Nor was this all. Harold’s violence became impossible to make head against, and the poor queen was driven into exile
... without any mercy against the stormy winter, and she came to Bruges beyond sea, and Count Baldwine there well received her ... the while she had need.
And so, for some three years, both Emma and Harthacnut were fugitives at Baldwin’s court, till on the death of the violent and worthless Harold, some three years after, they returned. Harthacnut, equally inglorious, reigned some two years only, and actually died during his own marriage feast as he stood up to wassail his bride. His body was brought to Winchester for interment in the Old Minster, as a modern inscription in the Cathedral serves to remind us; while his mother enriched the New Minster with a gruesome relic—the head of the blessed Saint Valentine the Martyr—to pay for masses for his soul. Then in 1043 came Edward the Confessor, son of Emma and Æthelred the Redeless, who was “hallowed king at Winchester on the first Easter day”; and the realm had peace at least, if not rest, for over twenty years.
Since her return to England, Emma, ‘the lady,’ had not been idle, for at the accession of the new king she was not only re-established in all her old supremacy, but had recovered much of the wealth which Harold had wrested from her, and the remaining seven years of her life witnessed a continual struggle for ascendancy between her and Edward her son. Edward had no sooner been crowned than he set himself to seize her treasure—doubtless it was national rather than personal property—but Emma, skilled to fish in troubled water, had landed both loaves as well as fishes in her net, and this time Godwine the earl, unfortunately for her, cast his weight into the opposing scale; accordingly, six months after Edward’s coronation, we read—
The King was so advised that he and Earl Leofric, and Earl Godwine, and Earl Siward, with their attendants, rode from Gloucester to Winchester unawares upon the Lady (Emma), and they bereaved her of all the treasures which she owned, which were not to be told ... and after that they let her reside therein—
a passage notable in its way, for it brings before us, in close juxtaposition, practically all the great characters of the Confessor’s reign—Ælfgyfu Emma, and the king her son, and the three great earls, with their attendants—Godwine, the great Earl of Wessex, accompanied possibly by his sons Harold and Tostig: Leofric, Earl of Mercia, the ‘grim earl’ of Tennyson’s poem, husband of the famous Godiva: and Siward, Earl of Northumbria, the old Siward of Shakespeare’s Macbeth—and suggests a striking subject for pictorial representation, which as yet, unfortunately, no artist’s brush has attempted. It was doubtless in the national interest that the three rival earls were led to combine to support the king against his mother, but we cannot but regret that the circumstance which united this notable and noble trio together in the support of the king—probably the only occasion in his reign when the king ever commanded their united support—should not have been one more heroic than that of forcing a defenceless if grasping old woman to render up the keys of her treasure-chest.
We have one more picture of the ‘Old Lady’—the legend of Queen Emma and the ploughshares, a legend peculiarly characteristic of mediaeval sentiment, which is quaintly narrated in full and charming detail by more than one chronicler. Her enemies had slanderously connected her name with that of Alwine, Bishop of Winchester, and she had appealed to the ordeal by fire to clear her reputation.
Coming from Wherwell Abbey, where she had been forced to retire for refuge, she had passed the night in prayer and fasting, and in the morning, in the presence of the king and a great concourse of people, she had been led forward by two bishops, to pass barefooted over nine red-hot ploughshares laid in order in the nave of the Old Minster church. Yet such was the potency of the protection she derived from her blameless conduct and unsullied conscience, that she was not only unharmed but had actually passed over the ploughshares before she became conscious that she had even reached them, whereupon the king, overwhelmed with contrition and remorse, implored her forgiveness, in the words of the repentant prodigal: “Mother, I have sinned against Heaven and before thee and am no more worthy to be called thy son”; while in token of his sincerity he presented his own body before the queen and the bishops for punishment. The bishops touched him each with a rod, after which the pious king received three strokes from the hand of his weeping mother.
The Winchester chronicler, conscious of a ‘divided duty,’ has managed very dexterously to extricate the king from severe censure, while honourably loyal to the lady paramount of his city. In 1052 Emma died, and was buried by her second husband’s side in the Old Minster. Her bones still rest, as already mentioned, mingled with his, in one of the Cathedral mortuary chests.