She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (14 page)

If Brien Fitzcount was Matilda’s chivalric champion, her most passionately loyal supporter, then Miles of Gloucester brought to her cause a razor-sharp military brain. As Stephen advanced on Bristol, Miles led a contingent of troops around behind the king’s army and marched on Wallingford. Suddenly, the soldiers Stephen had left there found the tables violently turned. Miles’s men smashed their way into the besiegers’ forts, killing those who resisted and taking prisoner anyone willing to surrender. With the siege successfully lifted and Fitzcount liberated, Miles was poised – potentially at least – to march on London. When the news reached the king, Stephen turned his army about and raced back to protect his capital, while Miles – to whom the advantages of guerrilla strikes were becoming increasingly apparent – wheeled north to attack Worcester, of which Waleran of Meulan was the
new earl. By the time Stephen and his right-hand man heard what had happened there and came to the aid of the devastated city, three weeks had passed and Miles was long gone.

A pattern had been set. Matilda’s supporters could not strike a decisive blow against Stephen’s much larger army, but they could keep the king on the back foot with feints and lightning strikes, darting just out of his reach while exhausting him in the pursuit. And this brutal dance bought Matilda time to consolidate her west-country power base. She moved from her half-brother’s castle at Bristol to the royal fortress at Gloucester, where her most gifted commander Miles (who, the
Gesta Stephani
said, ‘always behaved to her like a father in deed and counsel’) was in charge of her safety. Here, she was a ruler at the head of her own royal household, not a client in her brother’s establishment. She did not yet have much that was tangible to offer in the way of privilege and patronage, but she could give royal promises of future preferment to those nobles who were prepared to cast off their allegiance to her rival.

There were increasing numbers of such men as the months wore on, but fewer who would support her cause with the unswerving ferocity of the triumvirate of Miles of Gloucester, Brien Fitzcount and her brother, Earl Robert. As the magnates hesitated – some of them confusing not only the chroniclers but Stephen and Matilda too about where their loyalties lay – there was a terrible price to pay for the country. The network of Norman castles that had been constructed with intimidating speed little more than half a century earlier to pin down the population of a newly conquered land was now atomised, each fortification a closely defended island amid a sea of devastation, the surrounding countryside plundered to supply local garrisons, or reduced to blackened earth by hostile troops. It was ‘a dreadful thing’, said William of Malmesbury in quiet anguish, ‘that England, once the noblest nurse of peace, the peculiar habitation of tranquillity, had sunk to such wretchedness’.

Matilda had done well – if at a heavy cost – to make her challenge so potent a reality on English soil, and she had undoubtedly
damaged Stephen’s kingship; but her own claim to rule was still a long way from universal acceptance. And the risk was that this increasing anarchy might become a form of violent stalemate. Bishop Henry, who saw the danger that the future might hold little but mutually assured destruction, threw himself into the search for peace, presiding over a meeting at Bath between Matilda’s brother Robert and Stephen’s queen Mathilde, before sailing across the Channel to consult both Louis VII of France and his own and Stephen’s elder brother Thibaud of Blois. With what proposals he returned we do not know, but, whatever they were, Matilda – who was schooled in the hard-headed politics of the Empire, and conscious that hers was still the weaker hand – was prepared to accept them.

Stephen, however, preferred to fight. Perhaps he believed that war gave him an unanswerable advantage over an opponent who could not lead her own troops, and that his own presence on the battlefield would serve to remind his kingdom that he was not only a king but a warrior, something that Matilda could never be. But, if Matilda’s sex denied her the benefits of military leadership, it also protected her from the dangers of war. However great Stephen’s triumphs, this was one enemy who would never be killed or captured in combat. Stephen himself, meanwhile, was about to learn at first hand the perils that awaited a king who stood in his army’s front line.

The man who brought the cat-and-mouse conflict at last to the point of open confrontation was Ranulf, earl of Chester, Robert of Gloucester’s son-in-law, who had until now, despite his marriage, remained at least superficially Stephen’s man. The polar opposite of the loyalists Brien Fitzcount and Miles of Gloucester, Ranulf made a principle only of his own territorial interests. In 1140, however, that meant seizing the opportunity to grab Lincoln Castle from the harried king. The earl took the fortress by bare-faced trickery: he sent his wife on a social call to the castellan’s lady, and then arrived himself, all smiles, to escort her home – but, once welcomed inside, he and his knightly attendants ambushed the
guard and barred the gates to all but the detachment of troops he had stationed nearby. Stephen had lost the fortress to a sucker punch, and only a lengthy siege could now retrieve it.

