"The love which Canute had inspired by his wise and conciliatory rule was dissipated by the bad government of his sons, Harold and Harthacnut, who ruled in turn. After seven years of misgovernment, or rather anarchy, England, freed from the hated rule of Harthacnut by his death, returned to its old line of kings, and 'all folk chose Edward [surnamed The Confessor, son of Ethelred the Unready] to king,' as was his right by birth. Not that he was, according to our ideas, the direct heir, since Edward, the son of Edmund Ironside, still lived, an exile in Hungary. But the Saxons, by choosing Edward the Confessor, reasserted for the last time their right to elect that one of the hereditary line who was most available. With the reign of Edward the Confessor the Norman Conquest really began. We have seen the connection between England and Normandy begun by the marriage of Ethelred the Unready to Emma the daughter of Richard the Fearless, and cemented by the refuge offered to the English exiles in the court of the Norman duke. Edward had long found a home there in Canute's time. ... Brought up under Norman influence, Edward had contracted the ideas and sympathies of his adopted home. On his election to the English throne the French tongue became the language of the court, Norman favourites followed in his train, to be foisted into important offices of State and Church, and thus inaugurate that Normanizing policy which was to draw on the Norman Conquest. Had it not been for this, William would never have had any claim on England." The Normanizing policy of king Edward roused the opposition of a strong English party, headed by the great West-Saxon Earl Godwine, who had been lifted from an obscure origin to vast power in England by the favor of Canute, and whose son Harold held the earldom of East Anglia. "Edward, raised to the throne chiefly through the influence of Godwine, shortly married his daughter, and at first ruled England leaning on the assistance, and almost overshadowed by the power of the great earl." But Edward was Norman at heart and Godwine was thoroughly English; whence quarrels were not long in arising. They came to the crisis in 1051, by reason of a bloody tumult at Dover, provoked by insolent conduct on the part of a train of French visitors returning home from Edward's Court. Godwine was commanded to punish the townsmen of Dover and refused, whereupon the king obtained a sentence of outlawry, not only against the earl, but against his sons. "Godwine, obliged to bow before the united power of his enemies, was forced to fly the land. He went to Flanders with his son Swegen, while Harold and Leofwine went to Ireland, to be well received by Dermot king of Leinster. Many Englishmen seem to have followed him in his exile: for a year the foreign party was triumphant,