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Edward - later known as Edward the Martyr - was born in around 962 when his father Edgar was 19 years old.
At the time of his birth his father had been king of the English for around three years.
King Edgar died in 975 when Edward was about 13 years of age.
The young prince was crowned King of the English, but his reign would last a little less than three years.
In 978 he was brutally murdered at Corfe Castle when he was about 16. He was succeeded by his younger half-brother, 12-year-old AEthelred.
However, when Edward’s father died, many noblemen in England did not consider him to be the legitimate heir and the crown was contested.
This was because though Edward was acknowledged as King Edgar’s son, his mother was not the King’s lawful wife, AElfthryth who had been crowned and anointed queen.
Edward’s mother is thought to have either been his first wife or consort AEthelflaed, or a nun called Wulfthryth, whom Edgar had lived with for a few years.
Regardless, a number of very powerful noblemen instead supported Edgar’s next eldest son AEthelred - his son by his third wife AElfthryth - as the natural heir.
Civil war almost broke out over the issue, but in the end Edward, with the support of England’s leading clerics Dunston of Canterbury and Oswald of York - won out.
Edward’s father King Edgar, who was the great-grandson of Alfred the Great, had irritated England’s nobility during his 16 year reign by supporting forcing monastic reforms on them.
He had also introduced fines for anyone who didn’t pay their church tithes (money people had to give to the church) and he dispossessed minor members of the nobility and gave their land to the church.
Edward was the child of his first wife, though this was now in dispute.
Instead strong factions within the nobility said that AEfthryth, the anointed Queen was King Edgar’s true wife and that Edward was not the legitimate heir.
Therefore her son AEthelred was the true heir to the throne.
In the end the matter was settled and 13-year-old Edward was chosen as king over his younger half-brother AEthelred.
Nevertheless it seems that during Edward’s short rule the noblemen sought to reverse King Edgar’s clerical reforms anyway.
Very few charters survive from Edward’s reign, compared with other kings of that era but it’s generally thought there was a breakdown of royal authority in this period and it’s thought much of these activities were controlled by the earldorman
Less than three years after he ascended to the throne, when he was 16, Edward was visiting step-mother Ælfryth and his half-brother AEthelred at Corfe Castle in Dorset.
After he died Edward was venerated as a saint and a martyr - hence his name Edward the Martyr.
After being buried in Wareham he was reburied in a throne in Shaftesbury. The shrine was destroyed over 500 years later during the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1500s.
His bones were found again in 1931 and moved to a bank vault. Tests carried out later that century confirmed the bones had injuries consistent with Edward’s reported injuries.
Neither the Anglican or Catholic churches would take the bones so in the 1980s he was interred in a Russian Orthodox Shrine in Surrey.
It’s quite sad end not only for a king of England, but for a young boy. He lost his mother as a child, lost his father when he was 13, was crowned king the same year, brutally murdered when he was 16, buried, dug up, reburied, dug up again thanks to Henry VIII, found again then turned away by the Church of England and Catholic Churches and eventually buried in a Russian church in suburban Surrey.
Let’s hope at some point in the future Henry VIII’s bones aren’t dug up by future anti-reformationists and forced to undergo the same fate.
Let’s hope the bones of George V, king in 1931, don’t suffer a similar humiliating fate and are denied a home by whoever is in charge of England 400 years from now.
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