CHAPTER III
IF KING ETHELRED OF ENGLAND HAD NOT
MARRIED THE NORMAN EMMA
Not much turns upon the marriage of kings in these days. The German Kaiser is not the less German assuredly because his mother was an Englishwoman. Nor did her marriage to the Crown Prince of Prussia give Prussia or Germany the slightest hold upon England.
It was altogether different in an earlier day. One royal marriage in particular, that of King Ethelred the Redeless, the "Unready," of England, to Emma, the daughter of Richard the Fearless, Duke of Normandy, in the year 1002, exercised upon Britain and the world the most tremendous influence. It led to the invasion and subjugation of England by William, surnamed the Conqueror, and to the reconstruction of that mother country of ours, politically, socially and racially, upon new lines. No royal marriage, perhaps, ever had such enduring and far-reaching consequences; no queen-elect ever took with her to her adopted country such a lading of fateful changes.
The marriage was a sufficiently commonplace affair in itself. Ethelred was a smooth and rather gentle prince, who thought much more of his own easy fortunes than of anything else. He wanted a wife, and he did not like the Danes, who were racially and politically the nearest neighbors of his royal house. He visited Normandy, and must have pleased the Duke, for Richard, a bold and resourceful man, bestowed this fair-haired Emma, a lineal descendant of the victorious Norse pirates, but now quite Frenchified, upon the young Englishman.
She was not destined to see her progeny long reign over England. But it did not matter about her descendants. The great change did not come with them. What she really did was to supply to her nephew, Duke William, known to history as the Conqueror, who was yet to come to the throne of Normandy, a pretext to seize the English crown for himself.
William was of illegitimate birth. His mother was Arvela, a poor girl whom Duke Robert saw washing clothes in the river one day and straightway became enamored of. But on his father's side William was, through Emma's marriage, cousin of King Edward the Confessor, son of the unready Ethelred. On a lucky day for him he visited England. It was at a time when Edward was very ill, and William claimed ever after that he had received from Edward, on his sick bed, a solemn promise that the Norman duke should succeed him upon the English throne.
Edward had no son, but it appears quite unlikely that a wise ruler such as he was should deliberately have given away the throne and country to a foreigner, especially when his brother-in-law Harold, Earl of Wessex, a capable man, stood ready to succeed him. The English, at any rate, took this view of the matter, for they straightway made Harold king, ignoring the claim of the vilely born Duke William to the throne.