Crown and Country: A History of England through the Monarchy

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 statement leaves everything open. Was Cnut marrying Emma to reconcile the English? Or to buy off the Normans? Was she in Normandy? Or in England, perhaps under some form of restraint? And on what terms did the marriage take place? Emma already had two sons by Æthelred; while Cnut himself had an English wife or (as Emma preferred to call her) concubine, Ælfgifu, by whom he also had two sons, Swain and Harold Harefoot. According to Emma’s side of the story her marriage agreement with Cnut cut the Gordian knot, since Cnut promised that ‘if God should grant her a son by him, he would never appoint the son of any other wife as his successor’. Such a son, Harthacnut, was soon born, and the children of the couple’s two previous relationships were disinherited, at least as far as England was concerned.

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.

Chapter 5

Confessor and Conquest

Edward the Confessor, Harold Godwinson

EDWARD WAS NOMINATED as king almost before the life was out of his predecessor. ‘Before [Harthacnut] was buried’, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports, ‘all the people chose Edward for king at London.’ Some historians have understood this to mean that Edward II was carried to the throne on a wave of patriotic sentiment for the House of Wessex. It is possible. On the other hand, the verdict of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle suggests, at best, modified rapture: ‘they received him as their king as was natural’.

I

By this time, Edward was already nearing forty. He had spent well over half his life as an exile in Normandy and was probably more French than English. Certainly, he seems to have been happier in Norman or French company. Both his coins, whose portrait type is the most realistic yet, and the Bayeux Tapestry show him with a long, rather lugubrious face, and moustache and beard. The beard began as a rather straggly imperial but became more luxuriant with age. In character, he seems to have had something of that other long-term exile, Charles II, about him. He was ordinarily rather lazy about affairs of state, but, when backed into a corner, he could be both cunning and decisive. And he, too, was determined never to go on his travels again.

The difference, of course, lay in their sexual appetites. Later, the fact that Edward was childless was misunderstood by his monkish admirers to mean that, though married for over two decades, he was voluntarily celibate. On this basis he was named ‘the Confessor’ and honoured as a saint.

But the real Edward was a man and a king of his time. And he did all the things an eleventh-century king had to do. He led his troops and his fleet. He loved hunting, and, when he relaxed of an evening, he liked to listen to the recital of bloodthirsty Norse sagas. Of course, like most English kings, he was pious and showy in his devotions – especially towards the end. But his childlessness, it seems clear, was the result, not of piety, but of mere bad luck – and perhaps of an impossible wife.

Edward’s coronation was delayed for the unusually long period of nine months. This allowed for careful preparation; it also enabled the coronation to be timed to coincide with Easter, the principal feast of the Church. ‘Early’ on Easter Day Edward was crowned at Winchester ‘with much pomp’. Archbishop Eadsige of Canterbury performed the ceremony and ‘before all the people well admonished [the king]’. The Church, clearly, wanted another Edgar: it remained to be seen whether they had got him.

Eight months later, Edward took what he probably saw as his first steps towards becoming his own man. Accompanied by Earls Godwin and Leofric, he rode from Gloucester to Winchester, ‘took his mother unawares’ and stripped her, once more, of her lands and treasures. The reason, the Anglo-Saxon chronicler heard, was that Edward resented the fact that Emma’s behaviour towards him had been lukewarm at best. ‘She was formerly very hard upon the king her son, and did less for him than he wished before he was king, and also since.’ Edward soon relented and made a partial restitution. But for Emma, the glory days were over. She was reduced from the regal state of mater regis to a mere royal widow. And, instead of dabbling in high politics, she seems to have retired to live out the last years of her life at her house in Winchester, where she died in 1052 and was buried next to Cnut.

But Edward soon exchanged one form of female domination for another. For, on 23 January 1045, he married Edith, Godwin’s cultivated, forceful daughter. Her two older brothers had already been made earls: Swein of a new earldom carved out from Wessex and Mercia along the Welsh border, and Harold of East Anglia. United, it seemed, the Godwin family could carry all before it. But there now occurred the first of a series of disastrous quarrels. It was provoked by Swein, who, although the eldest, was the black sheep of the family and seems to have seen himself more as a Danish freebooter than an English aristocrat. He first seduced an abbess and then murdered his cousin, Earl Beorn. Harold was outraged, but Edward, perhaps slyly, eventually pardoned Swein.

