It did not suit very well that one Norman gentleman after another came to London to fill some high official position. Eadward appeared to wish to surround himself wholly with Normans, and the whole aspect of the English court was changed little by little. The king proved his own weakness in every way—he was as like Æthelred the Unready as a good man could be like a bad one.
Godwine grew more and more angry, and his determination to show that England could do without the crowds of interlopers who were having every thing their own way worked him disaster for a time. There was a party of the king's friends journeying homeward to Normandy, who stopped overnight in the city of Dover and demanded its hospitality in insolent fashion. The Dover men would not be treated like slaves, and a fight followed in which the Frenchmen were either killed or driven out of the town. Eadward of course sided with his friends, and was very indignant; he sent orders to Earl Godwine, who was governor of the region, to punish the offenders, but Godwine refused squarely unless the men should have been fairly tried and given a chance to speak for themselves. This ended in a serious quarrel, and the king gained a victory without any battle either, for there was a sudden shifting of public feeling in Eadward's favor—Godwine's own men forsook him [Pg190] and were loyal to the crown, and the great earl was banished for conscience sake, he and all his family, for the king even sent away his own wife, though he kept all her lands and treasures, which was not so saint-like and unworldly as one might have expected. One of Godwine's sons had proved himself a very base and treacherous man, and the earl had shielded him; this was one reason why his defence of English liberty was so overlooked by his countrymen, but the Normans had a great triumph over this defeat, and praised the pious king and told long stories of his austere life, his prayers, and holy life. After he was canonized these stories were lengthened still more, but while he was yet without a halo some of his contemporaries charge him with laziness and incapacity. He certainly was lacking in kingly qualities, but he gained the respect and love of many of his subjects, and was no doubt as good as so weak a man could be. After his death Englishmen praised him the more because they liked William the Conqueror the less, and as for the Normans they liked anybody better than Harold, who had been a much more formidable opponent in his claim to the English crown. Mr. Freeman says: "—————— The duties of secular government ... were ... always something which went against the grain. His natural place was not on the throne of England, but at the head of a Norman abbey.... For his virtues were those of a monk; all the real man came out in his zeal for collecting relics, in his visions, in his religious exercises, in his gifts to churches and monasteries, in his desire to mark his [Pg191] reign as its chief result, by the foundation of his great abbey of Saint Peter at Westminster. In a prince of the manly piety of Ælfred things of this sort form only a part, a pleasing and harmonious part, of the general character. In Eadward they formed the whole man."