ST. EDWARD THE CONFESSOR

Greymouth Evening Star, 24 December 1934, Page 2

ST. EDWARD THE CONFESSOR

PARADOX OF ENGLISH HISTORY. The Dean of Durham (Very Rev. C. A. Alington, D.D.) writes in the London “Daily Telegraph”: — It is a strange paradox that the only English King to attain to canonisation was one of the least English of them all; and Edward the Confessor has not the excuse of his successors from Normandy, Holland or Hanover, for he was an Englishman by birth, but neither in character nor in inclination. What good he did to the country was again the paradoxical service of preparing the way for its conquest by foreigners, and though that may well be held to have been a blessing (for the Normans are the most wonderful people in all European history) it can hardly be counted to him for righteousness. . As we read his history we find little to admire. He possessed the monastic virtues and he loved the clergy—particularly, as a chronicler acidly remarks, those “from across the sea.” the good government which the country received in his reign was due to the capable advisers with whom he was on very doubtful terms; and his reputation is largely due to the historical accident that, while the English naturally honoured the memory of their last native king, the Normans, cn their side, had every reason to be grateful to him. He attained the honour of canonisation less than a century after his death, in 1161.

THE “KING’S EVIL.” But there must have been in him qualities of goodness which touched the popular imagination. He was certainly ineffective, but his intentions were good: the purity of his life, his abstinence from profane language, the regularity of his devotions and the general simplicity of his character all made their appeal, and after I his death legends testified to his su-i peinatural sanctity. He was the first English king to touch for the “king’s evil,” and there is as little doubt of the efficacy of his treatment as of that of Queen Anne, though it is possible that the promise of gold medals to those who were healed did something to stimulate recovery. He was a great devotee of the chase, a lover of “fleet hounds” and “pouncing birds,” and when engaged in this pursuit “conducted himself so mildly that he would not utter a word of reproach to the meanest person. For when he had gone out once hunting and a countryman had upset the standings by which the deer are driven into the toils, struck with noble anger, he exclaimed, ‘By God and His Mother! I will serve you just such a turn if ever I have the chance.’ Here was a noble mind, which forgot that he was a king, and could not think himself allowed to injure a man even of the lowest condition.” It is a pathetic little story, but it is perhaps the only one worth telling about King Edward. It is more to the purpose to remember him as the creator, or rather recreator, of the West Minster—so called to distinguish it from the older fane of St. Paul. BUILT AS AN ATONEMENT. It is characteristic that this great church in honour of St. Peter was

built as an atonement for his failure to make the pilgrimage to Rome, and built at the bidding of a Pope; characteristic also that it was a monastic church, and that the monastic buildings preceded that of the Minster. His solid passages and substructures remain, but it is only from the Bayeux tapestry and his biographer’s description that we can judge of its character. The piety of later generations destroyed his work, but it was in honour of the first builder that its glorious reconstruction was begun. Edward was too ill to attend at the consecration of his church on December 28, 1065: ten days afterwards he was dead. January 6, 1066 —that momentous year in English history—witnessed the first Royal burial and the first Royal consecration within its walls. There, translated, first a hundred years later, and then on October 13, 1269, rests the body of the Confessor —the pathetic and paradoxical albino-monk-king, revered by the 'English because he bequeathed the throne to Harold, and by the Normans because he promised it to William—the man on whose weakness the strength of England is so strangely and securely based.