CHAPTER 4
‘Ennobled by her virtues as by her titles’
The queenship of Matilda of Boulogne has been largely overshadowed by the career of her more celebrated cousin, the Empress Matilda. The story of the Empress has made her a champion to many modern writers: hers is a dramatic tale of a woman bravely fighting for her rights after her throne was usurped by Stephen, Count of Mortain. Yet the two Matildas had more in common than their name. They were both descended through their mothers from the royal Anglo-Saxon line, both heiresses in their own right, both married to power-hungry men and both determined to defend the patrimony of their sons. Events gave the victory to the Empress’s cause, but it is arguable that Matilda of Boulogne was the greater queen. Interpreted in the light of representations of ideal feminine behaviour, a comparison of their activities emphasises the importance of conduct for royal women, whose power to command was tempered by the manner in which they elected to present their deeds. Matilda of Boulogne thought and fought like a man, but she never made the mistake of acting like one, in contrast to the Empress, whose demanding, dictatorial behaviour cost her her chance of the throne.
Matilda of Boulogne was selected by Henry to be the bride of his nephew Stephen as part of his dynastic policy following the disaster of the White Ship. Stephen was born around 1096, the third child of Adela, daughter of William I and Matilda of Flanders, and her husband Stephen, Count of Blois, whose lands lay between the troubled borders of France, Normandy and Anjou. Stephen’s elder brothers were provided with lands and lordships, and when their father died on crusade in 1102, it made sense for Countess Adela to look to her brother’s court to secure her third boy’s fortune. Stephen became Count of Mortain after Henry’s success at the battle of Tinchebrai in 1106, and the King continued to grant him large endowments in England and Normandy over the next decade, making him one of the most significant landholders in the realm.
When Henry’s heir William was drowned in 1120, Stephen’s status was heightened. If the King’s new marriage to Adeliza of Louvain produced no heirs, and his daughter Matilda and her husband, the Emperor Henry, remained childless, then Stephen and his brothers would have a strong claim to the English crown. Five years later, when neither Adeliza nor Empress Matilda had provided a child, Henry came to an agreement with Matilda’s father, Eustace of Boulogne. Eustace, Henry’s vassal for the lands he held in England, was also his brother-in-law: Mary, the Countess of Boulogne, was the younger sister of Matilda of Scotland. Eustace was a pious man, drawn to the spiritual life, and he wished to retire from the world and spend the rest of his days as a monk at Cluny. Since he had no son (the Gesta Stephani meanly describes the Countess of Boulogne as ‘barren’, even though she was a mother), Eustace consented to invest Stephen with his English lands and his county of Boulogne. After the wedding, Count Eustace said a private goodbye to his daughter at Romilly, took his vows and disappeared into the cloister. The marriage took place early in 1125 - the lack of an exact date is a tantalising omission, given how closely it bound the lives and ambitions of the two Matildas.
Henry I had numerous reasons for choosing Matilda for his favourite nephew. Stephen’s elder brother Thibault had just succeeded to the lands of Champagne, adding them to his county of Blois, which made him an increasingly significant player in Continental politics, and a man Henry needed to cultivate in order to keep the northern border of Normandy secure. The King may also have wished to compensate Stephen for the loss of the Montgomery holdings in Normandy, originally confiscated from the family and given to Stephen, but which he had been obliged to return during a period of military unrest. The Boulogne inheritance was a rich one, incorporating the county of Lens as well as the city itself, a staging post on the trade routes that led to Paris.
However, neither of these reasons is as powerful as that of the future of the crown, and this is where the date of the marriage becomes so significant. On 23 May, the Emperor Henry died at Utrecht, leaving his widow, the Empress Matilda, in a position to take up her claim as her father’s direct heir. Matilda of Boulogne was, like her cousin, descended through their grandmother, Margaret of Scotland, from the ancient kings of England. She had a further dose of royal blood through her father Eustace, also a descendant of Aethelred II. Her marriage with Stephen would therefore associate another potential claimant to the crown with Henry’s house, and in this respect the marriage may be seen as part of ‘the dynastic chess game designed to make the Empress her father’s successor’.1However, as the marriage took place before Emperor Henry’s death, it is highly possible that Matilda’s royal connections were being deployed to strengthen Stephen’s claim.2 The latter argument gives some insight not only into Stephen’s perception of his uncle’s intentions, which wavered confusingly at the end of the King’s life, but also into Matilda’s. In arranging her marriage early in 1125, Henry, on some level, gave her to understand that he had designated her the next queen of England. So, while the perseverance shown by Matilda of Boulogne in the defence of her husband’s rights was no more than would have been expected of a loyal wife, her tenacity and courage might also have been motivated by the sense that she was fighting for her own position as a rightfully anointed queen.
How, though, could Matilda of Boulogne have believed this when the claim of the Empress Matilda seemed so clear-cut? In 1127, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes Henry’s Christmas court at Windsor, where ‘He caused archbishops and bishops and abbots and earls and all the thegns that were there to swear to give England and Normandy after his death into the hand of his daughter.’ King David of Scotland swore first, followed, after an undignified scuffle over precedence, by Stephen, then the King’s illegitimate son Robert, Earl of Gloucester. It would be wrong, however, to attribute Henry’s insistence that his magnates swear fealty to Matilda to a desire to circumvent Stephen’s claim. In 1127, the King’s anxiety was focused on William Clito, the son of his disgraced and dispossessed brother, Robert Curthose, who had been his prisoner since Tinchebrai. Clito’s claim was strong, and arguably, on the grounds of his sex, weightier than the Empress Matilda’s. He had the support of many Norman barons and, worse, for Henry, that of Louis VI of France. In March 1127 Clito, with Louis’s support, succeeded to the title of Count of Flanders, to which he had some rights through his grandmother Matilda of Flanders. With this move, the French King hoped to destroy the traditional alliance between England and Flanders, and to worry Henry’s ever-harassed Norman borders. The threat from Clito was short-lived. After he attacked Boulogne that summer, Henry and Stephen bullied and bribed the Flemings to rebel, and Clito was caught up in a war with another candidate for the Flanders title, Thierry of Alsace, in which he conveniently died the following July.
By then, though, Henry had attempted to shore up his daughter’s power by marrying her to Geoffrey of Anjou. The Empress herself appears to have objected to this match with a boy ten years her junior, and felt it as a disparagement, since Geoffrey barely had even a comital title, but in 1127, with Clito and Louis plotting against him, Henry had deemed an alliance with Anjou a necessity. Negotiations were rushed through, and the wedding took place at Le Mans in June. The marriage secured Henry’s southern Norman border against incursions from the French, but it made his nomination of his daughter more controversial, as it was unclear what role Geoffrey was intended to play when his wife inherited the crown. The Durham chronicler, the Le Mans Chronicle and Henry of Huntingdon suggest there was some understanding that Geoffrey would share a joint rule, a possibility of which William of Malmesbury was also aware. Huntingdon and Malmesbury claim that a further oath-swearing took place in 1131. Nevertheless the unpopularity of the marriage among the English magnates was used by some as a way of levering themselves out of their promise.
