GODWIN, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), an English authoress of the last century, was born at Hoxton, on April 27, 1759. Her family was of Irish extraction, and Mary’s grandfather, who was a respectable manufacturer in Spitalfields, realized the property which his son squandered. Her mother, whose maiden name was Dixon, was Irish, and of good family. Mr Wollstonecraft, after dissipating the greater part of his patrimony, tried to earn a living by farming, which only plunged him into deeper difficulties, and be led a wandering, shifty life. The family roamed from Hoxton to Edmonton, to Essex, to Beverley in Yorkshire, to Laugharne, Pembrokeshire, and back to London again.

After Mrs Wollstonecraft’s death in 1780, soon followed by her husband’s second marriage, the three daughters, Mary, Everina, and Eliza, sought to earn their own livelihood. The sisters were all clever women,—Mary and Eliza far above the average,—but their opportunities of culture had been few. They turned their thoughts towards the profession of teaching, and Mary, the eldest, was to make the first venture. She went in the first instance to live with her friend Fanny Blood, a girl of her own age, whose father, like Wollstonecraft, was addicted to drink and dissipation. As long as she lived with the Bloods, Mary helped Mrs Blood to earn money by taking in needle-work, while Fanny painted in water-colours. Everina went to live with her brother Edward, and Eliza made a hasty and, as it proved, unhappy marriage with a Mr Bishop. All the Wollstonecraft sisters were enthusiastic, excitable, apt to exaggerate trifles, and to magnify inattentions into slights; and Eliza had the family temperament in excess. Bishop was a man of violent temper, and when his wife’s reason had almost given way under the miseries of her married life, Mary resolved to find some means of supporting her, and arranged her secret and sudden flight. A legal separation was afterwards obtained, and the sisters, together with Fanny Blood, took a house, first at Islington, afterwards at Newington Green, and opened a school, which was carried on with indifferent success for nearly two years. During their residence at Newington Green. Mary was introduced to Dr Johnson, who, as Godwin tells us, “treated her with particular kindness and attention. 1 '

In 1785 Fanny Blood married Hugh Skeys, a merchant, and went with him to Lisbon, where she died in childbed after sending for Mary to nurse her. “The loss of Fanny,” as she said in a letter to Mrs Skeys’s brother, George Blood, “was sufficient of itself to have cast a cloud over my brightest days. . . . I have lost all relish for pleasure, and life seems a burden almost too heavy to be endured.” Her first novel, Mary, a Fiction, written in 1787, was intended to commemorate her friendship with Fanny. After closing the school at Newington Green, Mary obtained a situation as governess in the family of Lord Kingsborough, in Ireland, which she held for nearly a year. Her pupils were much attached to her, especially Margaret King, afterwards Lady Mountcashel; and indeed Lady Kingsborough gave the reason for dismissing her that the children loved their governess better than their mother. Mary now resolved to devote herself to literary work, and she was encouraged in this purpose by Johnson, the publisher in St Paul’s Churchyard, in whose house she resided for a few weeks, before she obtained lodgings in George Street, Blackfriars. She acted as Johnson’s literary adviser, and undertook translations, chiefly from the French. Mary, a Fiction, the story already mentioned, was not published till 1796. The Elements of Morality, an old fashioned bo,ok for children, and Lavater’s Physiognomy, were among her translations. Her Original Stories from Peal Life were published, with illustrations by Blake, and in 1792 appeared A Vindication of the Eights of Woman, the work with which her name is always associated.

