Now, at last, Matilda stood at the heart of politics, and the chroniclers could no longer keep her at the margins of the stories they told. But they did not like what they saw. ‘She was lifted up into an insufferable arrogance’, Henry of Huntingdon declared censoriously, ‘… and she alienated the hearts of almost everyone.’ The author of the Gesta Stephani, who had until now treated her with disdain, also reacted with withering disapproval: ‘she had brought the greater part of the kingdom under her sway, and on this account … she was mightily puffed up and exalted in spirit’.
It has become the defining account of the difficulties Matilda faced at this, the crucial moment when the kingdom lay within her hands. More than eight hundred years later, historians have had no hesitation in endorsing the same damning verdict. ‘All chroniclers agree that in her hour of victory she displayed an intolerable pride and wilfulness,’ one of the most perceptive writers on the period remarks; while another, more gently but no less categorically, explains that ‘here for the first time an aspect of her character, which had not so far been apparent, was to let her down’.
But it is striking that not all the chroniclers did in fact join this critical chorus. William of Malmesbury, for example, did not choose to contrast his eulogising account of the earl of Gloucester’s ‘restraint and wisdom’ with any explicit criticism of ‘that formidable lady’, his hero’s half-sister. And another source gives us an altogether different portrait of Matilda’s approach to her royal destiny. The abbot of Gloucester, a renowned scholar named Gilbert Foliot, supplied Brien Fitzcount with a sophisticated legal and theological defence of Matilda’s claim, in the course of which he penned an elegant sketch of the former empress as a devoted royal daughter.
… in accordance with her father’s wishes she crossed the sea, passed over mountains, penetrated into unknown regions, married there at her father’s command, and remained there carrying out the duties of imperial rule virtuously and piously until, after her husband’s death, not through any desperate need or feminine levity but in response to a summons from her father, she returned to him. And though she had attained such high rank that, it is reported, she had the title and status of queen of the Romans, she was in no way puffed up with pride, but meekly submitted in all things to her father’s will …
Foliot’s approving description of a modestly dutiful woman in the years before 1135 is, of course, a partisan portrayal in pursuit of a political argument – but the same is also true of the hostile Gesta Stephani, the chief witness for the prosecution in the years after King Henry’s death. And closer examination of the Gesta’s account of Matilda’s conduct after the battle of Lincoln demonstrates that criticism of the ‘intolerable pride’ with which she responded to her rival’s defeat cannot for a moment be taken as the product of coolly neutral observation. ‘She at once put on an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the modest gait and bearing proper to the gentle sex,’ the Gesta’s author complained, and ‘began to walk and speak and do all things more stiffly and more haughtily than she had been wont, to such a point that soon, in the capital of the land subject to her, she actually made herself queen of all England and gloried in being so called’.
The Gesta’s support for Stephen’s cause is unmistakable here – but so is the extent to which the writer is troubled by the very idea of a woman holding power in her own right. Matilda was facing the challenge of becoming queen of England (a title which, despite the Gesta’s affronted protests, she did not yet have) – not in the conventional sense of a king’s partner, but in the unprecedented form of a female king. And kings did not deport themselves with a ‘modest gait and bearing’. Instead, they were – and were required to be – supremely commanding and authoritative, as her father and her first husband had been. William of Malmesbury’s admiring description of King Henry had made the point insistently:
The standard of his justice was inflexible; he kept his subjects in order without disturbance and his nobles without loss of dignity … If any of the more important lords, forgetting their oath of allegiance, swerved from the narrow path of loyalty, he used at once to recall the strays by prudent counsel and unremitting efforts, bringing the rebellious back to toeing the line by the severity of the wounds he inflicted on them. Nor could I easily recount the long-continued labours he expended on such people, leaving no action unpunished which could not be committed by the disaffected without some impairment of his royal dignity.
In such circumstances, it is hard to imagine quite what Henry would have had to do to be accused of acting with ‘insufferable arrogance’. The expectation of unquestioning obedience, and the punishment of those who did not comply with his commands, were indissoluble elements of his kingship. He believed in his own authority, and there could be no suggestion of unwonted pride in the fact that he required others to acknowledge it. How, then, could Matilda achieve a ‘royal dignity’ to match her father’s if she could employ only the ‘modest gait and bearing proper to the gentle sex’ to command her kingdom?