Matilda’s concept of her own queenship, then, should not be measured against a simple model in which the rightful heiress was dispossessed of her claim. In the rapidly changing political climate of Henry’s last decade the King’s motivations and contingencieswere constantly shifting, and the position of the Empress remained less a legal reality than a matter of opinion, even at her father’s deathbed.
When Henry I of England died at Lyons-la-Forêton 1 December 1135, the validity of the oaths was questioned by pro-Stephen chroniclers, while even pro-Empress commentators conceded that the King had to some extent changed his mind as he was dying. William of Malmesbury maintained that he nominated Matilda, but not Geoffrey - ‘He assigned all his lands on both sides of the sea to his daughter in lawful and lasting succession’ - adding that he had recently been angry with Geoffrey, which suggested that Henry had originally envisioned shared rule but had had doubts at the end. John of Salisbury quotes the leading magnate Hugh Bigod as declaring that the lords were absolved from their oath by the King; the Gesta Stephani, which is hostile to the Empress, went further, claiming that the oath had been extracted under duress and was therefore invalid, though, unlike Salisbury, the Gesta’s author did not record that Henry named Stephen. That no official announcement was made is shown by the account of Orderic Vitalis, who describes the anger and confusion of the Norman barons. They continued to argue about what to do for some weeks, having no idea which candidate they were supposed to support. From both pro-Empress and pro-Stephen writers, then, it is evident that there was some equivocation about the succession, indeed, enough to conclude it is ‘beyond question that [Henry] chose to die without committing himself to any successor’.3 So why did Henry, who had apparently been so keen to assure the Empress’s succession, lose his resolve in his last hours? Did he perhaps feel that the Angevin marriage had been a precipitate error, now that fate had disposed of Clito? According to Malmesbury the bishop of Salisbury maintained he had sworn the original oath only on condition that Henry did not give his child in marriage to ‘anyone outside the kingdom without consulting himself and the other chief men’, and while the second oath-swearing of 1131 would technically have overridden such objections, the very need for it shows that Henry was aware of the sensitivity of the situation. It is quite possible that he was in pain, confused and afraid, and thus unable to make his wishes clear; on the other hand, it is just as likely that he had expressed those wishes privately during the week it took him to die.
Ultimately, what Stephen did mattered more than what Henry said. Henry himself had understood the necessity of speed in securing the crown, and his nephew followed his example. When the King died, Stephen and Matilda were in Boulogne and the Empress in her husband’s lands in Anjou. Within four or five days, Stephen and a small band of supporters had arrived in London. Most of Henry’s leading magnates remained in Normandy, attending Henry’s corpse, a factor which eased Stephen’s progress considerably, and on 22 December the new King was crowned at Westminster. It was a bloodless coup.
Matilda stayed in Boulogne with her family for the first months of 1136. She and Stephen had five children: Eustace, William, Baldwin, Matilda and Mary. If Stephen could succeed in holding the crown, their prospects, as well as her own, would be radically different. From Boulogne, she was in a position to keep a close eye on events in Normandy. In early December, Stephen’s elder brother Count Thibault had been invited by the Norman lords to receive the dukedom from them, but as they met the news arrived from England that Stephen had already been acknowledged by the people of London as king. Speculatively, we might consider that Thibault’s acceptance of this fraternal treachery (he was, after all, Countess Adela’s elder child and therefore had a stronger claim than Stephen if the Empress was to be overlooked) points to Henry’s having privately named Stephen before he died. Further, the invitation of the Norman magnates suggests that Stephen’s usurpation was not a simple matter of his having swiped the crown from under the nose of a defenceless woman, but a decision enacted in an environment where, if the lords were clear on anything, it was that they did not wish a woman to govern them. That the Normans summoned Thibault so swiftly makes it clear they preferred a man.
The Empress, meanwhile, had also acted quickly to consolidate her power as far as she was able. She and Geoffrey were on the Norman borders in the first week of December, laying claim to the castles she had been given as dower, but she received no furthersupport from the Norman lords, another confirmation that their wishes lay elsewhere. Matilda had achieved a little peninsula of power in the duchy, which would be crucial in years to come, but for the moment her attempts to prosecute her claim were contained within the southern marches.
Matilda of Boulogne’s own coronation at Westminster at Easter 1136 was an important step in reinforcing her husband’s status. She was the second English queen to descend directly from the Anglo-Saxon royal line after her aunt Matilda of Scotland and, since Stephen’s claim was bolstered by his wife’s heritage, her own connections, as Henry I had recognised, were significant in lending him legitimacy. The coronation, and the court held afterwards at Oxford, was Stephen’s first major display of regal power, intended to impress his kingship on the people in a way his unavoidably rushed coronation could not do. Henry of Huntingdon recorded excitedly that ‘never was there one to exceed it in numbers, in greatness, in gold, silver, gems, costume and in all manner of entertainments’. Among the guests was Henry of Scotland, Matilda’s cousin through her uncle King David, who had paid homage in his father’s name to Stephen at York, and who was now seated on the King’s right, a mark of the speed with which the Scottish monarch had submitted to the new rule in England. Three archbishops, five earls and more than twenty-four barons attended the court, as did Matilda’s eldest son Eustace, now the heir to the English throne.
All of Matilda’s children were now royal, and almost immediately their future marriages became matters of state. Her two-year-old daughter Matilda was betrothed to the thirty-one-year-old Count Waleran of Meulan, the second-greatest landowner in Normandy and, along with his stepfather and cousin, one of the leaders of an important group of magnates. Little Matilda even went through some sort of marriage ceremony. But her parents’ hopes of cementing Waleran’s loyalty suffered a setback when Matilda and her brother Baldwin died in London the following year. The Queen chose to bury her babies at Holy Trinity Aldgate, a house to which she had formed a particular attachment since her marriage and which, as a foundation of Matilda of Scotland, also had a place in the emergent spiritual traditions of English queens. The tiny coffins were interred on either side of the high altar, and records from the priory describe the King and Queen grieving together over their double loss.
The royal couple sought solace in their faith, and piety seems to have been one of the cornerstones of their relationship. They shared an intellectual interest in developing variants of belief, from the simple, mystical spirituality of hermits and anchorites to the elaborate splendours of high Cluniac ritual. As queen, Matilda was able to both witness and participate in one of the most prolific periods of monastic expansion since the Conquest. During the twelfth century, over a hundred religious houses were founded for women where, in 1066, only nine had existed. The vigour of this renaissance was characterised by an unusual degree of co-operation between the sexes as men and women worked together the better to serve their God, a mood that was reflected in the pious collaborations of Matilda and Stephen.
