13 October. 1662 Book of Common Prayer: Translation of King Edward the Confessor
Edward the Confessor, the last truly Anglo-Saxon King,
was remembered with such affection he became a sainted embodiment of a pacific
and idealistic form of kingship under Henry III. Paul Binski asks why.
EDVVARD REX.
Edward the Confessor enthroned, opening scene of the Bayeux Tapestry
Edward the Confessor was born between 1002 and 1005; he
came to the English throne in 1042 and died early in 1066. The year 2005 has
been declared to be the thousandth anniversary of his birth, and has been
celebrated both in his birthplace of Islip, Oxfordshire, and in Westminster
Abbey, his great foundation. Some have looked at the inexorable rise of the
Danish House of Godwin, which culminated in Harold taking the throne in 1066,
and seen Edward’s reign as a failure. A cosmopolitan, half-Norman monarch,
Edward’s principal achievement is nevertheless held to have been the
preservation of the unity of his kingdom. And he has always been
acknowledged as the preserver of the ancient peace and harmony of a bygone
England. But Edward was manifestly about other things too.
His image has never been that of a dynamic king. He
appears in the Bayeux Tapestry, made around 1080; in the very first scene he is
shown enthroned at Westminster and firmly in command; later he is shown seated
and decrepit, while Harold slinks back from Normandy to report on his dealings
with William of Normandy. Then, in a series of spectacular and ambiguous
scenes, Edward is shown on his deathbed in his chamber at Westminster, perhaps
transmitting the kingdom of England to Harold by means of his feeble hand
gesture. His funeral procession to his newly built Westminster Abbey follows:
as well as being Edward’s burial site this is also (by implication) the future
coronation place of William the Conqueror. In reversing the flow of action at
this point from right to left, the Tapestry seems to pause and reflect on the
local topography of Westminster. Indeed, the palace and abbey, which he founded
there, remain Edward’s most enduring physical monument. Edward the Confessor
began the creation of the political heart of the nation and, as a saint (which
he became in the twelfth century) he symbolized it.
Edward did not at first seem to possess the natural
qualifications of a saint. The early literature of praise about him is as much
concerned with his queen, Edith, as with his own royal virtues. Slowly, accounts
of his posthumous miracles were bolted onto a conventional royal biography. It
took the combined efforts of the monks of Westminster with the support of Henry
II to gain his canonization in 1161. Two years later his body was translated to
a shrine behind the Abbey’s high altar in the presence of the Archbishop of
Canterbury Thomas Becket in 1163. Here he was to remain until the reign of
Henry III.
As a saint, Edward was not associated with great miracles
or a sustained tradition of pilgrimage: he represented a different style of
sanctity from the martyred Thomas of Canterbury. He was the virtuous, high-born
king who died peacefully in his bed and took nearly a century to canonize.
Thomas, in contrast, was not high born, was not obviously virtuous, was
slaughtered on the pavement of his own cathedral, and was canonized just three
years later. Both were canonized in the reign of Henry II and (for the first
time for English saints) by the authority of Rome. Thomas was the more truly
popular figure. Yet he never became the national saint: the creation of a such
a figure was a matter of state politics.
Edward was a saint in traditional English form. The
French historian André Vauchez draws a distinction between the aristocratic
sainthood of north-western Europe and the urban sanctity of the Mediterranean
world. England remained a country of ‘holy sufferers’, men and women who were
high-born and whose styles of life and death entailed the trauma of inner
(spiritual) or outer (fleshly) martyrdom. This tradition was of great
antiquity: the imprint of the cults of royal saints had been made long before
the Norman Conquest. It was deep and persistent, and its main representatives
were typical: kings or princes who attained physical martyrdom (notably Edmund
of East Anglia [d.869] and Edward the Martyr [d.978]); and women who renounced
their high-born station to embrace chastity and the monastic life (such as
Edburga of Winchester, Etheldreda of Ely or Edith of Wilton). Edward, named the
Confessor to distinguish him from Edward the Martyr, displayed the style of
sanctity of the inner martyr, based on the privations of chastity.
One way of judging who the most popular saints really
were in the Middle Ages was the number of days free from work or festa ferianda
granted in their name: adopting this criterion, St Thomas of Canterbury was by
the thirteenth-century much the most universally celebrated saint of English
origin. St Edward remained the saint of the political elite, not even being
noted among the festa ferianda for the diocese of London, while Thomas, the
embodiment of the vox populi, dominated London in a way inconceivable for
Edward. Yet much about St Edward – not least the form of his thirteenth-century
shrine – suggests that his cult was built up in deliberate imitation of such
truly popular and miraculous cults as Thomas’s.
