Battle of Hastings, The (3 page)

The strongest recommendation of Cnut’s reign, as has been remarked, is that his contemporaries found so little to say about it. His comparatively early death in 1035 left the kingdom to
the chaos of a disputed inheritance. Neither he nor any of his sons appears to have been physically robust. It is an ironic reflection that, if Cnut had been as healthy and lived as long as Edward
the Confessor (there cannot have been more than a few years between them in age), there
would never have been a Norman Conquest. It is probable that Cnut had intended his son
by Emma to succeed him; but Harthacnut’s absence in Denmark at the time of his father’s death left the way open for his half-brother, Harold Harefoot (Sweyn had predeceased his father),
to fill the vacancy, first theoretically as regent until Harthacnut could return, but later as King Harold I. His tenure of the throne was brief; but it included one event that was to produce
reverberations as late as 1066.

During Cnut’s relatively peaceful reign, his stepsons Edward and Alfred, Emma’s children by Æthelred, had grown up in Normandy. We know little of their life there. They do not
seem, for example, ever to have been granted land or honours in Normandy when they reached adulthood, though their sister was respectably married to the Count of the Vexin. On the occasions when
they appear as charter witnesses there, their names generally occur rather insultingly low in the order of precedence. In 1033 William’s father, Duke Robert, assembled a fleet for the
purpose, it was said, of assisting the young athelings to regain their inheritance. The fleet lay for some time at Jersey and then sailed for Mont St Michel to attack Brittany instead. It was
hardly a convincing gesture of support. On the other hand, they do appear to have been recognized as the rightful heirs of their father, despite their mother’s subsequent marriage to his
conqueror and the birth of another son. Emma herself appears to have remembered them only intermittently, at least in public, her main ambitions being centred on her son Harthacnut, a fact that
aroused the lasting resentment of her eldest son Edward. In 1036 the younger brother, Alfred the Atheling, returned to England, to visit his mother at Winchester. According to the anonymous author
of the life of Emma, he was lured over by a forged letter from Harold Harefoot, written in Emma’s name, asking that one of her sons
come to her immediately to discuss
how the throne might be regained.
^vi
Whether this story is true or not, it is unlikely that he was coming simply to make a social call. On the other hand,
he does not seem to have arrived in any kind of strength. According to the life of Emma, he brought only a few men. He was intercepted by Godwin, Earl of Wessex and handed over by him to King
Harold Harefoot who had Alfred’s men murdered or mutilated and the Atheling himself blinded so savagely that he died of his wounds at Ely.

Blinding was not at that time a very unusual punishment (after 1066 it was, for example, the penalty for poaching one of the royal deer). Like other forms of mutilation common at the time (and
promoted by the Church in England as a more merciful fate than death), it was designed to render the victim harmless. None the less in this instance it created consternation. (It may be noted that
it is unlikely that so common an act of Dark Age violence would have aroused such surprise or revulsion in other countries; that it did so in England indicates the extent to which a less savage and
more law-abiding society had prevailed there.) Harold Harefoot’s motives are perfectly clear; the Atheling posed an obvious threat to his power. Godwin’s motives are less clear. He had
voted for Harthacnut’s succession and against Harold after Cnut’s death, and this may have appeared a way to reinstate himself in the king’s good graces. In later years, when he
came to trial for his part in the crime, he maintained that in surrendering Alfred to Harold’s men, he was acting under the king’s orders and had not known that the Atheling’s
mutilation was intended. Whatever the facts of the case, it shocked the inhabitants of England, most of whom had probably virtually forgotten the Atheling’s existence during the peaceful days
of Cnut’s reign. Never was a bloodier deed done in this land since the Danes came, declared the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, which recorded the death of ‘the guiltless
Atheling’ in a burst of poetry. Whatever Godwin’s motives, his part in the crime permanently stained his name and soured his relations with Alfred’s brother Edward when the latter
eventually succeeded to the throne. Not the least of the Norman accusations against Godwin’s son Harold in future years would be the fact that his father had betrayed a prince of the royal
house of Wessex who was kin to their duke and was under Norman protection.

