§ 2. The Election and Coronation of Harold. January 5–6, 1066

The throne of England was now vacant, vacant under circumstances such as England had never seen before. The late King’s dying orders were obeyed, and, as soon as Eadward’s breath was out of his body, the Witan of England knew that their King was dead. But by the Law of England in the eleventh century, the announcement that the King was dead could not be answered by a cry for the long life of the King who still was living.^[32] The Witan, not yet departed from their Christmas gathering, heard that the throne was vacant, and they knew that it was for them alone to fill it. And, with the news that they had no longer a King, came the news that the last wish of the King who was gone had pointed out to them whom he wished to fill his kingly seat after him. All scruple was taken from every mind when men knew that the son of Æthelred, the heir of Cerdic, had, as his last act, named as his successor the son of Godwine, the grandson |Meeting of the Witan. January 5, 1066.| of Wulfnoth. It was no time for delay. Men came together as speedily upon the death of Eadward as they had come together to choose Eadward himself upon the death of Harthacnut. The King lay dead in his palace, while Earls and Prelates, Thegns and citizens, came together to choose the King who should reign in his stead. |Doubtful candidature of William and Eadgar.| The choice was speedy and unanimous. Later writers speak of voices being raised for Eadgar, even of voices being raised for William.^[33] And so it may have been. Here and there sentimental feelings may have caused this or that voice to utter the name of the royal boy, even in preference to the noblest of a merely subject house. And, in our land of free debate, some daring Norman may even have ventured to breathe the thought that the King’s kinsman, who had made Normandy so great and flourishing, might make England no less great and flourishing also. But words |No sign of local jealousies.| like these told not on the spirit of the Assembly. Nor do we hear of any expression of those local jealousies which had divided England on more than one earlier vacancy. We hear nothing of any rivalry of the House of Leofric against the House of Godwine; we hear nothing of any murmurs of the fierce Danes of the North against the inauguration of a new West-Saxon dynasty. If the sons of Ælfgar dreamed, as they doubtless did, of a divided Kingdom—of the Imperial Crown for one of themselves they hardly could have dreamed—their hopes were doomed to disappointment. Such thoughts, as we shall soon see, still lived in men’s minds, but in that great Gemót of London^[34] they found no open spokesman. It was not only London, ever foremost in every patriotic cause; it was not only Wessex, proud of her illustrious son; it was not only East-Anglia, cherishing the recollections of his earliest rule; it was not only Hereford, rejoicing in her recovered being, safe alike against British foes and Norman governors; it was the Witan, not of this or that shire or ancient |Harold chosen by all England.| Kingdom, but of the whole realm of England, who chose Harold the son of Godwine to fill the vacant throne.^[35] His reign had long been looked for, and now the dying voice of Eadward had marked him out as the worthiest object of their choice. The wise ruler, the unconquered warrior, the bountiful founder,—the shield of the Kingdom, the shelter of the oppressed, the judge of the fatherless and the widow^[36]—the Earl of the West-Saxons, the conqueror of Gruffydd, the pacificator of Northumberland, the founder of Waltham—stood forth before them as the foremost man of England. He, and he alone, stood forth above other men, sprung from no line of Kings, but the son of a father greater than Kings, the man who in long years of rule had shown that there was none like him worthy to fill the throne of the heroes of old time, worthy, as none of royal race were worthy, to wield the sword of Æthelstan and sit upon the judgement-seat of Ælfred. The assembled people of England, in the exercise of their ancient and undoubted right, chose with one voice Harold the son of Godwine to be King of the English and Lord of the Isle of Britain. On no day in their annals did the English people win for themselves a higher or a purer fame.

