Brief was the sojourn of Tostig at the court of Rouen; speedily made the
contract between the grasping Duke and the revengeful traitor. All that
had been promised to Harold, was now pledged to Tostig--if the last would
assist the Norman to the English throne.
At heart, however, Tostig was ill satisfied. His chance conversations
with the principal barons, who seemed to look upon the conquest of
England as the dream of a madman, showed him how doubtful it was that
William could induce his Quens to a service, to which the tenure of their
fiefs did not appear to compel them; and at all events, Tostig
prognosticated delays, that little suited his fiery impatience. He
accepted the offer of some two or three ships, which William put at his
disposal, under pretence to reconnoitre the Northumbrian coasts, and
there attempt a rising in his own favour. But his discontent was
increased by the smallness of the aid afforded him; for William, ever
suspicious, distrusted both his faith and his power. Tostig, with all
his vices, was a poor dissimulator, and his sullen spirit betrayed itself
when he took leave of his host.
“Chance what may,” said the fierce Saxon, “no stranger shall seize the
English crown without my aid. I offer it first to thee. But thou must
come to take it in time, or----”
“Or what?” asked the Duke, gnawing his lip.
“Or the Father race of Rou will be before thee! My horse paws without.
Farewell to thee, Norman; sharpen thy swords, hew out thy vessels, and
goad thy slow barons.”
Scarce had Tostig departed, ere William began to repent that he had so
let him depart: but seeking counsel of Lanfranc, that wise minister
reassured him.
“Fear no rival, son and lord,” said he. “The bones of the dead are on
thy side, and little thou knowest, as yet, how mighty their fleshless
arms! All Tostig can do is to distract the forces of Harold. Leave him
to work out his worst; nor then be in haste. Much hath yet to be
done--cloud must gather and fire must form, ere the bolt can be launched.
Send to Harold mildly, and gently remind him of oath and of relics--of
treaty and pledge. Put right on thy side, and then----”
“Ah, what then?”
“Rome shall curse the forsworn--Rome shall hallow thy banner; this be no
strife of force against force, but a war of religion; and thou shalt have
on thy side the conscience of man, and the arm of the Church.”
Meanwhile, Tostig embarked at Harfleur; but instead of sailing to the
northern coasts of England, he made for one of the Flemish ports: and
there, under various pretences, new manned the Norman vessels with
Flemings, Fins, and Northmen. His meditations during his voyage had
decided him not to trust to William; and he now bent his course, with
fair wind and favouring weather, to the shores of his maternal uncle,
King Sweyn of Denmark.
In truth, to all probable calculation, his change of purpose was politic.
The fleets of England were numerous, and her seamen renowned. The
Normans had neither experience nor fame in naval fights; their navy
itself was scarcely formed. Thus, even William’s landing in England was
an enterprise arduous and dubious. Moreover, even granting the amplest
success, would not this Norman Prince, so profound and ambitious, be a
more troublesome lord to Earl Tostig than his own uncle Sweyn?
So, forgetful of the compact at Rouen, no sooner had the Saxon lord come
in presence of the King of the Danes, than he urged on his kinsman the
glory of winning again the sceptre of Canute.
A brave, but a cautious and wily veteran, was King Sweyn; and a few days
before Tostig arrived, he had received letters from his sister Githa,
who, true to Godwin’s command, had held all that Harold did and
counselled, as between himself and his brother, wise and just. These
letters had placed the Dane on his guard, and shown him the true state of
affairs in England. So King Sweyn, smiling, thus answered his nephew
Tostig:
“A great man was Canute, a small man am I: scarce can I keep my Danish
dominion from the gripe of the Norwegian, while Canute took Norway
without slash and blow [222]; but great as he was, England cost him hard
fighting to win, and sore peril to keep. Wherefore, best for the small
man to rule by the light of his own little sense, nor venture to count on
the luck of great Canute;--for luck but goes with the great.”
“Thine answer,” said Tostig, with a bitter sneer, “is not what I expected
from an uncle and warrior. But other chiefs may be found less afraid of
the luck of high deeds.”
“So,” saith the Norwegian chronicler, “not just the best friends, the
Earl left the King,” and went on in haste to Harold Hardrada of Norway.
