Canute left three sons, by name sweyn,
Harold, and hardicanute; but his Queen,
Emma, once the Flower of Normandy, was the mother of
only Hardicanute. Canute had wished his dominions
to be divided between the three, and had wished Harold
to have England; but the Saxon people in the South
of England, headed by a nobleman with great possessions,
called the powerful earl Godwin (who is
said to have been originally a poor cow-boy), opposed
this, and desired to have, instead, either Hardicanute,
or one of the two exiled Princes who were over in Normandy.
It seemed so certain that there would be more bloodshed
to settle this dispute, that many people left their
homes, and took refuge in the woods and swamps.
Happily, however, it was agreed to refer the whole
question to a great meeting at Oxford, which decided
that Harold should have all the country north of the
Thames, with London for his capital city, and that
Hardicanute should have all the south. The quarrel
was so arranged; and, as Hardicanute was in Denmark
troubling himself very little about anything but eating
and getting drunk, his mother and Earl Godwin governed
the south for him.
They had hardly begun to do so, and
the trembling people who had hidden themselves were
scarcely at home again, when Edward, the elder of the
two exiled Princes, came over from Normandy with a
few followers, to claim the English Crown. His
mother Emma, however, who only cared for her last
son Hardicanute, instead of assisting him, as he expected,
opposed him so strongly with all her influence that
he was very soon glad to get safely back. His
brother Alfred was not so fortunate. Believing
in an affectionate letter, written some time afterwards
to him and his brother, in his mother’s name
(but whether really with or without his mother’s
knowledge is now uncertain), he allowed himself to
be tempted over to England, with a good force of soldiers,
and landing on the Kentish coast, and being met and
welcomed by Earl Godwin, proceeded into Surrey, as
far as the town of Guildford. Here, he and his
men halted in the evening to rest, having still the
Earl in their company; who had ordered lodgings and
good cheer for them. But, in the dead of the
night, when they were off their guard, being divided
into small parties sleeping soundly after a long march
and a plentiful supper in different houses, they were
set upon by the King’s troops, and taken prisoners.
Next morning they were drawn out in a line, to the
number of six hundred men, and were barbarously tortured
and killed; with the exception of every tenth man,
who was sold into slavery. As to the wretched
Prince Alfred, he was stripped naked, tied to a horse
and sent away into the Isle of Ely, where his eyes
were torn out of his head, and where in a few days
he miserably died. I am not sure that the Earl
had wilfully entrapped him, but I suspect it strongly.
Harold was now King all over England,
though it is doubtful whether the Archbishop of Canterbury
(the greater part of the priests were Saxons, and
not friendly to the Danes) ever consented to crown
him. Crowned or uncrowned, with the Archbishop’s
leave or without it, he was King for four years:
after which short reign he died, and was buried; having
never done much in life but go a hunting. He
was such a fast runner at this, his favourite sport,
that the people called him Harold Harefoot.
Hardicanute was then at Bruges, in
Flanders, plotting, with his mother (who had gone
over there after the cruel murder of Prince Alfred),
for the invasion of England. The Danes and Saxons,
finding themselves without a King, and dreading new
disputes, made common cause, and joined in inviting
him to occupy the Throne. He consented, and soon
troubled them enough; for he brought over numbers
of Danes, and taxed the people so insupportably to
enrich those greedy favourites that there were many
insurrections, especially one at Worcester, where the
citizens rose and killed his tax-collectors; in revenge
for which he burned their city. He was a brutal
King, whose first public act was to order the dead
body of poor Harold Harefoot to be dug up, beheaded,
and thrown into the river. His end was worthy
of such a beginning. He fell down drunk, with
a goblet of wine in his hand, at a wedding-feast at
Lambeth, given in honour of the marriage of his standard-bearer,
a Dane named towed the proud.
And he never spoke again.
Edward, afterwards called by
the monks the confessor, succeeded; and his
first act was to oblige his mother Emma, who had favoured
him so little, to retire into the country; where she
died some ten years afterwards. He was the exiled
prince whose brother Alfred had been so foully killed.
He had been invited over from Normandy by Hardicanute,
in the course of his short reign of two years, and
had been handsomely treated at court. His cause
was now favoured by the powerful Earl Godwin, and he
was soon made King. This Earl had been suspected
by the people, ever since Prince Alfred’s cruel
death; he had even been tried in the last reign for
the Prince’s murder, but had been pronounced
not guilty; chiefly, as it was supposed, because of
a present he had made to the swinish King, of a gilded
ship with a figure-head of solid gold, and a crew of
eighty splendidly armed men. It was his interest
to help the new King with his power, if the new King
would help him against the popular distrust and hatred.
