Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Kings & Queens (8 page)

O
n the death of his brother William Rufus in 1100, Henry illegally took the throne of England ahead of his second-eldest brother, Robert Curthose. His excuse may well have been that Robert was away on crusading duty in the Holy Land.

Indeed Robert had been offered the kingship of Jerusalem. But Henry knew that it was only a matter of time before his brother would be back challenging him for what he believed to be his rightful inheritance.

Luckily Henry was proving popular with the people. He took the politically expedient measures of repealing Rufus’s hated laws on hunting restrictions and of recalling Anselm from exile to resume his position as Archbishop of Canterbury.

The shrewest move, however, was to marry Edith of Scotland. She was daughter of Malcolm III and, more important still, was descended from Alfred the Great. Thereby the union restored the ancient royal House of Wessex to the English throne, a highly popular outcome with his Saxon subjects. Henry stood in good stead to receive his brother.

On his eventual arrival at Portsmouth, with a massed army at his side, Robert marched to Alton in Hampshire where he duly met Henry. In a unique confrontation the two opposing forces formed a circle, while the brothers met in the middle. After a few tense minutes of negotiation, they threw their arms round each other in an extraordinary gesture of reconciliation. All seemed well, but Robert clearly became disgruntled and eventually the brothers did come to blows, in Normandy. Victorious Henry locked up Robert for life and sequestered his dukedom. So it was, on the 40th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, that history reversed itself: the English had conquered Normandy.

Once again all seemed well. Henry and his wife, now renamed as the fashionably Norman Matilda to keep his nobles happy, had four children, of which two were sons and potential heirs. He is also credited with fathering at least 20 illegitimate children, a record in royal annals.

But the king’s lusty happiness was not destined to last. One legitimate son died young; the other, William Aethling (named after his Anglo-Saxon ancestor), died tragically at sea. He was returning after dark to England from Normandy aboard
The White Ship
on its maiden voyage, when the vessel struck a rock and sank. On hearing of the tragedy from the sole survivor, Henry is said to have been so devastated that he never smiled again.

Desperate to have another male heir, the king married again at the age of 53: this time to a French girl of 18. But no son was forthcoming. Instead he resolved to prepare his daughter, also called Matilda, for succession. Henry I reigned for 35 years.

A
lthough Matilda was never actually crowned queen of England, she was effectively the queen in the sense of being ruler of the nation. This ‘reign’ lasted only a few months in 1141, and it proved a considerable struggle.

Matilda was made of stern stuff with great will power. Daughter of Henry I and Matilda of Scotland, she was promised the throne by her father, since his only rightful male heir had died in an accident at sea.

Her ambitious father managed to present his daughter in all the right circles, and at the tender age of twelve she was married to Henry V, Holy Roman Emperor, no less. She had to learn German fast and lived in Germany. As a result of this union she is often referred to as Empress Matilda. After ten years of marriage, however, the emperor died. Her forever networking father then arranged a second marriage for her, this time to Geoffrey Plantagenet, son of the Count of Anjou. An erstwhile enemy was thereby befriended and, of course, the foundations were laid for the Plantagenet empire ruled by the future Henry II.

All Matilda had to do was grasp the reins of power. And this would occupy her energies for a good deal of her remaining life. Her rival to the throne would be Stephen, grandson of William the Conqueror through his daughter Adela.

Although Stephen had been made to swear an oath supporting Matilda’s succession to the throne, he had other ideas when Henry I died. Commanding more support than Matilda could muster from nobles and bishops, Stephen was able to seize the throne. There was little that Matilda could do to dislodge the usurper, until he foolishly placed himself in a vulnerable position.

During a skirmish in Lincoln he climbed down from his horse and continued fighting on the ground. When his weapons broke, the king fell to the mercy of Matilda’s knights who clapped him in prison.

Thereupon Matilda endeavoured to persuade the aristocracy to grant this woman her rightful status. However, the former empress’s haughty demeanour made her more enemies than friends, and on rejecting demands to halve her subjects’ tax bill, she was refused the coronation. Instead her main ally, the powerful bishop Henry of Blois conferred on her the tentative title of ‘Domina’, or ‘Lady of the English’.

But this state of affairs was never going to last and within a couple of months the country was in a state of civil war. One day, while residing at home in Winchester, she discovered that fire was enveloping the town – and no accident either. For several weeks the city was ablaze, the great abbey was destroyed and with it a great gold cross given by King Canute. When the army of her former ally, turned enemy, Bishop Henry arrived from London, Matilda’s supporters fled. She herself escaped but Stephen was released from prison and was soon hunting her down.

Bitter years of siege and counter-siege followed, including once when encircled at Oxford Matilda managed to escape by crossing the snow-laden land wearing a white cape as camouflage. Eventually the two adversaries came to a settlement: Stephen would keep the crown if Matilda’s son Henry (by Geoffrey Planatagenet) could become heir to the throne. And so their conflict ended. In fact, Stephen died a year later so Matilda had the more sastisfactory outcome.

