EDWIN AND ELGIVA.
"He was a man
Of an unbounded stomach, ever ranking
Himself with princes;----
His own opinion was his law,
He would say untruths; and be ever double,
Both in his words and meaning. He was never
But where he meant to ruin, pitiful.
He was a scholar, and a ripe, and good one;
Exceeding wise, fair spoken, and persuading;
Lofty and sour, to them that loved him not,
But to those men that sought him sweet as summer."
SHAKSPERE.
Edwin was not more than sixteen years of age when he ascended the
throne. Although so young, he had married a beautiful and noble lady of
his own age, who appears to have been somewhat too closely related to
him to please the stern dignitaries who were then placed at the head of
the church, for it was at this period when the rigid discipline of the
Benedictine monks was first introduced into England. Odo, a Dane, and
a descendant from those savage sea-kings who destroyed the abbeys of
Croyland and Peterborough, was, at this time, archbishop of Canterbury,
for it was not then uncommon to place the pastoral crook in warlike
hands, as there are many instances on record which show that those who
could best wield the battle-axe were entrusted with the crosier; and
Odo had served both under Edward and Athelstan, and had fought and
prayed at the battle of Brunanburg. But before describing the most
important events of the reign of Edwin, we must give a brief sketch of
the life of Dunstan, and endeavour to throw a little light upon the
dark shadows which have so long settled down upon his character.
Dunstan, who plays so prominent a part at this period, appears to
have lived near Glastonbury, and while yet a boy, seems to have been
fond of visiting an ancient British church which had probably been
erected by the Christians soon after the departure of the Romans. At
a very early period of his life, he was a believer in dreams and
visions, and while yet unknown, imagined that a venerable figure
appeared to him and pointed out the spot on which he was one day to
erect a monastery. His studies were encouraged, and his abilities are
said to have been so great that he was soon enabled to outstrip all
his companions in learning. We next find him suffering from a severe
fever, probably the result of excessive application, and which at last
produced a state of dreadful delirium. In the height of his madness,
he seized a stick and rushed out of his chamber, running with the
speed of a maniac over hills and plains; and fancying in his frantic
flight that a pack of wild hounds were pursuing him. Night found him
in the neighbourhood of a church, on which workmen had been employed
during the day; the invalid ascended the scaffold, and without injuring
himself, got safely into the church, where he sank into a heavy
slumber, from which he awoke not until morning, when he found his
intellects restored, though, to draw a charitable conclusion from any
of his future actions, we should be justified in believing that there
were intervals when the disease returned. He had sufficient patronage
to obtain an introduction to the church or monastery at Glastonbury,
where he again renewed his studies, and besides obtaining a thorough
knowledge of the literature of that age, he appears to have excelled in
mathematics, music, writing, engraving, and painting, and also to have
been a skilful worker in metals. Such talents as these, when so few
excelled in any branch of the polite or finer mechanical arts, could
not fail of bringing him speedily into notice, and he seems to have
had an introduction to the royal palace early in the reign of Edmund.
No greater proof of his intellectual attainments can be adduced, than
his being accused while at court of dealing in the arts of magic; for
so far had he shot beyond the ignorance and error of the age, that
what could now be readily comprehended by an ordinary understanding,
was in that benighted period attributed to supernatural agency; and so
strongly did the current of prejudice set in against him, that Dunstan
was driven from the court.
We can imagine with what shouts of derision he was pursued, and with
what loathing and heartburning he must have quitted the palace as he
fled before his insulting enemies, who, not content with having hurled
him from his high estate, pursued him, and threw him into a miry ditch,
beside a marsh, where they left him to escape or perish. We can picture
him reaching his friend's house, at about a mile distant, the sorrow
that wrapped his heart as he looked upon his blighted prospects, the
anger that lighted his eye, and the burning scorn which he poured in
withering words upon the unlettered herd, as he breathed his sorrow,
and suffering, and disgrace, into the bosom of his friend, and, with
a sigh, looked upon all his hopes thus undeservedly overthrown. For a
short period, we here lose sight of Dunstan; when we next meet with
him, he is on the point of marriage with a maiden to whom he appears
to have been greatly attached. He is dissuaded from marriage by his
relation, the bishop of Ælfheag, who tells him that such inclinations
only emanate from the Evil one, and persuades him to become a monk.
