the deepest admiration on the part of the men at least of his own Earldom, is proved by the clearest of evidence. But it is equally clear that Godwine was essentially a wary statesman, and in no sense a chivalrous hero. We have seen that, mighty as was the power of his eloquence, he did not trust to his eloquence only.[72] He knew how to practise the baser as well as the nobler arts of statesmanship. He knew how to win over political adversaries by bribes, threats, and promises, and how to find means of chastisement for those who remained to the last immoveable by the voice of the charmer. When we think of the vast extent of his possessions,[73] most or all of which must have been acquired by royal grant, it is almost impossible to acquit him of |His relation to ecclesiastical bodies.| a grasping disposition. It is also laid to his charge that, in the acquisition of wealth, he did not always regard the rights of ecclesiastical bodies.[74] This last charge, it must be remembered, is one which he shares with almost every powerful man of his time, even with those who, if they took with one hand, gave lavishly with the other. And accusations of this sort must always be taken with certain deductions. Monastic and other ecclesiastical writers were apt to make little or no distinction between acts of real sacrilege, committed by fraud or violence, and the most legal transactions by which the Church happened to be |Godwine’s lack of bounty to the Church.| a loser. Still it should be noticed that Godwine stands perhaps alone among the great men of his own age in having no ecclesiastical foundation connected with his name. As far as I am aware, he is nowhere enrolled among the founders or benefactors of any church, religious or secular.[75] Such a peculiarity is most remarkable. How far it may have arisen from enlightenment beyond his age, how far it was the result of mere illiberality or want of religious feeling, it is utterly impossible to say. But it is clear that Godwine is, in this respect, distinguished in a marked way from his son, whose liberality, guided as it was by a wise discretion, was conspicuous among his other great qualities. Again, it is hardly impossible to acquit Godwine of being, like most fathers who have the |Godwine’s over care for his own household.| opportunity, too anxious for the advancement of his own family. He promoted his sons, both worthy and unworthy, to the greatest offices in the Kingdom, at an age when they could have had but little personal claim to such high distinctions. In so doing, he seems to have overstepped the bounds of policy as well as those of fairness and good feeling. Such an accumulation of power in one family could not but raise envy, and higher feelings than envy, in the breasts of rivals, some of whom may have had as good or better claims to promotion. That Godwine sacrificed his daughter to a political object is a charge common to him with princes and statesmen in all ages. Few men in any time or place would have thrown away the opportunity of having a King for a son-in-law, and, as Godwine doubtless hoped, of becoming, at least in the female line, the ancestor of a line of princes.
The faults of the great Earl then are manifest. But his virtues are equally manifest. In the eyes of contemporary Englishmen such faults as I have mentioned must have seemed little more than a few specks on a burnished mirror. His good government of his Earldom is witnessed, not only by the rhetoric of his panegyrist, which however may at least be set against the rhetoric of his accusers, but by the plain facts of the welcome which greeted him on his return from banishment, and the zeal |His strict administration of justice.| in his behalf displayed by all classes.[76] As a ruler, Godwine is especially praised for what in those days was looked on as the first virtue of a ruler, merciless severity towards all disturbers of the public peace. In our settled times we hardly understand how rigour, often barbarous rigour, against thieves and murderers, should have been looked on as the first merit of a governor, one which was always enough to cover a multitude of sins. Public feeling went along with the prince or magistrate who thus preserved the peace of his dominions, however great might be his own offences in other ways, and however cruel in our eyes might be the means by which he compassed this first end of government. To have discharged this great duty stands foremost in the panegyrics of Godwine and of Harold.[77] It was accepted at the hands of the Norman Conqueror as almost an equivalent for the horrors of the Conquest.[78] It won for his son Henry a splendid burst of admiration at the hands of a native writer who certainly was not blind to the oppression of which that prince himself was guilty.[79] A certain amount of tyranny was willingly endured at the hands of a man who so effectually rid the world of smaller tyrants. And, in opposition to the praise thus bestowed on Godwine, Harold, William, and Henry, we find the neglect of this paramount duty standing foremost in the dark indictments against the ruffian Rufus[80] and the heedless Robert.