Book: Hereward, The Last of the English

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With the same rational and prudent policy, William respected the fallen
royal families, both of Harold and of Edward; at least, he warred not
against women; and the wealth and influence of the great English ladies
was enormous. Edith, sister of Harold, and widow of the Confessor, lived
in wealth and honor at Winchester. Gyda, Harold's mother, retained Exeter
and her land. Aldytha, [Footnote: See her history, told as none other can
tell it, in Bulwer's "Harold."] or Elfgiva, sister of Edwin and Morcar,
niece of Hereward, and widow, first of Griffin of Wales, and then of
Harold, lived rich and safe in Chester. Godiva, the Countess, owned, so
antiquarians say, manors from Cheshire to Lincolnshire, which would be now
yearly worth the income of a great duke. Agatha, the Hungarian, widow of
Edmund the outlaw, dwelt at Romsey, in Hampshire, under William's care.
Her son, Edward Etheling, the rightful heir of England, was treated by
William not only with courtesy, but with affection; and allowed to rebel,
when he did rebel, with impunity. For the descendant of Rollo, the heathen
Viking, had become a civilized, chivalrous, Christian knight. His mighty
forefather would have split the Etheling's skull with his own axe. A Frank
king would have shaved the young man's head, and immersed him in a
monastery. An eastern sultan would have thrust out his eyes, or strangled
him at once. But William, however cruel, however unscrupulous, had a
knightly heart, and somewhat of a Christian conscience; and his conduct to
his only lawful rival is a noble trait amid many sins.

So far all went well, till William went back to France; to be likened, not
as his ancestors, to the gods of Valhalla, or the barbarous and destroying
Viking of mythic ages, but to Caesar, Pompey, Vespasian, and the civilized
and civilizing heroes of classic Rome.

But while he sat at the Easter feast at Fecamp, displaying to Franks,
Flemings, and Bretons, as well as to his own Normans, the treasures of
Edward's palace at Westminster, and "more English wealth than could be
found in the whole estate of Gaul"; while he sat there in his glory, with
his young dupes, Edwin, Morcar, and Waltheof by his side, having sent
Harold's banner in triumph to the Pope, as a token that he had conquered
the Church as well as the nation of England; and having founded abbeys as
thank-offerings to Him who had seemed to prosper him in his great crime:
at that very hour the handwriting was on the wall, unseen by man; and he
and his policy and his race were weighed in the balance, and found
wanting.

For now broke out in England that wrong-doing, which endured as long as
she was a mere appanage and foreign farm of Norman kings, whose hearts and
homes were across the seas in France. Fitz-Osbern, and Odo the
warrior-prelate, William's half-brother, had been left as his regents in
England. Little do they seem to have cared for William's promise to the
English people that they were to be ruled still by the laws of Edward the
Confessor, and that where a grant of land was made to a Norman, he was to
hold it as the Englishman had done before him, with no heavier burdens on
himself, but with no heavier burdens on the poor folk who tilled the land
for him. Oppression began, lawlessness, and violence; men were ill-treated
on the highways; and women--what was worse--in their own homes; and the
regents abetted the ill-doers. "It seems," says a most impartial
historian, [Footnote: The late Sir F. Palgrave.] "as if the Normans,
released from all authority, all restraint, all fear of retaliation,
determined to reduce the English nation to servitude, and drive them to
despair."

In the latter attempt they succeeded but too soon; in the former, they
succeeded at last: but they paid dearly for their success.

Hot young Englishmen began to emigrate. Some went to the court of
Constantinople, to join the Varanger guard, and have their chance of a
Polotaswarf like Harold Hardraade. Some went to Scotland to Malcolm
Canmore, and brooded over return and revenge. But Harold's sons went to
their father's cousin; to Sweyn--Swend--Sweno Ulfsson, and called on him
to come and reconquer England in the name of his uncle Canute the Great;
and many an Englishman went with them.

These things Gospatrick watched, as earl (so far as he could make any one
obey him in the utter subversion of all order) of the lands between Forth
and Tyne. And he determined to flee, ere evil befell him, to his cousin
Malcolm Canmore, taking with him Marlesweyn of Lincolnshire, who had
fought, it is said, by Harold's side at Hastings, and young Waltheof of
York. But, moreover, having a head, and being indeed, as his final success
showed, a man of ability and courage, he determined on a stroke of policy,
which had incalculable after-effects on the history of Scotland. He
persuaded Agatha the Hungarian, Margaret and Christina her daughters, and
Edgar the Etheling himself, to flee with him to Scotland. How he contrived
to send them messages to Romsey, far south in Hampshire; how they
contrived to escape to the Humber, and thence up to the Forth; this is a
romance in itself, of which the chroniclers have left hardly a hint. But
the thing was done; and at St. Margaret's Hope, as tradition tells, the
Scottish king met, and claimed as his unwilling bride, that fair and holy
maiden who was destined to soften his fierce passions, to civilize and
purify his people, and to become--if all had their just dues--the true
patron saint of Scotland.

