The chroniclers who described the events of the winter of 1135–6 made little mention of Matilda. They had dutifully reported the oaths to support her taken by the Anglo-Norman nobility in 1127 and again in 1131, and William of Malmesbury – the most sympathetic to Matilda’s cause – recounted Henry’s deathbed declaration of her right to succeed him. But she is conspicuous by her absence from most contemporary narratives of the aftermath of her father’s last illness.
That historiographical absence reflects a physical one. Henry’s strategic plan for Matilda’s marriage left her stranded on the sidelines, with her husband in Anjou, rather than at the centre of the action precipitated by his sudden death. It was not that she was slow to react. In the first week of December, as soon as the shocking news came from Lyons-la-Forêt, Matilda rode north to seize control of the disputed border castles of Domfront, Exmes and Argentan that she had been promised as her dowry. She was so successful in her mission that her grip on this frontier territory was never shaken, and it was from these fortresses that her campaign to claim Normandy and England would be launched. For the moment, however, she could reach no further. Geoffroi was detained by rebellion in Anjou, while Matilda, it seems, was immobilised by a pregnancy that had begun only a few weeks before her father’s death. She established her household at Argentan, the four-towered castle that King Henry had built forty miles south of Caen to serve as a garrison, a treasury and a favourite lodge from which he could hunt in the nearby Gouffern forest. She gave birth there to her third son, William, on 22 July 1136.
By that time, however, events in England had moved decisively beyond her grasp. Had Matilda stood at the centre of the Anglo-Norman political stage when her father died, at Lyons-la-Forêt or Rouen, Westminster or Winchester, she would have been poised to assert her claim to his throne as his only legitimate child, born in the purple (that is, born to a reigning king just as her father had been, a circumstance of which Henry himself had made much in pressing his own right to the throne thirty-five years earlier), her title validated by Henry’s designation and the barons’ oaths of loyalty. As it was, she was barely even in the wings. At her dying father’s side, she might have made a credible figurehead for unity, taking on Henry’s weighty mantle as bringer of peace to his people. Instead, in her absence, the nobles had more than enough reason to look elsewhere for leadership.
For all Henry’s attempts to bind the future to his will, the only precedents so far established for the succession of the Norman kings of England favoured might over right. William Rufus in 1087 and Henry himself in 1100 had won the throne by acting swiftly to seize the crown, and then fighting to retain it. The legitimacy of their rule was born of their hold on power, not the other way round. In theory, Matilda’s claim to be her father’s heir was unanswerable, but in practice she was hampered by multiple disadvantages: she was female; her husband, whose status in relation to her claim to the crown remained deeply ambiguous, was a distrusted outsider among the powerful men she now sought to rule; and she was not there in person to counter escalating doubts and uncertainties. Meanwhile, the barons who had accompanied Henry’s corpse from Rouen to Caen went into conclave during the uncertain weeks while they waited for the wind to change for the long Channel crossing, and emerged with a proposal that the crown should go to an alternative candidate: Thibaud, count of Blois, son of Henry’s formidably able sister Adela.
Plausible though Thibaud might have been as a ruler – at forty-five, he was a seasoned soldier and experienced politician as well as a royal nephew – the magnates had overlooked the fact that the precedents of the half-century since the Conquest offered no more convincing support to the idea of a king chosen by election than they did to the prospect of the hereditary principle handing the crown to a king’s daughter. Someone else, however, had been paying much closer attention to the lessons of recent history. While the Norman barons debated and Matilda settled into her stronghold at Argentan, Thibaud’s younger brother Stephen, count of Mortain, left his wife’s county of Boulogne at speed with the smallest of retinues and took ship across the shortest stretch of the Channel from Wissant, Boulogne’s main port, to Dover. Without pausing to gather support or supplies, he rode the eighty miles to London as hard as he could. He was welcomed into the city before turning seventy miles south-west to Winchester, the historic capital of Anglo-Saxon England, where his youngest brother Henry was bishop. There Stephen took control of the heaped silver and gold in the royal treasury; and on 22 December, just three weeks after King Henry’s death, he was crowned king of England in the vast Romanesque cathedral by the hastily summoned archbishop of Canterbury.
It was 1100 all over again. The blueprint of Henry’s own coup d’état after his brother Rufus’s death in the New Forest could scarcely have been followed more assiduously. Speed and implacable resolve had won Henry the throne; and now Stephen had taken the crown for himself before the nobles at Caen or Matilda at Argentan had an inkling of what was happening.
In principle, Stephen’s credentials as a potential king were questionable. He was not even the senior male heir within his own family – his elder brother Thibaud had inherited their father’s lands and title as count of Blois – and his royal blood came in the female line from his mother Adela, which suggested no hereditary grounds on which Matilda’s claim, or that of her young sons, should be disbarred in favour of his own. Moreover, he had made great play of his loyal support of King Henry’s wishes over the succession, vying with his illegitimate cousin Robert of Gloucester to be first among the magnates to swear allegiance to Matilda as Henry’s heir in 1127. His victory in that precedence dispute, and his prominence among the noble oath-takers, now left him vulnerable to dangerous accusations of perjury, something of which his apologists among the chroniclers were all too well aware. (Chief among them, the anonymous author of the Gesta Stephani – The Deeds of Stephen – put into the mouth of the dying King Henry a conscience-wracked acknowledgement that the oath had been extorted from his barons, as a basis from which to argue that ‘any forcible exaction of an oath from anyone has made it impossible for the breaking of that oath to constitute a perjury’.)
But, while legalistic theorising might cast a shadow over Stephen’s pretensions, they were much more plausible in pragmatic and empirical terms. After all, King Henry himself had defied the hereditary claims of an older brother; and Stephen’s character and experience suggested that he might be capable of emulating his royal uncle in more ways than one. By now in his early forties, a decade older than his cousin Matilda, Stephen had made his career at Henry’s court. His uncle’s favour had made him a rich man – the king had given him the Norman county of Mortain in the south-west of the duchy as well as valuable lands in England that made him one of the greatest of the Anglo-Norman nobility – but Stephen had had to work for his rewards. Mortain was a frontier lordship, while his English estates had been seized from magnates who had opposed Henry in the name of Robert Curthose and his son William Clito. Stephen’s personal interests – now inseparable from his loyalty to his uncle – therefore threw him into the fight against Clito and his followers.
