This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  The figure behind the crown at the time was the man who became St Dunstan. He was a nobleman born in 925. At the age of eighteen he was created Abbot of Glastonbury, for centuries past and centuries to come, an important church. It was from Glastonbury that Dunstan helped to rebuild English monastic orders. He had been banished from England by Edgar’s eldest brother Eadwig. Eadwig was easily distracted and on his coronation day he left the anointing celebrations to amuse himself with a woman and her daughter. He was found, in flagrante delicto, by the bishop, Dunstan. The King was upset, the woman was upset, the daughter was upset and Dunstan ended up in exile, and the daughter ended up married to the King. But a couple of years later, when Edgar became King of Wessex, the historical partnership between Edgar and the now restored Dunstan began.

  Edgar became King of Wessex in 959 when he was sixteen but chose not to assume the throne until he believed he was mature in mind and moral thought. In those days, a man could not be ordained a priest until he was thirty. So we should not separate Edgar’s religious foundation from his reign and the timing of his coronation as late as Whit Sunday at Bath in 973: Edgar was thirty in 973. With Dunstan as his tutor, Edgar based his whole thinking on theology and so the religious communities became important and different than during the reign of many other rulers. Equally, Edgar’s authority was different. It came not from the crown he wore, but from the religious significance of anointment. In the coronation order written by Edgar with Dunstan, the importance of the ceremony was not the placing of the crown on the new king’s head, but the solemn moment of anointment. This was not simply piety. That act set the king apart from other men.

  Shortly after his coronation, the eight kings in Britain (Kenneth, King of Scots; Malcolm, King of Cumbrians; Maccus, King of Islands; Dufnal; Siferth; Huwal; Jacob and Juchil) arrived on the same day at the foot of Edgar’s throne at Chester to beg he should accept their allegiance and their acknowledgement of his supremacy. Even with such fealty, Edgar was not long for his throne. As one of the earliest poems in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us, he died in the seventh month of 975, and terrible times were to come: ‘His son, a stripling, succeeded then to the throne; the name of the prince of earls was Edward. Then the praise of the Ruler fell away everywhere throughout the length and breadth of Mercia, and many wise servants of God were expelled.’

  Edgar had married twice and Edward was his son by the first marriage. But Edward’s mother died and in 964 Edgar married again. His new wife was a widow of the Ealdorman of East Anglia. Her name was Ælfthryth and the surviving son she bore Edgar was Æthelred who was to become known as the Unready. Edward was visiting his step-mother Ælfthryth and his half-brother Æthelred at their home at Corfe Castle in Dorset. On 18 March, he arrived, dismounted, was surrounded by his step-mother’s servants and held while he was repeatedly stabbed until he was dead. So the finger points to Ælfthryth, but nothing is known for certain. What is known is that within a month her son, Æthelred, was crowned in Edward’s place. The King has been described as ‘a child, a weakling, a vacillator, a faithless, feckless creature’.15 Churchill is a little unkind. Æthelred the Unready has had an unfair press. Unready comes from ‘unraed’, meaning ill-counselled rather than not ready.

  What is not in doubt is that in 980 the Viking raiders returned. They sailed across from Ireland – their western stronghold – and attacked Chester. Others landed along the south coast from Kent to Cornwall. They had strongholds in France and some on the Isle of Wight. The memorable confrontation was in the Essex seaport Maldon. Danish Vikings on one side of the river met English Saxons on the other. The Vikings demanded gold, otherwise threatening the English with a storm of spears. The Essex alderman, a man called Byrhtnoth, refused. He pledged to defend the land of his prince, Æthelred. A writer of the time tells us that Byrhtnoth cried that ‘The heathen shall fall in the war. Not so likely shall you come by the treasure: point and edge [in other words, spear and sword] shall first make atonement, grim warplay, before we pay tribute.’ Æthelred again resorted to Danegeld, a common practice after Alfred. But Æthelred could not be certain that his money would buy safety because he had within his ranks many Danish mercenaries. He is said to have ordered the slaughter of all Danes living in the south. Whether or not this story is exaggerated hardly matters because many Danes were indeed killed. The attacks on the Danes living in England started on 13 November, St Brice’s Day, 1002. At Oxford, Danes took refuge in a church, which was burned down. The dead included Gunhilde, the sister of Sweyn I, King of Denmark, known as Sweyn Forkbeard. It is reasonable to think that the Danish king invaded England the following year to seek revenge although there is no primary source material to confirm this.