It is not among the least oddities of this book that it is dedicated to Μ. Talleyrand Périgord, late bishop of Autun. Mary Wollstonecraft still believed him to be sincere, and working in the same direction as herself. Tn the dedication she states the “main argument” of the work, “built on this simple principle that, if woman be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge, for truth must be common to all, or it will be inefficacious with respect to its influence or general practice.” In carrying out this argument she used extraordinary plainness of speech, and it was this that caused all, or nearly all, the outcry. For she did not attack the institution of marriage, nor assail orthodox religion; her book was really a plea for equality of education, passing into one for state education and for the joint education of the sexes. It was a protest against the assumption that woman was only the plaything of man, and she asserted that intellectual companionship was the chief, as it is the lasting, happiness of marriage. It may, however, be admitted that she discussed some subjects, not usually mentioned in print, with a certain want of reticence and delicacy. She dealt directly with dangerous and explosive questions, incidentally upheld greater freedom of divorce, and denied the eternity of the torments of hell.

Mrs Wollstonecraft, as she now styled herself, desired to watch the progress of the Revolution in France, and went to Paris in 1792. Godwin, in his memoir of his wife, considers that the change of residence may have been prompted by the discovery that she was becoming attached to Fuseli, but there is nothing to confirm this surmise; indeed, it was first proposed that she should go to Paris in company with him and his wife, nor was there any subsequent breach in their friendship. She remained in Paris during the Reign of Terror, when communication with England was difficult or almost impossible. Some time in the spring or summer of 1793 Captain Gilbert Imlay, an American, became acquainted with Mary—an acquaintance which ended in a more intimate connexion. There was no legal ceremony of marriage, and it is doubtful whether such a marriage would have been valid at the time; but she passed as Imlay’s wife, and her brother, Charles Wollstonecraft, wrote from Philadelphia that he had seen a gentleman who informed him “that Mary was married to Captain Imlay of this country.” Imlay himself terms her in a legal document, “Mary Imlay, my best friend and wife,” and she believed that his love, which was to her sacred, would endure. In August 1793 Imlay was called to Havre on business, and was absent for some months, during which time most of the letters published after her death by Godwin were written. Towards the end of the year she joined Imlay at Havre, and there in the spring of 1794 she gave birth to a girl, who received the name of Fanny, in memory of the dear friend of her youth. Imlay became involved in a multitude of speculations, which rendered him restless and dissatisfied, and his affection for Mary and their child was already waning. He left her for some months at Havre, and when he allowed her to join him in England, it appears from her letters that she went with a heavy heart and forebodings of sorrow. In June 1795, in less than two months after their reunion, Mary again left England for Norway, empowered by the document in which Imlay calls her his wife, to act for him in his business relations with Norwegian timber merchants. Her Letters from Norway, divested of all personal details, were afterwards published. She returned to England late in 1795, and found letters awaiting her from Imlay, intimating his intention to separate from her, and offering to settle an annuity on her and her child. For herself she rejected this offer with scorn: “From you,” she wrote, “1 will not receive anything more. I am not sufficiently humbled to depend on your beneficence.” They met again, and for a short time lived together, until the discovery that he was carrying on an intrigue under her own roof drove her to despair, and she attempted to drown herself by leaping from Putney bridge, but she was rescued by watermen. Imlay now completely deserted her, although she continued to bear his name.

In 1796, when Mary λVollstonecraft was living in London, supporting herself and her child by working, as before, for Mr Johnson, she met William Godwin. A friendship sprang up between them,—a friendship, as he himself says, which “melted into love.” Godwin states that “ideas which he is now willing to denominate prejudices made him by no means willing to conform to the ceremony of marriage;” but these prejudices were overcome, and they were married at St Paneras Church on March 29, 1797. And now Mary had a season of real calm in her stormy existence. Godwin, for once only in his life, was stirred by passion, and his admiration for his wife equalled his affection. But their happiness was of short duration. A daughter, Mary, afterwards the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, was born August 30, 1797. At first all seemed to go well, but unfavourable symptoms set in, and on September 10th,the mother, after enduring all her sufferings with unvarying gentleness and sweetness of temper, passed away. She was buried in the churchyard of Old St Paneras, but her remains were afterwards removed by Sir Percy Shelley to the churchyard of St Peter’s, Bournemouth.

