She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (13 page)

In the spring of 1139, therefore, Matilda at last decided to stake her claim as publicly and explicitly as she could in direct defiance of Stephen’s hold on her father’s crown. Her first step was to send to Rome, in the hope that Pope Innocent II could be convinced to throw the moral and political support of the Holy See behind her campaign. In April, Bishop Ulger of Angers crossed the Alps, as Matilda herself had done before him, to attend the second Lateran Council, a great gathering of almost a thousand prelates from across western Christendom. There, he presented her case: Stephen, he said, had usurped the throne of England which was Matilda’s by right, thanks to her hereditary title and the oaths of loyalty sworn to her by the spiritual and temporal peers of the kingdom.

In response, Stephen’s representative, a smoothly fluent lawyer named Arnulf, archdeacon of the Norman diocese of Sées, made no attempt to engage with the substance of Matilda’s claim, instead trying to sweep it aside in its entirety by arguing that she was not, in fact, her father’s legitimate heir. Her mother, Queen Edith-Matilda, Arnulf declared, had not simply been educated in a convent but had made profession as a nun; her marriage to King Henry had therefore been invalid, and Matilda was no more than one of Henry’s many bastards. It was a specious argument as well as an insulting one, since Edith had taken no vows, and her freedom to marry had been confirmed by the saintly Anselm, then
archbishop of Canterbury, almost forty years before. But it served Stephen’s purpose, for the time being at least. Pope Innocent had only just returned to Rome after nearly a decade of schism within the Church caused by disputes over his own election, and he had more pressing problems at hand than England’s distant troubles. He had heard enough. Refusing to engage any further with the lawyers’ bickering, he halted the hearing by reiterating the position he had taken three years earlier, recognising the fait accompli of Stephen’s coronation and therefore his status as king.

The edifice of Stephen’s rule was still holding, despite public argument in the papal curia and the threat of more noble defections in the wake of Gloucester’s defiance. But the strain was more and more apparent, with Stephen himself constantly on the move in the effort to stamp out resistance before it could spread out of control, while doling out ever more lavish rewards from the depleted royal treasury to magnates in whose loyalty he could trust less and less. ‘The king hastened, always armed, always accompanied by a host, to deal with various anxieties and tasks of many kinds which continually dragged him hither and thither all over England,’ the author of the
Gesta Stephani
reported despairingly. ‘It was like what we read of the fabled hydra of Hercules; when one head was cut off, two or more grew in its place.’ And in June 1139, tensions within the regime at last reached breaking point.

The backing of his younger brother Henry, bishop of Winchester, had been crucial to the success of Stephen’s coup, and Henry – whose unwavering commitment to the interests of the Church coincided happily with his flamboyant personal ambition – had expected that his own eminence in spiritual and temporal affairs would in due course be recognised by his election as archbishop of Canterbury after the death of the elderly William of Corbeil in 1136. But in December 1138, Henry found himself passed over in favour of a much more obscure candidate, Abbot Theobald of Bec, whose principal qualification appeared to be his association with the Beaumont twins, Waleran of Meulan and Robert of Leicester, the young noblemen whose influence over Stephen was obvious
and growing. Having shoved aside the pretensions of the king’s brother, the Beaumonts next turned their sights on Bishop Roger of Salisbury, King Henry’s former chief minister, who, along with a pair of episcopal nephews, Bishop Alexander of Lincoln and Bishop Nigel of Ely, still controlled the chancery and the exchequer, the administrative institutions through which England was governed. The three bishops had at their disposal not only the substantial powers of pen and parchment but knights and castles strategically placed across their dioceses – and, in the fear-filled summer of 1139, it was not difficult to persuade the increasingly paranoid king of the threat their power might now represent.

More difficult was the question of how to bring them down. Mere suspicion was insufficient grounds for the arrest of a peer of the realm, but suspicion was all there was. In the absence of any concrete evidence that the bishops were engaged in treasonable conspiracy, Waleran of Meulan came up with a ploy by which they might be disarmed. When the court arrived in Oxford in June, one of the Beaumonts’ noble allies was persuaded to pick a fight with the bishop’s men over the rooms they had been allocated, a domestic dispute which turned violently ugly, as happened all too readily when steel blades were a part of everyday dress. But bloodshed within the bounds of the royal court, contrived though it was in this instance, constituted a breach of the king’s peace, for which Bishop Roger and his nephews were summarily arrested. They were sacked from their offices in the royal administration, to be replaced by Beaumont nominees, and their castle strongholds were seized into the king’s hands along with the treasure and the weapons stockpiled there.

