CHAPTER XXVII

.

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.

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