Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (13 page)

Emma, crowned queen of England a second time alongside Cnut in 1017 and mother of his heir, now emerged to play a leading part in a series of carefully calculated religious ceremonies which sought to lay the ghost of the recent bloody past. In 1020 Cnut went on progress in Essex, accompanied by Archbishop Wulfstan and other leading magnates. His destination was Ashingdon, where his final, decisive battle with Ironside had taken place. It had been a disastrous day for the English. ‘There’, lamented the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, ‘had Cnut the victory, though all England fought against him … And all the nobility of the English nation was undone.’ On this progress, Cnut ‘ordered to be built there a minster of stone and lime for the souls of the men who were there slain’ – English as well as Danish. Emma’s presence is not mentioned but the priest Cnut appointed to Ashingdon Minster was Emma’s client, Stigand.

Emma’s role three years later in the translation of the relics of St Ælfheah is much better documented. Ælfheah was the archbishop of Canterbury who had been martyred by the Danish army in England on 19 April 1012 in an orgy of drunken violence. He was half pelted to death with meat-bones and finally felled with an axe-blow to the head. Now Emma, queen of England, with Cnut’s ‘royal son, Harthacnut’, came to Rochester ‘and they all with much majesty, and bliss, and songs of praise carried [the body] into Canterbury’.

Long before this, however, Cnut, probably advised by Archbishop Wulfstan, had entered into a formal agreement with his English subjects. It was reached in a meeting of the
witan
held at Oxford in 1018. ‘The Danes and English’, as
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
summarizes, ‘were united … under King Edgar’s Laws,’ which Cnut soon reissued with his own extensive modifications. Cnut then moved quickly to normalize his rule in England. Most of the Danish army and fleet were paid off with a Danegeld of £72,000 besides a separate payment by London. The sum was vast. But, for the first and last time, the Danegeld actually achieved its purpose and all but forty ships returned home. It was not quite business as usual, however, as Cnut continued the deeply unpopular tax known as the
heregeld
or army tax. This had first been imposed as an emergency measure by Æthelred in 1012 but Cnut kept it going to pay a standing army of
housecarls
or retainers. Some would have remained in England as a garrison, but many accompanied Cnut on his wanderings.

For Cnut’s interests extended far beyond England: to Denmark, which he inherited in 1019, and Norway, which he occupied in 1028, and even to part of Sweden. The acquisition and retention of this vast empire kept Cnut abroad for most of the 1020s. But he was always careful to keep his English subjects informed. In 1019–20 he sent them an open letter from Denmark, and in 1027 another from Rome, whither he had gone to play an honoured part in the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor, Conrad II. These letters, ‘unparalleled in any other country’, complement the spirit of the constitutional settlements of 1014 and 1018. Cnut, as chief executive of England, reports to his subjects as shareholders in a common enterprise. And the analogy of an Annual General Meeting is exact. For the letters – which are addressed, respectively, to ‘all [the king’s] people … in England’ and to ‘the whole race of the English, whether nobles or
ceorls
’ – were evidently intended to be read out aloud at Shire and Hundred Courts and
burh
moots. In view of this audience, part of their message is straightforwardly populist:

I went myself with the men who accompanied me to Denmark [Cnut reported in 1019–20], from where the greatest injury has come to you, and with God’s help I have taken measures so that never henceforth shall hostility reach you from there as long as you support me rightly and my life lasts. Like Alfred, in other words, Cnut is claiming to have settled the Danish question; and, like Alfred, he is a king who takes his people into his confidence.

V

The upshot of all this is that, within a few years of his accession, Cnut the Viking had become more English than the English – at least when he was in England. Nothing better illustrates this transformation than the famous story about Cnut and the incoming tide. Cnut’s courtiers proclaimed that his power was so great that he really ruled the waves. To expose their folly, Cnut ordered his throne be carried to the seashore and placed at the water’s edge. Cnut forbade the sea to advance. But the waves ignored him and soaked his feet. ‘Let all the world know’, Cnut told his now shamefaced courtiers, ‘that the power of kings is empty and worthless’ compared with the majesty of God.

The incident, if true, was a consummate piece of political theatre. But what really matters is that the story is only to be found in the twelfth-century English source of Henry of Huntingdon. For this is Cnut as the English wanted to remember him: the king they had severed from his harsher Nordic roots and remade in their own image as a Christian and a gentleman.