Edward’s fortunes changed with the rise to maturity of
Henry III (r.1216-72). The St Edward of late medieval devotion was in many
regards the saint whom Henry had taken as his beloved friend and patron. The
attraction that Henry felt for Edward as a model is impossible to explain
totally, but the evidence of Henry’s affection speaks for itself. In his great
chamber at Westminster, Henry’s four-poster bed was surmounted by a vast
wall-painting (now lost but copied in 1819) of the coronation of St Edward
together with other images that stressed aspects of the virtue of the saint:
showing his charity to St John the Evangelist by giving a ring to the poor
John, dressed as a pilgrim; his Solomonic wisdom; and female personifications
of his virtues of largesse and debonereté (temperateness or moderation). St
Edward was to occupy, indeed form, the calm centre of Henry’s personal world
amidst life’s trials and tribulations, and the two men came to lie with one
another in death.
The 1230s were clearly fundamental in the rise of Edward
as the special companion of Henry III. In 1227, as a result of the prompting of
Stephen Langton the Archbishop of Canterbury, Pope Gregory IX had ordered the
celebration of St Edward’s feast (October 13th) by the English Church. Langton
did much to raise the profile of the great English saints, old and new. But
sustained royal support was still vital.
Something connected Henry and Edward. It may not be a
coincidence that the two English kings most drawn to St Edward, Henry III and
Richard II, both ascended to the throne as boys: did Edward provide them with
an ideal father-figure? Historian David Carpenter sees the key period in the
development of Henry’s interest in St Edward as being the years 1233-37, and
identifies a number of religious and political considerations in the
recognition of Edward as Henry’s blessed predecessor, not least a new and
intensified pattern of observing the saint’s feast at Westminster itself in these
years. The monks of Westminster stood to benefit: Henry’s pietas served to bind
his patronage to their Abbey in perpetuity, with St Edward the guarantor of
their liberties and privileges. It may even have been some of the monks of
Westminster, the abbot Richard of Barking and the royal servant and monk
Richard le Gras, who finally persuaded Henry to take up St Edward’s cause at a
moment when the foreigners at Henry’s own court, notably the disliked Bishop of
Winchester, Peter des Roches, were falling into disfavour. Henry married
Eleanor of Provence in 1236: perhaps his acquisition of a serious patron saint
was a symptom of growing up. By 1241 he was absorbed in plans for a new shrine,
and by 1245 had demolished much of the Confessor’s church at Westminster to
make way for something far more splendid to house the saint.
It was Henry’s marriage that brought onto the stage of St
Edward’s cult another celebrated and gifted individual, the writer and artist
Matthew Paris (d. 1259). It was almost certainly Matthew who assembled the
model on which is based the greatest surviving pictorial celebration of St
Edward in existence, the illustrated Anglo-Norman verse Life of St Edward in
Cambridge University Library. This poem, based upon a combination of Aelred of Rievaulx’s
Latin Life of 1163 and Paris’s historical writing, is dedicated to
Eleanor of Provence. However, this sole extant manuscript is a copy by
Westminster scribes and artists working in the 1250s. The text includes the
statement that it was illustrated by its own author, a state of affairs that
can only have applied to the uniquely talented Matthew Paris, and its main
purpose was to introduce the new Queen to Henry’s patron saint at the time of
their marriage. Everything about the text implies a date not long after 1236.
Matthew is known to have written (or translated) and illustrated Lives both of
St Thomas and St Edward, and it is possible that the Cambridge manuscript was
originally bound up with a Life of St Thomas. The Cambridge Life is concerned
with the tomb and shrine of St Edward, and this would have been balanced by
accounts of the spectacular tomb-miracles of Thomas. The young Eleanor would
thus have had in her hands illustrated Lives of the two unavoidable English
saints. Matthew had shown an adroit understanding of human nature: perhaps in
gaining the Queen’s sympathies he would gain the King’s. But more probably he
had already directed such an illustrated Life to Henry.
The Cambridge Life of St Edward, written by a Benedictine
apologist for the royal family, is massively informative about the
thirteenth-century cult of St Edward and what it stood for. The text and images
do not contain anything so banal as a ‘programme’ for royal conduct and
devotion; and yet the sense that they embody a prescription for kingship is powerful.
