HAROLD THE SON OF GODWINE.

23

passed since Godwine's marriage, we may assume that all of them were already born, though some of the younger ones may still have been children. The eldest sons had reached manhood, and we shall find two at least of them filling the rank of Earl during the period with which we are now dealing. Swegen, the eldest son, seems to have been invested with an Earldom from the very beginning of Eadward's reign, as he signs a charter with that title in the King's second year. Gytha's nephew, Beorn, also remained in England while his brother Osbeorn was banished, and while his other brother Swegen was putting forth his claims to the Crown of Denmark. He had doubtless firmly attached himself to the interests of his uncle. He also was, probably at a somewhat later time, raised to an Earldom, seemingly the Earldom of the Middle-Angles, lately held by Thored." The Earldom held by Swegen was geographically most anomalous. It took in the Mercian shires of Hereford, Gloucester, and Oxford, and the West-Saxon shires of Berkshire and Somerset.3

But, along with the comparatively obscure names of Swegen and Beorn, a greater actor now steps upon the field. We have now reached the first appearance of the illustrious man round whom the main interest of this history will henceforth centre. The second son of Godwine lived to be the last of our native Kings, the hero and the martyr of our native freedom. We have indeed as yet to deal with him only in a subordinate capacity, and in some sort in a less honourable character. The few recorded actions of Harold, Earl of the East-Angles, could hardly have enabled men to look forward to the glorious career of Harold, Earl of the West-Saxons, and of Harold, King of the English. To his first great government, a trying elevation indeed for one in the full vigour of youth and passion, he was apparently raised about three years after the election of Eadward, when he himself could not have passed his twentyfourth year. While still young, he saw somewhat of the fluctuations of human affairs, and he seems to have learned wisdom from experience. Still there must have been in him from the beginning the germ of those great qualities which shone forth so conspicuously in his later career. It is not hard to paint his portraiture, alike from his recorded actions, and from the elaborate descriptions of him which we possess from contemporary hands. The praises of the 1 Cod. Dipl. iv. 74. This charter must Swegen, Tostig, and Gyrth, all with the be early in the year 1043, earlier at least rank of Dux," is deservedly marked as than the Gemót which we shall presently doubtful by Mr. Kemble. see was held in November. Swegen was therefore probably appointed in the Gemót at which Eadward was finally established as King. Another charter, of 1044 (Cod. Dipl. iv. 80), signed by Harold, Leofwine,

2 See vol. i. p. 347, and Appendix G, on the Great Earldoms. His first signature is in 1045. Cod. Dipl. iv. 97.

3 Fl. Wig. 1051.

great Earl sound forth in the latest specimen of the native minstrelsy of Teutonic England. And they sound forth with a truer ring than the half conventional praises of the saintly monarch, whose greatest glory, after all, was that he had called Harold to the government of his realm. The Biographer of Eadward, the panegyrist of Godwine, is indeed the common laureate of Godwine's whole family; but it is not in the special interest of Harold that he writes. He sets forth the merits of Harold with no sparing hand; he approves of him as a ruler and he admires him as a man; but his own personal affection plainly clings more closely to the rival brother Tostig. His description of Harold is therefore the more trustworthy as it fully agrees with the evidence of his recorded actions. Harold then, the second son of Godwine, is set before us as a man uniting every gift of mind and body which could attract to him the admiration and affection of the age in which he lived.2 Tall in stature, beautiful in countenance, of a bodily strength whose memory still lives in the rude pictorial art of his time,3 he was foremost alike in the active courage and in the passive endurance of the warrior. In hunger and watchfulness, in the wearing labours of a campaign no less than in the passing excitement of the day of battle, he stood forth as the leader and the model of the English people. Alike ready and vigorous in action, he knew when to strike and how to strike; he knew how to measure himself against enemies of every kind, and to adapt his tactics to every position in which the accidents of warfare might place him. He knew how to chase the light-armed Briton from fastness to fastness, how to charge, axe in hand, on the bristling lines of his Norwegian namesake, and how to bear up, hour after hour, against the repeated onslaughts of the Norman horsemen and the more terrible thunder-shower of the Norman arrows. It is plain that in him, no less than in his more successful, and therefore more famous, rival, we have to admire, not only the mere animal courage of the soldier, but that true skill of the leader of armies which would have placed both Harold and William high among the captains of

any age.