Love for a time made Dunstan eloquent, and our only marvel is, that a
man who was so susceptible of the tender passion should, on a future
day, become the unfeeling opponent of marriage, and wield the power he
possessed with an unrelenting and iron arm over every priest who had
entered into this honourable bond of union. For a long time the bishop
argued in vain. Dunstan had then many reasons to urge in favour of
love and marriage; and probably, at that period, never dreamed that he
should have to use both force and argument against them; but he seems
to have been doomed to suffer disappointment: and, although he endured
it, it soured his better nature, for, like Jonah's gourd, all that
promised him hope and delight seemed as if it only grew up to perish a
withering mockery. Sickness again attacked him, a disease that brought
him well nigh to death's door; he gave up all hopes of recovery, he
renounced all earthly happiness, and when he began to turn his inward
eye to that spiritual existence beyond the grave, earth heaved up
slowly, and to him sadly, and shut out the coveted land of which he had
obtained a dim glimpse, but that earth was no longer to him the garden
of hope and love. He rose from his sick bed a melancholy and altered
man; became a monk, and in his cold, grey, stony cell, which shut him
up as in a grave, from the warm womanly heart he had once so fondly
doted upon, he vowed to lead a life of celibacy.
Up to this period of his life, Dunstan wins our sympathy: we have
seen him driven out, amid hooting and derision, from the court; we
have seen the golden link of love, which still bound him to mankind,
snapped heartlessly asunder; and now we behold him buried, with all
his genius and learning, in the lonely cell of a silent monastery. No
marvel that, like the weary lion who has been hard pressed by the cruel
hunters, he at last got up and shook himself--looked round with disgust
upon the narrow cave he had been driven into, and glared with scorn and
rage as he thought upon the puny power he had fled from; then shook his
majestic mane and rushed out, and filled the whole neighbourhood with
his roar.
How from his soul he must have spurned the ignorant mass who came to
look at him in the cell which he had dug in the earth, and which seems
to have been but little larger than a common grave! What contempt he
must have felt for the illiterate crowd, as he toiled in his smithy, to
hear them attribute the roaring of his bellows, and the clattering of
his hammer, to the howling and bellowing of the devil; and, even sick
and weary as he was of the world, a suppressed smile must have played
about the corner of his mouth, as he saw the credulous crowd gather
around, who believed that he had seized the foul fiend by the nose.
Still it is hard to suppose that a man of his learning and talent would
for a moment lend himself to so improbable a tale: he might, however,
have seen the power he was likely to gain from such a rumour, so let
it take its course, leaving those to credit it who were simple enough
to do so. The making for himself a narrow cell, and living in it for
a given time, was no uncommon penance at that period, when hermits
were found in lonely places, and priests, who had been driven from
their monasteries by the Danes, were compelled to shelter in caves and
forests, which they frequently never quitted until death. Guthlac, on
the lonely island at Croyland, differed but little from Dunstan in his
self-inflicted probation.
It is, after all, difficult to suppose that his fame spread amongst the
highest ranks, through an idle and vulgar rumour being circulated of
his having pulled Satan's nose. Such a report would never have drawn
the Lady Ethelfleda, who had descended from Alfred the Great, to visit
him--to extol his conversation, and to praise his piety; to introduce
him to the king, and, at her death, to leave him all her wealth. Still
less likely is it that such a fabrication would have raised him high
in the estimation of the venerable Chancellor Turketul, the man who
had so distinguished himself, in the reign of Athelstan, at the battle
of Brunanburg. Nor can we believe that a grandson of the great Alfred
would be so credulous as to appoint him abbot of Glastonbury, unless
he had had some solid proofs of his learning and piety; for Edred made
him his confidential friend and councillor, and entrusted to his care
all his treasure.[7] We will not acquit him of ambition, nor deny
that he might have deviated a little from a fair and honest course to
obtain power; that he became cautious and reserved; for the man who in
his younger days had been driven from the court for his candour, and
rolled in a ditch by those who were either envious of his talents or
too ignorant to appreciate his high intellectual attainments, would
naturally become more wary for the future. He who but received hardship
and insult as a reward for his wisdom, would best display it afterwards
by remaining silent. Martyrs to a good cause act otherwise; but all
men covet not such immortality. We are painting the character of a man
disappointed in ambition and love; yet eager as of old for power--such
elements, though imperfect, are human. The man who inflicted stripes
upon himself for refusing the see of Winchester, in the hopes of one
day being made Archbishop of Canterbury, had before been whipped
for his honesty; and although such deception would ill become one
who aspired to be a saint, it would be pardoned in a disappointed
statesman. A man kicked out of court, under the imputation of having
"dealings with the devil," but played trick for trick when he put the
lash into the hand of St. Peter. Dunstan had his eye upon an eminence,
and was resolved to attain it. Usurers and misers sometimes fix their
thoughts upon a given sum, which they resolve to obtain, and then
become honest. Human nature a little warped was the same nine hundred
years ago as now. We are drawing the character of one who was then a
living and moving man, subject to human infirmities, for in his alleged
saint-ship we have no belief whatever, though Dunstan himself might
aspire to the title, and with a brain at times diseased, try at last to
find that sanctity within himself which others attributed to him, even
as a healthy man with a yellowish look discovers, through the allusions
of his friends, that he has got the jaundice, although his countenance
has only been exposed to the sun.