Was Edward already tiring of Godwin and his over-mighty family? If so, this would explain why Edward was also building up his own, French, party. His nephew, Ralph of Mantes, son of his sister Godgifu’s first marriage, was made earl of Hereford, which had formed part of Swein’s much larger earldom. And Robert, the former abbot of the great Norman abbey of Jumièges, was made bishop of London. Then, in October 1050, Eadsige of Canterbury, who had been incapacitated for much of the previous decade, died. There followed a disputed appointment. The monks at Canterbury elected a kinsman of Godwin’s. But Edward decided that Robert of Jumièges should have the archbishopric; overturned the election and sent Robert off to Rome to get his pallium (a narrow stole of white wool that marked the papal confirmation of the appointment of an archbishop) from the pope.

Edward can only have intended this as a deliberate challenge to Godwin. Not only was his kinsman slighted, but Canterbury lay at the heart of Godwin’s sphere of influence. Worse was to come. In the course of the summer, another of Edward’s extended French family, Count Eustace of Boulogne, came to visit the king. Eustace had married Edward’s sister, Godgifu, as her second husband, and had had children by her. Was the purpose of his visit, perhaps, to discuss the succession which the childlessness of Queen Edith left vacant? Eustace planned to return via Dover. The unpopularity of the French, already endemic in England, led him to expect trouble, and perhaps even to provoke it. He and his men donned armour and then tried forcibly to quarter themselves in the town. One householder resisted and a Frenchman was killed. A general melee resulted, leaving twenty English dead, and nineteen French, beside the wounded. Eustace complained personally to Edward, giving a slanted version of the story. Edward, happy probably to humiliate Godwin, took Eustace’s side and ordered Godwin, as earl of Wessex, to punish the town. But Godwin refused, ‘because he was loath to destroy his own people’.

Faced with Godwin’s direct challenge to royal authority, Edward convened the witan to meet at Gloucester on 8 September. Meanwhile, Godwin, who ‘took it much to heart that in his earldom such a thing should happen’, summoned his forces. So did Swein (back in the family fold when there was trouble). And so did Harold. The three met at their manor of Beverstone, fifteen miles south of Gloucester. Edward, taken by surprise at the size of Godwin’s army, hastily called on the forces of the rival earls, headed by Leofric.

Once again, civil war seemed inevitable. But, once again, it was avoided. Cooler heads pointed out the obvious:

It was very unwise that they should come together, for in the two armies was there almost all that was noblest in England. They therefore prevented this, that they might not leave the land at the mercy of our foes, whilst engaged in destructive conflict betwixt ourselves.

Matters were therefore postponed to give time for tempers to cool. Hostages were exchanged and the witan directed to reconvene in a fortnight in London. In the interim, the balance of forces shifted. The army of the royalist earls was constantly swollen with the arrival of recruits from the distant north. On the other hand, Godwin’s ‘army continually diminished’. By the time Godwin and his sons had taken up their positions in their London residence in Southwark on the south bank of the Thames, it was clear that the game was up. Stigand, Emma’s former confidant, who was now bishop of Winchester, was sent to deliver Edward’s ultimatum. Godwin, certain now that he would be condemned, refused to appear before the witan, and was immediately outlawed, together with his whole family. This then divided: Godwin, his wife and three of his sons fled to the family harbour at Bosham and thence to exile in Flanders. While Harold, with another brother, rode to Bristol, where a ship was ready prepared to take them to Ireland. Only their sister, Queen Edith, remained at the mercy of her family’s enemies, who were now headed by her own husband. In a grim echo of his treatment of his mother, Edward stripped his wife too of her lands and treasures, and packed her off to a nunnery.

When everything was over, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reflected on the mutability of fortune:

Wonderful would it have been thought by every man that was then in England, if any person had said before that it would end thus! For [Godwin] before was raised to such a height, that he ruled the king and all England; his sons were earls, and the king’s darlings; and his daughter wedded and united to the king.

Now all was lost.

It had not happened without planning, of course. Indeed, Edward, despite the apparently fortuitous course of events, seems to have prepared the ground for the coup with care. He even involved those outside the political elite by abolishing the hated heregeld, which won him instant popularity.

But the completeness of his success tempted Edward to overreach himself. The most obvious symptom was to invite his nephew William, duke of Normandy, to England. William arrived with ‘a great force of Frenchmen’ all of whom were entertained at court. We do not know what passed between uncle and nephew. But the suspicion must be that this was the moment when Edward formalized his nomination of William as his heir. According to Norman sources, Robert of Jumièges, on his way to Rome earlier in 1051, had paused in Normandy to convey the initial offer to William. Now, in Edward’s moment of triumph, the deed was done. William paid homage and Edward received him as heir. The royalist earls pledged their support, and a son and grandson of Godwin’s, who were already in Edward’s hands as hostages, were handed over to William to make sure that the exiled Godwins acquiesced.

What was Edward doing? In retrospect, it looks as though he was taking a decision of enormous strategic importance and deciding – no less – that the future of England should be Norman, not Anglo-Saxon.