[81] Godwine is set forth to us, in set phrases, it may be, but in phrases which do not the less express the conviction of the country, as a ruler mild and affable to the good, but stern and merciless to the evil |Godwine never reached the same power as Harold afterwards.| and unruly.[82] But with all his vigour, all his eloquence, it is clear that Godwine never reached to the same complete dominion over King and Kingdom which, in later years, fell to the lot of his nobler son. He always remained an object of jealousy, not only to the French favourites of Eadward, but to the Earls of the other parts of England. We shall find that his eloquent tongue could not always command a majority in the Meeting of the Wise.[83] |Importance of eloquence.| But the importance attributed to his oratory, the fluctuations of success and defeat which he underwent in the great deliberative Assembly, show clearly how advanced our constitution already was in an age when free debate was so well understood, and when free speech was so powerful.[84] In this respect the Norman Conquest undoubtedly threw things back. We shall have to pass over several centuries before we come to another chief whose influence clearly rested to so great a degree on his power of swaying great assemblies of men, on the personal affection or personal awe with which he had learned to inspire the Legislature of his country.
The marriage of Godwine with his Danish wife Gytha had given him a numerous and flourishing offspring. Six sons and three daughters surrounded the table of the Earl of the West-Saxons. In the names which several of them bore we may discern the influence of their Danish mother.[85] The sons of Godwin were Swegen,[86] Harold, Tostig, Gyrth, Leofwine, and Wulfnoth. His daughters were Eadgyth, Gunhild, and perhaps a third, Ælfgifu.[87] As twenty-three years had now passed since Godwine’s marriage, we may assume that all of them were already born, though some of the younger ones may still have been children. The elder sons had reached manhood, and we shall find two at least of them filling the rank of Earl during the period |Swegen Earl, 1043.| with which we are now dealing. Swegen, the eldest son, seems to have been invested with an Earldom from the very beginning of Eadward’s reign, as he signs a charter with that rank in the King’s second year.[88] Gytha’s |Beorn Earl, 1045?| nephew, Beorn, also remained in England, while his brother Osbeorn was banished, and while his other brother Swend was putting forth his claims to the Crown of Denmark. He had doubtless attached himself firmly to the interests of his uncle. He was also, probably at a somewhat later time, raised to an Earldom, apparently the Earldom of the Middle-Angles, lately held by Thored.[89] The Earldom held by Swegen was geographically most anomalous. It took in the Mercian shires of Hereford, Gloucester, and Oxford, and the West-Saxon shires of Berkshire and Somerset.[90]
But, along with the comparatively obscure names of Swegen and Beorn, a greater actor now steps upon the field. We have now reached the first appearance of the illustrious man round whom the main interest of this history will henceforth centre. The second son of Godwine lived to be the last of our native Kings, the hero and the martyr of our native freedom. We have indeed as yet to deal with him only in a subordinate capacity, and in some sort in a less honourable character. The few recorded actions of Harold, Earl of the East-Angles, could hardly have enabled men to look forward to the glorious career of Harold, Earl of the West-Saxons, and of Harold, King of the English. To his first great government, a trying elevation indeed for one in the full vigour of youth and passion, he was apparently raised about three years after the election of Eadward, when he himself could not have passed his twenty-fourth year. While still young, he experienced somewhat of the fluctuations of human affairs, and he seems to have learned wisdom by experience. Still there must have been in him from the beginning the germs of those great qualities which shone forth so conspicuously in his later career. |His character.| It is not hard to paint his portraiture, alike from his recorded actions, and from the elaborate descriptions of |Contemporary testimonies.| him which we possess from contemporary hands. The praises of the great Earl sound forth in the latest specimen of the native minstrelsy of Teutonic England. And they sound forth with a truer ring than the half conventional praises of the saintly monarch, whose greatest glory, after all, was that he had called Harold to the |Evidence of the Biographer.| government of his realm.[91] The biographer of Eadward, the panegyrist of Godwine, is indeed the common laureate of Godwine’s whole family; but it is not in the special interest of Harold that he writes. He sets forth the merits of Harold with no sparing hand; he approves of him as a ruler and he admires him as a man; but his own personal affection plainly clings more closely to the rival brother Tostig. His description of Harold is therefore the more trustworthy, and it fully agrees with the evidence of his recorded actions. Harold then, the second son of Godwine, is set before us as a man uniting every gift of mind and body which could attract to him the admiration and affection of the age in which he lived.