Crown and Country: A History of England through the Monarchy. David Starkey

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СКАЧАТЬ his eyes were put out and his hands cut off. Not surprisingly, Kent subsequently remained quiet, though Cenwulf in turn made some concession to local pride by setting up his brother Cuthred as puppet-king of Kent.

      Cenwulf himself died in 821. His death was followed by another, even more drawn-out struggle for the succession, which once more gave Mercia’s enemies, internal and external alike, their opportunity. And this time the whole edifice of Mercian imperial power was brought crashing down. Fittingly, the man who struck the decisive blow was another victim of Offa’s, Egbert.

      Egbert was a scion of the royal house of Wessex. Somehow he had fallen foul of Offa, and, like many others, had fled ‘in fear of death’ to take refuge in Francia at the court of Charlemagne. But in 802, after the death of Offa’s son-in-law King Beorhtric, Egbert the exile returned to succeed effortlessly to the throne of Wessex. Now, twenty years later, Cenwulf ’s death offered him the opportunity to avenge the slights he had suffered at Mercian hands. The year 825 was his annus mirabilis: Egbert himself defeated the new Mercian king Beornwulf at Ellendun; the East Anglians then rose against Mercian domination and killed Beornwulf as he tried to suppress the revolt; meanwhile, Egbert’s son, Æthelwulf, occupied the remaining provinces of the former Mercian empire in Sussex, Kent and Essex, and, by some at least, was greeted as liberator. Four years later, Egbert scaled fresh heights: he conquered Mercia and marched against the Northumbrians, defeating them in battle and receiving submission and tribute.

      A new great power had arisen in England: Wessex. But it would have to confront a new and even greater threat: the Vikings.

      Chapter 3

       Wessex

       Æthelwulf, Æthelbald, Æthelberht, Æthelred, Alfred the Great

      ONCE, IN THE FOURTH AND FIFTH CENTURIES, the Saxons had been Europe’s most feared pirates, plundering the coasts of Britain and Gaul at will. Then they grew bolder and became settlers and conquerors.

      Now the process was about to repeat itself with another Germanic people on the move: the Vikings. They came from further north, from Denmark and even Norway. They were intrepid seafarers, as the Anglo-Saxons had once been; they were also pagan and they were (despite the whitewash of some recent historians) even more savage. The Viking raids on England began in the late eighth century, when Offa still held sway. An isolated raiding party landed at Portland and killed the king’s reeve, the leading royal official, at Dorchester. Then, in 793, they struck at the other end of the country and destroyed the monastic church on Lindisfarne.

      Little more is heard of them for forty years. But from 835 the raids became regular. For Anglo-Saxon England was now rich – as rich, probably, as late Roman Britain and as vulnerable. Particularly attractive to the raiders were the forms of portable wealth which have appealed to thieves and robbers throughout the ages: the golden crosses and altar plate, the jewels surrounding the relics and studding the bindings of lavishly illuminated Bibles, the vast quantities of silver coin struck by Offa and his successors, the silver-mounted drinking horns and gold rings and brooches of the rich. Much of this portable wealth was concentrated in the minster-churches and monasteries, which thus became favourite Viking targets. Probably all that mattered was that these churches were rich. But the fact that they were centres of a rival faith may have made their destruction a duty to the pagan Vikings as well as a pleasure. Towns, which were also rich and lightly defended, were other victims of choice. As were captives, who could be ransomed, sold or enslaved.

      All this was bad enough. But in the 860s there came a change in the raids that was both qualitative and quantitative: in 865 a ‘great army’ invaded England, and it was reinforced in 871 by ‘a great summer army’. Thousands of men were involved; they had royal leadership and their aim was conquest. Within a decade, everything north and east of Watling Street had fallen: Northumbria in 867, East Anglia in 869 and most of Mercia in 874–7. The kingdoms of Northumbria and East Anglia were obliterated, never to revive, and their kings were offered as sacrifices to Odin (the Nordic Woden), perhaps in the gruesome ritual of the ‘blood-eagle’, in which the victim’s ribcage was cut open and his lungs torn out and draped round his shoulders like an eagle’s folded wings. The succession to five bishoprics was disrupted for long periods and three of them were never re-formed. Everywhere, libraries and archives were destroyed; learning itself perished and the whole achievement of Anglo-Saxon England seemed on the point of obliteration.

      I

      In the rout, only one Anglo-Saxon kingdom survived, Wessex, and even that hung by a thread. It had certain advantages, however, which might give it hope. These included a secure succession, an unusually effective structure of government and, above all, it was to prove, the personal qualities of its king, Alfred. Like all Anglo-Saxon kings, Alfred was a man of action and a warrior. But he was also, uniquely for his own age and for long after, a true philosopher-king. Moreover, unlike many philosophers and almost all kings, he wrote and published widely. The result is that his very words have come down to us and, for the first time in our history, we can hear the genuine voice of an English king.

      It is a very attractive voice too: reasonable, practical and persuasive. So much so, indeed, that it is easy to forget that it is also the voice of a master politician, who had an agenda and wants us to see things from his point of view. Actually, it is very difficult not to, since almost everything that survives from the period is written by Alfred or influenced by him. To a remarkable extent therefore our image of Alfred as ‘The Great’ is – still, and after over a thousand years – a product of Alfred’s own self-invention. It goes without saying that such a view is not impartial. But it has survived only because Alfred’s achievements matched the grandiosity of his vision.

      Alfred was a grandson of the great King Egbert. His own father, Æthelwulf, succeeded in 839 after having acted for many years as sub-king or viceroy in the eastern provinces of Wessex, which he had conquered in 825. His marriage, to his first wife Osburh, was unusually fruitful, with five sons who reached maturity. This could be a mixed blessing, as the results of Edward III’s numerous progeny would show. But Æthelwulf was able to get his sons to agree to a sort of succession in survivorship, in which each brother would succeed his elder, saving all the time certain property rights to the children of the deceased. Rather surprisingly, the agreement held. Even more surprisingly, all four sons who survived Æthelwulf succeeded in turn to the throne.

      Alfred, born in about 849, was the youngest of this band of brothers, being junior by at least twenty-five years to Æthelstan, the eldest. As the youngest of the family, he seems to have been a favourite child, indulged and even a little spoiled. He was also bright, curious, with an excellent memory and, like many younger sons, an unusually adventurous intelligence. But events were just as important in forming the man. His mother died when he was very young. Even more importantly, his father, taking advantage perhaps of his wife’s death, decided that thirty years as viceroy and king was enough. Instead, in 855, when Alfred was about six, he embarked on a pilgrimage to Rome. Æthelbald, his eldest surviving son, was left as king in his place, but Alfred, as the youngest, seems to have accompanied his father. They travelled in style and stayed in the city for about a year. It was far fallen from its ancient splendour. But more than enough remained to fire the imagination of a sensitive and impressionable child like Alfred. Probably his interest in history dates from this experience. As does his ambition, his lust for fame and his determination, as it were, to build a new Rome in England’s green and pleasant land.

      But there was more to come. On the way back from Rome, Æthelwulf visited the Frankish court, and, on 1 October 856 at Verberie-sur-Oise near Paris, was married to Princess Judith, daughter of Charles the Bald, king of West Francia, and great-granddaughter of Charlemagne. At the same time, Judith was anointed and crowned queen by Archbishop Hincmar of Reims, the master-liturgist and inventor of tradition, in an ordo or form of service which he had devised. It was the first recorded coronation of an English queen and perhaps the first time СКАЧАТЬ