5
Many Anglo-Saxon kings can be described as serial monogamists. Kings such as Edward the Elder, Edmund I and Edgar enjoyed a succession of wives, discarding them with apparent ease. Few Anglo-Saxon kings can be said to be polygamous however and most at least divorced their wife before taking another. King Cnut is an exception to this rule. Rather than divorcing his first wife to marry his second, he simply maintained both queens, allowing them separate spheres of influence in his empire. This was a position deeply resented by the two women and for over twenty years, Emma of Normandy and her rival Aelfgifu of Northampton were locked in a power struggle with each other that made them both notorious in England. Both sought to make their own son the heir of their husband and both went to extreme lengths in doing so. Although they are blamed for this and their bad reputations are partly of their own making it must be said that Cnut himself propagated the situation with his conduct. As women they also received harsher criticism than their sons, which is clearly a biased result, considering that it was the sons who were the true rivals for the crown.
Emma of Normandy was destined for a great marriage. As the daughter of Richard I, Duke of Normandy, she would have known that her fate lay in an arranged marriage, although it was the Viking raids that determined who her husband would be. The Dukes of Normandy were of Danish descent and Emma’s own mother, Gunnor, was Danish. Normandy therefore appears to have been seen as a safe-haven for the Viking raiders and it is likely that Emma’s sympathies lay with them. Her father certainly appears to have favoured the Danes and this brought him into conflict with the King of England, Aethelred. In 991 the Pope brokered a peace between the two rulers in which each agreed not to harbour the others’ enemies.1 This truce appears to have had little effect, but it may have brought the courts of England and Normandy into closer contact.
The agreement between England and Normandy does not appear to have been lasting and, in 1000, the Vikings raided England before travelling to Normandy.2 The raiders were welcomed by Emma’s brother, Richard II, and Aethelred apparently decided that a more lasting relationship with Normandy was required. The oldest Emma could have been at this time is mid-teens and she is unlikely to have had any say in the negotiations for her marriage to Aethelred. She must have been daunted by the news that she was to marry a forty year-old widower with a large family of his own. However, England was larger and wealthier than Normandy and it is possible that Emma also relished the rise in status that marriage to Aethelred would bring. Certainly, there is no record that she objected and, in early spring 1002, Emma crossed the channel and soon afterwards married Aethelred.3
Emma was crowned as queen soon after her marriage and she was obviously accorded a great deal of respect in England, always being referred to as ‘the Lady’ in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for example. However, her youth and the large age gap between herself and Aethelred means that Emma was not expected to play any political role and she appears only as a background figure in the last years of Aethelred’s reign. During her marriage she bore Aethelred only three children and this suggests that the couple were rarely together. Emma may also have been viewed with suspicion in an England damaged by years of Viking raids and, certainly, she seems to have continued to associate with the Danes. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 1003, for example, records that ‘here Exeter was destroyed because of the business of a French churl called Hugh, whom the Lady had set up as reeve; and the raiding army completely did for the town’.4 Whether Emma was involved in Hugh’s treachery or not her alienation was apparently uppermost in English minds during her first marriage.
England had been plagued by Viking attacks since the 980s and Aethelred was unable to contend with them, earning himself the nickname ‘the Unready’. He may, however, have consoled himself with the thought that the Vikings of the 980s, 990s and early eleventh century came only for plunder, leaving for the continent once they had wreaked their havoc. However, in 1013, the tenor of the Viking attacks suddenly changed with the arrival of a Viking fleet at Gainsborough led by Swein, King of Denmark, and his son, Cnut.5 Swein had been raiding in England for several years but, in 1013, he came looking for conquest, perhaps seeing the weakened kingdom as an easy target. He certainly appears to have conquered the kingdom with ease and, soon after his arrival, much of northern England submitted to him, abandoning their loyalty to Aethelred.6 Gratified at the ease of his conquest, Swein left his son to guard his ships and moved south.
