13 October. 1662 Book of Common Prayer: Translation of King Edward the Confessor
13 October. 1662 Book of Common Prayer: Translation of King Edward the Confessor
Binski, Paul. “The Cult of St. Edward the Confessor.” History Today (Volume:
55 Issue: 11 2005). http://www.historytoday.com/paul-binski/cult-st-edward-confessor. Accessed 27 May
2014.
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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