The ruse was clear and – thought Stephen’s brother Henry – outrageous. Bishop Henry was a stalwart defender of ecclesiastical rights, with lavishly appointed and massively fortified castles of his own. He had also spent the months since he had been denied the archbishopric of Canterbury working furiously behind the scenes to secure his own nomination as the pope’s legate in England, a role which gave him even greater authority than he
would have had as archbishop. He therefore had both motive and means to strike back against his brother’s betrayal, and against the Beaumont brothers, his hated rivals who seemed now to be pulling the strings of royal policy. As a result, on 29 August, England witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of a king being summoned by his own brother to appear before a specially convened ecclesiastical council on charges that he had ridden roughshod over Church liberties. Although the council broke up after three days of argument and counter-argument without formal conclusion, it was now abundantly clear that, with every move the mistrustful king made to tighten his grip on power, more of the country would slip through his fingers.

Twenty-nine days later, for the first time in eight years, Matilda herself at last set foot on English soil. It had been apparent for some time that she would have to take the fight to Stephen, rather than inching forward from the safety of her base at Argentan. Normandy mattered, but the crown belonged to England, and she could not hope to succeed if her claim was not made a reality there. The difficulty was how to achieve that goal. Her brother’s defection meant that she could now, for the first time, reach the Norman coast – only fifty miles from Argentan, but fifty miles too far if the terrain was hostile – via his fortress at Caen. But the south coast of England offered no welcoming haven, since its harbours were under Stephen’s control. One of Gloucester’s men had tried to hold a gateway open by securing the earl’s castle at Dover against the king during the previous year, but had soon been overwhelmed by an intimidating fleet sent by Stephen’s queen Mathilde from her port at Boulogne. Meanwhile, the voyage around Land’s End to Gloucester’s stronghold at Bristol was too dangerously uncertain to provide a realistic alternative.

But during the summer of 1139 it emerged that there was a chink in Stephen’s apparently impenetrable defences. The towering castle at Arundel, overlooking its own port on the navigable river Arun just five miles from the sea, was the home of the dowager queen, King Henry’s widow Adeliza. She was now remarried
to William d’Aubigny, whom she had come to know as one of Henry’s most trusted household attendants, and, after the barren years of her first marriage, the happy couple were on the way to amassing a brood of seven children. Outwardly, she and her new husband were loyal subjects of King Stephen, but, privately, Adeliza’s sympathies lay with her stepdaughter. Respect for her dead husband’s chosen heir was reinforced by a personal relationship – the two women were almost exactly the same age, and had spent a significant amount of time in each other’s company after Matilda’s return from Germany – and by an old debt of gratitude for Matilda’s part in the political rehabilitation of Adeliza’s father almost thirty years earlier, when the eight-year-old princess had performed her first formal act of intercession as the emperor’s bride-to-be at Liège.

Old debts were about to be repaid. On 30 September 1139, a ship slipped quietly into the port of Arundel. A handful of its passengers – Robert, earl of Gloucester and a small, heavily armed bodyguard of loyal knights – disappeared almost immediately, hooded and cloaked, to ride 120 miles to the safety of the earl’s fortress at Bristol, moving under cover of night and across open country to avoid Stephen’s troops and spies. The rest of the party – Matilda, with a much larger military escort of her own – was spirited inside the impregnable walls of Arundel Castle. At last, she had taken the decision that she should abandon the battle for Normandy to her husband, and leave her three sons in safety under his supervision. Now, she hoped that support for her cause in England, which had so far achieved some piecemeal disintegration of Stephen’s hold on the realm, might take more threatening shape around the rallying point of her presence.

That, at least, was the theory. In practice, news of her arrival spread quickly, and Stephen – who was only ninety miles away, ruing his decision to allow Baldwin de Revières to go free, since he was now having to besiege him again at Corfe Castle in Dorset – immediately marched east to surround the ex-queen Adeliza and her royal guest at Arundel. Matilda, it seemed, was at her cousin’s
mercy. But her decision to expose herself to this danger was more finely calibrated than it appeared. By arriving at the head of a knightly escort rather than an army, she and her brother had used Stephen’s weapons of speed and surprise against him to make landfall in England before the king could be warned of what was happening. It was Robert of Gloucester who had openly defied Stephen’s authority, and against whom the king might legitimately take reprisals; but, by travelling fast with the bare minimum of protection, the earl was able to reach his power base at Bristol before Stephen could cut him off, a manoeuvre that would have been impossible had Matilda – who, however great her strength of character, was not used to the physical demands of a soldier’s life – ridden with him.

