She Wolves (8 page)
Emma was more than a decade older than Cnut and, in spite of the political nature of their marriage, she appears to have quickly gained influence over him. This influence was probably cemented by the births early in their marriage of a son, Harthacnut, and a daughter, Gunnhild. Cnut certainly appears to have treated Harthacnut as his heir, perhaps obeying his promise to Emma.
23
Emma was also crowned with Cnut in 1017 and appears to have enjoyed a higher status than she had done in Aethelred’s reign, even early in her second marriage.
24
It has even been suggested that she can be seen as Cnut’s co-ruler.
25
Certainly, attempts were made to emphasise Emma’s position as an English queen, as seen for example in a letter from 1020 in which the Archbishop of York addressed the king and queen jointly.
26
Whilst this improvement in her status must have been pleasing to Emma she must always have been acutely aware of Aelfgifu’s position as a rival in England. She had probably expected Cnut to quietly repudiate Aelfgifu soon after their marriage and it must have come as a shock to her when the king showed no signs of doing so. Aelfgifu’s whereabouts are not recorded for most of Cnut’s reign but it is possible that she and Emma often came into contact with each other. It has been suggested that Aelfgifu was given a household at Bosham in Sussex and, certainly, it is recorded that a daughter of Cnut drowned there and was buried in the local church.
27
If such a daughter existed, she would have been Aelfgifu’s rather than Emma’s. For Aelfgifu to be lodged at Bosham would have seemed uncomfortably close to Emma’s own base at Winchester, although Cnut may well have liked to keep both his wives within easy access of his court. However, as the sons of both women grew up, Cnut also appears to have realised the difficulties of keeping two rival wives and, in the late 1020s, he apparently began looking around for some way of making provision for Aelfgifu and her children.
As well as being King of England and Denmark, Cnut was King of Norway. In 1029 his regent in Norway drowned which left Cnut with an opportunity to advance Aelfgifu and her children.
28
In 1030, Cnut named his eldest son by Aelfgifu, Swein, King of Norway and dispatched the boy to Norway, along with his mother who was to act as regent.
29
This appointment must have pleased Aelfgifu and is a measure of Cnut’s respect for his first wife and her abilities. However the move was probably less popular with Emma and it may be significant that around the same time her son, Harthacnut, was appointed King of Denmark by his father.
30
Denmark was Cnut’s ancestral kingdom rather than one of his recent conquests and Emma may have felt a sense of satisfaction in the preferential treatment accorded to her own child.
Aelfgifu seems to have adopted her role as regent of Norway with gusto. She and Swein quickly took control of the country and set about trying to mould it into a Danish kingdom, as Cnut would have wanted. According to
Saint Olaf’s Saga
, the pair promptly introduced Danish laws to Norway, such as that forbidding anyone to leave the country without their leave.
31
The king and queen also introduced a number of new taxes to Norway, insisting, for example, that every man over five years of age contribute towards equipping warships as well as taxes in food which were required by the new king and his mother.
32
Although these new laws were introduced in Swein’s name, it was clear to everyone that it was his mother who was the real power in Norway. Even today, ‘Aelfgifu’s time’ is remembered as a period of misery and repression.
33
Aelfgifu was probably only carrying out Cnut’s commands but in the process she made both herself and the other Danes in Norway deeply unpopular, causing a wave of Norwegian nationalism to quickly sweep through the country.
This nationalism quickly took the form of a cult that began to grow up around the grave of King Olaf, the last native Norwegian king. Aelfgifu is reported to have been Olaf’s mistress in her youth and it is possible that she knew better than most how this king was no saint. However, she also recognised the dangers of this cult to Danish rule in Norway and apparently took steps to try to dispel it.
Saint Olaf’s Saga
, which recounts Aelfgifu’s attempts to dispel the cult around Olaf is the only source in which this shadowy queen’s character is fully developed and clearly shows her as something of a clever and determined woman. According to the saga, it was decided to disinter the body of King Olaf in order to see if it showed any signs of sanctity.
34
The body was duly found to be remarkably preserved and only Aelfgifu of those assembled seems to have showed any scepticism:
Then Alfifa [Aelfgifu] said, ‘Mighty little do bodies decompose when buried in sand. It would not be the case if he had lain in earth.’ Then the bishop took a pair of shears and cut the king’s hair and trimmed his whiskers. He had long whiskers as people in those days used to have.
