Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Kings & Queens (6 page)

N
o English king has had a worse press than Ethelred the ‘Unready’. Even Richard III and bad King John had their reprieves, but Ethelred has had more disparaging rhymes written about him than any other monarch. Writing a century after his death, William of Malmesbury said of him:

But what did Ethelred do to earn such a reputation? Can a man who reigned for 38 years have been all that bad? His great calumny was to give up, not even to try to defend, all that his ancestor Alfred the Great had painstakingly secured from the Vikings nearly two centuries before.

The Anglo-Saxon empire was by the 980s an evidently prosperous state, one of the wealthiest in Europe, with rich pickings to be had if its borders were not well defended.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
tells of a government in disarray, of indecision, treachery, ineptitude, even cruelty, of which Ethelred was the chief culprit.

Facing wave upon wave of Viking invasion, the king became ever more desperate. For a long time Danes had been settled under the Danelaw in eastern parts of the country. In a pique of paranoia, Ethelred issued a decree in 1002 that all Danes be massacred, on the grounds that they wished to depose him. Furthermore this order of execution was extended to all members of his governing counsel, the Witan. Ethelred’s nickname, the ‘Unready’, is a twelfth century translation of the Anglo-Saxon word ‘Unraed’, meaning ‘ill-advised’, or ‘having no counsel’, and may originate from this event, known as the ‘Massacre of St Brice’s Day’.

There may well be some exaggeration in this account, but it nevertheless shows the degree of madness that had taken hold of Ethelred’s mind. The king, intent at all costs on looking after number one, would ensure he and his family retreated to a safe distance from the flare of battle. One rare instance of initiative amid all the carnage was Ethelred’s decision to marry again, this time a Norman noblewoman, named Emma.

The move turned out to be politically expedient. By this time the north of France had been granted to the ‘Northmen’, hence the name Normandy, and they were using these shores to launch raids on the south coast of England. In marrying Emma, Ethelred could apply enough pressure to stop this and also find a useful ally in times of refuge. When, after 1013, the invasion force under Swein Forkbeard ruthlessly destroyed one city after another, including even the capital Winchester and London, the English king, Emma and their two sons (one of whom was the future Edward the Confessor) fled into exile in Normandy.

Now, as has happened on other occasions of peril, England were rescued by the weather. Their harsh winter of 1014 did for Forkbeard, and while the Danes were busy readying Canute to take his place, the English sent for their king in exile.

His pride puffed up, Ethelred duly consented, though was obliged to accept certain restraints if he were to sit upon the throne again. No longer would he extort high taxes from his subjects, or enslave them. Indeed he should govern in the caring manner of his illustrious predecessors in good Anglo-Saxon spirit. The terms of the agreement were formally written down and enshrined in
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
. This ‘treaty’ represented the first constitutional settlement in England between king and his people. It anticipates the Magna Carta of some 200 years later, and even the Reform Acts of the 19th century.

With a resolve hitherto unknown, Ethelred set about forcing back the Danes, albeit briefly. This time he had along side him the strength and military nous of his now full grown son and heir, Edmund ‘Ironside’.

E
dmund II, nicknamed Ironside ‘for his valour’, had a considerable task before him on taking over the crown from his weak father, Ethelred II. Though the nation had expressed its forgiveness of their errant king when he vowed to fight the Danes, Ethelred’s backsliding and death soon afterwards left a divided country for Edmund to rule.

Indeed Ethelred’s reign had caused such deep resentments that a powerful lobby, voiced by the bishops of Wessex, opposed Edmund’s kingship and instead wished to make the Danish Canute their king: ‘They repudiated and renounced in his [Canute’s] presence all the race of Ethelred, and concluded peace with him, swearing loyalty to him.’

Edmund had inherited a nation at war with itself. Canute drew on supporters in the north and east to besiege Edmund’s stronghold in London, while Edmund rallied as many of his countrymen to his side, especially from his ancestral Wessex. In one campaign after another Edmund was victorious. After 30-odd years of humiliation, here at last was an Anglo-Saxon king behind whom the nation could unite.

Alas some wounds would never heal. In what was probably a treacherous plot, one Eadric of Mercia joined forces with Edmund when the going suited, only to revert to his alliance with Canute at a critical stage in the Battle of Ashingdon, near Southend. Such double-dealing was, in fact, quite commonplace in Ethelred’s time but it was a decisive blow for Edmund’s cause – ‘all the flower of England perished there’.

However, Edmund survived the battle. Later, while in retreat in Gloucestershire, Canute caught up with him and curiously the two warriors – perhaps out of mutual respect, perhaps for political expediency, but perhaps with skulduggery in mind – agreed to a truce. Indeed they swore to be brothers, exchanged garments, weapons, even gifts. Then they agreed to partition the nation, Canute ruling the north, Edmund the south. An Anglo-Saxon church survives at Deerhurst where this pact was made. But within a month Edmund was dead, just 23 years old, and Canute was king.

C
anute is credited with being a great king, of both his Danish territory and England. He did indeed rule for nearly 20 years. But he came to the English throne with a bloody past behind him, for as
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
reported at the decisive Battle of Ashingdon,

‘Cnut had the victory, though all England fought against him….’

