At last, in 1013, there came a Danish invasion of exceptional severity. The marauders dashed through the country from end to end; they took Canterbury and slew the good Archbishop Elfheah (St. Alphege), because he refused to pay them an exorbitant ransom. Then Eadric gathered together the Witan, without the king's presence, and, with infamous treachery to his benefactor, proposed to them to submit entirely to the Danes. So when Swegen came over again in the next year, the whole realm bowed before him, and the great men, headed by the traitor Eadric, offered him the crown. Only London held out for King Aethelred, and stood a long siege, till its citizens learnt that their master had deserted them and fled over sea to the Duke of Normandy, whose sister Emma he had married. Then they too yielded, and the Witan of all England took Swegen as their king. But the Dane died immediately after his election, and then the majority of the English refused to choose his son Cnut as his successor. They sent to Normandy for their old king, and did homage once more to Aethelred; but the traitor Eadric resolved to adhere to Cnut, because he had lately murdered the thegns of the Five Boroughs, and dreaded the wrath of their followers. So Eadric's Mercian subjects and some of the men of Wessex joined the Danes, and there was civil war once more in England, till Aethelred the Ill-counselled died in 1016.
Edmund Ironside and Cnut, 1016.
Then his followers chose in his stead his brave son Edmund II., who was called Ironside because of his prowess in war. The new king was a worthy descendant of Alfred, and would have made no small mark in better times, but he spent his short reign in one unceasing series of combats with Cnut, a man as able and as warlike as himself. The two young kings fought five pitched battles with each other, and fortune swayed to Edmund's side; but in the sixth, at Assandun (Ashington, in Essex), he was defeated, owing to the treachery of the wretched Eadric the Grasper, who first joined him with a large body of Mercian troops, and then turned against him in the heat of the battle (1016).
Then Edmund and Cnut, having learnt to respect each other's courage, met in the Isle of Alney, outside the walls of Gloucester, and agreed to divide the realm between them. Cnut took, as was natural, the Anglo-Danish districts of Northumbria and the Five Boroughs, together with Eadric's Mercian ealdormanry. Edmund kept Wessex, Kent, London, and East Anglia. But this partition was not destined to endure. Ere the year was out the foul traitor Eadric procured the murder of King Edmund, and then the Witan of Wessex chose Cnut as king over the south as well as the north. The late king's young brothers and his two little sons fled to the Continent.
The empire of Cnut.
So Cnut the Dane became King of all England, and ruled it wisely and well for nineteen years (1016-35). He proved a much better king than people expected, for, being a very young man and easily impressed, he grew to be more of an Englishman than a Dane in all his manners and habits of thought. He ruled in Denmark and Norway as well as in this island, but he made England his favourite abode, and regarded it as the centre and heart of his empire. The moment that he was firmly established on the throne, he took measures for restoring the prosperity of the land, which had been reduced to an evil plight by forty years of ill-governance and war. He swept away the great ealdormen who had been such a curse to the land, slaying the traitor Eadric the Grasper, and Uhtred the turbulent governor of Northumbria. Then he divided England into four great earldoms, as these provinces began to be called, for the Danish name jarl (earl) was beginning to supersede the Saxon name ealdorman. Of these he entrusted the two Anglo-Danish earldoms, Northumbria and East Anglia, to men of Danish blood, while he gave Wessex and Mercia to two Englishmen who had served him faithfully, the earls Godwine and Leofric. The confidence in the loyalty of his English subjects which Cnut displayed was very marked: he sent home to Denmark the whole of his army, save a body-guard of two thousand or three thousand house-carles, or personal retainers, and did not divide up the lands of England among them. He kept many Englishmen about his person, and even sent them as bishops or royal officers to Denmark, a token of favour of which the Danes did not altogether approve. He endeavoured to connect himself with the old English royal house, by marrying Emma of Normandy, the widow of King Aethelred, though she was somewhat older than himself, so Cnut's younger children were the half-brothers of Aethelred's.
He gives Lothian to the King of Scotland.
Cnut gave England the peace which she had not known since the death of Eadgar, for no one dared to stir up war against a king who was not only Lord of Britain, but ruled all the lands of the Northmen, as far as Iceland and the Faroes and the outlying Danish towns in Ireland. The Welsh and Scots served Cnut as they had served Aethelstan and Eadgar, and were his obedient vassels. In reward of the services of Malcolm of Scotland Cnut gave him the district of Lothian, the northern half of Bernicia, to hold as his vassal. This was the first piece of English-speaking land that any Scottish king ruled, and it was from thence that the English tongue and manners afterwards spread over the whole of the Lowlands beyond the Tweed.
The rapid recovery of prosperity which followed on Cnut's strong and able government is the best testimony to his wisdom. The wording of the code of laws which he promulgated is a witness to his good heart and excellent purposes. His subjects loved him well, and many tales survive to show their belief in his sagacity, such as the well-known story of his rebuke to the flattering courtiers who ascribed to him omnipotence by the incoming waves of Southampton Water.
The sons of Cnut, 1035-1042.