[92] Tall in stature, beautiful in countenance, of a bodily strength whose memory still lives in the rude pictorial art of his time,[93] he was foremost alike in the active courage and in the passive endurance of the warrior. |His military genius.| In hunger and watchfulness, in the wearing labours of a campaign no less than in the passing excitement of the day of battle, he stood forth as the leader and the model of the English people.[94] Alike ready and vigorous in action, he knew when to strike and how to strike; he knew how to measure himself against enemies of every kind, and to adapt his tactics to every position in which the accidents of warfare might place him. He knew how to chase the light-armed Briton from fastness to fastness, how to charge, axe in hand, on the bristling lines of his Norwegian namesake, and how to bear up, hour after hour, against the repeated onslaughts of the Norman horsemen and the more terrible thundershower of the Norman arrows. It is plain that in him, no less than in his more successful, and therefore more famous, rival, we have to admire, not only the mere animal courage of the soldier, but that true skill of the leader of armies which would have placed both Harold and William high among the captains of any age.
But the son of Godwine, the heir of his greatness, was not merely a soldier, not merely a general. If he inherited from his father those military qualities which first drew on Godwine the notice alike of the English Ætheling[95] and of the Danish King, he inherited also that eloquence of speech, that wisdom in council, that knowledge of the laws of the land,[96] which made him the true leader and father of the English people. Great as Harold was in war, his character as a civil ruler is still more remarkable, still more worthy of admiration. One or two actions of his earlier life show indeed that the spirit of those days |His singular forbearance.| of violence had laid its hand even on him. But, from the time when he appears in his full maturity as the acknowledged chief of the English nation, the most prominent feature in his character is his singular gentleness and mercy. Never, either in warfare or in civil strife, do we find Harold bearing hardly upon an enemy. From the time of his advancement to the practical government of the Kingdom, there is not a single harsh or cruel action with which he can be charged. His policy was ever a policy of conciliation. His panegyrist indeed confines his readiness to forgive, his unwillingness to avenge, to his dealings with his own countrymen only.[97] But the same magnanimous spirit is shown in cases where his conduct was less capable of being guided by mere policy than in his dealings with Mercian rivals and with Northumbrian revolters. We see the same generous temper in his treatment of the conquered Princes of Wales and of the defeated invaders of Stamfordbridge. As a ruler, he is described as walking in the steps of his father, as the terror of evildoers |His championship of England against strangers.| and the rewarder of those who did well. Devoted, heart and soul, to the service of his country, he was no less loyal in personal attention and service to her wayward and half-foreign King.[98] Throughout his career he was the champion of the independence of England against the dominion of strangers. To keep the court of England free from the shoals of foreigners who came to fatten on English estates and honours, and to meet the same enemies in open arms upon the heights of Senlac, were only two different ways of discharging the great duty to which his whole energies were devoted. And yet no man was ever more free from narrow insular prejudices, from any unworthy |His foreign travels.| jealousy of foreigners as such. His own mind was enlarged and enriched by foreign travel, by the study of the politics and institutions of other nations on their own soil. He not only made the pilgrimage to Rome, a practice which the example of Cnut seems to have made fashionable among English nobles and prelates, but he went on a journey through various parts of Gaul, carefully examining into the condition of the country and the policy of its rulers, among whom we may be sure that the renowned Duke of Rouen was not forgotten.[99] And Harold was ever ready to welcome and to reward real merit in men of foreign birth. He did not scruple to confer high offices on strangers, and to call men of worth from foreign lands to help him in his most cherished undertakings. |Harold’s patronage of Germans as opposed to Frenchmen.| But, while the bounty of Eadward was squandered on Normans and Frenchmen, men utterly alien in language and feeling, it was the policy of Harold to strengthen the connexion of England with the continental nations nearest to us in blood and speech.[100] All the foreigners promoted by Harold, or in the days of his influence, were natives of those kindred Teutonic lands whose sons might still almost be looked upon as fellow-countrymen.
