TRINITY · 13 OCTOBER & TRINITY · 26 OCTOBER
Alfred the Great & Edward the Confessor
Kings & Confessors · The Royal Saints of England · d. 899 & 1066
Alfred — AL-fred · Athelney — ATH-el-nee · Wessex — WES-ex · Asser — AS-er · Edward — ED-werd · Aelred of Rievaulx — AL-red of REE-voh · Confessor — one who confessed the faith by holy life
O God, who didst call thy servants Alfred and Edward to rule in justice and live in holiness, that thy kingdom might be reflected in the governance of earthly realms; Grant that all who bear authority may serve with their wisdom, and all who are served may be governed with their mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
The Anglican tradition has always known that the royal office, when rightly ordered, is itself a form of holiness — not because power is sacred but because the just exercise of power in the service of the weak is precisely what the Gospel requires of those to whom it has been entrusted. Alfred the Great (AL-fred) of Wessex (WES-ex) and Edward the Confessor (ED-werd) are the two supreme examples in English history of what a Christian king looks like when he takes his baptism as seriously as his crown: Alfred, who saved England from the Vikings by military genius and governed it by the translation of wisdom into the vernacular tongue; Edward, who governed England for twenty-four years in such peace and personal sanctity that Aelred of Rievaulx (AL-red of REE-voh) wrote his life as a mirror of princes, and the men who drafted Magna Carta invoked his laws as the ideal of just governance. They are saints of the laity not despite their political office but through it, because they understood the office as a calling and the calling as a form of service to God.
Alfred (849–899) came to the kingship of Wessex in the worst moment of English history: the Danish Great Army had overrun Northumbria, Mercia, and East Anglia, and in the winter of 878 drove Alfred himself into the Somerset marshes of Athelney (ATH-el-nee). But from Athelney he gathered his forces, defeated the Danes at Edington, baptised the Danish king Guthrum as his godson, and spent the remaining twenty years of his reign rebuilding the Church and the learning that the invasions had destroyed. He translated Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care into English — the first major prose work in the English language — and sent a copy to every bishop in his kingdom with a letter saying that learning had so decayed in England that he could find almost no one south of the Humber who could read the Latin service books. He also translated Boethius, the first fifty psalms, and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. His biographer Asser (AS-er) describes a man who divided his time into three equal parts: eight hours of prayer and study, eight hours of government and administration, eight hours of sleep and bodily necessities. He is the only English monarch to be called the Great, and it is entirely deserved.
Edward the Confessor (1003–1066) is the Confessor in the technical sense: one who confessed the faith by holy life rather than by martyrdom. He governed England for a quarter century, devoted himself to the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey — which he consecrated a week before his death and in which every English monarch since William the Conqueror has been crowned — and left behind the legal tradition — the Confessor’s laws — that became the touchstone of English liberty for five centuries. Aelred’s biography presents a king whose court was governed by an ethos of restraint and prayer, who took his personal holiness seriously, and who understood the royal office as a vocation of service. He was buried in Westminster Abbey on 5 January 1066, and his shrine remains there, the heart of the Abbey’s holiness.
Alfred and Edward stand at the head of the Anglican saints of the laity as the witness that the political order, rightly ordered, participates in the Kingdom of God. Alfred translated the Pastoral Care because he believed that his bishops needed to be able to read it and his people needed to be able to hear it; Edward built Westminster Abbey because he believed that England needed a place worthy of the liturgy it had received. Both acts are acts of lay holiness: the king serving the Church with his particular gifts of power and learning. The saints of the laity are simply the saints of the baptised, doing what their baptism requires of them in the particular circumstances of their particular lives. And among the baptised, Alfred and Edward show that the throne, when entirely given to God, is as capable of holiness as any hermit’s cell or any nun’s choir, and that the man who prays the Office and translates scripture and governs with justice is doing exactly what his baptism requires of him, and no less than the monk who prays the Office in the enclosure.
O Almighty God, who by thy servants Alfred and Edward didst show that the throne and the cloister are equally capable of holiness when both are placed entirely at thy service; Grant that those who bear authority in the world may govern with Alfred’s love of wisdom and Edward’s love of peace, and that all thy people may know that the calling given in baptism is sufficient to make a saint of any life wholly offered to thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.