death of Sweyn, who expired at Gainsborough before he had time to
establish himself in his new-acquired dominions. The English prelates
and nobility, taking advantage of this event, sent over a deputation to
Normandy, inviting Ethelred to return to them, expressing a desire of
being again governed by their native prince, and intimating their hopes
that, being now tutored by experience, he would avoid all those errors
which had been attended with such misfortunes to himself and to his
people. But the misconduct of Ethelred was incurable; and on his
resuming the government, he discovered the same incapacity, indolence,
cowardice, and credulity which had so often exposed him to the insults
of his enemies. His son-in-law Edric, notwithstanding his repeated
treasons, retained such influence at court as to instil into the King
jealousies of Sigefert and Morcar, two of the chief nobles of Mercia.
Edric allured them into his house, where he murdered them; while
Ethelred participated in the infamy of the action by confiscating their
estates and thrusting into a convent the widow of Sigefert. She was a
woman of singular beauty and merit; and in a visit which was paid her,
during her confinement, by Prince Edmund, the King's eldest son, she
inspired him with so violent an affection that he released her from the
convent, and soon after married her without the consent of his father.
Meanwhile the English found in Canute, the son and successor of Sweyn,
an enemy no less terrible than the prince from whom death had so lately
delivered them. He ravaged the eastern coast with merciless fury, and
put ashore all the English hostages at Sandwich, after having cut off
their hands and noses. He was obliged, by the necessity of his affairs,
to make a voyage to Denmark; but, returning soon after, he continued his
depredations along the southern coast. He even broke into the counties
of Dorset, Wilts, and Somerset, where an army was assembled against him,
under the command of Prince Edmund and Duke Edric. The latter still
continued his perfidious machinations, and, after endeavoring in vain to
get the prince into his power, he found means to disperse the army, and
he then openly deserted to Canute with forty vessels.
Notwithstanding this misfortune Edmund was not disconcerted, but,
assembling all the force of England, was in a condition to give battle
to the enemy. The King had had such frequent experience of perfidy among
his subjects that he had lost all confidence in them: he remained at
London, pretending sickness, but really from apprehensions that they
intended to buy their peace by delivering him into the hands of his
enemies. The army called aloud for their sovereign to march at their
head against the Danes; and, on his refusal to take the field, they were
so discouraged that those vast preparations became ineffectual for the
defence of the kingdom. Edmund, deprived of all regular supplies to
maintain his soldiers, was obliged to commit equal ravages with those
which were practised by the Danes; and, after making some fruitless
expeditions into the north, which had submitted entirely to Canute's
power, he retired to London, determined there to maintain to the last
extremity the small remains of English liberty. He here found everything
in confusion by the death of the King, who expired after an unhappy and
inglorious reign of thirty-five years (1016). He left two sons by his
first marriage, Edmund, who succeeded him, and Edwy, whom Canute
afterward murdered. His two sons by the second marriage, Alfred and
Edward, were, immediately upon Ethelred's death, conveyed into Normandy
by Queen Emma.
Edmund, who received the name of "Ironside" from his hardy valor,
possessed courage and abilities sufficient to have prevented his country
from sinking into those calamities, but not to raise it from that abyss
of misery into which it had already fallen. Among the other misfortunes
of the English, treachery and disaffection had crept in among the
nobility and prelates; and Edmund found no better expedient for stopping
the further progress of these fatal evils than to lead his army
instantly into the field, and to employ them against the common enemy.