The choice of the Assembly had now to be announced to the King-elect. We know not whether that choice was made in his presence. Possibly he may have deemed that his most fitting place was still with his departed brother-in-law and his widowed sister. But, in any case, two members of the Assembly were sent, in the name of all, to offer the Crown of England, as the gift of the people of England, to the man whom they had chosen as their King. Who discharged that office we know not. None but men of the highest rank would be sent on such an errand. In the pictured record of that day’s acts they appear, not as Prelates but as lay chieftains. One bears the official axe;^[37] the other bears the Crown itself, and points towards the chamber of the dead, whence the Crown had doubtless been brought for the purpose of this symbolic offering.^[38] Who then were the men whom England thus trusted to speak such weighty words in her name? Were they the two Northern Earls, perhaps already the brothers-in-law of the elected King, stifling, as they best might, their local and family jealousies, their hopes of a divided kingdom? Or were they rather the two Earls of Eastern England, sons worthy of Godwine, brothers worthy of Harold, who were sent to bear the gift of England to the chief of their own house? That day’s vote had placed that house above the royalties of Gaul and Denmark; it had placed the line of Godwine on a height lower by one step only than the line whose youthful chief now sat on the throne of Augustus. It was for Gyrth and Leofwine, rather than for any other two men in England, to act on |Position of Harold.| that day as the spokesmen of their country. Harold stood, axe in hand, to receive them. The day for which he had looked so long had at last come. The path from which so many obstacles had been so strangely cleared away had at last brought him close to the great object of his life. He had now, not in figure, but in very truth, only to stretch forth his hand, and to grasp the Crown of England, the free gift of the people of England. No surprise could have filled his mind; for years he had been marked out, practically if not by a formal vote, as the man to whom that gorgeous gift must one day come. And yet that moment of realized dreams must have been a moment of anxiety, and even of fear. For him, no son of a kingly father, no scion of legendary heroes and of Gods of the elder faith, to see with his own eyes the diadem of Ecgberht and Cerdic ready for his grasp, was of itself a strange and wondrous feeling, such as few men but him in the world’s history can have felt. He was not like others before and since, who by fraud or violence have risen to royalty or more than royalty. Harold was not a Dionysios, a Cæsar, a Cromwell, or a Buonaparte, whose throne was reared upon the ruins of the freedom of his country. He was not an Eastern Basileus, climbing to the seat from which a fortunate battle or a successful conspiracy had hurled a murdered or blinded predecessor. He was not a Pippin, whose elevation, however expedient and rightful, could be brought about only by the displacement of a lawful, though an incompetent, King. He was not even a Rudolf, whose election, free and honourable as it was, came when the royal office had long been discredited in men’s eyes, and when traditional reverence no longer attached to any one ancient royal house. Harold was freely offered the Crown of England in all its glory and greatness, a Crown which had never before been offered to any but men of royal birth,^[39] which had never before been freely offered to any but men of the one Imperial House of Cerdic. |Difficulties of his situation.| He may well have paused as he looked at the glittering gift, through the mere greatness and strangeness of the position in which he stood. And other thoughts may well have pressed upon his mind, before he spoke the word which should change the Earl into a King. Harold knew better than any man the dangers which threatened himself |Double danger from Tostig and William.| and which threatened England. He knew what she had to fear from the vengeance of her own banished son, a vengeance which would be kindled into a sevenfold flame if Harold were King in a land where Tostig might not hold even an Earldom. He knew also, as no man knew, how much more she had to fear from the claims of the mighty and |Effects of the oath to William.| wily Duke beyond the sea. And heavy on his soul may still have pressed the memory of that fatal day when he had become the sworn man of that dangerous rival.^[40] If he had promised more than simple homage, casuistry and more than casuistry, the instinctive feeling of every honest man, would declare that an extorted promise, unlawful and impossible to fulfil, was perhaps a crime in him who had plighted it, but could be no crime in him who should obey a higher law by breaking it. But since that day, the heart of Harold could never have beaten so high, his step could never have been so light and joyous, as in the days when his faith was wholly free, when even his enemies could not impeach his truthfulness. And now the full weight of that day’s act must have stared him in the face. Let him accept the Crown now offered him by England, and Normandy |Harold’s anxiety, as expressed in the Tapestry.| would at once declare him a perjurer and a traitor. No wonder then if, as the picture sets him before us, he looked at the Crown at once wistfully and anxiously, and half drew back the hand which was stretched forth to grasp the glittering gift. And yet the risk had to be run. A path of danger opened before him, and yet duty no less than |Greater danger if he declined the Crown.| ambition bade him to enter upon the thorny road. If he declined the Crown, to whom should England offer it? Would the risk be less if the boy Eadgar could win the votes of the Witan, and if to the other dangers of England were to be added all the dangers which beset the land whose King is a child?^[41] What if the young Ætheling failed, as he doubtless would fail, to stand his ground at such a |Danger of a division of the Kingdom.| moment? Could the land hope to be united in any single choice? Would Mercia and Northumberland submit to the rule of some West-Saxon boasting neither the royal blood of Eadgar nor the personal glory of Harold? Would Wessex and East-Anglia, would mighty and growing London, submit to Eadwine or Morkere or to the youthful son of Siward? The dangers of accepting the Crown were great, but the dangers of refusing it were greater. Whoever reigned, Tostig and William would still try their chance, and, if it were not Harold who reigned, they would try their chance with far greater hope of success. The accession of Harold would indeed put fresh weapons into the hand of William, but it was not likely that the Duke would wholly cast aside his claims and his projects, simply because he would have some other King, and not Harold, to strive against. The fear indeed was that, if Harold shrank from the burthen, William would find no one single King to resist him. He would win an easy victory over a divided land, a land split asunder as it had been in the days of Harthacnut and the earlier Harold, a land, it might be, already torn in pieces by civil war. Under Harold alone could there be the faintest hope that England would offer an united front to either of the invaders who were sure to attack her. The danger then had to be faced. The call of patriotism distinctly bade Harold not to shrink at the last moment from the post to which he had so long looked forward, and which had at last become his own. The first man in England, first in every gift of war and peace, first in the love of his countrymen, first in renown in other lands, was bound to be first alike in honour and in danger. The gift now lay before him. Ambition bade him seize it. Duty in no way |The Crown accepted by Harold.| held back his hand. The offered gift was accepted. The eve of that great Epiphany, the day on which King Eadward was alive and dead,^[42] saw the Crown pass away for ever from the male line of Cerdic, and the next day saw it solemnly placed upon the brow of Harold. The evening of Eadward’s death must have been spent in preparation for the two great ceremonies of the morrow. On the morning of that short winter’s day, the Earl of the West-Saxons had kept his watch by the dying bed of his King and brother. Before its last hour had passed, he had become, not yet indeed a crowned and anointed King, but one called to kingship by the unanimous voice of his country, a King-elect of the English, who on the morrow might claim the sceptre and the diadem as his own.

