An individual scarcely less famous in the dark ages, and who, like
Merlin, lived in confidence with successive kings, was St. Dunstan. He
was born and died in the tenth century. It is not a little instructive
to employ our attention upon the recorded adventures, and incidents
occurring in the lives, of such men, since, though plentifully
interspersed with impossible tales, they serve to discover to us the
tastes and prepossessions of the times in which these men lived, and
the sort of accomplishments which were necessary to their success.
St. Dunstan is said to have been a man of distinguished birth, and to
have spent the early years of his life in much licentiousness. He was
however doubtless a person of the most extraordinary endowments of
nature. Ambition early lighted its fire in his bosom; and he displayed
the greatest facility in acquiring any talent or art on which he fixed
his attention. His career of profligacy was speedily arrested by a
dangerous illness, in which he was given over by his physicians. While
he lay apparently at the point of death, an angel was suddenly seen,
bringing a medicine to him which effected his instant cure. The saint
immediately rose from his bed, and hastened to the nearest church to
give God thanks for his recovery. As he passed along, the devil,
surrounded with a pack of black dogs, interposed himself to obstruct
his way. Dunstan however intrepidly brandished a rod that he held in
his hand, and his opposers took to flight. When he came to the church,
he found the doors closed. But the same angel, who effected his cure,
was at hand, and, taking him up softly by the hair of his head, placed
him before the high altar, where he performed his devotions with
suitable fervour.
That he might expiate the irregularities of his past life, St. Dunstan
now secluded himself entirely from the world, and constructed for his
habitation a cell in the abbey of Glastonbury, so narrow that he could
neither stand upright in it, nor stretch out his limbs in repose. He
took scarcely so much sustenance as would support life, and mortified
his flesh with frequent castigations.
He did not however pass his time during this seclusion in vacuity and
indolence. He pursued his studies with the utmost ardour, and made a
great proficiency in philosophy, divinity, painting, sculpture and
music. Above all, he was an admirable chemist, excelled in manufactures
of gold and other metals, and was distinguished by a wonderful skill
in the art of magic.
During all these mortifications and the severeness of his industry, he
appears to have become a prey to extraordinary visions and
imaginations. Among the rest, the devil visited him in his cell, and,
thrusting his head in at the window, disturbed the saint with obscene
and blasphemous speeches, and the most frightful contortions of the
features of his countenance. Dunstan at length, wearied out with his
perseverance, seized the red-hot tongs with which he was engaged in
some chemical experiment, and, catching the devil by the nose, held
him with the utmost firmness, while Satan filled the whole
neighbourhood for many miles round with his bellowings. Extraordinary
as this may appear, it constitutes one of the most prominent incidents
in the life of the saint; and the representations of it were for ever
repeated in ancient carvings, and in the illuminations of
church-windows.
This was the precise period at which the pope and his adherents were
gaining the greatest ascendancy in the Christian world. The doctrine
of transubstantiation was now in the highest vogue; and along with it
a precept still more essential to the empire of the Catholic church,
the celibacy of the clergy. This was not at first established without
vehement struggles. The secular clergy, who were required at once to
cast off their wives as concubines, and their children as bastards,
found every impulse of nature rising in arms against the mandate. The
regular clergy, or monks, were in obvious rivalship with the seculars,
and engrossed to themselves, as much as possible, all promotions and
dignities, as well ecclesiastical as civil. St. Augustine, who first
planted Christianity in this island, was a Benedictine monk; and the
Benedictines were for a long time in the highest reputation in the
Catholic church. St. Dunstan was also a Benedictine. In his time the
question of the celibacy of the clergy was most vehemently agitated;
and Dunstan was the foremost of the champions of the new institution
in England. The contest was carried on with great vehemence. Many of
the most powerful nobility, impelled either by pity for the sufferers,
or induced by family affinities, supported the cause of the seculars.
Three successive synods were held on the subject; and the cause of
nature it is said would have prevailed, had not Dunstan and his
confederates called in the influence of miracles to their aid. In one
instance, a crucifix, fixed in a conspicuous part of the place of
assembly, uttered a voice at the critical moment, saying, "Be steady!
you have once decreed right; alter not your ordinances." At another
time the floor of the place of meeting partially gave way,
precipitating the ungodly opposers of celibacy into the place beneath,
while Dunstan and his party, who were in another part of the assembly,
were miraculously preserved unhurt.
In these instances Dunstan seemed to be engaged in the cause of
religion, and might be considered as a zealous, though mistaken,
advocate of Christian simplicity and purity. But he was not contented
with figuring merely as a saint. He insinuated himself into the favour
of Edred, the grandson of Alfred, and who, after two or three short
reigns, succeeded to the throne. Edred was an inactive prince, but
greatly under the dominion of religious prejudices; and Dunstan, being
introduced to him, found him an apt subject for his machinations.
