She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (7 page)

Robert was still away, spending some time in southern Italy on a leisurely journey back from the Holy Land, when on 2 August 1100
William Rufus was killed, speared in the heart by a stray arrow during a hunting expedition in the New Forest. If Robert had hoped to succeed him as king of England – and he surely did, given that William had no children, and that each of the brothers had named the other his heir in a short-lived treaty of 1091 – he was to be bitterly disappointed. Their clever, ambitious youngest brother, Henry, was with Rufus when he died in the dappled sunlight of the forest. Henry took only an instant to weigh up the opportunity with which the rogue arrow had unexpectedly presented him. Ruthlessly composed amid the panic and confusion, he spurred his horse twenty miles north to Winchester, the ancient capital of Wessex, where he seized control of the royal treasury and persuaded the barons who had reached the town in time for Rufus’s hastily arranged burial the next morning to nominate him as their new king. He then rode full pelt for London, another sixty miles north-east, where he was crowned in Westminster Abbey on 5 August, less than seventy-two hours after his brother’s untimely death.

It was a brilliantly successful
coup d’état
. When Robert arrived home in Normandy a month later, he was unable to shake Henry’s hold on England. Six years after that, when military tension broke into open warfare at Tinchebray in south-western Normandy, Robert was defeated and captured by Henry’s forces. The remaining three decades of his life were lived in captivity, where he abandoned any attempt to revitalise his cause in favour of a contemplative existence spent writing poetry and, from his comfortable quarters in Cardiff Castle, learning to speak Welsh.

Henry was now master of both England and Normandy – and the victory of this youngest of the Conqueror’s three sons seemed to represent a conclusive defeat for the principle that eldest sons might expect to succeed their royal fathers. But Henry’s perspective as a young pretender turned out to be very different from his scruples as an established and undisputed monarch. An archetypal poacher turned gamekeeper, Henry was adamant that his own offspring should never be ousted from power by a coup of the kind that he had masterminded to secure the throne for himself.

His campaign to establish the legitimacy of his line beyond all possible doubt began just three months after he became king, with his marriage to Edith, daughter of King Malcolm III of Scotland. Her father was dead, and Scotland shaken by conflict over the succession, but the orphaned and exiled princess was a beautiful young woman whose ‘perfection of character’, according to Orderic Vitalis, Henry had ‘long adored’. Her particular political virtue as Henry’s new queen, however, was that, through her mother, she had Anglo-Saxon royal blood in her veins. Edith herself was not an Ætheling, since only male heirs could claim that title. But any children of her marriage to Henry would have the unique distinction of tracing their descent from the house of Cerdic as well as from the Conqueror, and their right to rule would be affirmed twice over.

By the end of 1103, there were two royal infants: a girl called Matilda (the same Norman name that her mother had now adopted in place of the Anglo-Saxon Edith) and a boy named William. Despite the length and strength of their parents’ marriage, which lasted until the queen’s death in the spring of 1118, there would be no more children. The young Matilda was therefore despatched to Germany for a magnificent diplomatic marriage to the Holy Roman Emperor, Heinrich V, and her brother – whom Orderic Vitalis called William Ætheling, in recognition of his doubly royal heritage – was educated as befitted a prince who would cement his father’s success in binding England and Normandy together.

William was not, in fact, Henry’s only son, since well-sown wild oats meant that the king had a growing family of illegitimate children, more than twenty in all, scattered around his English and French domains. ‘All his life he was completely free from fleshly lusts,’ the chronicler William of Malmesbury wrote with an impressively straight face, ‘indulging in the embraces of the female sex, as I have heard from those who know, from love of begetting children and not to gratify his passions …’ But there could be no doubt that, among this large family, William was the apple of his father’s eye, the boy on whose shoulders all Henry’s hopes now rested.

William was only ten when he began to act as a formal witness of his father’s royal edicts. By the age of sixteen, he was married to the daughter of Count Foulques of Anjou and Maine, territories immediately to the south of Normandy, and had ridden into battle with his father against the forces of the French king Louis VI (known, thanks to his expanding girth, as Louis the Fat), on the plain of Brémule in eastern Normandy. Both his marriage and what turned out to be a stunning victory at Brémule were intended to secure his place in the succession against the one man who could challenge him: William Clito, only legitimate son of Henry’s older brother, the imprisoned Robert Curthose.