The morning of the Epiphany dawned. It was the Feast of the Kings, a fitting day for an august rite within the walls of that minster which was reared to be specially the home of Kings alike in life and in death. On that day began that long series of national ceremonies which has gone on uninterruptedly to our own time, and which has made the Abbey of Saint Peter the hearth and Prytaneion of the English nation. The octave of the consecration-day |Necessity for a speedy coronation,| had barely passed, and there was already a King to be buried and a King to be crowned. Earl Harold was King-elect by the choice of the Witan of all England; but he was not “full King” till he and his people had exchanged their mutual promises, till he had been arrayed with the outward badges of his kingly office, till the blessing of the Church and the unction of her highest minister had made the chosen of the people also the Anointed of the Lord. Those were not days when that crowning rite could be delayed for one needless moment. England could not be safely left for a single day without a King. The twofold right of the new Sovereign, as King alike by the election of the people and by the consecration of the Church, must be at once placed beyond all reach of doubt or cavil. The Christmas feast was not yet over, but it was the last day of the holy season; the Witan were still assembled; to have waited for another feast of the Church, for another gathering of the nation, would have been simple madness.^[43] The day of the coronation of Harold must therefore follow at once on the day |and therefore for a speedy burial.| of his election. And the coronation of Harold involved the previous burial of Eadward. England could not see two Kings of the English above ground at the same moment. Before then the Crown could be set on the brow of the King-elect, the hallowed soil of Saint Peter’s must close over the King who was no more. The day of the burial of Eadward must therefore follow at once on the day of his death. And never, even in the long history of that venerable Abbey, has there been such another day. Other |Greatness of the occasion.| Kings have been buried and crowned within its walls; but there has been no day like that, which beheld the last of one kingly line borne to his grave in the holy house of his own building, and which beheld the first—could men deem that he would be also the last?—of a newly-chosen race raised to the vacant throne alike by the bequest of his predecessor and by the will of his people. Of all the gorgeous rites celebrated by Kings and Prelates beneath the vaults of the West Minster, the twofold rite of that great Epiphany, which haste and urgency may well have rendered the least gorgeous of them all, is that around which the national memory of Englishmen may well centre most fondly. The first royal burial, the first royal consecration, within the newly-hallowed temple, possess an historic interest and an historic import beyond all those which have followed them.

The body of Eadward had been prepared for burial almost as soon as his soul had passed away. Decked in royal robes, the crown on his head, the pilgrim’s ring, so legend said, upon his hand, the saint lay ready for his last home. Stigand, who had stood by him in his last moments, seems to have stayed to help in paying this last tribute to his departed master.^[44] But the Primate, patriot in the eyes of Englishmen, schismatic in the eyes of Rome, was not to |Position of Stigand.| minister in either of the ceremonies of the morrow. As a Prelate of doubtful right, he was deemed unfit to hear the chief part in the consecration of Harold. As a simple priest, he might perhaps have been allowed to officiate at the funeral rites of Eadward. But it may well be that the newly-won privileges of the house of Saint Peter gave to the head of that house the ministration of all rites within its walls which did not need the special powers of a consecrated Bishop to give them sacramental efficacy. And Eadward doubtless sought, above all things, the prayers which the monks of the house which he himself had reared would |Stigand did not officiate at the funeral.| put up to Heaven for the soul of their founder. At all events, the priest who holds the first place in Eadward’s funeral procession is not set before us in our pictured record as adorned with any badge of pontifical rank.^[45] We may perhaps be allowed to guess that the chief ministry in the funeral rites of Eadward was assigned to his friend and bedesman, Abbot Eadwine. Early on the winter’s morning,^[46] perhaps while the minster still needed torchlight within the deep gloom of its massive walls and narrow windows, |Funeral of Eadward.| the King was carried to his grave. The body of Eadward, his form shrouded from sight, was borne on the shoulders of eight of his subjects, laymen all, and doubtless men of high degree. There was no need, as in the case of some later Kings, to assure his people, by the sight of his uncovered body, that he had not come unfairly by his end. Boys ringing bells walked on either side of the bier; behind them followed a crowd of clergy, surrounding the two chief ministers of the funeral ceremony, who walked bearing their office-books in their hands. In this guise the procession moved from the palace to the western door of the newly-hallowed minster. They swept along the nave, between the long rows of tall and massive pillars still fresh from the axe and hammer of the craftsman. They passed beneath the mighty arches, which, in all the strength and solidity of those early days of art, bore up the great central tower like a vast canopy over the choir below. They bore their burthen to the spot which Eadward had long before chosen as his place of burial, and there, before the altar of the saint whom he so deeply reverenced, the patron alike of Westminster and of Rome,^[47] the body of the last King of |General sorrow for Eadward.