We could perhaps argue that the context of violence, division and turmoil within which Matilda was forced to assert herself meant that she needed to tread particularly carefully, to avoid alienating those who did not yet share the unwavering loyalty of her innermost coterie. But her father had also had to fight for his throne against the pressing claims of a rival, and for both Henry and Stephen too, in equally troubled circumstances, it was clear that acting like a king – inhabiting the role with absolute conviction – was essential if the kingdom were to be convinced that the crown was on the right man’s head. In fact, those elements of Stephen’s character that were less than imperious served to raise questions about his authority rather than reinforcing it: his affable generosity, for example (‘such a kindly and gentle disposition that he commonly forgot a king’s exalted rank’, the Gesta noted), or his light voice, so soft that he had had to depute someone else to rouse his troops with a battlefield speech before the fighting at Lincoln.
The truth of the matter was that Matilda found herself trapped. She urgently needed to show that she was a credible ruler. Her sex had already prevented her from leading her own army into battle, but this, at last, was her chance to prove that being a woman (and a woman standing alone, given that the man to whom she was married was neither present in England nor a political asset there) need not constrain her command in the council chamber. But when she sought to emulate her formidable father and her first husband, the two great kings whose rule she knew best, she encountered not awestruck obedience, but resentment of a ‘haughtiness and insolence’ that was deemed unnatural and unfeminine.
That much is clear from the Gesta’s specific objections to her conduct on what should have been her triumphal approach to London. First, the Gesta claimed, she failed to show due deference to ‘the chief men of the whole kingdom’, the chronicler’s patron Bishop Henry of Winchester prominent among them.
… she did not rise respectfully, as she should have, when they bowed before her, or agree to what they asked, but repeatedly sent them away with contumely, rebuffing them by an arrogant answer and refusing to hearken to their words; and by this time she no longer relied on their advice, as she should have, and had promised them, but arranged everything as she herself thought fit and according to her own arbitrary will.
What this boils down to, when issues of style and substance are disentangled, is that Matilda did not do exactly what her advisers told her – and one can only guess what King Henry would have said to the suggestion that his counsellors should have the last word in his government.
Secondly, she summoned the richest of London’s citizens and asked them for a large sum of money as a contribution to her royal expenses, a request made ‘not with unassuming gentleness, but with a voice of authority’, the Gesta explained disapprovingly. When they begged to be excused, pleading poverty, ‘she, with a grim look, her forehead wrinkled into a frown, every trace of a woman’s gentleness removed from her face, blazed into unbearable fury’, declaring that the Londoners had lavished their wealth on Stephen’s cause, ‘and therefore it was not just to spare them in any respect or make the smallest reduction in the money demanded’. The citizens – here portrayed as innocents abashed by her rage – returned in anxious gloom to their homes.
Both of these incidents also appear in William of Malmesbury’s more sympathetic account – but in strikingly different form. William omits any mention of Matilda’s financial demands on the citizens of London, explaining instead that the inhabitants of the capital, ‘who had always been under suspicion and in a state of secret indignation, then gave vent to expressions of unconcealed hatred’ towards her. Meanwhile, Matilda’s supposedly high-handed treatment of her advisers here becomes a specific dispute with Bishop Henry, the most recent convert to her cause, and one whose support was predicated on his hopes of imposing his own influence on her rule. The bishop wanted Stephen’s personal estates, the rich and strategically vital counties of Mortain and Boulogne (the latter including vast tracts of land in Essex and Kent), to be committed to Stephen’s twelve-year-old son Eustace for as long as his father remained in prison. Matilda understandably refused, unwilling to hand over such power to a boy who would inevitably see her as the usurper of his royal inheritance – at which the bishop, ‘enraged by this affront’, left her court and began at once to plot against her.
