‘It is how everyone will see it when they have had time to think it over,’ answered the Lady. ‘Harold plotted to remove Tostig, so that he may reign without a rival. Suppose Harold should snatch at the crown after you are gone? Who would oppose him? Tostig alone.’
‘And I shall oppose him, even from exile,’ shouted Tostig. ‘Tomorrow I start for Flanders, because that is Judith’s home. But from Bruges I shall get in touch with Duke William. I still have friends among the Northumbrians. When Duke William wants me I shall return to the north.’
‘I wish I might live a little longer, to see how all this will turn out,’ said the King, with such candid simplicity that the words did not sound at all odd. ‘But I have been granted many visions, and all of them proved true. I must believe that pilgrim also saw true. Within six months from last July I shall be with God in Heaven.’
‘In Heaven you will see what comes to the English, and your prayers will help us,’ said the Lady gently.
Next morning the King stayed in his bed, complaining of weakness. Until the end of the month Harold rode between Britford and Oxford, negotiating with the rebels. In the end the Northumbrians got all they desired, as of course must happen when Harold refused to fight them. On the 1st of November Tostig embarked for Flanders; and on the same day the King began a slow journey to London, sometimes carried in a litter when he felt too feeble to ride.
11. The End and the Beginning
On Christmas Day the King feasted in state, his crown on his head. It was the first time he had kept Christmas in London, but in other respects the ritual of the feast was as usual. Yet he was a very sick man, and he sat in silence while the Councillors gossipped together and discussed the future.
Only Harold’s faction had come to the crown-wearing; for the Earls Edwin and Morcar were too shy to attend so soon after they had borne arms against the King. Gyrth and Leofwin were there, of course, and Stigand of Canterbury. Earl Waltheof came also, a timid and awkward young man. He recognised that his family was in decline since he was not Earl of the Northumbrians as his father had been; he was rather too obviously looking for allies, and made clumsy overtures to Aldred, Archbishop of York.
After dinner the King looked so feeble that the Lady left her place at the women’s table to come over and stand beside him. Earl Harold courteously moved along the bench to make room for his sister until she could sit beside her lord. I felt it strange to be pouring wine for a female at the Councillors’ table; in those days, when our rulers were English, women were not supposed to take any part in politics.
But Harold said cheerfully: ‘Here is a seat for you, Edith. That is as it should be. The Godwinssons sit at the right hand of the King, united to strengthen his rule.’
The Lady answered sharply: ‘The Godwinssons are not united. Wulfnoth is a hostage in Normandy, and Tostig is in exile because his brothers would not save him.’
‘Well, my dear, I’m sorry about young Wulfnoth, but it’s not my fault. I left him with the Duke because the King so commanded me. Tostig is in exile because the Northumbrians can’t abide him, and anyway he was never very loyal to his kin.’
‘He was loyal to his lord. I hope you also will be loyal to your King. That is his bread you eat.’
‘And the King’s bread can be dangerous to men of our house, eh, Edith? Well, so far it hasn’t choked me, so I can’t be plotting treason. Even if we don’t agree on everything let us keep on good terms. Remember, when Duke William is King he has promised to keep me as his chief minister. My position will be awkward if the Old Lady distrusts me.’
‘Don’t talk about the next reign as though the King were already dead. These messages from Heaven are sometimes hard to interpret. He may live for many years.’
‘No, Edith, look at him. It’s all right, he can’t hear what we say, he is already listening to the songs of the angels. Surely you can see death in his face? What’s the good of having a Danish spaewife for a mother if you can’t see his doom fluttering round the head of a dying warrior?’
‘Ah, you call him a warrior?’ said the Lady, pleased.
‘Of course he is a warrior, and a stark one. What does it matter that his axe has never tasted blood? Long ago he commended himself to God, and he has served his lord faithfully. That has been a long, hard fight.’
‘You know him, and you recognise his worth. Harold, will you be loyal to his commands after he is dead?’
‘I am loyal to him now. Since my father died I have served him loyally. But the commands of a dead King do not bind the living. The magnates will choose the next King of the English.’
