It was a situation that would recur in English history. In 1399, for example, Henry Bolingbroke, who had been disinherited of the dukedom of Lancaster by Richard II, returned in force to England. At first Henry announced, like Godwin, that he required only the restitution of what was rightfully his. But, as royalist resistance crumbled, Henry overthrew Richard II and usurped his throne – as had probably been his real intention all along.
A similar outcome seemed on the cards in 1052. But, once again, the instinctive quest for balance in the Anglo-Saxon polity came into play:
They were most of them loath to fight with their own kinsmen – for there was little else of any great importance but Englishmen on either side; and they were also unwilling that this land should be more exposed to outlandish people, because they destroyed each other.
These were the same arguments as in 1051. But they had the opposite effect this time and it was the royalist forces that backed off. Negotiations began, with Bishop Stigand acting once more as intermediary. Meanwhile, Archbishop Robert, who had done so much to provoke the crisis, realized that the game was up and, with his fellow French bishop, Ulf of Dorchester, cut his way out of the City and fled for France ‘on board a crazy ship’.
On the 15th the final scene was played out before the witan, which met in the king’s palace at Westminster. Godwin protested his innocence of all the charges laid against him and exculpated himself before ‘his lord King Edward and before all the nation’. Edward, though unwillingly, professed to believe him and gave him the kiss of peace. Godwin and his sons were then restored to their earldoms while his daughter, Edith, resumed her place as queen. It was now the turn of Edward’s fallen French followers to be outlawed. The charges were that they had ‘chiefly made the discord between Earl Godwin and the king’, and, more generally, that they had ‘instituted bad laws, and judged unrighteous judgements, and brought bad counsels into this land’. An exception, however, was made in favour of household servants, whom the king was permitted to keep on the proviso that they were ‘true to him and all his people’.
Again, these self-same words and phrases echo through the succeeding centuries. In the thirteenth century Henry III was required to divest himself of his French favourites in 1234 and of his Poitevin relations in 1258; while in the seventeenth century the Civil War was ushered in with the charge against Charles I’s minister, the earl of Strafford, that he had put discord between king and people. Even in the language of opposition, it would seem, the foundations of English politics were laid in Anglo-Saxon England.
Once the great crisis of 1051–2 was over, Edward II’s reign takes on a very different character. The interesting times, apparently, were finished. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which had given a breathless, blow-by-blow account of each political drama and its resolution, turns into a bare narrative of events. And there seem to have been rather few of those.
What had happened? And what was Edward’s own role in the change? Some historians see him as a broken man. Forced against his better judgement into a reconciliation with a man and a family he detested, he went into a sort of internal exile. He abandoned the affairs of the ungrateful kingdom of England for the kingdom of Heaven and devoted himself, more and more, to his great new monastic foundation of Westminster Abbey.
Edward’s Westminster Palace and the adjacent Abbey are represented in the Bayeux Tapestry – and archaeological evidence and contemporary descriptions confirm the broad accuracy of its representation. The Abbey, with a ground plan in the form of a Latin cross, was modelled on the great Norman foundations. One outstanding example is the abbey of Jumièges, which had been founded a decade before in a self-consciously Roman style of grandeur by its then abbot, Robert, Edward’s notorious archbishop of Canterbury.
Westminster, however, would outdo all its Norman rivals. Despite the French inspiration, two of the master masons were English, while a third was probably German. Under their direction, work started probably in the late 1050s and proceeded rapidly. It began at the east end, which was the nearest point to the riverside palace which Edward had built a little earlier. The choir was made up of two double bays. Each bay consisted of a pair of semicircular arches resting on plain, round columns, while the bays were divided from each other by massive piers. The crossings, where the choir met the transepts and nave, was surmounted by a lantern, in which four corner staircase turrets clustered around the massive central square tower. The nave, also made up of double bays, was half as long again as Jumièges and probably even higher. At the west end, which the Tapestry shows as work in progress, were two more square towers.
The result was by far the largest and most magnificent church in England and one of the noblest in northern Europe. But why, in the first place, should Edward have bothered to rebuild the poverty-stricken Abbey and nominate it as his burial place? The site, on Thorney Island, was surrounded by barely drained marshland, and all Edward’s dynastic connections pointed to Winchester. Contemporaries explained the king’s choice by his devotion to St Peter, the Abbey’s patron saint. This is no doubt true as far as it goes. But it was the Abbey’s proximity to London which counted for most. London had always been the commercial capital. But the events of the eleventh century show it usurping the role of the political capital as well: it had been the last place to hold out against Cnut and it was the scene of the decisive encounters between Edward and the Godwins in 1051–2.
Edward’s decision to site his abbey on Thorney Island both reflects this historical development and hastened it. And it means that, to all Edward’s other achievements, we should add this: he is the founder of Westminster as the royal and political capital of England.
Edward’s enthusiasm for Westminster is real enough. But it does not quite explain his apparent withdrawal and reconciliation with Godwin. Rather, Edward, the great survivor, decided that, if he could not get rid of the Godwins, then he would have to live with them. And, as he was no ascetic, he resolved to live with them as comfortably as possible.
Things were helped by the swift removal of Godwin himself from the political scene. For the tensions of 1051–2 seem to have been too much for the earl’s constitution. Within a few days of his triumphant vindication at the Westminster witan, he was taken unwell and went back home. Six months later Godwin, with his sons Harold and Tostig, was celebrating Easter with the king at Winchester. On Easter Monday, 12 April 1053, as he was sitting with Edward at table, he had a stroke: ‘he suddenly sank beneath [the table] against the foot-rail, deprived of speech and of all his strength’. He was carried into the king’s bedchamber and was expected to recover. Instead, he remained speechless and helpless, and, after lingering for three days, died on the 15th. He was buried in the Old Minster, close to his first patron, Cnut.
Godwin’s death drew the worst of the venom from Edward’s feud with his family. For the king’s inveterate dislike of the earl for his part in his brother Alfred’s death in 1036 was personal; it did not extend to his sons. On the contrary, Edward’s relations with them were correct and, in the fullness of time, even became warm.
This was especially true of Harold, who, following his brother Swein’s death on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which he had undertaken to atone for his sins, was now the head of the family. He succeeded to his father’s earldom of Wessex and soon to his role as nutricius or protector of the realm as the king’s right-hand man. His other brothers did not have to wait long for their share: Tostig became earl of Northumbria in 1055, Gyrth of East Anglia in 1057 and Leofwin of a newly created earldom of the south-eastern counties bordering the Thames estuary