It was apparently during this religious interregnum that the King and Queen of Northumbria received each a letter from Pope Boniface V. The letters, verbose and unpersuasive in style, can hardly have had much influence on the fresh and vigorous intellect of the Northumbrian king, but no doubt the fact that they should have been written at all by the father of western Christendom was felt as a compliment to Edwin’s greatness. Still, however, the king hesitated before making a final breach with the traditions of his fathers and accepting Christ instead of his ancestral Woden. Unable to dismiss the subject from his thoughts he sat much apart in solitary places and there mused upon the parting of the ways. While he thus sat one day, Paulinus came unbidden into his presence, laid his hand upon his head and said: “Rememberest thou this sign?” With that the scene outside the East Anglian palace came back vividly into Edwin’s memory. He was about to fall at the feet of Paulinus, but the bishop lifting him up said in a gentle voice: “Behold thou hast escaped by the Divine favour the snares of thine enemies: thou hast received the kingdom which was promised thee: delay not to stretch out thy hand and grasp the third blessing, even eternal life”.[59]

Thus admonished Edwin determined to delay no longer his profession of Christianity, but wisely resolved to associate as many as possible of his counsellors with him, and to make the great change the act of the nation rather than of the king alone. Then followed the memorable and well-known scene in the Witenagemot, or meeting of the wise men, perhaps at York, perhaps at the royal villa by the Derwent. When the subject of the proposed change of faith was mooted in the assembly of the elders, its first and most strenuous advocate was found to be the chief priest Coifi, who complained that his past years spent in zealous service of the gods had brought him no proportionate share of the royal favour. To this sordid calculator of the worldly advantages to be derived from this or that form of faith, succeeded an unnamed ealdorman who, in words as well fitted to the twentieth century as to the seventh, painted the short, perplexing and precarious life of man “like a sparrow flitting through your hall, O king! when we are seated round the fire at supper-time, while the winds are howling and the snow is drifting without. It passes swiftly in at one door and out at another, feeling for the moment the warmth and shelter of your palace, but it flies from winter to winter and swiftly escapes from our sight. Even such is our life here, and if any one can tell us certainly what lies beyond it, we shall do wisely to follow his teaching.” Moved by these and similar arguments the elders and counsellors of the king, unanimously as it would seem, voted for the proposed religious revolution.

After Paulinus had expounded to the assembly the doctrines of Christianity, Coifi exclaimed: “Long ago had I suspected that the things which we were worshipping were naught, for the more earnestly I sought for truth in that worship the less did I find it. Now I openly profess that in this new preaching alone is the way of eternal life to be found. O king! let us at once give over to the flames the temples and altars which we have consecrated so vainly.” The king gladly consented, but asked who should deal the death-blow. “I,” said Coifi. “Who more fitting than I to destroy, in the new wisdom which is given me, the idols which I worshipped in my folly?” He besought the king to give him arms and a war-horse, and though the multitude, who knew that it was forbidden to one of their priests to bear arms or to ride on anything but a mare, deemed him to be insane, he mounted the charger, rode to a great temple in the neighbourhood, hurled his lance into its sacred precincts and called upon his companions to give to the flames the shrine itself and all the enclosures by which it was surrounded from the gaze of the multitude. A hundred years afterwards men still showed at Goodmanham on the Derwent, east of York, the ruins of this great iconoclasm.

The overthrow of the old faith was followed by the visible triumph of the new. On Easter eve, 627, just a year after his escape from the dagger of the man of Wessex, Edwin was baptised by Paulinus in the new wooden church of St. Peter at York, a church which he was shortly to replace by a more elaborate edifice in stone. His sons by the Mercian princess before long followed his example: his young children, the offspring of Ethelburga, and even a little grandson Yffi, son of Osfrid, together with a great number of the nobles of the court, were all solemnly received into the Christian Church. The preaching of Paulinus, so long resultless, now seemed to be bearing abundant fruit. Up in remote Bernicia, where the royal villa of Yeavering nestled under a hill, an outlying sentinel of the Cheviots which still bears the name of Yeavering Bell, Paulinus was engaged for twenty-six consecutive days catechising and baptising in the river Glen the multitudes who flocked to him. Returning to Deira, to the Roman station of Cataractonium, he there baptised many converts in the river Swale, no church or oratory having yet been erected for Christian worship. In his zeal he overpassed the strict limits of Northumbria: he crossed the Humber, preached the Gospel in Lindsey, converted the “prefect” of the city of Lincoln, and baptised a multitude of people at noon-day in the river Trent, King Edwin himself honouring the ceremony by his presence. One of the many converts who went down on that day into the river with Paulinus described the scene to a youth who when an abbot, in his reverend old age, passed the tradition on to Bede, telling him that the great missionary was a man of tall stature, slightly stooping, with black hair, thin face, aquiline but slender nose, in his general aspect at once venerable and awe-inspiring. His constant attendant was a certain deacon James, a courageous and energetic man, who also lived to be a contemporary of the historian.