After meeting with some success at Gillingham, he prepared himself to
decide, in one general engagement, the fate of his crown; and at
Scoerston, in the county of Gloucester, he offered battle to the enemy,
who were commanded by Canute and Edric. Fortune, in the beginning of the
day, declared for him; but Edric, having cut off the head of one Osmer,
whose countenance resembled that of Edmund, fixed it on a spear, carried
it through the ranks in triumph, and called aloud to the English that it
was time to fly; for, behold! the head of their sovereign. And though
Edmund, observing the consternation of the troops, took off his helmet,
and showed himself to them, the utmost he could gain by his activity and
valor was to leave the victory undecided. Edric now took a surer method
to ruin him, by pretending to desert to him; and as Edmund was well
acquainted with his power, and probably knew no other of the chief
nobility in whom he could repose more confidence, he was obliged,
notwithstanding the repeated perfidy of the man, to give him a
considerable command in the army. A battle soon after ensued at
Assington, in Essex, where Edric, flying in the beginning of the day,
occasioned the total defeat of the English, followed by a great
slaughter of the nobility. The indefatigable Edmund, however, had still
resources. Assembling a new army at Gloucester, he was again in
condition to dispute the field, when the Danish and English nobility,
equally harassed with those convulsions, obliged their kings to come to
a compromise and to divide the kingdom between them by treaty. Canute
reserved to himself the northern division, consisting of Mercia, East
Anglia, and Northumberland, which he had entirely subdued. The southern
parts were left to Edmund. This prince survived the treaty about a
month. He was murdered at Oxford by two of his chamberlains, accomplices
of Edric, who thereby made way for the succession of Canute the Dane to
the crown of England.
The English, who had been unable to defend their country and maintain
their independency under so active and brave a prince as Edmund, could
after his death expect nothing but total subjection from Canute, who,
active and brave himself, and at the head of a great force, was ready to
take advantage of the minority of Edwin and Edward, the two sons of
Edmund. Yet this conqueror, who was commonly so little scrupulous,
showed himself anxious to cover his injustice under plausible pretences.
Before he seized the dominions of the English princes, he summoned a
general assembly of the states in order to fix the succession of the
kingdom. He here suborned some nobles to depose that, in the treaty of
Gloucester, it had been verbally agreed, either to name Canute, in case
of Edmund's death, successor to his dominions or tutor to his
children--for historians vary in this particular; and that evidence,
supported by the great power of Canute, determined the states
immediately to put the Danish monarch in possession of the government.
Canute, jealous of the two princes, but sensible that he should render
himself extremely odious if he ordered them to be despatched in England,
sent them abroad to his ally, the King of Sweden, whom he desired, as
soon as they arrived at his court, to free him, by their death, from all
further anxiety. The Swedish monarch was too generous to comply with the
request; but being afraid of drawing on himself a quarrel with Canute,
by protecting the young princes, he sent them to Solomon, King of
Hungary, to be educated in his court. The elder, Edwin, was afterward
married to the sister of the King of Hungary; but the English prince
dying without issue, Solomon gave his sister-in-law, Agatha, daughter of
the emperor Henry II, in marriage to Edward, the younger brother; and
she bore him Edgar, Atheling, Margaret, afterward Queen of Scotland, and
Christina, who retired into a convent.
Canute, though he had reached the great point of his ambition in
obtaining possession of the English crown, was obliged at first to make
great sacrifices to it; and to gratify the chief of the nobility, by
bestowing on them the most extensive governments and jurisdictions. He
created Thurkill Earl or Duke of East Anglia--for these titles were then
nearly of the same import--Yric of Northumberland, and Edric of Mercia;
reserving only to himself the administration of Wessex. But seizing
afterward a favorable opportunity, he expelled Thurkill and Yric from
their governments, and banished them the kingdom; he put to death many
of the English nobility, on whose fidelity he could not rely, and whom
he hated on account of their disloyalty to their native prince. And even
the traitor Edric, having had the assurance to reproach him with his
services, was condemned to be executed and his body to be thrown into
the Thames; a suitable reward for his multiplied acts of perfidy and
rebellion.
Canute also found himself obliged, in the beginning of his reign, to
load the people with heavy taxes in order to reward his Danish
followers: he exacted from them at one time the sum of seventy-two
thousand pounds, besides eleven thousand which he levied on London
alone. He was probably willing, from political motives, to mulct
severely that city, on account of the affection which it had borne to
Edmund and the resistance which it had made to the Danish power in two
obstinate sieges.[25] But these rigors were imputed to necessity; and
Canute, like a wise prince, was determined that the English, now
deprived of all their dangerous leaders, should be reconciled to the
Danish yoke, by the justice and impartiality of his administration. He
sent back to Denmark as many of his followers as he could safely spare;
he restored the Saxon customs in a general assembly of the states; he
made no distinction between Danes and English in the distribution of
justice; and he took care, by a strict execution of law, to protect the
lives and properties of all his people. The Danes were gradually
incorporated with his new subjects; and both were glad to obtain a
little respite from those multiplied calamities from which the one, no
less than the other, had, in their fierce contest for power, experienced
such fatal consequences.