In miracles, the hand of God is manifested; when the dead are raised,
and the blind suddenly restored to sight, we question not the Almighty
power; but we doubt St. Peter lacerating the back of Dunstan, and even
acquit the latter of so merry a joke, as that which was invented about
his taking the devil by the nose with his red hot tongs, and alarming
all the neighbourhood by his bellowings. If "possibility" is dragged
into the argument, we must remain silent, for no one is impious enough
to limit the power of the Deity. Where it would evince a want of faith
to doubt the holiness of the apostles, it would be no sin to hesitate
before we pronounced Dunstan, or Thomas-à-Becket, or Peter the Hermit,
saints. What a simple-minded peasant would devoutly believe to be the
truth in the present day, an intelligent person would be scarcely
tolerated in enlightened society for asserting,--and by such homely
facts as these are the truths of history only to be tested.
[Illustration: _Dunstan dragging King Edwy from Elgiva._]
The first act which brings Dunstan so prominently forward in the reign
of Edwin is his rude attack upon the king on the day of his coronation.
Edwin had retired early from the banquet-hall, to seek the society
of his beautiful wife Elgiva, in her own apartment, when his absence
was remarked by the assembled guests. Odo, the Danish archbishop, was
present at the coronation feast, and perceiving that the retirement
of the king displeased the company, commanded those persons who were
attendant upon him to fetch Edwin back. After some demur by the party
whom Odo addressed, Dunstan and another bishop, his relation, undertook
to bring back the king. Elgiva's mother was in the chamber with Edwin
and her daughter when the two bishops entered, rudely, and unannounced.
Edwin, it appears, at the moment of their entrance, was in one of his
merry moods, and doubtless glad that he had escaped from the drunken
revels of a Saxon feast, had taken off his crown and placed it on the
ground, and was engaged in a playful struggle with his queen, when the
bishops broke so rudely upon his retirement; or it is very probable
that the crown had fallen off his head while toying with her, and that
seeing the emblem of sovereignty thus cast aside like a bauble, may for
a moment have chafed the temper of the irritable and decorous Dunstan.
We could see nothing to condemn on the part of the bishop, if he had
respectfully solicited the return of the king to the banquet; but when
Edwin refused to go, and Dunstan dragged him rudely from his seat,
and forced the crown again upon his head, the latter far out-stepped
his commission, and acted more like a traitor than a loyal subject in
thus attempting to coerce the king. It would, in those days, have been
held a justifiable act on the part of Edwin to have laid the haughty
prelate dead at his feet. Elgiva, with the spirit of a true woman,
upbraided the bishop for his insolence, and Dunstan, we fear, made use
of such epithets as belonged more to the smithy than the sanctum; and
in which he alluded to the painted lady who is described in the Old
Testament as having been thrown out of her window, and devoured by
dogs. Nor should we think that the man who had the boldness to attempt
to drag out the king by force, would hesitate to throw out a gentle
hint, that, if opposed, he would adopt the same method of silencing her
as that which was used in stilling the tongue of a "king's daughter."
To account for this palace brawl, we must conclude that the Danish
prelate and the Saxon bishop had pledged each other to such a depth
in their cups as perilled their reason, or, in other words, there is
but little doubt, the reputed saint was the worse for the wine-cup.
