Harold Godwin.
Harold Godwin and William of Normandy were not strangers to each other when they drew up their battle forces on the field of Senlac-Hastings. Harold had spent some months in Normandy at the court of William some years prior to the death of Edward. And William had made known to Harold his claim to the English throne and his intention of maintaining that claim when the time should come. History relates that Harold, concealing his own ambitious designs, vowed solemnly to support William’s cause.
At the death of Edward, however, Harold found himself at the head of a powerful Saxon faction and felt strong enough to oppose William, should he persist in his intent to claim the throne.
But what about that oath made solemnly in the presence of the Sacrament! Is a man ever courageously self-respecting and invincibly valiant in whose soul festers the ulcer—perjury! When Richard the Third went forth to battle upon Bosworth field, he was already defeated and slain by his own avenging conscience.
When Harold heard of the landing of William’s Norman troops at Pevensey, he was then in the north of England engaged in a struggle with the Danes under the leadership of his own brother Tostig. Harold was slightly wounded in this battle but, in the end, Tostig lay dead upon the field and the Danes were put to flight. Thus from a battlefield red with a brother’s blood, Harold, a wounded man and a perjured man hastened southward to his fate in the dread slaughter of Hastings.
“And were things only called by their right name,
Cæsar himself would be ashamed of fame.”—Byron.
The word battlefield is a euphemism for human shambles. And “the chief who in triumph advances” is, in grim reality, but the lustiest and the bloodiest of the dogs of war. And the Alexanders, Cæsars, Napoleons are the madmen who have made men mad by their contagion, and have so accumulated horrors Pelion-Ossa piled on horrors as to make the angels weep o’er this mad planet of the universe.
A forceful peculiarity of mental unsoundness is the vehemence with which its victim conceives himself to be right and everybody else wrong, himself sane and all not in agreement with him insane. This fatuity is characteristic of ages as well as of individuals. It is manifest in the complaisant superiority which every age, every generation assumes toward the immediately preceding. “Back in the past, during the Dark Ages, in primitive times, etc.” are the words of balm with which the passing hour begins its own eulogy.
But blood is blood and hate is hate and war is war, whether waged by Macedonian Alexander B. C. 331, or by the Balkan forces A. D. 1912. Shades of the fallen upon that age-long battle ground! wouldn’t you feel strangely at home in the fray if by any chance you should come to life today?
International courts of justice, arbitration, disarmament, World-Peace—will they ever prevail? Knowing the past, knowing the heart of man, we answer No: dreaming of the future, dreaming of the godlike in the heart of man, we answer Yes.
So all day long the tide of battle rolled—from early day till dark. And William and his Norman followers were in possession of the field, and round them lay a host of dead and wounded, yet by reason of the sudden darkness and the exhaustion of the troops, no search could be made even for the Norman wounded: and tho’ groans and cries of thirst and deep sighings arose incessantly from the writhing masses just darker than the darkness, yet no search could be made or any aid given by reason of the utter exhaustion of the troops.
And on that field of death and awfully dying life Harold Godwin lay happily dead under a heap of the slain. Two monks, lanterns in hand, went out to search for him and with them went also the mother of Harold and Edith the woman that loved him. After hours of fruitless search amid scenes of gruesome horror, and as the dawn burst in red wonder over a bleeding world, Edith discovered Harold. So changed was he, so mutilated, hacked and hewed, blood-clotted, dismembered, that even his mother knew him not but the woman that loved him knew. With great difficulty was the body of Harold extricated from under the heap of the slain, but the monks and the women persevered at their task and finally bore him away.