She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (9 page)

Matilda’s performance on this intimidatingly magnificent occasion was immaculate. She was ‘a girl of noble character’, the anonymous chronicler remarked, ‘distinguished and beautiful, who was held to bring glory and honour to both the Roman Empire and the English realm’. It was also the beginning of her public life at her imperial husband’s side. It seemed an unlikely partnership: a girl scarcely on the brink of adulthood, married to a man of twenty-eight, a monarch who was not only able and astute but ruthlessly and relentlessly hard-headed. But observers were in no doubt of how well the relationship worked. ‘The emperor loved his noble wife deeply,’ wrote Orderic Vitalis; and, even if we choose to be a little more cynical than the conventions of courtesy allowed in describing the emotional dynamics of this dynastic alliance, it remains clear that Matilda won the trust and the respect of her powerful husband.

Her own family supplied the best of models for a royal consort. Her mother, Edith-Matilda, had been a devoted and skilful
partner in Henry I’s regime, while her maternal grandmother, Margaret of Scotland, was so widely revered for her piety that she was later declared a saint. But Matilda, who had never known her grandmother, had not seen her mother since she was eight years old, and her success as Heinrich’s queen owed as much to the resilient intelligence of her own response to the role as it did to her genes or the training of her earliest years.

A complex task lay ahead of her. To be the consort of a ruler was not to be a mere appendage; she was not simply a decorative ornament to his court, or the passive embodiment of a political treaty. A crowned queen shared in her husband’s majesty – she, too, had been anointed by God, her authority given divine sanction – and, if she was necessarily a satellite of his power, she nevertheless had an influential part to play in his government. She might emphasise the spiritual dimensions of his rule rather than the worldly preoccupations that took the lion’s share of a king’s attention: the saintly Margaret of Scotland, for example, was unusual only in the extent, not the fact, of her religious devotion. She might serve as his representative when he could not be physically present, as Edith-Matilda had done with distinction in England during the years King Henry spent across the Channel in Normandy. And she might temper his justice with mercy, her intercession enabling her husband to moderate the harshness of the punishments he inflicted without compromising the respect in which his judgements were held.

This, in fact, was the first formal queenly role which the eight-year-old Matilda had been called upon to play, in ritual form, on her arrival from England in 1110, when she was asked at Liège to intercede for a disgraced nobleman, Godfrey, count of Leuven and duke of Lower Lorraine (whose daughter Adeliza would become her stepmother ten years later). And from 1114, when she left her schoolbooks behind after the extravagant spectacle of her wedding to take her place at her husband’s side, she fulfilled her duties as a sponsor of petitions and supplications with a dignity and grace that would later inspire her German subjects to remember her as ‘the good Matilda’.

But she could not be insulated for long from the Empire’s dangerous instability. Her husband, like his father before him, faced armed rebellion in Saxony and the Rhineland, while conflict with the Church now loomed menacingly on German soil. Archbishop Friedrich of Cologne – the man who had touched holy oil to Matilda’s forehead at her coronation, and hitherto one of Heinrich’s most loyal ecclesiastical supporters – finally abandoned the emperor in 1114, his theological conscience finding common cause with his territorial ambition. Pope Paschal had already sanctioned the emperor’s excommunication three years earlier, but now, in April 1115, the archbishop formally pronounced the dread sentence of anathema at Cologne, where imperial forces had been defeated by a rebel army only a few months before. A formidable faction within the German Church now held that their emperor had been excluded from the community of the faithful. All those who had sworn homage and fealty to him, they declared, were no longer bound by their oaths.

If Heinrich had any doubt about the need to return to Italy to tackle the poisonous conflict between the Roman Empire and the Holy See at its source, it was dispelled three months later, when news came of the death of Matilde of Tuscany, countess of Canossa.
La gran contessa
, at almost seventy, had become a legend, ‘the daughter of Peter and the faithful handmaid of Christ’, according to the great reforming pope Gregory VII. Heir to vast estates in northern Italy stretching across the Lombard plain from the Apennines to the Alps, the countess had been the pope’s most devoted ally through forty years of violent struggle between the papacy and the Empire. From her impregnable fortress at Canossa, perched high on a spur of the north face of the Apennines looking over the plain to her nearby cities of Reggio and Modena, she rode with her troops against the Emperor Heinrich IV, standing in her stirrups with her father’s sword in her hand, the war-cry ‘For St Peter and Matilde!’ ringing around her.