Such was Harold as a leader of Englishmen in war and in peace. As for his personal character, we can discern that in the received piety of the age he surpassed his |His alleged spoliation of monasteries.| father. The charge of invasion of the rights of ecclesiastical bodies is brought against him no less than against Godwine; but the instance which has brought most discredit upon his name can be easily shown to be a mere tissue of misconceptions and exaggerations.[101] But it is far |His friendship with Saint Wulfstan.| more certain that Harold was the intimate friend of the best and holiest man of his time. Wulfstan, the sainted Bishop of Worcester, was the object of his deepest affection and reverence; he would at any time go far out of his way for the benefit of his exhortations and prayers; and the Saint repaid his devotion by loyal and vigorous |His foundation of the College at Waltham. [1060–2.]| service in the day of need.[102] Of his liberality his great foundation at Waltham is an everlasting monument, and it is a monument not more of his liberality than of his wisdom. To the monastic orders Harold seems not to have been specially liberal;[103] his bounty took another and a better chosen direction. The foundation of a great secular College, in days when all the world seemed mad after monks, when King Eadward and Earl Leofric vied with each other in lavish gifts to religious houses at home and abroad, was in itself an act displaying no small vigour and independence of mind. The details too of the foundation were such as showed that the creation of Waltham was not the act of a moment of superstitious dread or of reckless bounty, but the deliberate deed of a man who felt the responsibilities of lofty rank and boundless wealth, and who earnestly sought the welfare of his Church and nation |His personal demeanour frank and open.| in all things. As to his personal demeanour, he was frank and open in his general bearing, to a degree which was sometimes thought to be prejudicial to his interests.[104] Yet he could on occasion dissemble and conceal his purpose, a gift which seems sometimes to have been misconstrued,[105] and which apparently led him to the one great error of his life. He appears not to have been wholly free from |Charges of rashness.| the common fault of noble and generous dispositions. The charge of occasional rashness was brought against him by others, and it is denied by his panegyrist in terms which seem to imply that the charge was not wholly groundless.[106] And we must add that, in his private life, he did not, at least in his early days, imitate either the monastic asceticism of the King or the stern domestic purity of his rival |His connexion with Eadgyth Swanneshals.| the Conqueror. The most pathetic incident connected with his name, tells us of a love of his early days, the days apparently of his East-Anglian government, unrecognized by the laws of the Church, but perhaps not wholly condemned by the standard of his own age, which shows, perhaps above every other tale in English history or legend, how much the love of woman can do and suffer.[107]
Such was the man who, seemingly in the fourth year of Eadward, in the twenty-third or twenty-fourth of his own age, was invested with the rule of one of the great divisions of England; who, seven years later, became the virtual ruler of the Kingdom; who, at last, twenty-one years from his first elevation, received, alone among English Kings, the Crown of England as the free gift of her people, and, alone among English Kings, died, axe in hand, on her own soil, in the defence of England against foreign invaders. One prince alone in the later history of Europe rivals the peculiar glory which attaches to the name of Harold. For him we must seek in a distant age and in a distant land, but in a land connected with our own by a strangely abiding tie. English warriors, soldiers of Harold, chafing under the yoke of the Norman Conqueror, sought service at the court of the Eastern Cæsar, and there retained for ages their national tongue, their national weapon,[108] and the proud inheritance of their |Comparison of Harold with Constantine Palaiologos.| stainless loyalty. The memory of England and of Harold becomes thus strangely interwoven with the memory of the one prince of later times who died in a still nobler cause than that of the freedom of England. The King who died upon the hill of Senlac finds his only worthy peer in the Emperor who died before the Gate of Saint Rômanos. The champion of England against the Southern invader must own a nobler martyr still in the champion of the faith and liberty of Christendom against the misbelieving horde who have ever since defiled the fairest and most historic regions of the world. The blood of Harold and his faithful followers has indeed proved the most fertile seed of English freedom, and the warning signs of the times seem to tell us that the day is fast coming when the blood of Constantine shall no longer send up its cry for vengeance unheeded from the earth.