But, of course, a king who was absent from England for almost half his reign had to delegate power. Cnut had been quick to realize this and, as early as 1017, had taken ‘the whole government of England … and divided it into four parts’: Wessex, East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria. Wessex, for the time being, Cnut kept for himself; the other three he gave to so many trusted adherents. The result was to hasten the transformation of the Anglo-Saxon
ealdorman
into the Scandinavian loan-word
eorl
(‘earl’). The
ealdorman
was a figure deeply rooted in his shire; the earl, who was responsible for several shires, was a royal appointee who ruled a vast area arbitrarily assigned by the king.

Several of these earls, naturally enough, were Danes. But two of the most successful were English: Leofric, who was made earl of Mercia, and Godwin, whom Cnut created earl of Wessex. Leofric, husband of the famous Lady Godgifu (Godiva), came from an established
ealdorman
family. But Godwin’s origins are obscure and disputed. Most likely, he was the son of Wulfnoth, the
thegn
(knight) who had led the mutiny of the English fleet in 1009 against the henchmen of the hated Streona, and, beyond that, the great-grandson of the aristocratic chronicler, the
ealdorman
Æthelweard, who was himself of royal blood.

What mattered, however, was not Godwin’s family origins, but the fact that Cnut trusted him – and trusted him enough to advance him to giddy heights. He became a member of the extended royal family through his marriage to Cnut’s sister-in-law (some say sister), Gytha, by whom he had a fine brood of sons, who grew up to be proud, quarrelsome and able, and daughters who made good marriages. He built up a huge landed estate, which centred on his private port of Bosham on the Sussex coast. And, by the latter part of Cnut’s reign, he operated as virtual viceroy of England: ‘what he decreed should be written, was written; what he decreed should be erased, was erased’.

Then, on 12 November 1035, Cnut died at Shaftesbury and was buried in Winchester in the mausoleum of the English kings of the House of Wessex, with whom he had so carefully identified himself in life. Cnut’s death in his early forties was evidently unexpected and left all the pieces on the political chessboard in the wrong places – at least from the point of view of the queen dowager, Emma. Her son by Cnut, Harthacnut, was in Denmark, where he had been titular king since 1028. On the other hand, Harold Harefoot, Cnut’s son by Emma’s rival Ælfgifu,
was
in England, together with his formidable mother, whose appetite for power had been whetted by five very unsuccessful years as regent of Norway.

Which queen would place her son as king? And what moves should Earl Godwin and his fellow power-brokers make? The
witan
met at Oxford soon after Cnut’s death to decide the succession. But it split down the middle – or rather, along the Thames. Earl Leofric, ‘almost all the
thegns
north of the Thames’ and the commanders of the fleet in London threw their weight behind Harold Harefoot, while Godwin and the men of Wessex argued for Harthacnut. Godwin held out for as long as possible. But the weight of opinion against him was too great.

In most other countries, and in almost all subsequent centuries in England, from the twelfth to the seventeenth, such a situation would have led to civil war. But the extraordinarily consensual politics of late Anglo-Saxon England – with their precocious sense of a national interest – instead drove the parties to the unheard-of compromise of a regency. Harefoot was ‘to be governor [regent] of all England for himself and his brother Harthacnut’. The latter’s interest was put in the capable hands of his mother, Emma, who, the
witan
also decreed, ‘should remain at Winchester with the household of the king her son’. The queen dowager’s residence in the capital, with the royal household, Cnut’s treasures and Godwin himself as her right-hand man, meant in turn that she was effectively regent in Wessex.

The situation was awkward in any case. But it looks as though it was Emma’s ambition that destabilized it. She launched a propaganda war by spreading scurrilous stories about Harefoot’s birth. Harefoot struck back by stripping her of ‘all the best [of Cnut’s] treasure’. But, despite the slight, Emma held out in Winchester ‘as long as she could’.

At this moment Emma’s two sons by Æthelred, Edward and Alfred, decided to leave the safety of their exile in Normandy and fish in the troubled waters of an England which they had fled more than twenty years previously. Each claimed, innocently, to ‘wish to visit his mother’. But no one was deceived. Had Emma encouraged their gamble? Or had Harefoot, as Emma was later to claim, tricked these possible rivals into putting themselves into his power?