Malcolm Canmore promised a mighty army; Sweyn, a mighty fleet. And
meanwhile, Eustace of Boulogne, the Confessor's brother-in-law, himself a
Norman, rebelled at the head of the down-trodden men of Kent; and the
Welshmen were harrying Herefordshire with fire and sword, in revenge for
Norman ravages.

But as yet the storm did not burst. William returned, and with him
something like order. He conquered Exeter; he destroyed churches and towns
to make his New Forest. He brought over his Queen Matilda with pomp and
great glory; and with her, the Bayeux tapestry which she had wrought with
her own hands; and meanwhile Sweyn Ulfsson was too busy threatening Olaf
Haroldsson, the new king of Norway, to sail for England; and the sons of
King Harold of England had to seek help from the Irish Danes, and,
ravaging the country round Bristol, be beaten off by the valiant burghers
with heavy loss.

So the storm did not burst; and need not have burst, it may be, at all,
had William kept his plighted word. But he would not give his fair
daughter to Edwin. His Norman nobles, doubtless, looked upon such an
alliance as debasing to a civilized lady. In their eyes, the Englishman
was a barbarian; and though the Norman might well marry the Englishwoman,
if she had beauty or wealth, it was a dangerous precedent to allow the
Englishman to marry the Norman woman, and that woman a princess. Beside,
there were those who coveted Edwin's broad lands; Roger de Montgomery, who
already (it is probable) held part of them as Earl of Shrewsbury, had no
wish to see Edwin the son-in-law of his sovereign. Be the cause what it
may, William faltered, and refused; and Edwin and Morcar left the Court of
Westminster in wrath. Waltheof followed them, having discovered--what he
was weak enough continually to forget again--the treachery of the Norman.
The young earls went off, one midlandward, one northward. The people saw
their wrongs in those of their earls, and the rebellion burst forth at
once, the Welsh under Blethyn, and the Cumbrians under Malcolm and
Donaldbain, giving their help in the struggle.

It was the year 1069. A more evil year for England than even the year of
Hastings.

The rebellion was crushed in a few months. The great general marched
steadily north, taking the boroughs one by one, storming, massacring young
and old, burning, sometimes, whole towns, and leaving, as he went on, a
new portent, a Norman donjon--till then all but unseen in England--as a
place of safety for his garrisons. At Oxford (sacked horribly, and all but
destroyed), at Warwick (destroyed utterly), at Nottingham, at Stafford, at
Shrewsbury, at Cambridge, on the huge barrow which overhangs the fen; and
at York itself, which had opened its gates, trembling, to the great Norman
strategist; at each doomed free borough rose a castle, with its tall
square tower within, its bailey around, and all the appliances of that
ancient Roman science of fortification, of which the Danes, as well as the
Saxons, knew nothing. Their struggle had only helped to tighten their
bonds; and what wonder? There was among them neither unity nor plan nor
governing mind and will. Hereward's words had come true. The only man,
save Gospatrick, who had a head in England, was Harold Godwinsson: and he
lay in Waltham Abbey, while the monks sang masses for his soul.

Edwin, Morcar, and Waltheof trembled before a genius superior to their
own,--a genius, indeed, which had not its equal then in Christendom. They
came in and begged grace of the king. They got it. But Edwin's earldom was
forfeited, and he and his brother became, from thenceforth, desperate men.

Malcolm of Scotland trembled likewise, and asked for peace. The clans, it
is said, rejoiced thereat, having no wish for a war which could buy them
neither spoil nor land. Malcolm sent ambassadors to William, and took that
oath of fealty to the "Basileus of Britain," which more than one Scottish
king and kinglet had taken before,--with the secret proviso (which, during
the Middle Ages, seems to have been thoroughly understood in such cases by
both parties), that he should be William's man just as long as William
could compel him to be so, and no longer.

Then came cruel and unjust confiscations. Ednoth the standard-bearer had
fallen at Bristol, fighting for William against the Haroldssons, yet all
his lands were given away to Normans. Edwin and Morcar's lands were parted
likewise; and--to specify cases which bear especially on the history of
Hereward--Oger the Briton got many of Morcar's manors round Bourne, and
Gilbert of Ghent many belonging to Marlesweyn about Lincoln city. And so
did that valiant and crafty knight find his legs once more on other men's
ground, and reappears in monkish story as "the most devout and pious earl,
Gilbert of Ghent."

