It is a measure of the peculiarity of Matilda’s position in 1135 that we know so little about her. Her contemporaries, whether friends, enemies or neutral observers, struggled to decide how to handle or to judge her, how to place her within a political narrative that expected its chief protagonists to be male. As a result, she is an insubstantial, inconsistent presence in the chronicles, rarely seen in more than two dimensions, often disconcertingly portrayed as a marginal figure in her own story.
We can only guess what she looked like. Her father Henry, William of Malmesbury tells us, was ‘more than short and less than tall’, a vigorous, thickset man with receding black hair, a steady gaze and an unfortunate tendency to snore. Her mother, Edith-Matilda of Scotland, meanwhile, was ‘a woman of exceptional holiness, and by no means negligible beauty’. Although William puts no specific features to these royal good looks, he shows us the pious queen walking barefoot in church during Lent in penitential humility, and wearing a hair-cloth shift under her elaborate gowns. But, master of the thumbnail portrait though he was, William of Malmesbury’s sketch of Matilda herself is uncharacteristically opaque, a somewhat impersonal coupling of her parents’ most striking qualities: she ‘displayed her father’s courage and her mother’s piety; holiness in her found its equal in energy, and it would be hard to say which was more admirable’.
In part, of course, this arm’s-length treatment of Matilda’s character stems from the fact that she was an unknown quantity in England when she crossed the Channel at her father’s side in September 1126 for the first time in more than sixteen years. She was English-born, probably in February 1102 at Sutton Courtenay, a manor house near the ancient town and abbey of Abingdon in Oxfordshire, and seems to have lived in England for the first eight years of her life, although reliable information about her upbringing is almost entirely lacking. We know that her intelligent, capable mother rarely accompanied the king to Normandy, instead spending most of her time at the royal palace of Westminster, a mile and a half westwards along the Thames from London’s city walls, where Matilda’s flamboyant uncle, William Rufus, had built the largest great hall England had ever seen to house his marble throne. We cannot take it for granted that Matilda lived at Westminster with her mother – royal children rarely spent all or even most of their time in close proximity to their parents – but it seems likely that the queen’s cultured household, with its profound religious sensibility, provided the defining context for Matilda’s education.
Matilda’s mother tongue, like that of her parents and her peers, was Norman French, but she learned to read in Latin, the language of the Church, of international diplomacy, and of literate culture in England after the Conquest had obliterated Old English literary traditions. We might also hope, for her sake, that she was well prepared for her future as a royal bride, since it was a role she was expected to take up, in public at least, when she was no more than a child.
She was only six years old when the most eminent king in western Europe, Heinrich V of Germany, sought her hand in marriage. The kingdom of Germany was an agglomeration of states under the rule of a monarch chosen by a select group of the most powerful German noblemen and archbishops (albeit that, as in England, the hereditary principle proved hard to resist, so that Heinrich was the fourth heir of the Salian dynasty in direct succession to wear this supposedly elective crown). The German ruler was known not only as Rex Teutonicorum – king of the Germans – but also as Rex Romanorum – king of the Romans – in recognition of the fact that his power extended over what remained of the Western Roman Empire after its split from the Byzantine East, lands which included not only Germany but northern Italy, Burgundy, Austria and Bohemia. And the man who was elected king of the Romans could claim the right to be crowned by the pope in a ceremony which would elevate him from a mere king to the status of emperor, a title conferring on its holder a unique authority within western Christendom.
For Matilda’s father, King Henry, whose family had held the crown of England for less than fifty years and whose own controversial claim to the throne was not yet established beyond all challenge, this alliance with a monarch who would follow in Charlemagne’s footsteps as ruler of the Western Roman Empire was an enticing prospect – one for which he was more than prepared to send his small daughter overseas, and with her a large amount of money. And it was England’s wealth that made the match so appealing for Heinrich, whose authority over lands stretching from the Baltic to the Adriatic was not matched by his cashflow. The deal was done in the summer of 1109:seven-year-old Matilda was betrothed to the German king by proxy at a magnificent meeting of her father’s court, and it was agreed that, along with the hand of his child-bride, Heinrich would receive ten thousand silver marks, the same immense amount for which Robert Curthose had pawned the duchy of Normandy to William Rufus just thirteen years before.
Matilda had only a few months left to enjoy the familiarity of life in England. She had just passed her eighth birthday in February 1110 when she said goodbye to her parents, her brother and her home, and set sail for Boulogne, accompanied by a distinguished retinue of aristocrats and clergymen. They rode beside her carriage – its embroidered cushions doing little to ease the jolting of the wooden chassis on the wheel-axles – two hundred miles eastward, over the flat plain of Flanders and across the western borders of her future husband’s empire into the duchy of Lower Lorraine. There, in Liège, a great city ruled by a powerful prince-bishop, Matilda for the first time met the man to whom she was promised in marriage.
