CHAP. IX. Cnut. 10161035. these rivals still left Cnut uneasy on his throne. Æthelred's two sons by his marriage with Emma, The Reign of Elfred and Eadward, had remained with their mother at the court of Rouen; and Richard the Good, hampered though he was with border wars, was too dangerous a foe to neglect. The young Normans who, weary of peace and order, were just now following Roger de Toesny to Spain for a blow at the Moslem, would as soon have followed him to England to strike a blow for their duke's nephews. But Cnut matched the marriage policy of Ethelred with a marriage policy of his own. Young as he was, he was perhaps already father by an earlier wife of two children, Swein and Harald; but these with their mother were set aside, and the king sought for wife Ethelred's widow and the mother of his only rivals, Emma herself. Emma was ten years older than her new wooer, but her consent seems to have been quickly given, and her brother, the Norman duke, would naturally see in this new alliance the advantage he had seen in the old. With the murder of Eadric and the marriage of Emma all danger of a disputed throne was at an end; and with the passing away of his dread, the nobler and grander features of Cnut's temper were to develope themselves. The conqueror rose suddenly into a wise and temperate king. In nothing did his greatness show itself more clearly than in his anxiety to obliterate from men's minds the foreign character of his rule. At first sight indeed his triumph appeared to be a crowning of the long effort which the northmen had been making for The Danish Conquest. CHAP. IX. Cnut. 1016 1035. two hundred years to win Britain for their own; The Reign of for in spite of Alfred's struggle and of the victories of his sons, it seemed as though a Danish conquest and the rule of a Danish king had won the land for the Dane. It would be hard to overrate the results of such a winning. England would have been torn from all union with western Christendom; it would have sunk into one of the Scandinavian realms; and its fortunes would have been linked with those of Northern Europe. Nor would the results of such a change have been simply political, for the country would have been cut off from the enlightenment and civilization which its actual relations with the west were slowly introducing, while Scandinavia, whose lands were even now hardly emerging from barbarism, had no new element of progress to offer. But what might have been possible a hundred years before was impossible now. The success of the Dane had in fact come too late. Had Ælfred failed to arrest Guthrum's conquest our whole history might have changed. In spite of its union under Ecgberht England was then but a mass of isolated kingdoms without national consciousness or national cohesion. Once at the northman's feet, there was little to prevent it from becoming a northman's land, like its own Danelaw or like the Normandy at the mouth of Seine, a land where the bulk of the ruling class would have been Scandinavians, and whose local position would have made possible, what local position made impossible for Normandy, that it should be linked politically with the Scandinavian realm. But what might have been in Alfred's day could no longer be now. The work of a hundred CHAP. IX. Cnut. 1016 1035. years had made the country a single England. The The Reign of long war had kindled a national consciousness, and had brought about a national union, which no defeat could undo. The victories and the greatness of the house of Ælfred had begotten a pride in the English name, while the peace and prosperity of reigns like those of Æthelstan or Eadgar had raised the land to a new wealth, a new industrial energy. Political feuds might lay such a land at the feet of a Scandinavian ruler, but it was impossible that it could henceforth live a merely Scandinavian life. The conditions, too, under which a nation loses its older identity, were no longer present. The social and political traditions of the English people were henceforth in no danger of being merged and lost in the customs of its conquerors. Had the pirates won a hundred years back their settlement in England would have been an element of the first importance in determining its political character. The earlier Danish conquerors were colonists as well as conquerors, and settlers in the lands they won. But the old period of dispersion, of wandering, of colonization, was over for the Scandinavian peoples. Their revolutions at home had built up the petty realms of the North into great monarchies, whose military force had been shown in the conquest of England. But with these revolutions the migration and settlement of the sea-rovers had ceased. The colonists of the Danelaw had been fairly absorbed in the English people, and Cnut's conquest brought no new settlers. Guthrum was the head of a host which settled on Its character. CHAP. IX. the soil which Guthrum won. Cnut was the general The Reign of of an army which sailed back again homewards when its war work was done. Cnut. 10161035. Its results. The result of the Danish conquest was in fact the very reverse of what it seemed destined to be. It was not Scandinavia that drew England to it, it was England that was brought to wield a new influence over Scandinavia. The North was governed by orders from Winchester. Cnut's northern realms sank into under-kingdoms, ruled by under-kings; Denmark by one of his young sons, Norway in later days by another. It was with English troops that Cnut sailed at long intervals to repress revolt in the northern seas, to fight the Wends, to annex Norway to his Danish realm. It was by despatching English bishops and English preachers to the North that he pushed on the work of its civilization and its conversion to Christianity. The Danes who remained with the king in England held only subordinate offices. Even those whom he had rewarded with high rank in the first flush of victory, were gradually set aside for men of English blood. Thurkill was driven from the land only four years after he had entered on his earldom of East-Anglia; Cnut's nephew, Hakon, was sent to rule in Norway; while of his two brothers-in-law, one, Earl Ulf, quitted England to bear rule in Denmark, and a second, Earl Eric, was stripped of his power in Northumbria and banished from the realm.1 1 In 1021. Eng. Chron. (A. S. G.) 2 In 1029. (A. S. G.) 1 2 3 Probably in 1019. (A. S. G.) 4 The last charter signed by Eric is in 1023. Cod. Dip. 1239. (A. S G.) CHAP. IX. Cnut. 1016. 1035. The policy of Cnut. Cnut was himself the most prominent sign of the influence of England on its Danish conquerors. The Reign of With the instinct of genius, the young king from almost the first moment of his reign cast off the Dane to stand before his people as an English ruler. Fresh from the bloodshed of Assandun, fresh from the brutal murders which secured his throne, Cnut threw himself on the loyalty of his English subjects. Of the fleet and host which had brought England to his feet, he kept but forty ships and a few thousands of hus-carls, a paid body-guard which was strong enough to check isolated disaffection but helpless against a national revolt. By the summons of the bishops, ealdormen, and thegns to a great assembly on Eadmund's death, he showed that his authority was henceforth to rest not on force of arms but on law and custom. The solemn choice and crowning of Cnut at London stamped him in the eyes of the people at large as an English king rather than a foreign master; while his formal renewal of Eadgar's laws in a Witenagemot at Oxford, marked his resolve to rule in English fashion. How completely indeed he had already identified himself with his new English realm we see from his relations with his Danish kingdom.' If he visited it during the winter of 1019-20, it was but to make such arrangements as left Denmark practically a sub-kingdom, whose interests were subordinated to those of England. Jarl 1 Denmark probably passed to Cnut little more than a year after his coronation as king of the English if his brother Harald died about 1018. Dahlmann, "Geschichte von Dannemark," i. 105. (A. S. G.) |