Edred first made him abbot of Glastonbury, one of the most powerful
ecclesiastical dignities in England, and then treasurer of the kingdom.
During the reign of this prince, Dunstan disposed of all ecclesiastical
affairs, and even of the treasures of the kingdom, at his pleasure.
But Edred filled the throne only nine years, and was succeeded by Edwy
at the early age of seventeen, who is said to have been endowed with
every grace of form, and the utmost firmness and intrepidity of spirit.
Dunstan immediately conceived a jealousy of these qualities, and took
an early opportunity to endeavour to disarm them. Edwy entertained a
passion for a princess of the royal house, and even proceeded to marry
her, though within the degrees forbidden by the canon law. The rest of
the story exhibits a lively picture of the manners of these barbarous
times. Odo, archbishop of Canterbury, the obedient tool of Dunstan, on
the day of the coronation obtruded himself with his abettor into the
private apartment, to which the king had retired with his queen, only
accompanied by her mother; and here the ambitious abbot, after loading
Edwy with the bitterest reproaches for his shameless sensuality,
thrust him back by main force into the hall, where the nobles of the
kingdom were still engaged at their banquet.
The spirited young prince conceived a deep resentment of this unworthy
treatment, and, seizing an opportunity, called Dunstan to account for
malversation in the treasury during the late king's life-time. The
priest refused to answer; and the issue was that he was banished the
realm.
But he left behind him a faithful and implicit coadjutor in archbishop
Odo. This prelate is said actually to have forced his way with a party
of soldiers into the palace, and, having seized the queen, barbarously
to have seared her cheeks with a red-hot iron, and sent her off a
prisoner to Ireland. He then proceeded to institute all the forms of a
divorce, to which the unhappy king was obliged to submit. Meanwhile
the queen, having recovered her beauty, found means to escape, and,
crossing the Channel, hastened to join her husband. But here again the
priests manifested the same activity as before. They intercepted the
queen in her journey, and by the most cruel means undertook to make
her a cripple for life. The princess however sunk under the experiment,
and ended her existence and her woes together.
A rebellion was now excited against the sacrilegious Edwy; and the
whole north of England, having rebelled, was placed under the dominion
of his brother, a boy of thirteen years of age. In the midst of these
adventures Dunstan returned from the continent, and fearlessly shewed
himself in his native country. His party was every where triumphant;
Odo being dead, he was installed archbishop of Canterbury, and Edwy,
oppressed with calamity on every side, sunk to an untimely grave.
The rest of the life of Dunstan was passed in comparatively
tranquillity. He made and unmade kings as he pleased. Edgar, the
successor of Edwy, discovered the happy medium of energy and authority
as a sovereign, combined with a disposition to indulge the ambitious
policy of the priesthood. He was licentious in his amours, without
losing a particle of his ascendancy as a sovereign. He however reigned
only a few years; but Dunstan at his death found means to place his
eldest son on the throne under his special protection, in defiance of
the intrigues of the ambitious Elfrida, the king's second wife, who
moved heaven and earth to cause the crown to descend upon her own son,
as yet comparatively an infant.
In this narrative we are presented with a lively picture of the means
by which ambition climbed to its purposes in the darkness of the tenth
century. Dunstan was enriched with all those endowments which might
seem in any age to lead to the highest distinction. Yet it would
appear to have been in vain that he was thus qualified, if he had not
stooped to arts that fell in with the gross prejudices of his
contemporaries. He had continual recourse to the aid of miracles. He
gave into practices of the most rigorous mortification. He studied,
and excelled in, all the learning and arts that were then known. But
his main dependence was on the art of magic. The story of his taking
the devil by the nose with a pair of red-hot tongs, seems to have been
of greater service to him than any other single adventure of his life.
In other times he might have succeeded in the schemes of his political
ambition by seemly and specious means. But it was necessary for him in
the times in which he lived, to proceed with eclat, and in a way that
should confound all opposers. The utmost resolution was required to
overwhelm those who might otherwise have been prompted to contend
against him. Hence it appears that he took a right measure of the
understanding of his contemporaries, when he dragged the young king
from the scene of his retirement, and brought him back by force into
the assembly of the nobles. And the inconceivable barbarity practised
to the queen, which would have rendered his name horrible in a more
civilised age, was exactly calculated to overwhelm the feelings and
subject the understandings of the men among whom he lived. The great
quality by which he was distinguished was confidence, a frame of
behaviour which shewed that he acted from the fullest conviction, and
never doubted that his proceedings had the immediate approbation of
heaven.