Years of campaigning in Normandy and Flanders had established Stephen’s reputation as an energetic and effective soldier, while his presence at Henry’s court as the king’s most favoured nephew made his name as a man of courtesy, generosity and charming good nature. The possibility that he might one day come closer still to the throne may even have been in Henry’s mind during the unsettling years between the wreck of the White Ship – in which Stephen had so nearly died – and Matilda’s unforeseen return from Germany as an imperial widow. Certainly, in early 1125 his power and wealth were exponentially increased when Henry arranged his marriage to Mathilde, heiress to the county of Boulogne, an alliance which brought him control of the vital cross-Channel trading route to the Low Countries, as well as vast estates in the south-east of England.
If the thought that his nephew might succeed him had indeed occurred to Henry, it was summarily discarded after his daughter’s return. But Stephen had not been so quick to relinquish the idea. Beyond that, we cannot know for certain what he was thinking on his lightning dash across ice-cold water and frozen roads to snatch the crown for himself – what form his ambition took, or how he justified his actions, beyond the likelihood that he sought to keep the count of Anjou, a neighbour and bitter enemy of the counts of Blois, from taking power in his royal wife’s name. Nor can we be sure why Matilda made no greater effort, no more expansive move, to stake her claim. William of Malmesbury offers only the maddeningly opaque observation that she delayed any attempt to return to England ‘for certain reasons’. Was her health badly compromised by her pregnancy even in its earliest stages? Did she think the nobles who had knelt before her to swear their loyalty would simply rally to her cause, leaving her waiting at Argentan for acclamation that never came? Or was it the reverse, a belief that her position could only be made good by more military might than she so far had at her disposal?
What we do know is that, amid the paralysing confusion that followed Henry’s death – news, after all, could travel only as fast as a horse could gallop, and might already be dangerously old when it arrived – it was Stephen who seized the moment. This apparently easy-going man tapped into a vein of implacable single-mindedness to offer decisive leadership at a moment when England and Normandy were teetering on the brink of chaos. (There was ‘no one else at hand’, the Gesta Stephani declared, ‘who could take the king’s place and put an end to the great dangers threatening the kingdom’.) And fortune smiled on a man who found himself in the right place at the right time. His home in Boulogne was within striking distance of the English coast; its strategic importance to the English wool trade, together with Stephen’s own experience of the wealthy cloth towns of Flanders, won him a warm welcome in the city of London; and his formidable brother Henry, as bishop of Winchester, was on hand to broker his acceptance by the Church and to smooth his path into the ancient seat of royal government.
Above all, the key to Stephen’s coup was the solemn ceremony that took place in the incense-clouded cathedral at Winchester on 22 December. A coronation was not merely – or not at all, in Stephen’s case – a pageant for public display; the service at Winchester was a hurried affair in the presence of scarcely any noblemen and only three prelates. Instead, it was a sacramental rite, which changed forever the man at its centre. Stephen entered the cathedral a claimant to the throne; he left it a king. Some might think him a wrongful king, and oppose his rule on those grounds – but they could not deny his kingship, which had taken effect at the moment when the archbishop had touched his head, breast, shoulders and arms with holy oil. At that instant, the interregnum that had begun when Henry took his last breath at Lyons-la-Forêt was ended.
In that instant, too, lay the seeds of civil war. Matilda was the only surviving child of her father’s marriage, who had been named his heir and received oaths of loyalty from his nobles. Stephen, meanwhile, had been anointed and crowned as Henry’s successor. Two distinct forms of royal legitimacy now stood in direct opposition to one another, embodied in two different people. And it was clear that these rival claims could be reconciled only in victory for one, and defeat for the other.
By the spring of 1136, it seemed as though Stephen had already won the fight with a single blow. Matilda, weighed down by her pregnancy at Argentan, her husband entangled in home-grown revolt in Anjou, was an irrelevance. In January, her cousin had stood in her place as chief mourner at her father’s lavish burial. Later that month, his control of the riches of the royal treasury, combined with his contacts in the fertile recruiting-ground of Flanders, enabled him to mobilise an army of mercenaries with astonishing speed against King David of Scotland, Matilda’s maternal uncle, who had overrun the English frontier from Carlisle to Newcastle as soon as he heard of Stephen’s coup. The menacing size of Stephen’s forces – ‘greater than any in living memory’, according to the chronicler Henry of Huntingdon – rapidly persuaded David to come to terms, and the new king’s success in seeing off the Scots helped to convince the Anglo-Norman nobility that they should rally to Stephen’s standard.
What the country needed, in the words of the Gesta Stepha ni, was ‘a king who, with a view to re-establishing peace for the common benefit, would meet the insurgents of the kingdom in arms and would justly administer the enactments of the laws’. The oath Stephen had sworn at his coronation had promised his new subjects justice; now he had taken up arms against a hostile invasion to imposing effect. There could be no doubt that it was Stephen – not his cousin Matilda, nor his elder brother Thibaud, whose candidacy for the throne had withered in the bud once word of Stephen’s coronation began to spread – who offered the best chance of maintaining ‘peace for the common benefit’ across England and Normandy. Here perception and reality blurred and merged: the more pledges of allegiance the new king secured from among the nobles, the more unhesitatingly he could bring to heel those who resisted him; and the more effectively opposition was crushed, the more magnates would be driven to pledge him their support.
