CHAPTER 3
‘The Fair Maid of Brabant’
Matilda of Scotland did not live to experience the disaster of the White Ship in 1120, a tragedy for the Norman dynasty which had massive repercussions not only on the life of her daughter Matilda but on the future of England. After his mother’s death, William continued to act as regent in England for a year before joining his father in Normandy for his marriage to yet another Matilda, this one the daughter of Fulk of Anjou. King Henry had been threatened in the duchy since 1111 by an alliance between the French, Angevins and Flemings, but William’s marriage and Henry’s significant defeat of Louis VI of France at Bremule in 1119 secured his rule for the time being, and the following year William paid homage to Louis as his father’s nominal overlord for Normandy. The royal party sailed for England in November, but the ship in which William was a passenger - along with his illegitimate half-brother Richard, half-sister Matilda, Countess of Perche, and many of the heirs to the great estates of England and Normandy - was wrecked on a rock at the harbour of Barfleur. According to Orderic Vitalis, the captain, Thomas Fitzstephen, struggled to the surface, but when he heard that the heir to the throne had drowned he allowed the waves to claim him rather than face the King. None of the young nobles in William’s party was saved - indeed, the only survivor was a butcher from Rouen. Even for a man with as many children as Henry, the loss of three at once was personally shattering; the implications for the succession, moreover, were disastrous.
Henry’s second marriage, to Adeliza of Louvain, has conventionally been seen as a response to the urgent need for a legitimate heir in the aftermath of the shipwreck, but negotiations for his new wife may have begun as early as 1119. Adeliza’s father Godfrey ‘The Great’, landgrave of Brabant, Count of Louvain and Duke of Lower Lorraine, was a vassal of Henry’s son-in-law, the Holy Roman Emperor, and if the supposition that Henry met his daughter Matilda on the Continent in 11191 is correct, she may have been involved in arranging the match, which accords with the marriage contract having been agreed in April 1120, before the loss of the White Ship. Godfrey’s second wife, Clemence, whom he married after the death of Adeliza’s mother, Ida of Chiny, was the mother of the Flemish Count Baldwin VII, who had fought for the French as part of the anti-Norman alliance in 1118. When Baldwin died, Clemence and Godfrey, whose lands bordered with Flanders, strongly opposed the succession to the state of his cousin Charles. Henry I had come to terms with Charles after Bremule but, as part of a policy of containment, a union with the daughter of Charles’s enemy was an intelligent precaution.
Henry announced the marriage in council on 6 January 1121, and sent a party to Dover to meet Adeliza, who had already embarked for England. The wedding took place at Windsor on 29 January, barely two months after William’s death. Given the time needed for Adeliza’s preparations and the journey itself, it is clear that Henry intended to marry her even before he lost his son. William’s new bride, Matilda of Anjou, remained in England for some months after the disaster, presumably waiting to see if she was pregnant, but was retrieved by her father the same year. While she took the veil at Fontevrault, Henry kept her dower, much to Fulk’s indignation.
Eighteen-year-old Adeliza, known as the ‘Fair Maid of Brabant’, was reportedly quite beautiful. Considering her fifty-three-year-old bridegroom’s reputation as a womaniser, lust, as well as politics, and of course the distinction of her descent from Charlemagne, may have played a part in his choice. She was crowned on 30 January 1121, but from the beginning it was plain that Henry wanted her queenship to follow a very different model from that of Matilda of Scotland. Adeliza has often been viewed as a rather passive, ineffectual queen, since there is little evidence of her undertaking independent projects or embracing any political role, but this was less to do with her personal capacities, whatever they may have been, than with the fact that, as far as Henry was concerned, her purpose was to bear him sons. To this end, he kept his wife with him on his travels, leaving her scant opportunity to participate in government.