By the time of Swein’s invasion, Emma had been Aethelred’s wife for over a decade and was the mother of his children. Whatever innate sympathies she had had for the Vikings were probably long gone and she must have feared for the fate of her children. Aethelred was also anxious for the safety of his younger children and his wife and, late in 1013, both Emma and her children fled to Normandy to seek sanctuary at the court of her brother.7 Emma may have been pleased to see her home again but also acutely aware of the difficult position in which she found herself. This would have been compounded when, only weeks after she arrived, she was joined by Aethelred himself.8 Aethelred’s presence as a deposed king cannot have been welcome to either Emma or her brother and Emma may have felt concern for the future of her sons, Edward and Alfred.
In Aethelred’s absence, Swein was accepted as king throughout England. However, on 2 February 1014, he died suddenly, leaving his teenaged son, Cnut, as his heir in England.9 According to William of Malmesbury, the Danes in England immediately attempted to declare Cnut king.10 The English, however, decided to send for Aethelred, ‘declaring that their natural sovereign was dearer to them, if he could conduct himself more like a king than he had hitherto done’.11 Emma may have been sceptical, along with much of England, about Aethelred’s ability in this respect but she returned to England along with the rest of her English family, leaving Normandy for the last time in her life.
Aethelred quickly proved himself unequal to the task before him and, in the face of both rebellion by his eldest son, Edmund, and an invasion by Cnut, he died quietly in London on 23 April 1016.12 Emma, who was in London at the time, was probably by his side.
Aethelred’s death left Emma in a difficult position. For much of her marriage, Emma had probably hoped that her own son, Edward, would be chosen to succeed his father in preference to his older half-brothers. She may have been the source of a rumour that his father had named him as heir. According to one source:
When the royal wife of old King Aethelred was pregnant in her womb, all the men of the country took an oath that if a man child should come forth as the fruit of her labour, they would await in him their lord and king who would rule over the whole race of the English.13
Emma later proved herself to be a proficient propagandist and it is possible that she took steps to ensure that the succession to the throne fell to her own son, as her mother-in-law, Queen Aelfthryth, had done earlier. If this had been Emma’s hope, however, she would have realised in 1016 that neither of her sons were in a position to claim the crown. Soon after Aethelred’s death, Emma’s children were taken, once again, to her family in Normandy, although Emma, perhaps unwilling to return to Normandy as a penniless exile, remained behind in England, placing her hopes in her stepson, Edmund.
Soon after Aethelred’s death, the royal council in London elected Edmund as king.14 Emma, seeing little other hope, probably agreed with this election although she must have been uncomfortably aware that Edmund, as a mature man, already had both a wife and sons of his own. He also does not appear to have been inclined to protect his stepmother personally, and left London soon after his election in order to raise an army. Cnut quickly besieged London and Emma must have felt let down by Edmund on hearing, in the autumn, that Edmund and Cnut had agreed to divide the kingdom between them, leaving London in the hands of Cnut. When news of this division reached London, the citizens bought peace with the new king, finally lifting the siege.15 Emma’s whereabouts in the winter of 1016 are not recorded but she was presumably quickly taken into Cnut’s custody. Emma probably lost all hope when word arrived soon afterwards that Edmund had died, leaving Cnut as sole ruler of England.
Emma of Normandy was an excellent propagandist and provided her own version of the year following Aethelred’s death. According to an account commissioned by her, after Cnut had won the crown he ‘lacked nothing except a most noble wife; such a one he ordered to be sought everywhere for him, in order to obtain her hand lawfully, when she was found, and to make her the partner of his rule, when she was won’.16 According to Emma’s Encomium, Cnut searched across Europe to find such a bride and found her in a great queen who was living in Normandy.17 He did not, in reality, have to look so far afield and, in a more accurate account, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that ‘before 1 August [1017] the king ordered the widow of the former king Aethelred, Richard’s daughter, to be fetched to him as queen’.18 Emma, as Cnut’s prisoner, probably had very little say in her marriage to Cnut and it is likely that she would have seen it as the best offer that she was likely to get. As she herself later claimed, it is just possible that she also obtained a promise from the king that a son of their marriage could succeed in precedence to his sons by any other wife.19 This would certainly have been a necessary provision for Emma as she cannot have failed to know, in 1017, that Cnut was already married.
