promise of King Eadward in William's favour could hardly be asserted in the teeth of a bequest and an election in favour of an Englishman of royal birth and mature years, and one against whom William could have no personal complaint whatever. Incomparably inferior as Eadward doubtless was to Harold in every personal qualification, his succession could never have given William the opportunities which were afterwards given him by the accession of Harold. Eadward could not have been held up as an usurper, a perjurer, a man faithless to his lord, nor, had he been the opponent, could the superstitions of the time have been appealed to to avenge the fancied insult offered to the relics of the Norman saints. We can thus fully understand why an English poet, writing by the light of later experience, laments the death of the Ætheling as the cause of all the woes which came upon this poor nation.1 Even at the time, when men's eyes were not yet so fully opened, we may be sure that England rejoiced in his coming, and bitterly lamented his speedy removal. The son of the hero Ironside, the last grown man in the royal house, must, whatever were his personal qualities, have drawn to himself an interest which was not wholly sentimental.

The Etheling then came to England; but he never saw his namesake the King. He died almost immediately afterwards in London," and was buried with his grandfather Æthelred in Saint Paul's minster Why he was never admitted to the royal presence was unknown then as well as now." The fact that his exclusion was commented on at the time might seem to forbid, and yet perhaps it does not wholly forbid, the simplest explanation of all, that he was sick at the time of his landing, and that the sickness which caused his death also hindered his presentation to his uncle. If the exclusion had a

political object, to what party ought we to attribute it? A distinguished modern writer attributes it, though not very confidently, to the partizans of Harold. But it is not at all clear that Harold as yet

DEATH OF THE ÆTHELING.

275 aspired to the throne; it is far more likely that it was the death of the Etheling which first suggested to Harold and his friends that Eadward might be succeeded by a King not of the royal house. Because Harold did in the end succeed Eadward, we must beware of supposing that his succession had been looked forward to during the whole reign of Eadward. There must have been some moment when the daring thought-for a daring thought it was-of aspiring to a royal crown first presented itself to the mind of Harold or of those to whom Harold hearkened. And no moment seems so clearly marked out for that purpose by all the circumstances of the case as the moment of the death of the Etheling. If Harold had wished to thwart a design of King Eadward in favour of his nephew, he would hardly have waited for his landing in England to practise his devices. He would rather have laboured to hinder Ealdred's mission in the first instance, or to render it abortive, in some way or other, during the long period over which the negotiation was spread. If the exclusion of the Etheling from his uncle's presence was really owing to the machinations of any political party, there is another party on which the charge may fall with far greater probability. There was another possible successor who had far more to fear from the good will of the King towards the Ætheling than Harold had. Whether Harold had begun to aspire to the Crown or not, there can be little doubt that William had, and William was still by no means without influence at the English Court. There were still Normans about Eadward, Bishop William of London, Robert the son of Wymarc, Hugolin the Treasurer, and others whom Godwine or Harold had, perhaps unwisely, exempted from the general proscription. To shut out-by some underhand means, if at all—a prince of the blood from the presence of his uncle and sovereign, looks much more like the act of a party of this kind than the act of a man whom both office and character made the first man in the realm. The thing, if done at all, was clearly some wretched court intrigue, the fitting work of a foreign faction. The Earl of the West-Saxons, had his interests been concerned in the matter, would have set about hindering the Ætheling's succession in quite another way. But after all, it is far more likely that the fact that the two Eadwards never met was not owing either to the partizans of Harold or to the partizans of William, but that it was simply the natural result of the sickness of which the Ætheling presently died.

Another, and a far worse, insinuation against the great Earl hardly needs to be refuted. Among all the calumnies with which, for eight hundred years, the name of Harold has been loaded, there is one of which suggestion has been reserved for our own times. Norman enemies have distorted every action of his life; they have misrepresented every circumstance of his position; they have charged him with crimes which he never committed; they have looked at all his acts

through such a mist of prejudice that the victory of Stamfordbridge is changed under their hands into a wicked fratricide.1 But no writer of his own time, or of any time before our own,2 has ever ventured to insinuate that Earl Harold had a hand in the death of the Ætheling Eadward. That uncharitable surmise was reserved for an illustrious writer of our own time, in whom depreciation of the whole House of Godwine had become a sort of passion. It is enough to say that, had there been the faintest ground for such an accusation, had the idea. ever entered into the mind of any man of Harold's own age, some Norman slanderer or other would have been delighted to seize upon it. Nothing is more easy than to charge any man with having secretly made away with another man by whose death he profits, and the charge is one which, as it is easy to bring, is sometimes very hard to disprove. For that very reason, it is a charge on which the historian always looks with great suspicion, even when it is known to have been brought at the time and to have been currently believed at the time. The general infamy of Eadric is fully established, but we need not believe in every one of the secret murders which rumour charged him with having committed or instigated. Still less need we believe the tales which charge the Great William with having more than once stooped to the trade of a secret poisoner. When we think how easy the charge is to bring, and how recklessly it has been brought at all times, the mere fact that no such charge was ever brought against Harold does in truth redound greatly to his honour. Calumny itself instinctively shrank from laying such a crime to the charge of such a man. William was, as I believe, as guiltless of any such baseness as Harold himself. But the charge did not seem wholly inconsistent with the crafty and tortuous policy of the Norman Duke. The WestSaxon Earl, ambitious no doubt and impetuous, but ever frank, generous, and conciliatory, was at once felt to be incapable of such a deed.