‘God has already chosen the next King of the English. That was revealed to Bishop Britwold many years ago,’ said a piping voice.
Everyone started. Since the Council began the King had leaned back in his chair, his eyes closed; he had said nothing, and it seemed that he paid no attention to anything said beside him. Now, still with his eyes closed, he spoke clearly and distinctly. For a moment the high table was hushed.
‘If God should impose the King of His choice by an undoubted miracle, I shall not oppose God’s elect,’ said Harold easily. ‘But in these matters God often works through human agency. In the Kingdom of the English as it exists at present it would be reasonable that God should work through my agency, since I am war-leader and the most powerful of the Earls.’
‘My lord, do not tire yourself,’ said the Lady, laying her hand on the King’s shoulder. ‘There is no need to make speeches to your Councillors. We know that you have chosen Duke William to succeed you, we know that Harold has sworn to serve Duke William. All has been done as you commanded. The Council knows your will, and obeys. Do not persuade the obedient.’
The King sighed, and his next words came in a faint whisper.
‘Since you know my wishes and have sworn to obey them, I shall go to bed. Make what appointments are needed, settle the details of the taxes. This has been my last crownwearing, and for me it is already finished.’
He struggled to rise from his chair. The Lady took his right arm and I supported him on the left. Together we helped him to walk to his bedchamber, for the last time.
On the Feast of the Holy Innocents, three days after Christmas, the great church at Westminster was finished and consecrated. For twenty years the King had planned this great construction, and now he could not come to see the end of all his labours. At the hallowing of the most splendid church in England he was represented by the Lady; behind the High Altar masons were already preparing the tomb of the founder.
I also had greatly desired to see the consecration; but the King asked me to wait in his chamber beside him. From a little window beside his bed there was a clear view westward to the roof of the tall minster; I stood on a stool to peer out, and presently saw a mason climb a ladder to place a gleaming golden weathercock on the apex of the squat tower. That was the finishing touch to the building, by custom added at the moment of consecration. I told the King, and I think he understood what I said.
The King was not yet sixty-five, but he was dying of old age. That is not so extraordinary as it sounds, for he had surpassed by more than twenty years the greatest age attained by any other Cerdinga. Perhaps disappointment and vexation added something to his weakness. It was just ten weeks since, yielding to the Northumbrian rebels, he had acquiesced in the outlawry of Tostig.
The King knew that he was dying, and so did all his court. It was not an occasion for sorrow; he was going to Heaven, going home. He showed no fear of death, but he was distressed for the future of the country he was leaving. All through these last days he talked, in a high weak wandering voice; sometimes he recalled his youth, sometimes he spoke to imaginary companions, sometimes he told of what is hidden from ordinary sinners; and sometimes he warned us, as God had warned him.
During the first days of his sickness the Council met every afternoon in the hall beyond his bedchamber; but the trampling of horses and the clang of arms as bodyguards waited for their lords remi
nded the King of war and deepened his distress. The Lady asked the Council to meet in some other place, and perhaps this was a mistake; for then they met in Harold’s hall, the great hall in Southwark from which Godwin had conducted civil war when he returned from exile. Harold was already war-leader, and in the King’s absence he presided over the Council; when the magnates met in his hall he had in addition all the authority of the host.
So it went on, day after day, until the Twelve Days of Christmas were nearly ended. The Lady was worn out with watching, and I myself wandered from chamber to hall to kitchen in a daze of exhaustion. The King would eat nothing. He hovered perpetually between sleeping and waking, neither utterly unconscious nor really aware of us beside him. But what chiefly troubled me, and kept me running to the kitchen for linen cloths soaked in hot water, was that he always complained of the cold.
The weather was frosty; and the chamber lacked a chimney, so we could not make a great fire. I placed braziers of charcoal under every window, for the foul air from charcoal must have an outlet; and the Lady piled coverlets and furs on the sufferer’s bed. Still the King cried that he was cold. Once he thought himself back into his childhood, in the days of the Danish devastation; shivering, he pulled the blankets closer and whimpered that the heir of the Cerdingas had but one rug while Sweyn the pirate had the fleece of all the sheep in England.
