Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (14 page)

Chapter 5
Confessor and Conquest

Edward the Confessor, Harold Godwinson

EDWARD WAS NOMINATED
as king almost before the life was out of his predecessor. ‘Before [Harthacnut] was buried’,
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
reports, ‘all the people chose Edward for king at London.’ Some historians have understood this to mean that Edward II was carried to the throne on a wave of patriotic sentiment for the House of Wessex. It is possible. On the other hand, the verdict of
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
suggests, at best, modified rapture: ‘they received him as their king as was natural’.

I

By this time, Edward was already nearing forty. He had spent well over half his life as an exile in Normandy and was probably more French than English. Certainly, he seems to have been happier in Norman or French company. Both his coins, whose portrait type is the most realistic yet, and the Bayeux Tapestry show him with a long, rather lugubrious face, and moustache and beard. The beard began as a rather straggly imperial but became more luxuriant with age. In character, he seems to have had something of that other long-term exile, Charles II, about him. He was ordinarily rather lazy about affairs of state, but, when backed into a corner, he could be both cunning and decisive. And he, too, was determined never to go on his travels again.

The difference, of course, lay in their sexual appetites. Later, the fact that Edward was childless was misunderstood by his monkish admirers to mean that, though married for over two decades, he was voluntarily celibate. On this basis he was named ‘the Confessor’ and honoured as a saint.

But the real Edward was a man and a king of his time. And he did all the things an eleventh-century king had to do. He led his troops and his fleet. He loved hunting, and, when he relaxed of an evening, he liked to listen to the recital of bloodthirsty Norse sagas. Of course, like most English kings, he was pious and showy in his devotions – especially towards the end. But his childlessness, it seems clear, was the result, not of piety, but of mere bad luck – and perhaps of an impossible wife.

Edward’s coronation was delayed for the unusually long period of nine months. This allowed for careful preparation; it also enabled the coronation to be timed to coincide with Easter, the principal feast of the Church. ‘Early’ on Easter Day Edward was crowned at Winchester ‘with much pomp’. Archbishop Eadsige of Canterbury performed the ceremony and ‘before all the people well admonished [the king]’. The Church, clearly, wanted another Edgar: it remained to be seen whether they had got him.

Eight months later, Edward took what he probably saw as his first steps towards becoming his own man. Accompanied by Earls Godwin and Leofric, he rode from Gloucester to Winchester, ‘took his mother unawares’ and stripped her, once more, of her lands and treasures. The reason, the Anglo-Saxon chronicler heard, was that Edward resented the fact that Emma’s behaviour towards him had been lukewarm at best. ‘She was formerly very hard upon the king her son, and did less for him than he wished before he was king, and also since.’ Edward soon relented and made a partial restitution. But for Emma, the glory days were over. She was reduced from the regal state of
mater regis
to a mere royal widow. And, instead of dabbling in high politics, she seems to have retired to live out the last years of her life at her house in Winchester, where she died in 1052 and was buried next to Cnut.

But Edward soon exchanged one form of female domination for another. For, on 23 January 1045, he married Edith, Godwin’s cultivated, forceful daughter. Her two older brothers had already been made earls: Swein of a new earldom carved out from Wessex and Mercia along the Welsh border, and Harold of East Anglia. United, it seemed, the Godwin family could carry all before it. But there now occurred the first of a series of disastrous quarrels. It was provoked by Swein, who, although the eldest, was the black sheep of the family and seems to have seen himself more as a Danish freebooter than an English aristocrat. He first seduced an abbess and then murdered his cousin, Earl Beorn. Harold was outraged, but Edward, perhaps slyly, eventually pardoned Swein.

Was Edward already tiring of Godwin and his over-mighty family? If so, this would explain why Edward was also building up his own, French, party. His nephew, Ralph of Mantes, son of his sister Godgifu’s first marriage, was made earl of Hereford, which had formed part of Swein’s much larger earldom. And Robert, the former abbot of the great Norman abbey of Jumièges, was made bishop of London. Then, in October 1050, Eadsige of Canterbury, who had been incapacitated for much of the previous decade, died. There followed a disputed appointment. The monks at Canterbury elected a kinsman of Godwin’s. But Edward decided that Robert of Jumièges should have the archbishopric; overturned the election and sent Robert off to Rome to get his pallium (a narrow stole of white wool that marked the papal confirmation of the appointment of an archbishop) from the pope.