P
ossibly the most anarchic years the country has witnessed – worse even than during the English Civil War – were those experienced during the reign of Stephen. He himself was by all reports a likeable fellow: good-looking, kindly, generous – hardly the sort to wish for such a dreadful state of affairs. Unfortunately Stephen was not suited to being a king. He was out of his depth.

Descriptions of his reign from contemporary sources beggar belief. It seems that Stephen’s bid to hold on to his crown in the face of the iron-willed Matilda (whose right to the throne had been asserted by her father Henry I) simply got out of hand. Once Stephen had lost control, he was unable to regain it.

Rival factions of nobles and knights fought bitterly, each in turn burning and pillaging whole villages that might have pledged their support to the enemy. A protection racket was rife. It was said that ‘you could easily go a day’s journey without ever finding a village inhabited or a field cultivated.’

Even those who escaped the wholesale slaughter would probably suffer in the following famine that overtook much of the land. William of Malmesbury recorded, ‘The knights from the castles carried off both herds and flocks … pillaging the dwellings of the wretched countrymen to the very straw.’ Entire towns, such as Nottingham, Winchester, Oxford, Cambridge and Bedford were sacked, and thousands starved to death in the famine. It was said that every man who could, robbed his neighbour. Unspeakable tortures were committed to obtain treasures. Bodies were ‘broken on stones’ and the worst perpetrators ‘knotted cords round their heads and twisted them till they entered the brain’.

We do not know how much licence was written into these accounts, perhaps none. Such lawless horror prevailed for 15 years under Stephen’s reign. It took the strength and organisation skills of his successor, Henry II, to put an end to the chaos.

W
inston Churchill’s eponymous ancestor acclaimed the first Plantagenet ruler, Henry II, as the ‘very greatest King that England ever knew, but withal the most unfortunate’.

By his birth to Matilda and her second husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, Henry inherited the English crown. Through his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, he acquired half of France, and bit by bit during his reign Henry added virtually the rest of the country. He conquered Ireland too. So by 1180 this formidable warrior king had extended the frontiers of what could rightly be termed the Angevin Empire to include an immense area stretching from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees.

In his efforts to quell the turmoil inherited on succeeding Stephen, Henry earned widespread support from his nobles. One measure was to introduce a system of common law that standardized legal practice right across the country. Thus far, the history books present Henry II in a good light. But the second part of Churchill’s statement refers to his less successful dealings with the Church. Henry did not like sharing power with another institution, especially one that regarded itself as having supreme authority.

Yet his reign started well on this front. When Henry was introduced to the brilliant young Thomas Becket, a protégé of Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury, they immediately saw eye to eye and Henry made him royal chancellor. As soon as the Canterbury post fell vacant, the king fast-tracked his learned friend through the ordination process, from priest to bishop to archbishop, in a matter of days. Unfortunately, from there on their paths diverged.

As Becket himself declared on taking up his new position, he changed from ‘a patron of play-actors and a follower of hounds, to being a shepherd of souls.’ The two friends disagreed on several points of ecclesiastical administration as Henry endeavoured to assert the secular law over church law. Becket constantly refused to oblige.

Uppermost was the issue of jurisdiction over clergymen convicted of crimes. Henry wanted control of their sentencing and reprieve. Becket insisted it was a matter for the Church. Although this may not in itself seem to be a matter of life and death, the verdict would symbolize where the power lay.

In effect the two men were drawing up their battle lines – to give ground here would only lead to conceding more territory later. Like Thomas More centuries later in his resistance to Henry VIII, Becket could not act against his conscience, or all would be lost.

At one point Becket felt so intimidated he fled to France where he stayed for six years until Henry allowed him back after the Pope had threatened to excommunicate the whole of Britain. Here, indeed, were the early rumblings of the split that eventually ripped the English Church from Rome in the 16th century.

When Becket preached with characteristic fire on Christmas Day, excommunicating bishops who had taken part in the coronation of Henry’s son as future king, the report of it tipped Henry into the terrible rage that would haunt him for the rest of his life. His actual words – ‘What miserable drones and traitors have I nurtured and promoted in my household who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric!’ – have been turned into the more theatrically terse: ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?’

Did the king know that four of his trusty, though not the brightest, barons were within earshot? Did he intend this outburst to be effectively an order of execution? Surely the original words could not be construed to carry that meaning, but the re-rendering of them in a more snesational style surely could.

What we do know is that once the king heard of the murderous deed, committed, as it was, before the high altar of Canterbury Cathedral he was horrified and abject with remorse. In an act of penitence he donned sackcloth and ashes and ate nothing for three days. Four years later, after the pope had canonised Becket, Henry made a public confession of humility and sorrow by walking in sackcloth barefoot to the cathedral and staying overnight in a dank cell of the crypt. Never had such a loose utterance caused such distress to an English monarch.