The second son of Godwine was no doubt raised to greatness in the first instance mainly because he was a son of Godwine; but his great qualities gradually showed that the rank to which he was raised by his father’s favour was one which he was fully entitled to retain by his own merits. The earlier elevation of the great Earl’s eldest born was less fortunate. Swegen lived to show that he had a soul of real nobleness within him; but his crimes were great, he was cut off just as he was beginning to amend his ways, and he has left a dark and sad memory behind him. A youth, evidently of no common powers, but wayward, violent, and incapable of self-control, he was hurried first into a flagrant violation of the sentiment of the age, and next into a still fouler breach of the eternal laws of right. His end may well arouse our pity, but his life, as a whole, is a dark blot on the otherwise chequered escutcheon of the house of Godwine. It was clearly felt to be so; the panegyrist of the family never once brings himself to utter the |Of the Lady Eadgyth. 1045.| name of Swegen. Only one other child of Godwine calls for personal notice at this stage of our history. Eadgyth, his eldest daughter, became, nearly two years after Eadward’s coronation,[109] the willing or unwilling bride of the saintly monarch. She is described as being no less highly gifted among women than her brothers were among men; as lovely in person and adorned with every female accomplishment, as endowed with a learning and refinement unusual in her age, as in point of piety and liberality a fitting help-meet for Eadward himself.[110] But there are some strange inconsistencies in the facts which are recorded of her. Her zeal and piety did not hinder her from receiving rewards, perhaps, in plain words, from taking bribes. Undoubtedly this is a subject on which the feelings of past times differed widely from those of our own; but we are a little staggered when we find the saintly King and his pious Lady receiving money from religious houses to support claims which, if just, should have been supported for nothing, and, if unjust, should not have been supported at all.[111] But Eadgyth has been charged with far heavier offences than this. She |Suspicions of her loyalty to England.| seems to have become in some degree infected with her husband’s love of foreigners, perhaps even in some sort to have withdrawn her sympathies from the national cause. She has won the doubtful honour of having her name extolled by Norman flatterers as one whose heart was |Her alleged share in the murder of Gospatric.| rather Norman than English.[112] And all her reputation for gentleness and piety has not kept her from being branded in the pages of one of our best chroniclers as an accomplice in a base and treacherous murder.[113] Her character thus |Her relation to her husband.| becomes in some sort an ænigma, and her relation to her husband is not the least ænigmatical part of her position. One of Eadward’s claims to be looked on as a saint was the general belief, at least of the next generation, that the husband of the beautiful Eadgyth lived with her only |Eadward’s alleged chastity.| as a brother with a sister.[114] If this story be true, a more enlightened standard of morality can see no virtue, but rather a crime, in his conduct. We can see nothing to admire in a King who, in such a crisis of his country, himself well nigh the last of his race, and without any available member of the royal family to succeed him, shrank, from whatever motive, from the obvious duty of raising up |Evidence of the earliest writers.| direct heirs to his Crown. But it seems probable that this report is merely part of the legend of the saint and not part of the history of the King. His contemporary panegyrists undoubtedly praise Eadward’s chastity. But it is not necessary to construe their words as meaning more than might be asserted of Ælfred, of William, of Saint Lewis, or of Edward the First. The conjugal faith of all those great monarchs remained, as far as we know, unbroken; but not one of them thought it any part of his duty to observe continence towards his own wife. Still, from whatever cause, the marriage of Eadward and Eadgyth was undoubtedly childless; and the relations of the royal pair to each other in other respects are hardly more intelligible. Eadgyth is described as the partaker of all her husband’s good works, and as nursing him with the most affectionate care during his last illness.[115] Yet, at the moment of his reign when he could most freely exercise a will of his own, if he did not absolutely of his own accord banish her from his court, he consented, seemingly without any reluctance, to her removal from him by the enemies of her family and her country.[116] The anxiety of Eadward’s Norman favourites to separate Eadgyth from her husband is, after all, the most honourable record of her to be found among the singularly contradictory descriptions of her character and actions.
