She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (17 page)

But if Matilda’s escape had kept her cause alive – and raised doubts yet again about God’s verdict on Stephen’s claims – it also marked the end of her hopes that she might one day rule the kingdom her father had bequeathed to her in person. England found itself once more carved up into rival networks of fortresses (Matilda now making her base at the bishop of Salisbury’s massive citadel of Devizes in Wiltshire), with the countryside in between left plundered and desolate by the passing of troops from one armoured island to another. Given that her husband had made it abundantly clear that he could not and would not pause in his conquest of Normandy to send an army that might turn the tide decisively in England, it seemed that the kingdom was condemned to endure a war of attrition between evenly matched enemies, neither of whom had the strength to destroy the other. In the midst of this destructive deadlock, however, one small step pointed a way forward: for when Robert of Gloucester had returned from Normandy to England, too late to rescue his sister from the siege of Oxford, Geoffroi of Anjou sent with him Matilda’s eldest son, nine-year-old Henry.

This visit to England, Henry’s first, was relatively brief – two years spent in training with sword and schoolbooks in his uncle’s household at Bristol Castle – but it was significant nonetheless. Henry was the ace in Matilda’s hand, even at the same time as his presence sounded the death-knell for her prospects of standing alone as England’s monarch. Her sex had proved to be a stumbling block which she simply could not transcend. That she could not command troops on the battlefield had served to compromise her leadership – though it had also protected her from danger – but the fatal flaw in her campaign for the throne was not her own inability to fight, nor any theoretical limitation to her authority, but the inability of her most powerful subjects to accept the reality of a woman ruling by and for herself. Matilda’s son, as he grew
towards adulthood, was an entirely different prospect: a male heir who embodied all the hereditary right of Matilda’s claim, but who could also promise the uncomplicatedly powerful kingship of his grandfather and namesake.

Ensconced in her west-country power base after all the dramas and dangers of 1142, Matilda recognised that the battle she now faced was to win the crown for her son, rather than to wear it herself. The decision to fight for her son’s rights rather than her own was born of tough-minded political pragmatism, as well as fierce maternal and dynastic ambition, and in it there was no trace of the intolerable personal pride of which she had been accused during the months when the throne had seemed to be hers for the taking. Either that arrogance had disappeared as suddenly as it had supposedly appeared; or it had never in fact existed in the form that her enemies alleged.

Our view of Matilda during these years of dogged struggle is even more elusive than before because of the loss of the two greatest chroniclers among the ranks of her contemporaries: Orderic Vitalis, who died in 1142, lamenting the disintegration of his Anglo-Norman homelands, and William of Malmesbury, whose humane and inexhaustible curiosity was finally extinguished just after he had noted his intention to discover more details of Matilda’s audacious escape from Oxford at the end of that year. (The last sentence of his
Historia Novella
poignantly reads, ‘I am disposed to go into this more thoroughly if ever by the gift of God I learn the truth from those who were present …’) As a result, we have no way of knowing how Matilda coped with six years of relentless attrition during which she endured bereavements of her own. Miles of Gloucester, her ablest general, was killed by a misdirected arrow on a Christmas Eve hunting trip in the Forest of Dean in 1143. Four years later, her greatest lieutenant, her brother Robert, earl of Gloucester, succumbed to a fever at his castle at Bristol, and two years after that the staunchly faithful Brien Fitzcount died, having already retreated from the political world into a life of religious contemplation.

Despite these losses, Matilda could still rely on the west-country strongholds of which her brother’s earldom of Gloucester formed the heart, while Stephen dominated much larger swathes of territory across the midlands and the east. Some lords offered loyalty to one side or the other, while others, striving to protect their own interests, hovered between the two – though it is worth noting that, in the case of Robert of Gloucester’s powerful son-in-law, Ranulf of Chester, it was Matilda’s quietly steadfast treatment of her supporters, rather than Stephen’s suspicious unreliability, that won such allegiance as this serial turncoat was ultimately prepared to offer. Still other magnates, Waleran of Meulan among them, abandoned altogether the dark ambiguities of internecine conflict to pursue a war that offered instead the glorious certainties of faith and salvation, joining the crusade that set out from Europe for the Holy Land in 1147.

