The Ifs of History/Chapter 3
NOT much turns upon the marriage of kings in these days. The German Kaiser is not the less German assuredly because his mother was an Englishwoman. Nor did her marriage to the Crown Prince of Prussia give Prussia or Germany the slightest hold upon England.
It was altogether different in an earlier day. One royal marriage in particular, that of King Ethelred the Redeless, the "Unready," of England, to Emma, the daughter of Richard the Fearless, Duke of Normandy, in the year 1002, exercised upon Britain and the world the most tremendous influence. It led to the invasion and subjugation of England by William, surnamed the Conqueror, and to the reconstruction of that mother country of ours, politically, socially and racially, upon new lines. No royal marriage, perhaps, ever had such enduring and far-reaching consequences; no queen-elect ever took with her to her adopted country such a lading of fateful changes.
The marriage was a sufficiently commonplace affair in itself. Ethelred was a smooth and rather gentle prince, who thought much more of his own easy fortunes than of anything else. He wanted a wife, and he did not like the Danes, who were racially and politically the nearest neighbors of his royal house. He visited Normandy, and must have pleased the Duke, for Richard, a bold and resourceful man, bestowed this fair-haired Emma, a lineal descendant of the victorious Norse pirates, but now quite Frenchified, upon the young Englishman.
She was not destined to see her progeny long reign over England. But it did not matter about her descendants. The great change did not come with them. What she really did was to supply to her nephew, Duke William, known to history as the Conqueror, who was yet to come to the throne of Normandy, a pretext to seize the English crown for himself.
William was of illegitimate birth. His mother was Arvela, a poor girl whom Duke Robert saw washing clothes in the river one day and straightway became enamored of. But on his father's side William was, through Emma's marriage, cousin of King Edward the Confessor, son of the unready Ethelred. On a lucky day for him he visited England. It was at a time when Edward was very ill, and William claimed ever after that he had received from Edward, on his sick bed, a solemn promise that the Norman duke should succeed him upon the English throne.
Edward had no son, but it appears quite unlikely that a wise ruler such as he was should deliberately have given away the throne and country to a foreigner, especially when his brother-in-law Harold, Earl of Wessex, a capable man, stood ready to succeed him. The English, at any rate, took this view of the matter, for they straightway made Harold king, ignoring the claim of the vilely born Duke William to the throne.
But as the world knows, William was able to make good his flimsy claim. Whether Edward gave him the crown or not, Stamford Bridge and Hastings did give it him. When at last, following the law of the time, he presented himself to the suffrage of the English nation, the representatives of the beaten people had no option but to elect him. He was a part of the baggage that Queen Emma brought with her.
What was the rest of it? For one thing, union and consolidation, centralization. England up to that time had been but a broken congeries of earldoms or tribal territories, and would have gone on thus if it had not at last found a master. In the next place, William brought the touch of France, of Rome, of the graceful Latin world, to England. This son of a hundred pirates passed on to England the torch of a culture that had been lighted in Greece and relumed in Rome. It was not for nothing that what had been ox meat with the Saxons now became beef for the English; what had been calves' flesh became veal, and base swine flesh reappeared as a more elegant dish called pork. It meant something that the rude language of Beowulf was to be succeeded by the smoother lilt of Chaucer—that, in short, the English had a new and bookish tongue.
It meant, in simple truth, the disappearance of the old England and the birth of a new and greater nation. "It was in these years of subjection," says Green, "that England became really England." The Normans degraded the bulk of the English lords, but they made these displaced nobles the nucleus of a new middle class. At the same time their protection led to the elevation into the same middle class of a race of cultivators who had been peasants. Furthermore, the Norman rule expanded villages into towns and cities, and these in time began to stand, as powerful boroughs, for the rights of the people. The conquest, says Green, "secured for England a new communion with the artistic and intellectual life of the world without her. To it we owe not merely English wealth and English freedom, but England herself."
Edward A. Freeman calls the Norman conquest "the most important event in English history since the first coming of the English and their conversion to Christianity." If the succession of native kings had continued, says the same authority, "freedom might have died out step by step, as it did in some other lands. As it was, the main effect of the conquest was to call out the ancient English spirit in a new and antagonistic shape, to give the English nation new leaders in the conquerors who were gradually changed into countrymen, and by the union of the men of both races, to win back the substance of the old institutions under new forms."
In other words, the Norman Princess Emma brought with her John Bull as a part of her dowry, when she came to weak Ethelred as his bride.