Many of Adeliza’s charters were witnessed as a co-signatory to the King, including her first, a grant to the monks of Tiron in September 1121. As we have seen, witnessing was in itself a politically charged act, as it emphasised the queen’s elevated status not only in relation to other women (who appear rarely as cosignatories in royal charters) but also to men, as the queen’s name would come after the king’s and before those of the other witnesses. Queenly witnessing was thus an expression of power rooted in office. Adeliza’s frequent appearances as a witness to Henry’s charters also enable us to track her movements with her husband. After their marriage they went to Winchester, then to Westminster, for a crown-wearing ceremony at the Whitsuntide court. Adeliza surfaces again in a grant to Merton Priory in December, but witnesses no more documents with Henry until the confirmation of a grant to St Peter Exeter at Easter 1123, while the court was at Winchester. Henry travelled energetically in England throughout 1122. He was at Northampton at Easter, then Hertford, Waltham, Oxford, a two-day pause at Windsor, Westminster for Whit Sunday. After a visit to Kent, it was back to Westminster, then north to York, Durham and Carlisle, York again for the Feast of St Nicholas, Nottingham and Dunstable for Christmas. He kept up this pace for another six months before he and Adeliza sailed from Portsmouth for Normandy in June 1123. In the light of such a timetable, the Queen’s lack of independent charter activity becomes more understandable. It was not until 1126 that she issued her first as principal signatory, a grant to the canons of Holy Trinity at Christchurch London, which was drawn up while she was in residence at Woodstock.
The court in Adeliza’s time was structured along the lines Henry had been establishing for the first twenty years of his reign, which stood in a marked contrast to the roistering, undisciplined culture that had prevailed under William Rufus. The new, more sober tone had led to Henry and Matilda of Scotland being mocked for their stuffiness, but since, according to Eadmer, William Rufus’s courtiers had rampaged about the countryside boozing stolen wine, destroying crops and making improper advances to respectable women, the people, at least, appreciated Henry’s reforms. He prohibited the requisitioning of goods, set fixed prices for local purveyance and stipulated allowances for the members of his household, including forty domestic staff. As well as her constant proximity to the King, another obstacle to any meaningful political activity on Adeliza’s part may have been the regulated system of ‘administrative kingship’ that was one of the main achievements of Henry’s rule. This system, outlined in the Constitution Domus Regis, which lays down the hierarchy of offices, from chancellor through to stewards, butlers, chamberlain and constables, functioned on both sides of the Channel, with a limited entourage of officials accompanying the King and a larger group remaining permanently in either England or Normandy. In England the most important of these officials was Roger, bishop of Salisbury, who acted as regent when the King was in Normandy. As well as vice-regency, Henry introduced a body of travelling agents, inaugurated the exchequer (although in this period it was essentially an accounting procedure rather than a separate office), and insisted on more thorough record-keeping, all of which contributed to the stabilisation of government as England adjusted to the new patterns of landholding imposed by the Norman Conquest. As regent and collaborator with the king’s officers, Matilda of Scotland had played an important role in the implementation of Henry’s reforms, but their very efficiency left less room for Adeliza.
Cultural patronage, as Bishop Baudri had reminded the Conqueror’s daughter, was one sphere in which a woman might hope to outdo her husband or father, and which could compensate for diminishing influence in the political realm. As has been noted, women were especially influential in the development of vernacular literature (indeed, the production of ‘Old French’ works in France is minimal during the period in comparison with the blossoming of vernacular writing in the Anglo-Norman realm). Here, at least, Adeliza did make her mark. The rededication of ‘The Voyage of St Brendan’ to her after Matilda’s death shows that she was ready to participate in this tradition; she is recognised, too, in the mention of ‘the Queen of Louvain’ in Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, commissioned by Constance FitzGilbert, a Lincolnshire noblewoman. Adeliza herself commissioned an account of Henry’s reign from the poet David (now lost), which was set to music, as well as receiving the dedication of Philippe de Thaon’s ‘Bestiary’, the oldest surviving French example of the genre. Adeliza’s literary interests continued into her widowhood, during which she patronised the poet Serbo of Wilton. Her facility in French evinces a certain level of education, as, given her birthplace, it was unlikely to have been her first language. It is not known, though, whether, like Matilda, she spoke English. She might have availed herself of one of the new dictionaries, such as that attributed to Alexander, archdeacon of Salisbury, with its Anglo-Norman glossary of Old English words. Bi- and trilingual texts were also appearing, of which the most famous example is the Eadwine Psalter, produced at Canterbury in the mid-twelfth century.