Then the bishop said to the king and Alfifa, ‘Now the hair and the beard of the king are as they were when he died, but it had grown as much as you can see here cut off.’
Then Alfifa replied, ‘That hair would seem to me a holy relic only if fire does not burn it. We have often seen wholly preserved and undamaged the hair of persons who have lain in the ground longer than this man has.’
Thereupon the bishop had fire put in the censer, blessed it, and put incense on it. Then he laid King Olaf’s hair into the fire, and when all the incense was burned, the bishop took the hair out of the fire, and it was not burned. The bishop had the king and the other chieftains view it. Thereupon Alfifa bade them lay the hair into fire that had not been blessed. Then Einar Thambarskelfir bade her be silent and used hard language against her. So then, by the bishop’s pronouncement, the consent of the king, and the judgment of all the people, King Olaf was declared a true saint.
35
Clearly, Aelfgifu was a tenacious woman and unwilling to admit that she had been beaten. Beaten she was, however and, by 1035, both her and Swein’s positions were untenable and the pair fled back to Denmark as failures.
36
This was, perhaps, the end of Aelfgifu’s ambitions for her eldest son, Swein, who died soon after their expulsion from Norway, leaving her with only one surviving child, Harold, who was living in England.
Swein’s death was not the only one to rock the royal family in 1035 and that same year Cnut himself died suddenly at Shaftesbury.
37
News of the death must have come as a shock to both of Cnut’s wives, although it appears to have been Emma, perhaps present at Cnut’s deathbed, who acted first. Emma settled in Winchester soon after the death and quickly took possession of Cnut’s treasury, presumably hoping to hold it until her son, Harthacnut, could return from Denmark to claim it. It was at this point that Emma announced that Harthacnut had been named as Cnut’s successor in England, although this was strongly disputed.
The news of Cnut’s death would have taken longer to reach Aelfgifu in Denmark and she must have been equally shocked at the news. She was probably well aware of Emma’s hopes that Harthacnut would succeed to the throne both Denmark and England and whilst Harthacnut was already established in Denmark, she may have quickly turned to look at England with hopes for the future of her second son, Harold. Certainly with Swein’s death she had little to hold her in Denmark and by the end of the year, at the latest, Aelfgifu had returned to England and been reunited with her son, Harold. Harold Harefoot is a shadowy figure and it is likely that Aelfgifu was the driving force behind his actions following Cnut’s death, just as Emma was behind the actions of her own sons.
It was certainly Harold who took the initiative and, soon after his father’s death, he went to the Archbishop of Canterbury and demanded to be crowned King of England.
38
It seems likely that Aelfgifu would have been behind this direct attempt to pre-empt Emma but if this was the case, she was to be unsuccessful. The Archbishop, who perhaps had already been approached by Emma, refused to grant Harold the crown. Instead he placed the coronation regalia on the high altar, prohibiting anyone from touching it. This must have been a blow to Aelfgifu’s hopes and both she and Emma had to resign themselves to the succession being decided by the council.
Emma and Aelfgifu may have been present at the royal council that was held at Oxford and their presence would have contributed to the already tense atmosphere in the kingdom. Both women had certainly been busy rallying their supporters in the months since Cnut’s death and it appears to have been Aelfgifu who was the more successful. At the council it was decided that although Harthacnut was his father’s heir, Harold as the only son of Cnut present in England was to rule England as regent until the return of his brother.
39
This situation would not have been judged satisfactory by either of Cnut’s queens but, certainly, it was Aelfgifu who had the upper hand and, around that time, Harold was also able to deprive Emma of the royal treasury, further cementing his hold on the kingdom. Rather than bringing the rivalry of the two women to an end, however, the council at Oxford appears merely to have increased the tension between them.
Numerous Anglo-Saxon and later medieval chronicles refer to suggestions that neither Swein nor Harold were sons of Cnut. Florence of Worcester, for example, claims that Swein:
Was said to be his son by Aelfgifu of Northampton, daughter of Ealdorman Aelfhelm and the most noble lady Wulfrun; but some asserted that he was not the son of the king and this Aelfgifu, but that this same Aelfgifu wished to have a son by the king, but could not, and therefore ordered to be brought to her the newly born infant of a certain priest, and made the king fully believe that she had just borne him a son.
