She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (8 page)

 

It is a measure of the peculiarity of Matilda’s position in 1135 that we know so little about her. Her contemporaries, whether friends, enemies or neutral observers, struggled to decide how to handle or to judge her, how to place her within a political narrative that expected its chief protagonists to be male. As a result, she is an insubstantial, inconsistent presence in the chronicles, rarely seen in more than two dimensions, often disconcertingly portrayed as a marginal figure in her own story.

We can only guess what she looked like. Her father Henry, William of Malmesbury tells us, was ‘more than short and less than tall’, a vigorous, thickset man with receding black hair, a steady gaze and an unfortunate tendency to snore. Her mother, Edith-Matilda of Scotland, meanwhile, was ‘a woman of exceptional holiness, and by no means negligible beauty’. Although William puts no specific features to these royal good looks, he shows us the pious queen walking barefoot in church during Lent in penitential humility, and wearing a hair-cloth shift under her elaborate gowns. But, master of the thumbnail portrait though he was, William of Malmesbury’s sketch of Matilda herself is uncharacteristically opaque, a somewhat impersonal coupling of her parents’ most striking qualities: she ‘displayed her father’s courage and her mother’s piety; holiness in her found its equal in energy, and it would be hard to say which was more admirable’.

In part, of course, this arm’s-length treatment of Matilda’s character stems from the fact that she was an unknown quantity in England when she crossed the Channel at her father’s side in September 1126 for the first time in more than sixteen years. She was English-born, probably in February 1102 at Sutton Courtenay,
a manor house near the ancient town and abbey of Abingdon in Oxfordshire, and seems to have lived in England for the first eight years of her life, although reliable information about her upbringing is almost entirely lacking. We know that her intelligent, capable mother rarely accompanied the king to Normandy, instead spending most of her time at the royal palace of Westminster, a mile and a half westwards along the Thames from London’s city walls, where Matilda’s flamboyant uncle, William Rufus, had built the largest great hall England had ever seen to house his marble throne. We cannot take it for granted that Matilda lived at Westminster with her mother – royal children rarely spent all or even most of their time in close proximity to their parents – but it seems likely that the queen’s cultured household, with its profound religious sensibility, provided the defining context for Matilda’s education.

Matilda’s mother tongue, like that of her parents and her peers, was Norman French, but she learned to read in Latin, the language of the Church, of international diplomacy, and of literate culture in England after the Conquest had obliterated Old English literary traditions. We might also hope, for her sake, that she was well prepared for her future as a royal bride, since it was a role she was expected to take up, in public at least, when she was no more than a child.

She was only six years old when the most eminent king in western Europe, Heinrich V of Germany, sought her hand in marriage. The kingdom of Germany was an agglomeration of states under the rule of a monarch chosen by a select group of the most powerful German noblemen and archbishops (albeit that, as in England, the hereditary principle proved hard to resist, so that Heinrich was the fourth heir of the Salian dynasty in direct succession to wear this supposedly elective crown). The German ruler was known not only as
Rex Teutonicorum
– king of the Germans – but also as
Rex Romanorum
– king of the Romans – in recognition of the fact that his power extended over what remained of the Western Roman Empire after its split from the Byzantine East,
lands which included not only Germany but northern Italy, Burgundy, Austria and Bohemia. And the man who was elected king of the Romans could claim the right to be crowned by the pope in a ceremony which would elevate him from a mere king to the status of emperor, a title conferring on its holder a unique authority within western Christendom.

For Matilda’s father, King Henry, whose family had held the crown of England for less than fifty years and whose own controversial claim to the throne was not yet established beyond all challenge, this alliance with a monarch who would follow in Charlemagne’s footsteps as ruler of the Western Roman Empire was an enticing prospect – one for which he was more than prepared to send his small daughter overseas, and with her a large amount of money. And it was England’s wealth that made the match so appealing for Heinrich, whose authority over lands stretching from the Baltic to the Adriatic was not matched by his cashflow. The deal was done in the summer of 1109:seven-year-old Matilda was betrothed to the German king by proxy at a magnificent meeting of her father’s court, and it was agreed that, along with the hand of his child-bride, Heinrich would receive ten thousand silver marks, the same immense amount for which Robert Curthose had pawned the duchy of Normandy to William Rufus just thirteen years before.

Matilda had only a few months left to enjoy the familiarity of life in England. She had just passed her eighth birthday in February 1110 when she said goodbye to her parents, her brother and her home, and set sail for Boulogne, accompanied by a distinguished retinue of aristocrats and clergymen. They rode beside her carriage – its embroidered cushions doing little to ease the jolting of the wooden chassis on the wheel-axles – two hundred miles eastward, over the flat plain of Flanders and across the western borders of her future husband’s empire into the duchy of Lower Lorraine. There, in Liège, a great city ruled by a powerful prince-bishop, Matilda for the first time met the man to whom she was promised in marriage.

Heinrich was twenty-four years old. It was four years since he had become king of Germany in succession to his father, Heinrich IV, whose reign had been blighted by bloody conflict over the extent of his royal authority, both with the nobility of Saxony and with the pope. He had been excommunicated in the course of this struggle, and as a result his corpse still lay unburied in an unconsecrated side-chapel of the imperial cathedral at Speyer, awaiting reconciliation in death with the papacy against which he had fought so bitterly in life.