| the olden stock received its last kingly honours. We can well believe that, not only the poor whom he had relieved, the churchmen whom he had enriched, and the strangers on whom he had lavished the wealth of England, but that Englishmen of all ranks might well weep in awe and in sorrow over the grave of the last son of Cerdic and Woden. At such a moment, reversing the poet’s rule, the good that men have done lives after them and the evil is interred with their bones. There, by his grave in his own church, men’s thoughts would dwell on the virtues rather than on |Causes of sorrow and anxiety.| the weaknesses of the King who was taken from them. His faults as a King were great; but men would then think rather of all that was worthy in him as a man, and they might well deem that his last kingly act had covered a multitude of errors. In the crowd which filled the church, there could have been few whom Eadward had personally wronged; there must have been many whom he had personally benefitted. And, more than this, men must have felt that the two great rites of that day placed a great gulf between them and a long and honoured past, while a future rose before them, bright indeed with glorious hopes, but around which two dark clouds were gathering in opposite quarters of the heaven. No wonder then that by the grave of Eadward men wept and trembled.^[48] Psalms were sung, masses were said, alms were scattered abroad with a bounteous hand, needless offerings it might seem for a soul which men deemed that angels had already borne to the beatific vision.^[49] For three hundred days, days which stretch beyond the reign of Harold, the masses, the hymns, |Miracles wrought at the tomb.| the alms, continued to be daily offered.^[50] And wonders soon were wrought at the tomb of the royal saint. The blind received their sight, the lame walked, the sick were healed, the sorrowing received comfort.^[51] So thought men of his own day, men who had seen him in the flesh, and who have not shrunk from handing down to us even the less worthy actions of his life. If we deem such a belief and such a worship to be, not only superstitious in itself, but to have been thrown away on an unworthy object, we must remember with how fond a memory men must, ere a year had passed, have looked back to the happy days of the baleless King. We must remember how easily men would forget that the calm of those happy days was due, far less to the crowned monk upon the throne, than to the man of the stout heart and the strong arm who stood beside him. And let us remember too that the canonizing voice of |Other causes of popular canonization.| England was not always raised only to commemorate mere monastic virtues like those of Eadward. Foreign Kings and foreign Pontiffs might forbid, but a day came when England looked with no less devout reverence on the true heroes and martyrs of our land. If miracles adorned the tomb of Eadward at Westminster, no less mighty works were soon deemed to be wrought before Waltheof’s tomb in the chapter-house of Crowland, and two ages later, the sick were again healed and the blind again saw, before the tomb where English hearts still revered the relics which were all that the foeman’s sword had left of the mangled form of the martyr of Evesham.^[52]

The funeral rites were over; but the history of Eadward, as the history of a saint, is one which reaches beyond the grave. A King at whose tomb wonders were daily wrought, a King whom two hostile races could unite to look upon with reverence, gradually filled a larger and a larger space in men’s minds. Such a King, already canonized by the popular voice, a King who had done more than any King before him to bring the English Church into close connexion with the Roman See, could not fail, ere long, to obtain, by Papal authority, a formal admission into the register of the saints. But the steps by which he won his saint’s rank were gradual. Six-and-thirty years after |Examination of his body by Abbot Gilbert. 1102.| Eadward’s death, a Bishop and an Abbot of Norman birth, who had most likely never seen him in the flesh, were the first whom pious curiosity led to disturb the rest of the departed. It was already whispered that the body of Eadward, the instrument of so many miracles, was itself the subject of miracle. The holy King, men said, had never seen corruption. Abbot Gilbert, one of the great Norman line of Crispin, whom Lanfranc had put in charge of the house of Westminster,^[53] deemed it his duty to see whether the tale that so often met his ears were true. In company with Bishop Gundulf of Rochester, the Prelate to whose skill we owe the White Tower of London and the lowlier keep of Malling, and with other noble and pious persons, he opened the grave of Eadward. A sweet savour filled the minster; they unfolded the garments in which Eadward had been wrapped under the eyes of Stigand; the body lay as in sleep; the powers of nature had failed to do their work; the skin was still white and rosy; the limbs were still flexible; they might deem that he might again arise from his trance and again denounce the sins of England. The Bishop would fain have carried off one hair of his snowy beard to keep as a relic more precious than all the treasures of the earth.^[54] But not a hair could be pulled away from the face of the sleeping saint. The Abbot, with a reverence to which those ages were commonly strangers, checked the attempt; he restored the vestments and the body to their place, and bade that the remains of the man of God should rest in peace.