Canute had to pick up several pieces if he was to win over his new client nation.

The Danish king is remembered for the many good things he achieved: restoring peace and stability, and upholding Christian principles. But to do so would be to whitewash his character.

After Edmund Ironside had routed Canute and his army, the Viking king, on his retreat to Denmark, committed one of the most infamous acts of barbarity on record. He disposed of his English hostages by cutting off their hands, ears and noses - hardly acts of a Christian conscience. His ruthless cruelty was also manifest later when back in England seeking absolute power, when he systematically eliminated all potential sources of opposition.

Once Canute had secured the throne in 1016, he imposed a huge one-off tax on his subjects of £70,000 to pay off his Viking army and fleet, so they could return to their homeland on a good pension. This did at least become the final Danegeld the English had to finance. Nevertheless it was crippling to the treasury.

Thereafter the new king seems to have set about transforming his image into a more benevolent, if tough, leader. Very likely the Catholic Church, through the work of Archbishop Wulfstan, had a hand in this process. In what seems to have been a bid to reconcile himself to the English people, Canute married Ethelred’s widow, Emma of Normandy. Together they planned a series of religious ceremonies designed to lay the ghost of the past.

They underwent a pilgrimage of sorts to Ashingdon where Canute ‘ordered to be built a minster of stone and lime for the souls of the men who were there slain.’ In another act of reconciliation, they humbly translated to Canterbury the relics of St Aelfheah, archbishop of Canterbury, who had been brutally butchered to death by drunken Danish louts during the war years.

Finally, in an attempt to raise himself to the exalted House of Wessex, the king, with the help of his queen, ceremonially presented a magnificent gold cross to the New Minster at Winchester, traditional capital of Saxon England.

Canute tried his very hardest to portray himself as a bona fide English king. Yet he made no attempt, when the opportunity was there, to rise above his station. Unlike his Saxon predecessors, he claimed no divine authority. To make this abundantly clear he gave his famous demonstration on the beach.

His courtiers had claimed, perhaps sycophantically, that Canute was so great that even nature would obey him. The king ordered his throne to be carried down to the water’s edge, whereupon he sat on it and ordered the sea to recede. Contrary to popular understanding of the legend, Canute was not trying to prove that he had power over the waves. He sat there as the waves lapped over his feet. Finally, shin deep in water, Canute announced, ‘Let it be known that the power of kings is empty and worthless compared with the majesty of God.’ This was now the Christian king, having once been a marauding Viking terrorist, whom the English had recast as their own.

T
he popular image of Edward the Confessor is of a tall white-haired man with a long aristocratic face. This noble demeanour certainly served future monks well in reinforcing the idea that this Englishman was a pious, almost ascetic, king whose marriage was reputedly celibate on the grounds of chastity. Hence no heir.

Edward’s later canonisation, based largely on his apparent ability to heal scrofula (a form of tuberculosis of the neck) by touching the sufferer, led to his enormous popularity in the Middle Ages when pilgrims in their droves would visit his shrine in Westminster Abbey in the hope of being cured of their illnesses. This charismatic gift was perceived to come from the king’s divine authority, hence scrofula’s alternative name as the ‘King’s Evil’. If he could cure an individual, the logic ran, he could protect the nation; and so for 400 years Edward rode high as the patron saint of England.

But was he all that religious really? The question arises because of other known facts about him. His everyday life was much as one would expect of a king at this time. He loved hunting, ‘delighting at the baying and scrambling of hounds’, enjoyed listening to bloody-thirsty Norse sagas in the evening, and did not shirk battle duty when required. By all accounts he was a red-blooded male, not otherworldly, as his icon suggests.

His marriage to Edith, the domineering daughter of Godwin, earl of Wessex, had its difficulties. Edward became increasingly suspicious of his father-in-law’s political motives and eventually they came to arms. In the end Edith became her husband’s open enemy. All her property was confiscated and she was sent to a nunnery.

Is it not perfectly possible that Edward and Edith simply failed to conceive a child, or that the union was loveless? Perhaps later church figures embellished the virtue of Edward in order to justify, and promote further, his popularity.

With his background as it was – his mother Emma was Norman, and he was brought up in Normandy where his Saxon father Ethelred lived in exile – you might think he favoured the French as much as the English. He may never have wished for the likes of Godwin (whose son would accede as Harold II) to take the English throne. So it was no wonder that Edward secretly promised the crown to his Norman nephew William, who of course would soon invade to take what he considered rightfully his.

The building of Westminster Abbey must go down as Edward’s major triumph. It easily became the largest church in England and one of the finest in western Europe. Again his inspiration no doubt came from France where, as a boy, he would have seen other cathedrals being built in the grand new Romanesque style.

So why did Edward choose this difficult spot on Thorney Island surrounded by marshland when his dynastic roots lay in Winchester? He may well have been inspired by the tale that the ground was made holy by St Peter, but the real reason lies in its proximity to the City of London.

Though the city had long been the commercial capital, it was here that Edward had fought Godwin in the decisive battles of his campaign against the troublesome earl. Here was the place of his victory and here should be his political capital.

Thus it was in 1050 that Edward the Confessor moved his court to what became called the Palace of Westminster, a name retained to this day as the home of Parliament.