Jarl Eric, splendent with this victory, not to speak of that over the
Jomsburgers with his father long ago, was now made Governor of Norway:
Governor or quasi-sovereign, with his brother, Jarl. Svein, as partner,
who, however, took but little hand in governing;--and, under the
patronage of Svein Double-Beard and the then Swedish king (Olaf his
name, Sigrid the Proud, his mother's), administered it, they say, with
skill and prudence for above fourteen years. Tryggveson's death is
understood and laboriously computed to have happened in the year 1000;
but there is no exact chronology in these things, but a continual
uncertain guessing after such; so that one eye in History as regards
them is as if put out;--neither indeed have I yet had the luck to find
any decipherable and intelligible map of Norway: so that the other
eye of History is much blinded withal, and her path through those wild
regions and epochs is an extremely dim and chaotic one. An evil that
much demands remedying, and especially wants some first attempt at
remedying, by inquirers into English History; the whole period from
Egbert, the first Saxon King of England, on to Edward the Confessor,
the last, being everywhere completely interwoven with that of their
mysterious, continually invasive "Danes," as they call them, and
inextricably unintelligible till these also get to be a little
understood, and cease to be utterly dark, hideous, and mythical to us as
they now are.
King Olaf Tryggveson is the first Norseman who is expressly mentioned
to have been in England by our English History books, new or old; and of
him it is merely said that he had an interview with King Ethelred II. at
Andover, of a pacific and friendly nature,--though it is absurdly added
that the noble Olaf was converted to Christianity by that extremely
stupid Royal Person. Greater contrast in an interview than in this
at Andover, between heroic Olaf Tryggveson and Ethelred the forever
Unready, was not perhaps seen in the terrestrial Planet that day.
Olaf or "Olaus," or "Anlaf," as they name him, did "engage on oath to
Ethelred not to invade England any more," and kept his promise, they
farther say. Essentially a truth, as we already know, though the
circumstances were all different; and the promise was to a devout High
Priest, not to a crowned Blockhead and cowardly Do-nothing. One other
"Olaus" I find mentioned in our Books, two or three centuries before,
at a time when there existed no such individual; not to speak of several
Anlafs, who sometimes seem to mean Olaf and still oftener to mean nobody
possible. Which occasions not a little obscurity in our early History,
says the learned Selden. A thing remediable, too, in which, if any
Englishman of due genius (or even capacity for standing labor), who
understood the Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon languages, would engage in
it, he might do a great deal of good, and bring the matter into a
comparatively lucid state. Vain aspirations,--or perhaps not altogether
vain.
At the time of Olaf Tryggveson's death, and indeed long before, King
Svein Double-Beard had always for chief enterprise the Conquest of
England, and followed it by fits with extreme violence and impetus;
often advancing largely towards a successful conclusion; but never, for
thirteen years yet, getting it concluded. He possessed long since all
England north of Watling Street. That is to say, Northumberland, East
Anglia (naturally full of Danish settlers by this time), were fixedly
his; Mercia, his oftener than not; Wessex itself, with all the coasts,
he was free to visit, and to burn and rob in at discretion. There or
elsewhere, Ethelred the Unready had no battle in him whatever; and,
for a forty years after the beginning of his reign, England excelled in
anarchic stupidity, murderous devastation, utter misery, platitude, and
sluggish contemptibility, all the countries one has read of. Apparently
a very opulent country, too; a ready skill in such arts and fine arts
as there were; Svein's very ships, they say, had their gold dragons,
top-mast pennons, and other metallic splendors generally wrought for
them in England. "Unexampled prosperity" in the manufacture way not
unknown there, it would seem! But co-existing with such spiritual
bankruptcy as was also unexampled, one would hope. Read Lupus
(Wulfstan), Archbishop of York's amazing _Sermon_ on the subject, [8]
addressed to contemporary audiences; setting forth such a state of
things,--sons selling their fathers, mothers, and sisters as Slaves to
the Danish robber; themselves living in debauchery, blusterous gluttony,
and depravity; the details of which are well-nigh incredible, though
clearly stated as things generally known,--the humor of these poor
wretches sunk to a state of what we may call greasy desperation, "Let us
eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." The manner in which they treated
their own English nuns, if young, good-looking, and captive to the
Danes; buying them on a kind of brutish or subter-brutish "Greatest
Happiness Principle" (for the moment), and by a Joint-Stock arrangement,
far transcends all human speech or imagination, and awakens in one the
momentary red-hot thought, The Danes have served you right, ye accursed!