Heinrich was twenty-four years old. It was four years since he had become king of Germany in succession to his father, Heinrich IV, whose reign had been blighted by bloody conflict over the extent of his royal authority, both with the nobility of Saxony and with the pope. He had been excommunicated in the course of this struggle, and as a result his corpse still lay unburied in an unconsecrated side-chapel of the imperial cathedral at Speyer, awaiting reconciliation in death with the papacy against which he had fought so bitterly in life.
But the start of his son’s rule was not marred by such battles. The new young king had allied himself with his father’s enemies two years before the old king’s death, and, with their support, his accession brought a temporary peace to the Empire. The task that Heinrich now faced was to rebuild the power of his crown. In theory, his authority reached from Hamburg in the north to Rome in the south, from Lyons in the west to Vienna in the east. In practice, however, he needed to ride to Rome at the head of an ostentatiously imposing entourage – a retinue which might, as circumstances dictated, take on the form of an army – to stamp his rule on his Italian territories and to secure his coronation as emperor at the hands of the pope. For that, he needed money; and so his little bride, who would bring him such a great dowry, was graciously and warmly received.
For the next few months Matilda accompanied her future husband on imperial progress, first of all to the graceful city of Utrecht in the Netherlands, more than a hundred miles north of Liège. There, at Easter, the royal couple were formally betrothed once again, in person this time, and Heinrich endowed his wife-to-be with rich gifts and lands reflecting her status as his consort. The court then moved along the valley of the Rhine to Cologne, Speyer and Worms, before arriving at Mainz, the foremost archiepiscopal see of all Germany, where preparations were under way for Matilda’s coronation. At eight, she was too young to become a wife, but not to be recognised as a queen: a solemn betrothal was as binding in the sight of the Church as the marriage vows to which she had committed herself for the future, so that contemporaries saw no incongruity in the fact that Matilda would receive her crown some years before her wedding ring.
Mainz, like Speyer and Worms, was home to one of the three great Kaiserdome, imperial churches built in monumental red sandstone on an awe-inspiring scale. The Romanesque cathedral at Mainz had an inauspicious history: fire had gutted the building on the day of its inauguration almost exactly a century earlier, and in 1081 another devastating blaze had undone the painstaking repairs. But, thanks to Heinrich IV, a new octagonal tower now soared over the nave as his small daughter-in-law arrived in ceremonial procession on 25 July – the feast day of St James the Apostle, whose mummified hand was preserved among the priceless relics in the royal chapel – to be crowned Germany’s queen. A new archbishop had not yet been appointed to the see of Mainz after the death of the last incumbent in 1109, so that it was the archbishop of Trier who carried Matilda delicately in his arms while the archbishop of Cologne anointed her with holy chrism and placed a crown (which was almost certainly too large, as well as too heavy, for a child) on her young head.
The ritual was designed to impress all those present, the eight-year-old girl at its centre as well as the assembled onlookers, with its potent blend of the sacred and the majestic. It was therefore with a powerful sense of her royal duty and dignity that Matilda left Mainz for Trier, a little less than a hundred miles westward, to learn what it was to be a German queen. Her education there was overseen by the prelate who had held her during her coronation, Archbishop Bruno, one of her future husband’s closest and most trusted counsellors, a man described by the French statesman and chronicler Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis as ‘elegant and agreeable, full of eloquence and wisdom’. Trier was a Roman city, the oldest in Germany, lying in the valley of the Moselle river between low wooded hills, and its cosmopolitan Franco-German culture provided the ideal setting for this Norman princess to learn the language, laws and customs of her newly adopted home.
While Matilda studied under Archbishop Bruno’s careful guardianship, Heinrich put the treasure she had brought as her dowry to immediate and productive use. The royal couple’s betrothal at Utrecht in April had doubled as an opportunity for the king to begin the process of assembling forces for his planned expedition to Rome, and in August he crossed the Alps at the head of a vast following – Abbot Suger and Orderic Vitalis suggest a figure of thirty thousand knights, which, even allowing for evocative exaggeration, implies an exceptionally intimidating host – that was equipped and provisioned by Matilda’s silver.
Relations between Heinrich and Pope Paschal II had deteriorated badly since the king’s accession, over the bitterly contested question of investiture – the competition between Church and state for control of the creation of bishops, a running battle that was the focal point of a broader war over the relative powers of spiritual and temporal authority. Despite Paschal’s initial hopes, Heinrich had proved no more willing to yield to claims of a papal monopoly on investiture than his excommunicated father, and the pope therefore refused to crown him emperor unless he changed his mind. Heinrich had a ready answer: his soldiers seized Paschal and sixteen of his cardinals and held them all in close confinement for two months until they capitulated. Under this peculiarly irresistible form of persuasion, Paschal confirmed his royal enemy’s right to invest bishops with the ring and crozier of episcopal office; and on 13 April 1111, in the echoing basilica of St Peter in Rome, the pope’s unwilling hands placed the imperial crown – an octagonal diadem of gold studded with jewels and cloisonné enamelwork, enclosed by a golden arch and surmounted by a jewelled cross – on the new emperor’s head.
