The Norman Conquest (12 page)

This may not have been an obvious problem for the first few years of the couple’s marriage. We know that Edward was at least forty in January 1045, but we have no clear idea of the age of his bride. If Edith was the eldest of Godwine’s many children, she could have been as old as twenty-five, but equally she could have been
the minimum age for marriage as set by the Church, which was twelve. If the latter was the case, then the initial absence of children might not have been too surprising. As time wore on, however, public anxiety about the lack of a successor must have grown, and with it the tension between Edward and Godwine.
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There are signs of this happening in the chronicle accounts. At first we see the two men collaborating. When, for example, the archbishop of Canterbury resigned due to ill health in 1044, the shady deal by which he appointed his own replacement proceeded, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘by permission of the king and Earl Godwine’. But later in the decade the pair are seen to part company over England’s foreign policy. When Swein Estrithson sought English help against Magnus of Norway, Godwine was all in favour (his own marriage to Cnut’s sister-in-law meant that he was Swein’s uncle); according to John of Worcester, the earl ‘advised the king that he might safely send at least fifty ships’— but Edward refused. ‘It seemed a foolish plan to everybody’, explains the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, while John of Worcester adds that the opposition was led by Earl Leofric of Mercia. Whether or not Edward was actively cultivating Leofric as an ally, the episode shows that there were clearly others willing to help him stand up to Godwine.
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Nor was this Godwine’s only embarrassment at the time. That same year his eldest son, Swein, fled into exile, having caused a scandal the previous year by abducting the abbess of Leominster. This was bad enough, but two years later Swein returned to England in search of a pardon, only to compound his crime by betraying and murdering his cousin, Beorn Estrithson, the brother of the Danish king. This was regarded as a truly heinous offence. Swein was declared to be a ‘nithing’, says the Chronicle —a man without any honour—and once again fled overseas.
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And yet, if the case of Swein shows anything, it is that the power of Earl Godwine, despite the setbacks and embarrassments, remained as firm as ever. In 1050, just months after his second banishment, the earl’s good-for-nothing son received a royal pardon and was allowed to re-enter the country. Edward was evidently still obliged to accommodate his father-in-law’s every wish. The Godwines, it seems, could quite literally get away with murder.
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To add to the king’s woes at the end of the 1040s, the threat from Scandinavia persisted; the death of King Magnus, it seems, had
provided only a temporary respite. Norway and Denmark were once again at war, and such instability must have caused great anxiety for both the English king and his peaceable subjects. In 1048 the coasts of Kent and Essex were attacked by a pair of old-school Vikings, named by the Chronicle as Lothen and Yrling, who ‘seized indescribable booty, both in captives, gold and silver’. The following year Essex was raided again by an ever larger fleet, led this time by the exiled Osgod Clapa.
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By the end of the year 1050, however, Edward had come up with a plan —a plan which, if it worked, would rid him of the over-mighty Godwine, safeguard England from Viking attack, and simultaneously solve the pressing problem of the English succession. It was, in short, ambitious, and it required the participation of his kinsman, the duke of Normandy.

