She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (16 page)

Mathilde began by adopting the classic pose of the queen consort as intercessor, begging Bishop Henry’s council at Winchester not to recognise Matilda’s claim, and, when that intervention failed, writing to Matilda herself to ask ‘for her husband’s release from his filthy dungeon’. Once it became clear, however, that graceful pleading would get her nowhere, she did not hesitate to resort to brute force – uncompromisingly gritty and resolute behaviour for which she was not castigated but lauded. The author of the
Gesta Stephani
had scarcely taken a breath after berating Matilda for abandoning ‘the modest gait and bearing proper to the gentle sex’ when he launched into a paean of praise to Stephen’s queen: ‘… forgetting the weakness of her sex and a woman’s softness’, he wrote with obvious admiration, ‘she bore herself with the valour of a man’. In the circumstances, Matilda could have been forgiven for despairing at the double standard by which she was dubbed an unnatural virago and her opponent a paragon of Amazonian virtue.

Mathilde’s strategy was one of violent confrontation. She mustered her husband’s Flemish mercenaries under their able commander, William of Ypres, and marched them from her lands in Kent to the south bank of the Thames, separated only by a narrow stretch of river from London’s city walls and from Matilda’s residence in the palace of Westminster, which lay a mile and a half outside the capital to the west. There Stephen’s queen ordered that this ‘magnificent body of troops’ should ‘rage most furiously around the city with plunder and arson, violence and the sword’. The Londoners looked on in horror, the
Gesta Stephani
reported with a touch of bathos, as ‘their land was stripped before their eyes and reduced by the enemy’s ravages to a habitation for the hedgehog’.

Queen Mathilde was demonstrating with single-minded aggression that the would-be Queen Matilda could not protect her capital from the depredations of an army loyal to her rival. As a result, Matilda’s triumph suddenly began to seem more illusory
than real. And that in turn undermined the Londoners’ reluctant rationale for deserting a king whose territorial power dovetailed with their own trading interests, and who had wooed them with promises of privileged self-government. While Matilda remained preoccupied with her planned coronation, the decisive moment at which she would at last become England’s anointed ruler, the citizens of her capital despatched envoys to parley in secret with Stephen’s queen – and the result, for Matilda, was nothing short of catastrophic. On 24 June 1141, just as she was about to sit down to a banquet designed as a precursor to her ceremonial entry into London, the city’s bells began to toll in hideous cacophony, its western gates swung open and thousands of Londoners swarmed across the fields towards Westminster with weapons in their hands. In shock, Matilda and her attendants ran for their horses and fled westwards, making for the safety of her castle at Oxford, while the mob ransacked her lodgings and trampled the uneaten feast into the dirt. She had lost England’s capital; and with it her chance to be crowned England’s queen.

It was, said the
Gesta Stephani
, as though Stephen’s supporters were ‘bathed in the light of a new dawn’. Among those soaking up its rays was Bishop Henry of Winchester, who just two months earlier had proclaimed Matilda Lady of England, and ‘cursed all who cursed her, blessed those who blessed her, excommunicated those who were against her, and absolved those who supported her’. Now, having left her court and retreated to his episcopal palace at Winchester, he summarily retracted this anathema and complained to anyone who would listen about Matilda’s disgracefully assertive conduct – ‘that she had wished to arrest him; that she had disregarded everything she had sworn to him; that all the barons of England had kept their faith with her but she had broken hers, being unable to show restraint in the enjoyment of what she had gained’. Queen Mathilde, it turned out, had played her part in encouraging her brother-in-law’s defection as well as that of the Londoners, although in the bishop’s case she had shrewdly taken on the ego-massaging persona of humble petitioner rather
than avenging Amazon. (Bishop Henry had been moved, the
Ges
ta Stephani
solemnly explained, ‘by the woman’s tearful supplications, which she pressed on him with great earnestness …’)

Matilda soon learned of his betrayal, and, once she had rallied her forces after her chaotic flight from London, she made for Winchester at the head of her army, intending to secure the city and its treasury, and demanding that Bishop Henry appear before her to explain himself. But the bishop managed to slip away from his episcopal palace in the south-east of the city just as Matilda arrived at the royal castle in the west. Her forces, led by her brother Robert of Gloucester and her right-hand men Miles of Gloucester and Brien Fitzcount, had to content themselves with besieging the garrison the bishop had left behind. As they settled into the city for what promised to be a lengthy blockade, they had no inkling that Bishop Henry had appealed for help to Queen Mathilde, and that William of Ypres’s mercenaries were even at that moment advancing on the city and would soon encircle it.