At Easter, the irresistible logic of this virtuous circle was played out when Stephen staged a spectacular gathering of his court, ‘more splendid for its throng and size, for gold, silver, jewels, robes, and every kind of sumptuousness, than any that had ever been held in England’, Henry of Huntingdon reported admiringly. This theatrical demonstration of the magnificence of his kingship and his mastery of the kingdom – now reinforced by a papal letter approving his coronation and excusing the violation of his oath of loyalty to Matilda – secured the attendance, and with it the service, of all but a small handful of the bishops and nobles of England and Normandy. It was an occasion which combined promise and threat to overwhelming effect, and its glittering success was confirmed by the belated arrival of Robert of Gloucester, Matilda’s illegitimate half-brother, who had so far held himself aloof from Stephen’s nascent regime.
Gloucester was one of the greatest noblemen in the country, powerful, charismatic and intensely proud. He had been at his father’s bedside when he died, and received from him an extraordinary cash legacy of £60,000 from which to distribute wages and rewards to Henry’s troops and household. He might therefore have hoped to be a kingmaker, even if his bastardy meant that he could not be a king, and certainly the idea that he should now be compelled to swear allegiance to a man with whom he had once competed for influence at his father’s court cannot have been easy to swallow. But by the end of April it was clear that the alternative to accepting the new King Stephen was impotent and ultimately dangerous isolation. (‘If he were to resist,’ William of Malmesbury argued on his behalf, ‘it would bring no advantage to his sister or nephews, and would certainly do enormous harm to himself.’) Gloucester’s homage – which was performed in return for confirmation of his title to his lands, and ostentatiously warm demonstrations of royal favour – therefore acknowledged Stephen’s triumph, and, in doing so, made that triumph complete.
Or so it seemed. The winter of 1136 was a bitter one for Matilda. She had played her part in her father’s plans, entering into a distasteful marriage so that she and her sons would be ready to inherit his throne, only to discover that it was the precedent of Henry’s actions rather than the pronouncement of his intentions which determined the identity of his successor. She, who had once presided in majesty over the imperial court, now found herself embattled with her three boys in the frontier fortresses that remained her only foothold in her father’s lands. Perhaps it was a relief, in personal terms, that her partnership with her unloved husband could now function at a distance, as the political alliance it was, rather than in unwanted intimacy. But, for Matilda, the demands of duty and the exercise of power had always come before sentiment or personal satisfaction. The very concept of private happiness, in fact, can scarcely have made sense to a woman who had left her home as a child of eight to live out a public destiny. Any relief, therefore, at a separation made necessary by their joint campaign to press her claim – with Geoffroi now launching regular raids into Normandy from his base in Anjou – can only have been overshadowed by frustration at their failure to make any meaningful headway.
On the other hand, they were not, at least, being driven back from the Norman frontiers, and that in itself might cause Stephen problems. Normandy had been disintegrating into chaos ever since King Henry’s death. The duchy would always be more difficult to control than England, since it lacked the centralised administration that allowed English government to regulate itself in the king’s absence. It was no accident that Henry had spent more than half of his time on the Norman side of the Channel, and the wisdom of that decision was confirmed once his commanding presence was removed, when disputes between belligerent rival landowners sprang bloodily into life; ‘… stubborn Normandy, an unhappy mother country, suffered wretchedly from her viper brood’, Orderic Vitalis lamented from his cloisters at St Evroult. ‘For on the very same day that the Normans heard that their firm ruler had died … they rushed out hungrily like ravening wolves to plunder and ravage mercilessly.’
Such lawlessness did not in itself help Matilda’s cause, since, if the Norman barons loathed each other, they despised the Angevins more. In one raid lasting only thirteen days, Orderic reported, Geoffroi’s forces ‘made themselves hated forever by their brutality’, burning homes, crops and churches, plundering and slaughtering as they went. And, for as long as the army that fought in her name was led by her husband and recruited in Anjou, Matilda would struggle to be seen as the daughter of the king of England rather than the wife of the Angevin count. But, at the same time, the first cracks were beginning to appear in the facade of Stephen’s victory; and the longer Normandy was left to implode into violence, the wider those cracks might become.
Question marks were first raised over Stephen’s judgement in the summer of 1136, when he faced the task of extinguishing what should have been the last few embers of resistance in England. A lord named Baldwin de Revières, who had given devoted service to King Henry and his family, refused to recognise Stephen as king and fortified Exeter Castle against him. With characteristic energy and speed, Stephen raced westward to pin Baldwin and his small garrison within the looming walls of the castle, built on the Conqueror’s orders three-quarters of a century earlier. There could have been no better opportunity to display the military muscle that lay behind the theatrical splendour of the Easter Court, and Stephen’s army therefore included not only his formidable Flemish mercenaries but an imposing show of the baronial forces that were now at the king’s command.
As the siege tightened in the stifling heat of an exceptionally hot summer’s sun, the castle’s well ran dry. Its defenders survived for a while by eking out their supplies of wine, but when the wine-barrels too were empty Baldwin was forced to plead for the lives of his followers. The garrison’s desperation was obvious and pitiful. Baldwin’s wife came to Stephen as a supplicant, barefoot, her long hair hanging loose, weeping in grief and fear; and the dreadful effects of dehydration were shockingly evident, according to theGesta Stephani, in her companions’ ‘sagging and wasted skin, the look of torpor on their faces, drained of the normal supply of blood, and their lips drawn back from gaping mouths’. It was a churchman, Stephen’s brother Henry of Winchester, who argued that kingship rather than humanity should dictate his response to their pleas. Baldwin was a rebel and a traitor, and his destruction was not only warranted but necessary to demonstrate the terrible power of Stephen’s rule.
Others within the royal camp, however, led by Earl Robert of Gloucester, pressed for mercy. To the acute eyes of Bishop Henry, it was clear that the earl’s enthusiasm for leniency was closely related to his reluctance to join Stephen in the first place, and that his covert agenda was to undermine rather than reinforce the king’s authority. But, despite Stephen’s instinctive talent for rapid and decisive action, his royal uncle’s ruthlessness did not come so naturally to him. All his life, his easy, unpretentious charm and generous good nature had inspired genuine affection in those around him; but now he was about to discover the disadvantages, to a king, of being loved rather than feared. At Gloucester’s urging, Stephen allowed Baldwin and his garrison to go free. As a result, the very public moral of the siege of Exeter was that resistance to Stephen need be neither futile nor fatal.