The conflict was far from over. Once Heinrich and his army had returned to Germany, the papal council lost no time in repudiating the concessions he had extorted by force. The imperial coronation was a sacred rite that could not be undone, but, while hostilities continued, it was abundantly clear that the emperor’s bride could not hope to be crowned in her turn as his empress.
She could, however, expect to become his wife. In January 1114, just before her twelfth birthday – twelve being the canonical age at which girls were permitted to enter into the sacrament of marriage – Matilda and Heinrich finally took their vows in the towering cathedral at Worms on the western bank of the Rhine. The sheer grandeur of the celebrations, the most opulent gathering of the German court in a generation, defied the descriptive powers of the chroniclers. Five archbishops, thirty bishops and five dukes witnessed the ceremony, each attended by an ostentatious entourage; ‘as for the counts and abbots and provosts’, one well-informed but anonymous commentator continued,
no one present could tell their numbers, though many observant men were there. So numerous were the wedding gifts which various kings and primates sent to the emperor, and the gifts which the emperor from his own store gave to the innumerable throngs of jesters and jongleurs and people of all kinds, that not one of his chamberlains who received or distributed them could count them.
Matilda’s performance on this intimidatingly magnificent occasion was immaculate. She was ‘a girl of noble character’, the anonymous chronicler remarked, ‘distinguished and beautiful, who was held to bring glory and honour to both the Roman Empire and the English realm’. It was also the beginning of her public life at her imperial husband’s side. It seemed an unlikely partnership: a girl scarcely on the brink of adulthood, married to a man of twenty-eight, a monarch who was not only able and astute but ruthlessly and relentlessly hard-headed. But observers were in no doubt of how well the relationship worked. ‘The emperor loved his noble wife deeply,’ wrote Orderic Vitalis; and, even if we choose to be a little more cynical than the conventions of courtesy allowed in describing the emotional dynamics of this dynastic alliance, it remains clear that Matilda won the trust and the respect of her powerful husband.
Her own family supplied the best of models for a royal consort. Her mother, Edith-Matilda, had been a devoted and skilful partner in Henry I’s regime, while her maternal grandmother, Margaret of Scotland, was so widely revered for her piety that she was later declared a saint. But Matilda, who had never known her grandmother, had not seen her mother since she was eight years old, and her success as Heinrich’s queen owed as much to the resilient intelligence of her own response to the role as it did to her genes or the training of her earliest years.
A complex task lay ahead of her. To be the consort of a ruler was not to be a mere appendage; she was not simply a decorative ornament to his court, or the passive embodiment of a political treaty. A crowned queen shared in her husband’s majesty – she, too, had been anointed by God, her authority given divine sanction – and, if she was necessarily a satellite of his power, she nevertheless had an influential part to play in his government. She might emphasise the spiritual dimensions of his rule rather than the worldly preoccupations that took the lion’s share of a king’s attention: the saintly Margaret of Scotland, for example, was unusual only in the extent, not the fact, of her religious devotion. She might serve as his representative when he could not be physically present, as Edith-Matilda had done with distinction in England during the years King Henry spent across the Channel in Normandy. And she might temper his justice with mercy, her intercession enabling her husband to moderate the harshness of the punishments he inflicted without compromising the respect in which his judgements were held.
This, in fact, was the first formal queenly role which the eight-year-old Matilda had been called upon to play, in ritual form, on her arrival from England in 1110, when she was asked at Liège to intercede for a disgraced nobleman, Godfrey, count of Leuven and duke of Lower Lorraine (whose daughter Adeliza would become her stepmother ten years later). And from 1114, when she left her schoolbooks behind after the extravagant spectacle of her wedding to take her place at her husband’s side, she fulfilled her duties as a sponsor of petitions and supplications with a dignity and grace that would later inspire her German subjects to remember her as ‘the good Matilda’.
But she could not be insulated for long from the Empire’s dangerous instability. Her husband, like his father before him, faced armed rebellion in Saxony and the Rhineland, while conflict with the Church now loomed menacingly on German soil. Archbishop Friedrich of Cologne – the man who had touched holy oil to Matilda’s forehead at her coronation, and hitherto one of Heinrich’s most loyal ecclesiastical supporters – finally abandoned the emperor in 1114, his theological conscience finding common cause with his territorial ambition. Pope Paschal had already sanctioned the emperor’s excommunication three years earlier, but now, in April 1115, the archbishop formally pronounced the dread sentence of anathema at Cologne, where imperial forces had been defeated by a rebel army only a few months before. A formidable faction within the German Church now held that their emperor had been excluded from the community of the faithful. All those who had sworn homage and fealty to him, they declared, were no longer bound by their oaths.