When Cnut had been left behind at Gainsborough in 1013 to guard his father’s ships he did not concern himself only with military preparations. It is likely that it was during this period that he first met Aelfgifu of Northampton, a young noblewoman from a prominent Midlands family.20 Aelfgifu belonged to the family from which Aethelred’s son Edmund had taken his wife and it is clear that there were political considerations in both kings drawing their wives from the family. However, Cnut’s later conduct towards Aelfgifu suggests that there was a strong personal attachment between them and Aelfgifu bore Cnut two sons in quick succession. Aelfgifu is reported to have been the mistress of the Norwegian King Olaf before her marriage to Cnut and it is likely that her sympathies were wholly Scandinavian.21 Her own father, Ealdorman Aelfhelm, had been murdered on Aethelred’s orders and she would have had no love for either the English king or his Norman wife.
Aelfgifu’s whereabouts in 1016 are not recorded and she may have remained on her family’s estates in the Midlands with her children. She must have been jubilant when word reached her of Cnut’s victory over Edmund and it is possible that she waited to be called to London to take up her position as Cnut’s queen. If this was the case, she was to be disappointed and must have been horrified to hear the news that her husband had married Emma. Aelfgifu must have feared repudiation by Cnut and relegation to life in a nunnery, the fate of earlier abandoned queens. Aelfgifu, however, seems to have had a personal hold over Cnut that Emma could never have. Although her marriage had given Cnut some political advantage in England, there was probably an additional personal element in his choice of her. Conversely Cnut’s marriage to Emma was wholly political. Through his marriage to the English queen he was probably hoping both to present himself as an English king and to neutralise any support that Emma’s Norman family might give to her sons. It was common practice for conquering kings to marry into an existing royal family and Cnut’s own father, Swein, had married the Queen of Sweden after deposing her son.22 Throughout her marriage to Cnut, Emma was presented as an English queen, in spite of her foreign origins; hence she is always listed in sources by her English name, ‘Aelfgifu’.
Emma was more than a decade older than Cnut and, in spite of the political nature of their marriage, she appears to have quickly gained influence over him. This influence was probably cemented by the births early in their marriage of a son, Harthacnut, and a daughter, Gunnhild. Cnut certainly appears to have treated Harthacnut as his heir, perhaps obeying his promise to Emma.23 Emma was also crowned with Cnut in 1017 and appears to have enjoyed a higher status than she had done in Aethelred’s reign, even early in her second marriage.24 It has even been suggested that she can be seen as Cnut’s co-ruler.25 Certainly, attempts were made to emphasise Emma’s position as an English queen, as seen for example in a letter from 1020 in which the Archbishop of York addressed the king and queen jointly.26
Whilst this improvement in her status must have been pleasing to Emma she must always have been acutely aware of Aelfgifu’s position as a rival in England. She had probably expected Cnut to quietly repudiate Aelfgifu soon after their marriage and it must have come as a shock to her when the king showed no signs of doing so. Aelfgifu’s whereabouts are not recorded for most of Cnut’s reign but it is possible that she and Emma often came into contact with each other. It has been suggested that Aelfgifu was given a household at Bosham in Sussex and, certainly, it is recorded that a daughter of Cnut drowned there and was buried in the local church.27 If such a daughter existed, she would have been Aelfgifu’s rather than Emma’s. For Aelfgifu to be lodged at Bosham would have seemed uncomfortably close to Emma’s own base at Winchester, although Cnut may well have liked to keep both his wives within easy access of his court. However, as the sons of both women grew up, Cnut also appears to have realised the difficulties of keeping two rival wives and, in the late 1020s, he apparently began looking around for some way of making provision for Aelfgifu and her children.
As well as being King of England and Denmark, Cnut was King of Norway. In 1029 his regent in Norway drowned which left Cnut with an opportunity to advance Aelfgifu and her children.28 In 1030, Cnut named his eldest son by Aelfgifu, Swein, King of Norway and dispatched the boy to Norway, along with his mother who was to act as regent.29 This appointment must have pleased Aelfgifu and is a measure of Cnut’s respect for his first wife and her abilities. However the move was probably less popular with Emma and it may be significant that around the same time her son, Harthacnut, was appointed King of Denmark by his father.30 Denmark was Cnut’s ancestral kingdom rather than one of his recent conquests and Emma may have felt a sense of satisfaction in the preferential treatment accorded to her own child.
