house
of Cerdic for ever, and to recognise Canute as their King. How many
jarls and thanes of Danish origin do we find around the kings under
all the last governments. Edgar was especially blamed for the very
reason that he took them under his protection. But they had been
subjected only by war; no hereditary sentiment of natural loyalty
attached them to the West Saxon royal house. The ecclesiastical
aristocracy was besides determined by religious considerations; to
them these disasters and crimes seemed sufficient proof of the truth
of those prophecies of coming woe which Dunstan was believed to have
uttered. They repaired to Canute at Southampton, and concluded a peace
with him, the conditions of which were that they would abandon the
descendants of Ethelred for ever, and recognise Canute as their King;
he, on the other hand, promised to fulfil the duties of a King truly,
in both spiritual and temporal relations.[8] Yet once more, Ethelred's
eldest son, Edmund Ironsides, who was himself half a Dane by birth,
roused himself to a vigorous resistance: London and a part of the
nobility took his side; he gained through force of arms a settlement
by which, though indeed he lost the best part of the land and the
capital itself, he maintained the crown; he died however, soon after,
and then the whole country recognised Canute as King. The last scion
of the royal house in the land was banished, and all the claims of the
family to the crown again declared void. The Anglo-Saxon magnates
undertook to make a money payment to the Danish host; in return they
received the pledge from the King's hand, and the oath by his soul
taken by his chiefs.[9] It was a treaty between the Anglo-Saxon and
the Danish chiefs, by which the former received the King of the latter
as also their own.

This extremely important event links the centuries together, and
determines the future fortunes of England. The kingly house, whose
right and pre-eminence was connected with the earliest settlements,
which had completed the union of the realm and delivered it from the
worst distress, was at a moment of moral deterioration and disaster
excluded by the spiritual and temporal chiefs, of Anglo-Saxon and
Danish origin. They had first tried to limit it, to bind it by its own
promise; when this led to nothing, they annihilated its right by a
formal resolution of the realm, and procured peace by raising to the
throne another sovereign who had no right by birth. Ca