It was Lincoln all over again: a great nobleman had slipped the net of a siege laid against him and summoned an army to besiege the besiegers. But this time the roles were reversed. This time it was Matilda’s forces, laying siege to a small garrison within a city fortress, who were ambushed by their enemy’s sudden arrival. As the violence intensified – with the city engulfed in flames after Bishop Henry’s men threw burning brands into the streets, while William of Ypres tightened his stranglehold on the surrounding countryside – the urgent need to secure Matilda’s safety became starkly apparent. On Sunday 14 September, Robert and Miles of Gloucester rallied their troops for a final stand, hoping against hope to fight their way out, but intent at all costs on winning time for Matilda’s escape. In that, they succeeded: Matilda fled forty miles north-east to Devizes, riding astride her horse like a man for greater speed, the devoted Brien Fitzcount at her side. Her prostration after two unrelenting days in the saddle was such that she had to be carried the rest of the way to Gloucester on a litter tied between two horses (‘as though she was a corpse’, one chronicler
remarked – an observation which would later spawn wild rumours that she had been smuggled out of Winchester in a coffin).

But the price of her escape was high. Soon after she had reached the refuge of her own impregnable castle, Miles of Gloucester arrived at its gates, no longer the proud castellan but a lone fugitive, exhausted, alone and half-naked, his armour discarded in his flight. And he bore bad news. Matilda’s brother Robert had tried to hold out too long, and had been surrounded and captured. With his imprisonment, the last traces of Matilda’s triumph at Lincoln were stripped away. Her brother was indispensable to her cause, because of the men he commanded and the land he controlled – and now his freedom could only be secured by giving up the biggest prize of all: Stephen, who was still languishing in confinement at Bristol Castle.

Elaborate arrangements were put in place for the exchange of prisoners. Stephen was set free on the arrival at Bristol of his wife, Mathilde, and younger son, William, who were to be held there with all honour as surety for Earl Robert’s safety. Two days later, once Stephen had ridden to Winchester and been welcomed by his supporters there, Earl Robert set out in the opposite direction, leaving his own son behind as a guarantee of the queen’s wellbeing. When the earl had been safely received within the walls of his fortress at Bristol, Mathilde and her son were allowed to return to Stephen’s side, and Robert’s son was then released in his turn. With this stately diplomatic pavane along the road between Bristol and Winchester, the two sides once again took up the positions they had occupied eight months earlier, and Bishop Henry called yet another Church council to rubber-stamp his latest about-turn (‘saying that he had received the empress not of his own will but under compulsion … however, God in his mercy had given affairs a different course from what she had hoped, so that he might avoid destruction himself and rescue his brother from bondage …’). It was almost as though Matilda’s moment of triumph had never happened.

But not quite. The dramatic reverses that took place between February and November 1141 left permanent scars on the politi
cal landscape, the profound significance of which only gradually became apparent. While Stephen’s supporters had been occupied in the fight to secure his freedom in England, across the water Matilda’s husband, Geoffroi of Anjou, had seized the opportunity to advance steadily into central Normandy, and his presence in the duchy was now so strong that many magnates whose estates lay principally on the Norman side of the Channel saw no option but to recognise his authority. There could be no clearer demonstration of the new reality of Geoffroi’s power than the defection from Stephen’s cause of the king’s favourite, Waleran of Meulan, who had fought in Stephen’s army in the rout at Lincoln but came to terms with Geoffroi in Normandy only six months later. From this point on, Waleran and his twin brother, Robert of Leicester, would play a delicate game in order to safeguard their family’s lands on both sides of the sea – Waleran in Normandy with Matilda’s husband, and Robert in England with Stephen, each brother, from supposedly opposite sides, doing his utmost to minimise risk to the family’s interests. Despite Stephen’s resurgence in England, therefore, it was clear that, unless he could find some way to halt Geoffroi’s seemingly unstoppable momentum in Normandy, ultimate victory would always elude him.