Like mirror images, these first cousins faced one another: two grandsons of the Conqueror, each named William in his honour, born within a year of each other, and each designated as a royal heir, ‘Clito’ being the Latin equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon ‘Æthe-ling’. But only one could succeed; and Henry’s implacable determination that his son should be king made it certain that Louis the Fat would champion his rival. Both boys – at barely sixteen and seventeen, they were scarcely more – took their place amid the heat and dust of the battlefield at Brémule in August 1119, but it was William Ætheling who triumphed. William Clito fled with King Louis to the safety of the French stronghold at Les Andelys where, the next day, Henry returned the French king’s captured warhorse and all its splendid trappings, while William Ætheling sent back William Clito’s palfrey with a selection of rich gifts for his defeated cousin in an exquisitely judged gesture of chivalric condescension. One year later, in the summer of 1120, Louis finally bowed to the inevitable. He agreed to accept the homage of William Ætheling as lawful successor to the duchy of Normandy, thereby recognising the legitimacy of Henry’s rule on both sides of the Channel and of William’s claims as his designated heir. William Clito’s cause was lost, and William Ætheling’s future secure.

Fresh from this triumph, Henry and his magnates gathered at Barfleur, the harbour at the northern tip of the Cotentin peninsula from where the Conqueror had launched his assault on England in
1066, and which was now the greatest port on the Norman coast. By 25 November 1120, Henry’s fleet was ready to sail. The voyage between England and Normandy was a familiar one to the king and his court – Henry’s father had crossed the Anglo-Norman sea seventeen times in the twenty-one years he ruled England – but it was not to be taken lightly, especially in winter, when the risk of rough winds and towering waves made the journey particularly hazardous. Henry himself had never before sailed later in the year than September, but there seemed no cause for concern as he surveyed the glassy water, scarcely rippled by the southerly breeze that would billow gently in the ships’ sails on the way north to the English coast.

As the afternoon light began to fade, he embarked on the
esnec-
ca
, the king’s great dragon-headed longship, named ‘serpent’ in the ancient language of the Norsemen who had become ‘Normans’ when they settled in France two hundred years earlier. His son William, however, was not with him. Instead, the seventeen-year-old prince had taken passage on a newly refitted vessel named the
White Ship
, piloted – propitiously, it seemed – by the son of the shipmaster who had first brought the Conqueror from Barfleur to England fifty-four years earlier.

As the royal
esnecca
put to sea in the twilight, a glamorous company of ebullient young aristocrats assembled on the
White
Ship
’s freshly-scrubbed deck. Among them were two of William’s illegitimate siblings: Richard, newly betrothed to a rich Norman heiress, and another Matilda, wife of the powerful count of Perche. There too were the young earl of Chester and his wife, along with the earl’s illegitimate brother Othuer, who was the prince’s tutor, and the king’s favourite nephew, Stephen, count of Mortain. Altogether the prince’s entourage numbered more than two hundred people, from the cream of the Anglo-Norman nobility to the fifty rowers grasping the long oars that stretched down beneath the great square sail to the dark sea below.

And when at last the
White Ship
slipped out into the blackness of the quiet water, everyone on board was roaring drunk. Three
casks of wine had already been emptied by the time the ship was ready to sail. As the party grew wilder and more raucous, the boisterous behaviour of the prince’s companions had become so alarmingly reckless that Stephen, count of Mortain – who, alone, was still sober because of a stomach upset – asked to be put ashore. He was safely back on land when the ship left the quayside, its oars pulling violently through the water as the inebriated crew raced to overtake the
esnecca
, somewhere ahead in the pitch-dark night, with the clamorous encouragement of the drunken passengers.

No one saw the rock at the mouth of the harbour. There was no warning: just the heart-stopping jolt of a brutal impact; the sickening crunch of splintering wood; and sudden screaming panic as the ship began to list. With freezing water pouring in through the shattered hull, it took only minutes for the
White Ship
to go down. The frantic cries of hundreds of terrified voices carried faintly to the shore, but on a moonless night, in perishing temperatures, there was no hope of rescue.

