Gytha, when the city yielded, withdrew to the Steep Holm, and thence to Flanders.  Her grandsons fled to Ireland; from thence, in the course of the same year and the next, they twice landed in Somerset and Devonshire.  The Irish Danes who followed them could not be kept back from plunder.  Englishmen as well as Normans withstood them, and the hopes of the House of Godwine came to an end.

On the conquest of Exeter followed the submission of the whole West.  All the land south of the Thames was now in William’s obedience.  Gloucestershire seems to have submitted at the same time; the submission of Worcestershire is without date.  A vast confiscation of lands followed, most likely by slow degrees.  Its most memorable feature is that nearly all Cornwall was granted to William’s brother Robert Count of Mortain.  His vast estate grew into the famous Cornish earldom and duchy of later times.  Southern England was now conquered, and, as the North had not stirred during the stirring of the West, the whole land was outwardly at peace.  William now deemed it safe to bring his wife to share his new greatness.  The Duchess Matilda came over to England, and was hallowed to Queen at Westminster by Archbishop Ealdred.  We may believe that no part of his success gave William truer pleasure.  But the presence of the Lady was important in another way.  It was doubtless by design that she gave birth on English soil to her youngest son, afterwards the renowned King Henry the First.  He alone of William’s children was in any sense an Englishman.  Born on English ground, son of a crowned King and his Lady, Englishmen looked on him as a countryman.  And his father saw the wisdom of encouraging such a feeling.  Henry, surnamed in after days the Clerk, was brought up with special care; he was trained in many branches of learning unusual among the princes of his age, among them in a thorough knowledge of the tongue of his native land.

The campaign of Exeter is of all William’s English campaigns the richest in political teaching.  We see how near the cities of England came for a moment—­as we shall presently see a chief city of northern Gaul—­to running the same course as the cities of Italy and Provence.  Signs of the same tendency may sometimes be suspected elsewhere, but they are not so clearly revealed.  William’s later campaigns are of the deepest importance in English history; they are far richer in recorded personal actors than the siege of Exeter; but they hardly throw so much light on the character of William and his statesmanship.  William is throughout ever ready, but never hasty—­always willing to wait when waiting seems the best policy—­always ready to accept a nominal success when there is a chance of turning it into a real one, but never accepting nominal success as a cover for defeat, never losing an inch of ground without at once taking measures to recover it.  By this means, he has in the former part of 1068 extended his dominion to the Land’s End; before the end of the year he extends it to the Tees.  In the next year he has indeed to win it back again; but he does win it back and more also.  Early in 1070 he was at last, in deed as well as in name, full King over all England.