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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 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 no sympathy whatever. 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 wife. But his real affections were lavished on the Norman priests1 and gentlemen who flocked to his Court as to the land of promise. These strangers were placed in important offices about the royal person,2 and before long they were set to rule as Earls and Bishops over the already half

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HIS LOVE OF FOREIGNERS.

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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,' and Ralph the Timid was but the forerunner 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 settlement four and twenty years later. In all this the seeds of the Conquest were sowing, or rather, as I once before put it, 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 greatest 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 Swegen 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 Eadward and Godwine probably were.3 There is not a

shadow of evidence for those 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 are high-minded and faithful counsellors 2 Vol. i. p. 355.

1 Vol. i. p. 350.

3 See above, p. 9.

of the King; they are patriots 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.1 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 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. 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,3 most or all of which must have been acquired by royal grant, it is almost impossible to acquit him of 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.* 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 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. Such a peculiarity is most remark

1 Will. Malms. ii. 197. See Appendix D. 2 See above, p. 5.

3 See vol. i. p. 285. The French biographer of Eadward says (p. 57);

"Godwin k'out mis entente
Cunquere tresor e rente,

Mut fu garniz e estorez

D'or e de argent dunt out asez,
Ke par plaiz e par achatz
De grant aver out fait purchaz;
Mut out cunquis par boesdie
Plus ke par chivalerie."

+ See Appendix E.

5 A Godwine appears (W. Thorn. X

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able. 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 possible to acquit Godwine of being, like most fathers who have the chance, 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 on his behalf displayed by all classes.1 As a ruler, Godwine is specially 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. It was accepted at the hands of the Norman

Scriptt. 2224) as a benefactor of Christ Church, Canterbury. This may be the great Earl, or it may be the Godwine whose marriage settlement we have in Cod. Dipl. iv. 10.

1 This comes out nowhere more emphatically than in the comparatively hostile Abingdon Chronicle, 1052.

2 Vita Eadw. 408. Cf. Fl. Wig. 1066.

2

He

Conqueror as almost an equivalent for the horrors of the Conquest.1 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. A certain amount of tyranny was willingly endured at the hands of men 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 and the heedless Robert. 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 and unruly.5 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. 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. 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. 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. The sons of Godwine were Swegen, Harold, Tostig, Gyrth, Leofwine, and Wulfnoth. His daughters were Eadgyth, Gunhild, and Elfgifu. As twenty-three years had now Harold, i. 165.

1 See the Peterborough Chronicler's character of William, under the year 1087.

2 Ib. 1135.

3 Will. Malms. iv. 314. Ord. Vit. 672 B.

5 Vit. Eadw. 408.

6 Fl. Wig. 1048, 1049.

7 "When the chronicler praises the gift of speech, he unconsciously proves the existence of constitutional freedom." Lytton,

8 I attribute the Danish names in Godwine's family to the influence of Gytha rather than to any Danish tastes prevalent at the Court of Cnut, because the Danes settled in England seem to have so often adopted English names for their children. See vol. i. pp. 348, 354.

9 On the sons and daughters of Godwine see Appendix F.

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