Edward the Confessor

Edward was born between 1003 and 1005 at Islip in Oxfordshire, the seventh son of Æthelred the Unready and his first by his Norman second wife, Emma of Normandy. His childhood unfolded against Viking invasions led by Sweyn Forkbeard and his son Cnut. In 1013, when Sweyn seized the English throne, Emma fled with Edward and his younger brother Alfred to her brother's court in Normandy. Sweyn's death in February 1014 brought Æthelred briefly back, but Cnut's decisive victory over Edmund Ironside in 1016 sent Edward into a second exile that would last twenty-five years. His mother Emma married Cnut in 1017, the same year Cnut had Edward's last surviving half-brother Eadwig executed. The half-Danish prince Harthacnut, born to Emma and Cnut, became the realistic heir-apparent of England, and Edward's prospects of ever wearing the English crown shrank close to nothing.

During this long Norman exile Edward absorbed continental piety and French as a first language. According to William of Jumièges, Robert I, Duke of Normandy attempted an invasion to install him on the English throne in about 1034, blown off course to Jersey. He returned to England briefly in 1036, when he and Alfred came over at their mother's invitation; Alfred was captured by Earl Godwin of Wessex, blinded with red-hot pokers by Harold Harefoot's men, and died of his wounds. The murder would shape Edward's lifelong hatred of Godwin and his eventual attempt to break Godwin's power.

In 1041 the dying Harthacnut recalled Edward as his heir, and on Harthacnut's sudden death in June 1042 Edward was crowned at Winchester Cathedral on Easter Sunday 1043. His position was politically fragile. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records his initial popularity, but his rule depended on accommodation with the three great earls Leofric of Mercia, Siward of Northumbria, and above all Godwin of Wessex. On 23 January 1045 he married Godwin's daughter Edith, sealing a political compact whose subterranean instability would dominate his reign.

The crisis came in 1051. When Edward's brother-in-law Eustace II of Boulogne provoked an affray in Dover, Edward ordered Godwin as Earl of Kent to punish the townspeople; Godwin refused. Edward seized his chance, Archbishop Robert of Jumièges accused Godwin of plotting the king's murder, and the Godwins fled to Flanders and Ireland. Edith was sent to a nunnery. But within a year Godwin returned with an army, the kingdom would not fight for the king against him, and Edward was forced to restore Godwin to his earldoms, recall Edith, and exile Robert of Jumièges. From this point, the historian Richard Mortimer argues, Edward effectively withdrew from active politics, devoting himself increasingly to hunting and to the project of his abbey.

Godwin died in 1053; his son Harold succeeded to Wessex. By 1057 the Godwin brothers Harold, Tostig, Gyrth, and Leofwine controlled every English earldom except Mercia. The 1050s also saw Edward's most successful foreign policy in Scotland and Wales — Macbeth was overthrown in 1058 by Malcolm Canmore with English support, and Gruffydd ap Llywelyn of Wales was killed in 1063 after twin Godwin campaigns. But the autumn of 1065 brought political catastrophe. The Northumbrians rebelled against Earl Tostig, demanding his replacement by Morcar of Mercia. Tostig was a favourite of the king and queen; Edward demanded the rebellion be crushed; Harold refused; Edward was forced to accept his brother-in-law's banishment. The humiliation may have caused a series of strokes.

His greatest physical legacy is Westminster Abbey, the first Norman Romanesque church in England, built between 1042 and 1052 in close imitation of Robert of Jumièges's Norman abbey, consecrated on 28 December 1065. Edward was too weak to attend the consecration. He died at Westminster on 5 January 1066 and was buried in his new abbey on 6 January, the same day Harold Godwinson was crowned king of the English there. The Normans claimed Edward had promised the succession to William of Normandy in about 1051, during the brief eclipse of the Godwins; deathbed traditions recorded by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle claimed he had bequeathed it to Harold; the great-nephew Edgar the Ætheling, descendant of Edmund Ironside and arguably the most legitimate of the candidates, was a child whom Edward never publicly elevated. Historian Stephen Baxter's judgment of the resulting confusion is severe: "his handling of the succession issue was dangerously indecisive, and contributed to one of the greatest catastrophes to which the English have ever succumbed." Within nine months Harold would be dead at the Battle of Hastings, and Norman rule would replace Anglo-Saxon for centuries.

His canonization in 1161 by Pope Alexander III, prompted by Henry II's political need for papal favour and by the Westminster monks' campaign under Prior Osbert of Clare, made him the only English king ever raised to the altars of Rome. The Vita Ædwardi Regis, originally commissioned by his widow Queen Edith, was rewritten in the twelfth century to portray his marriage as celibate and his rule as saintly. Modern historians such as Frank Barlow and Peter Rex have revisited the verdict and call him an "energetic, resourceful, and sometimes ruthless" monarch whose reputation was tarnished by what followed his death rather than by what he did during it. The Saint Edward shrine in Westminster Abbey, where his body was translated in 1163 and again in 1269 under Henry III, remains today as the spiritual centre of English coronations.