The tensions between the worldly and spiritual elements of her new role were brought home to Matilda when she visited a holy hermit, Wulfric, as she travelled from Corfe Castle to Exeter the summer after her coronation. Wulfric was a favourite of King Stephen, who had visited him some years before and heard him prophesy that King Henry would die in Normandy and he, Stephen, would succeed him, but now Matilda found herself being scolded by the holy man for having taken too high-handed a stance in the case of a Somerset noblewoman who had attended her court at Corfe. Chastened, Matilda later chose to patronise her own, female hermit, Helmid the nun, who was provided with an acre of land to build a cell in the domains of the abbey of Faversham, Kent, founded by Stephen in the hope that it would become a family resting place, as Reading had been for Henry I.
Matilda’s provision for Helmid shows that she was attentive to a religious movement that represented a revolution in human consciousness, a new concept of meditative, inward-looking spirituality which appears for the first time in texts such as the Ancrene Riwle, a guide for anchoresses produced at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Anchorites were voluntarily walled up to spend their lives in prayer for their communities, many of them remaining in tiny cells (Eve of Wilton’s was just eight feet square) for aslong as fifty years. Matilda’s attraction to this extreme, isolated spirituality was shared by Stephen, and together they patronised the Savignac movement, inspired by the wandering saint Vitalis, who had established a community in the wild lands of Savigny in Stephen’s county of Mortain. Matilda founded a Savignac house at Coggleshall in Essex, and Stephen endowed three, at Furness in Lancashire, Buckfast in Devon and Longvilliers, across the Channel in Montreuil.
Matilda and Stephen also continued their close family association with the Cluniac order, which had received Matilda’s father and to which Stephen’s mother, too, had retired before her death. Matilda’s mother, Mary of Scotland, was buried in the Cluniac house at Bermondsey in 1115, and when Stephen came to endow Faversham, a colony of the faithful was sent from Bermondsey to inaugurate the community. Another strand of the reformed Benedictine order was the Cistercians, whose house at Clairmarais also enjoyed royal patronage. Matilda was also interested in the crusading traditions of her own and her husband’s families, and she supported the order of the Templars, who protected and financed the crusaders. The first documented English grant to the Templars was made by Matilda’s father, Eustace, and the Queen herself founded Cressing Temple in Essex in 1137 and Temple Cowley in Oxfordshire in 1139. The grand master of the order, Osto of Boulogne, witnessed two of Matilda’s charters as well as the treaty which eventually ended the civil war. Providing for the crusades was an active form of piety that appealed to Matilda’s ‘dauntless and decisive nature . . . accustomed to command. If she could not lead the knights of Christ against the enemies of the Church, she could at least provision them.’4
Religion was central to the lives of all aristocrats at the time, and daily attendance at Mass was a feature of the royal household, but Stephen and Matilda’s mutual enthusiasm for exploring new spiritual movements suggests that their religious life was verymuch a shared one, gesturing towards their closeness as a couple. As well as their religious affinities, both families had a strong tradition of educating their women. Stephen’s grandmother Matilda of Flanders had ensured that her children were well schooled, and Countess Adela, his mother, was a notable patron, praised by the poet Godfrey of Reims, who went as far as to suggest that God had arranged the battle of Hastings in order that she might become a princess. Adela corresponded with her husband when he was on crusade; she wrote, too, to Archbishop Anselm, from whom she requested prayers in manuscript, and Hugh de Fleury, who dedicated his Historia Ecclesiastica to her. She also demonstrated publicly that she was able to speak Latin. Adela combined intel-lectualism and spirituality with the capacity for government she had inherited from both her parents and, after the death of her husband, she was active in ruling Blois, Chartres and Meaux until her retirement. Matilda’s mother, Mary of Scotland, had enjoyed the same excellent education at the convents of Wilton and Romsey as her sister and, probably at her instigation, Matilda of Boulogne was also educated in England. Her own daughter Mary eventually became abbess of Romsey, linking the women of Matilda’s family over three generations with this centre of feminine piety and scholarship. Stephen, then, was accustomed to the company of cultivated women, and his consistent reliance on his wife’s advice and diplomacy indicates both trust and a respect for her intelligence.
Other evidence of the intimacy between Stephen and Matilda is the fact that Stephen, unlike the spectacularly promiscuous Henry I, is known to have been faithful to his wife. He had taken a mistress, as was almost expected of young aristocrats, before his marriage, and had a child by her in 1110, but he showed himself uxorious even in his arrangements for sin. ‘Damette’, or ‘Little Lady’, as his mistress was referred to, was firmly paid off when Stephen married, but their son, Gervase, was educated and entered the Church, eventually becoming abbot of Westminster. The only whiff of scandal attaching to the liaison came when Gervase arranged for his mother, ostensibly a woman of modest means, to rent the abbey’s manor at Chelsea at a cheap rate. When she took possession of the property, however, she was recorded as owning forty shillings and a valuable silk cloth, which suggests that Stephen had maintained her honourably for some years.
The strength of Stephen’s marriage was perhaps one of his greatest assets as a king, and Matilda’s active support became indispensable to him very early in his reign. In 1137, she accompanied him on a five-month military and diplomatic journey through Normandy, resulting in a three-year truce with Geoffrey of Anjou, who was still aggressively pushing his wife’s cause. It was a busy period for Matilda: of the total of fifty-eight charter attestations she made as queen, fifteen fall into the two-year period from 1136 to 1138. Peace in Normandy was essential if Anglo-Norman society was to hold together. For magnates with interests in both countries, a division of their fealty, and their privileges, between two lords was unacceptable, and if the Angevins gained ground in the duchy, it would strengthen the Empress’s case there. Stephen unwisely returned to England in November 1137 - and brought civil war with him.
In the summer of 1138, a series of rebellions broke out across England. The Empress Matilda had been sending envoys to potential pro-Angevins, and a number of lords now set themselves against the King. While Stephen occupied himself with risings in the Welsh marches, Matilda had her first experience of military activity as she took personal responsibility for an outbreak of unrest in Kent. Her Boulogne inheritance proved its worth in this conflict and in many more to come. Her father’s territories had included the port of Wissant, a vital - and wealthy - centre for the Anglo-Flemish wool trade and a resource for channelling money and mercenaries to England to assist the King. Paid Flemish troops were a crucial royal weapon, and Matilda is credited with having had the foresight, in the wake of William Clito’s death, to make peace with Thierry of Flanders in order to facilitate the provision of these Flemish soldiers. Generous grants to Thierry’s foundation of Clairmarais may have sealed the truce. Thus, when Dover rebelled, Matilda was able to call out ‘friends, kinsmen and dependents of Boulogne’.5 Using troops from Boulogne and Flanders under the command of her illegitimate cousin Pharamus of Boulogne, she successfully besieged Dover Castle. (She was not, incidentally, the only active female military leader at the time: Ludlow Castle was being mobilised against Stephen by Lady FitzJohn, the widow of the castellan, though Stephen chivalrously left Ludlow out of his campaign that year.)