If Heinrich had any doubt about the need to return to Italy to tackle the poisonous conflict between the Roman Empire and the Holy See at its source, it was dispelled three months later, when news came of the death of Matilde of Tuscany, countess of Canossa.La gran contessa, at almost seventy, had become a legend, ‘the daughter of Peter and the faithful handmaid of Christ’, according to the great reforming pope Gregory VII. Heir to vast estates in northern Italy stretching across the Lombard plain from the Apennines to the Alps, the countess had been the pope’s most devoted ally through forty years of violent struggle between the papacy and the Empire. From her impregnable fortress at Canossa, perched high on a spur of the north face of the Apennines looking over the plain to her nearby cities of Reggio and Modena, she rode with her troops against the Emperor Heinrich IV, standing in her stirrups with her father’s sword in her hand, the war-cry ‘For St Peter and Matilde!’ ringing around her.
Heinrich V had learned the lesson of his father’s inability to defeat Matilde, opting for conciliation instead of confrontation. He visited her respectfully at Bianello, the castle in the foothills to the north-east of Canossa that stood sentinel for the fortress, and appointed her his lieutenant in Liguria, swearing that ‘in the whole earth there could not be found a princess her equal’. His strategy paid off in 1115 when the dying countess – who, though twice married, had no children – named him her heir. This was an unprecedented opportunity to impose imperial rule in Italy, but it would have to be taken swiftly, before the pope, to whom Matilde had previously promised her lands, could act to stop him.
By the end of February 1116 the emperor’s forces were ready. When he left Augsburg at the head of his army, his fourteen-year-old wife was with him. Soldiers, horses, carts loaded with arms and provisions, and carriages for Matilda and her ladies travelled more than three hundred miles across the Alps, over the Brenner Pass, a prehistoric pathway that had become a regularised road when the Roman Empire expanded inexorably northward through the mountains. It was the lowest and easiest of the eight major Alpine passes, and an expedition that included the might of an imperial army had no need to fear the bandits who lay in wait by the roadside to relieve merchants and pilgrims of their possessions. But low and easy were relative terms in an Alpine crossing, and strength in numbers offered no cushion against the implacable landscape. Even swaddled in furs, Matilda could not escape the rawness of the thin air as she gazed up at the massive snow-drifted peaks that overshadowed their labouring convoy.
There could have been no greater contrast between the wildness of the mountains and the comfort of their reception in Italy: a forty-eight-hour stay amid the sumptuous luxury of the doge’s palazzo in Venice, behind crenellated walls and colossal towers that proclaimed La Serenissima’s mastery of the sea. From there, the emperor and his queen travelled south-west to Padua and Mantua before arriving outside the forbidding ramparts of Countess Matilde’s Apennine fortress at Canossa. Heinrich was shrewd enough to recognise that generosity and compromise were the surest ways to win support from those who had suffered under the harsh inflexibility of the countess’s rule, and he was welcomed inside Canossa’s gates, his young wife warmly greeted as a noble successor to her formidable namesake.
It was a whole year before the emperor felt confident enough of his hold on the regions of Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany to move towards Rome. But despite Heinrich’s efforts at diplomacy, Pope Paschal could not contemplate a second encounter with an imperial army with equilibrium. He withdrew the papal curia eighty miles to the south-east, to the magnificent abbey at Montecassino first founded by St Benedict almost six hundred years earlier, leaving Heinrich to take control of the holy city just before Easter 1117. It was a hollow victory: the emperor staged a triumphal procession through the Roman streets, but could not convince a single cardinal to participate in the elaborate ceremonies of crown-wearing that, by custom, marked the emperor’s presence in Rome on a great feast day of the Church.
Heinrich turned instead to Maurice Bourdin, the French-born archbishop of the Portuguese see of Braga, whom Paschal had sent to him as an envoy. A controversial and fiercely ambitious man, Bourdin lost no time in abandoning his allegiance to the pope in order to seize the chance of becoming indispensable to the emperor. Despite the fact that the only bridge over the Tiber was controlled by Pope Paschal’s supporters from their vantage point in the immense circular stronghold of the Castel Sant’Angelo, the imperial entourage managed to cross the river by boat to reach St Peter’s basilica. There, perhaps on Easter Sunday, and certainly again at Pentecost seven weeks later, Archbishop Bourdin placed an imperial crown on fifteen-year-old Matilda’s head as she sat in state at her husband’s side.