Her principal published works are as follows:— Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, 1787; The Female Reader (selections), 1789; Original Stories from Real Life, 1791; An Historical and Moral Vieιv of the Origin a/nd Progress of the French Revolution, and the Effects it has produced in Europe, vol. i. (no more published), 1790; Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792; Vindication of the Rights of Man, 1793; Mary, a Fiction, 1796; Letters written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, 1796; Posthumous Works, 4 vols., 1798. It is impossible to trace the many articles contributed by her to periodical literature, or to identify the translations executed for Mr Johnson. A memoir of her life was published by Godwin soon after her decease. A large portion of the work, William Godwin, his Friends and Contemporaries, was devoted to her, and a new edition of the Letters to Imlay, London, 1879, of which the first edition was published by Godwin, is prefaced by a somewhat fuller memoir.

GODWIN, William (1756-1836), an English political writer, historian, novelist, and dramatist, was born March 3, 1756, at Wisbeach in Cambridgeshire, at which place his father was a Nonconformist minister. His family came on both sides of worthy middle-class people, able to trace their descent in the same level of society for about 150 years; and it was probably only as a joke that Godwin, a stern political reformer and philosophical radical, attempted to trace his pedigree to a time before the Norman conquest and the great Earl Godwine. His father was a cold and dull man, his mother uneducated, but clever, shrewd, and full of sound common sense. Both parents were Calvinists: the father strict in observances beyond what was even then ordinary; the mother regretting in Godwin’s maturer years, and when some of her sons had turned out ill, that she had given birth to so many children, who, as she thought, were heirs of damnation. Mr Godwin, senior, died young, and never inspired love or much regret in his son; but in spite of wide differences of opinion, the most tender affection always subsisted between William Godwin and his mother, until her death at an advanced age.

William Godwin was educated for his father’s profession, and was at first more Calvinistic than his teachers, becoming a Sandemanian, of which sect he says, that they were the followers of “a celebrated north-country apostle [Gias], who after Calvin had damned ninety-nine in a hundred of mankind, has contrived a scheme for damning ninety-nine in a hundred of the followers of Calvin.”

He officiated as a minister at Ware, Stowmarket, and Beaconsfield. At the second of these places the teachings of French Reformers were brought before him by a friend, and these, while they intensified his political, undermined his religious opinions. He came to London, still nominally a clergyman, to set about the work of the regeneration of society with his pen—a real enthusiast, who, theoretically, shrank from no conclusions from the premises which he laid down. These were the principles of the Encyclopedists, and his own aim was the complete overthrow of all existing institutions, political, social, and religious. He believed, however, that calm discussion was the only thing needful to carry every change, and from the beginning to the end of his career he deprecated every approach to violence. He was, like Bentham—-whom, however, he does not seem to have influenced or been influenced by—a philosophic radical in the strictest sense of the term.

His first published work was au anonymous Life of Lord Chatham·, the first to which he gave his name was still nominally clerical. Under the inappropriate title Sketches of History, he published six sermons on the characters of Aaron, Hazael, and Jesus, in which, though writing in the character of an orthodox Calvinist, he enunciates the pregnant proposition, “God himself has no right to be a tyrant.” This was published in 1782, and for the next nine years he wrote largely in the Annual Register and other periodicals, producing also three novels, which have more completely vanished from the world than even the contributions to reviews. They were probably not worth preserving, but the “Sketches of English History” written for the Annual Register from 1785 onward still deserve study. He joined a club called the Revolutionists, and associated much with Lord Stanhope, Horne Tooke, Holcroft, and others, who, from their political principles and activity, were obnoxious to men in power. It is perhaps needless to say that the title of “reverend” dropped off from him without difficulty, and with no sense of discordance between the old and the new. Doubt and change never seem to have brought with them any keen sense of pain or outrooting. The equable calm of a cold temperament preserved him from much which affects warmer natures; but he also knew that he was at all times seeking after truth, and striving for what seemed right; and while such an one can scarcely be called modest, he is preserved for many qualms which affect more nervous and more selfdistrustful persons.