If Godwin had hoped to propitiate Harold Harefoot by his betrayal of the Atheling, he might have saved himself the trouble. Within four years Harold was dead, succeeded by his half-brother,
Harthacnut, who had been Godwin’s candidate for the throne all along. Harthacnut lasted a bare two years on the throne before dropping dead at a bridal feast, but during his short reign he
invited his half-brother, the Atheling Edward, by now the only surviving son of Æthelred, to return to England and (it is assumed) to succeed him. Thus, after a gap of twenty-four years, the
direct heir of the royal house of Wessex returned to the English throne.

It is difficult, on the limited evidence available, to assess the character of King Edward fairly. In part, this is due to the atmosphere of piety spread retrospectively over his life by the
appellation – which he acquired only after his death – of St Edward the Confessor. What is definitively known of him suggests that his later sainthood may have been no more deserved
than the title of ‘the Martyr’ was merited by his uncle Edward, assassinated in 978 for the benefit of his father Æthelred. The only thing we know of his personality is that he
seems to have had a tendency to fly into ungovernable rages. The main characteristic that can be deduced from his policies is a determination never to leave England again. The situation in England
to which he returned, though clearly
preferable to his former position of impoverished hanger-on at the ducal court in Normandy, cannot have been without difficulty, and it is
much to his credit that he negotiated it so successfully that he contrived (though clearly no warrior-king, like his half-brother Edmund Ironside) to die peacefully in his bed after a relatively
prosperous reign of twenty-four years. His biography, the
Vita Ædwardi Regis,
commissioned by his wife
,
portrays him as an old man, majestic, white-haired and white-bearded, all
his thoughts fixed on the next world. He is probably more realistically described by his twentieth-century biographer:

Since, however, it was during his reign that the faultlines that were to lead to Hastings became perceptible, we must make some effort to understand him.

He was born in or around 1005, and can therefore have been a child of no more than seven or eight when his mother took him to her native Normandy as an exile. He seems to have made a brief
reappearance in England when his father Æthelred was restored to his throne in 1014. Apart from one or two rather half-hearted
skirmishes around the coast, he saw no
more of England until his return as heir-presumptive to Harthacnut in 1041. Since he was educated from childhood at the Norman court, we may assume that he was bred to arms as no other form of
education for a king’s son would have been contemplated there. Whatever his belligerent impulses, he seems never to have put such an education into practical use. There is no credible
evidence of his appearance on any battlefield. According to the Scandinavian
Flateyjarbók
, he fought beside his brother Edmund in 1016 and nearly killed Cnut, but this is a very late
fourteenth-century source and cannot be regarded as reliable. Since he could only have been eleven or twelve at the time, this story seems particularly unlikely. Cnut may not have been a great
warrior, making up in guile what he lacked in physical prowess, but he cannot have been as feeble as that. Of the personalities who then dominated England he knew nothing. It is improbable that he
even spoke much English. If he did, it would certainly have been as a foreigner. In the first few years after his return, he must have had much to learn. One of the things he must have learned very
quickly was that, though he enjoyed a substantial reservoir of goodwill in the country as a whole as the last representative of the line of Alfred, in practice he held the throne only through the
continuing support of the dominant nobles of the kingdom, and in particular three of them: Siward, Earl of Northumbria; Leofric, Earl of Mercia; and Godwin, Earl of Wessex. All three had originally
been appointed by Cnut; all enjoyed considerable power in their own domains. The prospect of asserting his authority over them might well have daunted more forceful men than Edward.

