The idea of a Norman conquest of England was no new thing when
the actual blow fell in the autumn of 1066. The fateful marriage of Ethelred
and Emma, sixty years before, had made it impossible that the politics of the
island and the duchy should ever again be independent of each other; it led
directly to the English expedition of Robert of Normandy in 1034, and in Edward
the Confessor it gave England a king who was half a Norman in blood, and whose
ideas of government were derived from the political conditions of his mother's
land. To whatever aspect of the history of this period we may turn, this Norman
influence will sooner or later become apparent; in religion and commerce, as
in the narrower field of politics, the Norman is working his way into the main
current of English national life.
All this, however, is somewhat apart from the question as to the date at which Duke William began to lay plans for carrying out the conquest of England in his own person. There are two unknown quantities in the problem: the date at which it was generally recognised that Edward the Confessor would leave no direct heir to the English throne, and the king's own subsequent intentions with respect to the succession. Had such an heir been forthcoming in 1066 we may be sure that his inheritance would have been undisturbed from the side of Normandy, for William's daim to succeed his childless cousin by right of consanguinity was something more than a matter of form. Now Edward was married in 1045, being then in the very primei of life, and we must certainly allow for the passage of a reasonable period of time before we can feel certain that the politicians of England and Normandy were treating the succession as an open question. In particular it is difficult to be confident that in 1049, when the negotiations for the marriage of William and Matilda of Flanders were in progress, the ultimate childlessness of Edward the Confessor was known to be inevitable. 
A similar uncertainty hangs over the plans which the Confessor formed in the latter event for the future of his kingdom. His Norman blood, his early residence in the duchy, and the marked predilection which he showed for men of Norman race, very naturally lead to the impression that, in the earlier part of his reign at least, his desire was to provide for the transmission of his inheritance to his mother's family. But even this conclusion is not beyond question. Edward on his accession in 1042 occupied a most difficult position. After twenty-five years of Danish rule a very distinct party in the state wished to maintain the Scandinavian connection. Edward's recognition as king was mainly the work of Earl Godwine and his party, and the earl expected and could enforce full payment for his services. Edward would have shown less than the little intelligence with which he is to be credited if he had failed to see that some counterpoise to the power of his overmighty subject might be found by giving wealth and influence to strangers from across the Channel. Hence arose that stream of Norman immigration which distinguishes the reign and the consequent formation of a royalist, non-national party; for each individual settler must have understood that all he might possess in the island depended on the king's favour. Such a policy was bound sooner or later to produce a reaction on the part of Godwine and his associates; and thus arose the famous crisis of the autumn of 1051. Godwine, trying to reassert his influence in the state, fails to carry with him the other earls of England in an attack on the king's favourites and is driven to flee the country. What Godwine resented was clearly the existence of a rival power at court, and the apathy in his cause of such men as Leofric of Mercia and Siward of Northumbria suggests that he was not recognised by them as in any real sense the champion of national as against foreign influences. With his flight the first period of the reign of Edward the Confessor ends, and in the interval before his restoration William of Normandy made his first appearance on the sho