Edwin's first act was, however, sufficient to restore him again to his
senses, and although he was the friend of Turketul, the chancellor, and
stood high in the estimation of Odo, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the
young king deprived Dunstan of all the offices he held, confiscated his
wealth, and sentenced him to banishment.
Here we behold Dunstan once more driven from court, and he no longer
carries our sympathies with him, as before-time. A private gentleman,
much less a king, could not calmly have brooked the insult Dunstan
offered to his sovereign. Ten thousand men might be found in the
present day, who would have rebuked the proudest bishop that ever wore
a mitre, had he but dared to intrude thus upon their privacy. We have
before stated that Elgiva was somewhat closely related to her husband,
though it is pretty clear that this kinship extended not nearer than to
that of cousin. Such as it was, however, the savage Odo made it a plea
for divorce, and separated the king from his wife. Not contented with
this, the bloody-minded and cruel archbishop sent a party of savage
soldiers to seize her--to drag her like a criminal from her own palace,
and, oh! horrible to relate, to brand that beautiful face, which only
to look on was to love, with red hot iron--the lips and cheeks which
the young king had so proudly hung over and doted upon, were, by the
command of the cursed Odo, burnt by the hands of ruffianly soldiers--by
the order of this miscalled man of God--yet the lightning of Heaven
descended not to drive his mitre molten into his brain. Oh, what
heart-rending shrieks must that beautiful woman have sent forth!--what
inhuman monsters must they have been who held her white wrists, as
she writhed in convulsive agony. Death, indeed, would have been mercy
compared to such bloody barbarism; after this, she was banished, in all
her agony, to Ireland.
Time, that, like sleep, is the great soother of so many sorrows, healed
the wounds which the hard-hearted Odo had caused to be inflicted on
the youthful queen, and her surpassing beauty once more broke forth,
and erased the burning scars with which it had been disfigured,--like
a rose, that, in its full-blown loveliness, leaves no trace of the
blight that had settled down upon the bud. With a heart, yearning all
the more fondly for her youthful husband, through the sufferings,
which had been embittered by his absence, she rushed, on the eager
wings of love, to pour her sorrows into his bosom, and to pillow her
beautiful head on that heart which had known no rest since their cruel
separation; but the demons of destruction were again let loose upon
her. She was pursued and overtaken before she had reached those arms
which were open to receive her, and so dreadfully was the body of that
lovely lady mangled, that the blood rolls back chilly into the heart,
while we sit and sigh over her sufferings. We will not pain our readers
by describing this unparalleled butchery. But Odo reaped his reward.
"Vengeance is mine," saith the Lord; and before His unerring tribunal
the spirit of the mitred murderer, centuries ago, trembled.
From the hour of Elgiva's murder, the spirit of Edwin drooped. He seems
to have sat like a shadow with the sceptre in his hand, "nerveless,
listless, dead." His subjects rebelled against him. Dunstan was
recalled from banishment, and new honours were heaped upon his head.
Edwin's kingdom was divided, and though his brother Edgar was not more
than thirteen years of age, the dominions of Northumbria and Mercia
were placed under his sway. The infamous Odo, and his emissaries,
were at last triumphant; and there is scarcely a doubt but that, a
few years after the death of his wife, Edwin himself was murdered in
Gloucestershire. In several old chronicles it is darkly hinted that he
met with a violent death: in one, which is still extant in the Cotton
Library, it is clearly asserted that he was slain.
A youthful king, on whose head the crown, with all its cares and
heart-aches, was placed at the age of sixteen, was but ill-armed
to battle with the hoary-headed, cunning, and grey iniquity which
surrounded his throne. He, who would cast his crown upon the ground
to toy with his beautiful wife, was no match for that hypocrisy which
was hidden beneath the folds of a saintly garb. When, with a spirit
far beyond his years, he boldly resented the insult that Dunstan had
offered to him, the whole power of the court was at once arrayed
against him, for Dunstan was already venerated by the ignorant people
as a saint: he had the chancellor and the primate on his side; and
few would be found to make head against a cause on the part of which
such powerful authorities were arranged as leaders. The respect which
was due to a king must have been greatly lessened by the insult which
Dunstan had offered to his sovereign. It resembled more the conduct of
a schoolmaster towards an unruly pupil than that of a subject to his
superior. Edwin closed his troublous career about the year 959; and
by his death Edgar, who had for three years ruled over the northern
dominions, became king of England.