Thirty-eight years later a vain attempt was made by Osbert, Prior of Westminster, the special trumpeter of |Eadward’s canonization. 1140.| Eadward’s renown,^[55] to obtain formal canonization for him from Innocent the Second. But a day came when the House of William had passed away like the House of Cerdic, a day when men had taught themselves to hail a stranger from Anjou as the corner-stone which united Norman |Eadward canonized by Alexander the Third. 1161.| and English royalty. Then, at last, the influence of a King who reigned from the Orkneys to the Pyrenees was able to procure from Rome the decree which placed the predecessor whom all his subjects agreed to reverence among authorized objects of religious honour.^[56] The green tree had now returned to the trunk; it had brought forth its queenly leaves and its kingly fruit, and the day was now come to do special homage to the seer who had foretold that the good time would at last come back again. As one Pope Alexander had given the blessing of Rome to the enterprise of the Norman invader, his next successor of the same name might seem in some sort to undo the wrong by making the last King of the old royal stock of England |First Translation of Eadward. October 13, 1163.| an object of worship to the Church Universal. In the presence of the Angevin King, in whom men now saw the heir of Eadward, in the presence of the Norman Primate whom England learned to love as her champion and martyr, the body of Eadward was translated from his royal tomb to the shrine which was the fitting resting-place of the relics of a saint in glory. Things were not now as they were in the days of Abbot Gilbert. Then the body, entitled only to the reverence due to the remains of a departed Christian, was allowed to return unhurt and unplundered to the grave. But now that Eadward claimed the worship due to a canonized saint, whatever had touched the holy corpse became endowed with sanctity and miraculous power. The ring, the subject of so many legends, was drawn from his finger and was preserved as a wonder-working relic. The royal robes in which the body had been enfolded were borne away from the tomb and became vestments for the holiest worship of the sanctuary.^[57] And the anniversary of that day still preserves the memory of Eadward in the Kalendar of the English Church. It was not without a certain fitness that the Feast of the Translation of Saint Eadward should be kept, not on the eve of the Epiphany, but on the eve of the day of Saint Calixtus. It is well that two successive days should remind us of the memory of Eadward and of the memory of him who fell on the morrow of his festival.

Years rolled on, and the spot to which Eadward had been moved on his first translation was now deemed unworthy of a Saint who was already looked upon as the patron of England. A King now sat on the throne of Eadward, who was in many points a reproduction of Eadward himself. The same fervent zeal for God, the same neglect of duty towards man, the same vehemence in speech and weakness in action, the same love for men of foreign lands, the same spiritual bondage to a foreign yoke, the same deep and lavish devotion to the holy house of Saint Peter, appeared in Henry the Third which had already appeared in the predecessor whom he reverenced and resembled. The King who, like Eadward, aroused the feelings of the nation by his wasteful preference for strangers of every land, chose as the special objects of his religious devotion two royal saints of English birth. Before all other saints, King Henry’s worship was paid to the East-Anglian Eadmund and the West-Saxon Eadward. By his act those kingly names again found their way into the royal house, and the name of the saint himself became the most glorious in the later history of England.^[58] In honour of |Rebuilding of the West Minster. 1245.| Eadward the work of Eadward was destroyed.^[59] The church which he himself had reared was now deemed unworthy to be the dwelling-place of so great a saint.^[60] The “massive arches, broad and round,”^[61] of the church which so long was the model for all England,^[62] now gave way to those slender pillars and soaring arches which, alone among English minsters, go some way to reproduce the boundless height of Amiens and of Beauvais. There, alone among English minsters of its own date,^[63] did the tall apse and its surrounding chapels crown the eastern end of what was now the church of Saint Eadward. But that apse was not reared, as at Amiens and at Le Mans, at Pershore and at Tewkesbury, to form the most glorious of canopies for the |The shrine of Eadward.| altar of the Most High. Not in any subordinate chapel, but in the noblest spot of all, in the spot which elsewhere was reserved for the highest acts of Christian worship, was the new shrine of Eadward reared. And the workmanship of that gorgeous shrine was of a type fit for him who reared it, and for him in whose honour it was reared. Among all the Kings whose tombs are gathered together in that solemn spot, two alone reveal in their style of art the work of craftsmen from beyond the sea and even from beyond the |Comparison of Eadward and Henry the Third.| mountains. The resting-places of the two Kings in whose heart beat no English feeling, the two Kings who loved to be surrounded by men of any nation rather than their own, the two Kings who, more than any other Kings in English history, laid England, of their own act, prostrate at the feet of Rome,^[64] the shrine of Eadward, the tomb of Henry, are fittingly adorned with forms which awake no English associations, the work not of English but of |The Translation. October 13, 1269.| Italian hands. To that shrine, a hundred and three years after its first translation, the body of the saint was borne by a crowd of the noblest of the land.^[65] Among them two Kings and two Kings’ sons bowed their shoulders beneath the hallowed weight. The two highest of earthly rulers, the continental and the insular Basileus, Richard of Germany and Henry of England, were foremost to bear the burthen to which it was deemed a holy work to stretch forth a single finger.