Heinrich V had learned the lesson of his father’s inability to defeat Matilde, opting for conciliation instead of confrontation.
He visited her respectfully at Bianello, the castle in the foothills to the north-east of Canossa that stood sentinel for the fortress, and appointed her his lieutenant in Liguria, swearing that ‘in the whole earth there could not be found a princess her equal’. His strategy paid off in 1115 when the dying countess – who, though twice married, had no children – named him her heir. This was an unprecedented opportunity to impose imperial rule in Italy, but it would have to be taken swiftly, before the pope, to whom Matilde had previously promised her lands, could act to stop him.

By the end of February 1116 the emperor’s forces were ready. When he left Augsburg at the head of his army, his fourteen-year-old wife was with him. Soldiers, horses, carts loaded with arms and provisions, and carriages for Matilda and her ladies travelled more than three hundred miles across the Alps, over the Brenner Pass, a prehistoric pathway that had become a regularised road when the Roman Empire expanded inexorably northward through the mountains. It was the lowest and easiest of the eight major Alpine passes, and an expedition that included the might of an imperial army had no need to fear the bandits who lay in wait by the roadside to relieve merchants and pilgrims of their possessions. But low and easy were relative terms in an Alpine crossing, and strength in numbers offered no cushion against the implacable landscape. Even swaddled in furs, Matilda could not escape the rawness of the thin air as she gazed up at the massive snow-drifted peaks that overshadowed their labouring convoy.

There could have been no greater contrast between the wildness of the mountains and the comfort of their reception in Italy: a forty-eight-hour stay amid the sumptuous luxury of the doge’s palazzo in Venice, behind crenellated walls and colossal towers that proclaimed La Serenissima’s mastery of the sea. From there, the emperor and his queen travelled south-west to Padua and Mantua before arriving outside the forbidding ramparts of Countess Matilde’s Apennine fortress at Canossa. Heinrich was shrewd enough to recognise that generosity and compromise were the surest ways to win support from those who had suffered under
the harsh inflexibility of the countess’s rule, and he was welcomed inside Canossa’s gates, his young wife warmly greeted as a noble successor to her formidable namesake.

It was a whole year before the emperor felt confident enough of his hold on the regions of Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany to move towards Rome. But despite Heinrich’s efforts at diplomacy, Pope Paschal could not contemplate a second encounter with an imperial army with equilibrium. He withdrew the papal curia eighty miles to the south-east, to the magnificent abbey at Montecassino first founded by St Benedict almost six hundred years earlier, leaving Heinrich to take control of the holy city just before Easter 1117. It was a hollow victory: the emperor staged a triumphal procession through the Roman streets, but could not convince a single cardinal to participate in the elaborate ceremonies of crown-wearing that, by custom, marked the emperor’s presence in Rome on a great feast day of the Church.

Heinrich turned instead to Maurice Bourdin, the French-born archbishop of the Portuguese see of Braga, whom Paschal had sent to him as an envoy. A controversial and fiercely ambitious man, Bourdin lost no time in abandoning his allegiance to the pope in order to seize the chance of becoming indispensable to the emperor. Despite the fact that the only bridge over the Tiber was controlled by Pope Paschal’s supporters from their vantage point in the immense circular stronghold of the Castel Sant’Angelo, the imperial entourage managed to cross the river by boat to reach St Peter’s basilica. There, perhaps on Easter Sunday, and certainly again at Pentecost seven weeks later, Archbishop Bourdin placed an imperial crown on fifteen-year-old Matilda’s head as she sat in state at her husband’s side.

This was not an imperial coronation. Bourdin was not the pope – indeed, he had been excommunicated before the Pentecost ceremony for his abandonment of the papal cause – and Matilda was not anointed as an empress. Officially, she remained
Regina
Romanorum
, the queen of the Romans; but, despite its irregularities, this ceremonial confirmation of her imperial status left a lasting
mark. She had not been crowned by the pope, but she had been given a crown in the pope’s church at the side of her husband the emperor; and for the rest of her life she would be known to contemporaries as the Empress Matilda,
Mathilda Imperatrix
.

