She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (11 page)

As relations deteriorated between these two tenaciously wilful men, Matilda found herself caught in the middle. This time, as the mother of two young sons – and perhaps with a sense that her powerful father might even now be keeping open his plans for the succession – she stood shoulder to shoulder with her once-despised husband. In the summer of 1135, as political disagreement escalated into the flexing of military muscle, she remained with Geoffroi in Anjou while Henry prowled the southern frontiers of Normandy, soldiers at his back. Father and daughter were still estranged in November when the king retired for a few days to his lodge at Lyons-la-Forêt to enjoy the hunt. It would prove to be his last journey.

The bitter conflict of his last months had been rooted in Henry’s refusal to surrender any of his territories to his presumptuous son-in-law while his grip on government, even at the age of sixty-seven, remained as strong as ever. But that did not mean that his
commitment to the succession of his own bloodline had wavered. Now, when he suddenly found himself facing the unanswerable reality of death, he spent his final hours insisting on his daughter’s right to his throne. But the unexpectedness of his illness allowed no time for remorse or reconciliation, and Matilda was not at his side when he died during the night of 1 December.

The next morning, his body was carried to Rouen, where it was reverently received into the hushed cathedral. An expert embalmer set to work on the corpse (‘lest it should rot with lapse of time and offend the nostrils of those who sat or stood by it’, William of Malmesbury explained), removing the internal organs, which were placed in an urn and buried at the nearby church of Notre-Dame-du-Pré, before filling the body with aromatic balsam, covering it with salt and sewing it into layers of ox-hide. It was then transported west to Caen, just twenty miles from the Norman coast, to lie in state in the austerely beautiful abbey church of St Etienne which had been founded sixty years earlier by Henry’s father, the Conqueror, and now housed his tomb. There the bier rested for four weeks, until in January 1136 favourable winds at last allowed the monks of St Etienne to escort the body across the Channel to Henry’s own foundation, the great Cluniac abbey at Reading, for burial before the high altar of the still uncompleted church.

Matilda was not among the noble mourners at the funeral who made precious offerings and distributed alms for the good of her father’s soul. For, by then, her claims as his heir had already been dealt an unexpected and desperate blow.

 

The chroniclers who described the events of the winter of 1135–6 made little mention of Matilda. They had dutifully reported the oaths to support her taken by the Anglo-Norman nobility in 1127 and again in 1131, and William of Malmesbury – the most sympathetic to Matilda’s cause – recounted Henry’s deathbed declaration of her right to succeed him. But she is conspicuous by her absence from most contemporary narratives of the aftermath of her father’s last illness.

That historiographical absence reflects a physical one. Henry’s strategic plan for Matilda’s marriage left her stranded on the sidelines, with her husband in Anjou, rather than at the centre of the action precipitated by his sudden death. It was not that she was slow to react. In the first week of December, as soon as the shocking news came from Lyons-la-Forêt, Matilda rode north to seize control of the disputed border castles of Domfront, Exmes and Argentan that she had been promised as her dowry. She was so successful in her mission that her grip on this frontier territory was never shaken, and it was from these fortresses that her campaign to claim Normandy and England would be launched. For the moment, however, she could reach no further. Geoffroi was detained by rebellion in Anjou, while Matilda, it seems, was immobilised by a pregnancy that had begun only a few weeks before her father’s death. She established her household at Argentan, the four-towered castle that King Henry had built forty miles south of Caen to serve as a garrison, a treasury and a favourite lodge from which he could hunt in the nearby Gouffern forest. She gave birth there to her third son, William, on 22 July 1136.

By that time, however, events in England had moved decisively beyond her grasp. Had Matilda stood at the centre of the Anglo-Norman political stage when her father died, at Lyons-la-Forêt or Rouen, Westminster or Winchester, she would have been poised to assert her claim to his throne as his only legitimate child, born in the purple (that is, born to a reigning king just as her father had been, a circumstance of which Henry himself had made much in pressing his own right to the throne thirty-five years earlier), her title validated by Henry’s designation and the barons’ oaths of loyalty. As it was, she was barely even in the wings. At her dying father’s side, she might have made a credible figurehead for unity, taking on Henry’s weighty mantle as bringer of peace to his people. Instead, in her absence, the nobles had more than enough reason to look elsewhere for leadership.

For all Henry’s attempts to bind the future to his will, the only precedents so far established for the succession of the Norman kings of England favoured might over right. William Rufus in 1087 and Henry himself in 1100 had won the throne by acting swiftly to seize the crown, and then fighting to retain it. The legitimacy of their rule was born of their hold on power, not the other way round. In theory, Matilda’s claim to be her father’s heir was unanswerable, but in practice she was hampered by multiple disadvantages: she was female; her husband, whose status in relation to her claim to the crown remained deeply ambiguous, was a distrusted outsider among the powerful men she now sought to rule; and she was not there in person to counter escalating doubts and uncertainties. Meanwhile, the barons who had accompanied Henry’s corpse from Rouen to Caen went into conclave during the uncertain weeks while they waited for the wind to change for the long Channel crossing, and emerged with a proposal that the crown should go to an alternative candidate: Thibaud, count of Blois, son of Henry’s formidably able sister Adela.