What followed, Hereward heard not from flying rumors; but from one who had
seen and known and judged of all. [Footnote: For Gyda's coming to St. Omer
that year, see Ordericus Vitalis.]

For one day, about this time, Hereward was riding out of the gate of St.
Omer, when the porter appealed to him. Begging for admittance were some
twenty women, and a clerk or two; and they must needs see the chatelain.
The chatelain was away. What should he do?

Hereward looked at the party, and saw, to his surprise, that they were
Englishwomen, and two of them women of rank, to judge from the rich
materials of their travel-stained and tattered garments. The ladies rode
on sorry country garrons, plainly hired from the peasants who drove them.
The rest of the women had walked; and weary and footsore enough they were.

"You are surely Englishwomen?" asked he of the foremost, as he lifted his
cap.

The lady bowed assent, beneath a heavy veil.

"Then you are my guests. Let them pass in." And Hereward threw himself off
his horse, and took the lady's bridle.

"Stay," she said, with an accent half Wessex, half Danish. "I seek the
Countess Judith, if it will please you to tell me where she lives."

"The Countess Judith, lady, lives no longer in St. Omer. Since her
husband's death, she lives with her mother at Bruges."

The lady made a gesture of disappointment.

"It were best for you, therefore, to accept my hospitality, till such time
as I can send you and your ladies on to Bruges."

"I must first know who it is who offers me hospitality?"

This was said so proudly, that Hereward answered proudly enough in
return,--

"I am Hereward Leofricsson, whom his foes call Hereward the outlaw, and
his friends Hereward the master of knights."

She started, and threw her veil hack, looking intently at him. He, for his
part, gave but one glance, and then cried,--

"Mother of Heaven! You are the great Countess!"

"Yes, I was that woman once, if all be not a dream. I am now I know not
what, seeking hospitality--if I can believe my eyes and ears--of Godiva's
son."

"And from Godiva's son you shall have it, as though you were Godiva's
self. God so deal with my mother, madam, as I will deal with you."

"His father's wit, and his mother's beauty!" said the great Countess,
looking upon him. "Too, too like my own lost Harold!"

"Not so, my lady. I am a dwarf compared to him." And Hereward led the
garron on by the bridle, keeping his cap in hand, while all wondered who
the dame could be, before whom Hereward the champion would so abase
himself.

"Leofric's son does me too much honor. He has forgotten, in his chivalry,
that I am Godwin's widow."

"I have not forgotten that you are Sprakaleg's daughter, and niece of
Canute, king of kings. Neither have I forgotten that you are an English
lady, in times in which all English folk are one, and all old English
feuds are wiped away."

"In English blood. Ah! if these last words of yours were true, as you,
perhaps, might make them true, England might be saved even yet."

"Saved?"

"If there were one man in it, who cared for aught but himself."

Hereward was silent and thoughtful.

He had sent Martin back to his house, to tell Torfrida to prepare bath and
food; for the Countess Gyda, with all her train, was coming to be her
guest. And when they entered the court, Torfrida stood ready.

"Is this your lady?" asked Gyda, as Hereward lifted her from her horse.

"I am his lady, and your servant," said Torfrida, bowing.

"Child! child! Bow not to me. Talk not of servants to a wretched slave,
who only longs to crawl into some hole and die, forgetting all she was and
all she had."

And the great Countess reeled with weariness and woe, and fell upon
Torfrida's neck.

A tall veiled lady next her helped to support her; and between them they
almost carried her through the hall, and into Torfrida's best
guest-chamber.

And there they gave her wine, and comforted her, and let her weep awhile
in peace.

The second lady had unveiled herself, displaying a beauty which was still
brilliant, in spite of sorrow, hunger, the stains of travel, and more than
forty years of life.

"She must be Gunhilda," guessed Torfrida to herself, and not amiss.

She offered Gyda a bath, which she accepted eagerly, like a true Dane.

"I have not washed for weeks. Not since we sat starving on the Flat-Holme
there, in the Severn sea. I have become as foul as my own fortunes: and
why not? It is all of a piece. Why should not beggars beg unwashed?"

But when Torfrida offered Gunhilda the bath she declined.

"I have done, lady, with such carnal vanities. What use in cleansing that
body which is itself unclean, and whitening the outside of this sepulchre?
If I can but cleanse my soul fit for my heavenly Bridegroom, the body may
become--as it must at last--food for worms."