This was not an imperial coronation. Bourdin was not the pope – indeed, he had been excommunicated before the Pentecost ceremony for his abandonment of the papal cause – and Matilda was not anointed as an empress. Officially, she remainedReginaRomanorum, the queen of the Romans; but, despite its irregularities, this ceremonial confirmation of her imperial status left a lasting mark. She had not been crowned by the pope, but she had been given a crown in the pope’s church at the side of her husband the emperor; and for the rest of her life she would be known to contemporaries as the Empress Matilda, Mathilda Imperatrix.
Her experiences in Italy shaped not only her sense of her own political standing, but her political education too. In 1118, when Heinrich was forced to return north to deal with rebellion in Germany, he left Matilda, at just sixteen, to rule his Italian territories in his stead. Now her task was not to mitigate the terrible majesty of her husband’s authority, but to embody it. Very few details have survived of her actions as regent, save for one cameo in a court at Castrocaro, set amid gently rolling hills thirty miles south of Ravenna, when she sat in judgement over the conflicting claims to a local church of a bishop and an abbey from the neighbouring towns of Forlì and Faenza. The climactic moment of the case came when the young queen rose to declare her decision in favour of the monastery, and to pronounce an imperial prohibition on anyone who dared challenge her ruling.
If we cannot recreate more details of her government in Italy in 1118–19, we can at least decipher its place among the formative influences of Matilda’s young life. Since crossing the Alps, she had had the opportunity to witness at close quarters a vicious political game, played on a European stage for the highest possible stakes in this world and the next. She had also, at Pentecost in St Peter’s, acquired a plausible claim to share in her husband’s unique imperial status. And she had now, for the first time, stood alone to exercise the royal authority in which she shared through her marriage. It was hardly surprising if, in the process, she absorbed a deeply felt sense of her own regality, together with an understanding that ruthlessness and reconciliation could each be vital weapons in a ruler’s armoury. All were, of course, entirely proper to her role as consort to the most exalted ruler in western Europe. But it was only a year after her return from Italy to Germany in the autumn of 1119 that the first hint came of what would prove to be a dramatically different future.
The drowning of her brother William in the wreck of the White Ship in November 1120 can hardly have been a devastating emotional blow. Eighteen months younger than Matilda, he had been only six when she left England, and, immersed in her new life in the Empire, she had not seen him or their parents for a decade. Nor did his death precipitate any immediate transformation in her position. Her father, King Henry, married again within a matter of weeks and kept his young bride at his side as he travelled through his domains, in the hope that she would give him a new heir. Even as the months went by without any sign that Queen Adeliza might have conceived, there remained the constant possibility of an imminent pregnancy. And certainly there was no public suggestion that Matilda, who was already a queen in a distant land, might figure in Henry’s plans for the succession.
But there are signs that Matilda’s husband and her father were well aware of her potential importance in Anglo-Norman affairs, should Henry’s hopes of a son be disappointed. When the bitterly destructive conflict between the Empire and the papacy was finally ended by a concordat agreed at Worms in 1122 (which distinguished between the spiritual and temporal investiture of bishops, assigning the former to the pope and the latter to the emperor), the settlement owed a great deal to the precedent of the English agreement over the same issue that King Henry had reached with the papacy in 1106. And in the years after 1122, the priority which Heinrich gave to the closeness of his contact with his father-in-law is striking.
Matilda had hoped to visit Henry in England that summer for the first time in twelve years, but, with the king waiting in Kent for her arrival, she had to abandon her journey when she was refused safe passage by the count of Flanders, a vassal of the French king who had every reason to fear being caught in a vice by closer cooperation between the Anglo-Norman realm on one side and the Empire on the other. Thereafter, despite the ongoing threat of unrest in the northern duchy of Saxony, the emperor threw himself into a hard-fought battle to wrest control of Utrecht from its bishop – a city which he had previously visited only once, in 1110, for his formal betrothal to his child-bride. Now, however, his repeated presence there – in 1123 at the head of an army – indicated the strategic significance of its location less than forty miles from a point on the North Sea coast where neither the count of Flanders nor the king of France could impede imperial communications with England.
Perhaps Heinrich envisaged a future in which England and Normandy might become the western limits of an extended empire over which he and Matilda would rule together, before uniting their territorial claims in the person of their son and heir. But no such child had yet been born when that dream was shattered. In the spring of 1125, visiting Utrecht for the third time in three years, the emperor was overwhelmed by an agonising and desperate illness that he had struggled to conceal. On 23 May, at the age of thirty-eight – ‘in the very flower of his age and victories’, wrote William of Malmesbury – Heinrich died. To this energetic, bold, ruthless man, Matilda had been a devoted wife and a trusted consort; the little Norman princess had become a German queen in quietly triumphant style. Now, at twenty-three, she was his widow, trusted in death, as she had been in life, when he bequeathed into her keeping the priceless crown, lance and sword that made up the imperial insignia.