It was a lesson reinforced eight months later by the king’s belated attempt to take control of the spreading anarchy in Normandy. Stephen’s regime could not hope to endure without challenge if he failed to establish an unshakeable grip on Normandy as well as England. His most powerful subjects held lands on both sides of the Channel, and they looked to their king to protect their interests on French as well as English soil. But it took Stephen more than a year even to take ship for the Norman coast; and he was still twenty-five miles from the walls of Matilda’s fortress at Argentan when his army suddenly disintegrated. Simmering hostility between Stephen’s Flemish mercenaries and his Norman barons erupted into violence, while the deep mutual suspicion between the king and Robert of Gloucester was laid bare when Gloucester accused Stephen of plotting to ambush and kill him. The king and his closest supporters retreated to England after nine fruitless months, leaving Normandy neither at peace nor protected from Angevin assault, with Gloucester now ensconced in his Norman power base around Caen and Bayeux. Seven months after that, in June 1138, the disaffected earl publicly renounced his allegiance to Stephen, and declared for his sister Matilda.
Gloucester’s decision to set himself up as his sister’s championtransformed Matilda’s position beyond recognition. Until the summer of 1138, hers had been a lost cause, supported only by the forces of her Angevin husband, who was a hated outsider in Normandy, while England itself remained completely beyond her reach. Now, at a stroke, the support of her half-brother gave her a foothold, and potentially an army, at the heart of her cousin’s kingdom. And Stephen’s regime – which had once seemed, in the absence of any viable opposition, so tightly woven as to be unassailable – began to fray so badly that it was possible for the first time to imagine it unravelling altogether.
Initially, it appeared that the king might be doing enough to contain the damage. In Normandy, the joint forces of Earl Robert and Count Geoffroi were held off by Count Waleran of Meulan, the elder of two noble brothers, the Beaumont twins, who were fast becoming Stephen’s right-hand men. Meanwhile, Stephen himself sped through England at the head of his troops, seizing castles and territory that belonged to Gloucester and his followers. Once again, he failed to press home a siege, this time at Bristol, where Gloucester’s supporters were holed up within the earl’s massive fortress, a bastion built of creamy-pale limestone quarried from his lands near Caen. But, if the king’s decision to turn away from this daunting stronghold in favour of softer targets gave renewed suggestions of an unwillingness to strike the killer blow, that hardly seemed to matter once the men of Yorkshire had rallied at Northallerton around the standard of their archbishop to defend the kingdom against Matilda’s uncle David of Scotland, whose forces had overrun the north once more in the spring and summer of 1138. Mustered around a ship’s mast hung with the banners of the patron saints of the great Yorkshire cathedrals, St Peter of York, St John of Beverley and St Wilfred of Ripon, topped with a gleaming silver pyx containing the consecrated host, the English army routed the Scots in less than two hours.
It was a terrible and bloody triumph, with thousands of Scots cut down by English arrows that ‘buzzed like bees and flew like rain’. And it was a wounding blow for Matilda, given that her cause in England, as in Normandy, was now identified with an invading enemy beaten back by forces loyal to King Stephen. There could be no mistaking, if there had been any doubt before, that Matilda herself would have to stand at the centre of the campaign to secure her inheritance. She needed her husband for the sons he had given her and for the troops he now led, and her half-brother as an Anglo-Norman magnate who could take her fight into the heart of Stephen’s kingdom. But the legitimacy of her cause depended on Matilda alone. Her uniquely royal blood – despite the female body in which it was housed – represented the only hope of challenging the sanctity of Stephen’s coronation.
In the spring of 1139, therefore, Matilda at last decided to stake her claim as publicly and explicitly as she could in direct defiance of Stephen’s hold on her father’s crown. Her first step was to send to Rome, in the hope that Pope Innocent II could be convinced to throw the moral and political support of the Holy See behind her campaign. In April, Bishop Ulger of Angers crossed the Alps, as Matilda herself had done before him, to attend the second Lateran Council, a great gathering of almost a thousand prelates from across western Christendom. There, he presented her case: Stephen, he said, had usurped the throne of England which was Matilda’s by right, thanks to her hereditary title and the oaths of loyalty sworn to her by the spiritual and temporal peers of the kingdom.
In response, Stephen’s representative, a smoothly fluent lawyer named Arnulf, archdeacon of the Norman diocese of Sées, made no attempt to engage with the substance of Matilda’s claim, instead trying to sweep it aside in its entirety by arguing that she was not, in fact, her father’s legitimate heir. Her mother, Queen Edith-Matilda, Arnulf declared, had not simply been educated in a convent but had made profession as a nun; her marriage to King Henry had therefore been invalid, and Matilda was no more than one of Henry’s many bastards. It was a specious argument as well as an insulting one, since Edith had taken no vows, and her freedom to marry had been confirmed by the saintly Anselm, then archbishop of Canterbury, almost forty years before. But it served Stephen’s purpose, for the time being at least. Pope Innocent had only just returned to Rome after nearly a decade of schism within the Church caused by disputes over his own election, and he had more pressing problems at hand than England’s distant troubles. He had heard enough. Refusing to engage any further with the lawyers’ bickering, he halted the hearing by reiterating the position he had taken three years earlier, recognising the fait accompli of Stephen’s coronation and therefore his status as king.
The edifice of Stephen’s rule was still holding, despite public argument in the papal curia and the threat of more noble defections in the wake of Gloucester’s defiance. But the strain was more and more apparent, with Stephen himself constantly on the move in the effort to stamp out resistance before it could spread out of control, while doling out ever more lavish rewards from the depleted royal treasury to magnates in whose loyalty he could trust less and less. ‘The king hastened, always armed, always accompanied by a host, to deal with various anxieties and tasks of many kinds which continually dragged him hither and thither all over England,’ the author of the Gesta Stephani reported despairingly. ‘It was like what we read of the fabled hydra of Hercules; when one head was cut off, two or more grew in its place.’ And in June 1139, tensions within the regime at last reached breaking point.