  The carnage and the massacres were without parallel. For four gruesome years, from Norwich and Thetford in East Anglia to the downs of Kent, to the upper reaches of the Thames, to Exeter in the West Country, limbless, violated, sightless victims of Viking anger were piled high. The slaughter stopped only when, predictably, Æthelred paid more bribes. This time the price was 36,000 pounds of silver – probably three years of the national income. But it was not enough. Sweyn did leave but he returned. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells what happened next. The year was 1011 and the host described by the chronicler was the Danish invader:

  The king and his counsellor sent to the host, and craved peace, promising them tribute and provisions on condition that they should cease their harrying. They had East Anglia, Middlesex, Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire . . . then they besieged Canterbury. And there they seized the Archbishop and kept the Archbishop as their prisoner. Then the host became greatly incensed against the Bishop, because he was not willing to offer them more money and forbade any ransom to be given for him. Moreover they were very drunk. Then they took the Bishop and led him to their tribunal and pelted him to death with bones and the heads of cattle; and one of them smote him on the skull with the iron of an axe so that he sank down and his holy blood fell upon the earth and his holy soul was sent forth to God’s kingdom

  If we find this so horrifying an account of how marauders dealt with a hostage in the eleventh century, then we may pause to consider our own times in the twenty-first century – exactly 1,000 years on. The act of hostage-taking has not much changed; nor has the motive. Nor have the likely consequences for a prisoner when a demanded ransom is not paid. The difference between the times of King Alfred and those of Æthelred was that where Alfred used gold and the edge of his sword to bring about peace, Æthelred relied on the Danegeld. Consequently money was hard to come by. So much had been paid out that it probably took Æthelred’s counsellors a great deal of time before they could find enough to satisfy the invaders. Æthelred’s time was running low. Moreover, a new moment in British history was approaching. We would be hearing of a great imperial king, Cnut, and not hearing much of a remarkable woman, Emma of Normandy, who would be mother of two kings and wife of two kings. First the arrival of Cnut.

  Cnut was the son of Sweyn Forkbeard and in 1013 he accompanied his father on raids into England. They penetrated deeply and proceeded the conquest of the monarchy. Sweyn’s forces were so powerful that the five boroughs of Danelaw capitulated, as did Oxford and Winchester. London held firm, but that was no matter because it soon fell and Sweyn was accepted as lord of West Mercia – a traditional Wessex stronghold. Æthelred left the country. He really had no choice. Sweyn had usurped his authority so he took refuge with his brother-in-law, the Duke of Normandy, with his wife Emma, the duke’s younger sister. Emma was one of those too often mislaid links in Saxon history; a half century on, her link to England would bring William to Hastings: Emma of Normandy was to be the mother of Edward the Confessor.