Three other deaths followed among the great men of the land, two of which were of no small political importance. It was not of any

1 See vol. iii. Appendix CC.

2 Unless indeed some tradition of the sort had found its way into the confused mind of Saxo (p. 203), when he made Harold murder King Eadward. He may have been thinking of Eadward the Ætheling, or he may have been writing purely at random.

3 Palgrave, Hist. Ang. Sax. 352. "He was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral; and sad and ruthful [rueful?] were the forebodings of the English, when they saw him borne to

DEATHS OF LEOFRIC AND RALPH.

277

special moment, as far as we know, when Heaca, Bishop of the SouthSaxons, died, and was succeeded in the chair of Selsey by Ethelric, a monk of Christ Church, of whom we shall hear in the days of the Conqueror.1 It was quite another matter when the great Earl of the Mercians, so long the honoured mediator between opposing races and opposing interests, died in a good old age in his own house at Bromley in Staffordshire 2 (August 31, 1057). Of all the churches and monasteries which had been enriched and adorned by the bounty of Leofric and Godgifu, none was dearer to them than the great minster of Coventry, the city with which their names are inseparably connected in one of those silly legends which have helped to displace our early history. There Leofric was buried in the church which he and his wife had raised from the foundations, and had enriched with gifts which made it wealthier and more magnificent than all the minsters of England. Godgifu survived her husband many years; she saw her son and grandsons rise and fall; she saw her granddaughter share first a vassal and then an Imperial Crown, and then vanish out of sight as a homeless widow. At last she herself died, still in the possession of some part at least of her vast estates, a subject of the Norman invader."

8

4

A few months after the death of Leofric came the death of the stranger who had seemingly held a subordinate Earldom under his authority. Ralph, Earl of the Magesætas, the French nephew of King Eadward, died near the end of the year (December 21, 1057), and was buried in the distant minster of Peterborough,' to which he had been a benefactor. I have already started the question whether the thoughts of Eadward had ever turned towards him as a possible successor. After the death of the Etheling, the hopes of Ralph and his brother Walter, if they had any, might again revive. But if so, death soon cut short any such schemes. Walter, the reigning prince of a foreign state, would have no chance. If any such prince were

to be chosen, it would be better at once to take the renowned Duke of the Normans than the insignificant Count of Mantes. But Ralph, whether he was ever actually thought of or not, was clearly a possible candidate; his death therefore, following so soon after the death of the Ætheling, removed another obstacle from the path of Harold.

The deaths of the two Earls involved a redistribution of the chief governments of England, which would naturally be carried out in the following Christmas Gemót. The Earldom of the Mercians, such parts of it at least as had been under the immediate authority of Leofric, was conferred on his son Ælfgar.1 It shows how vast must have been the hereditary influence of his house, when such a trust could not be refused to a man who had so lately trampled on every principle of loyalty and patriotism. But care was taken to make him as little dangerous as possible. Ælfgar may have hoped that, on the death of Ralph, the Earldom of the Magesætas would again be merged in Mercia, and that, excepting the shires attached to Northumberland, he might rule over the whole realm of Offa and Æthelflæd. But policy altogether forbade that the Herefordshire border should be again placed in the hands of one who had so lately acted as the ally of Gruffydd. We know not whether the Welsh King had already entered into a still closer relation with the English Earl by his marriage with Elfgar's beautiful daughter Ealdgyth. The date of that marriage is not recorded; it may have already taken place, or it may have happened on the next occasion, one distant only by a few months, when we shall find the names of Gruffydd and Ælfgar coupled together. But if the Welsh King was already the son-in-law of the Mercian Earl, there was a still further reason for placing some special safeguard on that border of the realm. In short, the government of Herefordshire was so important that it could not be safely placed in any hands but those of the foremost man in England. There is distinct evidence to show that, within two or three years after the death of Leofric, the Earldom of Herefordshire was in the hands of Harold. We can therefore hardly doubt that, on the resettlement which must have followed the deaths of Leofric and Ralph, the Earldom of the Magesætas was attached to the Earldom of the West-Saxons, and that Harold now became the immediate ruler of the district of which he had been the deliverer, and of the city of which he might claim to be the second founder. Earl Ralph had left a son, a namesake, probably a godson, of the great Earl, and Harold the son of Ralph appears in Domesday as a landowner both before and after the Conquest. His name still survives within his father's Earldom, where it cleaves to an existing parish and to the site of a castle which has wholly vanished. But Earldoms were not hereditary, 3 See Appendix G.

1 See Appendix G.

2 See Appendix II.