But Matilda had no further part to play in the government of the Empire. Successful though her marriage had been in personal and political terms, it had failed as a vehicle for dynastic ambition. Had she had a son, she might have ruled in his name until he came of age, as her husband’s grandmother, the redoubtable Empress Agnes, had done for six years during the minority of Heinrich IV. But when the body of Heinrich V was solemnly conveyed three hundred miles along the Rhine to be buried beside his father, grandfather and great-grandfather at Speyer Cathedral, it was as the last emperor of the Salian line. Matilda handed over the imperial insignia to the archbishop of Mainz, who would preside over the election of the next king of Germany, and made her way to join her father in Normandy. In doing so, she abandoned the German lands with which her dead husband had endowed her, and turned her back on offers of marriage from among the ranks of the German princes. Instead, she returned, a German-speaking woman, to the Anglo-Norman court she had left as a French-speaking child a decade and a half earlier. She brought with her an imperial title, as well as more tangible riches from the imperial treasury, including two jewelled crowns of solid gold – one of them so heavy that it could only be worn when supported by two silver rods – and the mummified hand of the apostle St James, on whose feast day she had been crowned at Mainz Cathedral.
Some Anglo-Norman observers, orbiting around the gravitational fields of Rouen and Westminster, would later remark that the adult Matilda who returned to her childhood home was haughty and full of amour propre. Certainly – and unsurprisingly, given the nature of the surviving sources – they betray no sign of sympathy for a young woman who had lost her husband, her guiding influence since childhood, in a bereavement that abruptly uprooted her from everything that was familiar in her life for the second time in fifteen years. Nor is there any acknowledgement that there might be other, less censorious ways of describing the grandeur of a widowed queen who had been the consort of the greatest monarch in Europe for almost as long as she could remember, and had received an imperial crown in the papal basilica along the way. Now, it seemed, she might wear a crown in her own right as her father’s only surviving heir. Whatever view her countrymen might take of Matilda’s deportment, the crucial question was this: could a woman rule?
The simple answer was that there was no formal prohibition to prevent her from doing so. The very fact that the principles governing royal inheritance in the Anglo-Norman realm were so fluid, that precedents had scarcely had time or opportunity to take root since the violent upheavals of 1066, and that realpolitik rather than theoretical right had triumphed in the contested successions of 1087 and 1100, meant that there were few incontrovertible rules by which candidates for the throne might be either selected or excluded. One of those few rules, thanks to the Church’s increasingly strict control over the sacrament of marriage, was that illegitimate children no longer stood alongside their legitimate half-siblings in the line of succession. Despite the fact that King Henry’s father, the great Conqueror himself, had been bastard-born, neither Henry nor any of his nobles seems to have given serious consideration to the possibility that the eldest of his large illegitimate brood, Robert, earl of Gloucester, might claim the throne, even though the charismatic earl was already a proven leader on the battlefield and at his father’s court.
Bastardy, then, was a clear disqualification; being female, however, was not. There is no record of a single word of protest from any of the Anglo-Norman nobles when Henry required them to swear that they would support his daughter as his successor, should he die without a male heir. The only controversy that erupted in January 1127 was the result not of dissent spilling over but of eagerness to demonstrate loyalty, in the form of a squabble over who should be first in line to take the oath. That honour went to David, king of Scots, the younger brother of Henry’s first queen and Matilda’s maternal uncle, who had been brought up at the English court and held rich estates in England as well as the Scottish throne. Once the Scots king had sworn, however, there was a tussle for precedence between Robert of Gloucester, Henry’s illegitimate son, and the king’s favourite nephew, Stephen of Mortain, who had so narrowly escaped a watery grave in the wreck of the White Ship – ‘a noteworthy contest’, William of Malmesbury reported, from which Stephen, the son of Henry’s sister Adela, emerged victorious.
But a pledge of future allegiance imposed by a present and irresistibly formidable king did not guarantee that Matilda’s rule would ultimately be accepted. Within the unpredictable arena of European politics, where frontiers between rival territories were shaped and reshaped not only by the treacherous currents of international diplomacy but by the constant friction of war, a monarch was by definition a soldier, a feudal lord riding with sword unsheathed at the head of steel-clad knights. Despite the extraordinary exploits of Matilde of Canossa, that was a role for which no woman was trained, or could hope to inhabit without challenge. At the same time, a king’s duty to protect his lands and his people also required that he should be a judge and a lawgiver – and, while women might appear in court as litigants or witnesses, there was no official, public place for a woman in the process of making or enforcing the law.
Though Matilda was not explicitly barred from inheriting her father’s throne, then, the idea of what it meant to be a monarch remained inescapably male. That assumption was embedded even in the language of regality: a queen’s very title, from the Anglo-Saxon word cwén, meant the wife of a king, not his female equivalent. In Latin, meanwhile, a regina or imperatrix – a queen or an empress – was a female adjunct to a rex or imperator, derivative words representing a derivative form of authority.
