Malcolm apparently recovered the full possession of Cumberland, possibly on the death of Thorfinn, when Malcolm married his widow Ingebiorg, a marriage of whose results we shall hear again. These Scottish affairs had but little interest for our English writers, who were satisfied with recording the brilliant victory of Siward and the rich booty which he won, without going on to dwell on events which were purely Scottish. As their narrative ends with the defeat of Macbeth and Malcolm's first proclamation as King, it naturally passed out of mind that that proclamation did not at once give him full possession of all Scotland. The two defeats of Macbeth were confounded together, and it was believed that the usurper met his death in the battle which he fought against Siward. The error began very early, and it obtained prevalence enough to become enshrined in the poetry which, far more than any historical record, has made the name of Macbeth immortal. In the course of this year (1054), seemingly at a Gemót held at Midsummer, possibly that in which the expedition against Macbeth was decreed,1 a most important step was taken with regard to the succession to the Crown. It was a step which proved altogether fruitless, but it is most important as showing what men's feelings and wishes were at the time. It proves beyond doubt that now, two years after the return of Godwine, the idea of the succession of William had altogether passed away, while the idea of the succession of Harold had not yet occurred to men's minds. The state of the royal house was such as to cause the deepest anxiety. The English people, though they cared little for any strict law of succession, still reverenced the blood of their ancient princes, and they had ever been wont, save under the irresistible pressure of foreign conquest, to choose their Kings only from among the descendants of former Kings. But now the line of their former Kings seemed to be altogether dying out. Eadward was without children or hopes of children. There was no man in the land sprung from the male line of Ethelred and Eadgar. It is quite possible that there may have been men descended from earlier Kings; but they could only have been distant kinsmen, whose royal descent was well nigh forgotten, and who were no longer allowed to count as Ethelings. There was indeed a grandson of Æthelred dwelling in the Kingdom in the person of Ralph of Hereford. Ralph would very likely have been the successor to whom Eadward's personal inclinations would 1 Now that the Housecarls are an established institution, wars are carried on with much greater speed than they were in Ethelred's time. If the expedition was voted at the end of June, Siward could easily have met Macbeth in the field before the end of July. STATE OF THE ENGLISH SUCCESSION. 245 have led him. He shared with William of Normandy the merit of being a stranger speaking the French tongue, and he had the advantage over William of being a real descendant of English royalty. And the tie which bound Ralph to Eadward was a very close one. Old Teutonic feeling held the son of a sister to be hardly less near and dear than a son of a man's own loins,' and we have seen some indications that this feeling was not wholly forgotten in England in the eleventh century. The sister's son of Brihtnoth and the sister's son of Siward2 are mentioned in a special way among the chosen companions of their uncles, beneath whose banners they fought and died. Eadward, in his heart of hearts, would naturally fall back upon Ralph, his own nephew, the son of the daughter of Ethelred and Emma, as a candidate whom the English people might perhaps be persuaded to accept, when the cause of the Norman became hopeless after Godwine's revolution. But however sacred was the relation between a man and his sister's son, it was not one which by the Law of England conferred any right to the royal succession. The preference attaching to kingly blood was confined to those who were of kingly blood by direct male descent; it does not appear that the son of a King's daughter had any sort of claim to be considered in a royal election more than any other man in the realm. And as for Ralph himself, his foreign birth and his personal conduct were, either of them, quite enough to make him thoroughly distasteful to the English people. Men had had quite enough of him as Earl, and they certainly had no wish to have any further experience of him as King. In the present lack of heirs, men's thoughts turned to a branch of the royal family whose very existence was perhaps well nigh forgotten. Seven