So they made a bargain. Edward the Confessor
got the Throne. The Earl got more power and more
land, and his daughter Editha was made queen; for
it was a part of their compact that the King should
take her for his wife.
But, although she was a gentle lady,
in all things worthy to be beloved good,
beautiful, sensible, and kind the King from
the first neglected her. Her father and her
six proud brothers, resenting this cold treatment,
harassed the King greatly by exerting all their power
to make him unpopular. Having lived so long
in Normandy, he preferred the Normans to the English.
He made a Norman Archbishop, and Norman Bishops;
his great officers and favourites were all Normans;
he introduced the Norman fashions and the Norman language;
in imitation of the state custom of Normandy, he attached
a great seal to his state documents, instead of merely
marking them, as the Saxon Kings had done, with the
sign of the cross just as poor people who
have never been taught to write, now make the same
mark for their names. All this, the powerful
Earl Godwin and his six proud sons represented to
the people as disfavour shown towards the English;
and thus they daily increased their own power, and
daily diminished the power of the King.
They were greatly helped by an event
that occurred when he had reigned eight years.
Eustace, Earl of Bologne, who had married the King’s
sister, came to England on a visit. After staying
at the court some time, he set forth, with his numerous
train of attendants, to return home. They were
to embark at Dover. Entering that peaceful town
in armour, they took possession of the best houses,
and noisily demanded to be lodged and entertained
without payment. One of the bold men of Dover,
who would not endure to have these domineering strangers
jingling their heavy swords and iron corselets
up and down his house, eating his meat and drinking
his strong liquor, stood in his doorway and refused
admission to the first armed man who came there.
The armed man drew, and wounded him. The man
of Dover struck the armed man dead. Intelligence
of what he had done, spreading through the streets
to where the Count Eustace and his men were standing
by their horses, bridle in hand, they passionately
mounted, galloped to the house, surrounded it, forced
their way in (the doors and windows being closed when
they came up), and killed the man of Dover at his
own fireside. They then clattered through the
streets, cutting down and riding over men, women, and
children. This did not last long, you may believe.
The men of Dover set upon them with great fury, killed
nineteen of the foreigners, wounded many more, and,
blockading the road to the port so that they should
not embark, beat them out of the town by the way they
had come. Hereupon, Count Eustace rides as hard
as man can ride to Gloucester, where Edward is, surrounded
by Norman monks and Norman lords. ‘Justice!’
cries the Count, ’upon the men of Dover, who
have set upon and slain my people!’ The King
sends immediately for the powerful Earl Godwin, who
happens to be near; reminds him that Dover is under
his government; and orders him to repair to Dover
and do military execution on the inhabitants.
‘It does not become you,’ says the proud
Earl in reply, ’to condemn without a hearing
those whom you have sworn to protect. I will
not do it.’
The King, therefore, summoned the
Earl, on pain of banishment and loss of his titles
and property, to appear before the court to answer
this disobedience. The Earl refused to appear.
He, his eldest son Harold, and his second son Sweyn,
hastily raised as many fighting men as their utmost
power could collect, and demanded to have Count Eustace
and his followers surrendered to the justice of the
country. The King, in his turn, refused to give
them up, and raised a strong force. After some
treaty and delay, the troops of the great Earl and
his sons began to fall off. The Earl, with a
part of his family and abundance of treasure, sailed
to Flanders; Harold escaped to Ireland; and the power
of the great family was for that time gone in England.
But, the people did not forget them.
Then, Edward the Confessor, with the
true meanness of a mean spirit, visited his dislike
of the once powerful father and sons upon the helpless
daughter and sister, his unoffending wife, whom all
who saw her (her husband and his monks excepted) loved.
He seized rapaciously upon her fortune and her jewels,
and allowing her only one attendant, confined her
in a gloomy convent, of which a sister of his no
doubt an unpleasant lady after his own heart was
abbess or jailer.
Having got Earl Godwin and his six
sons well out of his way, the King favoured the Normans
more than ever. He invited over William,
duke of Normandy, the son of that Duke
who had received him and his murdered brother long
ago, and of a peasant girl, a tanner’s daughter,
with whom that Duke had fallen in love for her beauty
as he saw her washing clothes in a brook. William,
who was a great warrior, with a passion for fine horses,
dogs, and arms, accepted the invitation; and the Normans
in England, finding themselves more numerous than
ever when he arrived with his retinue, and held in
still greater honour at court than before, became
more and more haughty towards the people, and were
more and more disliked by them.