But the start of his son’s rule was not marred by such battles. The new young king had allied himself with his father’s enemies two years before the old king’s death, and, with their support, his accession brought a temporary peace to the Empire. The task that Heinrich now faced was to rebuild the power of his crown. In theory, his authority reached from Hamburg in the north to Rome in the south, from Lyons in the west to Vienna in the east. In practice, however, he needed to ride to Rome at the head of an ostentatiously imposing entourage – a retinue which might, as circumstances dictated, take on the form of an army – to stamp his rule on his Italian territories and to secure his coronation as emperor at the hands of the pope. For that, he needed money; and so his little bride, who would bring him such a great dowry, was graciously and warmly received.

For the next few months Matilda accompanied her future husband on imperial progress, first of all to the graceful city of Utrecht in the Netherlands, more than a hundred miles north of Liège. There, at Easter, the royal couple were formally betrothed once again, in person this time, and Heinrich endowed his wife-to-be with rich gifts and lands reflecting her status as his consort. The court then moved along the valley of the Rhine to Cologne, Speyer and Worms, before arriving at Mainz, the foremost archiepiscopal see of all Germany, where preparations were under way for Matilda’s coronation. At eight, she was too young to become a wife, but not to be recognised as a queen: a solemn betrothal was as binding in the sight of the Church as the marriage vows to
which she had committed herself for the future, so that contemporaries saw no incongruity in the fact that Matilda would receive her crown some years before her wedding ring.

Mainz, like Speyer and Worms, was home to one of the three great
Kaiserdome
, imperial churches built in monumental red sandstone on an awe-inspiring scale. The Romanesque cathedral at Mainz had an inauspicious history: fire had gutted the building on the day of its inauguration almost exactly a century earlier, and in 1081 another devastating blaze had undone the painstaking repairs. But, thanks to Heinrich IV, a new octagonal tower now soared over the nave as his small daughter-in-law arrived in ceremonial procession on 25 July – the feast day of St James the Apostle, whose mummified hand was preserved among the priceless relics in the royal chapel – to be crowned Germany’s queen. A new archbishop had not yet been appointed to the see of Mainz after the death of the last incumbent in 1109, so that it was the archbishop of Trier who carried Matilda delicately in his arms while the archbishop of Cologne anointed her with holy chrism and placed a crown (which was almost certainly too large, as well as too heavy, for a child) on her young head.

The ritual was designed to impress all those present, the eight-year-old girl at its centre as well as the assembled onlookers, with its potent blend of the sacred and the majestic. It was therefore with a powerful sense of her royal duty and dignity that Matilda left Mainz for Trier, a little less than a hundred miles westward, to learn what it was to be a German queen. Her education there was overseen by the prelate who had held her during her coronation, Archbishop Bruno, one of her future husband’s closest and most trusted counsellors, a man described by the French statesman and chronicler Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis as ‘elegant and agreeable, full of eloquence and wisdom’. Trier was a Roman city, the oldest in Germany, lying in the valley of the Moselle river between low wooded hills, and its cosmopolitan Franco-German culture provided the ideal setting for this Norman princess to learn the language, laws and customs of her newly adopted home.

While Matilda studied under Archbishop Bruno’s careful guardianship, Heinrich put the treasure she had brought as her dowry to immediate and productive use. The royal couple’s betrothal at Utrecht in April had doubled as an opportunity for the king to begin the process of assembling forces for his planned expedition to Rome, and in August he crossed the Alps at the head of a vast following – Abbot Suger and Orderic Vitalis suggest a figure of thirty thousand knights, which, even allowing for evocative exaggeration, implies an exceptionally intimidating host – that was equipped and provisioned by Matilda’s silver.

Relations between Heinrich and Pope Paschal II had deteriorated badly since the king’s accession, over the bitterly contested question of investiture – the competition between Church and state for control of the creation of bishops, a running battle that was the focal point of a broader war over the relative powers of spiritual and temporal authority. Despite Paschal’s initial hopes, Heinrich had proved no more willing to yield to claims of a papal monopoly on investiture than his excommunicated father, and the pope therefore refused to crown him emperor unless he changed his mind. Heinrich had a ready answer: his soldiers seized Paschal and sixteen of his cardinals and held them all in close confinement for two months until they capitulated. Under this peculiarly irresistible form of persuasion, Paschal confirmed his royal enemy’s right to invest bishops with the ring and crozier of episcopal office; and on 13 April 1111, in the echoing basilica of St Peter in Rome, the pope’s unwilling hands placed the imperial crown – an octagonal diadem of gold studded with jewels and
cloisonné
enamelwork, enclosed by a golden arch and surmounted by a jewelled cross – on the new emperor’s head.

The conflict was far from over. Once Heinrich and his army had returned to Germany, the papal council lost no time in repudiating the concessions he had extorted by force. The imperial coronation was a sacred rite that could not be undone, but, while hostilities continued, it was abundantly clear that the emperor’s bride could not hope to be crowned in her turn as his empress.

She could, however, expect to become his wife. In January 1114, just before her twelfth birthday – twelve being the canonical age at which girls were permitted to enter into the sacrament of marriage – Matilda and Heinrich finally took their vows in the towering cathedral at Worms on the western bank of the Rhine. The sheer grandeur of the celebrations, the most opulent gathering of the German court in a generation, defied the descriptive powers of the chroniclers. Five archbishops, thirty bishops and five dukes witnessed the ceremony, each attended by an ostentatious entourage; ‘as for the counts and abbots and provosts’, one well-informed but anonymous commentator continued,