In the months and years after the battle of Val-ès-Dunes, William had been busy consolidating his victory, destroying castles and capturing rebels. Count Guy, the leader of the failed revolt, proved a particularly stubborn problem, having fled to his castle at Brionne which, according to William of Poitiers, was virtually impregnable, its stone keep surrounded on all sides by the unfordable waters of the River Risle. As William of Jumièges explains, the duke was forced to surround Brionne with siege castles in order to strangle it into submission. At length (after three years in one account) the starving count surrendered and was sent into exile.
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As William ousted the man who had tried to topple him, his loyal subjects worried about the security of his dynasty. ‘Now that the duke, flourishing in the strength of his youth, was passed the age of adolescence’, says William of Jumièges, ‘his magnates urgently drew attention to the problem of his offspring and succession.’ Like Edward the Confessor, William needed to get married and busy in his bed so that others could sleep easy in theirs. William of Poitiers indicates that there was discussion and disagreement amongst the duke’s advisers about where he ought to go looking for a wife. In the Middle Ages, matrimony among the great was often an extension of diplomacy; historically, the dukes of Normandy had sought brides beyond their borders. In the end it was decided that William should marry Matilda, a daughter of Baldwin, count of Flanders.
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We don’t know much about the young Matilda— her date of birth, like Edith’s, is unknown.
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So too, for that matter, is her height: the popular notion that she was only four feet two inches is a modern myth.
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William of Jumièges tells us that she was ‘a very beautiful and noble girl of royal stock’. The ‘beautiful’ part sounds conventional, but given that the principal concern was to produce children, Matilda’s attractiveness must have mattered. ‘Royal stock’ refers to the fact that Matilda’s mother, Adela, was a daughter of the late French king, Robert the Pious, who had died in 1031. This, of course, meant that Matilda herself was a niece of Robert’s son and successor, Henry I, and indeed it seems quite possible that the king, William’s ally in 1047, may have suggested the marriage alliance with Flanders. Certainly in May the following year both William and Count Baldwin appear together as witnesses on a charter drawn up at Henry’s court.
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What William of Jumièges fails to mention (unsurprisingly) is that before the marriage could be celebrated it was forbidden by the pope. Indeed, the first certain information we have about the match comes in October 1049, when Pope Leo IX, then holding a celebrated council in the French city of Rheims, intervened to ban it. Chroniclers writing in the early twelfth century believed that he did so because William and Matilda were too closely related, but the fact that no modern historian has been able to discover a credible genealogical link between the couple suggests that the real reason for the ban lay elsewhere.
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The true explanation was probably political. In 1049 Leo had only been pope for a few months, and had been appointed by his relative, the emperor Henry III, who—it just so happened— was on extremely bad terms with Baldwin of Flanders. Earlier in the year, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle explains, Baldwin had attacked the imperial palace at Nijmegen, and the emperor, in revenge, had assembled a great army against him, made up of famous men from all regions— including Pope Leo. By the time the Council of Rheims met in October Baldwin had submitted, but neither Henry III nor Leo IX would have been happy at the thought of their former enemy strengthening his position in any way— say, for example, by entering a marriage alliance with the duke of Normandy.
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So the pope’s objections were probably political rather than canonical; but being political meant they could be speedily overcome.
Within months of the Council of Rheims senior Norman churchmen were visiting Leo in Rome, and by 1051 we find Matilda witnessing charters as William’s countess. Most likely, therefore, the marriage was celebrated at some point in 1050, when William was in his early twenties and Matilda in her mid-to-late teens. The wedding took place in the small town of Eu on Normandy’s north-eastern border. The bride arrived escorted by her father, who also brought many gifts, and the groom came accompanied by his mother and stepfather, as well as many knights. ‘He married her legally as his wife,’ says William of Jumièges, ‘and led her with the greatest ceremony and honour into the walls of Rouen.’ The ducal capital, adds William of Poitiers, gave itself over to rejoicing.
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In England, however, there may have been rather less jubilation. Edward the Confessor, of course, had an extremely long and close relationship with Normandy and its rulers, and there is no reason to suppose that this had in any way suffered since he had left to reclaim his father’s crown. But his relationship with Flanders was, by contrast, terrible. Possibly this was due to the malign influence of his mother, who may have poisoned the mind of Count Baldwin during her long sojourn in Bruges. Whatever the cause, throughout the 1040s the count had repeatedly given refuge to the king’s enemies. Gunhilda and her children; Osgod Clapa; the incorrigible Swein Godwineson— all had fled to Flanders after Edward had sent them into exile. So too had Lothen and Yrling, the two pirates who raided Kent and Essex in 1048, in order to sell their plunder. Flanders, in short, had become for Edward what Normandy had been for his father— a harbour for his enemies and place to unload English riches. Small wonder that when the German emperor had asked Edward to mount a naval blockade of Baldwin’s ports in 1049, the English king had readily obliged.
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The marriage of William and Matilda must therefore have filled Edward with considerable foreboding: an alliance between Normandy and Flanders raised the alarming prospect of a Channel coast hostile from one end to the other. Clearly, the king had to do something to counteract this latent threat to English interests. It was yet another reason why the young Norman duke was an essential part of his plan.