His first conspicuous action, almost as soon as he was crowned, was with the support of all three and revealed much both about Edward’s own character and the reserves of resentment he felt
he
had to pay off. In company with the three great earls, he rode without warning to Winchester where his mother, Emma, was living, stripped her of all that she owned,
‘untold riches in silver and gold’, and abandoned her there with a bare subsistence. The reason given for this in one version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is that in past days she had
been very hard towards him, and had done less for him than he had wished before he was king. A more practical reason may have been that she had control of the royal treasury, which was normally
kept in Winchester, the old capital of the kingdom. She may have been holding it on behalf of her son Harthacnut, and using it to interfere in matters of state (one version of the Chronicle states
that she was holding it ‘against him’). The fact that he was accompanied on his raid by the three most powerful men in the land indicates that there was more than a private grudge here,
but a private grudge there must undoubtedly have been, and the fact that it, rather than a perfectly legitimate public reason, is officially recorded in the Chronicle suggests that it must have
been widely known. Whatever lay behind his actions, it signalled Emma’s retirement from public life. Her death is recorded in 1051.

In the meantime, Edward had to come to terms with the main men of his new kingdom. Of the three great earls, his most difficult relationship was with Godwin. To begin with, Godwin was on his
doorstep. Northumbria was far distant, alien, Danish territory, and Edward would not be the first King of England never to visit it. There is no evidence that his father ever went there, apart from
an attack on the Danes in Cumbria in 1000. Siward, a Dane himself, was powerful, but he concerned himself only minimally with the affairs of central government; his chief preoccupations were with
his frontier with Scotland and with potential threats from Scandinavia. Mercia, stretching right across
the English midlands from Wales to the North Sea, was nearer, but not
near enough to demand Edward’s attention on a daily basis; and with Leofric he had no quarrel. Wessex, which included most of the south of England, including London, Winchester and most of
the king’s own lands, was unavoidable, and with Godwin he had a very definite quarrel, since he held him responsible for the death of his younger brother Alfred. On the other hand, Godwin
seems to have played the greatest part in supporting Edward’s claim to the throne. This was almost certainly not entirely disinterested. Godwin had six sons who needed to be provided with
earldoms, and he had daughters, one of whom might prove to be the mother of an heir to the throne. We do not know what arguments were used to persuade Edward that Godwin’s eldest daughter,
Edith, would make him a suitable queen. Whatever they were, he did not resist them, and the marriage took place in 1044. To Edith herself, there seem to have been no objections; records describe
her as beautiful, accomplished, well-educated and pious. From surviving stories, she also appears to have been humourless, acquisitive and arrogant. None the less, marriage to the daughter of the
man whom Edward regarded as responsible for his brother’s death must have been an unwelcome pill to swallow, and the fact that the marriage proved childless raised inevitable speculation.

At the outset of Edward’s reign, the lack of an obvious heir cannot have appeared as a serious problem to anyone. Aged no more than thirty-eight when he succeeded to the throne, he had
ample time to provide an heir of his own body, and his wife, who must have been in her early twenties when she married, came of a conspicuously prolific family. The legend of Edward’s vow of
lifelong celibacy had its origins later in his reign, and, in due course, did much to strengthen his claims to sanctity; but it is not
impossible that, jostled into marriage
with the daughter of the man against whom he maintained an unremitting grudge, he hit on this expedient to deny Godwin what he wanted most: a grandson who was heir to the throne. It would have been
typical of what can be deduced of his sense of humour.

It was only in 1051 that the cracks in the political façade began to surface. They showed then through an incident that seemed, in its apparent total irrelevance and irrationality,
entirely unplanned. Edward’s brother-in-law, Eustace of Boulogne, second husband of his sister Godgifu, came to England on a visit to the king at Gloucester, and, in the words of one version
of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘spoke with him what he would’ and set off home. As he approached Dover, he and his men stopped to eat, and, for no explained reason, put on their armour.
In Dover, they attempted to commandeer lodgings by force. One of Eustace’s men wounded a householder when he tried to enter his home against his will and was killed by the outraged townsman.
A riot immediately broke out; Eustace and his men slew the townsman on his own hearth and then more than twenty other men throughout the town. The citizens retaliated by killing nineteen of
Eustace’s men and wounding as many more. Eustace escaped with his remaining followers and returned to the king at Gloucester where he appears to have given Edward a very one-sided account of
the fracas. The king, enraged, sent for Godwin and ordered him to carry war into Dover and punish the town. Godwin refused, being loath, as the Chronicle reports, to harm his own people.