In 1793 Godwin published his great work on political science, The Inquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness. Although this work is little known and less read now, it was one of the epoch-making books of English thought, Godwin could never have been himself a worker on the active stage of life. But he was none the less a power behind the workers, and Political Justice takes its place with Milton’s Speech for Unlicensed Printing, with Locke’s Essay on Education, with Rousseau’s Émile, among the unseen levers which have moved the changes of the times. It is therefore necessary to speak of this book more particularly. By the words “political justice” the author meant “the adoption of any principle of morality and truth into the practice of a community,” and the work was therefore an inquiry into the principles of society, of government, and of morals. For many vears Godwin had been “satisfied that monarchy was a species of government unavoidably corrupt,”and from desiring a government of the simplest construction, he gradually came to consider that “government by its very nature counteracts the improvement of original mind.” Believing in the perfectibility of the race, that there are no innate principles, and therefore no original propensity to evil, he considered that “our virtues and our vices may be traced to the incidents which make the history of our lives, and if these incidents could be divested of every improper tendency, vice would be extirpated from the world.” All control of man by man was more or less intolerable, and the day would come when each mau, doing what seems right in his own eyes, would also be doing what is in fact best for the community, because all will be guided by principles of pure reason. But all was to be done by discussion, and matured change resulting from discussion. Hence, while Godwin thoroughly approved of the philosophic schemes of the precursors of the Revolution, he was as far removed as Burke himself from agreeing with the way in which they were carried out. So logical and uncompromising a thinker as Godwin could not go far in the discussion of abstract questions without exciting the most lively opposition in matters of detailed opinion An affectionate son, and ever ready to give of his hard-earned income to more than one ne’er-do-well brother, he maintained that natural relationship had no claim on man, nor was gratitude to parents or benefactors any part of justice or virtue. In a day when the penal code was still extremely severe, he argued gravely against all punishments, not only that of death. Property was to belong to him who most wants it; accumulated property was a monstrous injustice. Hence marriage, which is law, is the worst of all laws, and property the worst of all properties. A man so passionless as Godwin could venture thus to argue without suspicion that he did so only to gratify his wayward desires. Portions of this treatise, and only portions, found ready acceptance in those minds which were prepared to receive them. Perhaps no one received the whole teaching of the book. But it gave cohesion and voice to philosophic radicalism; it was the manifesto of a school without which the milder and more creedless liberalism of the present day had not been. Godwin himself in after days modified his communistic views, but his strong feeling for individualism, his hate of all restrictions on liberty, his trust in man, his faith in the power of reason remained; it was a manifesto which enunciated principles modifying action, even when not wholly ruling it.

In May 1794 Godwin published the novel of Caleb Williams, or Things as they are, a book of which the political object is overlooked by many readers in the strong interest of the story. It is one of the few novels of that time which may be said still to live. A theorist who lived mainly in his study, Godwin yet came forward boldly to stand by prisoners arraigned of high treason in that same year—1794. The danger to persons so charged was then great, and he deliberately put himself into this same danger for his friends. But when his own trial was discussed in the Privy Council, Pitt sensibly held that Political Justice, the work on which the charge could best have been founded, was priced at three guineas, and could never do much harm among those who had not three shillings to spare.