  It was at this point that Sweyn, instead of enjoying the fruit of his campaign, died. He had been King of Denmark for nearly thirty years and had spent much of that time raiding England, especially after the killing of his sister Gunnhild during the massa
cre of St Brice’s Day, 1002. He had been king of Danish England for only forty days or so when he had a fall from his horse and on 3 February 1014 he died at his home and headquarters, Gainsborough. The English returned to their exiled monarch, Æthelred, with petitions that he should return to England with his bride, Emma of Normandy. There is no evidence that he wanted to return, but it could be that Emma displayed her ambition sufficiently enough to persuade him to do so. But the line and loin of Sweyn Forkbeard ran strongly and deeply in young Cnut. He decided that he would claim the English throne for Denmark. Equally, the blood of famous lineage flowed through Wessex veins. Æthelred may have found testing times too much, but his son brought, for a short moment, the style and vigour that Alfred himself would have found inspiring. This was Edmund, who would be dubbed Ironside for his exploits. It was Edmund, barely freed from his teenage years, who gathered a loyal band to harry and strike the invaders. When Æthelred died in 1016, Edmund became king. He was successful and in two years had built a reputation for his exploits. Then, at the mere age of twenty-two, Edmund died. How and why, we are uncertain. It was as if the Wessex line had snapped. The counsellors and burghers believed no fate would will them to victory and they abandoned their pedigree and gave their allegiance to Cnut.

  Cnut promised to rule for all men’s good. Yet there was still the ambition of Emma of Normandy with which to contend. Æthelred was dead; Edmund Ironside was dead; but Emma’s sons weren’t. And their father was Æthelred. The counsellors of the English had agreed to abandon the family of Æthelred from its royal line, in other words, its claim to the throne. But kings don’t stay kings if they rely on paper agreements. Cnut saw just one way out of this dilemma; marry the opponent. So Cnut married Emma. But he already had a wife and a son. He packed them off first to the north and made his wife his queen there, and then later he made her Regent of Norway. Emma and Æthelred’s sons were not allowed to live in England – nothing was left to chance – and by 1016 they were living in Normandy.

  Cnut was King of Denmark and conqueror of Norway. Soon he controlled everything from the entrance to the Baltic Sea down to the Bay of Biscay. His was a real and large empire with England its headquarters. And so Cnut’s was a careful and wary reign of assurance and cajoling, but interestingly he did all this from England. He liked the climate, the way of life and the laws and institutions that Edgar had established. Cnut would have liked to have ruled in the style of Edgar, regarding his reign as seventeen years of relative peace. Cnut was a holy-minded man who now hoped for the blessing of wisdom. He developed a system that we would now call devolved government. People had more responsibility for their affairs, but were not independent. Cnut did not want England to go back to warlords and so, for example, in Cnut’s England a very real Danish relationship between the throne and the people who were in charge of the regions developed. And, in the English hierarchy, the Danish title of earl emerged. The earl was appointed by the king. So, the interests of the king would override those of the region. This was a change in the way that England was governed.

  By 1030 or so, the Danish earls had disappeared. Cnut’s chief advisers then seemed to be Godwine (often Godwin), Earl of Wessex, and Leofric, Earl of Mercia, both Anglo-Saxon. Here we have another important clue in the historical detective story. The rivalry of these two families, Godwine’s and Leofric’s, meant it was now quite impossible that England would be united against the Normans when they invaded in 1066. When, in 1035, Cnut died, his empire became leaderless because no one could separate ambition from constitutional sense. He had three sons, but none was impressive; certainly not one of them had the notion that something other than brawn was necessary to rule effectively. The Wessex line was always a possibility through another two sons of Emma of Normandy (by Æthelred): Edward the Albino and Alfred the Innocent. They were living in exile in France and one of them, Alfred, immediately on Cnut’s death travelled to England. Enter the amazingly ambitious Earl Godwine of Wessex. Albert was intercepted, his courtiers killed; he was blinded and destined to spend his days ineffectual in an Ely monastery. We are getting close to the events that led to 1066 and more than that. Cnut had wanted his son Harthacnut (Emma was his mother) to succeed him as King of England and Denmark. But there was a war on Denmark’s borders and he simply couldn’t leave for England. Godwine and Emma said Harthacnut should be declared King, even if he stayed in Denmark. But Leofric, Godwine’s rival, proposed that another son of the late King should be regent. (Leofric’s teenage wife, by the way, was Lady Godiva.) His name was Harold. This was Harold I. The Saxons called him Harold Harefoot. By 1037, Harthacnut was still in Denmark. Harold Harefoot was recognized as King and Emma went into exile, in Flanders. Godwine, being Godwine, now supported Harold. But Harold didn’t last long and as soon as he was dead Harthacnut arrived to claim the throne. But like all of Cnut’s sons, he died at about the age of twenty-five. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle suggests the King was in drink: ‘The year 1042: in this year Harthacnut died as he stood at his drink and he suddenly fell to the ground with a horrible convulsion; and those who were near took hold of him, but he never spoke again, and passed away on June 8.’