Meanwhile, Matilda herself was left vulnerable to Stephen’s advancing troops; but here it suddenly became clear that her sex could, for once, be used to her benefit rather than her disadvantage. Matilda was the daughter of a king, the widow of an emperor, and Stephen’s own cousin, who had been welcomed into the hospitality of his predecessor’s queen. Were Stephen to wage war on two women of such exalted status, he risked not only opprobrium but open rebellion from a far greater number of his subjects than he had so far faced. Even if he were to decide that this was a risk worth taking, the mighty fortifications of Adeliza’s castle could not easily be overrun, and if Stephen were pinned down by another lengthy siege, Robert of Gloucester would be free to strike against him at will. Meanwhile, even should he succeed in taking Arundel, it was far from clear that it would be either legally or politically tenable to hold Matilda captive.

Much better, the king’s brother Bishop Henry argued, to allow her to join Gloucester in Bristol, since Stephen would then be able to fight without restraint against an enemy hemmed into a single place, well away from the crucial administrative and economic centres of the south-east. Reluctantly, Stephen stood down his preparations for a siege and gave orders that Matilda should be delivered into her half-brother’s care at a pre-arranged place
within reach of Bristol by the uneasy pairing of Bishop Henry himself and his rival Waleran of Meulan – a noble escort ‘which it is not the custom of honourable knights to refuse to anyone’, William of Malmesbury pointed out, ‘even their bitterest enemy’.

Bishop Henry’s advice was strategically sound, although a less transparent character than Stephen might perhaps have hesitated before allowing his disaffected brother to ride a hundred miles in the company of the cousin who was claiming his throne. The opportunity to parley in private with the bishop was an unexpected bonus for Matilda, whose risky tactics had paid off handsomely. Despite Stephen’s best attempts to secure his kingdom against her, she had slipped, wraith-like, through his defences to reach the safety of her half-brother’s citadel at Bristol. Her situation there could not be said to be strong – especially given that Stephen and his soldiers were now heading westward towards them with their usual menacing speed – but it was infinitely better than it had been when she was cooped up at Argentan, able to do little more than worry away at the fringes of her cousin’s power.

Now she could begin to exploit the momentum of her advance, recruiting to her cause men who had been waiting to declare themselves until opposition to Stephen was no longer a do-or-die mission for principled loners, but an unmistakably viable political movement. Chief among them were Brien Fitzcount and Miles of Gloucester, two of the ‘new men’ who had risen high in the service of her father. Fitzcount, as his name suggested, was an illegitimate son of the count of Brittany, and his service to King Henry had been rewarded with grants of land in Wales and the strategically valuable lordship of Wallingford in the Thames Valley. Miles of Gloucester, meanwhile, had acquired his toponymic by following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather as sheriff of Gloucestershire and keeper of the king’s castle at Gloucester itself. Four years earlier, in 1135, both men had concluded that discretion was the better part of valour and acknowledged Stephen as king, but both now lost no time in committing themselves to the newly arrived Matilda.

Fitzcount, who had been brought up in King Henry’s household, knew Matilda and her half-brother well. Indeed, he and Robert of Gloucester – two bastard-born magnates, one the king’s natural son, the other almost an adopted one – had been at Matilda’s side more than a decade earlier when she travelled to Rouen for the unhappy betrothal that preceded her second marriage. As an illegitimate child with no offspring of his own, Fitzcount’s family loyalties were exclusively focused on the royal dynasty that had welcomed and nurtured him, and the allegiance he now offered to Matilda was heartfelt and unshakeable. Just as well, given that it was only a matter of days before his resolve was brutally tested by the arrival of Stephen’s troops outside the walls of Wallingford Castle. The king was making impressive headway as he pushed westward across country from Arundel towards Bristol, seizing castles as he went. He set a siege in train at Wallingford as he passed, and Fitzcount – though his garrison was well provisioned and protected behind the castle’s walls and double moat – was left isolated and exposed, cut off from his allies in the west country and facing two hastily constructed forts on the opposite side of the river full of soldiers intent on starving him out, however long it might take.