King Edward

Edward, later known as Edward the Confessor, was a king of England of the House of Wessex and a canonized saint of the Latin Church. He was the son of King Aethelred II and Emma of Normandy. His childhood and youth were shaped by the Danish conquest of England in the early eleventh century. After the victories of Sweyn Forkbeard and Cnut, Edward and his brother Alfred lived for many years in exile in Normandy, at the court of their mother's family. He was recalled to England in the early 1040s and succeeded his half-brother Harthacnut on the English throne in 1042. His accession restored the West Saxon royal line after a generation of Danish rule.

Edward's reign, which lasted until 1066, was in political terms a period of relative internal peace, though it was dominated by the power of the great earls, above all Earl Godwin of Wessex and his sons. In 1045 Edward married Edith, Godwin's daughter. The marriage produced no children. Later hagiographers presented the union as a celibate, spiritual marriage, a claim that served the image of the virgin king but which modern historians treat with caution. What is historically certain is the absence of an heir, which left the succession unsettled. A major political crisis in 1051 and 1052 saw the temporary exile of the Godwin family and an increase of Norman influence at court, followed by the family's armed return and restoration. Edward's long Norman exile left a mark on his ecclesiastical appointments and on the composition of his household, and later Norman writers claimed that he had designated William, Duke of Normandy, as his heir, a claim that remains disputed.

Edward's later reputation rested less on military achievement than on piety and on his refoundation of the church of Saint Peter at Westminster. In the last years of his life he rebuilt the abbey on a grand Romanesque scale, and the new church was consecrated at the end of December 1065, when the king was already mortally ill. He died in the first days of January 1066 and was buried in the church he had rebuilt. The following day Harold, son of Godwin, was crowned. The childless death of Edward opened the succession struggle that ended, later that year, with the Norman victory at Hastings and the coronation of William I.

Devotion to Edward grew at Westminster in the twelfth century. Osbert of Clare compiled a life that presented him as a miracle-working confessor. Pope Alexander III formally canonized him in 1161. In 1163 his relics were translated to a new shrine in Westminster Abbey in a ceremony associated with King Henry II and Archbishop Thomas Becket; the date of the translation, 13 October, became his principal feast. For a time he was regarded as a patron saint of England, a role later more often associated with Saint George. His shrine at Westminster remained a focus of royal piety in the later Middle Ages. Historians distinguish the historical king, a ruler of limited military energy whose reign prepared the ground for 1066, from the saint of medieval legend, the chaste confessor and healer. Both images have shaped his memory.