Aelfgifu seems to have adopted her role as regent of Norway with gusto. She and Swein quickly took control of the country and set about trying to mould it into a Danish kingdom, as Cnut would have wanted. According to Saint Olaf’s Saga, the pair promptly introduced Danish laws to Norway, such as that forbidding anyone to leave the country without their leave.31 The king and queen also introduced a number of new taxes to Norway, insisting, for example, that every man over five years of age contribute towards equipping warships as well as taxes in food which were required by the new king and his mother.32 Although these new laws were introduced in Swein’s name, it was clear to everyone that it was his mother who was the real power in Norway. Even today, ‘Aelfgifu’s time’ is remembered as a period of misery and repression.33 Aelfgifu was probably only carrying out Cnut’s commands but in the process she made both herself and the other Danes in Norway deeply unpopular, causing a wave of Norwegian nationalism to quickly sweep through the country.
This nationalism quickly took the form of a cult that began to grow up around the grave of King Olaf, the last native Norwegian king. Aelfgifu is reported to have been Olaf’s mistress in her youth and it is possible that she knew better than most how this king was no saint. However, she also recognised the dangers of this cult to Danish rule in Norway and apparently took steps to try to dispel it. Saint Olaf’s Saga, which recounts Aelfgifu’s attempts to dispel the cult around Olaf is the only source in which this shadowy queen’s character is fully developed and clearly shows her as something of a clever and determined woman. According to the saga, it was decided to disinter the body of King Olaf in order to see if it showed any signs of sanctity.34 The body was duly found to be remarkably preserved and only Aelfgifu of those assembled seems to have showed any scepticism:
Then Alfifa [Aelfgifu] said, ‘Mighty little do bodies decompose when buried in sand. It would not be the case if he had lain in earth.’ Then the bishop took a pair of shears and cut the king’s hair and trimmed his whiskers. He had long whiskers as people in those days used to have.
Then the bishop said to the king and Alfifa, ‘Now the hair and the beard of the king are as they were when he died, but it had grown as much as you can see here cut off.’
Then Alfifa replied, ‘That hair would seem to me a holy relic only if fire does not burn it. We have often seen wholly preserved and undamaged the hair of persons who have lain in the ground longer than this man has.’
Thereupon the bishop had fire put in the censer, blessed it, and put incense on it. Then he laid King Olaf’s hair into the fire, and when all the incense was burned, the bishop took the hair out of the fire, and it was not burned. The bishop had the king and the other chieftains view it. Thereupon Alfifa bade them lay the hair into fire that had not been blessed. Then Einar Thambarskelfir bade her be silent and used hard language against her. So then, by the bishop’s pronouncement, the consent of the king, and the judgment of all the people, King Olaf was declared a true saint.35
Clearly, Aelfgifu was a tenacious woman and unwilling to admit that she had been beaten. Beaten she was, however and, by 1035, both her and Swein’s positions were untenable and the pair fled back to Denmark as failures.36 This was, perhaps, the end of Aelfgifu’s ambitions for her eldest son, Swein, who died soon after their expulsion from Norway, leaving her with only one surviving child, Harold, who was living in England.
Swein’s death was not the only one to rock the royal family in 1035 and that same year Cnut himself died suddenly at Shaftesbury.37 News of the death must have come as a shock to both of Cnut’s wives, although it appears to have been Emma, perhaps present at Cnut’s deathbed, who acted first. Emma settled in Winchester soon after the death and quickly took possession of Cnut’s treasury, presumably hoping to hold it until her son, Harthacnut, could return from Denmark to claim it. It was at this point that Emma announced that Harthacnut had been named as Cnut’s successor in England, although this was strongly disputed.
