e and
killed his tax-collectors; in revenge for which he burned their city. He
was a brutal King, whose first public act was to order the dead body of
poor Harold Harefoot to be dug up, beheaded, and thrown into the river.
His end was worthy of such a beginning. He fell down drunk, with a
goblet of wine in his hand, at a wedding-feast at Lambeth, given in
honour of the marriage of his standard-bearer, a Dane named TOWED THE
PROUD. And he never spoke again.

EDWARD, afterwards called by the monks THE CONFESSOR, succeeded; and his
first act was to oblige his mother Emma, who had favoured him so little,
to retire into the country; where she died some ten years afterwards. He
was the exiled prince whose brother Alfred had been so foully killed. He
had been invited over from Normandy by Hardicanute, in the course of his
short reign of two years, and had been handsomely treated at court. His
cause was now favoured by the powerful Earl Godwin, and he was soon made
King. This Earl had been suspected by the people, ever since Prince
Alfred's cruel death; he had even been tried in the last reign for the
Prince's murder, but had been pronounced not guilty; chiefly, as it was
supposed, because of a present he had made to the swinish King, of a
gilded ship with a figure-head of solid gold, and a crew of eighty
splendidly armed men. It was his interest to help the new King with his
power, if the new King would help him against the popular distrust and
hatred. So they made a bargain. Edward the Confessor got the Throne.
The Earl got more power and more land, and his daughter Editha was made
queen; for it was a part of their compact that the King should take her
for his wife.

But, although she was a gentle lady, in all things worthy to be
beloved--good, beautiful, sensible, and kind--the King from the first
neglected her. Her father and her six proud brothers, resenting this
cold treatment, harassed the King greatly by exerting all their power to
make him unpopular. Having lived so long in Normandy, he preferred the
Normans to the English. He made a Norman Archbishop, and Norman Bishops;
his great officers and favourites were all Normans; he introduced the
Norman fashions and the Norman language; in imitation of the state custom
of Normandy, he attached a great seal to his state documents, instead of
merely marking them, as the Saxon Kings had done, with the sign of the
cross--just as poor people who have never been taug