In 1148, Matilda herself left England to return to Normandy. This was not a surrender, but a recognition of where the long-term power of her position now lay. While she and Stephen had been locked in violent stand-off in England, her husband had advanced through Normandy with methodical ruthlessness, finally sweeping into the capital, Rouen, at the beginning of 1144. That summer, he was formally invested as duke of Normandy – his claim to the title justified by his wife’s inheritance and his own military success – amid the solemn grandeur of Rouen’s great cathedral. By the end of the year he had secured recognition as duke from Louis VII of France, and controlled every castle in the duchy save one, the fortress of Arques, just outside the port of Dieppe. A few months later, when Arques finally capitulated, Geoffroi’s conquest was complete. Stephen no longer held a single Norman stronghold, and all hope that he might one day retrieve his position there was extinguished.

From that point on, though Stephen unquestionably had the upper hand in England, it was increasingly apparent that the foundations of his power were crumbling away. No magnate with a claim to estates in Normandy could now afford to commit himself irretrievably to Stephen, however great the short-term advantage
on the English side of the Channel. The king, too, was getting older – he turned fifty probably in 1142 – and, because the legitimacy of his rule depended on the personal sanction of his coronation rather than hereditary right, it could not be assumed that his teenage son, Eustace, had any certain claim to succeed him.

Stephen pressed hard in the attempt to persuade Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury to crown his son during his own lifetime, a custom previously adopted by the kings of France in an attempt to reinforce the practice of hereditary succession. But the days were gone when his brother, Bishop Henry, stood ready and able to swing the weight of the Church behind Stephen’s cause. The new reformist pope, Eugenius III, elected in 1145, refused to renew the worldly bishop’s status as papal legate. (Only a year earlier, Eugenius’s spiritual mentor, Bernard of Clairvaux, had vituperatively denounced Bishop Henry as ‘the man who walks before Satan, the son of perdition, the man who disrupts all rights and laws’.) And Stephen’s determination to take a stand on his royal authority over episcopal appointments in England antagonised Eugenius enough for the pope to reject any suggestion that Eustace should be pre-emptively crowned.

Matilda, meanwhile – who knew from her years of experience in Germany and Italy just how destructive conflict with the papacy could be – handled her relations with the Church with skilful diplomacy, something which contributed to the growing perception that, as the
Gesta Stephani
now began to suggest, it was her son, not Stephen’s, who was
iustus regni Anglorum heres et appetitor
– ‘the lawful heir and claimant to the kingdom of England’. Strikingly, the
Gesta
’s author speaks of Stephen as ‘the king’ and Henry as ‘the lawful heir’ as if there were no incompatibility between the two. And, from one increasingly influential point of view, there was none: it was possible to accept that Stephen was king with God’s blessing as manifested through his anointing, and at the same time to argue that the hereditary right to succeed to Henry I’s throne had passed through Matilda to his grandson.

Young Henry had returned to Normandy in 1144 in the wake
of his father’s conquest of Rouen, to continue his political education in the duchy where, as Geoffroi soon astutely declared, he would take over the reins of government once he reached adulthood. Three years later – now almost fourteen, with his grandfather’s restless energy and a temperament as fiery as his flame-coloured hair – Henry made another impromptu appearance in England. He recruited a small company of mercenaries, hired on credit because he had no ready cash, and sailed across the Channel in an impulsive attempt to relieve his mother’s hemmed-in military position. News of his unexpected arrival sparked panic among Stephen’s supporters: rumour had it that he stood at the head of an army of thousands, with more troops to come. But soon more accurate reports, of a tiny band led by an inexperienced boy, began to spread, and, after a failed attempt to seize Purton Castle near the Wiltshire town of Cricklade, Henry’s unpaid soldiers began to desert him. Neither Matilda nor Robert of Gloucester, hard pressed as they were, had the funds to bail him out of the hole he had dug for himself; so the chastened teenager appealed for help instead to Stephen himself, who – ‘ever full of pity and compassion’, the
Gesta Stephani
reported – sent him the money for his return crossing to Normandy.

Stephen’s magnanimity to his young cousin might seem extraordinary – and it certainly appeared so to the
Gesta
’s author, who could explain it only in terms of a ‘profound and prudent’ belief that ‘the more kindly and humanely a man behaves to an enemy, the feebler he makes him and the more he weakens him’. It was not the first time that the king had conducted himself with unusual mildness, a quality that might variously be lauded as generosity or condemned as weakness. In this case, however, his lack of a killer instinct dovetailed neatly with the inescapable political conclusion that it was entirely in Stephen’s interests for Matilda’s son to be removed from English soil as quickly as possible – an achievement for which a limited amount of cash clearly seemed a small price to pay. As for Henry, safely back in Normandy by the end of May 1147, it had been a hot-headed and in some ways 
foolish escapade; but it had also put down a marker of his utter determination to fight for his inheritance.

