by Ed West
The two young princes arrived in the country separately, although we can’t know what they planned to do afterwards and who got to be king. Edward got close to Southampton but seeing that the coast was well defended, sensibly headed back to spend another few years sponging off relatives in France. His brother Alfred went via Flanders and then to Kent, where he was met by Canute’s former sidekick Earl Godwin, now one of the richest men in the country.
Godwin, a thegn from Sussex, had risen to become effective ruler of the country under Canute while the old Viking was either in Scandinavia or crying in front of a church. He was the son of Wulfnoth, the nobleman who had a sea battle with Eadric, and there was something a bit shady about his origins. Godwin may have been of noble family, one theory being that his father descended from Alfred the Great’s brother Ethelred, and people rarely rose from nothing at the time. Another story is that during the 1016 invasion Canute’s then friend Ulf was lost and helped by a handsome youth herding cattle, and this young man, Godwin, ended up marrying Ulf’s sister. Alternatively Godwin’s first wife may have been Canute’s sister, who was basically a human trafficker exporting English girls to Denmark, until she was killed by a bolt of lightning, which one or two people thought fair.3 By 1020 Godwin was Earl of Wessex, and also accompanied Canute on various military expeditions, eventually becoming bajulus, or bailiff of the kingdom; with his second wife Gytha, a Danish aristocrat, he had six sons and four daughters.
Canute was impressed with Godwin’s ‘intelligence, his steadfastness, his strength and courage, and his eloquence’,4 and he was widely praised: ‘Rather than acting proudly, he became a father figure to all good men. Gentle by nature and education, he treated inferiors and equals alike with courtesy,’ according to one historian, although his treatment of Prince Alfred was less commendable.
Godwin took Alfred and his men to Guildford, just south of London, but overnight his forces disappeared and at first dawn the Frenchmen found themselves surrounded by Harold’s soldiers, who killed most of them and took Alfred away.
Godwin may have been in on the plot, or he may have just been ordered by the king to hand Alfred over (Norman chroniclers blame him, but they blame the Godwins for everything, and Emma did not seem to hold him responsible). Alfred was taken to East Anglia where his eyes were gouged out, and he died soon after; strangely Emma’s biography, when recording this tragedy, features two comedy eyes beside the text, a sort of primitive emoji that seems in poor taste.
Suffice it to say this didn’t do much for Harold’s already low levels of popularity; but while the king was widely hated, no one hated him more than his half brother Hardicnut, who had been in Denmark the whole time getting angrier and angrier about not being king of England. Hardicnut had his own problems, largely having to do with King Magnus of Norway, Olaf the Stout’s son who had become king in 1035 after Harefoot’s mother Elfgifu and brother Sweyn had been forced out.5 However in 1039 Magnus and Hardicnut made a treaty, agreeing that if one of them died first without an heir the other should inherit all their kingdoms; this would prove to be a critical moment in English history after Magnus’s insane uncle turned up.
The following year Hardicnut was about to invade from Denmark, and had arrived in Bruges where he learned that Harold had died of ‘elfshot’, that is attacked by elves, the diagnosis for viruses people couldn’t understand at the time. Hardicnut then had Harold’s body decapitated and thrown in a bog, before drinking himself to death at a wedding reception.
They weren’t a very sophisticated royal family.
Emma’s son by Canute was not much better than his predecessor, and by all accounts as roundly hated, but he did have a strange childhood, and had not seen his mother since the age of five. Hardicnut took the chance to punish various people he blamed for Alfred’s death, among them Godwin, who appeased the king by giving him a warship which could carry eighty men and then got various magnates from across the country to swear oaths on his behalf.
The new king soon made himself immensely unpopular by quadrupling taxes, and responded to a tax revolt in Worcester by flattening the town in 1041 after two officials were murdered. This policy, where royal officials rode into town and simply killed lots of people and burned down loads of houses, seems a bit excessive to modern eyes and, while it was standard practise, it didn’t tend to win him fans.
In nearby Coventry, Leofric, Earl of Mercia, was given the task of enforcing the new and unpopular tax, much to the dismay of his people, as well as his compassionate blonde wife Godgifu, ‘God’s gift’. In perhaps one of those moments when men promise their other half something without really paying attention to the conversation, Leofric pledged to Godgifu that he’d abolish the tax if she would ‘Ride naked before all the people, through the market of the town.’ Godgifu, or Godiva as she was later called, did just this, with her hair covering her modesty and accompanied by two horsemen.6 The story about the locals agreeing to look away, however, is a later addition, as is the bit about one village idiot, Thomas, suffering blindness as punishment for looking at her, from which we get the phrase ‘Peeping Tom’ (the link between looking at naked women and blindness is a myth common to many cultures, not to mention schoolyards).
It became the most memorable tax protest in history. Only a couple of hundred people lived in Coventry at the time, but as it grew the Lady Godiva pageant became its main attraction, and thousands were turning up by the seventeenth century.7
Hardicnut ruled for only two years, his awful reign unexpectedly ending at the wedding of one of his cronies, Canute’s standard bearer Tofi the Proud, who was marrying Gytha, daughter of one Osgod Clapa. The party was held in Lambeth, on the south bank of the Thames, and in line with Viking tradition huge amounts of alcohol had been consumed; such drinking parties could go on for eight days, and it was considered hugely impolite to refuse a drink when offered one of their near-lethal concoctions. The king had been boozing and was in the middle of the speech when he collapsed, ending Canute’s dynasty in rather ignominious style.
The kindest thing that could be remarked of Hardicnut came from Henry of Huntingdon, who said his court was ‘laid four times a day with royal sumptuousness’, that is, he could organize a good drinking session.
The last of Canute’s line was buried at the Old Minster in Winchester and Emma paid for a very costly relic to be laid there, supposedly the head of St Valentine, who at the time was just known as a Roman priest who had been murdered, and had yet to become associated with courting couples and the multibillion dollar card and flowers industry. Whether it was actually St Valentine’s head, or just the head of some random man, God alone knows.
CHAPTER SIX
Edward, Patron Saint of Divorcees
It was unfortunate for Ethelred that, out of sixteen children, only one son survived until middle age, and he was a bit of a drip. Edward ‘the Confessor’ had had to flee England when he was just thirteen and grew up in Normandy with his uncle, Duke Richard. Although he was more of a Norman than an Englishman, he had an even worse relationship with his mother than Ethelred did, which is saying something.
St Edward—‘confessor’ means ‘pious’ rather than guilty, and just referred to someone who was holy enough to be a martyr but hadn’t actually been martyred—became a cult figure in later years, and by the low standards of his predecessors he was certainly gentle. However, he ended up with a halo mainly because of the back-stabbing politics of the era, a timely biography commissioned by his wife, and by later Norman attempts to smear his archenemy, Earl Godwin; although building Westminster Abbey obviously helped.
Edward was largely considered pious because he didn’t talk during church services, as most people did, but just sat there staring into space, as people do now. He also initiated the tradition where the king would heal the victims of a skin disease called scrofula just by touching them, and this practise of the king’s evil, where the monarch touched the sick once a year, continued until the eighteenth century.1 The illness in
question, a form of tuberculosis, often went into remission on its own and was never fatal, so people naturally attributed it to the monarch’s hand.
Edward was not exactly saintly—more weird than anything. In the words of one historian, ‘the personality described by eyewitnesses is that of a … neurotic with a tendency to paranoia and possessed of a fearsome temper that often made him impervious to reason’.2 While ‘his “saintly” detachment can be read in quite another way, as the “schizoid” alienation of the classic lone wolf, who has decided that since no one cares for him he in turn will care for nobody’. Edward also had ‘an elephantine memory for slights and an ability to bear grudges eternally’.
Freud would probably have blamed his mother, with whom he played a starring role in a horrific family psychodrama. As a child she abandoned him to go and live with her Scandinavian lover, who had driven Edward’s father to an early grave, and after Canute’s death she ignored her son and then actively conspired against him. She doesn’t appear to have liked Edward (he also hardly got a mention in her book) and he seems to have actively hated her.
Edward had been invited over to England by Hardicnut, and after his untimely ending found himself king, the royal line of Alfred restored once again. However he could not free himself from his mother’s control, as she was not only the richest woman in England, but also controlled the treasury. And so on taking charge Edward conspired with the leading magnates Godwin and Leofric, and had his mother arrested and put on trial, one of the suggested reasons being her alleged affair with Stigand, a slightly dubious bishop who would later be excommunicated by five different popes. Emma was tried not by twelve men good and true, which didn’t come about for another two centuries, but by walking over nine red hot ploughshares, the sharp part of a plough, trial by ordeal believed to be the most effective way of determining whether someone was guilty. Courtroom drama ensued, however, when she survived this test, and Edward, satisfied by her innocence, restored her lands. Emma was so brave during her trial that after doing the walk she asked when it began, only to be told it was over; the story comes from Emma’s own book and is probably not entirely true, or at least it got lots of basic facts wrong, such as mentioning a bishop who didn’t arrive in the country until later.
Afterwards Emma turned to Magnus of Norway and tried to get him to overthrow her own son. Magnus had his problems at home but had written a letter to Edward claiming he was rightful king because Hardicnut had promised him the throne, but stating that he couldn’t be bothered doing anything about it right now. In the autumn of 1047 for a few weeks it looked like the Norwegians would invade, but on October 25 Magnus died.
Maybe because of his overbearing mother, the Confessor grew into a gentle, slightly weak man; he was so pale as to be almost albino, obsessed with religion, and interested only in praying rather than the two main pursuits of kingship—fighting and fornicating. As a man of God, Edward’s grand ambition was to build an abbey to rival St Paul’s in London, a ‘West minster’. Whether his religious devotion was worth it in the end is doubtful, as the new abbey cost 10 percent of the kingdom’s income, when in retrospect building a few castles or training some archers would have been a better idea.
Later, though, this rather weedy, mysterious, pale, sex-scared man—the sort who probably would get harassed by louts today if he lived in rundown government housing—was edged out as patron saint of England by the more manly St George, despite the latter being a) foreign and b) nonexistent. As it is, Edward is the patron saint of divorcees and difficult marriages, and is certainly a good choice for that position, having married into a family of half-Viking nouveau riche gangsters.
Edward’s reign was dominated by conflict with Earl Godwin, now the biggest landowner and powerbroker in the land. Although Harold Godwinson would die heroically as England’s last native king, his family were mostly a bunch of yobs who were involved in several murders, and who had risen to power through sheer violence and intimidation.
Edward also blamed Godwin for his brother’s death, so when the king came to be crowned the earl, with gangland-style largesse, gave him a warship even larger than the one he gave Hardicnut, big enough to fit 120 men, decorated with ‘a golden lion’ and a winged and golden dragon that ‘affrights the sea, and belches fire with triple tongue’, lined with tasteful ‘patrician purple.’
The Godwin family increased their power by appointing allies to key Church positions, some of whom didn’t appear to be very religious. The worst offender was Stigand, who enjoyed an annual income of £3,000 and was widely seen as corrupt, and excommunicated by Rome for holding two sees at the same time in order to rake in the revenues; by the time of the Norman invasion he was, after the king and the Godwin family, the richest man in England.
In contrast to the gentle, sexless king, Godwin’s six sons were never likely to be candidates for sainthood. The eldest, Sweyn, was the most psychotic: in a notorious incident he kidnapped Eadgifu, the abbess of Leominster, on the way back from invading Wales, and ‘kept her as long as it suited him, and then let her go home’. Whether it was consensual or rape it was considered appalling to carry on in that way with a bride of Christ, and to make it worse they were related.3 Afterwards he took refuge with his Danish cousin Bjorn, volunteering to fight for Denmark in yet another war against Norway (although he seemed to have spent much time fighting with Danes) and eventually persuaded Bjorn to raid the Isle of Wight with him—and then murdered him. Even by the low standards of the period this was considered shocking and Sweyn Godwinson was declared nithing, ‘nothing’, without any social standing and therefore legitimate for anyone to kill—although eventually he was allowed back.4
Second son Harold was far more sensible. Immensely brave, tall at 5’11” (5’8” was the male average), exceptionally good-looking and fond of women, he was a feared leader but also much loved by his men for his affability and good humor. He was also incredibly strong, and by all accounts, even hostile Norman ones, he was an extremely charismatic leader.
Tostig, brother number three, was linked to a string of murders. While as a young man he was popular—even Edward liked him—and a devoted husband, Tostig later appears to have gone totally insane. The three younger brothers we hear less of, especially the youngest Wulfnoth, who appears to have spent his entire adult life in a dungeon.
King Edward hated Godwin, but perhaps having no choice but to recognize his power, married the earl’s daughter Edith. Had Edward and Edith had children, our history would have been very different, and while there has been speculation that the king may have been gay—one historian wrote that ‘it should be noticed that he was, rightly or wrongly, credited with no bastards, something rather unusual at the time’5 or asexual, his hatred for his father-in-law probably can’t have helped. Whatever a man’s sexual preferences, being married to a woman whose father helped murder your brother is going to make things awkward. Edward the Confessor and his wife seemed to have been reasonably happy, although he spoke of her as his ‘beloved daughter’, which doesn’t suggest a marriage burning with passion, and she used to lie by his feet to show her humility. Much of this comes from Edith’s own biography, which was written in 1066 just as the country was falling apart, and painted her in particular as the model wife; the In Vita Edith describes her as ‘an incomparable bride, virtuous, intelligent, well-educated, talented and generous’. But then she also compared her father Godwin to Jesus, in that terrible accusations were made against both of them but essentially they were both really good guys.
The king’s relations with the Godwins reached crisis point in October 1050 when the archbishop of Canterbury died, followed in January 1051 by the archbishop of York. These were the two most important Church positions and Edward put Norman cronies of his into the roles, which could only have been seen as an insult to Godwin. Worse still, the new primate Robert of Jumieges was outspoken against the Earl of Wessex, publically saying he intended to do to Edward what he had done to Alfred; not the most diplomatic o
f language. Even Edward was embarrassed by this and did not attend Jumieges’s investiture as archbishop because he was such a liability.
Robert was one of many Normans and other Frenchmen who had come over with Edward in 1042 as his escort and so the Godwins were able to present themselves as the anti-French party, which always works in English politics. Among the Normans already in England was Edward’s sister’s son Earl Ralph the Timid, who had inherited the earldom of Hereford and earned his nickname after running away from the Welsh in 1055. He died in 1057 and had he survived England may well have had a King Ralph in 1066;6 another Norman, Regenbald, was made royal chancellor in 1062, and the foreigners being given good grants of land and cushy jobs possibly didn’t help the king’s popularity.7
The following year Eustace of Boulogne, the husband of Edward’s sister and a major ally, made a diplomatic visit to England. It got off to a shaky start when Eustace stabbed to death an innkeeper in Dover when the man refused to let him stay the night, then started a brawl that left twenty of the townspeople dead along with nineteen of Eustace’s men; not the most successful of diplomatic visits then.
Afterwards Edward called a council at Gloucester in which Robert of Jumieges accused Godwin of conspiring against him.8 In response the king ordered that Dover be harried, but Godwin refused. Harrying was quite a typical response to a crime committed in a town; as well as Hardicnut in Worcester King Eadred had harried Thetford, and his successor Edgar had done the same to Thanet, but Godwin, quite reasonably, demanded that the other side of the story be heard. And so Edward exiled the entire family, half of the Godwin clan going to Ireland and the others to the continent. Edward sent his wife to live in a convent as punishment, and she was ‘despoiled of all her lands and movables’.
From 1051, when the country was now in chaos, the coins in England began to be issued with PACX on one side, ‘Peace’—which rather suggests that all wasn’t entirely well.