Reality did not, of course, always conform so neatly to linguistic etymology or political theory. Matilda’s contemporaries in England hardly had far to look to find instances of women taking a lead in government, whether it was Queen Edith-Matilda presiding over meetings of her absent husband’s council, Empress Agnes holding the German Empire together in the name of her little son, or Matilda herself pronouncing judgement in her husband’s stead in the court at Castrocaro. True, women might be excluded from formal, public office in normal circumstances, but a queen was by definition exceptional, sharing in her husband’s unique authority through the sacrament of marriage and the consecration of her crowning.
But what made such manifestations of female rule fundamentally unthreatening to the maleness of kingship was the fact that this queenly authority was exercised in the name of a husband or son. And, for all that Matilda stood centre stage as the nobles swore their oaths in 1127, it was clear that the capacity of royal women to act as vessels for the transmission of kingly power lay at the heart of Henry’s plans for his daughter. She might still be supplanted in the succession if he and his young wife had a new son; but, if they did not, Matilda stood ready, a woman young and strong enough to replenish Henry’s lineage with sons of her own. Her destiny might yet lie in her role as the daughter and mother of kings, rather than as a monarch in her own right.
For that, however, she would need a new husband, and quickly – a requirement that became acute in the spring of 1127 with a spectacular revival in the fortunes of Henry’s exiled nephew William Clito, once the rival of William Ætheling, now a threat to the drowned prince’s sister Matilda. In March, Count Charles of Flanders – the man who had blocked Matilda’s path between the Empire and England five years earlier – was brutally murdered while he prayed before the altar of a Bruges church, and King Louis of France seized upon this unexpected chance to install William Clito in his place as ruler of the wealthy and strategically vital lowlands that lay between Boulogne and Antwerp. Matilda’s marriage was now a matter of critical importance defensively as well as dynastically, and the identity of her prospective bridegroom clear: Geoffroi, the son and heir of Count Foulques of Anjou whose lands, immediately to the south of Normandy, might either protect or threaten its borders.
A week before the wedding in June 1128, Geoffroi was knighted by his bride’s royal father in Rouen. He cut a gorgeous figure: fifteen years old, and nicknamed ‘le Bel ’ (‘the Fair’), he was lithe and athletic, his face ‘glowing like the flower of a lily, with rosy flush’, dressed in the finest armour with golden spurs and a sparkling gem-studded helmet, golden lions rearing proudly on his shield. Matilda, however, was hardly likely to be dazzled by a beautiful boy. Eleven years his senior, and with fifteen years’ experience of imperial politics under the belt of her silken gown, she angrily disdained the idea that she should marry an untested teenager whose status was so vastly inferior to her own. If, as seems entirely possible, her grief for the dead emperor was heartfelt, then the contrast between this arrogant adolescent and the father-figure that Heinrich had been can only have deepened her revulsion at the match. Hildebert of Lavardin, the learned and deeply pious archbishop of Tours, wrote to her in sorrow soon after the alliance was proposed to seek reassurance that she would no longer distress her father with her disobedience. But in the end, as the archbishop had foreseen, Henry was immovable, and, for Matilda, unhappy duty prevailed.
The unwilling bride endured three weeks of extravagant celebrations, from the wedding ceremony in the glorious new cathedral at Le Mans on 17 June until the couple’s tumultuous arrival in Angers, the capital of her new husband’s comté, where they were greeted by cheering crowds and a cacophony of bells. By that time it had at least been arranged that Matilda’s new title would be that of a countess, rather than a countess-in-waiting. Her father-in-law, Count Foulques, left immediately after the wedding to embark on the long journey to the Holy Land, abandoning Anjou to his son in favour of a crown of his own, acquired through a new marriage to Melisende, heiress to the recently established Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. However, Matilda remained unimpressed. Whenever she could, she avoided calling herself ‘countess’, preferring the overriding magnificence of her personal style as ‘empress, and daughter of the king of the English’.
Vows, however reluctantly taken, could not be forsworn. Nevertheless, within a year it seemed that the relationship might founder. Matilda’s personal antipathy to the match had not been enough to outweigh the political logic of an Angevin alliance to counter the threat of William Clito’s menacing presence in Flanders; but less than six weeks after the wedding that threat abruptly vanished when Clito was killed in a skirmish with a Flemish rival. It is possible that this welcome reversal of fortune prompted King Henry to reconsider the calculations he had made about his daughter’s future and the usefulness of her new husband – and, if Matilda’s prospects as a female heir remained profoundly uncertain, her husband’s position was more nebulous still. Did Geoffroi expect in time to become a king in right of his wife, as his father was about to do far away in Jerusalem? Certainly the young count, whose golden good looks concealed a will and temper to match Matilda’s own, was antagonised by Henry’s refusal to elucidate his plans for his new son-in-law. By the end of 1129 the couple were living apart. Matilda had left Anjou to return to her father’s city of Rouen in Normandy, and Geoffroi was loudly threatening to turn his back on the whole fiasco by departing on pilgrimage to the shrine of St James at Compostela in north-western Spain.