40
Florence of Worcester had also heard a similar story about the birth of Harold, whom he claimed to be a foundling and the child of a humble shoemaker rather than the king.
41
Stories such as these appear to have become common around the time of Cnut’s death and, tellingly, a version exists in the
Encomium
of Queen Emma herself. In this account, Aelfgifu was a ‘concubine’ of Cnut, rather than his wife, and Harold, the son of a servant, was taken by Aelfgifu to pass off as her child by the king.
42
It seems likely that Emma was the source of the rumours both about Aelfgifu’s concubinage and the rumours of her sons’ births. This was probably a deliberate policy to damage the status of Harold in the eyes of the nobility of England, thus emphasising her own legitimate marriage to Cnut and the legitimacy of her son, Harthacnut.
If Emma resorted to dirty tricks in order to denigrate the son of her rival then she was not the only one. By August 1036, word had reached Gunnhild, Emma’s daughter by Cnut who was living in a Germanic state, that Aelfgifu was working to ensure the succession of Harold.
43
Aelfgifu was apparently holding feasts and offering gifts to the nobles of the kingdom in order to bring them round to her point of view. This together with fact that Harthacnut had still not materialised in England appears to have strengthened Aelfgifu’s cause in relation to her rival. Emma could spread rumours about Aelfgifu and Harold but without a son present in England, there was very little that she could do to advance her own cause.
By mid-1036, Emma herself appears to have become exasperated at Harthacnut’s failure to arrive and claim the English crown; for the first time in twenty years, she once again looked towards her sons by Aethelred. According to Emma’s own account, written several years after the disaster of 1036, it was Harold himself who summoned her two older sons to England, forging a letter to appear to be from their mother inviting them to claim the English crown.
44
However it seems unlikely that Harold and, for that matter, Aelfgifu would have risked summoning rivals to England in 1036. A more likely candidate is Emma herself, writing to her sons, pointing out to them: ‘I wonder what plan you are adopting, since you are aware that the delay arising from your procrastination is becoming from day to day a support to the usurpers of your rule’.
45
It is unlikely that Emma expected both sons to heed her summons. Both decided to come to their mother separately and Edward arrived safely with Emma in Winchester. Alfred, however, decided to come by a less direct route and his party was intercepted by Harold at Guildford. Simeon of Durham writes:
[Alfred] Was carried heavily chained to the Isle of Ely; but, as soon as the ship reached the land, immediately his eyes were there most cruelly torn out, and then he was taken to the monastery and delivered to the custody of the monks.
46
Alfred died soon after his blinding and Edward, hearing the news, fled quickly back to Normandy leaving his mother alone and without sons in England once again. Aelfgifu, who was so often behind the actions attributed to her sons, may have played a role in ordering the murder of Alfred and it would have given her some satisfaction to be behind the death of the son of the rival who had deprived her of her husband and her sons of their inheritance.
The death of Alfred and Harthacnut’s continued failure to return to England marked the end of Emma’s hopes for the English crown for one of her sons for some time and, in 1037, Harold was finally able to claim the crown in his own name. According to the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, Emma was ‘driven out without any mercy to face the raging winter beyond the sea to Bruges’.
47
Once again, Emma’s propagandist would appear to have been behind this account but there is no doubt that in 1037 with Emma driven to Flanders as an exile, her future looked bleak indeed. Aelfgifu, now the only queen in England, must have been jubilant and apparently set about ruling England alongside her son, Harold Harefoot.
Emma of Normandy’s prospects looked bleak in 1037, but she was not defeated and from Flanders she sent once again to Harthacnut, asking him to come and claim the English crown.
48
Harthacnut, perhaps angered at the way that his mother had been treated, finally arrived in Flanders with a fleet in early 1040. Emma and Harthacunt were still in Flanders when, on 17 March 1040, Harold Harefoot died suddenly in England having reigned as king for only three years.
49
Aelfgifu of Northampton disappears from the sources with the death of her only surviving son and it seems likely that she quickly fled, knowing that her rival would return to take her vengeance. Her fate is a mystery but she cannot have enjoyed a happy old age.