[Footnote 25: In one of these sieges Canute diverted the course of the
Thames, and by that means brought his ships above London bridge.]
The removal of Edmund's children into so distant a country as Hungary
was, next to their death, regarded by Canute as the greatest security to
his government: he had no further anxiety, except with regard to Alfred
and Edward, who were protected and supported by their uncle Richard,
Duke of Normandy. Richard even fitted out a great armament, in order to
restore the English princes to the throne of their ancestors; and though
the navy was dispersed by a storm, Canute saw the danger to which he was
exposed from the enmity of so warlike a people as the Normans. In order
to acquire the friendship of the duke, he paid his addresses to Queen
Emma, sister of that prince, and promised that he would leave the
children whom he should have by that marriage in possession of the Crown
of England. Richard complied with his demand and sent over Emma to
England, where she was soon after married to Canute. The English, though
they disapproved of her espousing the mortal enemy of her former husband
and his family, were pleased to find at court a sovereign to whom they
were accustomed, and who had already formed connections with them; and
thus Canute, besides securing, by this marriage, the alliance of
Normandy, gradually acquired, by the same means, the confidence of his
own subjects. The Norman prince did not long survive the marriage of
Emma; and he left the inheritance of the duchy to his eldest son of the
same name, who, dying a year after him without children, was succeeded
by his brother Robert, a man of valor and abilities.
Canute, having settled his power in England beyond all danger of a
revolution, made a voyage to Denmark, in order to resist the attacks of
the King of Sweden; and he carried along with him a great body of the
English, under the command of Earl Godwin. This nobleman had here an
opportunity of performing a service, by which he both reconciled the
King's mind to the English nation and, gaining to himself the friendship
of his sovereign, laid the foundation of that immense fortune which he
acquired to his family. He was stationed next the Swedish camp, and
observing a favorable opportunity, which he was obliged suddenly to
seize, he attacked the enemy in the night, drove them from their
trenches, threw them into disorder, pursued his advantage, and obtained
a decisive victory over them. Next morning Canute, seeing the English
camp entirely abandoned, imagined that those disaffected troops had
deserted to the enemy: he was agreeably surprised to find that they were
at that time engaged in pursuit of the discomfited Swedes. He was so
pleased with this success, and with the manner of obtaining it, that he
bestowed his daughter in marriage upon Godwin, and treated him ever
after with entire confidence and regard.
In another voyage, which he made afterward to Denmark, Canute attacked
Norway, and, expelling the just but unwarlike Olaus, kept possession of
his kingdom till the death of that prince. He had now by his conquests
and valor attained the utmost height of grandeur: having leisure from
wars and intrigues, he felt the unsatisfactory nature of all human
enjoyments; and equally weary of the glories and turmoils of this life,
he began to cast his view toward that future existence, which it is so
natural for the human mind, whether satiated by prosperity or disgusted
with adversity, to make the object of its attention. Unfortunately, the
spirit which prevailed in that age gave a wrong direction to his
devotion: instead of making compensation to those whom he had injured by
his former acts of violence, he employed himself entirely in those
exercises of piety which the monks represented as the most meritorious.
He built churches, he endowed monasteries, he enriched the
ecclesiastics, and he bestowed revenues for the support of chantries at
Assington and other places, where he appointed prayers to be said for
the souls of those who had there fallen in battle against him. He even
undertook a pilgrimage to Rome, where he resided a considerable time:
besides obtaining from the pope some privileges for the English school
erected there, he engaged all the princes through whose dominions he was
obliged to pass to desist from those heavy impositions and tolls which
they were accustomed to exact from the English pilgrims. By this spirit
of devotion, no less than by his equitable and politic administration,
he gained, in a good measure, the affections of his subjects.
