Since her return to England, Emma, ‘the lady,’ had not been idle, for at the accession of the new king she was not only re-established in all her old supremacy, but had recovered much of the wealth which Harold had wrested from her, and the remaining seven years of her life witnessed a continual struggle for ascendancy between her and Edward her son. Edward had no sooner been crowned than he set himself to seize her treasure--doubtless it was national rather than personal property--but Emma, skilled to fish in troubled water, had landed both loaves as well as fishes in her net, and this time Godwine the earl, unfortunately for her, cast his weight into the opposing scale; accordingly, six months after Edward’s coronation, we read-- The King was so advised that he and Earl Leofric, and Earl Godwine, and Earl Siward, with their attendants, rode from Gloucester to Winchester unawares upon the Lady (_Emma_), and they bereaved her of all the treasures which she owned, which were not to be told ... and after that they let her reside therein-- a passage notable in its way, for it brings before us, in close juxtaposition, practically all the great characters of the Confessor’s reign--Ælfgyfu Emma, and the king her son, and the three great earls, with their attendants--Godwine, the great Earl of Wessex, accompanied possibly by his sons Harold and Tostig: Leofric, Earl of Mercia, the ‘grim earl’ of Tennyson’s poem, husband of the famous Godiva: and Siward, Earl of Northumbria, the old Siward of Shakespeare’s _Macbeth_--and suggests a striking subject for pictorial representation, which as yet, unfortunately, no artist’s brush has attempted. It was doubtless in the national interest that the three rival earls were led to combine to support the king against his mother, but we cannot but regret that the circumstance which united this notable and noble trio together in the support of the king--probably the only occasion in his reign when the king ever commanded their united support--should not have been one more heroic than that of forcing a defenceless if grasping old woman to render up the keys of her treasure-chest. We have one more picture of the ‘Old Lady’--the legend of Queen Emma and the ploughshares, a legend peculiarly characteristic of mediaeval sentiment, which is quaintly narrated in full and charming detail by more than one chronicler. Her enemies had slanderously connected her name with that of Alwine, Bishop of Winchester, and she had appealed to the ordeal by fire to clear her reputation.