The Frenchmen gone, peace was easily negotiated between the cipher-king and his powerful ministers. To Earl Godwine, his wife, his sons and his daughter, full restitution was made of all the offices and all the property of which they had been deprived. “The Lady” was fetched back from her convent and again installed in the palace. “Friendship was made fast between Godwine’s family and the king; and to all men good laws were promised, and outlawed were all the Frenchmen who before perverted law and justice,[245] and counselled ill-will against this land, save those (few) persons whom the king liked to keep about him, because they were loyal to him and to his people.” At a great meeting of the witan, held outside of London, Earl Godwine appeared and made his defence, clearing himself, we are told, before his lord King Edward and before all the people of the land, of all the things that were laid to his charge and to that of his sons.

The chief agent in these negotiations was Stigand, Bishop of Winchester, a very noticeable figure in the ecclesiastical history of the times, a busy, diplomatising person who had been a keen partisan of the Lady Emma’s; had shared her downfall and had afterwards been appointed to the bishopric of Winchester, which he now exchanged for the archiepiscopal see of Canterbury, practically, though not canonically, vacant by the flight of Robert of Jumièges. His position, which was already in the eyes of strict churchmen a doubtful one so long as his predecessor lived, was not improved by his tardy journey to Rome in the year 1058 in quest of his pallium, for he had the misfortune to receive it from the hands of a Pope, Benedict X., who, though apparently chosen in a regular manner, did not second Hildebrand’s reforms, and being deposed in favour of Nicholas II., bishop of Florence, figures in ecclesiastical history as an anti-pope. A pallium conferred by such hands was held to bring with it no blessing; on the contrary, by committing the English metropolitan to the losing party, which opposed the famous Gregory VII., it had a very important influence on subsequent events, and gave to the buccaneering expedition of William the Bastard something of the character of a religious crusade.

To the great earl himself the revolution of 1052 brought no long enjoyment of power. Godwine fell sick soon after his landing in England, and though he recovered for a time, his health was evidently much shaken. In the following year, when King Edward was keeping Easter at Winchester with Godwine, Harold and Tostig for his guests, as they sat at meat, the earl “suddenly sank down by the king’s footstool, bereft of speech and strength. They carried him into the king’s bower, hoping that the attack would pass off, but it was not so. He continued so, speechless and powerless, from Easter Monday till the following Thursday [April 15, 1053], when he died. He lieth there within the Old Minster; and his son Harold took to his earldom (Wessex), resigning that which he had hitherto held (East Anglia), which was given to Elfgar,” son of Leofric and Godiva. In the face of this perfectly straightforward and circumstantial account given by the Saxon chronicler, of the death of an elderly statesman, after a hard and laborious life, from a stroke of apoplexy or paralysis, it is unnecessary to reproduce the idle legends of Norman historians two generations later, who represented that death as the fulfilment of a blasphemous imprecation of the divine vengeance on himself if he had had part or lot in the murder of the Etheling Alfred.

Earl Harold succeeded not only to the earldom but also to the political predominance of his father, and for the remaining thirteen years of Edward’s reign we may safely consider him as the real ruler of the kingdom. Only it must be observed that though Harold was the king’s efficient man of business, the chosen companion of his sports and of his leisure was another brother, Tostig, who in the year 1055 received the earldom of Northumbria. This peculiar position of favour in the palace and absenteeism from his province led to complications which will be related hereafter. For the present our notice of the internal affairs of the kingdom may close with the fact that in the year 1057 the Etheling Edward, son of Edmund Ironside, came to England accompanied by his wife, Agatha, a kinswoman of the Emperor Henry III., and by what a Saxon ballad-maker quaintly calls “a goodly team of bairns”. Probably it was the intention of the older Edward that his namesake should succeed him on the throne, though he may have at times vacillated between the more remote but known kinsman in Normandy and the nearer stranger from Hungary. But whatever the king’s intentions may have been, they were foiled by sickness or some less innocent agency. “We know not,” says the chronicler, “for what cause that was done that he might not see his kinsman, King Edward. Woe was that wretched mishap, and harmful to all this people that he ended his life so soon after he came to England, for the unhappiness of this poor folk.” There is a mystery in all this which it is vain now to try to penetrate. Only one cannot help again remarking the lack of virility in these latest scions of the house of Cerdic. Assuredly neither William the Bastard nor Harold Godwineson, would have been content to linger out forty years of life in exile, nor when returned to their native land would have been so easily snuffed out of existence as was this prince, the descendant of fifteen generations of West Saxon kings.

