6
The measure of the king
At the beginning of the twelfth century, in the reign of Henry I, it was declared that the measurement of the yard (0.9 metres) should be ‘the distance from the tip of the king’s nose to the end of his outstretched thumb’. Yet what gave the kings of England such significance and control? They represented the country in a physical, as well as a spiritual, manner. They embodied the country, in its coinage and in its judicial process, in its land tenure and in its religious life. The history of England cannot be written without a careful account of its sovereigns. For many centuries it was impossible to imagine a country without a king. It was believed that a king’s health would affect the health of the kingdom as a whole, and that the private vices of the king could provoke a public calamity. The image of England might be that of the king outstretched.
The origins of kingship cannot be found. We may deduce from the evidence of the Neolithic monuments that there was power in the land from the fourth millennium bc. Who once lay in the great works of Sutton Hoo or Avebury? The kings of the dead have also gone down into the earth.
And then we begin to see flashes of regal pre-eminence. The early Saxon kings claimed that they were descended from the gods, in particular from Woden, and it was believed that they possessed magical powers. Even the supposedly saintly Edward the Confessor traced his descent from pagan Woden. In some more remote age of the world the king might also have been the high priest of the tribe. It is likely that, his true wife being a goddess, he was allowed to have intercourse with whomever he chose. This may help to account for the excessive promiscuity of later English kings; even until recent times they were always permitted and even expected to keep mistresses.
The Saxon kings were violent men, warlords in all but name, but they clothed themselves in the panoply of divine power. Their banners were carried before them wherever they walked. From the tenth century the kings took on classical and imperial titles such as caesar, imperator, basileus and Augustus. In their magnificence we may see traces of ancient British kings, combining wrathfulness and vengeance with spells and rituals. In essence it was the same authority wielded by Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.
The continuity is there. The promises made by King Edgar at his coronation in 973 were repeated in the coronation charter of Henry I, beginning with the words ‘In the name of the Holy Trinity! I promise three things to the Christian people subject to me! First, that God’s Church and all Christian people of my dominions shall keep true peace!’ The ceremony, devised by Archbishop Dunstan to crown Edgar at Bath, has been at the centre of every subsequent coronation. Much of it was employed, for example, at that of Elizabeth II in 1953. In his writings, particularly in his preface to the soliloquies of St Augustine, King Alfred reflects upon the divine power of the king, who is closer to God than anyone else in the realm; indeed, God Himself can be seen as ‘an exceedingly powerful king’. The damned souls of doomsday are compared to men ‘condemned before some king’.
From generation to generation the same message has been passed. The monarch has been anointed with holy oil, and is invested with divine power; he or she has been elected by God, rather than the people, and has been blessed by the Holy Spirit. That is why, from the tenth century, the king organized and controlled both the monasteries and the bishoprics; the strength and unity of the nation were materially assisted by the union of secular and ecclesiastical authority. The leading clergy were the king’s servants, assisting him in times of peace and war. He was a Christus.
The main task of the king was indeed to lead his people into battle. By the aggrandizement of land and wealth he rendered the country more powerful and more worthy of God’s grace. All the land was his. He owned all highways and bridges, all monasteries and churches, all towns and rivers, all markets and fairs. That is why from the earliest times England was controlled by a minute and complex system of taxation. The coin itself was minted in the king’s name. The voice of the king was the voice of law; it could be said that he held the laws of the land in his breast. This was also the claim of Richard II, many centuries after his Saxon ancestors.
William the Conqueror did not need to create the role of a powerful and centralizing king, therefore; he simply had to take up the part acquired by him. He adopted his crown three times a year at a ceremony known as the festal crown-wearing; we may imagine a tableau in which the king, in silent possession of his majesty, receives the homage of his great lords. There had been such crown-wearings in the eighth century but the practice may lie further back. These three days of the year – Christmas, Easter and Pentecost – were also the days when the pagan kings of the north used to perform a ritual sacrifice for the sake of the people. So kingship had very ancient roots. It has been said that William borrowed from the customs of the Frankish or Roman or Byzantine civilizations; yet it may be that his true ancestors are to be found in those who ordered the building of Stonehenge.
The Angevin kings, the line of Henry II, Richard I and John I, chose instinctively to espouse and even to exaggerate the sense of divine kingship. They were all wilful and ruthless sovereigns who systematically exploited the resources of the country to bolster their own sense of significance. Richard was the first king to use the plural ‘we’ in the composition of royal charters. John was the first to call himself the king of the land rather than the king of the people. The premise of absolute power was of course challenged by the barons in the course of John’s reign, but it did not disappear with his death. It lay beneath the confused inheritance and dynastic struggles of the later generations; royal power was still a question of what was possible rather than what was just or right. In the thirteenth century the principle of primogeniture or the hereditary right of the eldest son was first advanced. The power of the Crown was secure in the reigns of Henry IV, Henry V and Edward IV. Richard II was the monarch most inclined to emphasize the divine rights of kingship.
There was no progress towards a more liberal or benevolent concept of monarchy working in partnership with the great magnates of the land. As soon as the conditions were right, at the beginning of what has become known as the Tudor period, the king reasserts all of his authority and power with as much forcefulness as any Norman monarch.
The belief that the king’s touch could cure the skin disease of scrofula emerged at some point in the twelfth century, although Edward the Confessor was accredited with miraculous powers at an earlier date. It is possible that Henry II was the first king to make a ritual out of healing those afflicted by the disease, and one of his courtiers wrote that the ‘royal unction’ was manifest ‘by the diminution of groin disease and the cure of scrofula’. The tradition continued until at least 1712, when Queen Anne touched the three-year-old Samuel Johnson for the latter disease. Johnson remained a staunch royalist for the rest of his life.
7
The coming of the conquerors
By the end of the tenth century England was a rich and prosperous country. So the men of Denmark still came in search of treasure and of slaves; they fought against naturalized Danes as well as Englishmen. Sporadic raiding took place in the 980s, and in the course of one attack London was put to the torch. It was one of the many great fires of London. In 991 a Danish army overwhelmed a native force in Essex, giving rise to a great English poem of lament entitled ‘The Battle of Maldon’:
Our thoughts must be the braver, our hearts the steadier,
Our courage the greater, as our strength grows less.
It is a poem containing all the stoicism and valour of the tenth-century warrior. He rode to the battlefield and then dismounted in order to fight on foot; he killed, rather than captured, the enemy. The English monarch Ethelred II was obliged to sue for peace after the signal defeat at Maldon. The Vikings wanted money, and Ethelred agreed to buy them off with £22,000 of silver and gold. The negotiations were helped by the fact that the English king could understand Old Norse. The taxation system of the nascent state was put into operation to provide what has become known as Danegeld or ‘the Danish tax’.