St Edward is presented not as a martial flower of chivalry, but as a
peaceable and co-operative king. The warrior ethos of earlier Anglo-Saxon
notions of kingship is resolutely set aside. Edward is possessed of moral and
spiritual delicacy. The elegant pen and wash illustration, using little gold
and no strident colour, set off this new sensibility well. Because St Edward
possessed the more reflective virtues, his spirituality is focused on and
derives from his chastity and his formation of a chaste marriage with Edith.
Edward’s virtues are not exactly kingly, nor indeed are they exclusively
masculine: their character is clerical, or monastic. The impracticality of not
providing an heir is set aside in favour of a higher cause. This Edward is a
monkish visionary, his visions often occurring at Mass where he is depicted
just behind the priest, like a deacon.
The character and scope of sacral kingship preoccupied
Henry III: Edward was its emblem. There is much in the Cambridge Life about the
virtues of marriage which will have been of pastoral interest to the young
Henry and Eleanor; but arguably an even stronger theme is that of friendship,
of the bond between the saints especially. Every king must have his saintly
model: Edward’s was St John the Evangelist, the model of youthful chastity and
the greatest Christian visionary. When, in ordinary charity, Edward unknowingly
gives a ring to St John in disguise, the point is made that the king not only
exerts patronage but is also bound to the saint in a spiritual marriage. This
episode was the most popular represention of St Edward in the Middle Ages: and
it was a profound assertion of the bond that linked Henry and Edward,
king and saint and which is so hard to explain in practical terms.
As an essentially peaceable and sedentary monarch, Paris
places Edward in his palace at Westminster in ‘parliament’ (an early occurrence
of this word is used in the Life) with his baronage. Westminster is the true
political centre of the kingdom. Under the real Confessor this would have been
unhistorically premature; under the Plantagenets it was becoming true. Edward’s
wisdom, whose example was King Solomon, lent to his reign peace and right
order, his laws being the guarantor of the ancient liberties of the English
people in the calm summer before the Conquest. This king is beneath the law
and, critically, is ethically capable of self-governance. He has none of the
brutish bodily or degraded moral appetites of the Godwin dynasty – or (one is tempted
to say) of twelfth-century Angevin despotism. The downfall of the greedy,
disreputable Harold at Hastings is thus part of the moral order. Paris
celebrated this new temperance, this all-governing ‘mesure’ as he put it, which
means that Edward’s court was the court of a gently magnanimous man who
expressed his contempt for earthly gain by abolishing taxes and forgiving
thieves.
The self-controlled, peaceable and co-operative king that
emerges in these pages is the perfect expression of the ideals of a reforming
church in the period after Magna Carta. It is an ideal royal image, not (except
in the barest outlines) a reflection of the historical Edward. Its intellectual
formation and ethical character is as much clerical and monastic as royal. Many
of its most important ideals were framed by the Cistercian and
Benedictine authors who constructed it. They were shared by the reforming
clergy of the era: the same themes of temperance, chastity and friendship
appear in the Lives of the new bishop-saints St Edmund of Abingdon, Archbishop
of Canterbury (d. 1240) and St Richard of Chichester (d. 1253). The St Edward
of Henry III’s reign, in short, unites the strengths of the Anglo-Saxon lineage
of royal sainthood with a new morally, politically and spiritually subtle
sensibility. Church and public (temporal) power, once divided, were now hand in
hand.
Stephen Langton, one of the greatest of this new
generation of clerics, had been especially clever in regard to the celebration
of sainthood. In 1220 he initiated what Powicke called ‘a period of ceremonial
stocktaking in the Church in England’ which included a series of
carefully-staged events, often with an eye to the royal presence: the
canonization of Hugh of Lincoln, the second coronation of Henry III and the foundation
of a new Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey; the start of works on the cathedral
at Salisbury; and the brilliantly orchestrated translation of St Thomas in July
of that year. Becket’s body was carefully moved in the presence of the young,
impressionable Henry III to a dazzling new shrine and a great feast summoned in
the new archiepiscopal hall. In this way Langton relaunched what was to
be the most successful period of his primacy. Langton understood that the
adventus, or symbolic ritual triumphant entry, of a saint could make a powerful
political statement, in this case, as Richard Eales has argued, of the ‘renewal
of peace and right order in the English Church and Kingdom’. It was but a short
step to regard St Edward as another model for this notion of peace and right
order, of a community of the realm or communitas regni as it was known at the
time.