True Hero of the North, true darling of War and of Song, was Harold
Hardrada! At the terrible battle of Stiklestad, at which his brother,
St. Olave, had fallen, he was but fifteen years of age, but his body was
covered with the wounds of a veteran. Escaping from the field, he lay
concealed in the house of a Bonder peasant, remote in deep forests, till
his wounds were healed. Thence, chaunting by the way, (for a poet’s soul
burned bright in Hardrada,) “That a day would come when his name would be
great in the land he now left,” he went on into Sweden, thence into
Russia, and after wild adventures in the East, joined, with the bold
troop he had collected around him, that famous body-guard of the Greek
emperors [223], called the Vaeringers, and of these he became the chief.
Jealousies between himself and the Greek General of the Imperial forces,
(whom the Norwegian chronicler calls Gyrger,) ended in Harold’s
retirement with his Vaeringers into the Saracen land of Africa. Eighty
castles stormed and taken, vast plunder in gold and in jewels, and nobler
meed in the song of the Scald and the praise of the brave, attested the
prowess of the great Scandinavian. New laurels, blood-stained, new
treasures, sword-won, awaited him in Sicily; and thence, rough foretype
of the coming crusader, he passed on to Jerusalem. His sword swept
before him Moslem and robber. He bathed in Jordan, and knelt at the Holy
Cross.
Returned to Constantinople, the desire for his northern home seized
Hardrada. There he heard that his nephew Magnus, the illegitimate son of
St. Olave, had become King of Norway,--and he himself aspired to a
throne. So he gave up his command under Zoe the empress; but, if Scald
be believed, Zoe the empress loved the bold chief, whose heart was set on
Maria her niece. To detain Hardrada, a charge of mal-appropriation,
whether of pay or of booty, was brought against him. He was cast into
prison. But when the brave are in danger, the saints send the fair to
their help! Moved by a holy dream, a Greek lady lowered ropes from the
roof of the tower to the dungeon wherein Hardrada was cast. He escaped
from the prison, he aroused his Vaeringers, they flocked round their
chief; he went to the house of his lady Maria, bore her off to the
galley, put out into the Black Sea, reached Novgorod, (at the friendly
court of whose king he had safely lodged his vast spoils,) sailed home to
the north: and, after such feats as became sea-king of old, received half
of Norway from Magnus, and on the death of his nephew the whole of that
kingdom passed to his sway. A king so wise and so wealthy, so bold and
so dread, had never yet been known in the north. And this was the king
to whom came Tostig the Earl, with the offer of England’s crown.
It was one of the glorious nights of the north, and winter had already
begun to melt into early spring, when two men sate under a kind of rustic
porch of rough pine-logs, not very unlike those seen now in Switzerland
and the Tyrol. This porch was constructed before a private door, to the
rear of a long, low, irregular building of wood which enclosed two or
more courtyards, and covering an immense space of ground. This private
door seemed placed for the purpose of immediate descent to the sea; for
the ledge of the rock over which the log-porch spread its rude roof,
jutted over the ocean; and from it a rugged stair, cut through the crag,
descended to the beach. The shore, with bold, strange, grotesque slab,
and peak, and splinter, curved into a large creek; and close under the
cliff were moored seven warships, high and tall, with prows and sterns
all gorgeous with gilding in the light of the splendid moon. And that
rude timber house, which seemed but a chain of barbarian huts linked into
one, was a land palace of Hardrada of Norway; but the true halls of his
royalty, the true seats of his empire, were the decks of those lofty
war-ships.
Through the small lattice-work of the windows of the loghouse, lights
blazed; from the roof-top smoke curled; from the hall on the other side
of the dwelling, came the din of tumultuous wassail, but the intense
stillness of the outer air, hushed in frost, and luminous with stars,
contrasted and seemed to rebuke the gross sounds of human revel. And
that northern night seemed almost as bright as (but how much more
augustly calm, than) the noon of the golden south!
On a table within the ample porch was an immense bowl of birchwood,
mounted in silver, and filled with potent drink, and two huge horns, of
size suiting the mighty wassailers of the age. The two men seemed to
care nought for the stern air of the cold night--true that they were
wrapped in furs reft from the Polar bear. But each had hot thoughts
within, that gave greater warmth to the veins than the bowl or the
bearskin.