Probably as reinsurance, the two travelled separately. Edward made for Southampton but was beaten off and returned to Normandy. Alfred, on the other hand, evaded the English fleet and successfully landed at Dover. But he was soon picked up by Godwin’s troops and taken to Guildford. The upshot was another royal murder, which ranked as a
cause célèbre
with Edward the Martyr’s death at Corfe. Alfred’s men were killed or variously mutilated, while the
æthling
(prince) himself was taken to Ely, where he too was blinded, and ‘so carelessly … that he soon died’.

The deed was done ‘by the king’s [Harefoot’s] men’. But what was Godwin’s role?
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
said that he handed over Alfred ‘because such conduct was very agreeable to Harold [Harefoot]’. Godwin himself later claimed on oath that he was only acting on Harefoot’s orders. The issue is important morally: if the first were true, Godwin was an accessory before the fact in Alfred’s murder; if the latter, he was innocent. But the political realities were the same. As early as 1036, Godwin had decided that, with Harthacnut still unable to leave Denmark, his cause and Emma’s was hopeless, and it was time to conciliate Harefoot.

As usual, Godwin read the runes correctly, and in 1037, following Harthacnut’s continued absence, Harefoot was universally accepted as king. Emma, irreconcilable, was driven out ‘against the raging winter’. She found refuge in Flanders, where, under the protection of Count Baldwin V, she settled into a comfortable exile in Bruges. Meanwhile, Ælfgifu, who had been both indefatigable and imaginative in winning over support to Harefoot, was triumphant and probably acted as virtual regent for her colourless son.

But Emma in Bruges was not idle either. She had discussions with Edward. She poured out her troubles to her daughter by Cnut, Godgifu, who was married to Henry, son and heir of the Holy Roman Emperor, Conrad II. But everything depended on her beloved Harthacnut. Only he had the power. Finally, in 1039, an agreement with the now independent kingdom of Norway freed his hands in Scandinavia and he set sail with a great fleet of sixty-two ships to join Emma in Bruges. He overwintered there. But, before he could launch an invasion of England, Harefoot died at Oxford on 17 March 1040.

Once more, this time more by good luck than anything else, England had avoided civil war. Instead, the
witan
‘sent after Harthacnut to Bruges, supposing they did well’. But Emma and Harthacnut, who were taking no chances this time, brought the great fleet with them anyway. Raising the vast sums required to pay off the ships would bedevil the politics of the reign: England had got out of the habit of paying the Danegeld and saw no reason to recommence. Harthacnut’s other concern was to take his revenge on the regime that had kept him, as he saw it, from his inheritance for five years. Harefoot’s body, which had been buried at Westminster, was ‘dragged up and thrown in a ditch’, and moves, which came to nothing, were made against Godwin for his complicity in Alfred’s murder.

Emma was now in her element. As
mater regis
(‘queen mother’), she recovered all the wealth and more that she had lost in 1037. But how to guarantee the future? Her son Harthacnut was only in his early twenties. But he was unmarried and the males of Cnut’s line were, it was now clear, not long-lived. In the circumstances, Emma turned to her other surviving son, Edward, as the spare, if not the heir that she had always considered Harthacnut to be. In 1041 Edward was recalled from Normandy and, according to
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, ‘sworn as king and abode in his brother’s court’. It was during this strange period of double kingship that Emma commissioned the
Encomium Emmae Reginae
, with its frontispiece showing her, Harthacnut and Edward, all three wearing crowns.

But the diarchy did not last long. Emma’s fears about Harthacnut’s longevity proved correct and he had a seizure during a drinking bout at a marriage at Lambeth. He survived the stroke itself but never recovered speech and died on 8 June 1042. He was unregretted: ‘then were alienated from him’,
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
reports, ‘all that before desired him, for he framed nothing royal during his whole reign’. It is a damning verdict and shows that the years of uncertainty which had followed Cnut’s death, and the heavy taxation of Harthacnut’s reign, had dissipated any remaining English affection for Cnut’s house. Its direct male line, in any case, was extinguished. Perhaps it was time to return to the House of Wessex.