Meanwhile, the Scots, whose ruler, King David, had been persuaded by his niece the Empress to abandon his truce with Stephen, invaded in April, and by the end of July had pillaged their way to Yorkshire. In August, a royalist army defeated them at Northallerton, decimating the rebels, though King David himself escaped. From September, peace negotiations were held and after Christmas, Matilda was appointed to treat with David, who was, of course, her uncle as well as the Empress’s. The papal legate Alberic of Ostia had originally approached Matilda to ask for her help in convincing a reluctant Stephen of the necessity for a truce, and in the end the Queen’s ‘shrewdness and eloquence triumphed’.6 An agreement was reached at Durham on 9 April 1139 according to which Henry of Scotland was created Earl of Northumbria. Matilda and Henry travelled south together to ratify the treaty at Nottingham. Matilda had emphasised that the newly created county of Northumberland was not to be an extension of Scotland, but would remain part of England, retaining its English laws and customs. She thereby succeeded in creating a ‘buffer zone’ on the Scottish border by investing a Scottish prince with an interest in keeping an English peace.
Interestingly, this development may represent a new strategy for the governance of English comital lands which connects Matilda’s Scots initiative with her predecessor, Adeliza of Louvain. The Scots initiative was the first in a series of attempts by Stephen to regulate the administration of the country by incorporating the magnates into a hierarchy of local government. Particular towns or castles would be held for the King by officials (some of whom were given earldoms for the purpose) who would co-operate with regional military government on behalf of the crown to defend against or anticipate attack. This system was not a consistent feature of Norman or French comital administration, but it had been employed in Adeliza’s father’s territories of Brussels and Louvain. When Adeliza had invited her brother Joscelin to England and invested him as castellan of Arundel, she was following the model of her father, the Duke of Brabant. Introduced by Adeliza in 1136 and imitated by Matilda and Stephen in 1139, this is ‘the only directly proveable example of foreign innovation in administration in Stephen’s reign’, and its source is a queen.7
*
When Stephen seized power, he initially received the support of Henry I’s illegitimate son, Earl Robert of Gloucester, but in May 1138, Robert withdrew his homage from Stephen and declared for his sister Empress Matilda. If Robert had held his peace since 1136 out of prudence, his decision now was a matter of ambition but also, apparently, one of conscience. The correspondence of Gilbert Foliot, the abbot of Gloucester, with Brian FitzCount, an ally of Robert’s, shows that the earl sought biblical justification for his change of allegiance. According to Foliot, Robert was influenced by the passage in the Book of Numbers about inheritance by women: ‘It seemed to some that by the weakness of their sex they should not be allowed to enter into the inheritance of their father. But the Lord, when asked, promulgated a law, that everything their father possessed should pass to the daughters.’ Foliot’s claim has been disputed, but Robert’s change of heart made an immediate and crucial difference to the Empress’s prospects. With Robert on her side, she was strong enough to make her attempt on the throne.
In September 1139, the Empress, her brother and a company of Angevin knights landed on the Sussex coast. Robert rode straight away for Bristol and the west country, circumventing the King’s army on the way. The choice of Sussex for the launch of the Empress’s campaign was dictated in part because the Queen Dowager, Adeliza of Louvain, had shown support for her cause. According to William of Malmesbury, Adeliza and the Empress had been in correspondence for some time, and Adeliza now defied her second husband, William d’Aubigne, a staunch Stephenite, to offer the Empress protection at their seat at Arundel Castle.
Diplomatically, this placed Stephen in an awkward position, as the Empress and Queen Adeliza had anticipated it would. Adeliza and Stephen, Orderic Vitalis corroborates, had up to this point enjoyed a cordial relationship. If Stephen were to attack Arundel, it would be a mark of grave disrespect to a lady who was highly thought of in the kingdom. And Stephen was always gallant where women and children were concerned. To the consternation of Orderic, who suggested he would have been better to act ‘after the fashion of his ancestors’, Stephen permitted a safe-conduct for the Empress and Earl Robert’s wife, Mabel, to leave the castle. William I would have had no truck with such chivalrous gestures.
It is possible that Stephen, unlike Orderic, had a fuller understanding of what appeared to some contemporaries as a conspiracy between the two women. Adeliza hoped to make peace between the rival claimants. Stephen had visited her at Arundel in 1138, around the time of her marriage to d’Aubigne, and he had confirmed the grants to Reading she had made at the memorial Mass for King Henry in 1136. Adeliza was thus assured of his goodwill, and she chose to make her move towards negotiation when the Empress’s cause was weak. Very few rebel outposts remained in England and the Empress had no significant champion in the country. By hosting her at Arundel, Adeliza could work alongside her husband to try to bring about a settlement, with herself and d’Aubigne as mediators. This was a risk, as Adeliza was gambling with her husband’s standing in the event of displeasing the King. That Adeliza’s conventional adoption of the queen’s ‘peace-weaving’ role could be construed by contemporaries as disingenuous, if not treacherous, shows something of the poisonous, paranoid mood of the country at the time.
One of the Empress’s main aims on her arrival in England was to disseminate the moral rightness of her cause. Just as commentators had been keen to chart the intellectual progress of Robert of Gloucester’s decision to declare for his sister, now both royalist and Angevin parties concerned themselves not only with results on the battlefield but with their ethical justification. Might had to demonstrate that it was right. The more sophisticated atmosphere of the court of Henry I and Matilda of Scotland had inspired a more scrupulous attention to political ideology: ‘Stephen’s accession started a long-running aristocratic seminar on the subject which did not end until 1153 . . . In these arguments, the synods and the conferences of the intervening years, we see the stirrings of the effects of literacy on the closet group of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy: its developing tendency intellectually to justify its pragmatic actions . . . Those at the top of society had begun to feel that they needed to occupy the moral high ground.’8 For an increasingly literate Norman ruling class, conflict now required something other than military resolution, it necessitated an evaluation of theoretical perspectives which could stand up to scrutiny.
As Gloucester’s dilemma had shown, one such area of theoretical concern was inheritance rights, specifically those of women: ‘In particular the inheritance rights of women mattered to them in determining where their allegiance ought to lie.’9 The royalists were in no position to argue against the idea that women could inherit or transmit claims, since their own King’s right to the throne was based on it (though one attempt to circumvent this was the revival of the old claim that Empress Matilda was illegitimate, as her mother Matilda of Scotland had been professed as a nun before her marriage to Henry I). There is little proof, however, that inheritance rights in general were one of the causes of the civil war.
