The Monarchs

The Monarchs: Edward the Confessor - The King Who Built Westminster Abbey

The king whose death caused 1066. The only English king made a saint, the builder of Westminster Abbey - and the man whose failure to name an heir ended Anglo-Saxon England.

Edward the Confessor is the king whose death caused 1066. Everything about the Norman Conquest — Harold's brief reign, William's claim, the arrow at Hastings — flows from the fact that Edward died in January of that year without a son, and that at least three men believed he had promised them the throne.

He is also the only English king to have been made a saint, the builder of the first Westminster Abbey, and for centuries the patron saint of England before St George displaced him. And he is oddly hard to see clearly, because almost everything written about him was written afterward, by people with a stake in what his reign was supposed to have meant — the Normans justifying a conquest, the monks of Westminster promoting a saint, and later kings adopting a holy predecessor.

The real Edward is somewhere underneath all of that: a king who ruled peacefully for twenty-four years, kept a fractious kingdom mostly quiet, and left it in a succession crisis that ended the Anglo-Saxon state forever.

Key Facts

Reigned: June 8, 1042 to January 5, 1066
Born: around 1003 at Islip, Oxfordshire
Parents: Aethelred the Unready and Emma of Normandy
Spent roughly 25 years in exile in Normandy before becoming king
Married: Edith of Wessex, daughter of Earl Godwin — no children
Rebuilt Westminster Abbey, consecrated days before his death
Canonized in 1161; the only English king made a saint
Died: January 5, 1066 at Westminster; his death triggered the Norman Conquest

The Exile

Edward's early life was shaped by the Viking conquest of England. His father Aethelred lost his kingdom to the Danes; his mother Emma was a Norman princess, sister to the Duke of Normandy. When the Danish king Cnut took England in 1016, the young Edward was sent for safety to Normandy, and there he stayed for a quarter of a century.

This is the single most important fact about him, and it is usually underplayed. Edward grew up not English but Norman — French-speaking, raised among the Norman aristocracy, formed by their culture and their politics. He returned to England in his late thirties essentially a foreigner, a claimant restored to a throne his family had lost, dependent at first on the very magnates who had served the Danish kings.

Chief among them was Godwin, Earl of Wessex, the most powerful man in England, who had risen under Cnut and who effectively controlled the south. Edward owed his throne partly to Godwin's support, and he paid for it in 1045 by marrying Godwin's daughter Edith. The marriage bound the king to the family that would, within a generation, produce the last Anglo-Saxon king — and provide the Normans with the man they would kill at Hastings.

Edward the Confessor enthroned, from the opening scene of the Bayeux Tapestry

King and the Godwins

Edward's reign was, for most of its length, a long negotiation with the overwhelming power of the house of Godwin, whose sons held earldoms across England. It was not always peaceful. In 1051 Edward moved against them, exiled Godwin and his sons, and sent his own wife Edith to a nunnery — a startling act that suggests real hostility within the marriage or at least a bid to break free of her family.

It did not hold. The following year Godwin returned with a fleet, the country declined to fight for the king against him, and Edward was forced to back down, restore the earldoms, and take Edith back. From that point his practical power was limited, and the Godwins were ascendant. When Godwin died in 1053, his son Harold inherited the earldom of Wessex and became the dominant figure of the reign.

It was during the 1051 crisis, according to the later Norman account, that Edward supposedly promised the succession to his young kinsman William of Normandy. Whether he did, and whether such a promise could bind the English witan who actually chose kings, became the central question of 1066. Edward said many things to many people about the succession over the years; that is part of how the catastrophe happened.

The Abbey

Edward's lasting monument is Westminster Abbey. There had been a modest monastery on Thorney Island, in the marshes west of London, for generations. Edward rebuilt it on a grand scale in the new Romanesque style he had known in Normandy — the first great Norman-style church in England, begun years before the Conquest that would fill the country with them.

He moved his principal residence next to it, establishing Westminster as the seat of English royal government, which it has remained for a thousand years. The Palace of Westminster and the Abbey stand together today because Edward put them there.

The timing was cruelly precise. The new abbey was consecrated on December 28, 1065. Edward was too ill to attend. He died a week later, on January 5, 1066, and was buried in the church he had built — the first of the long line of monarchs to lie at Westminster. Every English coronation since 1066 has taken place in his abbey. The Bayeux Tapestry, made for the Normans, opens with Edward on his throne, and shows his funeral procession approaching the newly finished church, the hand of God reaching down toward it.