The backing of his younger brother Henry, bishop of Winchester, had been crucial to the success of Stephen’s coup, and Henry – whose unwavering commitment to the interests of the Church coincided happily with his flamboyant personal ambition – had expected that his own eminence in spiritual and temporal affairs would in due course be recognised by his election as archbishop of Canterbury after the death of the elderly William of Corbeil in 1136. But in December 1138, Henry found himself passed over in favour of a much more obscure candidate, Abbot Theobald of Bec, whose principal qualification appeared to be his association with the Beaumont twins, Waleran of Meulan and Robert of Leicester, the young noblemen whose influence over Stephen was obviousand growing. Having shoved aside the pretensions of the king’s brother, the Beaumonts next turned their sights on Bishop Roger of Salisbury, King Henry’s former chief minister, who, along with a pair of episcopal nephews, Bishop Alexander of Lincoln and Bishop Nigel of Ely, still controlled the chancery and the exchequer, the administrative institutions through which England was governed. The three bishops had at their disposal not only the substantial powers of pen and parchment but knights and castles strategically placed across their dioceses – and, in the fear-filled summer of 1139, it was not difficult to persuade the increasingly paranoid king of the threat their power might now represent.
More difficult was the question of how to bring them down. Mere suspicion was insufficient grounds for the arrest of a peer of the realm, but suspicion was all there was. In the absence of any concrete evidence that the bishops were engaged in treasonable conspiracy, Waleran of Meulan came up with a ploy by which they might be disarmed. When the court arrived in Oxford in June, one of the Beaumonts’ noble allies was persuaded to pick a fight with the bishop’s men over the rooms they had been allocated, a domestic dispute which turned violently ugly, as happened all too readily when steel blades were a part of everyday dress. But bloodshed within the bounds of the royal court, contrived though it was in this instance, constituted a breach of the king’s peace, for which Bishop Roger and his nephews were summarily arrested. They were sacked from their offices in the royal administration, to be replaced by Beaumont nominees, and their castle strongholds were seized into the king’s hands along with the treasure and the weapons stockpiled there.
The ruse was clear and – thought Stephen’s brother Henry – outrageous. Bishop Henry was a stalwart defender of ecclesiastical rights, with lavishly appointed and massively fortified castles of his own. He had also spent the months since he had been denied the archbishopric of Canterbury working furiously behind the scenes to secure his own nomination as the pope’s legate in England, a role which gave him even greater authority than he would have had as archbishop. He therefore had both motive and means to strike back against his brother’s betrayal, and against the Beaumont brothers, his hated rivals who seemed now to be pulling the strings of royal policy. As a result, on 29 August, England witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of a king being summoned by his own brother to appear before a specially convened ecclesiastical council on charges that he had ridden roughshod over Church liberties. Although the council broke up after three days of argument and counter-argument without formal conclusion, it was now abundantly clear that, with every move the mistrustful king made to tighten his grip on power, more of the country would slip through his fingers.
Twenty-nine days later, for the first time in eight years, Matilda herself at last set foot on English soil. It had been apparent for some time that she would have to take the fight to Stephen, rather than inching forward from the safety of her base at Argentan. Normandy mattered, but the crown belonged to England, and she could not hope to succeed if her claim was not made a reality there. The difficulty was how to achieve that goal. Her brother’s defection meant that she could now, for the first time, reach the Norman coast – only fifty miles from Argentan, but fifty miles too far if the terrain was hostile – via his fortress at Caen. But the south coast of England offered no welcoming haven, since its harbours were under Stephen’s control. One of Gloucester’s men had tried to hold a gateway open by securing the earl’s castle at Dover against the king during the previous year, but had soon been overwhelmed by an intimidating fleet sent by Stephen’s queen Mathilde from her port at Boulogne. Meanwhile, the voyage around Land’s End to Gloucester’s stronghold at Bristol was too dangerously uncertain to provide a realistic alternative.
But during the summer of 1139 it emerged that there was a chink in Stephen’s apparently impenetrable defences. The towering castle at Arundel, overlooking its own port on the navigable river Arun just five miles from the sea, was the home of the dowager queen, King Henry’s widow Adeliza. She was now remarried to William d’Aubigny, whom she had come to know as one of Henry’s most trusted household attendants, and, after the barren years of her first marriage, the happy couple were on the way to amassing a brood of seven children. Outwardly, she and her new husband were loyal subjects of King Stephen, but, privately, Adeliza’s sympathies lay with her stepdaughter. Respect for her dead husband’s chosen heir was reinforced by a personal relationship – the two women were almost exactly the same age, and had spent a significant amount of time in each other’s company after Matilda’s return from Germany – and by an old debt of gratitude for Matilda’s part in the political rehabilitation of Adeliza’s father almost thirty years earlier, when the eight-year-old princess had performed her first formal act of intercession as the emperor’s bride-to-be at Liège.
Old debts were about to be repaid. On 30 September 1139, a ship slipped quietly into the port of Arundel. A handful of its passengers – Robert, earl of Gloucester and a small, heavily armed bodyguard of loyal knights – disappeared almost immediately, hooded and cloaked, to ride 120 miles to the safety of the earl’s fortress at Bristol, moving under cover of night and across open country to avoid Stephen’s troops and spies. The rest of the party – Matilda, with a much larger military escort of her own – was spirited inside the impregnable walls of Arundel Castle. At last, she had taken the decision that she should abandon the battle for Normandy to her husband, and leave her three sons in safety under his supervision. Now, she hoped that support for her cause in England, which had so far achieved some piecemeal disintegration of Stephen’s hold on the realm, might take more threatening shape around the rallying point of her presence.