Between claim and counterclaim, it is clear that Matilda faced two pressing and intractable problems: her relationship with Bishop Henry, without whom she would not have been recognised as ‘lady of England’, but who expected as the price of his backing a degree of control over royal policy that no monarch could tolerate; and the attitude of the Londoners, whose overwhelming economic interest in the trade route through Boulogne predisposed them to support Stephen’s claim to the crown, an alliance which Stephen himself had cemented with expansive promises of royal favour. But the minute Matilda tried to tackle those problems with what her father would have recognised as kingly authority, she was accused of acting with a headstrong arrogance unbecoming to her sex.
That is not to say that her decisions and her behaviour were beyond reproach. It is not difficult to imagine that the daughter of the domineering King Henry – a woman who had been raised in imperial splendour and was now for the first time wielding power that she believed had been stolen from her – might have been less than subtle in her treatment of former opponents. At the same time, it is not easy, even with hindsight, to decide whether confrontation or conciliation was the better way of dealing with those of her subjects whose professions of new-found loyalty seemed likely to be the thinnest of political veneers. But we can be more confident in rejecting the suggestion that ‘an aspect of her character, which had not so far been apparent … let her down’. Matilda’s fledgling regime was not crippled by the sudden revelation of previously undetected personal flaws. Instead, she was taking her first steps in the new persona of a female monarch – and found herself stumbling over the implicit contradictions between being a woman and being a king.
Could any woman have kept her footing? It seems unlikely. As Matilda made preparations at Westminster for the coronation she hoped would transform her from England’s lady to its reigning queen, she faced resistance led by an enemy who showed that, in the exercise of female power, context was everything. Stephen himself was doing little from his prison cell in Bristol Castle to stiffen the resolve of those who still hesitated to accept Matilda’s victory. (His characteristic mildness was such that, when visited by the archbishop of Canterbury, a consummate political pragmatist who ‘thought it unbefitting his reputation and position’ to transfer his allegiance to Matilda ‘without consulting the king’, Stephen gave him ‘a courteous permission to change over as the times required’.) But his cause was kept alive by his queen, Mathilde, a woman every inch as formidable as Matilda herself, but one who – acting as she was in the name of her incarcerated husband – escaped any kind of censure.
Mathilde began by adopting the classic pose of the queen consort as intercessor, begging Bishop Henry’s council at Winchester not to recognise Matilda’s claim, and, when that intervention failed, writing to Matilda herself to ask ‘for her husband’s release from his filthy dungeon’. Once it became clear, however, that graceful pleading would get her nowhere, she did not hesitate to resort to brute force – uncompromisingly gritty and resolute behaviour for which she was not castigated but lauded. The author of the Gesta Stephani had scarcely taken a breath after berating Matilda for abandoning ‘the modest gait and bearing proper to the gentle sex’ when he launched into a paean of praise to Stephen’s queen: ‘… forgetting the weakness of her sex and a woman’s softness’, he wrote with obvious admiration, ‘she bore herself with the valour of a man’. In the circumstances, Matilda could have been forgiven for despairing at the double standard by which she was dubbed an unnatural virago and her opponent a paragon of Amazonian virtue.
Mathilde’s strategy was one of violent confrontation. She mustered her husband’s Flemish mercenaries under their able commander, William of Ypres, and marched them from her lands in Kent to the south bank of the Thames, separated only by a narrow stretch of river from London’s city walls and from Matilda’s residence in the palace of Westminster, which lay a mile and a half outside the capital to the west. There Stephen’s queen ordered that this ‘magnificent body of troops’ should ‘rage most furiously around the city with plunder and arson, violence and the sword’. The Londoners looked on in horror, the Gesta Stephani reported with a touch of bathos, as ‘their land was stripped before their eyes and reduced by the enemy’s ravages to a habitation for the hedgehog’.