They were host and guest; and as if with the restlessness of his
thoughts, the host arose from his seat, and passed through the porch and
stood on the bleak rock under the light of the moon; and so seen, he
seemed scarcely human, but some war-chief of the farthest time,--yea, of
a time ere the deluge had shivered those rocks, and left beds on the land
for the realm of that icy sea. For Harold Hardrada was in height above
all the children of modern men. Five ells of Norway made the height of
Harold Hardrada [224]. Nor was this stature accompanied by any of those
imperfections in symmetry, nor by that heaviness of aspect, which
generally render any remarkable excess above human stature and strength
rather monstrous than commanding. On the contrary, his proportions were
just; his appearance noble; and the sole defect that the chronicler
remarks in his shape, was “that his hands and feet were large, but these
were well made.” [225]
His face had all the fair beauty of the Norseman; his hair, parted in
locks of gold over a brow that bespoke the daring of the warrior and the
genius of the bard, fell in glittering profusion to his shoulders; a
short beard and long moustache of the same colour as the hair, carefully
trimmed, added to the grand and masculine beauty of the countenance, in
which the only blemish was the peculiarity of one eyebrow being somewhat
higher than the other [226], which gave something more sinister to his
frown, something more arch to his smile. For, quick of impulse, the
Poet-Titan smiled and frowned often.
Harold Hardrada stood in the light of the moon, and gazing thoughtfully
on the luminous sea. Tostig marked him for some moments where he sate in
the porch, and then rose and joined him.
“Why should my words so disturb thee, O King of the Norseman?”
“Is glory, then, a drug that soothes to sleep?” returned the Norwegian.
“I like thine answer,” said Tostig, smiling, “and I like still more to
watch thine eye gazing on the prows of thy war-ships. Strange indeed it
were if thou, who hast been fighting fifteen years for the petty kingdom
of Denmark, shouldst hesitate now, when all England lies before thee to
seize.”
“I hesitate,” replied the King, “because he whom Fortune has befriended
so long, should beware how he strain her favour too far. Eighteen pitched
battles fought I in the Saracen land, and in every one was a
victor--never, at home or abroad, have I known shame and defeat. Doth
the wind always blow from one point?--and is Fate less unstable than the
wind?”
“Now, out on thee, Harold Hardrada,” said Tostig the fierce; “the good
pilot wins his way through all winds, and the brave heart fastens fate to
its flag. All men allow that the North never had warrior like thee; and
now, in the mid-day of manhood, wilt thou consent to repose on the mere
triumph of youth?”
“Nay,” said the King, who, like all true poets, had something of the deep
sense of a sage, and was, indeed, regarded as the most prudent as well as
the most adventurous chief in the Northland,--“nay, it is not by such
words, which my soul seconds too well, that thou canst entrap a ruler of
men. Thou must show me the chances of success, as thou wouldst to a
grey-beard. For we should be as old men before we engage, and as youths
when we wish to perform.”
Then the traitor succinctly detailed all the weak points in the rule of
his brother. A treasury exhausted by the lavish and profitless waste of
Edward; a land without castle or bulwark, even at the mouths of the
rivers; a people grown inert by long peace, and so accustomed to own lord
and king in the northern invaders, that a single successful battle might
induce half the population to insist on the Saxon coming to terms with
the foe, and yielding, as Ironsides did to Canute, one half of the realm.
He enlarged on the terror of the Norsemen that still existed throughout
England, and the affinity between the Northumbrians and East Anglians
with the race of Hardrada. That affinity would not prevent them from
resisting at the first; but grant success, and it would reconcile them to
the after sway. And, finally, he aroused Hardrada’s emulation by the
spur of the news, that the Count of the Normans would seize the prize if
he himself delayed to forestall him.
These various representations, and the remembrance of Canute’s victory,
decided Hardrada; and, when Tostig ceased, he stretched his hand towards
his slumbering warships, and exclaimed:
“Eno’; you have whetted the beaks of the ravens, and harnessed the steeds
of the sea!”