In after years of turbulence and discord men looked back on the reign of Edwin as a sort of golden age. They said that then a woman with her new-born babe might cross Britain from sea to sea unharmed by any man. In many a place where he saw a clear fountain bubbling up beside the public way he would order stakes to be erected, upon which brazen pots were hung, and none dared to touch them save the thirsty travellers for whose use they were designed. His state was indeed kingly. Not only in war was his standard displayed; but in peace also, as he was journeying from villa to villa and from province to province, attended by a long and brilliant train of servants, a banner with a tuft of feathers, called by the Romans tufa and by the English thuuf and hinting perhaps at something like imperial dignity, was borne before the mighty king of Northumbria.

But this splendour of regal power was early overshadowed. It was not, after all, from Eburacum that the word of power was to go forth which was to bind the various Teutonic races of England into one nation. The Anglian power was not thoroughly established over Wales, and already the destined rival of Northumbria, the Mercian kingdom, was rising into baleful pre-eminence. Singularly enough, it was from these two powers which are said to have sheltered Edwin in the time of his evil fortunes that his ruin came. Cadwallon, King of Gwynedd, descended from that Maelgwn whom Gildas vituperated under the name of “The Great Dragon of the Island,” was son of Cadvan, at whose court, it is said, Edwin had passed his boyhood. Doubtless Cadwallon keenly resented the position of inferiority to which his nation had been reduced by Ethelfrid’s great victory of Chester, which shut them off from Strathclyde, as Ceawlin’s victory of Deorham had shut them off from Devon and Cornwall. When Edwin, once Cadvan’s humble guest, had become the mightiest prince in Britain, Cadwallon, unwilling to accept his yoke, had taken refuge—so say the Welsh annals—in Ireland. He had now returned and was determined to strike one more blow for independence and for liberty of passage to Strathclyde. With this intent he formed an alliance with the ruler of Mercia, Penda, who became king in 626, a year before Edwin’s baptism; who was still pagan; and who in his dull ferocity was as typical a specimen of the old faith as Edwin of the new. The alliance of the Welsh Christian and the English pagan for the overthrow of the newly born Christianity of Northumbria was scarcely felt to be unnatural, so intense was the bitterness engendered by the Paschal controversy and the varying fashions of ecclesiastical tonsure.

The armies met at Heathfield, which is identified with Hatfield Chase on the north-east of Doncaster, on October 12, 633. We have no details of the encounter: we only know that Edwin was defeated, that he and his eldest son Osfrid were slain, and that Cadwallon and his ally roamed in savage wrath over the plains of Yorkshire and Northumberland. The Christian, even more ferocious than the pagan, spared neither sex nor age, recognised no claim to mercy drawn from the profession of one common faith, and vowed (this surely when out of hearing of his ally) that he would root out the whole brood of Angles from the land of Britain.[60]

Edwin’s second son fled for refuge to the court of the Mercian king, and was afterwards slain by him, in violation of his sworn promise of protection. The widowed Ethelburga fled to the court of her brother, the King of Kent, under the escort of Paulinus. The royal infants—such was the terror of the times—were separated from their mother, and it was left for a brave soldier named Bass, one of Edwin’s thegns, to bring to the Kentish court the girl Eanfled, her brother Wuscfrea, and their little nephew Yffi, the orphaned son of Osfrid. The widowed queen afterwards sent the boys to the court of her cousin, Frankish Dagobert, that they might be safe from the new rulers of Bernicia, but both died in infancy in that foreign land. As for Paulinus he seems to have bowed his head to the storm of the recrudescent paganism of Northumbria. He vacated his Yorkish see, and was appointed Bishop of Rochester, in succession to Romanus, who had been drowned in the Mediterranean when sent on a mission to Rome. He died in 644. The ill-starred union of Mercian paganism and British fanaticism seemed to have accomplished its purpose. Northumberland was a wilderness and Northumbrian Christianity a vanished dream.

CHAPTER IX.
OSWALD OF BERNICIA.

When the cause of Christianity and, as connected with it, the hope of eventually building in the new England a civilised and well-ordered state seemed at its darkest, light arose from an island in the Hebrides; it spread to a rough storm-beaten rock on the Northumbrian coast; it illumined one of the noblest and loveliest pages in the history of our nation, the reign of Oswald of Bernicia.