That, at least, was the theory. In practice, news of her arrival spread quickly, and Stephen – who was only ninety miles away, ruing his decision to allow Baldwin de Revières to go free, since he was now having to besiege him again at Corfe Castle in Dorset – immediately marched east to surround the ex-queen Adeliza and her royal guest at Arundel. Matilda, it seemed, was at her cousin’s mercy. But her decision to expose herself to this danger was more finely calibrated than it appeared. By arriving at the head of a knightly escort rather than an army, she and her brother had used Stephen’s weapons of speed and surprise against him to make landfall in England before the king could be warned of what was happening. It was Robert of Gloucester who had openly defied Stephen’s authority, and against whom the king might legitimately take reprisals; but, by travelling fast with the bare minimum of protection, the earl was able to reach his power base at Bristol before Stephen could cut him off, a manoeuvre that would have been impossible had Matilda – who, however great her strength of character, was not used to the physical demands of a soldier’s life – ridden with him.
Meanwhile, Matilda herself was left vulnerable to Stephen’s advancing troops; but here it suddenly became clear that her sex could, for once, be used to her benefit rather than her disadvantage. Matilda was the daughter of a king, the widow of an emperor, and Stephen’s own cousin, who had been welcomed into the hospitality of his predecessor’s queen. Were Stephen to wage war on two women of such exalted status, he risked not only opprobrium but open rebellion from a far greater number of his subjects than he had so far faced. Even if he were to decide that this was a risk worth taking, the mighty fortifications of Adeliza’s castle could not easily be overrun, and if Stephen were pinned down by another lengthy siege, Robert of Gloucester would be free to strike against him at will. Meanwhile, even should he succeed in taking Arundel, it was far from clear that it would be either legally or politically tenable to hold Matilda captive.
Much better, the king’s brother Bishop Henry argued, to allow her to join Gloucester in Bristol, since Stephen would then be able to fight without restraint against an enemy hemmed into a single place, well away from the crucial administrative and economic centres of the south-east. Reluctantly, Stephen stood down his preparations for a siege and gave orders that Matilda should be delivered into her half-brother’s care at a pre-arranged place within reach of Bristol by the uneasy pairing of Bishop Henry himself and his rival Waleran of Meulan – a noble escort ‘which it is not the custom of honourable knights to refuse to anyone’, William of Malmesbury pointed out, ‘even their bitterest enemy’.
Bishop Henry’s advice was strategically sound, although a less transparent character than Stephen might perhaps have hesitated before allowing his disaffected brother to ride a hundred miles in the company of the cousin who was claiming his throne. The opportunity to parley in private with the bishop was an unexpected bonus for Matilda, whose risky tactics had paid off handsomely. Despite Stephen’s best attempts to secure his kingdom against her, she had slipped, wraith-like, through his defences to reach the safety of her half-brother’s citadel at Bristol. Her situation there could not be said to be strong – especially given that Stephen and his soldiers were now heading westward towards them with their usual menacing speed – but it was infinitely better than it had been when she was cooped up at Argentan, able to do little more than worry away at the fringes of her cousin’s power.
Now she could begin to exploit the momentum of her advance, recruiting to her cause men who had been waiting to declare themselves until opposition to Stephen was no longer a do-or-die mission for principled loners, but an unmistakably viable political movement. Chief among them were Brien Fitzcount and Miles of Gloucester, two of the ‘new men’ who had risen high in the service of her father. Fitzcount, as his name suggested, was an illegitimate son of the count of Brittany, and his service to King Henry had been rewarded with grants of land in Wales and the strategically valuable lordship of Wallingford in the Thames Valley. Miles of Gloucester, meanwhile, had acquired his toponymic by following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather as sheriff of Gloucestershire and keeper of the king’s castle at Gloucester itself. Four years earlier, in 1135, both men had concluded that discretion was the better part of valour and acknowledged Stephen as king, but both now lost no time in committing themselves to the newly arrived Matilda.
Fitzcount, who had been brought up in King Henry’s household, knew Matilda and her half-brother well. Indeed, he and Robert of Gloucester – two bastard-born magnates, one the king’s natural son, the other almost an adopted one – had been at Matilda’s side more than a decade earlier when she travelled to Rouen for the unhappy betrothal that preceded her second marriage. As an illegitimate child with no offspring of his own, Fitzcount’s family loyalties were exclusively focused on the royal dynasty that had welcomed and nurtured him, and the allegiance he now offered to Matilda was heartfelt and unshakeable. Just as well, given that it was only a matter of days before his resolve was brutally tested by the arrival of Stephen’s troops outside the walls of Wallingford Castle. The king was making impressive headway as he pushed westward across country from Arundel towards Bristol, seizing castles as he went. He set a siege in train at Wallingford as he passed, and Fitzcount – though his garrison was well provisioned and protected behind the castle’s walls and double moat – was left isolated and exposed, cut off from his allies in the west country and facing two hastily constructed forts on the opposite side of the river full of soldiers intent on starving him out, however long it might take.
If Brien Fitzcount was Matilda’s chivalric champion, her most passionately loyal supporter, then Miles of Gloucester brought to her cause a razor-sharp military brain. As Stephen advanced on Bristol, Miles led a contingent of troops around behind the king’s army and marched on Wallingford. Suddenly, the soldiers Stephen had left there found the tables violently turned. Miles’s men smashed their way into the besiegers’ forts, killing those who resisted and taking prisoner anyone willing to surrender. With the siege successfully lifted and Fitzcount liberated, Miles was poised – potentially at least – to march on London. When the news reached the king, Stephen turned his army about and raced back to protect his capital, while Miles – to whom the advantages of guerrilla strikes were becoming increasingly apparent – wheeled north to attack Worcester, of which Waleran of Meulan was the new earl. By the time Stephen and his right-hand man heard what had happened there and came to the aid of the devastated city, three weeks had passed and Miles was long gone.
