|Points of analogy between his position and that of the Emperors.| Whatever vague and transitory homage Cæsar may have received from Scots or Northumbrians, it is certain that no King of the West-Saxons ever knew a superior beyond the limits of his own island. But, from the days of Ecgberht onwards, every King of the West-Saxons had claimed or aspired to a superiority of his own through the whole extent of his own island; and now Æthelstan had converted those lofty dreams into a living reality. Gaul, Spain, Italy, Denmark, the Slavonic and other less known lands beyond the Elbe, all had bowed to the dominion of the first Teutonic Cæsar. To England alone he had been a model and a counsellor, but not a master. As the one perfectly independent prince in Western Christendom, Æthelstan was the equal of Emperors, and within his own island he held the same position which the Emperors held in the rest of the world. Like an Emperor, he not only had his own kingdom, governed under him by his own Dukes or Ealdormen, but his kingdom was surrounded by a circle of vassal princes who paid to him the homage which he himself paid to no superior upon earth. As no other prince in Western Christendom could claim for his own kingdom the same perfect independence of all Imperial superiority, so no other prince in Western Christendom could show, in a crowd of dependent princes, so perfect a reproduction of the Imperial majesty. And |No universally acknowledged Emperor at this time.| it must not be forgotten that during the first half of the tenth century there was not, as there was before and after, any one Emperor universally acknowledged by all the Christian states of the West. The days of the Carolingian Cæsars were past; the days of the Saxon Cæsars were not yet come. Guy, Lambert, Berengar, |888–896.| were Augusti not less fleeting, and far more feeble, than any of the tyrants of whom Britain had once been so fertile. The King of the English and Lord of all Britain might well feel himself to be a truer representative of Imperial greatness than Emperors whose rule was at most confined to a corner of Italy. He was, beyond all doubt, the second among Western Kings. The Kings of the Eastern Franks, not yet Emperors in formal rank, but marked out in the eyes of all men as the predestined heirs of Charles, were the only rulers who could be held to surpass him in power and glory. Without waiting for any formal coronation, the soldiers of Henry and Otto had saluted their victorious Kings as Imperatores and Patres Patriæ, and, with the same feeling, Æthelstan assumed, or received from his counsellors, the titles which placed |Revival of the Empire under Otto [962], not likely to make the English Kings withdraw their Imperial claims.| him on a level with them. The new birth of the Empire during the reign of Eadgar, the coronation of Otto the Great, which at once restored to the Imperial crown no small share of its ancient power and dignity, would by no means tend to make our princes lay aside any Imperial claims which they had already asserted. Eadgar was on the best terms with his Imperial uncle; still it might be thought needful to assert that England owed him no kind of homage, and that the other princes of Britain owed homage to Eadgar and not to Otto.

Here then, as it seems to me, and not in any traditions of Ambrosius or Carausius, is to be found the true explanation of the otherwise startling title of Emperor of |Full import of the Imperial titles.| Britain. That title was meant at once to assert the independence of the English crown upon any foreign superior, and to assert the dependence of all the other powers of Britain upon the English crown. It was meant to assert that the King of the English was, not the homager but the peer, alike of the Imperator of the West and of the Basileus of the East, and it was meant to assert that Scots, Welsh, and Cumbrians owed no duty to Rome or to Byzantium, but only to their Father and Lord at |They go out of use after the Norman Conquest, because insular dominion is no longer the chief object.| Winchester. The Imperial titles last in common use down to the Norman Conquest; after that their employment is rare, and they gradually die out altogether. And why? Because the Norman and Angevin Kings, though they were by no means disposed willingly to abate a tittle of the rights of their predecessors within the four seas of Britain, were far from looking on insular dominion as the main object of their policy. They were Kings of England, and they knew the strength and value of England; some of them had wisdom enough to value England for her own sake; still in the eyes of all of them, one main value of England was to serve as a nursery of men and a storehouse of money to serve their plans of continental ambition. They were Kings of England, but they were also Counts of Anjou, Dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine, striving after an equality with their liege lord at Paris, sometimes perhaps after a superiority over him. The British Empire in which Æthelstan gloried, and in which Cnut in the midst of his Northern triumphs gloried no less, was assuredly not despised by the wisdom of Henry of Anjou. But if it was one object of his policy, it was not the only one. In the eyes of the Poitevin knight-errant who came after him, it seemed hardly worth keeping; and it was something which could not be kept in the grasp of John and Henry the |The old claims take a more strictly feudal shape under Edward the First.| Third. At last in the great Edward there again arose a true Bretwalda, one who saw that the dominion of Æthelstan and Eadgar was a worthier prize than shadowy dreams of aggrandizement beyond the sea. But by this time the notion of a British Empire had given way to more purely feudal ideas, and his claims to supremacy took their shape |Later traces of the ideas.| accordingly. But traces of the old ideas still lingered on. Through the fourteenth, the fifteenth, the sixteenth centuries, a chain of instances may be put together which show that the idea of an Empire of Britain was not wholly forgotten.^[186] Even when no Imperial claims were put forward on behalf of England, it was thought needful carefully to shut out all claims on the part of any other power to Imperial supremacy over England. And in the sixteenth century, along with the revived study of our early history, the Imperial titles themselves revive in a more definite form. The Imperial character of the English sovereignty was strongly asserted both by Henry the Eighth and by Elizabeth. In the days of Charles the Fifth a denial of all dependence on the Roman Cæsar may have been no less needful than a denial of all dependence on the Roman Pontiff. Henry may well have deemed it prudent to take the same precautions against his Imperial nephew which Eadgar had taken against his Imperial uncle. Protests of the like sort were again made in the reign of Elizabeth. We find her more than once formally described as Empress, an Empress whose Empire reached from “the Orcade isles to the mountains Pyrenee.” In this last description we find the key to the style. An Empire implied subordinate kingdoms. Elizabeth claimed to be Empress as being independent of the continental Emperor; she also claimed to be Empress as having a royal vassal within her own island. The same phrases which assert the independence of England upon the Austrian Emperor also assert the dependence of Scotland upon the English Empress.^[187]

This then I believe to be the true account of the Imperial titles and Imperial pretensions of the English Kings in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Our Kings meant to assert at once their own perfect independence and the dependence of the other princes of Britain upon them. |Growth of the English system of dependencies. 827–1869.| It is perhaps worth notice that in all this we may see the beginnings of a system which has gone on to our own day. From the days of Ecgberht onwards the House of Cerdic has never been without its dependencies. Their sphere has gradually been enlarged; as nearer dependencies have been incorporated with the central state, another more distant circle of dependencies has arisen beyond them. Wessex held the supremacy over England; England held it over Great Britain; Great Britain held it over Ireland and a crowd of smaller islands and colonies; the United Kingdom holds it over colonies and dependencies of every kind, from Man to New Zealand. Since the days of the Roman Commonwealth, no other land has had so large an experience of the relations between a central power and half-incorporated states of various kinds. |Imperial character still retained by England.| In this sense, England is now a more truly Imperial power than any other in the world. Putting aside the local associations of Rome and Constantinople, no modern state comes so near to the notion of an Empire as understood either by Æthelstan or by Otto. There is therefore an historical meaning in the familiar phrases of “the British Empire” and “the Imperial Parliament,” whether any remembrance of ancient Bretwaldas and Basileis was or was not present to the minds of those who devised them.