CHAP. X. Godwine, the men of Wessex, "for that he was too long in The House of Denmark," and Harald became king over all the land. Godwine remained earl of Wessex. But if he had forsaken Harthacnut, Emma was still faithful to her 10351053. Harthacnut. son. She seems to have cared little for her children by Ethelred, whom she had not seen since their boyhood, and to have concentrated her love on her younger children by Cnut. When the sentence of the Witenagemot therefore drove her from Winchester, she took refuge not in Normandy, which was now backing the Etheling Eadward, but in Flanders. Her temper was active as of old. From "Baldwin's land" her messengers again pressed Harthacnut to strike a blow for his heritage; and in the winter of 1039 he sailed to Flanders to devise plans with his mother for a great invasion, and returned to the north at the opening of spring to put himself at the head of the fleet which he was preparing. But death had already removed his rival. In March, 1040, Harald Harefoot died at Oxford, and was carried to Westminster for burial. When Harthacnut touched at Bruges with his fleet he was met by the news that the English Witan had chosen him for their king; and in the following June he landed peacefully at Sandwich with the fleet of sixty vessels which had been gathered for the conquest of the kingdom. The fierce vengeance of the young sovereign, it may be of Emma, tore up his predecessor's body from its resting-place and flung it into a fen. Godwine again found himself in hard straits. He had to clear himself by solemn oath of the charge of betrayal of Ælfred brought against him by Arch All memory of the stand he had CHAP. X. Godwine. 1035 1053. bishop Elfric. made for the succession of Harthacnut was lost in The House of the fresher memory of his submission to Harald. But costly gifts enabled him to retain his earldom through Harthacnut's reign. The two years of the young king's rule were marked by little save heavy taxation for payment of the Danish host which was to have won back England, and by the stern suppression of resistance to this Danegeld at Worcester. Discontent would probably have passed into revolt, had not the certainty of his approaching end turned men's minds to the Ætheling Eadward. The rise of a new sympathy for the house of Cerdic had been seen in the charge brought against Godwine, and the misrule of Harald and Harthacnut had rendered the succession of another Dane impossible. Even Harthacnut turned to his mother's son; and ere he died Eadward was summoned by the king himself from his refuge in Normandy, and recognized as heir to the throne. A halo of tenderness spread in after-time round this last king of the old English stock. Legend told of his pious simplicity, his blitheness and gentleness of mood, the holiness that won him in after-time his title of Confessor, and enshrined him as a saint in the abbey church at Westminster. His was the one figure that stood out bright against the darkness when England lay trodden under foot by Norman conquerors; and so dear became his memory that liberty and independence itself seemed incarnate in his name. Instead of freedom the subjects of William or Henry called for the "good laws of Eadward the The Etheling Eadward. CHAP. X. Godwine. 10351053. Confessor." But it was, in fact, as a mere shadow of The House of the past that the exile returned to the land that had cast him out in his childhood. His blue eyes and flaxen hair, indeed, were those of his race; but the fragile form, the delicate complexion, the transparent womanly hands of Eadward told that no great warrior or ruler was to mount in him the throne of Æthelstan and Eadgar. He was a stranger too in the realm. Thirty years had passed since the child had been driven from English shores, and save in his fruitless descent on Southampton he had never touched them since. He had grown to manhood at the Norman court. His memories were not of the father who had died in his childhood, or of the mother who had forsaken him through long years of exile, but of the Norman dukes who had sheltered him, of his uncle Richard the Good, of his cousins Richard and Robert, of Robert's son William, the young kinsman who was battling with a storm of rebellion and treachery in the land which Eadward loved. In all but name, indeed, he was a Norman. He spoke the Norman tongue; he used in Norman fashion a seal for his charters; his sympathies lay naturally with the friends of his Norman life. The Englishmen among whom he found himself when Harthacnut summoned him to his court were all strangers to him, and the shy, timid exile of forty had neither Cnut's temper nor Cnut's youth to enable him to throw himself into new associations. It is characteristic of Eadward's sympathies that ailing as his half-brother was, he seems again to have quitted England after his recognition as heir to the crown, and to have been still in Normandy in the summer CHAP. X. Godwine. of 1042, when Harthacnut "died as he stood at his The House of drink" at a marriage feast in Lambeth. It was not, indeed, till the Easter-tide of 1043 that Eadward saw himself crowned at Winchester by the two archbishops as English king. The months that lay between this crowning and the death of his predecessor had probably been months of busy negotiation with the English nobles, and above all with the earl of Wessex. For jealously as he had been looked on by Harthacnut, Godwine was still the greatest power in the land. Earl Siward was hardly settled in his distant Northumbria, and the mutilated Mercia of Leofric could not vie in extent or power with the great West-Saxon earldom. Wealth, character, political experience, the memory of his long supremacy under Cnut, and of his personal sway for two years over Wessex after Cnut's death, as well as a sense of the skill and daring with which he had faced and lived through the ill-will of Harald and the hatred of Harthacnut, gave Godwine in fact at this moment a weight beyond that of any other Englishman. Nor did it seem likely that this weight would be thrown on Eadward's side. The great house to which his wife belonged seems to have clung almost as closely to the earl as his own sons. Two of her brother Ulf's children, Beorn and Osbeorn, were in England at this time, and closely linked to the earl; while their elder brother, Swein Estrithson, as he was called, was fighting in the northern seas for the crown of Denmark. But at the news of Harthacnut's death, Swein sailed back to England to claim a crown which seemed easier 10351053. Coronation of СНАР. Х. Godwine. 10351053. to win. Kinship, gratitude, political tradition alike The House of seemed to sway Godwine to Swein's side both in his claims to the Danish and the English thrones. The earl owed all to Cnut, and Swein was not only his own wife's nephew, but he was Cnut's sister's son, and nearest in blood, now Harthacnut was dead, to the king who had raised Godwine to the power he held. His support of Cnut's will, his fidelity to Harthacnut, show that three years before Godwine had looked to a union of the crowns of England and Denmark as of high political value, and such a union. might easily have been brought about by the crowning of Swein, and his return to the North with a force of Englishmen. But whatever may have been the strength of Godwine's family sympathies, he must soon have seen that it was impossible to indulge them. As in his stubborn effort to secure half England for Harthacnut, Godwine found himself face to face with the will of a whole people. The worthlessness of Cnut's children had wiped out the memory of Cnut's greatness and wisdom. It was indeed the very policy of Cnut, the English and national character of his rule, which had roused into new and stronger life the national consciousness of Englishmen, a consciousness which now expressed itself in the sudden assertion of their will to have no stranger to rule over them, but one of their own royal stock. Before King Harthacnut was buried, says the chronicle, "all folk chose Eadward for their king." State of Normandy. That there was still dispute among the nobles at the Witenagemot shows that the acclamation of the people found fierce opposition, while the assertion of |