turning for support to Earl Leofric of Mercia and Earl Siward of Northumbria, whenever he felt himself too much in the grip of Earl Godwin.
At the same time he went to work systematically to contrive openings for placing his foreign friends in positions of influence. Being a man without much energy Edward planned no sudden coup d'état, nor did he achieve any dramatic success in asserting himself; but he did enough, by persistently adhering to the same tactics, to make his reign a period of continual struggle between rival aspirants for ascendancy in his counsels, and he managed so to manipulate events that a French-speaking element in a few years gained a firm foothold in the ranks of the nobility and in the Church, and gradually acquired considerable territorial influence in many parts of central and southern England. It is, of course, easy to arraign this policy as unpatriotic; and, as it ultimately led to the conquest of England by the Normans, Edward has sometimes been denounced as the most worthless of the old English kings. The introduction from abroad of more civilised manners and ideas was in itself, however, no bad thing, and Edward ought rather to be praised for it. It must be remembered, too, that at the outset of his reign England had clearly fallen behind the Continent in many ways, and required to be re-awakened. It seems, then, rather beside the mark to charge Edward with want of patriotism because he attempted to supply new educative influences in the only way open to him, and altogether inaccurate to picture him, as has sometimes been done, as a saintly nonentity entirely at the beck and call of foreign ecclesiastics, and without any policy of his own. The truer picture seems to be that he was neither unpatriotic nor over-saintly, in spite of the grotesque stories handed down about him by monkish biographers of the next generation; he was rather a well-intentioned man of mediocre talent, thrust late in life and unexpectedly into an extremely difficult position, and unfortunately not strong enough to play the king's part with credit to himself or advantage to his subjects.
It is not surprising, then, to find that nothing was done in his long reign of twenty-three-and-a-half years (1042-1066) to weld England together into a more compact state or to retard the growth of feudalising tendencies, and that when he died, leaving no direct heir, the quarrelsome magnates, who had tried unceasingly to overshadow him during his lifetime, held hopelessly divergent views about replacing him.
The outstanding feature of Edward's reign during his earlier years is undoubtedly the constant growth of Godwin's territorial power, and the persistency with which the earl sought to aggrandise himself and his family, not only in his own province of Wessex, but also in Mercia and East Anglia. Godwin's first great success was obtained in 1045, when he induced Edward, in spite of his known preference for celibacy, to marry his daughter Edith and endow her with important estates in many part of
