The Norman Conquest (18 page)

The effect of Ælfgar’s promotion was to recalibrate English politics. In September 1052 Godwine and his sons seemed set to enjoy a monopoly of power but, barely seven months on, the deaths of Swein and Godwine himself had reduced the number of earldoms under their control from three to one. As the new earl of Wessex, Harold was now the kingdom’s most powerful magnate, but his power was checked by the combined weight of Leofric in Mercia and Ælfgar in East Anglia, as well as Earl Siward, who remained in charge in Northumbria. For the first time in a generation, barring the brief exception of 1051–2, there was something approaching a balance of power between England’s earls.

Whether this balance handed any initiative back to the king is a moot point.
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If we consider the most pressing and controversial of all political questions – the succession – then the answer seems to be: probably not. The return of the Godwine family clearly meant that there was little or no chance that the crown would pass peacefully to William of Normandy. Yet even the Godwines, determined
as they had been to see Edith honourably restored to her position as queen, must have realized that there was even less likelihood that Edward was going to beget an heir of his own body. An alternative plan therefore had to be found. One option might have been to consider the candidacy of Earl Ralph, the king’s nephew, son of his sister Godgifu, but there is no sign that this was ever discussed, or that Ralph ever entertained any hopes in this direction.

Edward, however, had another nephew, descended in the male line, and the son of a former king. The king in question was Edward’s elder half-brother, Edmund, by this date if not before remembered as ‘Ironside’ for his heroic but ultimately unsuccessful struggle against his supplanter, Cnut. Shortly before his death in 1016 Edmund had fathered two sons who had subsequently fallen into Cnut’s clutches. According to John of Worcester, the Dane wanted them dead, but to avoid scandal in England sent them to be killed in Sweden. The Swedish king, however, refused to comply, and sent the infants on to Hungary, where they were protected and raised. One of them, named after his father, died in Hungary at an unknown date. But the other, whose name was Edward, survived and prospered. For obvious reasons, historians have dubbed him Edward the Exile.
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In 1054 it was decided to find Edward the Exile and bring him to England, evidently to become the kingdom’s heir: in the first half of the year Bishop Ealdred of Worcester set out across the Channel to put the plan into action. Precisely whose plan it was, however, is difficult to say. The D version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that the bishop went overseas ‘on the king’s business’, a statement which carries some weight since the D version was compiled in Ealdred’s own circle. At the same time, Ealdred is known to have been a Godwine sympathizer: he had secured Swein’s pardon in 1050 and aided Harold’s escape in 1051. It is hard to believe that the embassy could have left in the teeth of opposition from either Edward or the Godwines, though fair to point out that raising a powerless exile to the throne had worked very well for the Godwines in the past. Given the balance of power in England, perhaps the most plausible scenario is that both the king and his in-laws agreed to drop their most cherished schemes for the succession in favour of a compromise candidate who enjoyed something like cross-party support.