One theory used to explain Stephen’s desertion by his barons is the ‘tenurial crisis’ whereby uncertainties in inheritance law that were not regulated until the next reign threatened many magnates with dispossession. Yet the three leading magnates who prosecuted the conflict, Robert of Gloucester, Miles of Gloucester and Brian FitzCount, were in receipt of Stephen’s confirmation of their holdings as granted under Henry I and the contention that inheritance law was not ratified in England until Henry II has been challenged. Nor, beyond the Empress’s own claim, did they themselves have any particular interest in women’s inheritance. Anxieties about what was very much a gender issue might be read on another level: that the war was not fought to determine the rights or wrongs of a specific view of land transmission, but as a manifestation of scruple, in which self-interest came to require a bulwark of ideology.10
Yet if ‘no concerns about inheritance customs pre-programmed men to defect from Stephen’,11 and they were therefore not hoping for reform of those customs under the Empress, it does not automatically follow that the magnates were sanguine about the future implications of such a precedent. Another way of looking at the gender aspects of the debate about the Empress’s rights and comparing her position with that of Matilda of Boulogne is to consider the way in which their conduct was perceived. As the Life of St Margaret of Scotland demonstrates, women who wielded power could be lauded, rather than perceived as transgressive, provided that power was modified within a context of appropriately feminine piety and submissiveness. Gilbert Foliot’s praise of the Empress emphasises precisely such qualities (the italics are this writer’s):
In accordance with her father’s wishes she crossed the sea . . . married there at her father’s command and remained there carrying out the duties of imperial rule virtuously and piously until, after her husband’s death, not through any desperate need or feminine levity, but in response to a summons from her father, she returned to him. And though she had attained such high rank . . . she was in no way puffed up with pride, but meekly submitted to her father’s will and on his advice took a second husband . . . In all this you will not find any cause why she should have been disinherited.
Implicitly, Empress Matilda’s fitness to rule is grounded here in her obedience, meekness and submissiveness to her father (and, the repeated emphasis conveys, to her Heavenly Father), and it follows that in pursuing her claim she was not acting with a ‘masculine’ lust for power, but motivated by the ‘feminine’ qualities of compliance and duty. The Gesta Stephani provides an interesting counterpoint. In this instance, even the usually antipathetic writer of the Gesta is compelled to praise Empress Matilda for her bravery. However, he does so by highlighting her masculine qualities: ‘The Countess of Anjou, who was always above feminine softness and had a mind steeled and unbroken in adversity . . .’ It was these traits - which, as Marjorie Chibnall has so rightly pointed out, would not have been as greatly criticised had they been displayed by a man - that were to prove disastrous to the Empress’s hopes.
Initially, the Empress had cause for optimism. After just one month in England, her supporters had organised and taken control of the southern marches and the Severn Valley. On 7 November 1139, Robert of Gloucester successfully attacked Gloucester. Meanwhile, Stephen was busy putting down sporadic uprisings throughout the country. He and Matilda kept Christmas together at Salisbury, and in February Matilda travelled to France for a ceremony that had great propaganda value for the royalists: the betrothal of her fourteen-year-old son Eustace to Constance, the sister of Louis VII of France. This strengthened the alliance agreed between the French and English kings in 1137, and was obviously a powerful demonstration of the French King’s faith in the future of Stephen’s dynasty. Matilda’s role in negotiating this marriage has been seen as establishing a precedent for the involvement of queens in the alliances of their children.12
The following August, Matilda was once more employed as her husband’s diplomatic representative at a putative peace conference in Bath. She and Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury represented the royalist party, while Robert of Gloucester spoke for the Empress. Bishop Henry of Winchester, King Stephen’s younger brother, then took the proposals to King Louis, who was now concerned for the future of his sister as well as his own rights as the overlord of Normandy. Stephen himself found them too disadvantageous and rejected them. His unwillingness to come to terms exacerbated the unrest in England, but it was not until the siege of Lincoln the following year that the Empress decisively gained the upper hand.
Stephen’s actions between August 1139 and February 1141 have been criticised for incoherence, but though it may at first appear that he rushed about the country desperately fighting fires, his policy of ‘administrative’ earldoms theoretically left him free to lend his presence where it was most urgently required. When Ranulf, Earl of Chester seized the castle of Lincoln just before Christmas 1140, Stephen’s response was to try to create a similar role for him. In return for the settlement of a land claim in the region, the earl and his brother were left in charge of the castle. But Stephen did not trust Ranulf and a month later he reneged on his promise. No chronicler offers a precise reason for his change of heart, but John of Hexham gives an account of a quarrel between Ranulf and Henry of Scotland over disputed rights in Carlisle and Cumberland. According to this story, Queen Matilda, advised that Ranulf was planning to kidnap Henry, arranged for him to travel safely back to Scotland with a strong bodyguard. There is little more to this version of events than rumour, though it is notable that it acknowledged the significance of the Queen’s intervention. However, it does hint at an awareness that Ranulf was generally belligerent. His ambitions in Lincolnshire were highly threatening to other magnates, and Stephen may have retracted the concessions he had granted him after a hostile reaction from other lords at his Christmas court.
The battle for Lincoln was one of the most decisive events of the civil war. Orderic Vitalis notes that two women were closely involved in the original seizure of the castle by the Earl of Chester. The countesses of Chester and Lincoln, Matilda and Hawise, distracted the castellan’s wife while Ranulf entered the castle as though he planned to do no more than collect his wife from her visit. A small detail, but one that illustrates how even women not possessed of queenly authority were able to do more to support their husbands’ strategies than standing by as anxious spectators. Stephen attacked Lincoln Castle on Candlemas, 2 February. It was considered an inauspicious day for a battle, as the feast marks the change in the Church calendar from the celebrations of the Nativity to the anticipation of the sorrows and privations of Lent. In the procession to morning Mass before the King rode out on his raid, Stephen dropped his candle and it broke. Such an interruption in the carefully choreographed liturgy was seen as another bad omen, but Stephen was determined. He made a good show in the mâlée, fighting with first his axe and then his sword, but he was ignominiously laid low by a well-aimed rock (so much for the glamour of chivalry), and taken prisoner.
Stephen was removed to Gloucester, where he met his cousin the Empress a week later, and then detained at Earl Robert’s fortress at Bristol. Matilda of Boulogne was campaigning in the south. She was in London in April, which suggests she had turned back in an attempt to hold the capital. There the Queen ‘made supplication to all, importuned with prayer, promises and fair words for the deliverance of her husband’.13 The Empress held an Easter court at Oxford, then progressed to Winchester, where she received a royalist delegation from London which included Matilda’s clerk, Christian. The Londoners petitioned for the King’s release, but the Empress slyly insisted that he was not a prisoner - how could a king be held prisoner by his own vassals? Matilda countered this by claiming that the archbishop of Canterbury would never accept the Empress without the specific permission of the King. Yet Stephen’s liegemen were turning to the Empress in increasing numbers. Crucial defectors were Earl Geoffrey de Mandeville, Hugh Bigod of Essex and Aubrey de Vere, the future Earl of Oxford. Mandeville’s declaration for the Empress, in return for which he was granted substantial concessions and rewards, particularly affected the Queen, as he held custody of the Tower of London, which Matilda was forced to quit in mid-May. Her new daughter-in-law Constance, though, was obliged to stay behind. Matilda retreated to Kent, which was safer and well positioned for communication with her county of Boulogne.
After a second conference with a party from London in June at St Albans, the Empress proceeded to Westminster. Initially, the citizens had been reluctant to receive her, as Matilda of Boulogne’s forces, under her Flemish captain William of Ypres, were laying waste to the land on the Surrey shore, but De Mandeville’s change of sides, and thus the possession of the Tower, smoothed the Empress’s path and she began to make plans for a crown-wearing ceremony at Westminster. It was at this point that she adopted the title of ‘Lady of the English’. The Gesta Stephani, however, considered her behaviour at Westminster far from ladylike. The crown appeared to be within reach, but it was her conduct that allowed it to slip from her grasp. To the Londoners, her behaviour seemed discourteous and stubborn, even downright pig-headed. She demanded large sums of money from the city and insulted its representatives when they turned her down. On her arrival at the palace, she had received petitioners, as was customary for a ruler, including envoys from Matilda of Boulogne who requested that Eustace be allowed to inherit King Stephen’s Continental holdings if he were not to become king. Failing to appreciate that a show of clemency and ‘feminine’ pacifism would win her vital support, the Empress refused outright. By 24 June, the Londoners had had enough of her, and decided to declare their loyalty to Queen Matilda. The city bells were rung as a signal to the people to storm the palace, and the Empress and her entourage made such a hasty escape that they were obliged to abandon their dinner.
At first King Stephen’s brother Bishop Henry had been prepared to come to an accommodation with the Empress, but the Westminster debacle was so distasteful to him that he withdrew his support. It was rumoured that the Empress was planning to make an illegal gift of the county of Boulogne to one of her champions, and the Bishop met with Matilda to reassure her, promising to work for the King’s freedom. To recover from the embarrassment of London and to stage a show of strength, the Empress held a court at Oxford, moving on in August to Winchester, where Bishop Henry had immured himself in Wolvesey Palace. Matilda rushed to her brother-in-law’s defence, arriving on 12 August to besiege the besiegers. Her supporters were now swelled by the earls of Essex and Pembroke, who had returned to the royalist camp, bringing a contingent of Essex and Suffolk barons with them, and after two days the Empress and Robert of Gloucester were hounded out of the city, the Empress riding astride her horse like a man for greater speed. She managed to reach Devizes, but Earl Robert, fighting in her rearguard, was taken by the Earl of Warenne.
Matilda of Boulogne now had a vital hostage of her own and the rival campaigns had reached a stalemate. Once again, women took the diplomatic lead. Matilda communicated with Robert’s wife Mabel, Countess of Gloucester, through messengers to negotiate an exchange of prisoners. Mabel, anxious for her husband’s safety, proposed easy terms for his return, while Matilda suggested that if Stephen were released, Earl Robert could be appointed royal justiciar. William of Malmesbury saw this as an attempt to bribe Robert into changing sides, but the Earl himself rejected both plans, his wife’s because it was motivated by her ‘too eager affection’, according to Malmesbury, and the Queen’s because his sister would never countenance it. Nevertheless, Matilda and Countess Mabel were able to come to an agreement about the fates of the two most powerful men in the country without their conduct being portrayed as arrogant or excessively ambitious. ‘It is striking that there is no disparaging comment, only recognition of their actions as peacemakers and indeed power brokers, involved in careful diplomacy.’14 They finally brokered a complex deal in which Matilda and her younger son William went to Bristol, remaining with Mabel as hostages for Stephen. Meanwhile, the King was liberated to travel to Winchester, where he freed Earl Robert. Robert then returned to Bristol to release the Queen, leaving his son William at Winchester with the King, who freed him when his own wife and child were released. During this exchange, Stephen and Gloucester had time for a polite, rather sportsmanlike chat, agreeing that neither should take the situation personally.
Support for the Empress among the barons now began to decline. A general proposition for their disenchantment has been termed ‘neutralism’, meaning that the self-interest of the magnates was no longer felt to be secure with the Empress and that they thought it wiser simply to withdraw. They had not come to her side out of chivalry, and they were not gallant now. ‘Matilda had shown at the height of her power that she had neither the political judgement nor the understanding of men to enable her to act wisely in a crisis.’15 The Empress was also dealing with a cunning politician in Matilda of Boulogne. To recover the loyalty of Geoffrey de Mandeville, Matilda granted him a charter at Canterbury, promising that he could retain the advantages bestowed on him by the Empress if he returned to the King’s side. Although Queen Matilda was an experienced diplomat who had commanded military campaigns, she was always careful to present herself as a supplicant: a mother seeking justice for her son, a loving wife concerned for her husband. She was conciliatory where the Empress was harsh, and she knew that a display of apparent weakness could count as a strength. As she sat beside him in her gold crown at their Christmas court at Canterbury, Stephen had every reason to be grateful for the intelligence and fortitude of his wife.
The King relied even more heavily on Matilda early in the next year, 1142. Although the Empress’s hopes had received a serious setback, the uprisings continued. Stephen and Matilda made a progress to York, where they were reconciled with Ranulf of Chester, but the King was ill throughout much of the spring and summer, suffering from lassitude and depression. A great army was mustered at York and then had to be sent home again because the King was too listless to determine how they should advance. Faced with her husband’s debilitation, Matilda became more active than ever. She travelled alone across the Channel and on 23 June held a court at Lens, in her county of Boulogne, in an attempt to raise funds and men. By the autumn, Stephen had recovered sufficiently to besiege Oxford, where the Empress was staying. He was no longer in a position to be gentlemanly, as he had been at Arundel three years before. The siege continued until December but the Empress made yet another escape, creeping out of the wintry city in a white cloak, invisible against the snow, and making her way to Abingdon accompanied by just a handful of knights. The Empress Matilda may have had unappealing manners, but she was gloriously brave.
From 1141 to 1147, Matilda of Boulogne based herself mainly in London. Her presence was important in retaining the loyalty of the city, and she was conveniently close to Dover to ensure that the crucial communications between Dover and Wissant remained accessible. During this period, 56 percent of Matilda’s attested and independent charters were made within forty miles of London and none more than eighty miles away. While Stephen trailed from siege to siege, Matilda supervised government business, and it has been judged probable that she was also responsible for the collection of revenues at the Westminster exchequer.
Oxford had surrendered after the Empress’s escape, but still the war dragged on. The next summer Stephen was defeated at Wilton by Earl Robert, who now controlled the territory to the west of Winchester. In Normandy, the King’s imprisonment after Lincoln had prompted the magnates to seek terms with the Empress’s husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, who was still pushing her cause along the duchy’s borders. Geoffrey campaigned stolidly in Normandy every year, and in 1144 he took Rouen and had himself invested as duke in April. The loss of Normandy was a bitter blow, and the only comfort Stephen could take from it was that gradually, the barons on both sides were losing interest in the fight for England.