But the son of Godwine, the heir of his greatness, was more than a soldier, more than a general. If he inherited from his father those military qualities which first drew on Godwine the notice alike of the

1 Chronn. Ab. and Wig. 1065. See Appendix D.

2 Vita Eadw. 408. "Virtute corporis et animi in populo præstabat ut alter Judas Machabæus."

In the Bayeux Tapestry Harold is represented as lifting the Norman soldiers from the quicksands with the greatest ease.

4 Vita Eadw. 409. "Uterque [the

writer is comparing Harold and Tostig] satis pulcro et venusto corpore et, ut conjicimus, non inæquali robore, non disparis audacia. Sed major natu Haroldus procerior staturâ, patris satis [these words are clearly corrupt] infinitis laboribus, vigiliis et inediâ, multâ animi lenitate et promptiori sapientiâ."

CHARACTER OF HAROLD.

25

English Etheling' and of the Danish King, he inherited also that eloquence of speech, that wisdom in council, that knowledge of the laws of the land,2 which made him the true leader and father of the English people. Great as Harold was in war, his character as a civil ruler is still more remarkable, still more worthy of admiration. One or two actions of his earlier life show indeed that the spirit of those days of violence had laid its hand even on him. But, from the time when he appears in his full maturity as the acknowledged chief of the English nation, the most prominent feature in his character is his singular gentleness and mercy. Never, either in warfare or in civil strife, do we find Harold bearing hardly upon an enemy. From the time of his advancement to the practical government of the Kingdom, there is not a single harsh or cruel action with which he can be charged. His policy was ever a policy of conciliation. His panegyrist indeed confines his readiness to forgive, his unwillingness to avenge, to his dealings with his own countrymen only. But the same magnanimous spirit is shown in cases where his conduct was less capable of being guided by mere policy than in his dealings with Mercian rivals and with Northumbrian revolters. We see the same generous temper in his treatment of the conquered Princes of Wales and of the defeated invaders of Stamfordbridge. As a ruler, he is described as walking in the steps of his father, as the terror of evil-doers and the rewarder of those who did well. Devoted, heart and soul, to the service of his country, he was no less loyal in personal attention and service to her wayward and half-foreign King. Throughout his career he was the champion of the independence of England against the dominion of strangers. To keep the court of England free from the shoals of foreigners who came to fatten on English estates and honours, and to meet the same enemies in open arms upon the heights of Senlac, were only two different ways of discharging the great duty to which his whole energies were devoted. And yet no man was ever more free from narrow insular prejudices, from any unworthy jealousy of foreigners as such. His own mind was enlarged and enriched by

foreign travel, by the study of the politics and institutions of other nations on their own soil. He not only made the pilgrimage to Rome, a practice which the example of Cnut seems to have made fashionable among English nobles and prelates, but he went on a journey through various parts of Gaul, carefully examining into the condition of the country and the policy of its rulers, among whom we may be sure that the renowned Duke of Rouen was not forgotten.1 And Harold was ever ready to welcome and to reward real merit in men of foreign birth. He did not scruple to confer high offices on strangers, and to call men of worth from foreign lands to help him in his most cherished undertakings. But, while the bounty of Eadward was squandered on Normans and Frenchmen, men utterly alien in language and feeling, it was the policy of Harold to strengthen the connexion of England with the continental nations nearest to us in blood and speech.2 All the foreigners promoted by Harold, or in the days of his influence, were natives of those kindred Teutonic lands whose sons might still almost be looked upon as fellow-countrymen.

Such was Harold as a leader of Englishmen in war and in peace. As for his personal character, we can discern that in the received piety of the age he surpassed his father. The charge of invasion of the rights of ecclesiastical bodies is brought against him no less than against Godwine; but the instance which has brought most discredit upon his name can be easily shown to be a mere tissue of misconceptions and exaggerations. And it is far more certain that Harold was the intimate friend of the best and holiest man of his time. Wulfstan, the sainted Prior and Bishop of Worcester, was the object of his deepest affection and reverence; he would at any time go far out of his way for the benefit of his exhortations and prayers; and the Saint repaid his devotion by loyal and vigorous service in the day of need.* Of his liberality his great foundation at Waltham is an everlasting monument, and it is a monument not more of his liberality than of his wisdom. To the monastic orders Harold seems not to have been specially liberal; his bounty took another and a better chosen direction. The foundation of a great secular College, in days when all the world seemed mad after monks, when King Eadward and Earl Leofric

5

1 Vita Eadw. 410; a passage which I shall have to refer to again.

2 I refer both to Harold's own proceedings at Waltham and to the general promotion of Germans during this reign. See Stubbs, De Inv. ix.