  Edward the Albino (later the Confessor) was the only choice as successor as far as Emma was concerned, although the arrangement did not quite work in her favour: ‘The year 1043: in this year Edward was consecrated King in Winchester on the first day of Easter with great ceremony. Soon in this same year the King had all the lands which his mother owned confiscated for his own use, and undertook from her all that she possessed.’ Why so harsh with his old mother? Very simply, they did not get on. Edward thought she had always favoured his brother and she had established a cabal of influence that could have been used against him. These were classic signs of a dowager attempting to be the real power and to even rule. Her confidant in all this, or so Edward thought (probably rightly), was the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stigand. Edward took no chances and so confiscated everything Stigand owned or laid claim to. Moreover, it was clear that Earl Godwine was determined to be the real kingmaker. It was far from simple for the Wessex earl. Edward was never a hard and ruddy character. He was an albino, which added a sense of mystery, and he was also a pious man who felt unsafe in his newly given realm, which was why he brought his own Norman priests and administrators into his court and why land was given to Norman families who would protect him.

  The introduction of Normans into the court and realm of Edward the Confessor is a further reminder that just as Caesar was not the first Roman seen by the Britons, so William the Conqueror was hardly the first Norman in England. The Normans were already established when, in 1066, Duke William landed at Pevensey. The Normans who followed Edward to England were increasingly suspicious of Godwine and his ambitions for his sons. However, Godwine grew more powerful with Edward on the throne, even though the King regarded him with great suspicion and still saw him as the man behind the death of his brother, Alfred. Alfred’s elder sons became earls. One of them, Swein, stretched family loyalties when he seduced an abbess and murdered his cousin, one of the King’s earls. Edward publicly declared him to be ‘nithing’, meaning ‘a man without any honour’. Swein fled to Flanders. Yet, Godwine was not invulnerable, especially as the accusations about Albert never went away. In 1051, the Normans convinced Edward that Godwine’s evil act could no longer be ignored. Godwine was driven into exile.

  It was about now that the story of the right of William of Normandy to the English throne becomes obvious. With Godwine away, William visited England and, so it would seem, talked to Edward about the succession. There is no evidence to hand that William had a promise that he would succeed Edward. Yet, let us consider three points: although there were Norwegian claims – and they would be enforced with bloody consequences – Edward’s nephew’s son, Edgar, was the blood line to the throne, but was too young and had no support to defend the claim. Secondly, the other contender for the throne of England was the Godwine family. Edward was perhaps a ditherer but he had
made it clear that he still had his suspicions (perhaps solid belief) that the Godwines had intercepted his brother Albert. The Godwines were in exile. Thirdly, Edward felt comfortable with his Normans. He would be advised by his Normans at court that the Godwines had to be stopped and that William was the natural and blood successor, even invoking the family connection through his disgraced mother. So on balance, if we want to take an opinion, the likelihood is that Edward would at the very least have indicated that he favoured William as his successor even if he did not make promises. All this is important when considering the reasons for the invasion and the utter changes these islands were to experience after the invasion of 1066.

  However, the Godwines did not give up a throne so easily and they succeeded in their ambition. In 1052, Godwine returned from exile with an army raised in Flanders. With his son, Harold Godwineson, Godwine forced Edward to give back his authority in England. Godwine died shortly after his return and Harold succeeded to the authority his father had won from Edward. Then, in January 1066, Edward died and by his death set in train the invasion. This, from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: