Battle of Hastings, The Read online

  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.

  The reports of the incident raise many questions, few of which can be pursued in detail here. Why did Eustace come to talk to his brother-in-law at this particular time? Boulogne was a long-standing ally of England, there might have been good diplomatic reasons for Eustace’s visit, but they are not explained in the sources. Why did Eustace, on his journey home, stop to arm before entering Dover? There was no reason why the townspeople should have been assumed to be hostile until they were provoked. Whatever lay behind it, the consequences were great. Godwin’s refusal to punish the town infuriated the king, who summoned the most important men in the country to Gloucester for a meeting of the Witan, the general council of the kingdom. The coincidence with these events of a rising by the Welsh on the frontier in the earldom of Godwin’s eldest son Sweyn may have been chance or may not. Accusations against Godwin, who had become too powerful too fast, were being made to the king. Robert of Jumièges, the Norman Archbishop of Canterbury (who had managed to insinuate himself into the appointment against Godwin’s candidate, though the latter was supported by the monks of Canterbury), alleged that Godwin was plotting Edward’s death as he had plotted his brother’s. In the meantime, Godwin with his sons Sweyn and Harold were assembling their men at Beverstone in order to go to the king in force to present their case. The northern earls Siward and Leofric, summoned to a meeting of the Witan, arrived with a modest entourage but, finding the south in uproar, sent hastily for reinforcements to support the king. There was then a period of stand-off. The forces confronting each other must have been fairly evenly balanced, but it is noticeable that no one was prepared to strike the first blow or be responsible for tipping the country into civil war. It was realized, says the Chronicle, that this would be great unwisdom, since it would leave the kingdom open to attack by its enemies. This is worth marking as possibly the first recorded instance of all the great men of the kingdom deliberately drawing back from war in the interests of the country at large. The matter was adjourned to a hearing in London in September, to which Godwin and his sons were summoned to defend themselves against accusations of treason.

  By the time of the hearing, Edward had, with considerable adroitness, strengthened his position to such an extent that he was able to order Godwin to present himself in court with no more than twelve men to support him; he refused, through Stigand, Bishop of Winchester, to give Godwin hostages for his safety, adding the slightly sinister message that Godwin could have peace and pardon only when he returned to Edward his brother Alfred, alive and well, with all his followers and possessions. Godwin, a pragmatic man if ever there was one, rode to the coast and took ship for Flanders with all his family, except his sons Harold and Leofwine who fled to the Viking kingdom of Dublin. Edward sent Bishop Ealdred in pursuit of Harold and Leofwine, but he could not catch them, ‘or [said the Chronicle] he would not’. All were outlawed. Queen Edith was stripped of her possessions and consigned to the custody of the king’s half-sister, who was Abbess of Wherwell. There are indications that considerable pressure was put on Edward to divorce her, probably by Robert of Jumièges. If there was, he resisted it. It was a wonderful business, says the Chronicle, because Godwin was so exalted that he ruled the king and all England, and his sons were earls and the king’s favourites.

  Flanders was a natural refuge for English political exiles. Together with Normandy, it had also proved, over the past century, a convenient jumping-off point for Viking marauders, and an equally convenient place for them to sell the booty they obtained in England. Much of Edward’s foreign policy was designed to neutralize or contain the hostility of the Count of Flanders; the recent marriage of Godwin’s third son, Tostig, to the count’s half-sister can have done as little to reassure Edward as the marriage of William of Normandy to the count’s daughter Matilda at about this time. There were suspicions that William’s choice of Matilda could have been influenced by the fact that she could claim descent from King Alfred through her father. Godwin lay low and waited.

  In the meantime, the D Chronicle, the northern version, records an event unnoted by any other sources, English or Norman. Immediately after the outlawing of the Godwin family, it says, Earl William came from beyo
nd the sea with many Frenchmen and was received by the king and then went home again. If William of Normandy did indeed pay a visit to Edward at this time, it is almost incredible that this is not mentioned by the E or C versions of the Chronicle, especially E, which is so closely associated with Canterbury and whose writer must have been much nearer to the scene of action than the author of the D version. However, there are many instances throughout the history of the Chronicle when its silence in a certain year is contradicted by evidence in other sources that recordable events had in fact taken place. This may be one example of an inexplicable silence, and the absence of comment in E and C, therefore, cannot necessarily be taken to mean that William’s visit did not happen. It is, however, even more incredible that it should not have been recorded by the Norman chroniclers, who could have turned it to so much advantage when William needed to bolster his claim to the throne. There are, as will be seen, good reasons for doubting whether the visit ever took place. But either way, there is plenty of evidence that in Godwin’s absence foreigners, particularly Normans, were in the ascendent at court.

  In the meantime Godwin was preparing to try his luck in England again. Harold and Leofwine made a preliminary raiding expedition from Dublin to Porlock in summer 1052 and then retreated after harrying Porlock and its environs and provisioning their ships. Godwin left the river Yser on 22 June and arrived off Sandwich, after landing briefly at Dungeness where he received a warm welcome. The king sent out ships to take him but Godwin evaded them and, when a storm blew up, returned to Bruges. The king, in a piece of strategy reminiscent of his father, then decommissioned part of his fleet to save money. A rendezvous between Godwin and his sons was eventually effected in August, and their united fleet sailed along the south coast of Sussex and Kent, carefully refraining from any kind of harrying or pressure of the inhabitants of what had been part of Godwin’s earldom. They did, however, encourage volunteers, and by the time they rounded the North Foreland had assembled a formidable fleet and army, with which they sailed up the Thames as far as Southwark, where Godwin had a large manor and where the Londoners were generally friendly to him. The king had sent out an appeal for troops and ships but the response was slow. On this occasion, Godwin had the advantage in strength and was given passage through London Bridge by the townspeople. Once through, he drew up his ships to encircle the king’s and the two fleets sat and looked at each other.

  Godwin sent emissaries to the king to open negotiations, asserting that he had no desire to attack and only sought permission to come before the king and clear himself. Leofric and Siward made it equally clear that they were not prepared to fight Godwin. Civil war could only damage their lands and property, and they may, for all we know, have been as opposed to the idea of foreign domination at court as Godwin clearly was. Robert of Jumièges and his friends read the writing on the wall, as Godwin had done a year earlier. They did not wait for Godwin to meet the king but fled London, killing a number of the townspeople in their haste, sailed from Essex in a clapped-out old ship and made for Normandy; they left behind Robert’s pallium, the symbol of his position as archbishop, in their hurry. Stigand, acting once again as intermediary, arranged the audience with the king, where Godwin and Harold, fully armed, threw themselves at his feet, casting aside their weapons, and asked for leave to clear themselves. Edward, in no position to refuse, listened to Godwin’s case, gave him the kiss of peace and restored to him and his sons (with the exception of Sweyn, whose murder of his cousin Bjorn and abduction and rape of the abbess of Leominster had sent him on pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the course of which he died) the earldoms that had been forfeited. His short bid for independence from the Godwins was over. The queen returned from Wilton to which she seems to have been moved from Wherwell and resumed her usual place at the king’s side. Stigand’s diplomatic efforts were rewarded with Robert’s archbishopric of Canterbury, which he continued to hold in plurality with his bishopric of Winchester; this caused great offence in Rome, not so much because Stigand retained Winchester (holding appointments in plurality was deplored but hardly unusual in the eleventh century), but because Robert had been uncanonically superseded. The offence was compounded by the fact that Stigand economically kept Robert’s pallium for his own use.

  The king did not have to maintain his appearance of friendship with Godwin for very long. Godwin died in 1053, felled by a stroke at the king’s Easter feast. He was succeeded as Earl of Wessex by his son Harold who thus became the richest and most powerful man in the kingdom. On the death of Siward in 1055, Tostig, Harold’s next brother, received his earldom of Northumbria; Mercia passed to Ælfgar, Leofric’s son, on his father’s death in 1057; and Gyrth, Godwin’s fourth son, succeeded to East Anglia, which had been held successively by Harold and Ælfgar. The possessions of the Godwin family, added together, dwarfed the king’s. On the other hand, Harold’s relationship with the king was much easier than his father’s had been, and it seems clear that Edward gradually came to rely on his strength and ability more and more, to the extent that he is described in the Chronicles as subregulus, under-king. Edward’s relations with Tostig seem to have been even warmer. But there was still no heir, and it was clearly unlikely that Edward and Edith would have a child, still less that he would have reached an age to be able to rule by the time his father died. It may have been the urging of his councillors that persuaded Edward to look elsewhere for a successor, and remember that his half-brother, King Edmund Ironside, had left sons. One of them, Edward the Atheling or Exile, was still living at the court of Hungary, and steps were taken to fetch him home to England as heir-apparent.

  There were diplomatic problems over this, caused by wars between Flanders, the German emperor and Hungary. Bishop Ealdred of Worcester was sent with a mission to Cologne in 1054 to seek the help of Emperor Henry III of Germany in contacting the King of Hungary and negotiating for the return of the Atheling. But the diplomatic relations between Germany and Hungary were strained at this time, and, after waiting for a year, Ealdred was obliged to come home without success. The death of Henry III in 1056 made it possible for a second attempt to be made, and it may well have been Earl Harold who made it; his name as witness to a Flemish diploma issued by his brother-in-law, the Count of Flanders on 13 November 1056 is suggestive. The count himself travelled on to Cologne and Regensberg where he spent Christmas; if Harold went with him, it would not have been difficult to contact the Hungarian court from Regensburg. There is no proof that he did so, other than an indication in the Vita Ædwardi that Harold had been travelling on the Continent at about this time, and the fact of his witnessing of the Flemish diploma. Whether through Harold’s persuasions or not, the Atheling did agree to return, though it was not till 1057 that he reached English soil. He brought with him a Hungarian wife, Agatha, his son, Edgar, and two daughters, Margaret and Christina. Within days of landing in London, he died without even seeing his uncle, and was buried in St Paul’s. It was inevitable that there should have been suspicions of foul play, but it is hard to see whom a murder could have benefited. Not the king, certainly, and not the chief men of the kingdom who were desperate for a clear, undoubted heir. If Harold had privately had his sights on the throne at this date (and there is no evidence that he had), it would have been a simple matter for him to prevent the exile’s return or to have him murdered much further from England. Nor had there ever been suspicions of this kind against him, though there had been allegations of the kind against William of Normandy, several of whose opponents met deaths in doubtful circumstances. It is far more probable that the exile died from natural causes; he had undergone a long and dangerous journey, he was a middle-aged man of about forty (elderly by contemporary standards though no older than Harold was to be in 1066), and may well have been in poor health anyway. The Witan was left with his son, Edgar, a child of six.

  THE CONTENDERS

  The question of the succession to Edward is clouded by uncertainty and lack of conclusive evidence, but this has not prevented
innumerable scholars from attempting to assess the legitimacy of the competition. In a sense, the question is irrelevant, since the problem was ultimately to be resolved by force, but the various possibilities are of some importance in accounting for the actions of the people involved. In the mid-eleventh century there was no right of primogeniture in England either for the throne or in family inheritance to the extent that there was in Normandy and some other parts of Europe. Kingship was elective, though with a prejudice in favour of candidates from the ruling house. The situation regarding kingship in England was set out concisely by the monk and homilist Ælfric at the end of the tenth century:

  No man can make himself king, but the people have the choice to elect whom they like; but after he is consecrated king, he has authority over the people, and they cannot shake his yoke off their necks.viii

  The child Edgar was only one of many who saw themselves as rivals for England, though lineally he may have had the best claim. He was of the royal blood, throne-worthy. The title of ‘atheling’ was normally reserved for the sons of reigning kings, and Edward the Exile had never reigned. The fact, therefore, that he was known as the Atheling in King Edward’s lifetime is significant and implies that Edward regarded him as a likely successor – which in itself undermines William’s claim that the king had given his promise to him. Lineage, however, was only one of several factors to be considered before a new king of England was crowned. Descent from the royal line of Wessex was important; but it was far from being the most important requirement. The emphasis throughout the pre-conquest period seems to have been on the most credible candidate whenever there was a choice, as there usually was. The main consideration was the safety of the kingdom; in considering the claims of Edgar, the king’s councillors would not have forgotten the invasions and ultimate conquest that had followed the child Æthelred’s accession in 978. In the past a deceased king’s eldest son might have been passed over, because he was too young, because it was not felt that he was the best man to defend the realm or because there was a later son by a more powerful mother. It was said that Emma had made it a condition of her marriage to Æthelred that their sons should take precedence over his sons by his previous marriage. In fact, Æthelred was succeeded by Edmund Ironside, a son of the earlier marriage, because Emma’s sons were not of an age to oppose Cnut nor on the spot. Anglo-Saxon kings tended to die young, leaving eldest sons of tender years. King Alfred himself had succeeded three elder brothers who had held the throne in turn, one of whom (Æthelred I) had left at least one son, partly because it had been so set down in the will of his father, King Æthelwulf, but mainly because he was deemed the best available defender of the kingdom against the Danes at that time and his nephew was young and untried. If Alfred had not already proved himself a competent general, it is probable that his father’s will would have been disregarded or at least challenged. Later, his own eldest son and successor had to deal with the resentment of the cousin who felt his claims had been set aside. However, Edgar, despite his youth, was still a factor, as was shown by his election as king by all the councillors in London, as soon as the death of Harold at Hastings was known.