III
Only in foreign policy did Æthelred show any initiative with his decision to take Emma, daughter of Duke Richard I of Normandy, as his second queen. The core of Normandy, named after the Normanni (‘Northmen’), had been granted by the French king to the leader of a party of Vikings in 911. The Normans had quickly assimilated to French language and culture. But they preserved an ancestral sympathy for their Viking cousins, who were allowed to overwinter in Normandy in 1000 before making the short Channel crossing to the Solent and attacking England in the spring. Æthelred’s marriage put a stop to such help. Otherwise, he might have got more than he bargained for.
Emma is the first English queen to emerge fully into the light of history. She was handsome, astute and fertile. And she knew how to use a woman’s power, which consisted largely in marriage and childbearing. The result was that, from the moment she married Æthelred and took up residence at Winchester, she became the axis around which English politics turned. For Emma was determined that – let who will be king – it should be her children who would sit on the throne of England.
Emma also had a profound effect on the politics of Æthelred’s reign. His mother, to whom he was devoted, died in about 1000. This meant that Emma was not overshadowed by her, as Æthelred’s first wife had been. Instead, she soon emerged as a political player in her own right. She may have had a role in the palace coup of 1006, in which several leading ealdormen were expropriated, executed or blinded. And she was almost certainly an ally of the man who rode to power on the back of the coup: Eadric Streona (‘the grasper’). Eadric was made ealdorman of Mercia the following year and became the king’s favourite and minister. His rise, as usually happens when a favourite monopolizes power, triggered deep resentment. This further weakened English resistance and led directly to the self-destruction of the great fleet which the English assembled to use against the Vikings in 1009.
By this time it was clear to Swein Forkbeard, Bluetooth’s son and successor as king of Denmark, that England was his for the taking. He invaded in force in 1013, and the north and east quickly submitted to him. Then followed Winchester, until only London, where Æthelred had taken refuge, held out. But finally the Londoners, ‘because they dreaded what [Swein] would do to them’, surrendered as well. Æthelred sent Emma and his two sons by her to safety in Normandy, while he first retreated to the Isle of Wight before joining his family in exile.
But Swein was only a winter-king of England and died on 3 February 1014. What English arms had been unable to do, English weather, perhaps, accomplished. His death was followed by a succession crisis. The Danish occupying force chose Swein’s younger son, Cnut, as king. But the English had other ideas and sent to Æthelred to invite him to return – but on certain conditions. As a pledge of good faith he sent his young son, Edward, as a hostage, to begin negotiations. The complaints against Æthelred included high taxation, extortion and the enslavement of free men. By the end of the talks, Æthelred was forced to agree to govern within the rules established by his predecessors. And the terms of the agreement still exist today, for they were copied at the time into the national book of record, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It reports Æthelred’s undertaking as follows:
that [Æthelred] would be their faithful lord, would better each of those things that they disliked, and that each of the things would be forgiven which had been done or said against him. Then was full friendship established in word and in deed and in compact on either side.
Embedded here in the prose of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is the text, probably even the actual words, of a formal written agreement between the king and his people. It is the Anglo-Saxon Magna Carta. The circumstances in 1014, moreover, were very similar to those 200 years later. A political crisis and a foreign pretender brought the king, more or less naked, to the negotiating table. The throne would be his, but on conditions. The king agrees, since he has no choice. The terms and his consent to them are made public and the whole enshrined in a written document. The result is the first constitutional settlement in English history, and it began a tradition which descends through Magna Carta, the Petition of Right and the Reform Acts, down to the present.
And, even at the time, it seemed to open up a new chapter. Wulfstan, archbishop of York, soon afterwards preached a highly political sermon, almost certainly in the presence of the king and the witan, on the present discontents and their remedies:
the rights of free men are taken away and the rights of slaves are restricted and charitable obligations are curtailed. Free men may not keep their independence, nor go where they wish, nor deal with their property just as they desire …
Nothing has prospered now for a long time either at home or abroad, but there has been military devastation and hunger, burning and bloodshed in nearly every district time and again … And excessive taxes have afflicted us …
But the real indication of change was that Æthelred moved decisively and unexpectedly against the Danes, who found their position untenable and retreated back home.
Æthelred’s new resolution stemmed, almost certainly, from the new prominence of Edmund, his eldest son by his first wife. Father and son were opposites in character: the former took a firm stand on nothing but his kingly dignity; the latter, as his nickname ‘Ironside’ indicates, was a man of action in the best traditions of his house. But Edmund’s rise meant Streona’s decline, and the favourite resisted with all the black arts at his command.
The result drove Edmund to take over the former Viking dominions in the north and east, the so-called Danelaw, in an act of virtual rebellion against his father. At this point, the Danes reinvaded and father and son were reunited. Streona, slighted, betrayed Mercia and Wessex to the Danes, and on St George’s Day, 23 April 1016, Æthelred died. Rival meetings of the witan took place: that in Southampton elected the Danish claimant; that in London chose Edmund.
Edmund now proceeded to show what Æthelred II, with all the time and resources at his command, could have accomplished if he had tried. In a whirlwind campaign, he fought the Danes to a standstill until finally a partition of England along the line of the Thames was agreed: Edmund took the south and the Danes the north, including London. But a month later, on 30 November 1016, Edmund died, aged about twenty-three. His Danish opponent, Cnut, who was even younger, was now acknowledged as Rex totius Angliae (‘king of all England’).
Would the constitutional ideas of 1014 survive and flourish? Would England? In the circumstances of 1016 it seemed rather unlikely.
IV
Cnut, who became ‘king of all England’ in 1016, was the most successful Viking ever. His ancestors had raided England; he conquered it. They had exacted tribute; but he, as king of England, controlled English taxes, the English mints and the English Treasury, and he poured out their wealth on his Danish followers. And he did all this while barely in his twenties. No wonder his skalds, or court poets, hailed him as the true heir of Ivar the Boneless, the master of the longships and the greatest Dane of them all.
Even before he became king, Cnut had given the English a foretaste of his ancestral Viking ruthlessness. When he had been forced to leave England after his father Swein’s death, his last act had been to put in at Sandwich with his fleet. ‘There’, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports, ‘he landed the hostages that were given to his father and cut off their hands and ears and noses.’ In 1017 it was heads that rolled. Those executed included the sons of three ealdormen and Eadric Streona himself, who Cnut seems to have felt had changed sides once too often. The purge extended to surviving members of the dethroned royal family: Eadwig, Ironside’s brother, was first exiled and then lured back to England to his death, while Ironside’s sons, Edgar the Æthling and Edmund, found refuge at the court of Hungary.
But, by the summer, there were already signs that Cnut wished to balance ruthlessness with reconciliation. ‘Before the calends of August [16 July]’, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states, ‘the king gave an order to fetch him the widow of the other king, Æthelred, the daughter of Richard [of Normandy], to wife.’
This