His plan succeeded so far as inducing Richard himself, the Duke of Normandy, to espouse his cause, but it did not enable Ethelred to triumph over his enemies. They, on the contrary, conquered him, and, in the end, drove him from the country altogether. He fled to Normandy for refuge, with Emma his wife, and his two young sons. Their names were Edward and Alfred.
Massacre of the Danes.
Horrors of civil war.
Richard II., Emma's brother, who was then the Duke of Normandy, received the unhappy fugitives with great kindness, although he, at least, scarcely deserved it. It was not surprising that he was driven from his native realm, for he possessed none of those high qualities of mind which fit men to conquer or to govern. Like all other weak-minded tyrants, he substituted cruelty for wisdom and energy in his attempts to subjugate his foes. As soon as he was married to Emma, for instance, feeling elated and strong at the great accession of power which he imagined he had obtained by this alliance, he planned a general massacre of the Danes, and executed it on a given day, by means of private orders, sent secretly throughout the kingdom. Vast numbers of the Danes were destroyed; and so great was the hatred of the two races for each other, that they who had these bloody orders to obey executed them with a savage cruelty that was absolutely horrible. In one instance they buried women to the waist, and then set dogs upon them, to tear their naked flesh until they died in agony. It would be best, in narrating history, to suppress such horrid details as these, were it not that in a land like this, where so much depends upon the influence of every individual in determining whether the questions and discussions which are from time to time arising, and are hereafter to arise, shall be settled peacefully, or by a resort to violence and civil war, it is very important that we should all know what civil war is, and to what horrible atrocities it inevitably leads.
Ethelred's tyranny.
Alfred the Great, when he was contending with the Danes in England, a century before this time, treated them, so far as he gained advantages over them, with generosity and kindness; and this policy wholly conquered them in the end. Ethelred, on the other hand, tried the effect of the most tyrannical cruelty, and the effect was only to arouse his enemies to a more determined and desperate resistance. It was the phrensy of vengeance and hate that these atrocities awakened every where among the Danes, which nerved them with so much vigor and strength that they finally expelled him from the island; so that, when he arrived in Normandy, a fugitive and an exile, he came in the character of a dethroned tyrant, execrated for his senseless and atrocious cruelties, and not in that of an unhappy prince driven from his home by the pressure of unavoidable calamity. Nevertheless, Richard, the Duke of Normandy, received him, as we have already said, with kindness. He felt the obligation of receiving the exiled monarch in a hospitable manner, if not on his own account, at least for the sake of Emma and the children.
Emma's policy.
Emma's humiliation.
The origin and end of Emma's interest in Ethelred seems to have been merely ambition. The "Pearl of Normandy" had given herself to this monster for the sake, apparently, of the glory of being the English queen. Her subsequent conduct compels the readers of history to make this supposition, which otherwise would be uncharitable. She now mourned her disappointment in finding that, instead of being sustained by her husband in the lofty position to which she aspired, she was obliged to come back to her former home again, to be once more dependent, and with the additional burden of her husband himself, and her children, upon her father's family. Her situation was rendered even still more humiliating, in some degree, by the circumstances that her father was no longer alive, and that it was to her brother, on whom her natural claim was far less strong, that she had now to look for shelter and protection. Richard, however, received them all in a kind and generous manner.
Ethelred invited to return.
Restoration of Ethelred and Emma.
In the mean time, the wars and commotions which had driven Ethelred away continued to rage in England, the Saxons gradually gaining ground against the Danes. At length the king of the Danes, who had seized the government when Ethelred was expelled, died. The Saxons then regained their former power, and they sent commissioners to Ethelred to propose his return to England. At the same time, they expressed their unwillingness to receive him, unless they could bind him, by a solemn treaty, to take a very different course of conduct, in the future management of his government, from that which he had pursued before. Ethelred and Emma were eager to regain, on any terms, their lost throne. They sent over embassadors empowered to make, in Ethelred's name, any promises which the English nobles might demand; and shortly afterward the royal pair crossed the Channel and went to London, and Ethelred was acknowledged there by the Saxon portion of the population of the island once more as king.
War with Canute.