In the families of German national kings we not unfrequently find
among the women a hideous mixture of ambition, revenge, and
bloodthirstiness, which brings kings and kingdoms to ruin. In England
it appears, despite of Christianity and monastic discipline, in its
most atrocious form after the death of Edgar. His eldest son, for some
years his successor, was treacherously murdered by his stepmother (who
wished to advance her own son to the throne), at a visit which he paid
her as he returned from hunting. It was that Edward whose innocence
and leaning towards the Church have gained him the name of Martyr. The
son of the murderess did ascend the throne, but the guilt of blood
seemed to cleave to the crown; he met with the obedience of his
father's times no more. The Anglo-Saxon magnates seized the occasion
which this crime, or the subsequent vacillation of the government
between violence and weakness, offered them, to aim at an independent
position, and to indulge in a personal policy, each man for himself.

At this very moment the Danes renewed their invasions.

Little did Edgar and those around him understand their position, when
they attributed the peace they enjoyed to their own military power, in
the splendid and extensive display of which they took delight. In
reality it was the state of the world at large that brought this peace
about. First of all, it was due to the settlement of the Normans in
North Gaul, under the condition that they should be of one religion
and one realm, and should fulfil the natural duty of keeping off
fresh incursions: the current of Northern invasion thus lost its aim
and direction. But it was of still more decisive effect at the first
that the energetic family which arose in North Germany, and even
assumed the imperial authority, not content with warding off the
Danes, sought them out in their own country instead, and carried the
war against heathenism into the North. The Saxons beyond the sea were
indebted for the peace which they enjoyed chiefly to the great and
splendid deeds of arms of their kindred on the mainland. How much all
depended on this became very clear when Otto II, in the full glow of
great enterprises, met with an unlooked for and early death. Within
the empire two able women and their advisers succeeded in maintaining
peace; but in Denmark, as in other neighbouring countries, the hostile
elements got the upper hand. The Danish king's son, Sven Otto,
abandoned the religi