Edward can only have intended this as a deliberate challenge to Godwin. Not only was his kinsman slighted, but Canterbury lay at the heart of Godwin’s sphere of influence. Worse was to come. In the course of the summer, another of Edward’s extended French family, Count Eustace of Boulogne, came to visit the king. Eustace had married Edward’s sister, Godgifu, as her second husband, and had had children by her. Was the purpose of his visit, perhaps, to discuss the succession which the childlessness of Queen Edith left vacant? Eustace planned to return via Dover. The unpopularity of the French, already endemic in England, led him to expect trouble, and perhaps even to provoke it. He and his men donned armour and then tried forcibly to quarter themselves in the town. One householder resisted and a Frenchman was killed. A general melee resulted, leaving twenty English dead, and nineteen French, beside the wounded. Eustace complained personally to Edward, giving a slanted version of the story. Edward, happy probably to humiliate Godwin, took Eustace’s side and ordered Godwin, as earl of Wessex, to punish the town. But Godwin refused, ‘because he was loath to destroy his own people’.

Faced with Godwin’s direct challenge to royal authority, Edward convened the
witan
to meet at Gloucester on 8 September. Meanwhile, Godwin, who ‘took it much to heart that in his earldom such a thing should happen’, summoned his forces. So did Swein (back in the family fold when there was trouble). And so did Harold. The three met at their manor of Beverstone, fifteen miles south of Gloucester. Edward, taken by surprise at the size of Godwin’s army, hastily called on the forces of the rival earls, headed by Leofric.

Once again, civil war seemed inevitable. But, once again, it was avoided. Cooler heads pointed out the obvious:

It was very unwise that they should come together, for in the two armies was there almost all that was noblest in England. They therefore prevented this, that they might not leave the land at the mercy of our foes, whilst engaged in destructive conflict betwixt ourselves.

Matters were therefore postponed to give time for tempers to cool. Hostages were exchanged and the
witan
directed to reconvene in a fortnight in London. In the interim, the balance of forces shifted. The army of the royalist earls was constantly swollen with the arrival of recruits from the distant north. On the other hand, Godwin’s ‘army continually diminished’. By the time Godwin and his sons had taken up their positions in their London residence in Southwark on the south bank of the Thames, it was clear that the game was up. Stigand, Emma’s former confidant, who was now bishop of Winchester, was sent to deliver Edward’s ultimatum. Godwin, certain now that he would be condemned, refused to appear before the
witan
, and was immediately outlawed, together with his whole family. This then divided: Godwin, his wife and three of his sons fled to the family harbour at Bosham and thence to exile in Flanders. While Harold, with another brother, rode to Bristol, where a ship was ready prepared to take them to Ireland. Only their sister, Queen Edith, remained at the mercy of her family’s enemies, who were now headed by her own husband. In a grim echo of his treatment of his mother, Edward stripped his wife too of her lands and treasures, and packed her off to a nunnery.

When everything was over,
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
reflected on the mutability of fortune:

Wonderful would it have been thought by every man that was then in England, if any person had said before that it would end thus! For [Godwin] before was raised to such a height, that he ruled the king and all England; his sons were earls, and the king’s darlings; and his daughter wedded and united to the king.

Now all was lost.

It had not happened without planning, of course. Indeed, Edward, despite the apparently fortuitous course of events, seems to have prepared the ground for the coup with care. He even involved those outside the political elite by abolishing the hated
heregeld
, which won him instant popularity.

But the completeness of his success tempted Edward to overreach himself. The most obvious symptom was to invite his nephew William, duke of Normandy, to England. William arrived with ‘a great force of Frenchmen’ all of whom were entertained at court. We do not know what passed between uncle and nephew. But the suspicion must be that this was the moment when Edward formalized his nomination of William as his heir. According to Norman sources, Robert of Jumièges, on his way to Rome earlier in 1051, had paused in Normandy to convey the initial offer to William. Now, in Edward’s moment of triumph, the deed was done. William paid homage and Edward received him as heir. The royalist earls pledged their support, and a son and grandson of Godwin’s, who were already in Edward’s hands as hostages, were handed over to William to make sure that the exiled Godwins acquiesced.

