ABSTRACT
Alfred and Asser between them constructed a carefully composed portrait of ideal kingship which was to result in Alfred being seen, in the words of Edward Freeman, as the ‘most perfect character in history’,7 but only after a gap of many centuries. Alfred’s military and political successes were matched, if not surpassed, by his immediate successors, and, although Æthelweard gave him an enthusiastic notice,8 Alfred did not tower over succeeding kings in the way his role model Charlemagne did among the Franks. It was Alfred’s son Edward whose name was favoured by subsequent rulers, and after the murder of Alfred, son of Æthelred Unraed in 1036, there were no more Prince Alfreds until George III resurrected the name for his ninth and youngest son in 1780 (d. 1782). Alfred attracted little interest at the courts of his post-conquest successors. Although Asser’s Alfred may have been conceived as something of a secular saint,9 King Alfred was never culted and so not available for the post of saintly Anglo-Saxon royal supporter, in spite of the attempts by King Henry VI to have him recognized in Rome.10 It was Edmund of the East Angles and Edward the Confessor, the preferred royal saints, whose names were given to members of the later royal houses.11 Nor were Alfred’s exploits against the Vikings sufficiently impressive to allow him to become the military hero of the new régimes. After the successful advocacy of Geoffrey of Monmouth, that post went to King Arthur, and successive dynasties were reluctant to abandon this glamorous ancestor for the good, but inescapably duller, Saxon king.