Her experiences in Italy shaped not only her sense of her own political standing, but her political education too. In 1118, when Heinrich was forced to return north to deal with rebellion in Germany, he left Matilda, at just sixteen, to rule his Italian territories in his stead. Now her task was not to mitigate the terrible majesty of her husband’s authority, but to embody it. Very few details have survived of her actions as regent, save for one cameo in a court at Castrocaro, set amid gently rolling hills thirty miles south of Ravenna, when she sat in judgement over the conflicting claims to a local church of a bishop and an abbey from the neighbouring towns of Forlì and Faenza. The climactic moment of the case came when the young queen rose to declare her decision in favour of the monastery, and to pronounce an imperial prohibition on anyone who dared challenge her ruling.

If we cannot recreate more details of her government in Italy in 1118–19, we can at least decipher its place among the formative influences of Matilda’s young life. Since crossing the Alps, she had had the opportunity to witness at close quarters a vicious political game, played on a European stage for the highest possible stakes in this world and the next. She had also, at Pentecost in St Peter’s, acquired a plausible claim to share in her husband’s unique imperial status. And she had now, for the first time, stood alone to exercise the royal authority in which she shared through her marriage. It was hardly surprising if, in the process, she absorbed a deeply felt sense of her own regality, together with an understanding that ruthlessness and reconciliation could each be vital weapons in a ruler’s armoury. All were, of course, entirely proper to her role as consort to the most exalted ruler in western Europe. But it was only a year after her return from Italy to Germany in the autumn of 1119 that the first hint came of what would prove to be a dramatically different future.

The drowning of her brother William in the wreck of the
White
Ship
in November 1120 can hardly have been a devastating emotional blow. Eighteen months younger than Matilda, he had been only six when she left England, and, immersed in her new life in the Empire, she had not seen him or their parents for a decade. Nor did his death precipitate any immediate transformation in her position. Her father, King Henry, married again within a matter of weeks and kept his young bride at his side as he travelled through his domains, in the hope that she would give him a new heir. Even as the months went by without any sign that Queen Adeliza might have conceived, there remained the constant possibility of an imminent pregnancy. And certainly there was no public suggestion that Matilda, who was already a queen in a distant land, might figure in Henry’s plans for the succession.

But there are signs that Matilda’s husband and her father were well aware of her potential importance in Anglo-Norman affairs, should Henry’s hopes of a son be disappointed. When the bitterly destructive conflict between the Empire and the papacy was finally ended by a concordat agreed at Worms in 1122 (which distinguished between the spiritual and temporal investiture of bishops, assigning the former to the pope and the latter to the emperor), the settlement owed a great deal to the precedent of the English agreement over the same issue that King Henry had reached with the papacy in 1106. And in the years after 1122, the priority which Heinrich gave to the closeness of his contact with his father-in-law is striking.

Matilda had hoped to visit Henry in England that summer for the first time in twelve years, but, with the king waiting in Kent for her arrival, she had to abandon her journey when she was refused safe passage by the count of Flanders, a vassal of the French king who had every reason to fear being caught in a vice by closer cooperation between the Anglo-Norman realm on one side and the Empire on the other. Thereafter, despite the ongoing threat of unrest in the northern duchy of Saxony, the emperor threw himself into a hard-fought battle to wrest control of Utrecht from
its bishop – a city which he had previously visited only once, in 1110, for his formal betrothal to his child-bride. Now, however, his repeated presence there – in 1123 at the head of an army – indicated the strategic significance of its location less than forty miles from a point on the North Sea coast where neither the count of Flanders nor the king of France could impede imperial communications with England.

Perhaps Heinrich envisaged a future in which England and Normandy might become the western limits of an extended empire over which he and Matilda would rule together, before uniting their territorial claims in the person of their son and heir. But no such child had yet been born when that dream was shattered. In the spring of 1125, visiting Utrecht for the third time in three years, the emperor was overwhelmed by an agonising and desperate illness that he had struggled to conceal. On 23 May, at the age of thirty-eight – ‘in the very flower of his age and victories’, wrote William of Malmesbury – Heinrich died. To this energetic, bold, ruthless man, Matilda had been a devoted wife and a trusted consort; the little Norman princess had become a German queen in quietly triumphant style. Now, at twenty-three, she was his widow, trusted in death, as she had been in life, when he bequeathed into her keeping the priceless crown, lance and sword that made up the imperial insignia.