Edward the Confessor King Henry II and Pope Alexander III He was called 'Confessor' as the name for someone who was believed to have lived a saintly life but was not a martyr. In the 1230s King Henry III became attached to the cult of Saint Edward, and he commissioned a new life by Matthew Paris. Henry also constructed a grand new tomb for Edward in a rebuilt Westminster Abbey in 1269. He named his eldest son after him. Until about 1350, Edmund the Martyr, Gregory the Great and Edward the Confessor were regarded as English national saints, but Edward III preferred the
Confessor Confessor Confessor is a title used within Christianity in several ways. Its oldest use is to indicate a saint who has suffered persecution and torture for the faith but not to the point of death. The term is still used that way in the East. In Latin Christianity it has come to signify any saint, as well as those who have been declared blessed, who cannot be categorized by another title: martyr, apostle, evangelist, or virgin. As Christianity emerged as the dominant religion in Europe, persecutions became rare, and the title was given to saints who lived a holy life