Historians have suggested two dates, 1148 and 1150, as the beginning of the ‘magnates’ peace’, but Earl Robert’s death in October 1147 lends support to the earlier year, as his demise marked the collapse of even nominal party adherence. One by one, the lords simply gave up fighting. The Empress lingered on for four months with her small garrison at Devizes, where she had fled after her escape from Oxford, but early in 1148 she was back in Normandy. So irrelevant had she become by now that only one source mentions her departure. Gervase of Canterbury’s clerk reported approvingly that she had returned, a humbled wife, ‘to the haven of her husband’s protection’.
The careers of Matilda of Boulogne and the Empress Matilda had mirrored each other in many ways. Both women now chose to retreat from active politics and, following the example of their mothers, Matilda and Mary of Scotland, in the tradition of pious female royalty, they elected to live apart from their husbands and to embrace religious seclusion. The Empress opted for the priory of Nôtre-Dame-du-Pré, outside Rouen, for her retirement; after 1147 Matilda of Boulogne lived mainly in Canterbury at the monastery of St Augustine. It seems that Matilda had long felt the call of the contemplative life. As early as 1141, during the negotiations for Stephen’s release, she had proposed an unusual solution: that Stephen might emulate her own father and retire to a monastery, in which case she could have decided to do likewise. Alternatively, Matilda suggested, the King could live as a sort of permanent pilgrim in the Holy Land, where she could have accompanied him. Her interest in crusading and the Templars made this an attractive idea, though it was never pursued, and Matilda settled for a less adventurous manner of drawing closer to God.
In spite of her decision to devote herself to the Church, Matilda remained busy. Some indication of her social character can be inferred from the fact that she complained of the boredom of living among the monks, who observed a rule of silence. One occupation was the supervision of the building of Faversham Abbey, seven miles west of the priory, which Stephen founded in 1147 as a dynastic monument to the house of Blois. Faversham had had royal associations since the fifth century, and a lodging house, the Maison Dieu, was built in the twelfth century for the use of royal travellers as they passed between London, Dover and Canterbury. Few buildings remain at Faversham, and those that survive are of a later date, but excavations have shown that the church, dominated by a massive central tower, was of the impressive proportions typical of Norman architecture, its nave measuring 370 feet by eighty. Faversham never achieved the prestige Stephen planned for it, any more than did his own dynasty, but Matilda, her husband and their eldest son Eustace were all eventually buried there.
Until the end of her life, Matilda was never able entirely to ignore the demands of her position as queen. Although the Empress had left England, the pursuit of the succession had passed to the next generation, in the person of her son Henry Plantagenet, known as Henry FitzEmpress, the future King Henry II. While the marriage between the Empress and Geoffrey of Anjou was emotionally distant, with neither seeming interested in the other’s company beyond the requirements of duty, as a business partnership it was a success. The Empress offered Geoffrey the opportunity to consolidate and expand his Continental holdings and he supported her fully in Normandy. The couple had three sons, Henry, born at Le Mans in 1133, Geoffrey (1134) and William (1136), but did not live together after 1138. Henry was associated early with his mother’s claims. Between the Westminster rout and the defeat at Winchester, when she was attempting to consolidate support among the barons, she offered lands not only in England but also Normandy in exchange for their loyalty, and a charter of 1141 to Aubrey de Vere begins: ‘Henry, son of the daughter of King Henry, rightful heir of England and Normandy . . .’ Henry was seven when his mother sailed for England to make good her rights, and in 1142 he was brought over to join her, his presence a meaningful instrument in her campaign in that it demonstrated that should she achieve the crown, the succession was assured. When his father obtained the dukedom of Normandy in 1144, Henry returned to the duchy, where he remained until 1147.In March of that year, on his own initiative, the fourteen-year-old gathered a small party of knights and set off for England to fight for his mother, but his gallant gesture ended in embarrassment as he was forced to appeal unsuccessfully to both the Empress and Robert of Gloucester for funds. In the end, it was his uncle Stephen who, instead of imprisoning him, kindly bailed him out and he went back to Normandy in disgrace.
The Empress, her husband and three sons met at Rouen in 1148 to decide the next step in the Angevin strategy. If Henry wanted to make good his own claim after the Empress’s return to Normandy, he would have to deal with the problem of the rival heir, Stephen’s son Eustace. Eustace’s parents had begun to lobby for their son’s rights to be recognised. In 1147, when he was twenty-one, Stephen knighted him, and with Matilda’s consent he was given possession of the honour and county of Boulogne. Eustace himself was insecure about his title to the kingdom, which may have been a consequence of his mother’s request to the Empress at Westminster in 1140 that he should be granted at least Stephen’s Continental holdings, implying that his inheritance was less than assured. In any event, when Henry arrived in England in spring 1149, Eustace took it as a personal challenge. One commentator, John of Hexham, noted that their personal rivalry was so intense that they seemed to be fighting a duel for the kingdom.
Henry FitzEmpress held his first English court at Devizes, which was still pro-Angevin, on 13 April. Presumably to Eustace’s dismay, the Stephenite Gesta described Henry as the ‘true heir’. The Gesta author was reflecting the mood of the country, which was increasingly inclined to the view that the Angevins would prevail. From Devizes, Henry moved to the court of his great-uncle, David of Scotland, at Carlisle, where, in the presence of a number of significant magnates, he was knighted. This may have been intended as a symbolic gesture, rather than as a declaration of war, but during Henry’s return journey from Carlisle, Stephen ordered Eustace to garrison Oxford, and the two young men fought a campaign of skirmishes in the south-west. Eustace attempted to capture Devizes, and almost succeeded in taking Henry prisoner at Dursley, but Henry eluded him and managed to escape to Normandy in January 1150.
In response to the confrontation between Henry and Eustace, Stephen and Matilda took steps to have Eustace crowned in his father’s lifetime, a custom which was unfamiliar in the England of that period, but which had precedents among the Anglo-Saxon kings and also in the Capet dynasty in France. Indeed, it was a policy that Henry II was to enact with his own son. It required the consent of Theobald, the archbishop of Canterbury, with whom the royal couple had until recently enjoyed good relations. Stephen had appointed Theobald to the see in 1138, in preference to his own brother Bishop Henry, and in 1147 Theobald had personally selected the Queen’s confessor, prior Ralph of Holy Trinity Aldgate. In 1149, though, Theobald refused to consent to Eustace’s coronation. His direction came from the papal curia, which had changed its policy towards Stephen’s rule since 1136, when the King had received a vital gesture of support from Innocent II that effectively confirmed his right to the crown. The papacy had also been supportive when the Empress’s adherents had tried to contest his claim at the Lateran Council of 1139. But Innocent’s successors, Celestine and Eugenius, took a more neutral line. The official reasoning was that the curia accepted Stephen as de facto king, but did not necessarily recognise him as the rightful ruler. Eustace’s coronation, establishing his right to inheritance, would contradict this piece of careful casuistry. Theobald had already displeased Stephen by attending a papal council at Reims the previous year against the King’s express wishes and had been exiled for a while. Eugenius III had placed England under interdict, though Matilda still succeeded in hearing Mass at Canterbury, and she interceded with her husband for the archbishop, who lodged at the abbey of St Bertin outside Boulogne during his exile.
