The Plantagenets (5 page)

Thus, in 1135, Matilda and Geoffrey were elbowed aside. The most that they could do was move to claim the disputed dowry castles and bide their time while Stephen cemented his unlikely rule in England and Normandy.

Stephen, however, did not find the practice of kingship anywhere near as easy as its acquisition. He lacked the calculated ruthlessness and political intelligence of Henry I. He relied on a small group of baronial friends for advice and assistance while ignoring others of greater status. He failed to impose himself on barons who resisted his authority and he managed to alienate other men who ought to have been his biggest supporters.

Within the first three years of his reign, Stephen’s rule on both sides of the Channel had been severely rocked. In Normandy, Geoffrey Plantagenet took up his son’s claim to be duke of Normandy. From 1136 he began to wage a war of conquest from Normandy’s southern borders, which Stephen was ill-placed to resist. All the king’s attention was focused on England, where he lost the support, in quick succession, of Matilda’s half-brother Robert of Gloucester, who was the most powerful baron in the country; of his own brother Henry, bishop of Winchester, whom he passed over for promotion to the see of Canterbury; and of Roger, bishop of Salisbury, a vastly experienced royal administrator whose followers and son were arrested in clear breach of Stephen’s promise at his coronation not to molest the Church or its bishops.

Stephen’s reign was, from the beginning, divisive. He was generous in dispersing Henry I’s carefully accumulated treasure – but he was not even-handed with it. He lavished favours on friends like the twins Waleran and Robert Beaumont at the expense of established, powerful barons like Ranulf earl of Chester. This destabilized both national and local politics and the effects were exacerbated by Stephen’s ill-advised attacks on the professional government that Henry I had constructed. He dismissed a number of prominent career administrators and attempted to run England through high-born military men,
who were appointed to run government in the counties by virtue of their rank, rather than their administrative experience.

If all this was highly disruptive to Anglo-Norman rule, it was equally encouraging to Matilda and her family as they watched Stephen’s government unravel from afar. By 1138 it seemed that a chance had arisen, as Matilda’s influential half-brother Robert earl of Gloucester officially defected from Stephen’s cause. In 1139, as Geoffrey Plantagenet continued his assaults on Normandy, Matilda appealed her case as her father’s heir to Rome and the Second Lateran Council and invaded England, allying with Gloucester and setting up her headquarters and a nascent alternative government in Bristol. A civil war had begun.

Matilda arrived to find England an unsettled realm. Very quickly her presence made things worse. She attracted a small but significant coalition of disaffected barons, including Gloucester, the Marcher lord Brian FitzCount and Miles of Gloucester, who had been a powerful official in the west country during her father’s reign, but the effect was to split England in two. Miles of Gloucester launched attacks on royalist strongholds across England – attacks that Stephen was unable to crush, and which allowed Matilda’s opposition faction to grow in strength and confidence. Yet the empress was nowhere near powerful enough totally to defeat the king and take control of England in her own right. The result was a prolonged period of war between the two cousins: both of them claimed to be the rightful ruler of England, but neither could impress their authority over the whole realm.

In 1141 the empress won her first significant victory. In late 1140 King Stephen had offended Ranulf earl of Chester by granting lands and castles that the earl coveted to his enemies. It had been enough to push him into armed opposition. Ranulf seized Lincoln castle from a royal garrison, and in February 1141 Stephen was besieging the castle to attempt its recapture. Seizing his chance, Robert earl of Gloucester marched troops to Lincoln and attacked the royal army. In the pitched battle that followed, Stephen’s troops were routed and the king was captured.

This should have been Matilda’s moment. She had an opportunity, with her cousin now captive, to take England for herself and her son.
She assumed the novel title of Lady of the English and attempted to arrange a coronation in London. Stephen’s brother, Henry bishop of Winchester, was by now a papal legate and threw his weight behind the empress. Many of England’s major barons abandoned the king and looked to their own estates, unwilling to save a regime of which they had long stood in doubt.