Still, reservations or no, Henry decided that he could not allow the marriage to disintegrate before it had served its purpose in providing him with a grandson. In the late summer of 1131 he brokered – or perhaps imposed – a reconciliation. A great council was held at Northampton on 8 September; there the Anglo-Norman nobles renewed their solemn oaths of allegiance to Matilda, who then returned with all honour to her husband in Anjou. Nothing had been clarified, but personal discontent had been suppressed, for the time being, under the pressure of an irresistible political imperative. And to good effect: on 5 March 1133 thirty-one-year-old Matilda gave birth at Le Mans to her first child, a healthy boy, Henry, who inherited his Angevin father’s red-gold hair and the vigorously stocky physique of the royal grandfather for whom he was named.
Little more than a year later, at Rouen in June 1134, the difficult birth of a second son, Geoffrey, almost cost Matilda her life. King Henry was at her bedside as she prepared for death by arranging her bequests and burial. Characteristically, she found the strength even in this extremity of illness to insist that her own wishes should be respected in the planning of her tomb, forcing her father to agree that she should be interred not, as he wanted, in the ancestral vault of the dukes of Normandy at Rouen Cathedral, but at the abbey of Bec in the peaceful valley of the Risle thirty miles south-west of the city, a spiritual home to which she had developed a particular devotion. Slowly, however, she recovered; and thereafter she and her husband found a way to work together as political partners united, if not by affection, then by their shared interest in their sons’ inheritance.
While Henry delighted in his sturdy grandsons, the dynastic triumph of their birth encouraged another attempt at self-assertion by their ambitious father. Geoffroi had succeeded in providing Henry’s daughter with legitimate male heirs, but he had received little encouragement to hope that the king envisaged him ruling England and Normandy at Matilda’s side. He had been granted no Anglo-Norman lands; he had not been invited to attend Henry’s court since his wedding; and he had not stood beside his royal wife as she received the oaths of the Anglo-Norman magnates in 1131. Four years later, it was beginning to grate heavily that he had not yet even taken possession of the castles along the border between Normandy and Anjou which he had been promised as a dowry along with Matilda’s hand. Henry, it seemed, had no intention of ceding control there to his son-in-law before his death. For Geoffroi, however, this royal refusal to hand over the fortresses was not only a slap in the face in terms of his already uncertain standing as Matilda’s husband, but a strategic blunder that might compromise his ability to make good her claim to Normandy and England whenever the time came to do so.
As relations deteriorated between these two tenaciously wilful men, Matilda found herself caught in the middle. This time, as the mother of two young sons – and perhaps with a sense that her powerful father might even now be keeping open his plans for the succession – she stood shoulder to shoulder with her once-despised husband. In the summer of 1135, as political disagreement escalated into the flexing of military muscle, she remained with Geoffroi in Anjou while Henry prowled the southern frontiers of Normandy, soldiers at his back. Father and daughter were still estranged in November when the king retired for a few days to his lodge at Lyons-la-Forêt to enjoy the hunt. It would prove to be his last journey.
The bitter conflict of his last months had been rooted in Henry’s refusal to surrender any of his territories to his presumptuous son-in-law while his grip on government, even at the age of sixty-seven, remained as strong as ever. But that did not mean that hiscommitment to the succession of his own bloodline had wavered. Now, when he suddenly found himself facing the unanswerable reality of death, he spent his final hours insisting on his daughter’s right to his throne. But the unexpectedness of his illness allowed no time for remorse or reconciliation, and Matilda was not at his side when he died during the night of 1 December.
The next morning, his body was carried to Rouen, where it was reverently received into the hushed cathedral. An expert embalmer set to work on the corpse (‘lest it should rot with lapse of time and offend the nostrils of those who sat or stood by it’, William of Malmesbury explained), removing the internal organs, which were placed in an urn and buried at the nearby church of Notre-Dame-du-Pré, before filling the body with aromatic balsam, covering it with salt and sewing it into layers of ox-hide. It was then transported west to Caen, just twenty miles from the Norman coast, to lie in state in the austerely beautiful abbey church of St Etienne which had been founded sixty years earlier by Henry’s father, the Conqueror, and now housed his tomb. There the bier rested for four weeks, until in January 1136 favourable winds at last allowed the monks of St Etienne to escort the body across the Channel to Henry’s own foundation, the great Cluniac abbey at Reading, for burial before the high altar of the still uncompleted church.
Matilda was not among the noble mourners at the funeral who made precious offerings and distributed alms for the good of her father’s soul. For, by then, her claims as his heir had already been dealt an unexpected and desperate blow.