^[66] With the one English Augustus there joined in the task his nephew, the one Englishman besides himself who ever bore the titles of foreign royalty, Edmund of Lancaster, whose vain pretensions to the Sicilian crown had been already transferred to the stronger hand of the conqueror from Anjou. Fit bearers for the foreign-hearted saint were an English King who hated Englishmen, and English princes who wasted English |Presence of Edward the First.| treasure in seeking after the kingship of other lands. But there was one who shared in their work who might seem sent there expressly to remind us that the object of their worship was, after all, an Englishman. Among those who bent to bear Eadward’s body was the prince who was named after his name, but whose life reproduced, not the life of Eadward the Confessor, but the life of Eadward the Unconquered.^[67] Those who then pressed to win spiritual blessings by touching the corpse of Eadward hardly deemed that among themselves was one who was to make his name more worthy of honour among Englishmen than the royal saint could ever make it. It was then deemed an honour and a privilege to draw near to the body of Eadward. Was it not rather the highest of honours paid to Eadward himself, that Harold stood by his side at his first burial, and that in the great rite of his translation a share was borne by him who did in truth live to wield the sceptre of the Isle of Albion, and in whom the Scot and the Briton once more bowed to an Eadward of England as their father and their lord?^[68]

But the posthumous history of Eadward the Confessor did not end even with this crowning triumph. His shrine at Westminster became the centre of a group of royal tombs such as gathered in earlier times in the more ancient seats of royalty at Winchester and Sherborne. Or a closer parallel still might be looked for in that renowned sanctuary of the West, the resting-place of Eadward’s nobler brother, where Briton and Englishman agreed to revere the name of the legendary Arthur, as at Westminster Englishman and Norman agreed to revere the name of the now well-nigh |Burial of Eadgyth, 1074;| legendary Eadward.^[69] Eight years after the burial of Eadward, his widow, the loving sister of Tostig, the loyal subject of William, was laid by his side before the altar of Saint Peter.^[70] The zeal of King Henry thought of her also, and her remains, translated to the chapel of her husband, were laid as near to his side as the remains of an ordinary sinful mortal might lie to those of a wonder-working saint. |of Eadgyth-Matilda, 1118.| To the other side of his shrine was moved the dust of another Eadgyth, disguised in history by her Norman name Matilda, her in whom the green tree first began to return to the trunk, and in whose grandson Normandy and England alike became parts of the dominions of the Angevin.^[71] No legend or effigy marks the graves of these royal Ladies, but soon the choicest skill of the craftsman was lavished on the tombs of Kings and princes which crowded round the shrine of their sainted predecessor. To the north King |Henry the Third.| Henry sleeps in his tomb of foreign work, beneath the |Edward and Eleanor.| shadow of the patron whom he had so deeply honoured.^[72] Worthier dust lies east and west of him. No graven figure marks the resting-place of his immortal son, but the loveliest work of all within that mighty charnel-house records the love and grief of the great King for a consort worthy of him. Succeeding ages surrounded the sacred spot with the sculptured forms of succeeding generations of English royalty. There sleeps the victor of Crecy and the victor of |Richard the Second.| Azincourt; there sleeps, beside his nobler Queen, the King from whom the Parliament of England, in the exercise of its |1399.| ancient right, took away the Crown of which he had shown himself unworthy. Thus around the shrine of Eadward were gathered the successors who in life had sworn to keep his fancied Laws, and who deemed it their highest honour to wear his Crown and to sit upon his royal seat. At last a King arose in whose eyes the wealth which earlier Kings had lavished on that spot outweighed the reverence with which so many ages had surrounded Eadward’s name. One Henry had reared alike the shrine and the pile which held it; the word of another Henry went forth to cast to the owls and to the bats all that earlier ages had deemed holy. |The body of Eadward removed under Henry the Eighth,| And yet some remorse seems to have smitten the soul of the destroyer before the shrine of the royal patron and lawgiver of England. Elsewhere the shrines of more ancient saints were levelled with the ground; elsewhere the dust of Kings and heroes was scattered to the winds. The wealth of Eadward’s shrine was indeed borne away to be sported broadcast among the minions of Henry’s court, but the empty casket still stood untouched, and the hallowed remains found another, if a lowlier, resting-place within the minster-walls. And the days yet came when one translation |and restored under Philip and Mary.| more restored the corpse of Eadward to its place of honour. And again it was from fitting hands that he received this last act of veneration. The foreign-hearted Eadward had been first placed in that shrine by the foreign-hearted Henry, the King whose foreign marriage proved the curse of England, and whose foreign tastes made England the victim and the bondslave of Rome. Shorn of his honours by a King who, with all his crimes, was at least an Englishman, Eadward was brought back to his shrine by a Queen whose work it was to bend the neck of England beneath the spiritual yoke of the Roman See and the temporal yoke of her Spanish husband.^[73] Translated first by the zeal of Henry and Eleanor, he was again restored to his old honours by the zeal of Philip and Mary. And now, while the dust of Eadmund and Harold is scattered to the winds, Eadward still sleeps in his shrine, unworshipped indeed but undisturbed; and the spot where an Englishman would best love to stand and muse in awe and wonder has become ground from which the votaries of devotion and art and history are bidden to turn away.