3 See Appendix E and QQ.

See William of Malmesbury's Life of Wulfstan, Angl. Sacr. ii. 248, 253.

5 He was however a benefactor to the Abbey of Peterborough. The local his

torian Hugo Candidus says (p. 44. ap. Sparke), "Comes Haroldus dedit Cliftune et terram in Londone juxta monasterium Sancti Pauli, juxta portum qui vocatur Etheredishythe." Harold's connexion with London should be noticed. It was also at his advice that King Eadward made a grant to Abingdon (Hist. Mon. Ab. i. 469), and that a Thegn named Thurkill, of whom we shall hear again, commended himself to the same church (Ib. i. 484).

HAROLD'S DEALINGS WITH THE Church.

1

27

vied with each other in lavish gifts to religious houses at home and abroad, was in itself an act displaying no small vigour and independence of mind. The details too of the foundation were such as showed that the creation of Waltham was not the act of a moment of superstitious dread or of reckless bounty, but the deliberate deed of a man who felt the responsibilities of lofty rank and boundless wealth, and who earnestly sought the welfare of his Church and nation in all things. As to his personal demeanour, he was frank and open in his general bearing, to a degree which was sometimes thought to be hurtful to his interests. Yet he could on occasion dissemble and conceal his purpose, a gift which seems sometimes to have been misconstrued, and which apparently led him to the one great error of his life. He appears not to have been wholly free from the common fault of noble and generous dispositions. The charge of occasional rashness was brought against him by others, and it is denied by his panegyrist in terms which seem to imply that the charge was not wholly groundless. And we must add that, in his private life, he did not, at least in his younger days, imitate either the monastic asceticism of the King or the stern domestic purity of his rival the Conqueror. The most pathetic incident connected with his name tells us of a love of his early days, the days apparently of his East-Anglian government, unrecognized by the laws of the Church, but perhaps not wholly condemned by the standard of his own age, which shows, above every other tale in English history or legend, how much the love of woman can do and suffer.*

Such was the man who, seemingly in the fourth year of Eadward (1045), in the twenty-third or twenty-fourth of his own age, was invested with the rule of one of the great divisions of England; who, seven years later, became the virtual ruler of the Kingdom ;

1 Vita Eadw. 409. "Cum quovis, quem fidelem putaret, interdum communicare consilium operis sui, et hoc interdum adeo differre, si debet duci [dici?], ut minus conducibile a quibusdam videretur fore suæ cominoditati."

2 Ib. 410. "Uterque [Harold and Tostig] interdum quædam simulare adeo egregie ut qui eos non noverit incertius nil æstimare poterit." In connexion with this curious passage I may quote a singular exaggeration from an unknown author; it is found in a marginal note on one of the manuscripts of the Winchester Annals (Luard, 27); "Haroldus Rex, si sapienter ageret quidquid agebat furore, nullus hominum illum [sic] resisteret. Sed adeo erat animi inconstantis, quod nullus suorum se credidit illi." Yet "sapienter" is the adverb which the Biographer specially applies

to Harold, in distinction to the "fortiter" of Tostig.

3 The charge of rashness brought against Harold during the last scene of his life I shall discuss elsewhere. I here add the Biographer's disclaimer (Vita Eadw. 409); "Porro de vitio præcipitationis sive levitatis, quis hunc vel illum sive quemvis de Godwino patre genitum, sive ejus disciplinâ et studio educatum arguerit?" There is a very remarkable passage further on (p. 422), in which the Biographer says that Harold was "ad sacramenta nimis (proh dolor) prodigus." The allusion clearly is to Harold's oath to William, which the Biographer never distintly men

tions.

4 I refer of course to the tale of Eadgyth Swanneshals, of which I shall have to speak again more than once.