A pattern had been set. Matilda’s supporters could not strike a decisive blow against Stephen’s much larger army, but they could keep the king on the back foot with feints and lightning strikes, darting just out of his reach while exhausting him in the pursuit. And this brutal dance bought Matilda time to consolidate her west-country power base. She moved from her half-brother’s castle at Bristol to the royal fortress at Gloucester, where her most gifted commander Miles (who, the Gesta Stephani said, ‘always behaved to her like a father in deed and counsel’) was in charge of her safety. Here, she was a ruler at the head of her own royal household, not a client in her brother’s establishment. She did not yet have much that was tangible to offer in the way of privilege and patronage, but she could give royal promises of future preferment to those nobles who were prepared to cast off their allegiance to her rival.
There were increasing numbers of such men as the months wore on, but fewer who would support her cause with the unswerving ferocity of the triumvirate of Miles of Gloucester, Brien Fitzcount and her brother, Earl Robert. As the magnates hesitated – some of them confusing not only the chroniclers but Stephen and Matilda too about where their loyalties lay – there was a terrible price to pay for the country. The network of Norman castles that had been constructed with intimidating speed little more than half a century earlier to pin down the population of a newly conquered land was now atomised, each fortification a closely defended island amid a sea of devastation, the surrounding countryside plundered to supply local garrisons, or reduced to blackened earth by hostile troops. It was ‘a dreadful thing’, said William of Malmesbury in quiet anguish, ‘that England, once the noblest nurse of peace, the peculiar habitation of tranquillity, had sunk to such wretchedness’.
Matilda had done well – if at a heavy cost – to make her challenge so potent a reality on English soil, and she had undoubtedly damaged Stephen’s kingship; but her own claim to rule was still a long way from universal acceptance. And the risk was that this increasing anarchy might become a form of violent stalemate. Bishop Henry, who saw the danger that the future might hold little but mutually assured destruction, threw himself into the search for peace, presiding over a meeting at Bath between Matilda’s brother Robert and Stephen’s queen Mathilde, before sailing across the Channel to consult both Louis VII of France and his own and Stephen’s elder brother Thibaud of Blois. With what proposals he returned we do not know, but, whatever they were, Matilda – who was schooled in the hard-headed politics of the Empire, and conscious that hers was still the weaker hand – was prepared to accept them.
Stephen, however, preferred to fight. Perhaps he believed that war gave him an unanswerable advantage over an opponent who could not lead her own troops, and that his own presence on the battlefield would serve to remind his kingdom that he was not only a king but a warrior, something that Matilda could never be. But, if Matilda’s sex denied her the benefits of military leadership, it also protected her from the dangers of war. However great Stephen’s triumphs, this was one enemy who would never be killed or captured in combat. Stephen himself, meanwhile, was about to learn at first hand the perils that awaited a king who stood in his army’s front line.
The man who brought the cat-and-mouse conflict at last to the point of open confrontation was Ranulf, earl of Chester, Robert of Gloucester’s son-in-law, who had until now, despite his marriage, remained at least superficially Stephen’s man. The polar opposite of the loyalists Brien Fitzcount and Miles of Gloucester, Ranulf made a principle only of his own territorial interests. In 1140, however, that meant seizing the opportunity to grab Lincoln Castle from the harried king. The earl took the fortress by bare-faced trickery: he sent his wife on a social call to the castellan’s lady, and then arrived himself, all smiles, to escort her home – but, once welcomed inside, he and his knightly attendants ambushed the guard and barred the gates to all but the detachment of troops he had stationed nearby. Stephen had lost the fortress to a sucker punch, and only a lengthy siege could now retrieve it.
Wearily, the king decided to tolerate this provocation rather than confront a magnate who had not yet explicitly defected to Matilda’s side. But when the citizens sent a surreptitious message complaining about the earl’s cruel and unjust behaviour, and pointing out that Ranulf and his family were spending Christmas at the castle with only perfunctory protection, Stephen could not resist committing himself to another of the lightning assaults that were his speciality. He marched a strike force from London to Lincoln before Twelfth Night had marked the end of the Christmas festivities, and besieged the castle with the help of the disgruntled townspeople. But, despite Stephen’s speed, Earl Ranulf had already slipped away. As he made for his estates in the northwest, he sent importunate messages to Matilda’s camp, offering his allegiance and appealing for help from his father-in-law.
Robert of Gloucester had so far been unimpressed by his son-in-law’s self-interested manoeuvring, but his daughter, Ranulf ’s countess, remained under siege in the castle, and it had to be said that her unlovely husband’s defection was a godsend to Matilda’s cause. Gloucester did not hesitate – and, this time, it was Stephen’s turn to be taken by surprise. Earl Robert and Earl Ranulf were almost outside Lincoln’s walls when the king realised that his small force was about to be attacked by a much larger army. His advisers urged him to retreat and regroup, but Stephen was a brave man, and the prospect of running away was repugnant to him. His father’s life had been blighted by a humiliating accusation of cowardice after he had fled from a siege at Antioch while on crusade forty years earlier, and Stephen was adamant that he would not risk the same fate. Instead, he readied his troops for battle.
The chroniclers laced their accounts of his preparations with portents of impending disaster. On the night before the armies met, a storm howled around the city, hailstones lashing down, thunder rolling around the blackness of the skies. At dawn the next morning, Sunday 2 February, when Stephen went to Lincoln’s immense cathedral to celebrate the feast of Candlemas, the flame of his elaborate candle suddenly flickered and died, and the wax broke in his hands. Mass had not yet ended when the pyx containing the consecrated host fell from the chain that supported it and plunged onto the altar. ‘This’, Henry of Huntingdon wrote with the implacable certainty of hindsight, ‘was a sign of the king’s downfall.’
Stephen was not so convinced that he faced inevitable defeat as he drew up his soldiers outside the west walls of the city. But it took only minutes, once the massed cavalry of Robert of Gloucester and Ranulf of Chester began to charge, for his hopes to be trampled into the freezing mud. The king stood firm at the head of his infantry in the centre of the field, but the earls who led what little cavalry he had quickly decided to save themselves and their men, rather than stay to face annihilation. Their receding hoof-beats drummed under the din of battle as Stephen laid about him with his great sword, steel striking on steel and slicing into flesh. When the weapon shattered in his grip, he fought on with a battle-axe, Matilda’s men pressing ever closer, until at last a rock struck his head and he fell to the ground. God, who had blessed his kingship in the hush of Winchester Cathedral five years earlier, had clearly now changed his mind.
