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The family connection will be more apparent to the eye by the following scheme: Ethelred the Saxon. Emma. Canute the Dane. \/ /\ \/ Edward. Hardicanute. Alfred. Harold was the son of Canute by a former marriage.
They willingly enough accepted the outward sign of baptism, but the holy water changed little of the inner man. Even Harold, the son of Canute, scarce seventeen years before the date we have now entered, being unable to obtain from the Archbishop of Canterbury who had espoused the cause of his brother Hardicanute the consecrating benediction, lived and reigned as one who had abjured Christianity.
He had murdered, or at least caused to be murdered, horribly, Alfred the Etheling, King Ethelred's son and heir-apparent, when it seemed his interest to support the claims of Hardicanute against Harefoot. He now found little difficulty in persuading his victim's younger brother to come to England, and become at once his king, his son-in-law and his puppet.
Canute and Emma therefore seem to have acted wisely, and to have done all that the nature of the case admitted to prevent a renewal of these dreadful struggles, by concentrating their combined influence in favor of Hardicanute, who, though not absolutely the heir to either line, still combined, in some degree, the claims of both of them.
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.
King Canute died in 1035, at thirty-six years of age, and his son Harald reigned after him in England for four years, and afterwards his son Harthaknud, or Hardicanute, for three years, when England again came under an Anglo-Saxon king to fall under the power of William of Normandy, a conqueror of Norwegian descent, twenty-four years later.
Happily, however, it was agreed to refer the whole question to a great meeting at Oxford, which decided that Harold should have all the country north of the Thames, with London for his capital city, and that Hardicanute should have all the south.
This a-fensive act showed what a great big broad nature Hardicanute had, also the kind of timber used in making a king in those days. Godwin, however, seems to have been a good political acrobat, and was on more sides of more questions than anybody else of those times.
Hardicanute, pleased with the splendour of this spectacle, quickly forgot his brothers murder; and on Godwins swearing that he was innocent of the crime, he allowed him to be acquitted.
Edward married a daughter of the German Emperor, and during the commotions in England, and the successive reigns of Harold Harefoot, Hardicanute, and the Confessor, had remained forgotten in his exile, until now suddenly recalled to England as the heir presumptive of his childless namesake. He arrived with Agatha his wife, one infant son, Edgar, and two daughters, Margaret and Christina.
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