Another novelty associated with Adeliza is the payment of ‘queen’s-gold’, which was to form an important part of the income of queens consort in the coming centuries. Queens-gold was a tax of an extra 10 per cent on any fine to the crown over the value of ten marks, as well as on tax paid by Jews. One origin of the custom is the dispute for primacy between the sees of York and Canterbury. Hugh the Chanter records that the bishop of Durham, Ralph Flambard, offered 1,000 marks of silver to Henry I and a hundred to Matilda of Scotland to favour the candidacy of York. Flambard, who had been treasurer to William Rufus, was apparently familiar with the 10 per cent balance of such payments. It has been claimed that ‘it is almost certain that Eleanor [of Aquitaine] was the first English queen granted the right to claim queens-gold’,2 and the practice was standardised during Eleanor’s queenship, but Adeliza is the first example of a queen receiving a proportion of a licence fine. She was given twenty silver marks from forty-five paid to Henry I by Lucy, Countess of Chester. (With a gold-silver ratio of 1:9, this represents a larger proportion [approximately two-fifths] of the total than was ratified under Henry II as one gold mark to the queen for every hundred silver marks received by the king.)
Henry was also generous to Adeliza in assisting her to make the best of her dower lands. As well as lands which had been part of Matilda’s holdings, such as Waltham and the Queenhithe revenues, Adeliza had estates in Essex, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Middle-sex, Gloucestershire and Devon, on which Henry granted her exemption from land tax for demesne (untenanted) holdings in the 1130 Pipe Roll. He also made her a gift of a portion of the royal estate at Berkeley, and the entire county of Shropshire, for which she was not obliged to return accounts at the biannual royal exchequer.
Even though Adeliza was well provided for financially, it could not compensate for the fact that her marriage failed in its primary objective. She and Henry had no children. The reason is uncertain (it was not for the want of trying), as neither of them was infertile. A letter to the Queen from Hildebert of Lavardin, archbishop of Tours, suggests that Adeliza had expressed her unhappiness to him. ‘If it has not been granted to you from Heaven that you should bear a child to the King of the English,’ wrote the archbishop consolingly, ‘in these [the poor] you will bring forth for the King of the Angels, with no damage to your modesty. Perhaps the Lord has closed up your womb, so that you might adopt immortal offspring . . . it is more blessed to be fertile in the spirit than the flesh.’3 Thus Hildebert encourages Adeliza to identify herself with the face of pious queenship, hinting that her lack of children might be turned into a form of holy chastity, such as that practised by her predecessor Matilda after she ‘ceased to desire offspring’. This may have been small comfort. Adeliza made no significant religious foundation of her own, though she was a witness to Henry’s 1125 charter for the foundation of Reading Abbey and also a patron of Waltham, Winchester Cathedral, Osney, Eynsham, St Sauveur in the Cotentin and the orders of the Templars and Cistercians. In later life she assisted in the foundation of the small priory of Pynham on the causeway at Arundel and of a leprosarium at Wilton, where she lived for a time in her first widowhood.
Adeliza was in Normandy with Henry until September 1126. On their return to England, they were accompanied by Henry’s newly widowed daughter, Matilda the Empress, his only surviving legitimate child. Politically, the two women had been connected even before Adeliza’s marriage, as Matilda’s husband, Henry V, had assisted her father in the recovery of his duchy of Lorraine, and Adeliza had attended the Imperial court as a young woman (the Empress was a year or so older than her stepmother). During the Christmas court at Windsor, which was attended by all the leading magnates as well as by David of Scotland, Matilda’s uncle, the Empress lived in Adeliza’s household, where she remained until she departed for her second wedding in May the following year. Henry was making plans for the succession, and though this was clearly necessary, it was a humiliating public declaration of Adeliza’s failure.
