Chapter V. The Danish Conquest of England. 975–1016

FOR THE DELEGATES OF THE CLARENDON PRESS.

Æthelred the Second, the prince in whose reign England and Normandy first began to have a direct bearing on each other’s affairs, is the only ruler of the male line of Ecgberht whom we can unhesitatingly set down as a bad man and a bad King. With singularly few exceptions, |Character of Æthelred the Second; his degeneracy.| the princes of that house form, as we have seen, one of the greatest lines to be found in the annals of any kingly house. With regard to one or two members of the family the evidence is so contradictory, they were cut off so young or reigned so short a time, that we have no certain knowledge what they really were. But Æthelred stands alone in giving us the wretched sight of a long reign of utter misgovernment, unredeemed, as far as we can see, by any of those personal virtues which have sometimes caused public errors and crimes to be forgotten. Personal beauty and a certain elegance of manners, qualities consistent with any amount of vice and folly, are the highest merits attributed to a prince, who, instead of the Unconquered, the Glorious, the Magnificent, or the Peaceful, has received no nobler historical surname than that of the Unready. His actions display a certain amount of energy, perhaps rather of mere restlessness. It was at any rate an energy utterly unregulated and misapplied, an energy which began enterprises and never ended them, which wasted itself on needless and distant expeditions while no effective resistance was made to the enemy at the gates. Æthelred’s reign of thirty-eight years displays little but the neglect of every kingly duty, little but weakness, impolicy, cowardice, blind trust in unworthy favourites and even in detected traitors. It is full of acts of injustice and cruelty, some of which are laid to the charge of the King himself, while others, if he did not himself order them, he at least did nothing to hinder or to punish. In that age almost everything in the history of a nation depended on the personal |Importance of the personal character of rulers.| character of its ruler. One great King could raise a kingdom to the highest point of prosperity; one weak or wicked King could plunge it into the lowest depths of degradation. So it was with England in the tenth century. The fabric of glory and dominion which was built up by the labours of Ælfred, Eadward, Æthelstan, Eadmund, and Eadred, the fabric which was firmly welded together by the strong and peaceful rule of Eadgar, now seems to fall to pieces at the first touch of a vigorous and determined enemy. And yet it was not wholly so. The work of so many conquerors and lawgivers from Ecgberht |The English needed only leaders worthy of the people.| onwards was not wholly fruitless. England passed into the hands of a foreign master; but England passed into his hands as a single kingdom, retaining too her old dominion over her vassal principalities. And it should not be forgotten how completely the whole evil was due to incompetent, cowardly, or traitorous leaders. The heart of the English people was still sound. Wherever a brave and honest man was in local command, local resistance was as vigorous as it could have been under Ælfred himself. And in the last agony, when valour and wisdom seemed all too late, Eadmund, the glorious son of the wretched Æthelred, stood forth like one of the old heroes of his house, to win back half the land from the invader, and to lose the rest far more through guile and treason than through open warfare. The thing which is utterly inexplicable throughout the reigns both of Æthelred and of Eadmund is the strange and incomprehensible treason of two or three Englishmen in high command. It is equally strange how their treachery could repeatedly paralyse the efforts of a whole nation, and how, after their repeated treasons, the traitors were again taken into favour and confidence by the princes whom they had betrayed. Our facts are minute and explicit; but we often need some explanation of their causes which is not forthcoming. A few of those private letters of which we have such abundance two or three centuries later would give us the key to many difficulties which chronicles, laws, and charters leave wholly insoluble.