From this time Godwin became anotable figure in London society, and there was scarcely an important person in politics, on the liberal side, in literature, art, or science, who does not appear familiarly in the pages of Godwin’s singular diary. For forty-eight years, beginning in 1788, and continuing to the very eud of his life, Godwin kept a record of every day, of the work he did, the books he read, the friends he saw. Condensed in the highest degree, the diary is yet easy to read when the style is once mastered, and it is a great help to the understanding of his cold, methodical, unimpassioned characters. He carried his method into every detail of life, and lived on his earnings with extreme frugality. Until he made a large sum by the publication of Political Justice, he lived on an average of .£120 a year. In 1797, the intervening years having been spent in strenuous literary labour, Godwin married Mary Wollstonecraft (see last article). Since both held the same views regarding the slavery of marriage, and since they only married at all for the sake of possible offspring, the marriage was concealed for some time, and the happiness of the avowed married life was very brief. Mrs Godwin died in giving birth to a daughter, afterwards the second wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, on September 10, 1797, leaving Godwin, prostrated by affliction, and with a charge for which he was wholly unfit—his own little daughter Mary, and her stepsister, Fanny Imlay, who ever afterwards bore the name of Godwin. His unfitness for the cares of a family, far more than love, led him to contract a second marriage with Mrs Clairmont, in 1800. She was a widow with two children, energetic and painstaking, but a harsh stepmother; and it may be doubted whether the children were not worse off under her care than they would have been under Godwin’s neglect. The second fiction which proceeded from Godwin’s pen was called St Leon, and published in 1799. It is chiefly remarkable for the beautiful portrait of Marguerite, the heroine, which was drawn from the character of his own wife.

The events of Godwin’s life were few. Under the advice of the second Mrs Godwin, and with her active co-operation, he carried on business as a bookseller under the pseudonym of Edward Baldwin, under which name he published several useful school-books and books for children, some by Charles and Mary Lamb. But the speculation was unsuccessful, and for many years Godwin struggled with constant pecuniary difficulties, for which more than one subscription was raised by the leaders of the Liberal party, and by literary men. In his later years the Government of Earl Grey conferred upon him the office known as “Yeoman Usher of the Exchequer,” to which were attached apart· ments in Palace Yard, where he died in the full posses, sion of his faculties, April 7, 1836, having completed his eightieth year.

In his own time, by his writings and by his conversation, Godwin had a great power of influencing men, and especially young men. Though his character would seem, from much which is found in his writings, and from anecdotes told by those who still remember him, to have been unsympathetic, it was not so understood by enthusiastic young people, who hung on his words as those of a prophet. The most remarkable of these was Percy Bysshe Shelley, who in the glowing dawn of his genius turned to Godwin as his teacher and guide. The last of the long series of young men who sat at Godwin’s feet was Edward Lytton Bulwer, afterwards Lord Lytton, whose early romances were formed after those of Godwin, and who, in Eugene Aram, succeeded to the story as arranged, and the plan to a considerable extent sketched out, by Godwin, whose age and failing health prevented him from completing it.

Godwin’s more important works are—The Inquiry concerning Political Justice, and itslnfiuence on General Virtue and Happiness,

1793; Things as they are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams, 1794; The Inquirer, a series of Essays, 1796; Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman, 1798; St Leon, a Talc of the Sixteenth Century, 1799; Antonio, a Tragedy, 1801; The Life of Chaucer, 1803; Fleetwood, a Novel, ∖ 8i)b∙, Faulkner, a Tragedy,1807; Essay on Sepulchres, 1809; Lives of Edward and John Philips, the Nephews of Milton, 1815; Mandeville, a Tale of the Times of Cromwell, 1817; History of the Commonwealth, 1824-1828; Cloudcslcy, a Novel, 1830; Thoughts on Man, a scries of Essays, 1831; Lives of the Necromancers, 1834. A volume of essays was also collected from his papers and published in 1873, as left for publication by his daughter Mrs Shelley. Many other short and anonymous works proceeded from his ever busy pen, but many are irrecoverable, and all are forgotten. Godwin’s place in literature is permanent, in that he produced one work which proved effective in changing the course of thought in its time, but not permanent in the sense that his writings will continue to be widely read. His life was published in 1876 in two volumes, under the title lVilliam Godwin, his Friends and Contemporaries, by C. Kegan Paul. The best estimate of his literary position is that given by Mr Leslie Stephen in his English Thought in the 18th Century. (C. K. P. )