Henry left for Normandy in 1127. Adeliza was with him there in 1129, returning in July and keeping Christmas at Winchester before sailing back across the Channel in the early autumn of 1130. She witnessed her last grant with the King at Rouen before July 1131. They were in England again in August, again with the Empress, who had already quarrelled with her new husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, and Matilda stayed with the Queen until the disagreement was patched up. She was reunited with Geoffrey in September. Adeliza may be presumed to have remained with the King during his English peregrinations until his return to Normandy in August 1133, but she is not mentioned as a charter witness between this point and Henry’s death in 1135, nor as being present at his deathbed, which was attended by his illegitimate son Robert of Gloucester and the bishop of Rouen. The nineteenth-century biographer Agnes Strickland claims Henry was bitter and cruelly ill-tempered about Adeliza’s infertility, but the tax grant of 1130 and the fact that Adeliza was by his side until 1131 suggests that their relationship was civil, even hopeful, at least up to that point, and there is no evidence, other than her absence from the records, that it deteriorated afterwards. Henry’s prolongation of his stay in Normandy is attributed by Henry of Huntingdon to the continuing quarrels between the Empress Matilda and her husband. There were, apparently, at least three occasions when he wished to leave for his kingdom due to concerns about rebellions in Wales.
On 1 December, Henry died at Lyons-la-Forêt, of a seizure supposedly brought on by a surfeit of lampreys, his body ‘much weakened by strenuous labours and family anxieties’.4 If there is any hint of reproach towards Adeliza, it can only be these ‘anxieties’, which centred on the uncertain succession. And if Henry was eager to return to England there is nothing to indicate that it was not in part to rejoin his wife.
Henry’s body was interred at Reading, the abbey he had founded in 1125 in a conscious celebration of his dynasty ‘for the salvation of my soul and that of King William my father and King William my brother and William my son and Queen Matilda my mother and Queen Matilda my wife’. There was no place for Adeliza in this vaunting of Norman blood. After a year of mourning, some of which she spent at the convent of Wilton, Adeliza granted the monks of Reading the manor of Aston in Hertfordshire, an annual payment of one hundred shillings and lands ‘to provide for the convent and other religious persons coming to the Abbey on the occasion of the anniversary of my lord King Henry’. Perhaps in imitation of Henry’s tribute to Matilda of Scotland, she also ordered a perpetual light to be maintained at his tomb.
Adeliza, too, chose to be buried at Reading, but if she was keen to maintain her royal associations in the next life, she was not yet ready to spend the rest of her earthly existence as a mourning queen dowager, and in 1138, she married for love. Her romance with William d’Aubigne was played out against the dramatic backdrop of the seizure (or usurpation, depending on one’s party) of the crown by Henry I’s nephew, Stephen of Blois. D’Aubigne’s father had been butler to Henry I - this was a court office rather than a domestic post and hence not such a disparagement as it might appear - and William himself held the lordship of Buckenham in Norfolk. He was from the first a loyal adherent of King Stephen, who granted him the earldom of Lincoln just after his marriage to Adeliza. William built the aptly named Castle Rising in newly fashionable stone, though during his marriage to Adeliza they lived mainly at her dower castle of Arundel on the Sussex coast, where she had installed her half-brother Joscelin as castellan in 1136 (she also assisted him in making a good marriage, to the northern heiress Agnes de Percy). William and Adeliza had at least seven children (Adeliza is the ancestress of two other queens, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard) and together they founded two Augustinian houses.
Some years before her death, Adeliza decided to leave her husband, with his consent, and devote herself to prayer. She spent five years in the Benedictine abbey of Afflighem, of which her Louvain family had been patrons since 1085. Upon her death there, however, she requested that she be buried next to Henry at Reading.
Despite the success of her second marriage, it was as a queen that Adeliza chose to identify herself in death. Given the civil war through which she lived, and in which her second husband played a significant role, it would have been surprising if she had not reflected on the consequences of her barren royal union. That she achieved a degree of contentment, and left her mark on the literary and pious tradition of Anglo-Norman queenship, demonstrates that while though she obviously suffered as a consequence of her failure to provide Henry with an heir, there was more to Adeliza than that failure. Her legacy is less regal than that of Matilda of Scotland, but it is royal nonetheless.