and thirty years before, the infant sons of Eadmund Ironside, Eadmund and . Eadward, had found a shelter from the fears of Cnut under the protection of the sainted Hungarian King Stephen.3 Eadmund was dead; he had died seemingly while still young. Eadward was still living. He had, no doubt through the influence of Stephen's Queen Gisela, a sister of the Emperor Henry the Second, received in marriage a lady of royal descent named Agatha, who most probably was a niece of the Hungarian Queen and of the sainted Emperor. This marriage would seem to show that, in those distant lands, Eadward was acknowledged as a prince, perhaps that he was looked to as one who might some day reign in his native island. And the fact that the son of Eadward and Agatha bore the renowned English name of 1 Tac. Mor. Germ. c. 20. "Sororum filiis idem apud avunculum, qui apud patrem honor. Quidam sanctiorem arctioremque hunc nexum sanguinis arbitrantur, et in accipiendis obsidibus magis exigunt." 2 See above, p. 242, for Siward nephew of Siward, and vol. i. p. 184 for Wulfmær nephew of Brihtnoth. 3 See vol. i. p. 277. f Eadgar, shows that the Ætheling himself cannot have wholly forgotten his native land. Yet banished, as he was, in his cradle, he could have retained hardly any of the feelings of an Englishman, and it is hardly possible that he could have spoken the English tongue. Eadward must have been even less of an Englishman than his royal namesake and uncle. Eadward the King had left England when he was many years older than Eadward the Ætheling, and he had lived in a land which had a much closer connexion with England. Still Normandy was dangerous, and Hungary was not. Whatever the Ætheling was, at least he was not a Frenchman; his connexions, though foreign, were in every way honourable and in no way formidable. Hungary was too distant a land to do England either good or harm, but the fame of the youngest Christian Kingdom and of its renowned and sainted King was doubtless great throughout Europe. And the connexion with the Imperial House, the distant kindred of the Ætheling's children with the illustrious Cæsar, the friend and brotherin-law of King Eadward, was of all foreign ties that which it most became Englishmen to strengthen. In default therefore of any member of the royal house brought up and dwelling in the land, it was determined to recall the banished Etheling with his wife and family. Besides his son Eadgar, he had two daughters, who bore the foreign names of Margaret and Christina. We shall hear of all three again. Eadgar, the last male descendant of Cerdic, lived to be in an especial manner the sport of fortune; a King chosen, but never crowned, a rival whom the Conqueror scorned to fear or to hurt, the friend and pensioner of successive usurpers of his own Crown. One of his sisters won a worthier fame. Margaret obtained the honours alike of royalty and of saintship; she became one of the brightest patterns of every virtue in her own time, and she became the source through which the blood and the rights of the Imperial House of Wessex have passed to the Angevin, the Scottish, and the German sovereigns of England.2 It is impossible to doubt that the resolution to invite the Ætheling was regularly passed by the authority of the King and his Witan. No lighter authority could have justified such a step, or could have carried any weight with foreign courts. Such an invitation was equivalent to declaring the Etheling to be successor to the Crown, so far as English Law allowed any man to be successor before the Crown was actually vacant. It is possible that, as in some other cases, an election before the vacancy may have been attempted; but 1 See Appendix FF. 2 It is only through Margaret that our Kings from Henry the Second onward were descended from Eadward the Elder, Ead mund, or Eadgar. But it must not be for- THE ÆTHELING INVITED TO ENGLAND. 