King of Denmark (1080–1086) who planned a great invasion of England, strengthened crown and Church, and was murdered at the altar in Odense — becoming Denmark's first saint and patron.
Cnut IV, remembered as Canute the Holy, was king of Denmark from 1080 to 1086 and became the country's first saint. A forceful and ambitious son of Sweyn II, he sought to raise both the power of the crown and the standing of the Church, and famously planned a great invasion of England to make good the Danish royal claim inherited from Cnut the Great against William the Conqueror.
The English expedition of 1085 gathered a huge fleet but broke up without sailing, and Canute's demands — heavy taxes, fines on those who had failed to muster, and tithes for the Church — provoked a revolt in Jutland. He was pursued to Odense and cut down before the altar of St Alban's Church in 1086. Miracles were soon reported at his tomb, and he was canonised in 1101 as Saint Canute, patron of Denmark.
Canute was born about 1042, one of the sons of Sweyn II Estridsson. Forceful, pious, and ambitious, he had been a candidate for the throne in 1076, when the assembly preferred his milder brother Harald. He spent Harald's reign as a leading warrior of the realm, raiding in the Baltic, and on Harald's death in 1080 he was at last chosen king.
He came to the throne with grand designs: to strengthen the monarchy, to advance the Church, and to press the old Danish claim to England.
Canute was everything his brother Harald was not: hard-driving, imperious, and consumed by ambition for the crown and the Church alike. The sources — shaped by the cult that grew around him — present a king of fierce piety and iron will, a lawgiver and a champion of the clergy who exalted royal authority to a new and, to many Danes, alarming pitch.
That combination of holiness and heavy-handedness is the key to both his fall and his sainthood. He demanded tithes and taxes with a rigour that outraged the freemen, and enforced the crown's rights without mercy; yet his devotion, his defence of the Church, and above all the manner of his death at the altar allowed churchmen to remember the harsh king as a martyr. He remains a paradox — the overbearing ruler whom Denmark came to venerate as a saint.
Canute's great project was the conquest of England. As a descendant of the royal house of Cnut the Great, he claimed the English throne, and in 1085 he assembled a vast fleet — with Norwegian and Flemish allies — to wrest it from William the Conqueror. But the host was kept waiting through the summer while Canute dealt with affairs in the south, and the levy, restless and unpaid, dispersed without ever sailing.
The reckoning fell on the king. Canute imposed heavy fines on those who had abandoned the muster and pressed his demands for taxes and Church tithes, and the freemen of Vendsyssel in northern Jutland rose in revolt. Canute fled south to the island of Funen.
The rebels pursued Canute to Odense, where he took refuge in the wooden church of St Alban. There, on 10 July 1086, he was cut down before the altar together with his brother Benedict and many of his men, struck by a lance through a window as he knelt in prayer, according to the tradition.
The years after his death brought famine, which many read as punishment for the killing of the king, and reports of miracles at his grave. In 1101 he was canonised — Denmark's first saint — and Odense became the centre of his cult.
Canute IV is remembered as the last Scandinavian king to plan seriously the conquest of England, and as the martyr-king whose sainthood gave the young Danish monarchy a sacred patron of its own. His drive to exalt crown and Church, though it cost him his life, pointed the way the Danish monarchy would later travel, and his cult at Odense bound the dynasty of the Estridsens to the holiness of one of their own. He is the patron saint of Denmark.