The old Earl Godwin, though he was
abroad, knew well how the people felt; for, with part
of the treasure he had carried away with him, he kept
spies and agents in his pay all over England.
Accordingly, he thought the time was
come for fitting out a great expedition against the
Norman-loving King. With it, he sailed to the
Isle of Wight, where he was joined by his son Harold,
the most gallant and brave of all his family.
And so the father and son came sailing up the Thames
to Southwark; great numbers of the people declaring
for them, and shouting for the English Earl and the
English Harold, against the Norman favourites!
The King was at first as blind and
stubborn as kings usually have been whensoever they
have been in the hands of monks. But the people
rallied so thickly round the old Earl and his son,
and the old Earl was so steady in demanding without
bloodshed the restoration of himself and his family
to their rights, that at last the court took the alarm.
The Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Norman
Bishop of London, surrounded by their retainers, fought
their way out of London, and escaped from Essex to
France in a fishing-boat. The other Norman favourites
dispersed in all directions. The old Earl and
his sons (except Sweyn, who had committed crimes against
the law) were restored to their possessions and dignities.
Editha, the virtuous and lovely Queen of the insensible
King, was triumphantly released from her prison, the
convent, and once more sat in her chair of state,
arrayed in the jewels of which, when she had no champion
to support her rights, her cold-blooded husband had
deprived her.
The old Earl Godwin did not long enjoy
his restored fortune. He fell down in a fit
at the King’s table, and died upon the third
day afterwards. Harold succeeded to his power,
and to a far higher place in the attachment of the
people than his father had ever held. By his
valour he subdued the King’s enemies in many
bloody fights. He was vigorous against rebels
in Scotland this was the time when Macbeth
slew Duncan, upon which event our English Shakespeare,
hundreds of years afterwards, wrote his great tragedy;
and he killed the restless Welsh King Griffith,
and brought his head to England.
What Harold was doing at sea, when
he was driven on the French coast by a tempest, is
not at all certain; nor does it at all matter.
That his ship was forced by a storm on that shore,
and that he was taken prisoner, there is no doubt.
In those barbarous days, all shipwrecked strangers
were taken prisoners, and obliged to pay ransom.
So, a certain Count Guy, who was the Lord of Ponthieu
where Harold’s disaster happened, seized him,
instead of relieving him like a hospitable and Christian
lord as he ought to have done, and expected to make
a very good thing of it.
But Harold sent off immediately to
Duke William of Normandy, complaining of this treatment;
and the Duke no sooner heard of it than he ordered
Harold to be escorted to the ancient town of Rouen,
where he then was, and where he received him as an
honoured guest. Now, some writers tell us that
Edward the Confessor, who was by this time old and
had no children, had made a will, appointing Duke
William of Normandy his successor, and had informed
the Duke of his having done so. There is no
doubt that he was anxious about his successor; because
he had even invited over, from abroad, Edward
the outlaw, a son of Ironside, who had come
to England with his wife and three children, but whom
the King had strangely refused to see when he did
come, and who had died in London suddenly (princes
were terribly liable to sudden death in those days),
and had been buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
The King might possibly have made such a will; or,
having always been fond of the Normans, he might have
encouraged Norman William to aspire to the English
crown, by something that he said to him when he was
staying at the English court. But, certainly
William did now aspire to it; and knowing that Harold
would be a powerful rival, he called together a great
assembly of his nobles, offered Harold his daughter
Adele in marriage, informed him that he meant
on King Edward’s death to claim the English crown
as his own inheritance, and required Harold then and
there to swear to aid him. Harold, being in the
Duke’s power, took this oath upon the Missal,
or Prayer-book. It is a good example of the
superstitions of the monks, that this Missal, instead
of being placed upon a table, was placed upon a tub;
which, when Harold had sworn, was uncovered, and shown
to be full of dead men’s bones bones,
as the monks pretended, of saints. This was
supposed to make Harold’s oath a great deal more
impressive and binding. As if the great name
of the Creator of Heaven and earth could be made more
solemn by a knuckle-bone, or a double-tooth, or a finger-nail,
of Dunstan!
Within a week or two after Harold’s
return to England, the dreary old Confessor was found
to be dying. After wandering in his mind like
a very weak old man, he died. As he had put
himself entirely in the hands of the monks when he
was alive, they praised him lustily when he was dead.
They had gone so far, already, as to persuade him that
he could work miracles; and had brought people afflicted
with a bad disorder of the skin, to him, to be touched
and cured. This was called ’touching for
the King’s Evil,’ which afterwards became
a royal custom. You know, however, Who really
touched the sick, and healed them; and you know His
sacred name is not among the dusty line of human kings.