Canute, the greatest and most powerful monarch of his time, sovereign of
Denmark and Norway, as well as of England, could not fail of meeting
with adulation from his courtiers; a tribute which is liberally paid
even to the meanest and weakest princes. Some of his flatterers,
breaking out one day in admiration of his grandeur, exclaimed that
everything was possible for him; upon which the monarch, it is said,
ordered his chair to be set on the sea-shore while the tide was rising;
and as the waters approached, he commanded them to retire, and to obey
the voice of him who was lord of the ocean. He feigned to sit some time
in expectation of their submission; but when the sea still advanced
toward him, and began to wash him with its billows, he turned to his
courtiers, and remarked to them that every creature in the universe was
feeble and impotent, and that power resided with one Being alone, in
whose hands were all the elements of nature; who could say to the ocean,
"Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther," and who could level with his
nod the most towering piles of human pride and ambition.
The only memorable action which Canute performed after his return from
Rome was an expedition against Malcolm, King of Scotland. During the
reign of Ethelred, a tax of a shilling a hide had been imposed on all
the lands of England. It was commonly called _danegelt_; because the
revenue had been employed either in buying peace with the Danes or in
making preparations against the inroads of that hostile nation. That
monarch had required that the same tax should be paid by Cumberland,
which was held by the Scots; but Malcolm, a warlike prince, told him
that as he was always able to repulse the Danes by his own power, he
would neither submit to buy peace of his enemies nor pay others for
resisting them. Ethelred, offended at this reply, which contained a
secret reproach on his own conduct, undertook an expedition against
Cumberland; but though he committed ravages upon the country, he could
never bring Malcolm to a temper more humble or submissive. Canute, after
his accession, summoned the Scottish King to acknowledge himself a
vassal for Cumberland to the Crown of England; but Malcolm refused
compliance, on pretence that he owed homage to those princes only who
inherited that kingdom by right of blood. Canute was not of a temper to
bear this insult; and the King of Scotland soon found that the sceptre
was in very different hands from those of the feeble and irresolute
Ethelred. Upon Canute's appearing on the frontiers with a formidable
army, Malcolm agreed that his grandson and heir, Duncan, whom he put in
possession of Cumberland, should make the submissions required, and that
the heirs of Scotland should always acknowledge themselves vassals to
England for that province.
Canute passed four years in peace after this enterprise, and he died at
Shaftesbury; leaving three sons, Sweyn, Harold, and Hardicanute. Sweyn,
whom he had by his first marriage with Alfwen, daughter of the Earl of
Hampshire, was crowned in Norway; Hardicanute, whom Emma had borne him,
was in possession of Denmark; Harold, who was of the same marriage with
Sweyn, was at that time in England.
HENRY III DEPOSES THE POPE
THE GERMAN EMPIRE CONTROLS THE PAPACY
A.D. 1048
FERDINAND GREGOROVIUS
JOSEPH E. DARRAS
(After the extinction of the Carlovingian line, A.D. 887, and the
division of the empire, the Church of Rome and the Christian world fell
into a highly demoralized state, attributable to the destitution to
which ecclesiastical bodies were reduced by the frequent predations of
bands of robbers, the immorality of the priesthood, and the power of
electing the popes falling into the hands of intriguing and licentious
patrician females, whom aspirants to the holy see were not ashamed to
bribe for their favors. So depraved had the general spirit of the age
become that Pope Boniface VII, A.D. 974, robbed St. Peter's Church and
its treasury and fled to Constantinople; while Pope John XVIII, A.D.
1003, was prevented, by general indignation only, from accepting a sum
of money from Emperor Basil to recognize the right of the Greek
patriarch to the title of "Universal Bishop."
A child, son of one of the old noble houses, was consecrated pope as
Benedict IX, A.D. 1033, according to some authorities, at the age of ten
or twelve years. He became noted for his profligacy and was driven from
his throne, the Romans electing, as Pope Sylvester III, John, Bishop of
Sabina, who is said to have paid a high price for the dignity. Benedict,
however, regained the papal seat shortly afterward, and drove Sylvester
into a refuge, but later sold the office to John Gratianus, Arch-priest
of Rome, who as Gregory VI made laudable attempts to effect a general
reformation. He failed in his efforts, and a chaotic state ensued; three
popes claiming the triple tiara and reigning in Rome: Gregory at the
Vatican, Benedict in the Lateran, and Sylvester in the Church of Santa
Maria Maggiore.
