was now become the guest of the Duke, in his palace at Rouen, but in reality he was his prisoner, only to be released on terms. Those terms were soon disclosed, and the English Earl, already marked as the successor of Edward, was made to swear, at Bayeux, as the price of his liberty, to become the guardian of William’s supposed interests in England, and to receive him, on Edward’s death, as King. These oaths he took, with others, upon a chest which William had secretly filled with the choicest saintly relics that Normandy contained. It does not become us, with our later knowledge of the very unsaintly character of the old bones usually palmed off in those times as the relics of saints, to scoff at Harold turning pale when the tremendous character of the contents of that chest was revealed to him. The credulity of that age did not permit him the assumption that the alleged relics were probably no more than the mere ordinary unsanctified plebeian bones and teeth and fragments of skin we may readily presume them to have been, with the same relation to the genuine articles as that of a Bank of Engraving note to one issued by the Bank of England. Harold accepted them, as he could not choose but do, at their face value, so to speak, and trembled. Such is the story handed down to us. The oath taken, Harold was free to return; and, as his own conscience later told him, and as ours must needs tell us, was free to disregard an oath, however solemn, taken under circumstances of compulsion. In two years from that time, January 5th, 1066, the Confessor died, with his latest breath naming Harold his successor—a choice later ratified by the council of the English realm. Harold was elected and proclaimed King, and the warrior-lawyer over in Normandy was left out in the cold. William, however, could not have been surprised at this, and set to work upon the next step in his scheme, which was to obtain the support of the Pope against “the perjurer,” as he was pleased to style Harold. All these things had been thought out long in advance by that wily brain. William, as claimant to the English throne, could be effectively aided by William as champion of the Church’s might; and William had ever been concerned, from motives of policy, to figure as one of the Church’s most devout sons. If you consider it, religion has ever, from the earliest times, been made the stalking-horse of scoundrels: a fact so patent that your playwright or your novelist is commonly concerned to furnish forth his villain with a text or a psalm, and thus moral sentiments on the stage are the stigmata of the wrong-doer. XXXIX