His birth and origin are utterly uncertain. The highest authorities, the contemporary English Chronicles, are silent. There are two alternative statements, which are seemingly quite irreconcilable, but either of which alone would have much to be said for it. By putting together certain passages in the English Chronicles, in Domesday, and in the will of the Aetheling Aethelstan, son of King Aethelred, a strong presumption is raised that Godwine was the son of Wulfnoth the South-Saxon who was outlawed in 1009, and that his services in the war against Cnut were deemed to entitle him to a restitution of his father’s forfeited lands. There is no direct statement to this effect, but a number of undesigned coincidences point towards such a belief. On the other hand, there is a story which appears in various quarters, and which seems to come from more than one independent source, which makes Godwine’s father Wulfnoth a churl somewhere on the borders of Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, and which makes Godwine win the favour of the Danish earl Ulf by showing him his way after the battle of Sherstone in 1016. A third account connects Godwine with the family of Eadric the traitor of Aethelred’s day; but this version seems at once to be impossible to reconcile with either of the other two stories, and to rest on less authority than either.

But, whatever was Godwine’s origin, there is no doubt that, according to Cnut’s rule of preferring Englishmen to high office, he rose to power very early in that king’s reign. He was an earl in 1018. The next year he distinguished himself at the head of the English troops in Cnut’s Northern wars, and received in marriage Gytha, the sister of the king’s brother-in-law Earl Ulf. In 1020 he became earl of the West-Saxons, that is, of all England south of the Thames, a new office, doubtless connected with Cnut’s frequent absences from England. All this again is not in the Chronicles, though particular points are incidentally confirmed by them. Still this stage of his history seems to be fairly made out from other sources.

From Cnut’s death in 1035 the events of Goclwine’s life are recorded in the Chronicles, often with great minuteness. Much is also learned from the contemporary biographer of Eadward. He asserted the claims of Harthacnut, the son of Cnut and Emma, to the crown of his father; but he had to consent to a division of the kingdom, and could only secure Wessex for Harthacnut, while Harold reigned in Northumberland and Mercia. He then acted as the chief minister of Emma, while she was regent on behalf of Harthacnut during his first reign. During this time the Aetheling Aelfred, son of Aethelred and Emma, landed in England in the hope of winning back his father’s crown; but coming into the power of Harold, he was blinded by his order, and died of his wounds. Godwine was said to have betrayed Aelfred to Harold, and the charge was eagerly seized upon by the Norman writers. But it was not invented by them. At the beginning of Harthacnut’s second reign in 1040, Godwine was formally accused of the death of Aelfred, and was regularly tried and acquitted. His guilt is asserted in a poem inserted in one of the Chronicles, but the words which tell against him are carefully altered in another version. The story is told with great confusion and contradiction, and the version unfavourable to Godwine seems to be inconsistent with his position at the time as minister, not of Harold, to whom he is said to have betrayed Aelfred, but of Harthacnut, whose kingship seems to be forgotten in the story. Godwine remained in power during the reigns of Harold and Harthacnut, and on the death of the last-named king in 1042, he was foremost in promoting the election of Eadward, the son of Aethelred and Emma, to the vacant throne. As earl of the West-Saxons he was the first man in the kingdom, but his power was still balanced by that of the other great earls, Leofric in Mercia and Siward in Northumberland. His sons Swegen and Harold, together with Beorn, the nephew of his wife Gytha, were promoted to earldoms (1043-1045), and his daughter Eadgyth was married to the king (1045). We hear much of his good and strict government of his earldom, and of his influence with the king and with the whole nation. He was not, however, all-powerful; in one very remarkable case, which is most instructive as a piece of constitutional history, he was out-voted in the witenagemdt on a question of foreign policy, In 1047, when his wife’s nephew Swegen Estrithson, now king of the Danes, was at war with Magnus of Norway, Godwine proposed to help Swegen with fifty ships; but the notion was opposed by Leofric, and “all folk” accepted the amendment of the Mercian earl. Godwine had also to strive against the king’s fondness for Normans and other strangers, above all in the disposal of ecclesiastical offices. Godwine’s policy, in this and in other matters, was opposed to all French connexions of every kind. Next to Englishmen he favoured natives of the kindred Continental lands, and he supported a policy of alliance with the empire and its princes. In all this, at home and abroad, he had specially to withstand the influence of the king’s Norman favourite Robert of Jumiéges, appointed bishop of London in 1044 and archbishop of Canterbury in 1051. Godwine was supported by the English bishops Stigand of Winchester and Lyfing of Worcester. The appointment of Robert to the archbishopric marks the decline of Godwine’s power; the foreign influence was now at its height, and the English earl was to feel the strength of it.