Yet the empress could not press home her advantage. She was opposed by spirited military defences organized under Stephen’s queen – another Matilda. She swiftly managed to fall out with the bishop of Winchester, and to offend most of the magnates whom she encountered with her natural arrogance and haughtiness. As summer approached, the citizens of London took against her when she refused to give them any financial concessions, and on 24 June 1141 they chased Matilda out of the city. With her campaign now in disarray, the empress tried to besiege Henry bishop of Winchester in his diocesan seat. In a disastrous battle, Robert earl of Gloucester was captured. In order to free her half-brother, Matilda had no option but to arrange a prisoner swap. She released King Stephen. Her brief victory, which had lasted just under eight months, was undone.

By the end of 1142, it seemed that Matilda’s battle for queenship was almost over. She had been chased by Stephen’s forces all the way to Oxford and by late November she was besieged in the castle, with hope draining away. Far away across the Channel her husband, Geoffrey Plantagenet, was pushing on with a highly successful conquest of Normandy. Robert earl of Gloucester had failed to persuade him to divert from the task to come and rescue his beleaguered wife. The best Geoffrey would send was 300 knights and their nine-year-old son Henry as a new figurehead for the Angevin cause in England.

As Christmas approached, Matilda was growing desperate. Rather than wait for the knights her husband had sent to come and lift the siege of Oxford, she placed her faith in her own resourcefulness. One snowy night Matilda wrapped herself in a white cloak, slipped silently towards a postern door in the castle, crept out past the guards and headed away towards the snowy fields. Her sheer white camouflage – a
ghostly cloak against the dark skyline – allowed her to trudge the eight miles or so to Abingdon without being captured. She walked the frozen landscape, ready at any moment for the crunch of hoofs in the snow to announce a search party sent to capture her. But it did not come. At Abingdon, she met with friends, who helped her on to the safety of the west country. She was saved, and with her, the fight for the kingdom of England lived on.

This famous moment in the war was both providential for Matilda and disastrous for the realm of England. Now reinforced by fresh troops and encouraged by the marvellous escape of his half-sister, Robert of Gloucester led the fightback against Stephen’s kingship. But once again the war lapsed into violent stalemate. Stephen held the Crown, but he remained a weak king who could not command the undivided loyalty of the Anglo-Norman barons. Matilda was at large and more powerful than ever, but after the debacle of 1141 she was discredited in too many eyes to have any hope of conquest in her own name. The only decisive action was taking place in Normandy, where Geoffrey Plantagenet was rapidly occupying a duchy that Stephen had visited only once (in 1137) during his whole reign. By 1144 Geoffrey had captured Rouen and had been recognized as duke of Normandy, forcing those barons whose property bestrode the Channel into the impossible position of having to acknowledge two lords for the same estates.

Both England and, to a lesser degree, Normandy remained crippled by conflict. The country, wrote the chronicler William of Newburgh, was ‘mutilated’. From 1142 England was firmly split between two courts – one under the king, nominally at Westminster and Winchester, and the other with Matilda, who ruled from Devizes in the south-west. The rule of law dissolved. With it went public order. England was torn three ways by a vicious civil war, between those who backed Stephen, those who backed Matilda, and those who backed themselves and no one else. With no adequate king in the north, King David I of Scotland ruled Westmorland, Cumberland and Northumberland. England, which under Henry I had been wealthy, well governed and stoutly defended at its borders, had now become a
patchwork of competing loci of authority and power. The country groaned with popular anguish. ‘It was as if,’ wrote the author of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, ‘Christ and his saints were asleep.’

In such a situation there were no victors. Stephen and Matilda both saw themselves as the lawful successor of Henry I, and set up official governments accordingly: they had their own mints, courts, systems of patronage and diplomatic machinery. But there could not be two governments. Neither could be secure or guarantee that their writ would run, hence no subject could be fully confident in the rule of law. As in any state without a single, central source of undisputed authority, violent self-help and spoliation among the magnates exploded. Flemish mercenaries garrisoned castles and newly fortified houses the length and breadth of the country. Forced labour was exacted to help arm the countryside. General violence escalated as individual landholders turned to private defence of their property. The air ran dark with the smoke from burning crops and the ordinary people suffered intolerable misery at the hands of marauding foreign soldiers.