The Succession That Failed

Edward and Edith had no children. Whether this was by choice — the saintly legend later held that he lived in deliberate chastity, hence the Confessor — or the result of a cold marriage to the daughter of the man who dominated him, cannot be known. The chastity story is almost certainly a later invention designed to support his canonization; a childless political marriage to a woman whose family he had once tried to destroy needs no supernatural explanation.

The result was a vacuum. Edward had a great-nephew, Edgar the Aetheling, a boy of the old royal line but too young and too unsupported to hold the throne against grown rivals. There was Harold Godwinson, the most powerful and capable man in England. There was William of Normandy, with his claim of a promise. There was Harald Hardrada of Norway, with a claim of his own.

The deathbed scene is the crux, and it is genuinely murky. The English sources say that Edward, dying, commended his kingdom to Harold's protection — which the English read as naming him successor, and the Normans read as a mere request for guardianship that could not override the earlier promise to William. The witan chose Harold, and he was crowned the very next day, January 6, in Edward's new abbey. Ten months later he was dead and England was Norman. Edward's failure to secure the succession — to father a son, to raise a credible heir, or to name one unambiguously and back it — is the hinge on which English history turned.

The Touch for the King’s Evil

One of Edward's more curious legacies outlived him by six hundred years. He was credited, in the saintly tradition that grew up after his death, with curing scrofula — a disfiguring tubercular condition of the lymph nodes — by the laying on of his hands. The disease became known as the King's Evil, and the royal touch was held to cure it.

Later English monarchs took up the practice as a demonstration that their kingship was sacred, descending from the holy Confessor. It became an elaborate public ceremony. Sufferers were brought before the king in their hundreds, he touched each one and hung a gold coin around their necks, and prayers were read. Charles II, master of royal theater, touched an estimated 90,000 people over his reign, and there were deaths in the crush at some sessions.

The custom died with the Stuarts. Queen Anne was the last English monarch to perform it — among the children she touched, in 1712, was the infant Samuel Johnson, who carried the scar and the memory all his life. Her Hanoverian successors regarded the whole thing as superstitious nonsense and quietly dropped it. That a medical ritual could run from an eleventh-century saint-king to the age of Enlightenment says a great deal about how potent the idea of sacred kingship remained, and Edward the Confessor was its fountainhead.

The Saint

Edward's cult grew after his death, promoted by the monks of Westminster, who had every reason to want a royal saint in their church. Miracles were reported at his tomb. He was said to have cured scrofula — the King's Evil — by his touch, beginning a tradition later English monarchs continued for six centuries. Pope Alexander III canonized him in 1161, and in 1269 Henry III, who idolized him, rebuilt the abbey again in the Gothic style we see now and moved Edward's body to the magnificent shrine that still stands behind the high altar — the only English royal saint's shrine to survive the Reformation more or less intact.

He was England's patron saint until the later Middle Ages, when the more martial figure of St George suited a nation at war with France rather better. But Edward's shrine remained a place of pilgrimage, and it is still there, in the heart of the abbey he built, surrounded by the tombs of the kings who came after him.

Legacy

Assessing Edward is genuinely difficult, because the sober record and the two competing legends pull in different directions. To the Normans he was the king who promised them England, which made the Conquest legitimate. To the medieval church he was a holy, chaste, miracle-working saint. To modern historians he is a competent but not commanding ruler who kept the peace, built a great church, and failed at the one dynastic task that mattered most.

What is not in doubt is his consequence. The peaceful, prosperous kingdom he governed for twenty-four years was, within a year of his death, conquered, its ruling class dispossessed, its language driven underground, and its whole future redirected. He did not cause that by any action so much as by an absence — the absence of a son and of a settled succession. Few kings have mattered so much by leaving so little.

Places Connected to Edward the Confessor

Westminster Abbey, London. His creation, twice rebuilt but still his in conception. His shrine stands behind the high altar — the spiritual heart of the building and the reason every coronation happens here.
The Bayeux Tapestry, Normandy. Opens with Edward enthroned and shows his death and funeral; the Norman version of the story that killed the Anglo-Saxon state.
The Coronation Chair, Westminster Abbey. Made later, for Edward I, but named and sited in the Confessor's chapel — the continuity is the whole point.
Islip, Oxfordshire. His likely birthplace; a village church is dedicated to him.
The Palace of Westminster. He made this the seat of English government by building his abbey and his hall beside it; it has never moved.