Whate’er of right belonged Unto the people’s king.
“And now was Harold hallowed as king, but little stillness did he there enjoy, the while that he wielded the kingdom.”
CHAPTER XXVI.
STAMFORD BRIDGE AND HASTINGS.
Upon the death of Edward the Confessor the election and coronation of Harold, son of Godwine, followed with the briefest possible interval. No serious notice seems to have been taken, at the time, of any claim to the crown which might be made on behalf of Edgar the Etheling, grandson of Edmund Ironside, the undoubted heir, on what we call legitimist principles, of the house of Cerdic. Though the year of Edgar’s birth is doubtful, he was certainly little more than a boy at his great-uncle’s death, and it is probable that the ascertained weakness of his character made the Wise Men of the kingdom unwilling to entrust even the nominal government of England at such a critical time to his nerveless hands.
The election of Harold was undoubtedly contrary to all the traditions of West Saxon royalty, but there are some considerations which may have made it seem a less revolutionary proceeding, and the new king somewhat less of an upstart, than they have appeared to later ages. Let the cloud which rests over Godwine’s birth and parentage be admitted, but it must be remembered that Harold was on his mother’s side a near kinsman of Canute, that in his veins flowed the blood of Gorm the Old and Harold Bluetooth, kings of Denmark in the preceding century, and that the then reigning King of Denmark was his own first cousin. As has been already said, Godwine and his tribe must have always appeared half-Danish to the Saxon people, and though the claims of the house of Cerdic were disregarded by his election they had been equally disregarded by the elections of Canute, Harold and Harthacnut of whom Harold Godwineson may have seemed in some sort the natural successor.
But that this view of the case would not be accepted in Normandy, all men knew full well, and none better than the new king himself. The Bayeux Tapestry, almost immediately after its picture of Harold enthroned, represents “an English ship coming to the land of Duke William”. Whatever this may mean, whether the flight of some Norman favourite to his native land, or a desperate attempt at self-exculpation and reconciliation on the part of Harold, it is followed with ominous rapidity by the picture, “Here William orders ships to be built,” in which the axes of the woodmen are felling the trees of the forest; that again by a picture, “Here they drag the ships to the sea,” and that by a lively scene, “These men carry arms to the ships and here they drag a cart with wine and arms”. After this in a scene which is not pictorially represented and at a date of which we are not accurately informed, William assembled his barons at Lillebonne and endeavoured to obtain from them a vote in favour of an expedition for the assertion of his rights to the throne of England. The expedition, however, appeared to the Norman nobles too dangerous, the naval power of England too great to give a hope of success, and notwithstanding the eloquent pleadings of William’s trusty henchman, William Fitz Osbern (son of one of the murdered guardians of his childhood), the assembly broke up in confusion without giving the desired promise of support. The assent, however, which he had been unable to obtain from the united baronage of the duchy, he succeeded in winning by entreaties and promises from the barons singly in private conference. The contingents of men, the numbers of ships which each baron undertook to furnish, were all set down in a book, in which were found the names not only of William’s own subjects but of volunteers from the neighbouring provinces of Brittany, Maine and Anjou. It was, so to speak, the memorandum of a great Joint Stock Company of conquest, which was entered in that “Domesday Book of the Conquerors,”[248] and though the precise rate of dividend was not there set down, it is evident that the lordships and estates in the doomed land, which William promised to his shareholders, bore some definite relation to the size of their contributions.
It remained only, according to medieval ideas, to get the blessing of heaven’s representative on the great spoliation. William had himself in his earlier days all-but brought an interdict on his realm by his marriage with Matilda of Flanders who, for some reason not very clearly explained, was held to be canonically unfitted to be his wife. But that breach with the Holy See had been healed through the mediation of the great churchman Lanfranc, Prior of the Abbey of Bec; and Lanfranc’s influence may probably now have been employed to obtain from Pope Alexander II. a formal approval of the invasion of England. The oath of Harold, so solemnly taken and so flagrantly broken, and his marriage to Aldgyth, after having promised to marry William’s daughter Adela, may possibly have been pressed against him at the court of Rome and may have helped towards the composition of the bull which was now issued denouncing Harold as a usurper and proclaiming William as Edward’s rightful heir. It is probable, however, that in the mind of Hildebrand, the master-spirit of the papal court, though not yet actually Pope, the independent attitude which the English Church had sometimes assumed, and notably the unfortunate fact that Archbishop Stigand had, during the lifetime of his own predecessor, received his pallium from the anti-pope Benedict X., were the chief reasons for the Church’s enthusiastic partisanship on the Norman side. The word Crusade was not yet heard in the Christian world, nor was it to be heard till near thirty years later, when Peter the Hermit at the Council of Clermont was to utter his fiery declamation against the misbelievers; but a virtual crusade was preached against Harold and his adherents, and all Europe knew that whenever William’s shipbuilding should be ended and he should be ready to sail, his troops would march to battle under the protection of a banner consecrated by the successor of St. Peter.
The Norman preparations, begun in the early months of 1066, lasted on through the summer and almost up to the autumnal equinox. Meanwhile, a portent in the heavens and the attacks of another foe were depressing the spirits of Englishmen. Soon after Easter “the comet star which some men call the hairy star,” which had for some time been creeping nearer to the sun, unnoticed in the early morning hours, began to blaze forth in the north-west in the evening sky. From April 24 till May 1 was the period of its greatest brilliancy, and it probably disappeared early in June. In the Tapestry we see six men pointing fearful fingers towards a star which trails a rudely drawn streamer of light behind it, and we are informed that “These men are marvelling at the star”. The comet here depicted is now known to be one which regularly returns to our firmament at intervals of some seventy-five or seventy-six years. Its return in 1758 verified the prediction of the astronomer Halley, then no longer living, and it is expected that once more in the year 1910 Englishmen will be gazing upwards, and with less fearful hearts than of old, will “wonder at the star”.
The less shadowy terror of the spring of that year came from the king’s banished brother Tostig, who now by right or wrong was determined to win back his lost earldom. He had gathered a considerable force of ships and men, no doubt chiefly in “Baldwin’s land,” among the subjects of his brother-in-law; and he had probably already made overtures of alliance to the Duke of Normandy and the King of Norway. He came, however, unaccompanied by allies “from beyond sea into Wight with as large a fleet as he could procure and there people paid him both money and provisions; and he went thence and did all the harm that he could along the sea-coast until he came to Sandwich”. The naval armament which Harold had collected in anticipation of the Norman attack availed to keep the southern coasts clear from further ravages by Tostig, who took on board a large number of butse-carlas, some willingly and some unwillingly, and steering northwards entered the Humber, and began to ravage Lincolnshire. The two northern earls, Edwin and Morkere, however, having summoned the fyrd succeeded in driving him out of the country. Most of his butse-carlas took the opportunity to desert, and with a dwindled force of twelve smacks he sailed for the Forth. The Scottish King, Malcolm Canmore, took him under his protection and helped him with provisions, and there he abode all summer.
The delay of these summer months, during which invasion was impending from two quarters at once, was disastrous for England. When Harold had collected his fleet and army, “such a land force both by land and sea as no king of the land had ever gathered before,” he went to the Isle of Wight and there lay at anchor all the summer, keeping the land force always close beside him on the coast. Had William made his invasion then, it may fairly be conjectured that he would never have sat on the throne of England. But when the day of the Nativity of St. Mary (September 8) was come, the men’s provisions were exhausted, and it was impossible to keep them longer under the standards. They were accordingly allowed to go home, and the king rode up to London, while his fleet sailed round to the Thames, and meeting unfortunately with bad weather, many of the ships perished ere they reached their haven.