The chronicles from the time are full of records of the bleak days that accompanied the war. The author of the
Gesta Stephani
records one example:

[The King] set himself to lay waste that fair and delightful district, so full of good things, round Salisbury; they took and plundered everything they came upon, set fire to houses and churches, and, what was a more cruel and brutal sight, fired the crops that had been reaped and stacked all over the fields, consumed and brought to nothing everything edible they found. They raged with this bestial cruelty especially round Marlborough, they showed it very terribly round Devizes, and they had in mind to do the same to their adversaries all over England.

Eventually, in 1148, Matilda left England. It may seem strange that she left a fight in which she had invested so much of her life, but after a decade spent leading the Plantagenet cause, her work was done. Her children – Henry and his two younger brothers Geoffrey and William
– were growing up across the Channel. Matilda aimed to live out the remaining nineteen years of her life in comfortable retirement at the priory of Notre-Dame-du-Pré, a cell of the abbey of Bec at Quevilly, where across the Seine she could visit Rouen, the Norman capital that Orderic Vitalis described as a ‘fair city set among murmuring streams and smiling meadows … strongly encircled by walls and ramparts and battlements …’ The city owed her much, for her grim efforts to distract King Stephen on the English front had allowed Geoffrey Plantagenet to capture it. Now she intended to enjoy the view.

And in any case, England was not abandoned. Her eldest son was approaching his sixteenth birthday. It was time for him to take up the struggle, time for Henry FitzEmpress to try his hand at conquest.

Ambition

Henry, sixteen years old and burning with ambition, landed on the shores of Devon on 13 April 1149. It was his third visit to the fractured realm that he would have heard his mother tell him time after time was his by birthright. He had seen the country in its bleakest hours: a war zone in which empress and king chased each other from town to town and castle to castle, burning property and terrorizing the common people in their quest to grind one another into the bloodstained soil. But his mother, who had carried the fight against Stephen for so long, was gone into retirement. Henry, on the verge of manhood, had come to announce his leadership of the Angevin cause in England.

This was not Henry’s home. He understood the English language, although he did not speak it. Yet he was no stranger to England. In 1142, aged nine, Henry had been brought briefly to the English front as a figurehead to his mother’s campaign. He had arrived in the dark days, shortly before Matilda’s great escape from the snowy wastes of Oxford. He stayed under the tutelage of his uncle Robert earl of Gloucester as England settled into its vicious stalemate. Henry spent fifteen months studying in Bristol, meeting the famous astronomer, mathematician and Scholastic philosopher Adelard of Bath, who dedicated to the young man a treatise on the astrolabe. Then from 1144, for reasons as much of safety as of political pragmatism, Henry had returned to his father, to help him secure his position as duke of Normandy.

Henry was a strange-looking young man. His blood was a rich broth of Norman, Saxon and Plantagenet strains. He could switch in seconds from bluff good humour to fierce anger. From his father, he
had inherited his auburn complexion and tireless energy; from his maternal grandfather a powerful domineering streak and the nose for an opportunity. Gerald of Wales, a writer well familiar with the Plantagenet family, left a vivid description of Henry later in life:

Henry II was a man of reddish, freckled complexion, with a large, round head, grey eyes that glowed fiercely and grew bloodshot in anger, a fiery countenance and a harsh, cracked voice. His neck was thrust forward slightly from his shoulders, his chest was broad and square, his arms strong and powerful. His body was stocky, with a pronounced tendency toward fatness, due to nature rather than self-indulgence – which he tempered with exercise. For in eating and drinking he was moderate and sparing …

From the earliest age, Henry was conspicuously brave, albeit rather reckless. When he had made his second visit to England, in 1147, it had been not to study but to fight. Although he was only thirteen he had managed to hire a small band of mercenaries to accompany him across the Channel, where he attempted to assist his mother’s war effort. The arrival of this wild teenager had briefly terrified England: rumours spread that he had come with thousands of troops and boundless treasure. The truth had been closer to farce: Henry the teenager had barely been able to afford to pay his hired soldiers, who deserted him within weeks of arrival. (‘Weakened by sloth and idleness, overcome by poverty and want, they abandoned the noble youth,’ wrote William of Newburgh.) Ignoring the rumours, Stephen’s reaction to Henry’s teenage invasion was more amused than intimidated: in order to bring the rather embarrassing episode to a close, the king had paid off Henry’s mercenaries for him and sent him packing back to Normandy.