As it turned out, however, the mission was unsuccessful. Ealdred
travelled as far as the imperial city of Cologne, where he was received by the local bishop and the emperor Henry III himself, but that appears to have been the furthest extent of his itinerary. No doubt he looked to Henry’s influence to get his message to Hungary, but either the distances were too great or the politics too complicated (Hungary had frequently been in rebellion against imperial rule). Or perhaps Ealdred’s offer did reach its intended recipient, only to be greeted with an indifferent response. Edward the Exile, having left England as an infant, can have had little or no memory of his native country, and almost certainly spoke no English. He had grown to manhood in Hungary and married a Hungarian lady named Agatha. To all intents and purposes he was simply an eastern European aristocrat with a curious family history. Whatever the reason, after almost a year abroad, Ealdred returned to England empty-handed.
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By the time of his return the country was embroiled in a fresh crisis. The early months of 1055 had brought the death of Siward, the long-serving earl of Northumbria. A warlike man, appointed by Cnut and nicknamed Digri (‘the Strong’) in Danish, Siward had remained usefully strenuous to the end. One of his chief responsibilities had been to check the ambitions of the kings of Scotland, who had been steadily advancing southwards from their heartlands around the River Tay for over a century. The summer before his death, apparently at Edward’s behest, the earl had led a campaign across the border to depose Macbeth (and thereby earned lasting fame: he is Old Siward in Shakespeare’s play). The operation was successful but, as in literature, so in life: Siward’s eldest son was killed in the fighting, and thus when the earl himself died a few months later there was debate about who should succeed him. Siward had another son, Waltheof, but he was evidently too young – or at least,
deemed
to be too young – to assume such an important strategic command. Instead, the royal council that met in March 1055 decided that the earldom of Northumbria should pass to Tostig, the second surviving son of Earl Godwine.
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The
Life of King Edward
is naturally in no doubt about the merits of this appointment. Tostig, it claims, was ‘a man of courage, endowed with great wisdom and shrewdness of mind’. Although shorter than Harold, he was in every other respect his older brother’s equal: handsome, graceful, brave and strong. ‘No age or province’,
the
Life
concludes, ‘has reared two mortals of such worth at the same time.’
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But clearly not everyone agreed. The
Life
also explains that Tostig had obtained his new title with the help of his friends, especially Harold and Queen Edith, ‘and with no opposition from the king’ – an assertion that would seem rather redundant unless the truth lay some way in the opposite direction. At the very least, the
Life
seems to be answering other voices which claimed that Edward had been against promoting yet another Godwineson to high office.

One of those voices almost certainly belonged to Earl Ælfgar, whose recent reappointment to East Anglia had served to restore some equilibrium to English politics. The promotion of Tostig to Northumbria now threatened to upset that equilibrium, and left Ælfgar and his father, Leofric of Mercia, sandwiched between the Godwines to the north and south. It seems very likely that Ælfgar angrily opposed Tostig and his family in the king’s council that March, for in the course of the same meeting he was declared an outlaw. The three different versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle offer sharply contrasting (though typically brief) accounts of this incident, reflecting the sympathies of their compilers and the tensions that were threatening to destabilize the kingdom. According to the E Chronicle, written at Canterbury and broadly pro-Godwine, Ælfgar was exiled ‘on the charge of being a traitor to the king and the whole country’, having accidentally admitted his guilt. But the C Chronicle, written at a monastery in Mercia, insists that the earl ‘was outlawed without having done anything to deserve his fate’. Significantly, the D Chronicle, compiled in the circle of Bishop Ealdred and usually careful not to take sides, echoes the sentiment that Ælfgar was essentially innocent.
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If the events of the Confessor’s reign had proved anything, however, it was that exiles rarely accepted their punishment. Like Harold before him, Ælfgar fled in the first instance to Ireland, where he bolstered his own military household by hiring a fleet of eighteen mercenary ships. From there he sailed back across the Irish Sea in order to seek the assistance of Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, king of the whole of Wales since a bloody victory over his southern rival earlier in the year. Gruffudd had no particular love for the English, nor indeed the family of his visitor: as recently as 1052 he had led a devastating raid across the English border, and at the start of his
career in 1039 he had been responsible for the death of uncle, Eadwine. But like all successful participants in the bear pit that was Welsh politics, GrufFudd knew a golden opportunity when he saw one. He and Ælfgar evidently agreed to sink their differences and join together for an attack on England. In late October 1055, their combined forces crossed the border into Herefordshire, where they defeated the local levies led by Earl Ralph and sacked the city of Hereford. When a larger English army was subsequently assembled against them, the invaders wisely withdrew, leaving its commander, Earl Harold, with nothing to do apart from ringing Hereford’s charred remains with an improved set of defences. At length Harold took it upon himself to negotiate and terms were agreed. ‘The sentence against Ælfgar was revoked,’ says the C Chronicle, ‘and he was restored to all his possessions.’
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Signs are that this reconciliation was genuine: the following year, when further Welsh victories meant that similarly favourable terms had to be granted to Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, negotiations were led on the English side by Harold and Earl Leofric, Ælfgar’s father, working in partnership. Certainly by the summer of 1056 Harold must have felt that affairs in England had been satisfactorily settled, for at some point during the autumn he left for the Continent: a charter drawn up on 13 November shows he was present at the court of the count of Flanders.