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We pass from the internal affairs of England to the notices, scanty, but possessing for us a peculiar interest, concerning wars with Scotland in the reign of Edward. We have seen that in 1018 the Scottish king, Malcolm II., by his victory at Carham wrested from Northumbria all its territory north of the Tweed. This king died in 1034, the year before the death of Canute. His own death seems to have been a violent one, but he had certainly murdered the man who, according to the complicated law of succession then prevailing, had the best right to succeed him on the throne, and had thus secured the succession for his grandson, a lad named Duncan. The short reign of this young man—it lasted only six years—was marked by some exciting events. In the year 1035 he led “an immense army” across the Border and laid siege to the new city of Durham. The siege lasted a long time, but in a successful sally of the besiegers the greater part of the Scottish cavalry was destroyed, and in the disordered flight of the army the infantry were also cut to pieces, and their heads being collected and brought within the walls were stuck upon stakes to adorn the market place of the city of St. Cuthbert. Then followed war, on the whole unsuccessful war, between Duncan and his cousin Thorfinn, the Scandinavian earl of Orkney and Caithness. Duncan was driven southward, and in August, 1040, he was murdered by the general who had hitherto been fighting his battles, Macbeth, Mormaer or Earl of Moray. There was nothing in this event to take it out of the ordinary category of royal murders in Scotland at this time. It took place not under Macbeth’s own roof but on neutral ground, at a place called Bothgowanan or the Smith’s bothie; the victim was not the venerable greybeard whom Tragedy brings before us, but a young man still “of immature age,” whose grandfather had not many years before killed the brother of Macbeth’s wife and ousted her family from the royal succession. In fact, we may almost say, looking to the vicissitudes of the two families who at this time alternately ruled Scotland, that it was Duncan’s turn to be murdered. Macbeth, who reigned from 1040 to 1058, seems to have been on the whole a good king, though reigning by a more than doubtful title. It is possible that he imitated his contemporary Canute by going on pilgrimage, as a chronicler tells us that in the year 1050 Macbeth, king of Scotland, scattered silver broadcast among the poor of Rome.

Such was the man against whom, in 1054, Siward the Strong, earl of Northumbria, moved with a large army accompanied by a fleet. Siward being himself brother-in-law of the murdered Duncan was uncle of the young Malcolm Canmore, who was now seeking to recover his father’s throne. We have also a hint from a later historian that there were Normans in the Scottish army. It is suggested, on rather slender evidence, that these were some of Edward’s favourites, displaced by the revolution of 1052, who had taken refuge at the court of Macbeth; and it is possible that their presence there may have had something to do with Siward’s expedition. However this may be, it is clear that a battle was fought on July 27, in which the Northumbrian earl was victorious, but at a heavy cost. His own son, Osbeorn, was slain (“with all his wounds in front,” as his father rejoiced to hear), and his sister’s son, Siward, as well as many of his own and the king’s house-carls. Some of these house-carls, we are expressly told, were Danes as well as Englishmen. There was a great and unprecedented capture of booty, but Macbeth himself escaped. He reigned, though probably with broken power, for four years longer, till 1058, in which year he was finally defeated and slain by Malcolm III. This prince, who is generally known by his epithet of Canmore (the Large-headed), is he who by his marriage with Margaret, daughter of the Etheling Edward, brought the blood of the old Saxon kings into the veins of the royal family of Scotland and indirectly into that of England also. Matilda, wife of Henry Beauclerk, daughter of Malcolm Canmore and Margaret, is the link which connects the Saxon with the Norman dynasty, Alfred with Victoria.

The year after his invasion of Scotland (1055) old Siward the Strong died of dysentery. Of him is told the well-known story that when he found his death drawing nigh, he said: “What a shame it is that I, who could not find my death in so many battles, should now be reserved for an inglorious death like that of a cow. At least arm me with coat of mail, sword and helmet: place my shield on my left arm, my gilded battle-axe in my right hand, that I, who was strongest among soldiers, may die a soldier’s death.” His command was obeyed, and thus honourably clad in armour he breathed out his soul. The great earldom of Northumbria, made vacant by the death of Siward, was bestowed on the king’s favourite brother-in-law, Tostig, who, however, held it not for long. Siward’s son, Waltheof, seems to have been little more than a child at his father’s death, but, though now passed over in the distribution of earldoms, he received, ten years after, the earldom of two southern counties, Northampton and Huntingdon, which had once formed an outlying portion of his father’s dominions, and he had a great share in the events which followed the Norman Conquest.

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The affairs of Wales, during the reign of Edward the Confessor, centred chiefly round the person of Griffith ap Llewelyn, “the head and shield and defender of the Britons,” as he is called by a Welsh chronicler; a terrible thorn in the side of England, as he must have appeared to his Saxon contemporaries. This man, whose father, Llewelyn, died in 1021, soon after achieving the supremacy in Wales, had been for sixteen years throneless and probably an exile. In 1039 Griffith slew the King of Gwynedd (North Wales), and being himself of a North Welsh house became practically supreme over all the Britons. And not over the Britons only did he win victories. “During his whole reign,” says the Chronicle of the Princes, “he pursued the Saxons and the pagan nations and killed and destroyed them and overcame them in a multitude of battles.” The life of a Welsh king at this time was necessarily one of continual turmoil. There was the ever-present rivalry between Gwynedd and Dyved (North and South Wales), barely held in check from time to time by the strong hand of such an one as Griffith. There were “the pagans,” the Danes of Dublin and Wexford, always ready to cross the narrow seas and harry the Welsh coast. Apparently the Christian Irish must sometimes have shared in these raids, for “the Scots” (which doubtless still means the Irish) are frequently alluded to as enemies of Griffith. In addition to this there was the long feud with Mercia, which had lasted for so many centuries, but which was now occasionally interrupted when it served the purpose of both Wales and Mercia to combine against Wessex.