The so-called soldiers, one finds, made not the least fight anywhere;
could make none, led and guided as they were, and the "Generals" often
enough traitors, always ignorant, and blockheads, were in the habit,
when expressly commanded to fight, of taking physic, and declaring that
nature was incapable of castor-oil and battle both at once. This
ought to be explained a little to the modern English and their
War-Secretaries, who undertake the conduct of armies. The undeniable
fact is, defeat on defeat was the constant fate of the English; during
these forty years not one battle in which they were not beaten. No gleam
of victory or real resistance till the noble Edmund Ironside (whom it
is always strange to me how such an Ethelred could produce for son)
made his appearance and ran his brief course, like a great and far-seen
meteor, soon extinguished without result. No remedy for England in that
base time, but yearly asking the victorious, plundering, burning and
murdering Danes, "How much money will you take to go away?" Thirty
thousand pounds in silver, which the annual _Danegelt_ soon rose to,
continued to be about the average yearly sum, though generally on the
increasing hand; in the last year I think it had risen to seventy-two
thousand pounds in silver, raised yearly by a tax (Income-tax of its
kind, rudely levied), the worst of all remedies, good for the day only.
Nay, there was one remedy still worse, which the miserable Ethelred
once tried: that of massacring "all the Danes settled in England"
(practically, of a few thousands or hundreds of them), by treachery and
a kind of Sicilian Vespers. Which issued, as such things usually do, in
terrible monition to you not to try the like again! Issued, namely, in
redoubled fury on the Danish part; new fiercer invasion by Svein's
Jarl Thorkel; then by Svein himself; which latter drove the miserable
Ethelred, with wife and family, into Normandy, to wife's brother, the
then Duke there; and ended that miserable struggle by Svein's becoming
King of England himself. Of this disgraceful massacre, which it would
appear has been immensely exaggerated in the English books, we can
happily give the exact date (A.D. 1002); and also of Svein's victorious
accession (A.D. 1013), [9]--pretty much the only benefit one gets out of
contemplating such a set of objects.
King Svein's first act was to levy a terribly increased Income-Tax
for the payment of his army. Svein was levying it with a stronghanded
diligence, but had not yet done levying it, when, at Gainsborough one
night, he suddenly died; smitten dead, once used to be said, by St.
Edmund, whilom murdered King of the East Angles; who could not bear
to see his shrine and monastery of St. Edmundsbury plundered by the
Tyrant's tax-collectors, as they were on the point of being. In all ways
impossible, however,--Edmund's own death did not occur till two years
after Svein's. Svein's death, by whatever cause, befell 1014; his fleet,
then lying in the Humber; and only Knut, [10] his eldest son (hardly
yet eighteen, count some), in charge of it; who, on short counsel, and
arrangement about this questionable kingdom of his, lifted anchor;
made for Sandwich, a safer station at the moment; "cut off the feet and
noses" (one shudders, and hopes not, there being some discrepancy about
it!) of his numerous hostages that had been delivered to King Svein;
set them ashore;--and made for Denmark, his natural storehouse and
stronghold, as the hopefulest first thing he could do.
Knut soon returned from Denmark, with increase of force sufficient for
the English problem; which latter he now ended in a victorious, and
essentially, for himself and chaotic England, beneficent manner. Became
widely known by and by, there and elsewhere, as Knut the Great; and is
thought by judges of our day to have really merited that title. A most
nimble, sharp-striking, clear-thinking, prudent and effective man, who
regulated this dismembered and distracted England in its Church matters,
in its State matters, like a real King. Had a Standing Army (_House
Carles_), who were well paid, well drilled and disciplined, capable of
instantly quenching insurrection or breakage of the peace; and piously
endeavored (with a signal earnestness, and even devoutness, if we look
well) to do justice to all men, and to make all men rest satisfied with
justice. In a word, he successfully strapped up, by every true method
and regulation, this miserable, dislocated, and dissevered mass
of bleeding Anarchy into something worthy to be called an England
again;--only that he died too soon, and a second "Conqueror" of us,
still weightier of structure, and under improved auspices, became
possible, and was needed here! To appearance, Knut himself was capable
of being a Charlemagne of England and the North (as has been already
said or quoted), had he only lived twice as long as he did. But his
whole sum of years seems not to have exceeded forty. His father Svein
of the Forkbeard is reckoned to have been fifty to sixty when St. Edmund
finished him at Gainsborough. We now return to Norway, ashamed of this
long circuit which has been a truancy more or less.