As the voices fell gradually, chillingly silent, two men were left alone in the darkness, clinging to a spar. One was a young nobleman named Geoffrey FitzGilbert; the other, a butcher named Berold, a native of Rouen, who had set foot on board only to reclaim some debts he was owed by the careless aristocrats of the prince’s court. They prayed together, trying to keep up each other’s spirits despite the shock and the biting cold. Eventually FitzGilbert could hold on no longer. His numbed and stiffened fingers lost their grip on the wet wood, and he slipped quietly away into the depths of the sea. But the butcher clung on, his rough sheepskin jacket – so unlike the waterlogged silks and furs that had dragged the drowning courtiers down – still preserving the last traces of his body’s warmth. At dawn, he was found by three fishermen. He was the
White Ship
’s only survivor.

It was two days before anyone dared break the news to King Henry, waiting anxiously in England for his son’s arrival. When a stuttering boy was finally pushed forward to tell him of the wreck, this bull of a man collapsed in anguish. It was a personal tragedy:
Henry had lost kinsmen, friends and servants, and, most terrible of all, three of his beloved children. But, for a king, the personal was always political, and all Henry’s hopes for his country’s future had been swallowed by the sea along with his drowned son. ‘No ship that ever sailed brought England such disaster,’ William of Malmesbury wrote grimly.

Overwhelming grief cast a long shadow over the rest of Henry’s life, but it did not incapacitate him for long. Just two months after the horror at Barfleur he married for a second time, to Adeliza, a beautiful girl the same age as his dead son. Politically, it was a promising alliance – Adeliza was the daughter of Godfrey, count of Leuven and duke of Lower Lorraine – but the
raison d’être
of the match was the need to resolve the sudden crisis over the succession. In that, however, it failed. Despite the fact that Henry’s ability to father children had been energetically demonstrated over the course of thirty years, and that Adeliza would eventually go on to have seven of her own when she married again after Henry’s death, this royal coupling produced no new heirs.

By 1125, it was already becoming clear that the fifty-seven-year-old king could not rely solely on the dwindling likelihood that his young wife might give him another son. But Henry did have one surviving legitimate child: his daughter, Matilda. He had not seen her for fifteen years, ever since she had left England as an eight-year-old girl to travel to Germany to join the court of her future husband, the Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich V. But in May 1125 the emperor succumbed to cancer at the age of just thirty-eight, and his young and childless widow was suddenly free to rejoin her father.

Henry lost no time in taking advantage of Matilda’s abrupt liberation from her imperial duties. At Christmas 1126, he presented his newly returned daughter to his magnates at a great gathering of the court held at Windsor and Westminster. There the nobles were required to swear a solemn oath that they would uphold her right, and that of any sons she might one day have, to succeed to her father’s throne. They did so without demur, in public at least;
but Henry could not rest content with this formal acceptance of his daughter’s title, and in 1131 he demanded that his leading subjects repeat their pledges, reiterating their commitment to Matilda as ruler-in-waiting.

By that time, Henry had also sought to bolster her position, as he had done that of his dead son, through an alliance with Anjou, Normandy’s southern neighbour. In 1128, Matilda therefore married Geoffroi, heir to the county of Anjou, whose sister had once been the wife of her drowned brother. And by the time Henry made his last, fateful journey to Lyons-la-Forêt, his daughter’s second marriage had given him two healthy grandsons, two-year-old Henry and one-year-old Geoffrey, in whose chubby hands lay the future of the Anglo-Norman realm.

The king had done all he could, but he could not be sure that it was enough. Earls, counts and bishops crowded at his bedside as he roused himself to insist again, with a dying man’s desperate urgency, that all of his lands, on both sides of the sea, should pass to his daughter. At last, on the night of 1 December 1135, Henry I died. ‘He was a good man, and was held in great awe,’ wrote the author of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
. ‘In his time no man dared do wrong against another; he made peace for man and beast.’ It was a mercy, perhaps, that the sightless eyes of the Lion of Justice would not see the darkness that followed his passing.