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Updated: May 10, 2025
So Hereward had secrets which he would not tell to her. At last! That, at least, was a misery which she would not confide to Lady Godiva, or to any soul on earth. But a misery it was. Such a misery as none can delineate, save those who have endured it themselves, or had it confided to them by another. And happy are they to whom neither has befallen.
He sat still because the chair was broken. It had been broken now for four years. For the hundred and twenty-ninth time in those years Mrs. Zapp said, in her rich corruption of Southern negro dialect, which can only be indicated here, "Ah been meaning to get that chair mended, Mist' Wrenn." Godiva Zapp was usually called "Goaty," and many times a day was she called by Mrs. Zapp.
Godiva, properly Godgifu, was an undoubted historical personage, the wife of Leofric, Earl of the Mercians, and mother of the Earls Morcar and Edwin, and of Edith, wife first of Gruffydd, Prince of North Wales, and afterwards of King Harold the Second.
No hint does any chronicler give of what manner of men they were, or what manner of deeds they did. Fair, gentle, noble, beloved even by William, they are mere names, and nothing more, in history: and it is to be supposed, therefore, that they were nothing more in fact. The race of Leofric and Godiva had worn itself out.
It attracted him also. He saw on the pedestal, that the piece was called 'Lady Godiva. 'But this isn't Lady Godiva, he said, smiling good-humouredly. 'She was the middle-aged wife of some Earl or other, who covered herself with her long hair. 'A la Maud Allan, said Gudrun with a mocking grimace. 'Why Maud Allan? he replied. 'Isn't it so? I always thought the legend was that.
In the year of Canute's death was born Hereward, second son of Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and Godiva. At the age of eighteen he was a wild, headstrong, passionate lad, short in stature, but very broad, and his eyes were one blue and one grey.
And Torfrida turned herself utterly to serve the Lady Godiva, and to teach and train her child as she had never done before, while she had to love Hereward, and to work day and night, with her own fingers, for all his men. All pride, all fierceness, all care of self, had passed away from her. In penitence, humility, obedience, and gentleness, she went on; never smiling; but never weeping.
Our faith in the story, so beautifully re-told by Tennyson, will not be shaken by the iconoclastic assertion that the effigy is merely an old sign taken from an armourer's shop; that the legend of Lady Godiva is common to half a dozen towns; and that she certainly never had anything to do with Coventry, in any event.
To the majority of the girls Coventry was just a word in the geography book, a place where ribbons were said to be made, and where for a better-read few, some one had hung with grooms and porters on a bridge; this detail, odd to say, making a deeper impression on their young minds than the story of Lady Godiva, which was looked upon merely as a naughty anecdote.
The possible danger of losing her opportunity to become Queen of France proved, however, beyond the ambitious young lady’s powers of endurance, and to the horror of her haughty mother and the delight of the foreign emissaries, the Princess Clementia then and there doffed her silken robes and appeared before all in the historic garb of Lady Godiva.
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