Wearily, the king decided to tolerate this provocation rather than confront a magnate who had not yet explicitly defected to Matilda’s side. But when the citizens sent a surreptitious message complaining about the earl’s cruel and unjust behaviour, and pointing out that Ranulf and his family were spending Christmas at the castle with only perfunctory protection, Stephen could not resist committing himself to another of the lightning assaults that were his speciality. He marched a strike force from London to Lincoln before Twelfth Night had marked the end of the Christmas festivities, and besieged the castle with the help of the disgruntled townspeople. But, despite Stephen’s speed, Earl Ranulf had already slipped away. As he made for his estates in the northwest, he sent importunate messages to Matilda’s camp, offering his allegiance and appealing for help from his father-in-law.

Robert of Gloucester had so far been unimpressed by his son-in-law’s self-interested manoeuvring, but his daughter, Ranulf ’s countess, remained under siege in the castle, and it had to be said that her unlovely husband’s defection was a godsend to Matilda’s cause. Gloucester did not hesitate – and, this time, it was Stephen’s turn to be taken by surprise. Earl Robert and Earl Ranulf were almost outside Lincoln’s walls when the king realised that his small force was about to be attacked by a much larger army. His advisers urged him to retreat and regroup, but Stephen was a brave man, and the prospect of running away was repugnant to him. His father’s life had been blighted by a humiliating accusation of cowardice after he had fled from a siege at Antioch while on crusade forty years earlier, and Stephen was adamant that he would not risk the same fate. Instead, he readied his troops for battle.

The chroniclers laced their accounts of his preparations with portents of impending disaster. On the night before the armies met, a storm howled around the city, hailstones lashing down, thunder rolling around the blackness of the skies. At dawn the
next morning, Sunday 2 February, when Stephen went to Lincoln’s immense cathedral to celebrate the feast of Candlemas, the flame of his elaborate candle suddenly flickered and died, and the wax broke in his hands. Mass had not yet ended when the pyx containing the consecrated host fell from the chain that supported it and plunged onto the altar. ‘This’, Henry of Huntingdon wrote with the implacable certainty of hindsight, ‘was a sign of the king’s downfall.’

Stephen was not so convinced that he faced inevitable defeat as he drew up his soldiers outside the west walls of the city. But it took only minutes, once the massed cavalry of Robert of Gloucester and Ranulf of Chester began to charge, for his hopes to be trampled into the freezing mud. The king stood firm at the head of his infantry in the centre of the field, but the earls who led what little cavalry he had quickly decided to save themselves and their men, rather than stay to face annihilation. Their receding hoof-beats drummed under the din of battle as Stephen laid about him with his great sword, steel striking on steel and slicing into flesh. When the weapon shattered in his grip, he fought on with a battle-axe, Matilda’s men pressing ever closer, until at last a rock struck his head and he fell to the ground. God, who had blessed his kingship in the hush of Winchester Cathedral five years earlier, had clearly now changed his mind.

Divine protection had not, however, abandoned him altogether. He was not dead – merely concussed, and distraught at the desertion of magnates who had sworn him their fidelity. He was also a prisoner. Stephen was first taken under guard 140 miles southwest to face Matilda at Gloucester Castle, and then on to her half-brother’s fortress at Bristol. There he was initially treated with honour, until his tendency to wander from his quarters – ‘especially at night, outside his appointed place of custody, after deceiving or winning over his guards’, as William of Malmesbury pointedly explained – persuaded Earl Robert to keep the king humiliatingly and uncomfortably chained in irons.