We thus find, within a few years after the accession of Eadward, the whole of the ancient Kingdoms of Wessex, Sussex, Kent, Essex, East-Anglia, and part of Mercia, under the government of Godwine, his two elder sons, and his nephew. His daughter meanwhile shared the throne of England with a King whom he had himself placed upon it. Such greatness could hardly be lasting. It rested wholly on Godwine’s own personal character and influence, for the fame of Harold was yet to be won. The |The other Earldoms;| part of Mercia which was not otherwise occupied remained, |Mercia under Leofric;| as before, in the hands of Leofric the son of Leofwine. This Earl and his famous wife Godgifu, the Lady Godiva of legend,[117] were chiefly celebrated for their boundless liberality to ecclesiastical foundations.[118] Worcester, Leominster, Evesham, Chester, Wenlock, Stow in Lindesey, and, above all, Coventry, were special objects of their bounty. They seem not to have been satisfied with mere grants of lands and privileges, but to have taken a special interest in the buildings and ornaments of the houses which they favoured. The minster of Coventry, rebuilt and raised to cathedral rank after their time, has utterly vanished from the earth, and recent changes have abolished even the titular position of the city as a see of a Bishop. But at Stow, the ancient Sidnacester, a place even then of infinitely less consideration than Coventry, portions of the church enriched by Leofric still remain.[119] Leofric, his son Ælfgar, his grandsons and his granddaughter, play an important part in the history of this period down to the complete establishment of the Norman power in |Relations between Leofric and Godwine.| England. It is clear that Leofric must have been more personally annoyed by the rise of Godwine and his house than any other of the great men of England. A race whom he could not fail to look down upon as upstarts hemmed him in on every side except towards the North. Later in the reign of Eadward, we shall find the rivalries and the reconciliations of the two houses of Godwine and Leofric forming a considerable portion of the history. But, while Leofric himself lived, he continued to play the part which we have already seen him playing,[120] that part of a mediator between two extreme parties, which was dictated to him by the geographical position of his Earldom.
North of the Humber, the great Dane, Siward the Strong, still ruled over the Earldom which he had won by the murder of his wife’s uncle.[121] The manners of the Northumbrians were so savage, murders and hereditary deadly feuds were so rife among them, that it is quite possible that the slaughter of Eadwulf may, by a party at least, have been looked on as a praiseworthy act of vigour. Perhaps however, as we go on, we may discern signs that Siward and his house were not specially popular in Northumberland, and that men looked back with regret to the more regular line of their native Earls. At any rate, Siward remained for the rest of his days in undisturbed possession of both the Northumbrian governments, and along with these he seems to have held the Earldoms of Northampton and Huntingdon within the proper limits of Mercia.[122] He ruled, we are told, with great firmness and severity, labouring hard to bring his troublesome province into something like order.[123] Nor was he lacking in that bounty to the Church, which might seem specially needful as an atonement for the crime by which he rose to power.[124]