Lady of the English (62 page)

Henry took the crown from her hands and held it between his own, and his eyes were the same grey as the rock crystals set in the gold.

Matilda saw him swallow with emotion and tears stung her 493

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own eyes. “Tomorrow, before your father leaves, we shall attend mass at Bec and your crown will be blessed and laid on the altar there until you are ready to send for it as England’s king.”

He replaced the diadem in the cloth, reverently refolding the stole around it. “It is yours too, Mother,” he said softly. “It holds your spirit.”

Matilda smiled at him, tears in her eyes. “Yes,” she said, proudly lifting her head. “It does.”

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Epilogue

Abbey of Afflighem, Belgium, Spring 1149

A deliza sat in the garden at Afflighem, enjoying the spring warmth. From her bench in a sheltered corner, she could admire the spring bulbs she had planted in the autumn.

She had not known if she would live to see them as she buried them, alive but dormant under the soil; she had thought they might push into the light and bloom when her physical body was in the grave. But by God’s grace she was still here to enjoy the cheerful gold of daffodils and hold a posy of violets, their delicate petals clad in spiritual purple. Her health was as fragile as this pale sunshine, but she had the peace to pray and be at one with God, and today she had a modicum of strength. The French Cistercian monk Bernard of Clairvaux claimed to have seen a vision of the Virgin Mary at Afflighem, and Adeliza found it easy to believe; she had not seen but she was certain that at times she felt the radiant presence at her side, giving her strength and light.

Raising the posy of violets to inhale their delicate scent, she looked beyond the beds and felt a sudden jolt as she saw a man walking along the path towards her. “Will?” Her heart began to pound and all the feelings she had put aside as she absorbed herself into a life of prayer and contemplation came flooding back. He had lost some of his robust vigour and looked careworn with more grey in his hair, but his expression and bearing LadyofEnglish.indd 495

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were calm and, as he reached her, there was even a slight curve to his lips.

He knelt on one knee in salute and bowed his head. “Adeliza,”

he said. “My queen, my wife, my reason.” Then he rose stiffly and kissed her on either cheek, but did not seek her lips.

“Will.” Her voice was hoarse with shock. “What are you doing here?”

He gave her a sidelong look, guarding against rebuff. “Is it not permitted to visit my wife?”

“I thought…I thought one set of farewells was grief enough.”

She had neither expected him to do so, nor prepared herself.

“I am ready to endure the heartache in order to have the joy of seeing you,” he said. “If you are not, tell me, and I will go.”

She made a wordless gesture indicating he should stay.

He gazed around. “The gardens are beautiful. There is no such tranquillity in England.”

“I did not expect to see another spring,” she said. “But God has granted me His grace to do so.” She bit her lip. “How are the children?”

“They do well,” he said. “They miss you, but they have their nurses and they have your letters even if they do not have you.

They know this is your home for now and that you have an important task to do.”

“And you, Will?”

He looked away for a moment, then back at her. “I manage, but there will always be an empty and aching place at my side.

I do everything in your name and God’s. Every coin I give, every charter, every act and deed of charity is for you.”

She hoped he was not going to ask her to return with him because it was impossible, and she did not want to wound him further.

Something of her anxiety must have conveyed itself to him because he said, “I think I must always have known our time 496

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was borrowed from God. I came to tell you that I have built a leper house at Wymondham and that Rising is now a palace fit for a queen, even if I know she will never hold court there.”

She had to swallow before she could speak. “Then fill these places with love and life, Will, in my name; do not make shrines of them. I will send you bulbs to plant in the autumn and they will flower this time next year for you and our children.”

He shook his head and cuffed his eyes and for a moment they sat in silence. Then he said, “I have been talking to men from both sides of the divide, and we all agree that Henry FitzEmpress will be our next king. Stephen does not see it now, but it will happen before Wilkin is old enough to grow a beard—I know it.”

“Then I must believe you,” she said.

“I have always spoken the truth to you.”

“Yes, you have.”

The abbey bell tolled for the service of nones. Adeliza rose from the bench and so did Will. Their arms clasped, they entered beneath the decorated arch of the abbey door and walked up the nave to kneel together before the altar as the monks filed in for the service. Between the great candles and beside the cross, the crown that Adeliza had worn to her marriage with Will and upon her wedding night gleamed with soft points of reflected light. Sunshine rayed through the windows, lighting Adeliza and Will where they knelt, and her sense of tranquillity returned. She felt peace settling over Will too, as if, side by side, they had received a joint blessing from the angels that were said to spread their divine light over Afflighem.

When the service was over, Adeliza laid her bunch of violets on the altar step, and went out with Will into the quiet warmth of the afternoon sun, and neither of them spoke, because the things unsaid were already known.

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Author’s Note

E mpress Matilda, as one of the strongest female personalities of twelfth-century English history, has often been the subject of historical fact and fiction. She is frequently portrayed in a less than complimentary light and I was curious to investigate her story and find out if she really was the termagant that some chroniclers and historians have made her out to be—or was there more to her than that?

The empress, as she liked to be known, seems to have been her own worst enemy at times. The
Gesta Stephani
reports that after Stephen’s capture, she was “headstrong in all that she did”

and that she insulted and threatened men who came to submit to her. She did not rise to acknowledge men who bowed to her, and she refused to listen to their advice,
“
rebuffing them by an arrogant answer and refusing to hearken to their words…

she no longer relied on their advice as she should have and had promised them, but arranged everything as she herself thought fit and according to her own arbitrary will.”