A little more than five years after her father’s death, Matilda
found herself at last within reach of his throne. She had come face to face with the cousin who had usurped her crown – but the chroniclers remain tantalisingly silent about the details of this fraught meeting, as they did so often with climactic events in her life. The author of the
Gesta Stephani
(possibly Robert of Lewes, the bishop of Bath, but, whoever he was, certainly a partisan of Stephen’s with close ties to the king’s brother Bishop Henry) was so hostile to Matilda that he could barely bring himself to name her. Where he did so, it was as ‘the countess of Anjou’, the disparaging title she herself spurned, while elsewhere in his text she appears obliquely as ‘King Henry’s daughter’ or ‘the earl of Gloucester’s sister’. William of Malmesbury was much more sympathetic to Matilda’s cause, although the hero of his narrative is not Matilda herself but her half-brother Earl Robert, ‘who’, William tells us admiringly, ‘for his steadfast loyalty and distinguished merit, has pre-eminently deserved that the recollection of him shall live for all time’. Neither writer was willing – or, probably, able – to give any sense of Matilda’s own experience of this violent turn of fortune’s wheel. It seems likely that this was the first time the cousins had met since Stephen had knelt before Matilda ten years earlier to renew his oath to recognise her as her father’s heir. But whether she greeted the captive king with cold disdain or blazing anger – anything in between seems less easily imaginable, given her forceful temperament – we cannot know.

What is clear is the chain reaction triggered by Matilda’s triumph. Her husband, Geoffroi of Anjou, advanced into Nor mandy and, through a well-judged mix of negotiation and military manoeuvring, began an apparently inexorable annexation of the duchy on her behalf. In England, meanwhile, Stephen’s support was crumbling. Some loyalists were driven from their castles at swordpoint by Matilda’s resurgent supporters, but more made the calculated decision to throw in their lot with her cause. Just as a virtuous circle of pragmatic political logic had allowed Stephen to establish his kingship in the wake of his coup, so Matilda now appeared to carry all before her. The battle of Lincoln had
reversed the polarity of politics; there seemed no prospect that Stephen – like Robert Curthose before him – would ever emerge from his prison, and magnates with territorial and dynastic interests to defend on either side of the Channel therefore had to face the reality of her victory.

Matilda herself proceeded with deliberation. Stephen was safely in chains, but he was still an anointed king, and to vindicate the legitimacy of her rule she would need the backing of the Church if her own prospective coronation were to supersede his. Above all, there was one man whose support she needed: Bishop Henry of Winchester, her own cousin, Stephen’s brother and the pope’s legate in England. The ground may already have been laid during their long ride together from Arundel to the outskirts of Bristol after Matilda’s arrival in England sixteen months earlier. Certainly, agreement was quickly reached when the two met again on 2 March – exactly a month after the battle at Lincoln – on open ground near the bishop’s city of Winchester. Matilda promised that she would consult him on all important matters of government; in return, Bishop Henry offered her his oath of allegiance, and surrendered the much-depleted royal treasury at Winchester into her hands. The next day, he received her in ceremonial procession into his cathedral, where a dozen bishops and abbots had gathered to welcome her into the sacred place where Stephen had been crowned.

Four weeks later, while Matilda waited behind the fifty-foot walls of Oxford Castle, her new ally Bishop Henry rose to speak before a specially convened council of the Church at Winchester. William of Malmesbury, who was there, gives a first-hand account of the address. The great King Henry, the bishop declared, had left England and Normandy to his daughter Matilda. However, when he died, ‘because it seemed tedious to wait for the lady, who made delays in coming to England since her residence was in Normandy’, Bishop Henry continued, in a startlingly smooth piece of historical revisionism, ‘provision was made for the peace of the country and my brother allowed to reign’. But Stephen, he explained, had
failed in his office: ‘No justice was enforced upon transgressors, and peace was at once brought entirely to an end, almost in that very year; bishops were arrested and compelled to surrender their property; abbacies were sold and churches despoiled of their treasure; the advice of the wicked was hearkened to, that of the good either not put into effect or altogether disregarded.’ As so often, Bishop Henry’s genuine concern for peace and for the interests of the Church dovetailed seamlessly with the certainty that his own influence – ‘the advice of the good’, as he modestly put it – should prevail.

And that advice was now clear. God had spoken, and Stephen was a prisoner. After sober consultation among the ranks of the assembled clergy, England’s Church pronounced its judgement in the voice of Bishop Henry himself: ‘We choose as lady of England and Normandy the daughter of a king who was a peacemaker, a glorious king, a wealthy king, a good king, without peer in our time, and we promise her faith and support.’