But we must come back to the doings of the great Epiphany. The last King of the House of Cerdic was laid in his grave; it was time for the first King of the House of Godwine to be placed upon his throne. Short as the interregnum had been, England could not go a moment longer without a crowned and anointed ruler. From the burial of Eadward men turned at once to the coronation of Harold. That great rite was performed with all solemnity, no doubt according to those venerable forms whose substance has been followed in the consecration of every English King down to our own time.^[74] The chief actor in that august ceremony was one not wholly unworthy of so high a function. The Primate of all England, while his canonical right to his see was called in question at home and abroad, could not be allowed to discharge the highest duty belonging to his office. The hands of Stigand might not minister an unction which was held to confer somewhat |The ceremony performed by Ealdred.| of sacramental grace and even of priestly sanctity.^[75] In his stead, the rite was performed by the Primate of Northumberland, his marked adhesion to the new King being perhaps taken as one pledge of the allegiance of his distant province. No living Englishman had seen so much of other lands, none had so often stood face to face with the rulers of other nations, as he who was now called upon to set the English Crown upon the brow of Harold. Ealdred, alone of living English Prelates, had gone, at the bidding of his King or at the call of his own devotion, to the banks of the Rhine, the Tiber, and the Jordan. He alone had stood, as the representative of England, before the thrones of the spiritual and the temporal chiefs of Christendom. He alone had gone, with such worship as none had gone before him,^[76] far beyond the threshold of the Apostles, to the city where the Infidel bore sway over the very spot of man’s redemption. He had tarried in the court of Cæsar, he had knelt at the tomb of Christ; but in all his wanderings he had never seen such a day or such a scene as when the Witan of all England came together to choose their Father and their Lord, and the diadem of Ecgberht rested on the lordly brow of the King chosen from his brethren. Could he have deemed that, at the next Christmas Feast, he should be called upon again to repeat that solemn rite on the same spot, under circumstances yet more new and wonderful? In the whole range of history, it is hard to point to a stranger fate than that of him to whose lot it fell to receive, within a single year, the coronation-oath of Harold and the coronation-oath of William.

The rite began. Earl Harold, the King-elect, was led by two Bishops, with hymns and processions, up to the high altar of the minster. Later usage assigned that honourable function to the Prelates of Durham and of Wells.^[77] It may then well be that Gisa, the supposed victim and enemy of Harold, really discharged one of the chief parts in his admission to his kingly office. The hymn sung by the choir in that great procession prayed that the hand of Harold might be strengthened and exalted, that justice and judgement might be the preparation of his seat, that mercy and truth might go before his face.^[78] Before the high altar the Earl of the West-Saxons bowed himself to the ground, and while he lay grovelling, the song of Ambrose, the song of faith and of victory, was sung over one whose sin at Porlock, whose atonement at Waltham, might well make him seem another Theodosius.^[79] The Earl then rose from the pavement, and for the last time he looked on the crowd |The Ecclesiastical Election.| around him, the Prelates and Thegns and the whole people of England, as still one of their own number. Their voice had already named him as their King, but a still more solemn election before the altar of God was needed before the Church admitted him to the sacramental unction. Once more the voice of Ealdred demanded of the English people, in ancient form, whether they would that Earl Harold should be crowned as their Lord and King. A loud shout |The Coronation oath.| of assent rang through the minster. Chosen thus by Prelates and people,^[80] the King-elect swore with a loud voice his threefold oath to God and to all his folk. Kings swore in after days that they would observe all the rights and liberties which the glorious Eadward had granted to his clergy and his people. The oath of the prince who had so lately renewed the Laws of Cnut was of a simpler form. Earl Harold swore to preserve peace to the Church of God and to all Christian people. He swore to forbid wrong and robbery to men of every rank within his realm. He swore to enforce justice and mercy in all his judgements, as he would that God should have mercy upon him. And all the people said Amen. The Bishops then prayed for the ruler whom they had chosen, for his guidance by the Spirit of wisdom in the government of his realm, for peace to his Church and people, for his welfare in this world and in the next.^[81] Then a yet more solemn prayer from the lips of Ealdred followed. In that ancient English form, which other nations have been fain to borrow of us,^[82] the God who had wrought His mighty works by the hands of Abraham and Moses and Joshua and David and Solomon was implored to shower down all the gifts and graces of those famous worthies upon him who was that day chosen to be King of the Angles and Saxons. Ealdred prayed that Harold, faithful as Abraham, gentle as Moses, brave as Joshua, humble as David, wise as Solomon, might teach and rule and guard the Church and realm of the Angles and Saxons^[83] against all visible and invisible foes. With feelings too deep for words must that prayer have risen from the hearts of all who could already see the gathering storm, which was still but like a little cloud out of the sea. The Primate prayed that their chosen King might never fail the throne and sceptre of the Angles and Saxons, that for long years of life he might reign over a faithful people, in peace and concord, and, if need be, in victory. Christ Himself was prayed to raise him to the throne of His kingdom, and to pour down upon him the unction of the Holy One.