At dawn on the Vigil of the Epiphany we saw that he could not last until sunset. When Earl Harold crossed over from Southwark he was asked to wait for the end, in the King’s chamber. Stigand had sent to inquire, and he also was summoned to the chamber. When there is no King in England the Archbishop of Canterbury is trustee for the people. If Stigand had been truly Archbishop he would have taken precedence even of Harold; in his equivocal position he was at least entitled to be present at the deathbed of the King.
Still my lord complained of the cold. In desperation the Lady lifted the coverlets and sat at the end of the bed with her husband’s feet in her bosom. Looking down, the King thanked her with a smile. Stigand knelt before a little desk, reciting the prayers for the dying. Harold stood by the head of the bed. I knelt by the door; but I took care to recite the psalm that Stigand had just finished, lest by inadvertance I should mingle my prayers with those of a schismatic.
In a wandering voice the King chatted with St. Peter, St. John, and Robert, his Norman falconer. Robert was far away in Wiltshire, but I am inclined to think the others were present in the chamber. Sometimes he spoke in the French of his exile, then for a time he went back to the old-fashioned language of his father’s court, in which gentlemen spoke pure English without any admixture of Danish. Harold and the Lady listened with puzzled frowns; but to me, a Saxon of Winchester, that seemed how the King of the English should speak.
Suddenly he came to himself and knew where he was. He tried to sit up, and by the time he sank back he was talking quite rationally to the chiefs of the English gathered round his bed: Harold the war-leader, the Lady, and the head of the clerks in England who might just possibly be Archbishop of Canterbury.
‘I have spoken with two friends of my youth,’ he said, ‘Norman monks who comforted my exile. They are dead, but they have come to me to help my passing. They have warned me of the evils that will afflict the English after I am gone. Woe to England! Because the Earls and the Bishops and the clergy are not what they should be, but rather servants of the Devil, the whole land will be given over to Satan for a year and a day.’
‘Not if we repent,’ said Stigand without hesitation. He was accustomed to quelling visionaries who threatened him with the wrath of God.
‘You will not repent. I asked these old monks, the friends of my youth, and that is what they told me,’ answered the King. The Lady shuddered, and I felt even more worried than before. These were not the babblings of a dying man; the King understood what was said to him and replied to it.
‘Well, what can we do to avert this calamity?’ asked Harold.
‘You can do nothing. Perhaps God will spare you, just as perhaps by His grace a tree that has been cut down and dragged three furlongs from its stump might send down fresh roots and grow again. The one is as likely as the other.’
Stigand shrugged his shoulders.
‘The King is a very holy man. Very holy men are shocked by the human weakness of their neighbours,’ he said lightly. ‘Besides, he is dying and his mind wanders. We should not let him see that we think he talks nonsense, for that would distress him; but we need not worry unduly.’
‘And I say that the King knows the will of God, and speaks true prophecies,’ said the Lady fiercely.
Meanwhile the King continued to foretell evil for his people. At times he spoke vehemently, and even I would wonder whether he was raving; then he would recollect himself, and address us by name to show that he knew what he was doing. About midday he fell silent. Two hours later, while the exhausted Lady still strove to warm his feet in her bosom, she felt the chill that meant that he had died in silence.
We sent to warn the Abbot of Westminster to prepare for the funeral next day, immediately after the High Mass of Epiphany. Then Stigand walked across to St. Paul’s, to arrange with Bishop William about Requiem Masses. Earl Harold and his strong escort of housecarles rode off to Southwark, where the Council would meet in the evening. The Lady and I, with the treasurer and other chiefs of the household, arrayed the dead King in his robes of state and laid him in his coffin. As soon as the chaplains and the clerks of the chancery had taken up their watch, kneeling by the bier, I went to the wardrobe. Now I was merely a chamberlain among many chamberlains; there was no longer a King’s bedchamber in which I was his trusted companion.