Matilda was particularly keen to see Eustace crowned, and after Theobald refused to be swayed she involved herself in the disputed election to the archbishopric of York. Stephen and the Pope had disagreed for some years over the installation to York of the papal candidate, Henry Murdac. The distinguished French cleric Bernard of Clairvaux had twice written to Matilda to ask for her intervention in the matter, the level of authority the Queen had achieved being shown in his reference to ‘the glory of your kingdom’, which acknowledged her as an equal partner with her husband. In order to mollify the Pope, Matilda persuaded Stephen to accept Murdac, who, in return, undertook to plead Eustace’s cause. According to John of Hexham, he achieved some limited success at the Curia in 1151, but much of the energy behind the plan had been Matilda’s, and when she died, it died with her. In the case of her second son, William, it does not appear even to have been considered.
Matilda’s last diplomatic mission took place in Flanders in 1150. Now that Louis VII, and his Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, were returned from crusade, Stephen sought to renew their anti-Angevin pact, and Bishop Henry visited Paris as an ambassador on his way to Rome. Matilda accompanied him as far as the border of Flanders, and the alliance was proposed, though an unusually bitter winter prevented a campaign from being fought. Matilda’s visit proved fruitful the next year, when Louis attacked Normandy from the north. However, the French king fell ill and the combined push against the Angevins collapsed when Geoffrey of Anjou and Henry FitzEmpress agreed a truce with France in 1151. Stephen held a great council in London at Easter 1152, which Matilda attended to try to rally support. The magnates were persuaded to swear an oath to Eustace, but both the King and the Queen knew how much that was worth. Increasingly, it seemed that only Henry FitzEmpress could unite the weary country.
Matilda was spared the inevitable collapse of her hopes for her husband and son when she died, at Headingham Castle on 3 May 1152, while on a visit to her friend and former lady-in-waiting Euphemia, Countess of Oxford. It was obvious that the Queen’s illness was fatal, but there was just enough time to summon her confessor, the prior of Holy Trinity Aldgate, who administered the last rites, and Stephen himself, who confirmed a grant to Holy Trinity on her behalf from Headingham. Matilda’s body was transported in state to London, then on to Faversham. Hers was the first royal burial at the abbey she and Stephen had hoped would celebrate the founding of a new English royal dynasty. She was joined there the next year by Eustace, who died of a seizure -some said brought on by rage - in August 1153.
King Stephen and Henry FitzEmpress met at Winchester on 6 November 1153. Henry paid homage to Stephen and was designated his heir. William of Boulogne, Matilda’s second son, paid homage to Henry, who swore to provide for him honourably. (Mary, the surviving royal daughter, had not married: she became a nun at St Sulpice, Rennes.) Stephen and Henry then travelled together to Westminster, where they were received by rapturous crowds who could hardly believe that peace had descended at last. The two enemies kept Christmas together, then travelled to Oxford, Dunstable, St Albans, London and Canterbury, where they heard Mass. Every stage of their journey was marked by public celebration and as much magnificence as Stephen’s drained resources could muster. In March Henry returned to Normandy. All he had to do now was wait for Stephen to die.
Perhaps it is not going too far to suggest that Stephen’s acquiescence in bestowing the kingdom on Henry was in some way related to his wife’s death. He was susceptible to depression, as his illness ten years before had shown, and ‘what Stephen could not replace was the Queen’s steadfastness of purpose and steady judgement’.16 Politically, there were sound and complex reasons why the Winchester agreement made sense, but after Matilda’s death and the shocking loss of Eustace, Stephen no longer had the emotional resources or purpose to go on struggling. He did not display any bitterness, and outwardly remained cheerful and active, but he was exhausted and grieving, and in October 1153 he began to suffer from a disease of the bowel and internal bleeding. He died at Dover on 25 October, attended by Prior Ralph and Archbishop Theobald, and was laid to rest with his wife and son at Faversham.
In many ways, Matilda of Boulogne was a model consort. As a regent, diplomat, warrior, counsellor and mother, she occupies a position alongside with her predecessors Matilda of Scotland and Matilda of Flanders at the apogee of English queenship, after which many historians concur that the power invested in the office began to decline. Yet she also lived in a period where writers were beginning to reconfigure their attitudes to feminine authority.
Anglo-Saxon commentators generally accept that women could participate in war and government, betraying ‘not the slightest surprise . . . when a woman is learned, devout, an able administrator or a brave fighter’.17 Matilda of Boulogne was all of these things. However, post-Conquest attitudes to gender shift to a point at which any sign of such capabilities in remarked upon with astonishment and viewed as exceptional. ‘Masculinity’, in terms of categorising the characteristics of women, becomes amorphous. In one sense it can be positive, in that if a woman does anything so unusual as to suggest she might have a brain it must be because she possesses ‘manlike’ qualities, but in another it can be negative, disturbing, unqueenly. The Empress Matilda found herself damned in the chronicles on both counts. Henry of Huntingdon reduces her brilliant escape from the siege of Oxford to ‘a woman’s trick’, while William of Newburgh condemns her ‘intolerable feminine arrogance’ - intolerable, that is, in a woman. The Gesta author claims that she ‘unsexed’ herself: ‘She began immediately to assume the loftiest haughtiness of the greatest arrogance - not now the humble gait of feminine docility, but she began to walk and talk more severely and more arrogantly than was customary, and to do everything herself.’ Comportment that was acceptable, even demanded, in a powerful man, but derided in a woman.
What Matilda of Boulogne achieved was a means of regulating her conduct in comparison with her rival’s in a way that successfully manipulated the new, post-Conquest model of queenly femininity. The Gesta describes her as ‘astuti pectoris virilisque con-stantiae femina’ - having the virile, courageous breast of a man, but the constancy or fortitude of a woman. Like the Empress, her courage made her manlike’, but her conduct was tempered by an acceptable level of conventional femininity. It is interesting to speculate what might have become of England’s first putative queen regnant had she been possessed of Matilda of Boulogne’s diplomatic feminine modesty during those tense days at Westminster. Neither the Empress nor Matilda succeeded in their ambitions, and Matilda’s husband is one of the great, if misunderstood, failures of English kingship. Matilda herself, though, was never anything less than a great queen.