The news of Cnut’s death would have taken longer to reach Aelfgifu in Denmark and she must have been equally shocked at the news. She was probably well aware of Emma’s hopes that Harthacnut would succeed to the throne both Denmark and England and whilst Harthacnut was already established in Denmark, she may have quickly turned to look at England with hopes for the future of her second son, Harold. Certainly with Swein’s death she had little to hold her in Denmark and by the end of the year, at the latest, Aelfgifu had returned to England and been reunited with her son, Harold. Harold Harefoot is a shadowy figure and it is likely that Aelfgifu was the driving force behind his actions following Cnut’s death, just as Emma was behind the actions of her own sons.
It was certainly Harold who took the initiative and, soon after his father’s death, he went to the Archbishop of Canterbury and demanded to be crowned King of England.38 It seems likely that Aelfgifu would have been behind this direct attempt to pre-empt Emma but if this was the case, she was to be unsuccessful. The Archbishop, who perhaps had already been approached by Emma, refused to grant Harold the crown. Instead he placed the coronation regalia on the high altar, prohibiting anyone from touching it. This must have been a blow to Aelfgifu’s hopes and both she and Emma had to resign themselves to the succession being decided by the council.
Emma and Aelfgifu may have been present at the royal council that was held at Oxford and their presence would have contributed to the already tense atmosphere in the kingdom. Both women had certainly been busy rallying their supporters in the months since Cnut’s death and it appears to have been Aelfgifu who was the more successful. At the council it was decided that although Harthacnut was his father’s heir, Harold as the only son of Cnut present in England was to rule England as regent until the return of his brother.39 This situation would not have been judged satisfactory by either of Cnut’s queens but, certainly, it was Aelfgifu who had the upper hand and, around that time, Harold was also able to deprive Emma of the royal treasury, further cementing his hold on the kingdom. Rather than bringing the rivalry of the two women to an end, however, the council at Oxford appears merely to have increased the tension between them.
Numerous Anglo-Saxon and later medieval chronicles refer to suggestions that neither Swein nor Harold were sons of Cnut. Florence of Worcester, for example, claims that Swein:
Was said to be his son by Aelfgifu of Northampton, daughter of Ealdorman Aelfhelm and the most noble lady Wulfrun; but some asserted that he was not the son of the king and this Aelfgifu, but that this same Aelfgifu wished to have a son by the king, but could not, and therefore ordered to be brought to her the newly born infant of a certain priest, and made the king fully believe that she had just borne him a son.40
Florence of Worcester had also heard a similar story about the birth of Harold, whom he claimed to be a foundling and the child of a humble shoemaker rather than the king.41 Stories such as these appear to have become common around the time of Cnut’s death and, tellingly, a version exists in the Encomium of Queen Emma herself. In this account, Aelfgifu was a ‘concubine’ of Cnut, rather than his wife, and Harold, the son of a servant, was taken by Aelfgifu to pass off as her child by the king.42 It seems likely that Emma was the source of the rumours both about Aelfgifu’s concubinage and the rumours of her sons’ births. This was probably a deliberate policy to damage the status of Harold in the eyes of the nobility of England, thus emphasising her own legitimate marriage to Cnut and the legitimacy of her son, Harthacnut.
If Emma resorted to dirty tricks in order to denigrate the son of her rival then she was not the only one. By August 1036, word had reached Gunnhild, Emma’s daughter by Cnut who was living in a Germanic state, that Aelfgifu was working to ensure the succession of Harold.43 Aelfgifu was apparently holding feasts and offering gifts to the nobles of the kingdom in order to bring them round to her point of view. This together with fact that Harthacnut had still not materialised in England appears to have strengthened Aelfgifu’s cause in relation to her rival. Emma could spread rumours about Aelfgifu and Harold but without a son present in England, there was very little that she could do to advance her own cause.
