A youthful king, on whose head the crown, with all its cares and heart-aches, was placed at the age of sixteen, was but ill-armed to battle with the hoary-headed, cunning, and grey iniquity which surrounded his throne. He, who would cast his crown upon the ground to toy with his beautiful wife, was no match for that hypocrisy which was hidden beneath the folds of a saintly garb. When, with a spirit far beyond his years, he boldly resented the insult that Dunstan had offered to him, the whole power of the court was at once arrayed against him, for Dunstan was already venerated by the ignorant people as a saint: he had the chancellor and the primate on his side; and few would be found to make head against a cause on the part of which such powerful authorities were arranged as leaders. The respect which was due to a king must have been greatly lessened by the insult which Dunstan had offered to his sovereign. It resembled more the conduct of a schoolmaster towards an unruly pupil than that of a subject to his superior. Edwin closed his troublous career about the year 959; and by his death Edgar, who had for three years ruled over the northern dominions, became king of England.
[CHAPTER XXVIII.]
THE REIGN OF EDGAR.
"The royal letters are a thing of course;
A king, that would, might recommend his horse,
And deans, no doubt, and chapters with one voice,
As bound in duty, would confirm the choice.
Behold your bishop! well he plays his part,
Christian in name, and infidel in heart."—Cowper.
Over the reign of Edgar, who ascended the throne in his sixteenth year, the shadow of Dunstan again falls, and those who had rent the kingdom asunder, and placed him, when a mere boy, upon the throne of Mercia, kept a more tenacious hold of the crown as its circle widened, and gathered closer round Edgar as they saw his power increased. Dunstan had by this time risen to the dignity of bishop of London. The infamous Odo had died about the close of the reign of Edwin, and, weakened as the power of that unfortunate king was, he had spirit enough to appoint another to the primacy of England. The bishop that Edwin had nominated perished in the snow while crossing the Alps; for the pontiffs had issued a decree that no one should be established in the dignity of archbishop till he had first visited Rome, and received the pallium; which, as we have before described, was a tippet made of the whitest and purest of lamb's wool, chequered with purple crosses, and worn over the shoulders. Another bishop was appointed in his place, but he was soon compelled to resign the primacy, the objections raised against him being, that he was modest, humble, and of a gentle temper—virtues which, although they form the very basis of the Christian character, but ill accorded with the views of the ambitious churchmen who now surrounded the throne of the young king. In 960, only a year after the accession of Edgar, Dunstan, although he held the sees of Winchester, Worcester, Rochester, and London, was appointed archbishop of Canterbury, and received the pallium from the hand of Pope John the Twelfth, at Rome. Dunstan lost no time in promoting the interests of those who had assisted in raising him to his new dignity. He appointed Oswald, a relation of Odo, to the bishopric of Worcester; and Ethelwold, with whom he had been educated in his early years, he made bishop of Winchester. They also, by the intercession of Dunstan, became the king's councillors. By this means, he had ever those who were his sworn friends and servants at the elbow of the sovereign. That he contributed to the spreading of education and to the encouragement of the fine arts will ever redound to the credit of Dunstan; while the supernatural gifts to which he laid claim—the vision of his mother's marriage with the Saviour—the song which, he said, the angel taught him, and with which he roused every monk in the monastery, at morning light, to learn—we must, in charity, attribute to that temporary insanity to which he was at times subject, and which did not even pass unnoticed by his contemporaries.
Nearly the first act of the primate appears to have been the establishment of the Benedictine rules in the monasteries; for the severe and rigid tenets which were adhered to by this new order of monks appear to have suited the cold, stony nature of the new archbishop, the warm emotions of whose heart had now died out, and faded into that cold, ashy grey, which, having lost all sympathy with the living and breathing world, lies as if dead and in a grave, while the heartless body still lives and acts.
Sorry we are that Edgar so implicated himself with the views of the ambitious primate, that whatever Dunstan planned, the king executed, and in every way favoured the new order of monks. The following may be taken as a sample of Edgar's eloquence in favour of the Benedictine order; it was delivered at a public synod, over which the king presided. After condemning the secular clergy for the smallness of their tonsure, in which the least possible patch of baldness was displayed, and finding fault with them for mixing with the laity, and living with concubines, for that was the new name by which Dunstan now designated the wives of the clergy, he addressed the primate as follows: "It is you, Dunstan, by whose advice I founded monasteries, built churches, and expended my treasure in the support of religion and religious houses. You were my councillor and assistant in all my schemes; you were the director of my conscience; to you I was obedient in all things. When did you call for supplies which I refused you? Was my assistance ever wanting to the poor? Did I deny support and establishments to the clergy or the convents? Did I not hearken to your instructions, who told me that these charities were of all others the most grateful to my Maker, and fixed a perpetual fund for the support of religion? And are all our pious endeavours now frustrated by the dissolute lives of the priests? Not that I throw any blame on you; you have reasoned, besought, inculcated, inveighed: but it now behoves you to use sharper and more vigorous remedies, and, conjoining your spiritual authority with the civil power, to purge effectually the temple of God from thieves and intruders."
Although Edgar was such an unflinching advocate of celibacy, and is said to have made married priests so scarce, that it was a rarity to see the face of one about his court, he appears to have fixed no limits to his own vicious propensities. While his first queen was yet surviving, he carried off a beautiful young lady, of noble birth, named Wulfreda, from the nunnery of Wilton, where she was receiving her education, under the sanctity of the veil. This, however, was no protection for her person; but Dunstan had the courage to step in, and inflict a penance upon the royal ravisher; which was, to fast occasionally; to lay aside his crown for seven years; to pay a fine to the nunnery; and, as if to make all in keeping with the action, for which he was thus mulct, he was to expel all the married clergy, and fill up their places with monks. Such was the penalty imposed upon him by Dunstan, who, himself disappointed in love in his earlier years, was now the sworn enemy of all married priests. Whether such edicts as he promulgated, and rigidly enforced, were calculated to check or increase such infamous acts as the above, there can scarcely remain matter of doubt; but how many Wulfredas the enforcing of his unnatural laws of celibacy were the means of violating can never now be known.