From this I read that she had a strong will and did not suffer fools gladly, but I also think she was kicking against a society that had rigid conceptions about the spheres of female roles and female power. I also have a notion (that I can’t prove) that Matilda suffered from acute premenstrual tension and this LadyofEnglish.indd 499

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might account for some of her sharp behaviour. A fraught political situation and a certain time of the month may just have combined to create disaster for her.

Despite her prickly relations with her cousin Henry of Winchester, she was on excellent terms with the Church and a monk, Stephen of Rouen, praised her greatly, saying that she was much loved by the poor and the nobility alike. She was, according to him, “wise and pious, merciful to the poor, generous to monks, the refuge of the wretched, and a lover of peace.” (It is ironic how hard she had to fight and how much misery and mayhem was created before any sort of peace came about.) Marjorie Chibnall in her biography of the empress also states that the Cistercian monks of Le Valasse remembered her as “a woman of intelligence and sense.”

There has been modern speculation that Matilda and the baron Brian FitzCount were lovers, but that notion comes from a misreading of a piece in the
Gesta Stephani
about the flight from Winchester. The text says in translation: “But she and Brien gained by this a title to boundless fame, since as their affection for each other had before been unbroken, so even in adversity, great though the obstacle that danger might be, they were in no wise divided.” There is no other reference to their closeness and this comment should be read in terms of a bond of service and friendship and not physical intimacy. Had there been even a hint of such, the chroniclers hostile to Matilda, including the
Gesta Stephani
, would have run with it for all it was worth. My own belief is that there was a powerful attraction between Brian and Matilda, but that it remained unspoken and was never acted upon.

No one knows for certain what happened to Brian. The most likely scenario is that he became a monk at Reading Abbey shortly after Matilda returned to Normandy. Certainly he disappears from the historical record at about this time. A 500

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suggestion that he went on crusade can be discounted as a fabrication. I have a strong feeling that Brian was not cut out for warfare and fought because he had to. Wallingford was one of the strongest fortresses on the empress’s side, but Brian was travelling with Matilda’s court for much of the time and the heroic defence of the place fell mostly to its castellan William Boterel. I suspect when Matilda left for Normandy, it was the last straw and Brian retired to a religious life. Since Reading Abbey had responsibility for the chapel on the Isle of May off the coast of Scotland in the twelfth century, I chose to send him there to end his days in peace.

In the matter of Matilda’s troubled marriage to Geoffrey of Anjou, I was interested to find out how long it took for her to become pregnant with the future Henry II, and it’s the reason I have introduced the contraceptive thread into the story. She married Geoffrey in 1128 and returned to Normandy a year later, not going back to her husband until September 1131. It was to be another nine months before Henry was conceived.

She went on to have two more sons in swift succession. Was this just chance, or was there something else going on? I think it well within the bounds of possibility that there was, and perhaps she hoped for an annulment.

Matilda did indeed escape from Oxford Castle during a severe and bitter winter, crossing the frozen moat and the Thames to reach Abingdon and eventually the safety of Wallingford. The chronicles differ in her method of escape. Once source says she escaped via a postern door, another that it was via a rope from a window.

When Matilda went to Normandy in 1148, she continued to work behind the scenes to help her son win England’s throne.

She sought in particular to foster relations with the Church and was a respected benefactor of numerous religious houses, to which she donated a considerable treasure in her will. When 501

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she died in 1167 her son Henry was a king reigning over a vast European empire that stretched from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees. As she had wished many years earlier, she was buried at the priory of Bec-Hellouin. Sadly, her bones were disturbed during various religious and political upheavals and her remains were eventually gathered up and buried in Rouen Cathedral, burial place of the Dukes of Normandy. So in the end her father got his way!

In fiction, the empress is usually paired with Stephen’s wife in the struggle for England. Matilda of Boulogne (she is called Maheut in the story to avoid confusion as it is another medieval form of the name) was Matilda’s cousin and shared the same maternal bloodline and thus a link to the English royal house.

She was the rod in Stephen’s spine and although sometimes portrayed as a gentle sort, she had an underlying toughness and was an excellent negotiator. She also had the advantage of being able to function in a deputy’s role and not be seen as a threat to the natural order by taking power of her own volition.

The above pairing has often been written about before and I wanted to take a different slant. During my research, I became very drawn to Henry I’s second queen, Adeliza of Louvain, who is less well known.

Adeliza’s story, which runs parallel to Matilda’s, is an interesting one. Negotiations to marry Henry were already under way before the disaster of the sinking of the
White Ship
in 1121

robbed him of his only legitimate son. Adeliza was born circa 1103 and the chronicler Henry of Huntingdon praised her beauty and said that gold and jewels paled beside it. The fact that she did not bear Henry any children although they were together for fifteen years was a source of deep distress to her.

She wrote to a friend, the churchman Hildebert of Lavardin, bishop of Le Mans, seeking his counsel on the matter and he told her:

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…if it has not been granted to you from Heaven that you should bear a child to the King of the English, in these (the poor) you will bring forth the King of the Angels, with no damage to your modesty. Perhaps the Lord has closed up your womb so that you might adopt immortal offspring…it is more blessed to be fertile in the spirit than in the flesh.

Henry, meanwhile, continued to beget bastard offspring on other women on a regular basis.

When Henry died, Adeliza retired to the nunnery at Wilton, near to which she had founded a leper hospice. Although she didn’t entirely seclude herself there (there are charters from her witnessed at Arundel and she was present at Reading Abbey on the anniversary of Henry’s death to give a hundred marks), she did spend much of her time at Wilton until the autumn of 1138 when she married William D’Albini, whose family were baronial officers in the royal household. They began a family immediately and in the next ten years Adeliza produced at least six children, thus confounding all her years of barrenness.