On the invitation of the Roman people, Henry the Black, the young and
zealous Emperor of Germany, repaired to Italy in 1045 and summoned a
great ecclesiastical council at Sutri, which passed a decree deposing
the three papal claimants. The same council elected to the tiara the
German bishop of Bamberg, who reigned in the holy see as Clement II. One
of his first ceremonies, carried out with all the gorgeous pomp of the
Roman Church, was the imperial coronation of Henry and his wife Agnes.
But Henry's action, while "it dragged the Church out of the slough it
had fallen into," startled the ecclesiastical world, and was a prelude
to the struggle between pope and emperor which, under St. Hildebrand,
Pope Gregory VII, culminated in the independent establishment of the
pontificate and papal power.)
FERDINAND GREGOROVIUS
Henry III, the son and successor of Conrad, was young, vigorous, and
God-fearing; a noble prince called, like Charles and Otto the Great, to
restore Rome, to deliver it from tyrants, and to reform the almost
annihilated Church. For the papacy had been still further dishonored by
Benedict IX. It seemed as if a demon from hell, in the disguise of a
priest, occupied the chair of Peter and profaned the sacred mysteries of
religion by his insolent courses.
Benedict IX, restored in 1038, protected by his brother Gregory, who
ruled the city as senator of the Romans, led unchecked the life of a
Turkish sultan in the palace of the Lateran. He and his family filled
Rome with robbery and murder; all lawful conditions had ceased. Toward
the end of 1044, or in the beginning of the following year, the populace
at length rose in furious revolt; the Pope fled, but his vassals
defended the Leonina against the attacks of the Romans. The
Trasteverines remained faithful to Benedict, and he summoned friends and
adherents; Count Gerard of Galeria advanced with a numerous body of
horse to the Saxon gate and repulsed the Romans. An earthquake added to
the horrors in the revolted city. The ancient chronicle which relates
these events does not tell us whether Trastevere was taken by assault
after a three-days' struggle, but merely relates that the Romans
unanimously renounced Benedict, and elected Bishop John of the Sabina to
the papacy as Sylvester III. John also owed his elevation to the gold
with which he bribed the rebels and their leader, Girardo de Saxo. This
powerful Roman had first promised his daughter in marriage to the Pope,
and afterward refused her; for the Pope had not hesitated, in all
seriousness, to sue for the hand of a Roman lady, a relative of his own.
Her father lured him on with the hope of winning her, but required that
Benedict should in the first place resign the tiara.
The Pope, burning with passion, consented and fulfilled his promise
during the revolt of the Romans. He was mastered by the demon of
sensuality; it was reported by the superstitious that he associated with
devils in the woods and attracted women by means of spells. It was
asserted that books of magic, with which he had conjured demons, had
been found in the Lateran. His banishment meanwhile aroused the haughty
spirit of his house, and anger at Gerard's treacherous conduct proved a
further incentive to revenge. His numerous adherents still held St.
Angelo, and his gold acquired him new friends. After a forty-nine days'
reign, Sylvester III was driven from the apostolic chair, which the
Tusculan reascended in March, 1045.
Benedict now ruled for some time in Rome, while Sylvester III found
safety either within some fortified monument in the city or in some
Sabine fortress, and continued to call himself pope. A beneficent
darkness veils the horrors of this year. Hated by the Romans, insecure
on his throne, in constant terror of the renewal of the revolution,
Benedict eventually found himself obliged to abdicate. The abbot
Bartholomew of Grotta Ferrata urged him to the step, but he unblushingly
sold the papacy for money like a piece of merchandise. In exchange for a
considerable income, that is to say, for the revenue of "Peter's pence"
from England, he made over his papal dignities by a formal contract to
John Gratianus, a rich archpriest of the Church of St. John at the Latin
gate, on May 1, 1045.