CHAP. XI. Conquest. acknowledgement from the lord of Mayenne. His The Norman submission carried William still further in the process of aggrandizement which was tearing the Maine country bit by bit from the grasp of Anjou. 10531071. Earl Harold. While William was thus fighting against odds in his own land he was in no case to hinder the triumph of Godwine or Godwine's house in lands over sea. Godwine indeed was fated to reap little from the victory he had won. Soon after his return he began to sicken, and in April, 1053, he suddenly fell speechless at the king's board. With his death Harold became earl of the West-Saxons. The death of Godwine indeed strengthened the position of his house. It at once changed its whole relation to the king. Whatever stain of Ælfred's blood lay on Godwine, none lay on his sons. Eadward had no galling sense that he owed them his crown, or that he had failed in a struggle to break their power. The earl's children had grown up in the king's court; they were his wife's kinsmen, and they seem to have shared the awe of the king's saintliness which was becoming general about them. From this time therefore Eadward's antipathy died gradually away. The wife whom he had discarded a year before won his affection. Tostig became his almost inseparable companion in chase or palace. Harold, if less cherished than his brother, was still regarded with favour. He took his father's place as the king's counsellor, but he was careful to hide the fact of his supremacy under demonstrations of loyal obedience to the king. "He always faithfully obeyed his rightful lord in word and deed," says the singer CHAP. XI. Conquest. 1053 1071. of Eadward's death-song, "nor left unheeded what was needful to his king." Over England, no doubt, The Norman the young earl's name exercized at first less command than his father's. But soon England saw with relief a ruler who brought with him no dark memories of the past, who had not stood by the invader's side at Assandun, whose first rise had not sprung from the favour of a foreign king, the sense of whose greatness was not dashed by suspicions of an Etheling's murder or by tolerance of Swein's crimes. Nor was Harold to prove himself wholly unworthy of the singular fortune which gave king and people alike peacefully into his hands. Born about 1021, in the opening of Cnut's reign, he was now in the prime of life and vigour, a tall, comely man, robust of frame, courteous and conciliatory, in temper a typical Englishman, indifferent to abuse, gifted with a cool self-command. Morally he rose in some points above his father's level; he was gentler in mood, more tolerant of opposition, more prone to forgive; he had far greater sympathy with English religion and English culture. He had inherited from Godwine an equal capacity for council and for war; he showed himself, in the years that followed, an active soldier and a skilful administrator. But in political ability he fell greatly below his father. Of the far-reaching statesmanship which had been Godwine's characteristic, of his capacity for wide combinations, of his foresight, his resource, the quickness with which he understood the need of change, and the moment for changing, Harold had little or none. But he was loyal to the policy of his house, and his patient, steady temper His character. Conquest. 1053 1071. CHAP. XI. was as fitted as that of his father for gradually winning The Norman back the power which the revolution of 1051 had shaken. As yet no dreams of any higher ambition seem to have visited the mind of Harold; his first political act indeed was to co-operate with Eadward in provid ing for the succession to the crown. All hope that the king would beget children by Eadgyth had now passed away; and, whether they were true or false, whispers from over sea of a promise to William of Normandy would spur the West-Saxon earl to a settlement of the question. The king's nearest kinsman was living in a far-off land. Two infant children of Eadmund Ironside had found a refuge from Cnut, nearly forty years back, in Hungary; and one of them, the king's nephew Eadward, was still living there with his son Eadgar, and his daughters Margaret and Christina. Eadward resolved to call the Ætheling home and own him for his heir; and in 1054 Bishop Ealdred was sent on this errand to the imperial Harold's policy in Mercia court. Hungary, however, was now at war with the empire, and after waiting a year at Cologne, Ealdred was forced to return and leave the plan to be carried out in more peaceful times. Conciliatory, however, as was his demeanour towards the king, Harold clung steadily to his father's policy of gathering England and its earldoms into the hands of his house. But we trace the caution and subtlety of his temper in the arrangements which followed on Godwine's return and death. The great Northumbrian earldom remained to Siward; the great West-Saxon earldom was taken by Harold himself. The policy of Godwine, CHAP. XI. Conquest. 1053 1071. as we have seen, had been to break up the Mercian earldom till the province of Leofric was reduced to The Norman little more than Cheshire, Shropshire, and Staffordshire. But the death of Beorn, the exile of Swein, and the revolution of 1051 had done much to build up again the central earldom. Mid-Britain and Lincolnshire seem now to have become attached to Leofric, and Mercia may have already stretched southward again as far as Oxford, while Harold's old earldom of East-Anglia had gone to Leofric's son Ælfgar. But the annexation of Nottinghamshire to Northumbria deprived Mercia of its hold on the Trent, and ran a block of strange territory into the heart of Leofric's earldom; the grant of Huntingdonshire and Northamptonshire to Siward barred all contact between the possessions of Leofric and his son; while Mercia was cut off from the Severn and the Welsh by the retention of Ralf in his earldom. of the Magesætas or Herefordshire, and the assignment, as seems likely, of the Hwiccas of Worcestershire and Gloucestershire to Odda, in compensation for his loss of western Wessex. By these adroit arrangements the assent not only of Siward and the king's kinsmen was secured to Harold's elevation, but even the Mercian house was won over, while its real power of action remained dexterously fettered. In the course of the following year, however, the death of the earl of Northumbria set Harold more free to carry forward his father's plan of absorbing all England within the rule of his house. Never had Siward's name been so great as in his later years. His energetic action had done much to displace And in Northumbria. CHAP. XI. The Norman 1053- Godwine; and if he consented to the earl's return it was doubtless not without a price. At any rate the year 1053 brought his continuous rule southward as far as the Trent in Nottinghamshire, and planted him in Mid-Britain as earl of Northampton and Huntingdon, making his power such as might well balance that of the house of Godwine. Another part of the price may possibly have been the assent of Godwine and Harold to a declaration of war on the Scot kingdom, to which Siward was urged alike by ambition and by family ties. Under the rule of Duncan the Scot kingdom had sunk low. The Orkney jarls had become masters of the Western Isles, of Caithness, and of the whole western coast to Galloway. The Mormær, or under-king of Moray, was practically independent in the north. The weakness of Duncan himself was fatally shown by the failure of the earlier attack which he had made on Northumbria, in spite of his close connexion by marriage ith its earls. In 1040, a year before the extension of Siward's power beyond the limits of Deira, Duncan made a fruitless raid as far as Durham; the burghers beat him back from the walls, and the Scots owed their safety to their horses, while Scottish heads hung round the battlements of the city. Immediately after this defeat, Duncan was slain by his subjects, and Macbeth, the Mormær of Moray, to whose charge the crime was laid, mounted the Scottish throne, while Duncan's two sons sought refuge with the Northumbrian earl. Though the rise of Macbeth seems to have marked a political revolution, the troubles of England, and it may be the jealousy of Godwine, had till now stood |