[On this day in 1075, Edith, the widowed queen of Edward the Confessor, died. Edith was the daughter of Earl Godwine (and the sister of Harold Godwineson). She had married Edward 30 years earlier, in January 1045. Their marriage was famously childless – had they had any children, there would have been no Norman Conquest...]
We know a reasonable amount about Edith because several decades later she commissioned one of the most important sources for her husband’s reign, a text known as the Life of King Edward. Unsurprisingly the anonymous author is fulsome in praise of his patron’s appearance, character and accomplishments. Edith, we are assured, was ‘inferior to none, superior to all . . . recommended by the distinction of her family and the ineffable beauty of her surpassing youth’. Educated by the nuns of Wilton in Wiltshire, she was also apparently quite the bluestocking, fluent in four languages, and so learned and talented that she was famous for her own poems, prose, needlework and painting. Dignified and reserved, serious and modest, affectionate, generous and honest: Edith was clearly ‘a wife worthy of so great a husband’. She and Edward were married at an unknown location on 23 January 1045.
But did Edward really have an alternative? Any assessment of his relationship with Godwine has to take into account the fundamental weakness of the king’s position at the start of his reign. Although he was fast approaching forty, he had not lived in England since his childhood; for a quarter of a century he had been living the life of an exile in Normandy. This meant that on his arrival in 1041 Edward had exceedingly few friends and allies – his only real confidants were the handful of Continental supporters who accompanied him from Normandy, many of whom were clerics. Godwine, by contrast, had been the principal force in English politics for almost all of the same twenty-five-year period. His lands and wealth, great as they were, could not quite rival those of the king; but in terms of lordship, the earl greatly outclassed Edward, with scores of followers in almost every shire in southern England, all ready to do his bidding. Events suggest that his will was all but irresistible. In 1040 he had supported Harthacnut, but the following year he had changed his mind and given his backing to Edward. What if he changed his mind again, and switched his support to another candidate – Magnus, for example, or perhaps Swein Estrithson? The reality was that, if Edward wanted to survive, he had little choice other than to do what Godwine suggested – and probably no say at all in choosing his own bride. As the author of the Life of King Edward explains with surprising candour, ‘Edward agreed all the more readily to contract this marriage because he knew that, with the advice and help of Godwine, he would have a firmer hold on his hereditary rights in England.
The corollary of this statement is pretty clear: had Edward refused, he would probably have found himself out of a job.
The suspicion, borne out by later events, is that Edward never forgave Godwine for Alfred’s murder, and merely went through the motions in marrying Edith. It is a suspicion reinforced by the fact that the match never produced any children. Later chroniclers insisted that this was because it was never consummated; most modern commentators, by contrast, ascribe it to sheer bad luck, and point to infertility as the more likely cause. Yet according to Edith’s own testimony (i.e. the Life of King Edward), the reason there were no children was because Edward had lived ‘a celibate life’; indeed, ‘he preserved with holy chastity the dignity of his consecration, and lived his whole life dedicated in true innocence’. This testimony deserves to be taken seriously; after all (as one modern historian has observed), had the reality been different, the Life would have been a laughing stock. More importantly, subsequent events do not support the idea that Edward was anxious to beget an heir. The reasonable conclusion remains that Edward agreed to marry Edith for purely political reasons and resisted her extensively chronicled charms.
The Norman Conquest, pp. 63-4.
The Bayeux Tapestry: Edith weeps at Edward's deathbed.
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