Plausible though Thibaud might have been as a ruler – at forty-five, he was a seasoned soldier and experienced politician as well as a royal nephew – the magnates had overlooked the fact that
the precedents of the half-century since the Conquest offered no more convincing support to the idea of a king chosen by election than they did to the prospect of the hereditary principle handing the crown to a king’s daughter. Someone else, however, had been paying much closer attention to the lessons of recent history. While the Norman barons debated and Matilda settled into her stronghold at Argentan, Thibaud’s younger brother Stephen, count of Mortain, left his wife’s county of Boulogne at speed with the smallest of retinues and took ship across the shortest stretch of the Channel from Wissant, Boulogne’s main port, to Dover. Without pausing to gather support or supplies, he rode the eighty miles to London as hard as he could. He was welcomed into the city before turning seventy miles south-west to Winchester, the historic capital of Anglo-Saxon England, where his youngest brother Henry was bishop. There Stephen took control of the heaped silver and gold in the royal treasury; and on 22 December, just three weeks after King Henry’s death, he was crowned king of England in the vast Romanesque cathedral by the hastily summoned archbishop of Canterbury.

It was 1100 all over again. The blueprint of Henry’s own
coup
d’état
after his brother Rufus’s death in the New Forest could scarcely have been followed more assiduously. Speed and implacable resolve had won Henry the throne; and now Stephen had taken the crown for himself before the nobles at Caen or Matilda at Argentan had an inkling of what was happening.

In principle, Stephen’s credentials as a potential king were questionable. He was not even the senior male heir within his own family – his elder brother Thibaud had inherited their father’s lands and title as count of Blois – and his royal blood came in the female line from his mother Adela, which suggested no hereditary grounds on which Matilda’s claim, or that of her young sons, should be disbarred in favour of his own. Moreover, he had made great play of his loyal support of King Henry’s wishes over the succession, vying with his illegitimate cousin Robert of Gloucester to be first among the magnates to swear allegiance to Matilda
as Henry’s heir in 1127. His victory in that precedence dispute, and his prominence among the noble oath-takers, now left him vulnerable to dangerous accusations of perjury, something of which his apologists among the chroniclers were all too well aware. (Chief among them, the anonymous author of the
Gesta Stephani
–
The
Deeds of Stephen
– put into the mouth of the dying King Henry a conscience-wracked acknowledgement that the oath had been extorted from his barons, as a basis from which to argue that ‘any forcible exaction of an oath from anyone has made it impossible for the breaking of that oath to constitute a perjury’.)

But, while legalistic theorising might cast a shadow over Stephen’s pretensions, they were much more plausible in pragmatic and empirical terms. After all, King Henry himself had defied the hereditary claims of an older brother; and Stephen’s character and experience suggested that he might be capable of emulating his royal uncle in more ways than one. By now in his early forties, a decade older than his cousin Matilda, Stephen had made his career at Henry’s court. His uncle’s favour had made him a rich man – the king had given him the Norman county of Mortain in the south-west of the duchy as well as valuable lands in England that made him one of the greatest of the Anglo-Norman nobility – but Stephen had had to work for his rewards. Mortain was a frontier lordship, while his English estates had been seized from magnates who had opposed Henry in the name of Robert Curthose and his son William Clito. Stephen’s personal interests – now inseparable from his loyalty to his uncle – therefore threw him into the fight against Clito and his followers.

Years of campaigning in Normandy and Flanders had established Stephen’s reputation as an energetic and effective soldier, while his presence at Henry’s court as the king’s most favoured nephew made his name as a man of courtesy, generosity and charming good nature. The possibility that he might one day come closer still to the throne may even have been in Henry’s mind during the unsettling years between the wreck of the
White
Ship
– in which Stephen had so nearly died – and Matilda’s
unforeseen return from Germany as an imperial widow. Certainly, in early 1125 his power and wealth were exponentially increased when Henry arranged his marriage to Mathilde, heiress to the county of Boulogne, an alliance which brought him control of the vital cross-Channel trading route to the Low Countries, as well as vast estates in the south-east of England.

If the thought that his nephew might succeed him had indeed occurred to Henry, it was summarily discarded after his daughter’s return. But Stephen had not been so quick to relinquish the idea. Beyond that, we cannot know for certain what he was thinking on his lightning dash across ice-cold water and frozen roads to snatch the crown for himself – what form his ambition took, or how he justified his actions, beyond the likelihood that he sought to keep the count of Anjou, a neighbour and bitter enemy of the counts of Blois, from taking power in his royal wife’s name. Nor can we be sure why Matilda made no greater effort, no more expansive move, to stake her claim. William of Malmesbury offers only the maddeningly opaque observation that she delayed any attempt to return to England ‘for certain reasons’. Was her health badly compromised by her pregnancy even in its earliest stages? Did she think the nobles who had knelt before her to swear their loyalty would simply rally to her cause, leaving her waiting at Argentan for acclamation that never came? Or was it the reverse, a belief that her position could only be made good by more military might than she so far had at her disposal?

What we do know is that, amid the paralysing confusion that followed Henry’s death – news, after all, could travel only as fast as a horse could gallop, and might already be dangerously old when it arrived – it was Stephen who seized the moment. This apparently easy-going man tapped into a vein of implacable single-mindedness to offer decisive leadership at a moment when England and Normandy were teetering on the brink of chaos. (There was ‘no one else at hand’, the
Gesta Stephani
declared, ‘who could take the king’s place and put an end to the great dangers threatening the kingdom’.) And fortune smiled on a man who found himself in
the right place at the right time. His home in Boulogne was within striking distance of the English coast; its strategic importance to the English wool trade, together with Stephen’s own experience of the wealthy cloth towns of Flanders, won him a warm welcome in the city of London; and his formidable brother Henry, as bishop of Winchester, was on hand to broker his acceptance by the Church and to smooth his path into the ancient seat of royal government.