“The oaths were said, the prayers were prayed.”^[84] And now came the sacramental rite itself which changed an Earl into a King, and which gave him, so men then deemed, grace from on high to discharge the duties which were laid upon him. The holy oil was poured by Ealdred upon the head of Earl Harold.^[85] And while the symbolic act was in doing, the choir raised their voices in that glorious strain to which the noblest music of later times has given a still higher majesty. The walls of the West Minster echoed to the anthem which told how Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet anointed Solomon King, and which added the prayer of England that Harold might live for ever.^[86] Again the Primate prayed that, as of old Kings and Priests and Prophets were anointed with oil, so now the oil poured on the head of God’s servant might be a true sign of the inner unction of the heart, a means of grace for His glory and the |The Investiture.| welfare of His people.^[87] And now King Harold, the Lord’s Anointed, the chosen of the people, the consecrated of the Church, vested in the robes of royalty and priesthood,^[88] received in due order the insignia of his kingly office. The sword was placed in his hand, with the prayer that he might therewith defend his realm, and smite his enemies and the |The Crowning.| enemies of the Church of God.^[89] The King then bowed his head, and the Imperial diadem of Britain was placed by the hand of Ealdred on the head of the King of the Angles and Saxons, the Emperor of the Isle of Albion.^[90] God was again implored to crown His Anointed with glory and justice and might, and to give him a yet brighter Crown in a more enduring Kingdom. Then the sceptre crowned with the cross, and the rod crowned with the holy dove, were placed, one after the other, in the royal hands. Prayer was again made that the sceptre of Harold’s Kingdom might be a sceptre of righteousness and strength, that he who had been anointed with the oil of gladness above his fellows might through all his days be a lover of righteousness and a hater of iniquity.^[91] Further prayers, further blessings, followed; the prayers and merits of all the saints, of the Virgin Mother of God, of the Prince of the Apostles, and of his successor the special Apostle of the English nation,^[92] were |“Hic residet Harold Rex Anglorum.”| implored on behalf of the crowned and anointed King. And now King Harold of England sat on his royal throne, the crown upon his brow, in his right hand the sceptre, in his left the orb of Empire,^[93] the proud badge which belonged of right to the Cæsar of another world. Two chiefs, perhaps his faithful brothers, bore the sword at his side; his people stood and gazed upon him with wonder and |Import of the ceremony.| delight.^[94] The day at last had come for which Harold and England had looked so long. The reward of thirteen years of loyal service had been given by the nation to her noblest son. And the die too had been cast; the danger was now to be faced in common; King and people were pledged to stand by one another in the struggle which was to come. And King and people did stand by one another, and, if they both fell, they both fell gloriously. The rite of that great day gave Harold, instead of the long and peaceful reign prayed for by his consecrator, a reign of nine months of little stillness.^[95] Then England was given over to bondage, and the name of Harold was given over to the voice of slander. But in the eye of truth, those nine months of little stillness, spent in the cause of England, were better than long years of inglorious ease and luxury, better than long years of hardly less inglorious sloth and superstition. As the momentary glory of Eadmund follows on the weary years of Æthelred, so the momentary glory of Harold followed on those years of Eadward which Harold alone had saved from being as weary as those of his father. And, in the eye of authentic history, never was crown more lawfully won, more worthily worn, than that which Ealdred placed that day on the head of him whom calumny marked so long as Harold the Usurper. If there ever was a lawful ruler in this world, such of a truth was Harold, King of the English and Lord of the Isle of Britain—King, not by the mouldering titles of a worn-out dynasty, not by the gold of the trafficker or the steel of the invader, but by the noblest title by which one man can claim to rule over his fellows, the free choice of a free people.

The rite was over. Earl Harold was now King; but we cannot help asking whether he stood alone in the great ceremony which had made him so. Did the Lady Ealdgyth, once again the wife of a King, share in the consecration of her husband? Her coronation is nowhere distinctly spoken of, but our ancient ritual provides a form for the anointing of the King’s consort, and for her investiture with the ring and crown.^[96] There is no reason to suppose that the wife of Harold, the grand-daughter of Leofric, would be debarred from any honour befitting the wife of a King, the mother of future Æthelings. But, in the absence of direct testimony, I do not venture to affirm the fact. Indeed I must confess that I feel less certain than I did when writing my last chapter, whether the marriage of Harold and Ealdgyth may not have followed his election to the Crown.^[97] Whether then the new King had a consort to share in his honours is a point which I must leave uncertain. But, according to all precedent, on the coronation followed the mass, with prayers and collects appropriate for the great solemnity.^[98] At that mass the King partook of the holiest rite of Christian worship. On the mass followed the banquet, and there, on the last day of the Christmas Festival, we cannot doubt that King Harold, in all the glory of his new dignity, wore his Crown with all kingly state in what was now his Palace of Westminster. The old dynasty had passed away; the new dynasty had taken possession; but not many days had gone before voices of warning came which showed that King Harold of England would soon have to do battle for his Crown.