In the course of 1051 a series of outrages committed by the king’s foreign favourites led to a breach between the king and the earl. The king’s brother-in-law, Eustace count of Boulogne, returning with his followers from a visit to the king, tried to obtain quarters by force in the houses of the burgesses of Dover. An Englishman who withstood them was killed; a fight followed, in which the count and his company were driven out of the town. The king, hearing the tale from Eustace, bade God wine inflict military chastisement on the townsmen; the earl refused, and demanded a fair trial of the charge before the witan. About the same time men’s minds were stirred by the outrages of several Normans who had received estates in Herefordshire. The influence of the archbishop was used against Godwine, and he was summoned to airpear before the witan at Gloucester as a criminal. He and his sons now gathered the whole force of their earldoms, and marched towards Gloucester in arms. They demanded the surrender of Count Eustace and of the other strangers who had done outrages, whether at Dover or in Herefordshire. The king called the other earls to his help; war was hindered by the mediation υf Leofric, and matters were adjourned to another meeting in London. There the king appeared with an army; Godwine and his sons were arraigned as criminals, and, on refusing to appear without a safe-conduct, λvere outlawed. Godwine and his whole family now left the kingdom, except his daughter, the Lady Eadgyth, who was banished from court to the monastery of Wherwell. The foreign favourites of the king were now supreme.

The next year the tide turned; the feeling of the nation showed itself in favour of Godwine. When his petition for a removal of his outlawry was refused, he came back from his shelter in Flanders at the head of a fleet. In most parts of England he was welcomed; he sailed up the Thames to London; the army gathered by the king refused to fight against him; and. in a great meeting outside the walls of London, he and his family were restored to all their offices and possessions, and the archbishop and many other Normans were banished. Godwine’s friend Stigand succeeded to the archbishopric. The next year Godwine was smitten with a fit at the king’s table, and died three days later, April 15, 1052. His death was worked up into a fabulous tale by his Norman enemies.

The patriotism and good government of Godwine are undoubted; but it is plain that he accumulated vast wealth for himself. Sometimes, it was said, he showed little regard to the rights of the church; but in the only case where we hear both sides, that of some lands in Kent disputed between him and the Norman archbishop, it appears that he had a legal claim. It is much more certain that he was unduly bent on the promotion of his own family. His eldest son Swegen gave great and deserved offence by the seduction of Eadgifu, abbess of Leominster, and still more by the treacherous murder of his cousin Beorn. He was outlawed, but was afterwards restored to his earldom. He accompanied his father to Flanders, but did not come back, having gone on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, on his return from which he died. Of his other sons, the second, Harold, succeeded Godwine in his earldom and Eadward in his kingdom; Tostig, Gyrth, and Leofric, all earls, play a part in the later history; Wulfnoth, the youngest, was a captive of William. Of his daughters the Lady Eadgyth survived her father, husband, and brother, and lived in great honour under the Conqueror. The others were Gunhild and Aelfgifu, the latter of whom appears in the story of Harold’s oath to "William.

See the English Chronicles and Florence of Worcester, 1035-52; the Life of Eadward, published in the Chronicles and Memorials; the iføconuum Emrtue or Gcsta Cnutonis, published by Pertz, and elsewhere; various notices in Domesday, and in the writers of the time generally. All the passages, historical and legendary, bearing on Godwine’s life, are collected and examined in the appendices to Freeman’s History of the Norman Conquest, vols. i. ii.