What was Edward doing? In retrospect, it looks as though he was taking a decision of enormous strategic importance and deciding – no less – that the future of England should be Norman, not Anglo-Saxon.

But, at the time, it may have appeared very different. For the offer to William was not irrevocable. Edward might yet have children of his own, especially if he changed wives, as Archbishop Robert was encouraging him to do. And, even if he did not, he could always change his mind about his nominated heir. Edward, in other words, was using the great expectations of the succession to manage the politics of the reign. Godwin and his family were down but not out. William might prove a useful ally if it came to a showdown. Or he might indeed be the best long-term bet as an acceptable king of England.

II

But such subtleties passed most Englishmen by. To them, it simply looked as if Edward were handing over England to the French. The result was that the balance of opinion, especially in the south-east, now started to shift to the Godwins. Realizing this, the Godwins decided to try their luck in England once more. Harold and his father effected a rendezvous at Portland on the Dorset coast and then made for the Thames estuary. Hitherto, they had behaved like any other marauding army. But now they set themselves to win hearts and minds – and, above all, men. Thanks in large part to Godwin’s earlier protection of Dover, they succeeded. They were especially keen to recruit sailors and soon assembled a formidable fleet, which pledged its loyalty to Godwin’s cause: ‘then said they all that they would with him live or die’.

Godwin now felt strong enough to try the issue with Edward again. The king had taken his stand in London, with the royalist earls and the fleet. As the Godwins’ armada approached from the east, Godwin sent to Edward formally to demand restitution, on behalf of himself and his family: ‘that they might be each possessed of those things that which had unjustly taken from them’. Edward dismissed the appeal and Godwin’s forces clamoured for a fight. But Godwin instead decided to tighten the noose. On Monday, 14 September, his ships successfully shot London Bridge, taking advantage of the flood tide and hugging the south bank at Southwark, where Godwin’s own London
burh
was situated. Once past the bridge, Godwin’s ships joined up with his land forces, who were drawn up along the Strand. The Godwin fleet and army thus formed ‘an angle’, as
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
puts it, and threatened to trap the king’s fleet against the bridge.

It was a situation that would recur in English history. In 1399, for example, Henry Bolingbroke, who had been disinherited of the dukedom of Lancaster by Richard II, returned in force to England. At first Henry announced, like Godwin, that he required only the restitution of what was rightfully his. But, as royalist resistance crumbled, Henry overthrew Richard II and usurped his throne – as had probably been his real intention all along.

A similar outcome seemed on the cards in 1052. But, once again, the instinctive quest for balance in the Anglo-Saxon polity came into play:

They were most of them loath to fight with their own kinsmen – for there was little else of any great importance but Englishmen on either side; and they were also unwilling that this land should be more exposed to outlandish people, because they destroyed each other.

These were the same arguments as in 1051. But they had the opposite effect this time and it was the royalist forces that backed off. Negotiations began, with Bishop Stigand acting once more as intermediary. Meanwhile, Archbishop Robert, who had done so much to provoke the crisis, realized that the game was up and, with his fellow French bishop, Ulf of Dorchester, cut his way out of the City and fled for France ‘on board a crazy ship’.

On the 15th the final scene was played out before the
witan
, which met in the king’s palace at Westminster. Godwin protested his innocence of all the charges laid against him and exculpated himself before ‘his lord King Edward and before all the nation’. Edward, though unwillingly, professed to believe him and gave him the kiss of peace. Godwin and his sons were then restored to their earldoms while his daughter, Edith, resumed her place as queen. It was now the turn of Edward’s fallen French followers to be outlawed. The charges were that they had ‘chiefly made the discord between Earl Godwin and the king’, and, more generally, that they had ‘instituted bad laws, and judged unrighteous judgements, and brought bad counsels into this land’. An exception, however, was made in favour of household servants, whom the king was permitted to keep on the proviso that they were ‘true to him and all his people’.