General Notes

Name Suffix:<NSFX> " Prince Of England
Edgar Atheling was the son of Edward the Exile and so the grandson of Edmund Ironside and great-grandson of Ethelred the Unready. There is some evidence that Edward the Confessor, his great uncle, intended Edgar to succeed him as king of England in 1066. After the death of Harold II at Hastings he was chosen as king by the remaining English magnates in London, but was soon forced to submit to the victorious William of Normandy. For the rest of his career, Edgar fulfilled the frustrating and ultimately barren existence suggested by his cognomen: an atheling was a member of a noble or royal family with a claim to the throne. By virtue of his position as the male heir of the House of Wessex, Edgar enjoyed patronage and hostility beyond his deserts, by turns an exile and a boon companion to the great. A rootless, restless, charming and feckless man, he had the personal qualities to attract supporters and lead troops, but neither the experience nor aptitude for political success. His career was a wheel of fortune which never reached the top. Initially accepted at William I's court, Edgar, with the rest of his family, fled to Scotland in 1068, where his sister Margaret married King Malcolm III. After the Treaty of Abernethy (1072) between Malcolm and William I, Edgar was again on his travels, to Flanders and France, where Philip I hoped to use him to foment trouble against William. Soon reconciled with William, Edgar received some small estates in England, a place at court, a pension of £1 day (which he casually exchanged for a horse) as the price of political emasculation. During this period, Edgar may have formed his attachment to Robert Curthose, whose character and career matched his so well. In 1086, Edgar was allowed to raise a force of two hundred knights to fight in sourthern Italy. On his return he was established with lands in Normandy where Curthose was now duke (1087), only to be expelled from them in 1091 as part of a treaty between Curthose and his brother William II, who evidently found Edgar's independence as unsettling as had his father. However, Edgar's Scottish connections proved useful to William Rufus in his attempts to destroy the hostile regime of King Donaldbane (1094-7), and in 1097 Edgar was put at the head of an English-sponsored invasion of Scotland which placed Edgar's nephew, also called Edgar, on the Scottish throne. Despite his family's hold on Scotland and Henry I of England's marriage to his niece, Matilda (1100), he, and Robert FitzGodwine, one of his English supporters who had been with him in Scotland, went to the newly captured Holy Land. Back in Europe, Edgar once more found himself on the losing side when he supported Curthose at the Battle of Tinchebrai (1106). Thereafter, Edgar lingered on in obscurity, a relic of an increasingly irrelevant past, a curiosity, perhaps, to a generation in which Edgar's freelance adventurism had little or no place.