Canterbury and Westminster were not in opposition to one
another. Canterbury had important lessons for Westminster in terms of its art
and architecture. Canterbury’s splendidly furnished Trinity Chapel and shrine
offered, to an alert art patron like Henry, a thoroughly cosmopolitan yardstick
of what could be attained if no expense was spared. Henry rose to the
challenge, the new church he began at Westminster in 1245 is testimony to a
dialogue between the best in what French and English Gothic architecture had to
offer, just as Canterbury had been. The architect William of Sens was working
in an essentially northern French idiom at Canterbury after 1174. Henry III’s
new church at Westminster, though copying the best High Gothic exemplars of
northern France such as Reims cathedral (1211-60) and the dazzling
Sainte-Chapelle in Paris (c.1243-48), was itself without precedent (or true
successor). The shrine churches of St Thomas and St Edward both possess a
significant degree of romanitas. St Thomas’s biographers built him up to match
the heroes of the great age of martyrdom in the early church: Canterbury’s
doubled quasi-Corinthian columns surrounding its shrine-space look like a
self-conscious nod to the Christian basilicas of Constantinian Rome. Its shrine
area has gleaming mosaic floors like those in medieval Roman basilicas.
Canterbury’s example may well have stimulated the adoption, late in the reign of
Henry III, of Roman Cosmati mosaics for the main pavements around the high
altar and shrine at Westminster, and indeed the shrine base of St Edward
himself.
Henry III and his peers had translated St Edward to the
new shrine with great ceremony in 1269. The body of the saint still lies
within, almost uniquely for an English medieval shrine. Three years later Henry
himself was dead, and was later buried in a shrine-like tomb next to St Edward,
in the same style of Roman mosaic, provided by his son Edward. There was
nothing odd about associating Roman mosaics with an Anglo-Saxon saint in this
way. Westminster Abbey was dedicated to (indeed, according to legend, by) St
Peter, one of St Edward’s own patrons. St Edward’s earthly patron and friend
Henry III wanted the best for him, which included the art of papal Rome.
Westminster’s resemblance to Canterbury in this regard has nurtured the myth
that St Edward was a great popular figure like St Thomas. Similarly the
tomb-pictures in the Cambridge Life of St Edward, which show queues of the sick
healed by the Confessor to the singing of the Te Deum, correspond to no known
historical reality about Edward’s miraculous powers. Even here, Becket’s
magnetism can be felt.
Edward remained an elite figure. Henry’s quasi-priestly
conception of kingship was as exclusive as his evocation of the church
furnishings of papal Rome. After Henry’s death, St Edward’s fortunes took a
turn for the worse. Edward I (r.1272-1307) had a significant devotion to St
Thomas. In 1307 the monks of Westminster translated the relics of King Sebert,
an early founder of the Abbey, a sign that St Edward’s shrine alone was
insufficient for their spiritual needs. Other, more subtle, signs that he was
ceasing to be the focus of devotional loyalties include the way in which the
royal coronation regalia, preserved as a privilege by the Abbey – his crown,
chalice, paten, slippers and other items – became known as the ornamentz reaux
de Saint Edward. Instead of being a spiritual figure, the saint now assumed the
character of an emblem of statehood and its rituals.
Even in this new guise, by the middle of the century St
Edward was being sidelined by St George. Where St Edward’s arms had headed
those of the baronage of England in the shields carved in the aisles of Henry
III’s choir in the abbey, under Edward III, St George’s replaced them in the
shields decorating the east-end arcading of St Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster,
splendidly decorated in 1350-63 with images of military saints such as St
Eustace, St Mercurius and St George himself, leading the male members of the
royal family towards the high altar and image of the Virgin Mary. The rise of
the cult of St George under Edward III at Windsor and Westminster, in effect
reinstated the warrior ethos that had been rejected by the sanctity of St
Edward. A brief revival of the cult of St Edward under Richard II, a boy who
came to the throne exceptionally young and who remained childless as a king,
did little to secure the saint’s long-term fortunes.
Although neither the first nor the last good English
king, Edward was the first to attract a sophisticated literary and artistic
vision of what virtuous rule comprises. He was important in embodying a
practical, rather than theoretical, view of kingship. St Edward rose with, and
helped to shape, the consolidation of the post-Conquest nation state and
emergence of its political centre at Westminster. He was rendered redundant as
a religious figure in the later Middle Ages by his immense success as a
political emblem. He was one of the few figures who helped to bring England
into being. He may also be the first English figure linked to the notion of
political nostalgia, a yearning for a lost Golden Age. Yet it is perhaps a mark
of the confidence, if not depth or sophistication, of the English that their
ruling class was prepared to transfer the idea of a national saint from him to
a figure, St George, with no traditional English ties or shrine, and who stood
for much that St Edward would (cordially) have disliked.
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