XXXVIII
Out of Robertsbridge and the Rother valley the road ascends steeply to John’s Cross, where the old coach-road bears to the left in a circuitous route to Battle, by Vine Hall and Whatlington, three-quarters of a mile longer than the absolutely straight modern highway.
The “John’s Cross” inn, the old toll-house, and a few cottages sum up the hamlet, and the rest of the way to Battle is of almost unbroken loneliness, except for the railway level-crossing, mid-way.
If, before we come into the town of Battle, we re-read the stirring story of the Norman invasion of 1066, and of the Battle of Senlac, known more generally to the world as the Battle of Hastings, fought on Saturday, October 14th, in that year, so fatal to English liberties, on the spot where Battle Abbey stands,—if, I say, before approaching Battle, we read anew the story of that history-making day of carnage, we shall come into the quiet town with highly exalted feelings, and shall find it a place of many and deep significances to us.
With the tale of that historic struggle thus freshened in our memories, it is not merely the quiet little Sussex country town to which we now come, but to the commanding hill of Senlac, overlooking the seven miles of wooded lesser hills and vales by which the Norman host advanced from Hastings.
The Norman invasion of England, the catastrophe of Senlac, and the woes that then befell the English may all be traced to the weak character and foolish policy of Edward the Confessor, a king whose reputation for piety has, during all these intervening centuries, glozed over his lack of the first qualities of kingship. Firm rule, wise and far-seeing policy at home and abroad—those are the qualities, above all others, we look for in a king, and mere saintliness of character in a ruler has never yet, nor ever will, serve the turn of any nation. Edward the Confessor has, time beyond the memory of man, been held up as a pattern of all the virtues. We are told how he founded the Abbey of St. Peter, which we now call Westminster Abbey, on Thorney Isle; we listen, with what faith we may, to the story of how successfully he prayed away the nightingales who were disturbing his orisons at Havering-atte-Bower. We know that Rome, in the fulness of time, canonised him; but we know also that, however fitted he was in life for the cloister, however unaffected his piety, however mild and urbane his rule, certainly, from the patriotic view-point, his métier was not d’être roi, for he it was who brought over the Normans to his court, and by his favours to them showed them how desirable a country was this England.
Edward was, in short, a Normanised Englishman. The long years of exile he had passed oversea in Normandy, before he was called upon to rule over Saxon England, had set their seal upon him, and his favourite courtiers were of Norman-French nationality. He had, certainly, married Editha, daughter of the great Saxon Earl Godwin, and sister of Harold; but his quarrels with her family go largely toward making up the story of his reign. The head and front of his offending is undoubtedly the alleged bequest, at a comparatively early period, of his crown to William, Duke of Normandy. Apart from the fact that the succession was not his to give, and would in any case have been the business of the Witan, this devising of crown and country to an alien whose ways were not those of the Saxons, and between whose people and Edward’s people the keenest jealousy and animosity already existed, was unpatriotic to the last degree; and had the “Confessor” been made to suffer the terrible fate that befell the second Edward, himself the patron of alien courtiers, that fate had been better deserved. Nay, were justice done the memory of that traitor to his country, his shrine in Westminster Abbey would be torn down and demolished.
But clearer and wiser views at last prevailed with the cloistered King, and in that clarified and enlarged vision, he, drawing towards his end, designated the Saxon Harold, his brother-in-law, his successor. Wisdom, however, was vouchsafed him too late: the mischief was done. The fates were working in those years against England and for Duke William of Normandy, whom history knows, ad nauseam, as “William the Conqueror.” That historic personage was a great captain, strong in battle and in strategy, but he had also the mind of an attorney, which could quirk you and quibble you, and chouse you as efficiently as the sharpest practitioner that ever misused the law. It was no matter to that acute and ambitious brain that the sanctimonious “Confessor” had revoked his bequest in favour of Harold; to him, at least, it held good. And events marvellously aided him. Somewhere about 1064, Earl Harold, already king-designate, was voyaging down channel, when his ships were driven ashore on the coast of Ponthieu, in territory tributary to William. Those were times when to be cast ashore was to suffer, not only the discomforts incidental to shipwreck, but to be seized and held to ransom by the scarce more than robber-lords of that age. Such an one was Count Guy of Ponthieu, who speedily seized Harold and imprisoned him in his castle of Beaurain, and would have held him there, over against the arrival of that ransom, had it not been for the Duke, who, hearing of this odd freak of fate, and with a keen eye to how the incident could be used to his own advantage, demanded his release. But Harold’s enlargement from an acknowledged and undisguised prison was merely an exchange for a gilded captivity. Nominally, he was now become the guest of the Duke, in his palace at Rouen, but in reality he was his prisoner, only to be released on terms. Those terms were soon disclosed, and the English Earl, already marked as the successor of Edward, was made to swear, at Bayeux, as the price of his liberty, to become the guardian of William’s supposed interests in England, and to receive him, on Edward’s death, as King. These oaths he took, with others, upon a chest which William had secretly filled with the choicest saintly relics that Normandy contained. It does not become us, with our later knowledge of the very unsaintly character of the old bones usually palmed off in those times as the relics of saints, to scoff at Harold turning pale when the tremendous character of the contents of that chest was revealed to him. The credulity of that age did not permit him the assumption that the alleged relics were probably no more than the mere ordinary unsanctified plebeian bones and teeth and fragments of skin we may readily presume them to have been, with the same relation to the genuine articles as that of a Bank of Engraving note to one issued by the Bank of England. Harold accepted them, as he could not choose but do, at their face value, so to speak, and trembled.
Such is the story handed down to us. The oath taken, Harold was free to return; and, as his own conscience later told him, and as ours must needs tell us, was free to disregard an oath, however solemn, taken under circumstances of compulsion.
In two years from that time, January 5th, 1066, the Confessor died, with his latest breath naming Harold his successor—a choice later ratified by the council of the English realm. Harold was elected and proclaimed King, and the warrior-lawyer over in Normandy was left out in the cold. William, however, could not have been surprised at this, and set to work upon the next step in his scheme, which was to obtain the support of the Pope against “the perjurer,” as he was pleased to style Harold. All these things had been thought out long in advance by that wily brain. William, as claimant to the English throne, could be effectively aided by William as champion of the Church’s might; and William had ever been concerned, from motives of policy, to figure as one of the Church’s most devout sons. If you consider it, religion has ever, from the earliest times, been made the stalking-horse of scoundrels: a fact so patent that your playwright or your novelist is commonly concerned to furnish forth his villain with a text or a psalm, and thus moral sentiments on the stage are the stigmata of the wrong-doer.