A Chronological History of Britain
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Successful Kings don’t rule alone. This is especially true for Kings with as much going on as Cnut.
And one of Cnut’s most influential right-hand men was actually his Queen. And Emma was more than just an advisor. She was wielding considerable power in her own right, power that likely expanded every time Cnut journeyed out of England.
But Queen Emma wasn’t Cnut’s only wife.
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Europe was in chaos in the 1020s. Crises just kept coming, and the powerful were trying to capitalize on disorder. And in times like these, actions can have outsized impact, even the smaller ones.
For example, if you sat in Leicester during the 1020s, the last thing you would have been paying attention to would have been the spat between dukes in Northern France. And even further below the things your list of interests would have been one of those Dukes taking a mistress and having a bastard boy.
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What we call history was, at one point, just current events. And world affairs never happen in a vacuum. It’s never just one thing happening after another… it’s a whole mesh of events that, while they might happen in their own sequences that look very much like just one thing happening after another, they’re actually interwoven with a massive web of other events (some seen and some unseen) that affect the outcomes of whatever was happening currently, and what could happen in the future.