Even in this house of mourning the living must eat. The Lady called for bread and wine in her chamber, unwilling to face the throng in the great hall. I was gratified, but not really surprised, when one of her women told me that the Lady wished me to pour her wine.
Normally I am ill at ease in the company of females; but it was easy to forget that the Lady was a woman. In middle age her sexless beauty made her look merely a commanding figure, apparently without bodily functions. She lay back on a pile of cushions, very tired after her long watching. Soon she was chatting with me easily, as though we had long been colleagues in the management of court ceremonial.
‘No one has been taken by surprise,’ she said. ‘The monks of Westminster will have practised the funeral psalms, and the tomb will be ready. My lord shall be buried on the great feast of Epiphany, in the minster he founded. That is as it should be. The funeral will be worthy of a great King. When the tomb has been closed I shall gather my household and pack my gear. There is nothing to keep me in London, and the Council will be glad to see me go. No woman should give advice on such a great matter as the succession to the crown of the English; and yet so long as I remain in the King’s hall the magnates will feel awkward if they ignore me. Will you come with me, Edgar, and be my chamberlain in Winchester? The new King will have Norman chamberlains about him, even though he has promised to rule with the advice of the English Council.’
‘I suppose the new King will be Duke William, madam?’ I said doubtfully. ‘Edgar Edwardsson, the young atheling, is in London, and the burgesses may cheer for him.’
‘But luckily the Council meets in Southwark, and cannot hear the cheers of the London burgesses. Perhaps the absence of Edwin and Morcar is another piece of luck, or rather a mark of God’s special favour. At Southwark Harold will be the only great secular magnate, and it is less than two years since he commended himself to William. He holds his new castle at Dover on purpose to ensure William’s peaceful entry into England. Tomorrow, after the funeral, King William will be proclaimed in his absence. Within ten days he will be here for his crowning. I want to be in Winchester before he arrives, so that I do not embarrass him.
‘Then, I suppose,’ she went on, ‘trouble will come in the north. My lord spoke of war and rapine for a year and a day, and I am sure he prophesied truly. That mu
st be it. Edwin and Morcar will proclaim themselves independent, and perhaps King Harold Hardrada may attempt to revive the realm of King Canute. But Duke William will overcome them. Best of all, he will bring with him my brother Tostig, his faithful vassal.’
‘Perhaps it would be well to make sure that Earl Harold has sent the news to Normandy. Tonight he is supreme in England, and he may be tempted to prolong his power by delaying the message. Unless Duke William is proclaimed tomorrow the atheling Edgar is sure to put forward his claim.’
‘Very well, Edgar. Go out and send a reminder to Southwark. I know you feel you ought to be doing something. In a crisis like this it’s hard, isn’t it, to sit still and do nothing? But you and I must learn to do nothing. Our lives ended today, though we may have to wait many years for death.’
But when I went to the outer gate to find a messenger I saw a messenger just arriving.
He was a smart young housecarle of Earl Harold’s bodyguard, fully armed and well mounted; though Harold’s hall, just across London Bridge, was so near that it would be quicker to walk than to saddle a horse for the journey. Nobody barred his way, since we were all busy and a little disorganised; but he sat his horse by the gate and called for the captain of King Edward’s bodyguard as formally as if he had come to introduce a foreign embassy.
‘That’s all right, my man,’ I said easily. ‘Come in, if you have something to say. All our housecarles are guarding the treasury, in case the burgesses try to plunder it while there is no King of the English. We don’t get back to the proper ceremonial until Duke William arrives to take up his inheritance.’
‘I have a message for the commander of the royal housecarles,’ he answered stiffly, ‘but perhaps you can deliver it for me. You are the chief of the chamberlains, aren’t you? You should tell the Lady as well, for the news concerns her. Here is the message. The magnates of the English, both Bishops and Earls, assembled in Council at Southwark, have offered the crown of the English to Harold Godwinsson, Earl of the West Saxons. He has accepted. Since the Council is gathered, and the Archbishop of Canterbury present in London, there is no need for delay. In Westminster tomorrow King Harold will be crowned, immediately after the funeral of the late King Edward.’
The Cunning of the Dove Page 23