At the start of the year 1051 a storm was already brewing between Edward and Earl Godwine. For some time, it seems, the two men
had not seen eye to eye over the government of the English Church. The king may not have had much power in secular politics, but he did have the final say in the appointment of abbots and bishops, and, unsurprisingly, he preferred to advance his own associates—the clerks of his chapel who had crossed with him from Normandy—rather than those put forward by his father-in-law. As the
Life of King Edward
explains, ‘when the holders of dignities died, one set of men wanted vacant sees for their own friends, and others were alienating them to strangers’.

This argument reached its highest pitch following the death, in October 1050, of Eadsige, the archbishop of Canterbury. The monks of Canterbury, who had the first say in choosing a replacement, elected one of their own, a certain Æthelric, and asked Godwine to seek the king’s approval. The earl readily agreed—Æthelric was one of his kinsmen—but his request was refused. Edward already had a candidate in mind in the shape of his long-time friend and mentor, Robert of Jumièges, who, as his surname suggests, was a Norman. The former abbot of Jumièges, Robert had crossed with Edward in 1041 and thereafter remained his most intimate counsellor— ‘the most powerful confidential adviser of the king’, as the
Life of King Edward
puts it. Towards the start of the reign Edward had elevated him to be bishop of London, possibly in the teeth of native opposition (unusually, there is no mention of the appointment in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). The prospect of his promotion to Canterbury certainly caused consternation in Godwine circles. ‘All the clergy protested with all their might against the wrong’, says the author of the
Life
. But they protested in vain, because ultimately the will of the king prevailed. In March 1051, Edward held a meeting of his council in London and Robert’s appointment was confirmed.
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At the same time, the king almost certainly dropped another, even bigger bombshell. Six years into their marriage, he and Edith still had no children, despite the prayers we know that certain churchmen had been offering up for their fertility. Of course, this fact is not surprising if we believe Edith’s later claim that Edward had never slept with her, and our grounds for believing as much are greatly reinforced by the king’s actions during this crucial year. It was probably in the same council of March that year that Edward announced that he wanted the English succession to go to his kinsman, William of Normandy.

‘Almost certainly’; ‘probably’: the announcement of William’s candidature for the throne has to be hedged around in this way because no English source written at the time admits that it happened. The suggestion that Edward promised William the succession occurs only in Norman sources written, or at least revised, after the Norman Conquest itself. This has led some historians to doubt that the promise was ever made at all, and to argue that it was a simply a story dreamt up after the event to justify William’s accession.
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Taken together, however, the English and Norman sources strongly suggest that the promise was made. Both William of Poitiers and William of Jumièges, for example, aver that the offer was carried to William in the first instance by Robert of Jumièges, and English sources confirm that the new archbishop of Canterbury did indeed leave England in the spring of 1051 (like all newly appointed archbishops, he had to travel to Rome to collect his pallium, or scarf of office, from the pope in person).
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Given the silence of our English sources, the reaction of Earl Godwine can only be guessed at, but we may suppose that it was not favourable. Defeated in recent years on the issue of foreign policy; frustrated in recent months in his scheme for a new archbishop, the earl was now, it seems, expected to abandon the hope of one day seeing a grandson on the English throne, and to accept instead that the position would be filled by yet another foreigner. The prospect can hardly have pleased him. William, if he came to England, would not be like Edward, a powerless exile with a small entourage. He would be an independent power, a duke of one of France’s most formidable provinces, with a reputation already established for prowess in arms. As such, he would be unlikely to tolerate the over-mighty earl, and well placed to destroy him.