2 247 it is perhaps more likely that all that was done was to guarantee to Eadward that same strong preference which naturally belonged only to a son of a reigning King. Such a preference, in favour of one who was the last remaining member of the royal family, would in effect hardly differ from an exclusive right. The resolution in short placed the Ætheling in the same position as if his father and not his uncle had been on the throne. His position would thus be the same as that of Eadwig and Eadgar during the reign of Eadred.1 But when we remember what followed, it is important to bear in mind that the preference which undoubtedly belonged to Eadward would not belong to his son. Eadward, though so long an exile, was an Englishman born, the son of a crowned King and his Lady. The young Eadgar was a native of a foreign land, and was not the son of royal parents. This quasi designation of Eadward to the Crown involves, as I before said, two things. It implies that the King had learned that the succession of William was a thing which he never could bring about. It implies also that neither Harold himself nor the English people had as yet formed any serious thought of the possible succession of one not of royal descent. Indeed one can hardly doubt that the resolution to send for the Etheling, if it was not made on Harold's own motion, must at any rate have had his full approval. No proposal could be more contrary to the wishes and interests of the Norman courtiers, who must either have unsuccessfully opposed it or else have found it their best wisdom to hold their peace. It was therefore, seemingly at the Whitsun Gemót, resolved to send an embassy to ask for the return of the Ætheling. And about the time that Earl Siward was warring in Scotland, the English ambassadors set forth on their errand. A direct communication with the court of Hungary seems to have been an achievement beyond the diplomatic powers of Englishmen in that age. The immediate commission of the embassy (July, 1054) was addressed to the Emperor Henry, with a request that he would himself send a further embassy into Hungary. At the head of the English legation was the indefatigable Bishop Ealdred, and with him. seems to have been coupled Abbot Elfwine of Ramsey.1 Both these Prelates had already had some experience of foreign courts. Ealdred had gone on the King's errand to the Apostolic throne,2 and Elfwine had been one of the representatives of the English Church at the famous Council of Rheims.3 The Bishop of Worcester clearly reckoned on a long absence, and we get some details of the arrangements which he made for the discharge of his ecclesiastical duties during his absence. The Abbey of Winchcombe, which he had annexed to his Bishoprick the year before, he now resigned, and the general government of the see of Worcester he entrusted to a monk of Evesham named Æthelwig. The church of that famous monastery, raised by the skill of its Abbot Mannig, was now awaiting consecration. For that ceremony he deputed his neighbour Bishop Leofwine of Lichfield. He then set forth for the court of Augustus. The Emperor was then at Köln, on his return from the consecration of his young son Henry as East-Frankish or Roman King in the Great Charles's minster at Aachen." The immediate tie between Eadward and Henry had been broken by the death of Queen Gunhild; the King who was now to be crowned was the child of Henry's second wife, the Empress Agnes of Poitiers. But the interchange of gifts and honours between the Roman and the insular Basileus was none the less cordial and magnificent. English writers dwell with evident pleasure on the splendid reception which the English Bishop met with both from the Emperor and from Hermann, the Archbishop of the city where Ealdred had been presented to Henry. We hear also how greatly edified the English Primate was, and what reforms he was afterwards enabled to make in England, through his inter 1 See Appendix FF. 2 See above, p. 74. 5 So I understand the passage in the Evesham History, p. 87, about Ethelwig's appointment to the Abbey of Evesham in 1059. He is there spoken of as one "qui multo antea tempore episcopatum Wigornensis ecclesiæ sub Aldredo archiepiscopo laudabiliter rexerat." See Mr. Macray's note. That Ealdred is called Archbishop need be no difficulty. It is the old question about the days of Abiathar the Priest. Cf. Appendix O0. 8 Young Henry was crowned at the age of five at Aachen, July 17th, 1054, by Hermann, Archbishop of Köln. See Lambert in anno. 9 Agnes, daughter of William the Great, Duke of Aquitaine, married King Henry in 1043 (Lambert and Chron. And. ap. Labbe, i. 276) or 1045 (Hugo Flav. ap. Labbe, i. 187) or 1049 (Chron. S. Maxent. in anno). Her father being dead, she is described as "filia Agnetis," the Agnes so famous in the history of Geoffrey Martel (see above, p. 274). Abbot Hugh, in recording the marriage, cannot refrain from the strange comment, Quum enim esset [Heinricus] alias bonus, et omnes ejus sitirent dominium, carnis tamen incontinentiam frænare non Leofwine bisceop to halgianne þæt mynster potuit." Was Henry the Third bound to æt Eofeshamme, on vi. Id. Oct." 6 On Mannig, see above, p. 45. 7 Chron. Wig. 1054. "And he lofode imitate Henry the Second ? T |