"She will needs enter religion, poor child," said Gyda; "and what wonder?"

"I have chosen the better part, and it shall not be taken from me."

"Taken! taken! Hark to her! She means to mock me, the proud nun, with that
same 'taken.'"

"God forbid, mother!"

"Then why say taken, to me from whom all is taken?--husband, sons, wealth,
land, renown, power,--power which I loved, wretch that I was, as well as
husband and as sons? Ah God! the girl is right. Better to rot in the
convent, than writhe in the world. Better never to have had, than to have
had and lost."

"Amen!" said Gunhilda. "'Blessed are the barren, and they that never gave
suck,' saith the Lord."

"No! Not so!" cried Torfrida. "Better, Countess, to have had and lost,
than never to have had at all. The glutton was right, swine as he was,
when he said that not even Heaven could take from him the dinners he had
eaten. How much more we, if we say, not even Heaven can take from us the
love wherewith we have loved. Will not our souls be richer thereby,
through all eternity?"

"In Purgatory?" asked Gunhilda.

"In Purgatory, or where else you will. I love my love; and though my love
prove false, he has been true; though he trample me under foot, he has
held me in his bosom; though he kill me, he has lived for me. What I have
had will still be mine, when that which I have shall fail me."

"And you would buy short joy with lasting woe?"

"That would I, like a brave man's child. I say,--the present is mine, and
I will enjoy it, as greedily as a child. Let the morrow take thought for
the things of itself.--Countess, your bath is ready."

Nineteen years after, when the great conqueror lay, tossing with agony and
remorse, upon his dying bed, haunted by the ghosts of his victims, the
clerks of St. Saviour's in Bruges city were putting up a leaden tablet
(which remains, they say, unto this very day) to the memory of one whose
gentle soul had gently passed away. "Charitable to the poor, kind and
agreeable to her attendants, courteous to strangers, and only severe to
herself," Gunhilda had lingered on in a world of war and crime; and had
gone, it may be, to meet Torfrida beyond the grave, and there finish their
doubtful argument.

The Countess was served with food in Torfrida's chamber. Hereward and his
wife refused to sit, and waited on her standing.

"I wish to show these saucy Flemings," said he, "that an English princess
is a princess still in the eyes of one more nobly born than any of them."

But after she had eaten, she made Torfrida sit before her on the bed, and
Hereward likewise; and began to talk; eagerly, as one who had not
unburdened her mind for many weeks; and eloquently too, as became
Sprakaleg's daughter and Godwin's wife.

She told them how she had fled from the storm of Exeter, with a troop of
women, who dreaded the brutalities of the Normans. [Footnote: To do
William justice, he would not allow his men to enter the city while they
were blood-hot; and so prevented, as far as he could, the excesses which
Gyda had feared.] How they had wandered up through Devon, found fishers'
boats at Watchet in Somersetshire, and gone off to the little desert
island of the Flat-Holme, in hopes of there meeting with the Irish fleet,
which her sons, Edmund and Godwin, were bringing against the West of
England. How the fleet had never come, and they had starved for many days;
and how she had bribed a passing merchantman to take her and her wretched
train to the land of Baldwin the Debonnaire, who might have pity on her
for the sake of his daughter Judith, and Tosti her husband who died in his
sins.

And at his name, her tears began to flow afresh; fallen in his overweening
pride,--like Sweyn, like Harold, like herself--

"The time was, when I would not weep. If I could, I would not. For a year,
lady, after Senlac, I sat like a stone. I hardened my heart like a wall of
brass, against God and man. Then, there upon the Flat-Holme, feeding on
shell-fish, listening to the wail of the sea-fowl, looking outside the
wan water for the sails which never came, my heart broke down in a moment.
And I heard a voice crying, 'There is no help in man, go thou to God.' And
I answered, That were a beggar's trick, to go to God in need, when I went
not to him in plenty. No. Without God I planned, and without Him I must
fail. Without Him I went into the battle, and without Him I must bide the
brunt. And at best, Can He give me back my sons? And I hardened my heart
again like a stone, and shed no tear till I saw your fair face this day."

"And now!" she said, turning sharply on Hereward, "what do you do here? Do
you not know that your nephews' lands are parted between grooms from
Angers and scullions from Normandy?"

"So much the worse for both them and the grooms."

"Sir?"

"You forget, lady, that I am an outlaw."

"But do you not know that your mother's lands are seized likewise?"