Historians have for some time now speculated on the purpose of this trip. One possibility is that we are catching Harold on the outward or return leg of a journey to Rome, for the
Life of King Edward
assures us that at some point the earl made a pilgrimage to the Holy City. Equally he could have been in Flanders simply to visit Count Baldwin – ‘that old friend of the English people’, as the
Life
calls him on two separate occasions – to whom the Godwines obviously felt a great debt of gratitude for his former hospitality. Any number of scenarios is theoretically possible, so it is not surprising to find that Harold’s trip of 1056 has been interpreted in some quarters as a second attempt to secure the return of Edward the Exile. This is really nothing more than an enticing theory, based on join-the-dots reasoning rather than actual evidence. The only certainties are that Harold was on the Continent in the autumn of 1056, and the following spring Edward the Exile arrived in England.
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And as soon as he arrived in England he dropped dead. From a
variety of sources we can surmise that he died on 17 April 1057, probably in London, and was buried in St Paul’s, but no source reveals the manner of his passing. The fact that he died so soon after his return looks suspicious, as does the revelation that he did not even get to meet his namesake uncle. ‘We do not know’, says the D Chronicle, enigmatically, ‘for what reason it was brought about that he was not allowed to visit his kinsman King Edward.’ Unsurprisingly this comment has provoked modern writers to reach a variety of opposing conspiracy theories: the Exile was murdered on the orders of Harold, or by agents working for William of Normandy, are among the most popular and least likely scenarios. One author has even suggested that the reason that the two Edwards did not meet was down to the Confessor himself, who still clung to the hope of a Norman succession and therefore refused to meet his prospective replacement. Suffice to say, whether the D Chronicler knew the truth or not, his coyness means that we can never know.
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The problem with the conspiracy theories is that, as much as this latest tragedy upset the author of the D Chronicle, it did not end the hope of an English succession, for Edward the Exile and his wife Agatha had produced three children, one of whom was a boy. We do not know whether any of them accompanied their father across the Channel in 1057, but they and their mother had all certainly arrived in England before 1066. The boy, named Edgar, cannot have been more than five years old in 1057, but his credentials for kingship were obviously impeccable. In a book written at Winchester around the year 1060, Edgar is called
clito
, the Latin equivalent of the English ‘ætheling’, a title conventionally bestowed upon members of the house of Wessex to signify that they were worthy of ascending the throne; according to an early twelfth-century source, Edgar was called ætheling by the Confessor himself.
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By the end of the 1050s, therefore, and possibly as early as 1057, some people in England, including the ageing king, evidently considered that the problem of the succession had finally been solved.

But the political map of England continued to mutate. The death of Edward the Exile in the spring of 1057 was followed by that of Earl Leofric in the autumn and of Earl Ralph just a few days before Christinas, while the previous year had witnessed the passing of the king’s other kinsman, Earl Odda. Once again there was
huge change at the top of political society with far-reaching consequences. Ælfgar succeeded his father as earl of Mercia but to do so was obliged to give up the earldom of East Anglia. Ælfgar could hardly have objected to this in principle – after all, Harold had similarly surrendered the eastern shires on inheriting his father’s earldom of Wessex – but he must have opposed the decision to award East Anglia to Gyrth, a younger brother of Harold and Tostig, apparently still in his teens. When a short time later the shires of the south-west Midlands that had belonged to Earl Ralph were awarded to yet another Godwine brother, Leofwine, we may reasonably suspect Ælfgar’s anger boiled over. Probably he made some sort of defiant protest, for in 1058 he was again sent into exile. The details are almost completely lacking, but apparently what occurred was a rerun of earlier events. ‘Earl Ælfgar was banished but soon returned with the help of Gruffudd’, says the D Chronicle. ‘It is tedious to tell how it all happened.’
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