By mid-1036, Emma herself appears to have become exasperated at Harthacnut’s failure to arrive and claim the English crown; for the first time in twenty years, she once again looked towards her sons by Aethelred. According to Emma’s own account, written several years after the disaster of 1036, it was Harold himself who summoned her two older sons to England, forging a letter to appear to be from their mother inviting them to claim the English crown.44 However it seems unlikely that Harold and, for that matter, Aelfgifu would have risked summoning rivals to England in 1036. A more likely candidate is Emma herself, writing to her sons, pointing out to them: ‘I wonder what plan you are adopting, since you are aware that the delay arising from your procrastination is becoming from day to day a support to the usurpers of your rule’.45
It is unlikely that Emma expected both sons to heed her summons. Both decided to come to their mother separately and Edward arrived safely with Emma in Winchester. Alfred, however, decided to come by a less direct route and his party was intercepted by Harold at Guildford. Simeon of Durham writes:
[Alfred] Was carried heavily chained to the Isle of Ely; but, as soon as the ship reached the land, immediately his eyes were there most cruelly torn out, and then he was taken to the monastery and delivered to the custody of the monks.46
Alfred died soon after his blinding and Edward, hearing the news, fled quickly back to Normandy leaving his mother alone and without sons in England once again. Aelfgifu, who was so often behind the actions attributed to her sons, may have played a role in ordering the murder of Alfred and it would have given her some satisfaction to be behind the death of the son of the rival who had deprived her of her husband and her sons of their inheritance.
The death of Alfred and Harthacnut’s continued failure to return to England marked the end of Emma’s hopes for the English crown for one of her sons for some time and, in 1037, Harold was finally able to claim the crown in his own name. According to theAnglo-Saxon Chronicle, Emma was ‘driven out without any mercy to face the raging winter beyond the sea to Bruges’.47 Once again, Emma’s propagandist would appear to have been behind this account but there is no doubt that in 1037 with Emma driven to Flanders as an exile, her future looked bleak indeed. Aelfgifu, now the only queen in England, must have been jubilant and apparently set about ruling England alongside her son, Harold Harefoot.
Emma of Normandy’s prospects looked bleak in 1037, but she was not defeated and from Flanders she sent once again to Harthacnut, asking him to come and claim the English crown.48 Harthacnut, perhaps angered at the way that his mother had been treated, finally arrived in Flanders with a fleet in early 1040. Emma and Harthacunt were still in Flanders when, on 17 March 1040, Harold Harefoot died suddenly in England having reigned as king for only three years.49 Aelfgifu of Northampton disappears from the sources with the death of her only surviving son and it seems likely that she quickly fled, knowing that her rival would return to take her vengeance. Her fate is a mystery but she cannot have enjoyed a happy old age.
Emma, on the other hand, arrived in England in triumph as the mother of the new king and quickly took up a position as Harthacnut’s closest advisor. Perhaps remembering her earlier vulnerability when none of her sons were present in England, she also persuaded Harthacnut to invite his half-brother, Edward, to return to England to share his brother’s rule:
Obeying his brother’s command, he was conveyed to England, and the mother and both sons, having no disagreement between them, enjoy the ready amenities of the kingdom. Here there is loyalty among sharers of the rule, here the bond of motherly and brotherly love is of strength indestructible.50
This was the point at which Emma’s Encomium ends and it was the image of a victorious queen mother that she wanted to present to the world, particularly perhaps to her rival Aelfgifu of Northampton. Whilst she was the victor in the power struggle with Aelfgifu, this was not the end of her story, however. After ruling for only two years, Harthacnut also died, leaving the throne to his half-brother, Edward the Confessor. Emma must have been pleased that the succession had been secured for her last remaining son but she did not have the same good relationship with Edward that she had enjoyed with Harthacnut. In 1043, only a short time after Edward’s coronation, Emma was forcibly deprived of her lands and treasures on the orders of the new king and retired from her place at court.51
For the rest of her life, Emma was always treated with the respect due to her as the king’s mother, but she was denied any political role and she died, almost unnoticed, on 6 March 1052.52 It was not for a quiet retirement that either Aelfgifu or Emma had fought following the death of Cnut and, in their old age, they may both have reflected on the futility of their struggle on behalf of their sons. Both women were determined to secure the lucrative role of queen mother for themselves and both, ultimately, suffered for their attempts. It is difficult to see either as entirely blameworthy, however, and Cnut, through his failure to regulate his unorthodox marital inclinations must ultimately bear much of the blame. It was only natural that both his wives would want to see their own son on the throne and clear that, without effective provision made for all his sons, his wives would compete. Both Emma of Normandy and Aelfgifu of Northampton are remembered as notorious for their political actions and the underhand methods that they both employed; for both, these actions were ultimately futile.