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