Divine protection had not, however, abandoned him altogether. He was not dead – merely concussed, and distraught at the desertion of magnates who had sworn him their fidelity. He was also a prisoner. Stephen was first taken under guard 140 miles southwest to face Matilda at Gloucester Castle, and then on to her half-brother’s fortress at Bristol. There he was initially treated with honour, until his tendency to wander from his quarters – ‘especially at night, outside his appointed place of custody, after deceiving or winning over his guards’, as William of Malmesbury pointedly explained – persuaded Earl Robert to keep the king humiliatingly and uncomfortably chained in irons.
A little more than five years after her father’s death, Matilda found herself at last within reach of his throne. She had come face to face with the cousin who had usurped her crown – but the chroniclers remain tantalisingly silent about the details of this fraught meeting, as they did so often with climactic events in her life. The author of the Gesta Stephani (possibly Robert of Lewes, the bishop of Bath, but, whoever he was, certainly a partisan of Stephen’s with close ties to the king’s brother Bishop Henry) was so hostile to Matilda that he could barely bring himself to name her. Where he did so, it was as ‘the countess of Anjou’, the disparaging title she herself spurned, while elsewhere in his text she appears obliquely as ‘King Henry’s daughter’ or ‘the earl of Gloucester’s sister’. William of Malmesbury was much more sympathetic to Matilda’s cause, although the hero of his narrative is not Matilda herself but her half-brother Earl Robert, ‘who’, William tells us admiringly, ‘for his steadfast loyalty and distinguished merit, has pre-eminently deserved that the recollection of him shall live for all time’. Neither writer was willing – or, probably, able – to give any sense of Matilda’s own experience of this violent turn of fortune’s wheel. It seems likely that this was the first time the cousins had met since Stephen had knelt before Matilda ten years earlier to renew his oath to recognise her as her father’s heir. But whether she greeted the captive king with cold disdain or blazing anger – anything in between seems less easily imaginable, given her forceful temperament – we cannot know.
What is clear is the chain reaction triggered by Matilda’s triumph. Her husband, Geoffroi of Anjou, advanced into Nor mandy and, through a well-judged mix of negotiation and military manoeuvring, began an apparently inexorable annexation of the duchy on her behalf. In England, meanwhile, Stephen’s support was crumbling. Some loyalists were driven from their castles at swordpoint by Matilda’s resurgent supporters, but more made the calculated decision to throw in their lot with her cause. Just as a virtuous circle of pragmatic political logic had allowed Stephen to establish his kingship in the wake of his coup, so Matilda now appeared to carry all before her. The battle of Lincoln had reversed the polarity of politics; there seemed no prospect that Stephen – like Robert Curthose before him – would ever emerge from his prison, and magnates with territorial and dynastic interests to defend on either side of the Channel therefore had to face the reality of her victory.
Matilda herself proceeded with deliberation. Stephen was safely in chains, but he was still an anointed king, and to vindicate the legitimacy of her rule she would need the backing of the Church if her own prospective coronation were to supersede his. Above all, there was one man whose support she needed: Bishop Henry of Winchester, her own cousin, Stephen’s brother and the pope’s legate in England. The ground may already have been laid during their long ride together from Arundel to the outskirts of Bristol after Matilda’s arrival in England sixteen months earlier. Certainly, agreement was quickly reached when the two met again on 2 March – exactly a month after the battle at Lincoln – on open ground near the bishop’s city of Winchester. Matilda promised that she would consult him on all important matters of government; in return, Bishop Henry offered her his oath of allegiance, and surrendered the much-depleted royal treasury at Winchester into her hands. The next day, he received her in ceremonial procession into his cathedral, where a dozen bishops and abbots had gathered to welcome her into the sacred place where Stephen had been crowned.
Four weeks later, while Matilda waited behind the fifty-foot walls of Oxford Castle, her new ally Bishop Henry rose to speak before a specially convened council of the Church at Winchester. William of Malmesbury, who was there, gives a first-hand account of the address. The great King Henry, the bishop declared, had left England and Normandy to his daughter Matilda. However, when he died, ‘because it seemed tedious to wait for the lady, who made delays in coming to England since her residence was in Normandy’, Bishop Henry continued, in a startlingly smooth piece of historical revisionism, ‘provision was made for the peace of the country and my brother allowed to reign’. But Stephen, he explained, had failed in his office: ‘No justice was enforced upon transgressors, and peace was at once brought entirely to an end, almost in that very year; bishops were arrested and compelled to surrender their property; abbacies were sold and churches despoiled of their treasure; the advice of the wicked was hearkened to, that of the good either not put into effect or altogether disregarded.’ As so often, Bishop Henry’s genuine concern for peace and for the interests of the Church dovetailed seamlessly with the certainty that his own influence – ‘the advice of the good’, as he modestly put it – should prevail.
And that advice was now clear. God had spoken, and Stephen was a prisoner. After sober consultation among the ranks of the assembled clergy, England’s Church pronounced its judgement in the voice of Bishop Henry himself: ‘We choose as lady of England and Normandy the daughter of a king who was a peacemaker, a glorious king, a wealthy king, a good king, without peer in our time, and we promise her faith and support.’
‘Lady of England’ was a nebulous, ambiguous title, but also a telling one. To be England’s lady – domina, in the Latin spoken by Bishop Henry and his ecclesiastical colleagues – was to exercise dominium, that is, power or lordship, of the kind that her royal father had enjoyed. All that remained was to proceed to Westminster, to take command of her capital and to be anointed as a new kind of queen – one who would rule in her own right, not as her husband’s helpmeet. The crown, it seemed, was finally hers.