away to the North. It was but to plan a
more terrible return. Youth of nineteen as he was, Cnut showed from the
first the vigour of his temper. Setting aside his brother he made himself
king of Denmark; and at once gathered a splendid fleet for a fresh attack
on England, whose king and nobles were again at strife, and where a
bitter quarrel between ealdorman Eadric of Mercia and AEthelred's son
Eadmund Ironside broke the strength of the realm. The desertion of Eadric
to Cnut as soon as he appeared off the coast threw open England to his
arms; Wessex and Mercia submitted to him; and though the loyalty of
London enabled Eadmund, when his father's death raised him in 1016 to the
throne, to struggle bravely for a few months against the Danes, a
decisive overthrow at Assandun and a treaty of partition which this
wrested from him at Olney were soon followed by the young king's death.
Cnut was left master of the realm. His first acts of government showed
little but the temper of the mere northman, passionate, revengeful,
uniting the guile of the savage with his thirst for blood. Eadric of
Mercia, whose aid had given him the Crown, was felled by an axe-blow at
the king's signal; a murder removed Eadwig, the brother of Eadmund
Ironside, while the children of Eadmund were hunted even into Hungary by
his ruthless hate. But from a savage such as this the young conqueror
rose abruptly into a wise and temperate king. His aim during twenty years
seems to have been to obliterate from men's minds the foreign character
of his rule and the bloodshed in which it had begun.

Conqueror indeed as he was, the Dane was no foreigner in the sense that
the Norman was a foreigner after him. His language differed little from
the English tongue. He brought in no new system of tenure or government.
Cnut ruled in fact not as a foreign conqueror but as a native king. He
dismissed his Danish host, and retaining only a trained band of household
troops or "hus-carls" to serve as a body-guard relied boldly for support
within his realm on the justice and good government he secured it. He
fell back on "Eadgar's Law," on the old constitution of the realm, for
his rule of government; and owned no difference between Dane and
Englishman among his subjects. He identified himself even with the
patriotism which had withstood the stranger. The Church had been the
centre of the national resistance; Archbishop AElfheah had been slain by
Danish hands. But Cnut sought th