s, turned
pirates against their own country, and aided by a storm occasioned the
loss of nearly the whole English navy.

There was but one man of note, at this miserable pass, who was true to
his country and the feeble King. He was a priest, and a brave one. For
twenty days, the Archbishop of Canterbury defended that city against its
Danish besiegers; and when a traitor in the town threw the gates open and
admitted them, he said, in chains, 'I will not buy my life with money
that must be extorted from the suffering people. Do with me what you
please!' Again and again, he steadily refused to purchase his release
with gold wrung from the poor.

At last, the Danes being tired of this, and being assembled at a drunken
merry-making, had him brought into the feasting-hall.

'Now, bishop,' they said, 'we want gold!'

He looked round on the crowd of angry faces; from the shaggy beards close
to him, to the shaggy beards against the walls, where men were mounted on
tables and forms to see him over the heads of others: and he knew that
his time was come.

'I have no gold,' he said.

'Get it, bishop!' they all thundered.

'That, I have often told you I will not,' said he.

They gathered closer round him, threatening, but he stood unmoved. Then,
one man struck him; then, another; then a cursing soldier picked up from
a heap in a corner of the hall, where fragments had been rudely thrown at
dinner, a great ox-bone, and cast it at his face, from which the blood
came spurting forth; then, others ran to the same heap, and knocked him
down with other bones, and bruised and battered him; until one soldier
whom he had baptised (willing, as I hope for the sake of that soldier's
soul, to shorten the sufferings of the good man) struck him dead with his
battle-axe.

If Ethelred had had the heart to emulate the courage of this noble
archbishop, he might have done something yet. But he paid the Danes
forty-eight thousand pounds, instead, and gained so little by the
cowardly act, that Sweyn soon afterwards came over to subdue all England.
So broken was the attachment of the English people, by this time, to
their incapable King and their forlorn country which could not protect
them, that they welcomed Sweyn on all sides, as a deliverer. London
faithfully stood out, as long as the King was within its walls; but, when
he sneaked away, it also welcomed the Dane. Then, all was over; and the
King took refuge abroad with the Duke of N