Edgar having heard rumours of the beauty of Elfrida, who was the daughter of Ordgar, earl of Devonshire, despatched one of his noblemen, named Athelwold, on some feigned business, to the castle of her father, to see if her features bore out the report he had heard of her beauty. Athelwold saw her, was suddenly smitten with her charms, and keeping the mission he was sent upon a secret, offered her his hand, was accepted, and married her. Though Athelwold had reported unfavourably of her beauty, and, through this misrepresentation, obtained Edgar's consent to marry her, influenced, as he said, by her immense wealth, the truth was not long before it reached the ears of Edgar, who resolved upon paying her a visit himself. The king's will was law; and all Athelwold could now do was to entreat of Edgar to allow him to precede him, pleading, as an excuse for his request, that he might put his house in order for the reception of his royal guest. His real object, however, was to gain time, and to persuade his wife to disguise her beauty by wearing homely attire, or to suffer another to personate her until the king's departure. But Elfrida, who, like Drida of old, concealed, under the form of an angel, the evil passions of a fiend, rebuked her husband sternly for having stepped in, and prevented her from ascending the throne, and for having himself snatched up that beauty which might have raised her to the rank of queen. All, however, was not yet lost; and never before had Elfrida bestowed such pains in decorating her person as she did on the day of the king's arrival. She was resolved upon captivating him; and as nature had done so much, she called in the charms of art to give a finish to her unequalled beauty. We can almost fancy poor Athelwold fidgeting about the turret-stair, and thinking every minute which she spent over her toilet an hour; and what a hopeless look the poor Saxon nobleman must have given, as, startled by the trumpets which announced the coming of the king, she rose from her seat with a proud step, and a kindling eye, glancing contemptuously upon her husband as she passed, and hurrying eagerly to the gate, to be foremost in welcoming the sovereign. The king was charmed; Athelwold was found murdered in a neighbouring wood; Edgar married Elfrida, and her name is another of those foul stains which disfigure the page of history. There is no proof that Edgar stabbed Athelwold with his own hand; on the contrary, there was a natural bravery about the king, more in keeping with the chivalric age than the barbarous times in which he lived. To cite a proof of his valour: it had been reported to him that Kenneth of Scotland, who was then on a visit at the English court, had one day said that it was a wonder to him so many provinces should obey a man so little; for Edgar was not only small in stature, but very thin. The Saxon king never named the matter to his guest, until one day when they were riding out together, in a lonely wood, when Edgar produced two swords, and handing one to the Scottish sovereign, said, "Our arms shall decide which ought to obey the other; for it will be base to have asserted that at a feast which you cannot maintain with your sword." Kenneth recalled his ill-timed remark, apologized, and was forgiven. Such a man would scarcely stoop to so base an act as assassination.
None of the Saxon kings had ever evinced such a love of pomp and display as Edgar. He summoned all the sovereigns to do homage for the kingdoms they held under him, at Chester; and, not content with this acknowledged vassalage, he commanded his barge to be placed in readiness on the river, and, seating himself at the helm, was rowed down the Dee by the eight tributary kings who were his guests. But with all his pride he was generous; and to Kenneth of Scotland, who had thus condescended to become one of his royal bargemen, he gave the whole wide county of Louth, together with a hundred ounces of the purest gold, and many costly rings, ornaments, and precious stones, beside several valuable dresses of the richest silk; only exacting in return that Kenneth should, once a year, attend his principal feast. Every spring he rode in rich array through his kingdom, accompanied by Dunstan and the nobles of his court, when he examined into the conduct of the rulers he had appointed over the provinces, and rigorously enforced obedience to the laws. He gave great encouragement to foreign artificers, regardless from what country they came; if they but evinced superior skill in workmanship, it was a sure passport to the patronage of Edgar. The tax which Athelstan imposed upon the Welsh, after he had won the battle of Brunanburg, Edgar commuted into an annual tribute of three hundred wolves' heads; and, by such a wise measure, the kingdom was so thinned of this formidable animal, that on the fourth year a sufficient number could not be found to make up the tribute. Three centuries after, and in the reign of Edward the First, we find England again so infested with wolves, that a royal mandate was issued to effect their extinction in the counties of Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford, and Stafford, and that in other places great rewards were also given for their destruction. Our Saxon ancestors called January Wolf-month, "because," says an old chronicle, "people are wont always in that moneth to be more in danger to be devoured of wolves than in any season els of the yere, for that through the extremity of cold and snow, those ravenous creatures could not find of other beasts sufficient to feed upon." The terror with which the wolf was regarded by our forefathers, doubtless caused many of the Saxon kings and leaders to assume the name of an animal which was so formidable for its courage and ferocity. Thus we find such names as Æthelwulf, the noble wolf; Berhtwulf, the illustrious wolf; Wulfric, powerful as a wolf; Eardwulf, the wolf of the province; Wulfheah, the tall wolf; Sigwulf, the victorious wolf; and Ealdwolf, the old wolf. So infested were the "cars" of Lincolnshire, and the wolds of Yorkshire, with wolves, which were wont to breed, in what are now the marshlands beside the Trent, amongst the sedge and rushes, that the shepherds were compelled to drive their flocks at night for safety into the towns and villages. And in the time of Athelstan, a retreat was built in the forest of Flixton, in Yorkshire, for passengers to shelter in, and defend themselves from the attacks of wolves.