A year later, when Matilda at last gave up her personal leadership of the struggle in England to return to Normandy in the summer of 1148, her decision seems to have been precipitated by the need to tread carefully in relation to the Church. Her strategically vital stronghold at Devizes Castle, thirty miles east of Bristol, had belonged to Bishop Roger of Salisbury before Stephen had confiscated it when the bishop fell from power, and Matilda’s troops had then captured it from Stephen’s forces. But the new bishop, Jocelin de Bohun, now demanded its return with the vigorous support of Pope Eugenius, who threatened excommunication against anyone unjustly withholding the fortress from ecclesiastical hands. Matilda was determined neither to risk the kind of bitter confrontation with the papacy that was damaging her rival’s cause, nor simply to abdicate control of a castle that formed one of the keys to her territorial position. It made sense, therefore, to remove herself from the firing line, and in June 1148 she travelled to Falaise, twenty miles south of Caen, to make her personal peace with Bishop Jocelin, while at the same time leaving the fortress itself safely in the hands of a loyal garrison.

But she was able to leave England secure in the knowledge that her son was poised to take her place. The developing partnership between mother and son was obvious from their seamless manoeuvring over Devizes: Matilda wrote to Henry explaining her pious decision to observe the dictates of the Church, and handing over the responsibility for implementing that decision to him; sixteen-year-old Henry, arriving at Devizes in the spring of 1149, then dutifully restored the outlying properties to the bishop, but explained that he needed to hold on to the castle for just a little longer, until God had brought victory to his cause. Between them, they had smoothly managed to pacify the Church, while leaving their troops undisturbed behind the walls of the bishop’s castle.

By the end of that year Henry had been knighted at Carlisle by his great-uncle David, king of Scots, a solemn moment which
publicly signalled his emergence into adulthood. He had also demonstrated his developing credentials as a military leader not only by seizing the Dorset harbour of Bridport, but, more importantly, by evading Stephen’s best attempts to capture him. And, on his return to Normandy at the beginning of 1150, Henry’s father Geoffroi, true to his word, handed over the government of the duchy into the hands of its new young duke.

Stephen now found himself in unfamiliar and deeply unnerving territory. He had succeeded for years in defending his crown against a rival whose claim raised as many questions as it answered, simply because she was female. Whatever arguments Matilda might make on the grounds of hereditary right or broken oaths of fealty, Stephen had on his side the fact of his kingship, a role which – as had become clear at the gates of London in 1141 – she could not hope to inhabit in any straightforward way. That fact, however, offered Stephen little defence against the charismatic new duke of Normandy, his revered grandfather’s namesake and every inch his heir. Meanwhile, Stephen himself could no longer lean on the mighty weight of the Church, which had done so much to underpin his acceptance as king; and the magnates too, on both sides of the partisan divide, increasingly saw in Henry the only hope of reuniting the dismembered Anglo-Norman realm.

Stephen’s powerlessness was now exposed with merciless clarity. A king who had won his throne by taking his chances without fear or hesitation suddenly found that he had no more moments left to seize. He could not force Henry onto the battlefield, because his nobles did not want to fight. The earls of Chester and Leicester, the former in Henry’s camp and the latter in Stephen’s, went so far as to agree a private treaty of mutual protection: if they were forced to go to war against each other, they declared, they would lead no more than twenty knights into battle, and any property each captured from the other would be returned. They were not alone in seeking an insurance policy of this kind; and the
Gesta Stephani
reported that, when Henry returned to England in 1153, Stephen found to his despair that a number of the magnates in his camp
‘had already sent envoys by stealth and made a compact with the duke’. The
Gesta
’s author had, of course, come to exactly the same political conclusion himself: he describes Stephen (who is clearly by this point no longer the hero of the narrative that bears his name) as ‘gloomy and depressed’ in the face of this betrayal, before recounting with breathless admiration how Henry ‘attacked the king’s party with determination and spirit everywhere … Nor did he fail of splendid success, rather did it come to him more abundantly the more eagerly he strove for loftier aims.’