At the same time, Matilda had discovered quite how deep resistance ran to the idea that she might rule for herself. It was one thing for the magnates to acknowledge that the line of legitimate succession might deposit the crown on a female head; quite another, it turned out, for them to accept that a woman should exercise power like any other king. Her husband’s military successes undoubtedly meant that Stephen would struggle to obliterate Matilda’s claims completely; on the other hand she too would have no chance of winning a decisive victory if the greatest strength of those claims – the theoretical legitimacy of her personal rule – could not in fact be put into practice.

For the moment, however, the implications of this stalemate remained unexamined, as the two sides manoeuvred for the best new foothold in the old terrain on which they now found them
selves. Stephen set out on yet another military sweep across his kingdom, but was halted at Northampton in May by a bout of serious illness. Matilda, meanwhile, took advantage of this lull in hostilities to send her brother, Earl Robert, to Normandy to solicit military help from her husband; but Geoffroi – whose principal concern was the conquest of Normandy rather than the pursuit of his wife’s royal title in distant England – found the earl’s presence so useful, as a commander and as a legitimising Norman presence in his Angevin army, that he repeatedly delayed Robert’s return.

Matilda had no way of knowing that Stephen’s health was already beginning to improve even as she despatched her brother to her husband’s side. As a result, Geoffroi’s ruthless prioritisation of his own interests placed his wife in grave danger. While she waited at Oxford for her brother’s return, Stephen gathered his troops and marched to Wareham, the Dorset port from which Earl Robert had sailed. There the rejuvenated king seized the castle and garrisoned it to block the earl’s gateway back into England, before marching north and then east towards Oxford. When Stephen’s army forded the deep waters of the river and stormed into the city, Matilda and her supporters were taken by surprise, horror-struck within the castle’s massive walls to find themselves once again under siege.

And this time, Stephen would not be deflected. Earl Robert – who raced to his ships when news of Matilda’s plight reached Normandy, incandescent with fury that he had been detained to help his brother-in-law at his sister’s expense – hurled his knights into an attack on Wareham as soon as his fleet reached the coast, taking the harbour and the town and pressing hard to force his way into the fortress. But Stephen had decided to let the port go if it kept Robert out of the way while he tightened his grip on Oxford, ‘thinking’, as the
Gesta Stephani
put it, ‘he could easily put an end to the strife in the kingdom if he forcibly overcame her through whom it began to be at strife’.

By the middle of December 1142, after three months trapped inside a burned and blackened city, Matilda and her small garrison
were cold, starving and almost bereft of hope. Just before Christmas, she decided to risk everything on one last effort to escape. It was not the first time she had had to call on her reserves of physical strength or her unbending will, and she had twice before succeeded in slipping through Stephen’s outstretched fingers, once in spiriting herself into Arundel Castle on her arrival in England, and then in securing a perilous route out of the besieged city of Winchester. This, though, was the most dangerous challenge she had yet faced, and she met it with undaunted courage. In the still of the night, with a bodyguard of just three trusted soldiers, she left Oxford Castle by a small side gate. The frozen terrain that confronted her seemed impossibly forbidding: a heavy fall of snow shrouded the ground stretching ahead into the darkness, and the shouts of the watch Stephen had set to encircle the castle echoed on the cold air.

But the bitter winter proved to be a welcome ally. Wrapped in white cloaks as camouflage against the snowy landscape, Matilda and her knights walked silently across the river, its treacherous current now muffled under a layer of ice thick enough to bear their weight with ease. No one saw them pass; no one challenged them as they trudged seven miles through the cold and dark, feet numb and freezing in the drifting snow. Fear and necessity kept exhaustion at bay until they reached Abingdon, where they found horses to carry them just a few miles more to the safe haven of Brien Fitzcount’s castle at Wallingford.

When news of her daring escape began to spread (‘a manifest miracle of God’, William of Malmesbury called it), Stephen accepted the surrender of the beleaguered garrison she had left behind and allowed them to go free, his customary generosity of spirit perhaps reinforced by a rueful admiration of his rival’s bravery. Even the author of the
Gesta Stephani
, who was sometimes venomous in his hostility to Matilda, seemed reluctantly impressed by the good fortune her courage had brought: ‘I do not know whether it was to heighten the greatness of her fame in time to come, or by God’s judgement to increase more vehemently
the disturbance of the kingdom, but never have I read of another woman so luckily rescued from so many mortal foes and from the threat of dangers so great,’ he wrote.