"She will take refuge with her grandsons, who are, as I hear, again on
good terms with their new master, showing thereby a most laudable and
Christian spirit of forgiveness."

"On good terms? Do you not know, then, that they are fighting again,
outlaws, and desperate at the Frenchman's treachery? Do you not know that
they have been driven out of York, after defending the city street by
street, house by house? Do you not know that there is not an old man or a
child in arms left in York; and that your nephews, and the few fighting
men who were left, went down the Humber in boats, and north to Scotland,
to Gospatrick and Waltheof? Do you not know that your mother is left
alone--at Bourne, or God knows where--to endure at the hands of Norman
ruffians what thousands more endure?"

Hereward made no answer, but played with his dagger.

"And do you not know that England is ready to burst into a blaze, if there
be one man wise enough to put the live coal into the right place? That
Sweyn Ulffson, his kinsman, or Osbern, his brother, will surely land there
within the year with a mighty host? And that if there be one man in
England of wit enough, and knowledge enough of war, to lead the armies of
England, the Frenchman may be driven into the sea--Is there any here who
understands English?"

"None but ourselves."

"And Canute's nephew sit on Canute's throne?"

Hereward still played with his dagger.

"Not the sons of Harold, then?" asked he, after a while.

"Never! I promise you that--I, Countess Gyda, their grandmother."

"Why promise me, of all men, O great lady?"

"Because--I will tell you after. But this I say, my curse on the grandson
of mine who shall try to seize that fatal crown, which cost the life of my
fairest, my noblest, my wisest, my bravest!"

Hereward bowed his head, as if consenting to the praise of Harold. But he
knew who spoke; and he was thinking within himself: "Her curse may be on
him who shall seize, and yet not on him to whom it is given."

"All that they, young and unskilful lads, have a right to ask is, their
father's earldoms and their father's lands. Edwin and Morcar would keep
their earldoms as of right. It is a pity that there is no lady of the
house of Godwin, whom we could honor by offering her to one of your
nephews, in return for their nobleness in giving Aldytha to my Harold. But
this foolish girl here refuses to wed--"

"And is past forty," thought Hereward to himself.

"However, some plan to join the families more closely together might be
thought of. One of the young earls might marry Judith here. [Footnote:
Tosti's widow, daughter of Baldwin of Flanders] Waltheof would have
Northumbria, in right of his father, and ought to be well content,--for
although she is somewhat older than he, she is peerlessly beautiful,--to
marry your niece Aldytha." [Footnote: Harold's widow.]

"And Gospatrick?"

"Gospatrick," she said, with a half-sneer, "will be as sure, as he is
able, to get something worth having for himself out of any medley. Let him
have Scotch Northumbria, if he claim it. He is a Dane, and our work will
be to make a Danish England once and forever."

"But what of Sweyn's gallant holders and housecarles, who are to help to
do this mighty deed?"

"Senlac left gaps enough among the noblemen of the South, which they can
fill up, in the place of the French scum who now riot over Wessex. And if
that should not suffice, what higher honor for me, or for my daughter the
Queen-Dowager, than to devote our lands to the heroes who have won them
back for us?"

Hereward hoped inwardly that Gyda would be as good as her word; for her
greedy grasp had gathered to itself, before the Battle of Hastings, no
less than six-and-thirty thousand acres of good English soil.

"I have always heard," said he, bowing, "that if the Lady Gyda had been
born a man, England would have had another all-seeing and all-daring
statesman, and Earl Godwin a rival, instead of a helpmate. Now I believe
what I have heard."

But Torfrida looked sadly at the Countess. There was something pitiable in
the sight of a woman ruined, bereaved, seemingly hopeless, portioning out
the very land from which she was a fugitive; unable to restrain the
passion for intrigue, which had been the toil and the bane of her sad and
splendid life.

"And now," she went on, "surely some kind saint brought me, even on my
first landing, to you of all living men."

"Doubtless the blessed St. Bertin, beneath whose shadow we repose here in
peace," said Hereward, somewhat dryly.

"I will go barefoot to his altar to-morrow, and offer my last jewel," said
Gunhilda.

"You," said Gyda, without noticing her daughter, "are, above all men, the
man who is needed." And she began praising Hereward's valor, his fame, his
eloquence, his skill as a general and engineer; and when he suggested,
smiling, that he was an exile and an outlaw, she insisted that he was all
the fitter from that very fact. He had no enemies among the nobles. He had
been mixed up in none of the civil wars and blood feuds of the last
fifteen years. He was known only as that which he was, the ablest captain
of his day,--the only man who could cope with William, the only man whom
all parties in England would alike obey.

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