What to make of all this? That the visit to Normandy took place and that Harold swore an oath we can accept. But it is impossible to believe that Harold acted voluntarily. However he got to Normandy, he was in the duke’s power. As was his younger brother, Wulfnoth. Harold therefore swore under duress and would have discounted his oath accordingly.
Moreover, he soon had more pressing things to worry about.
For, at the beginning of October 1065, Northumbria rose in revolt against Earl Tostig, Harold’s brother. Partly, it was a question of style. Tostig was a stranger to the area; he had tried to impose southern customs and he maintained, the northern men felt, unnaturally friendly relations with King Malcolm III of Scotland. But there were also more serious and specific charges: that he had perverted the law to kill his enemies; had robbed churches and had taxed disproportionately. The revolt was no hole-in-the-corner affair. Instead, the Northumbrian thegns (nobles) acted collectively and decisively. They killed Tostig’s retainers, seized his arsenal at York and confiscated his treasury. Having thus emasculated Tostig’s local power, they then chose as their earl Morkere, the younger brother of Earl Edwin of Mercia. Under the nominal command of their new earl, the rebels marched south, gathering the strength of three more counties of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Lincolnshire on the way, till they came to Northampton. There Earl Edwin joined them with the Mercian levies.
All seemed set for another civil war: between north and south and between Godwins and the rest. But, once again, a way out was found, with Harold performing the crucial role of peacemaker. He had gone to Northampton as the king’s representative at the meeting of the witan convened there, and had returned thence to put the rebels’ demands to Edward. No doubt on Harold’s advice, Edward accepted them at a second meeting of the witan on 28 October at Oxford; replaced Tostig with Morkere as earl of Northumbria and confirmed the Laws of Cnut, which embodied the separate legal status of the Danelaw.
Harold had played the statesman. He had put his country before his family and saved England from civil war. But there was a price: the Godwins were now irretrievably split and Harold’s dispossessed brother Tostig had become his deadliest enemy. After the Oxford meeting, Tostig fled with his family to Flanders, where he spent the winter contacting allies and plotting his revenge.
Edward by this time was about sixty. It was old for the time but his health was excellent. When, for instance, he received the news of the Northumbrian revolt he was hunting with Tostig in Wiltshire. But the political storm of the autumn, which came from a blue sky, affected him badly. He celebrated Christmas Day with the usual pomp. But on the 26th he took to his bed and was too ill even to attend the consecration of his new abbey at Westminster on the 28th.
Over the next few days, his condition worsened and he alternated between fitful sleep and delirium. As he shook with a particularly violent seizure his terrified attendants roused him and all his old lucidity seemed to return. He had had a prophetic dream, he explained. God’s curse was on England for her sins, and her troubles would cease only when the trunk of a green tree, which had been cut in half, reunited of itself and bore leaf again.
Was he really prophesying the fate of England and the House of Wessex? Or was it only, as the ever secularly minded Archbishop Stigand whispered to Harold, that he ‘was broken with age and disease and knew not what he said’?
As well as the archbishop and Earl Harold, the group gathered in the royal bedchamber included Robert fitzWimarch, the king’s kinsman and staller or master of the horse, and Queen Edith herself, ‘who was sitting on the floor warming his feet in her lap’. Edward, now fully himself, first spoke to Edith, beseeching God to be gracious to her: ‘for certainly she has served me devotedly, and has always stood close by my side like a beloved daughter’. Then he turned to Harold and said, ‘I commend this woman and all the kingdom to your protection’. The words do not quite amount to a bequest of the crown, but they were the next best thing. That Edward had nominated Harold as his heir was also stated as sober fact by The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; it was even admitted by the Norman sources – though, in view of the earlier undertakings of both Edward and Harold, they denied the validity of the bequest.
Edward’s final request was that his death should not be concealed, so that all his subjects could pray for his soul. He had his wish. He died on 5 January and was buried in his new abbey on the 6th.
On that same day, the Feast of the Epiphany, and in the same place, Harold was crowned king of the English. It was a peaceful, unchallenged succession and, as the ceremony took place so quickly, it must have been both anticipated and prepared for. Harold’s other moves display a similar confidence and good sense. He married Ealdgyth, sister of Earls Morkere and Edwin, as his queen. And he went on a progress to the north. He was back in London from York by Easter, which fell on 16 April.
But, a week later, on 24 April, Halley’s comet appeared in the skies and remained there till 8 June. It was universally taken as a portent of disaster. In the Bayeux Tapestry a group of men marvel at the flaming comet in the sky; it is labelled ISTI MIRANT STELLA, ‘these men marvel at the star’. A messenger is shown bringing the news to Harold, whose evident anxieties are reflected in the ghostly fleet of empty ships which appear beneath him, in the margin.
IV
But the disaster seemed long in coming. Tostig made the first moves, raiding from the Isle of Wight to Sandwich and thence to Lincolnshire. He fled from Sandwich with the approach of Harold, who had assembled ‘so large a force, naval and military, as no king collected before in this land’. And he was driven out of Lincolnshire by the brother earls, Edwin and Morkere. He then took refuge with his bosom friend, Malcolm III, in Scotland.
With Tostig out of the way, Harold was able to put his forces to the use for which he had raised them and guard the south coast against William: ‘for it was credibly reported that Duke William from Normandy, King Edward’s cousin, would come hither’. Harold stationed himself on the Isle of Wight, which enabled him to shadow perfectly the fleet that William was building, directly opposite, at the mouth of the River Dives. But then, about 8 September, shortage of provisions forced Harold to stand his forces down. It was a blow. But not, apparently, a bad one as the usual campaigning season was almost over.
But, just when he seemed safe, events started to run hard against Harold. For the stand-off in Scandinavia, which had given England three decades’ respite from the Vikings, now started to resolve itself. In 1062, King Harold Hardrada of Norway defeated King Swein of Denmark at the battle of Nissa, and two years later they made peace. Either was now free to take advantage of Edward’s death and attack England as the self-proclaimed heir of Cnut.
Harold Hardrada took the initiative. Though just over fifty, he was a formidable warrior of the old Viking type. He was bloodthirsty, and, in his own saga, gloried in his deeds:
Now I have caused the deaths
Of thirteen of my enemies.
I kill without compunction
And remember all my killings.
Harold, he determined, should be his fourteenth victim. He set sail for England with a huge armada of 300 ships; landed at the Tyne and linked up with Tostig, who swore fealty to him. Then they sailed up the Ouse towards the old Viking city of York. En route, they were intercepted by Earls Edwin and Morkere. Both sides suffered heavy losses when they met on 20 September. But Hardrada and Tostig were left in possession of the field and entered York.
Harold, who meantime had force-marched his troops from London, arrived at Tadcaster on the 24th. There he heard that Hardrada