Queen Mathilde was demonstrating with single-minded aggression that the would-be Queen Matilda could not protect her capital from the depredations of an army loyal to her rival. As a result, Matilda’s triumph suddenly began to seem more illusory than real. And that in turn undermined the Londoners’ reluctant rationale for deserting a king whose territorial power dovetailed with their own trading interests, and who had wooed them with promises of privileged self-government. While Matilda remained preoccupied with her planned coronation, the decisive moment at which she would at last become England’s anointed ruler, the citizens of her capital despatched envoys to parley in secret with Stephen’s queen – and the result, for Matilda, was nothing short of catastrophic. On 24 June 1141, just as she was about to sit down to a banquet designed as a precursor to her ceremonial entry into London, the city’s bells began to toll in hideous cacophony, its western gates swung open and thousands of Londoners swarmed across the fields towards Westminster with weapons in their hands. In shock, Matilda and her attendants ran for their horses and fled westwards, making for the safety of her castle at Oxford, while the mob ransacked her lodgings and trampled the uneaten feast into the dirt. She had lost England’s capital; and with it her chance to be crowned England’s queen.
It was, said the Gesta Stephani, as though Stephen’s supporters were ‘bathed in the light of a new dawn’. Among those soaking up its rays was Bishop Henry of Winchester, who just two months earlier had proclaimed Matilda Lady of England, and ‘cursed all who cursed her, blessed those who blessed her, excommunicated those who were against her, and absolved those who supported her’. Now, having left her court and retreated to his episcopal palace at Winchester, he summarily retracted this anathema and complained to anyone who would listen about Matilda’s disgracefully assertive conduct – ‘that she had wished to arrest him; that she had disregarded everything she had sworn to him; that all the barons of England had kept their faith with her but she had broken hers, being unable to show restraint in the enjoyment of what she had gained’. Queen Mathilde, it turned out, had played her part in encouraging her brother-in-law’s defection as well as that of the Londoners, although in the bishop’s case she had shrewdly taken on the ego-massaging persona of humble petitioner rather than avenging Amazon. (Bishop Henry had been moved, the Ges ta Stephani solemnly explained, ‘by the woman’s tearful supplications, which she pressed on him with great earnestness …’)
Matilda soon learned of his betrayal, and, once she had rallied her forces after her chaotic flight from London, she made for Winchester at the head of her army, intending to secure the city and its treasury, and demanding that Bishop Henry appear before her to explain himself. But the bishop managed to slip away from his episcopal palace in the south-east of the city just as Matilda arrived at the royal castle in the west. Her forces, led by her brother Robert of Gloucester and her right-hand men Miles of Gloucester and Brien Fitzcount, had to content themselves with besieging the garrison the bishop had left behind. As they settled into the city for what promised to be a lengthy blockade, they had no inkling that Bishop Henry had appealed for help to Queen Mathilde, and that William of Ypres’s mercenaries were even at that moment advancing on the city and would soon encircle it.
It was Lincoln all over again: a great nobleman had slipped the net of a siege laid against him and summoned an army to besiege the besiegers. But this time the roles were reversed. This time it was Matilda’s forces, laying siege to a small garrison within a city fortress, who were ambushed by their enemy’s sudden arrival. As the violence intensified – with the city engulfed in flames after Bishop Henry’s men threw burning brands into the streets, while William of Ypres tightened his stranglehold on the surrounding countryside – the urgent need to secure Matilda’s safety became starkly apparent. On Sunday 14 September, Robert and Miles of Gloucester rallied their troops for a final stand, hoping against hope to fight their way out, but intent at all costs on winning time for Matilda’s escape. In that, they succeeded: Matilda fled forty miles north-east to Devizes, riding astride her horse like a man for greater speed, the devoted Brien Fitzcount at her side. Her prostration after two unrelenting days in the saddle was such that she had to be carried the rest of the way to Gloucester on a litter tied between two horses (‘as though she was a corpse’, one chronicler remarked – an observation which would later spawn wild rumours that she had been smuggled out of Winchester in a coffin).
But the price of her escape was high. Soon after she had reached the refuge of her own impregnable castle, Miles of Gloucester arrived at its gates, no longer the proud castellan but a lone fugitive, exhausted, alone and half-naked, his armour discarded in his flight. And he bore bad news. Matilda’s brother Robert had tried to hold out too long, and had been surrounded and captured. With his imprisonment, the last traces of Matilda’s triumph at Lincoln were stripped away. Her brother was indispensable to her cause, because of the men he commanded and the land he controlled – and now his freedom could only be secured by giving up the biggest prize of all: Stephen, who was still languishing in confinement at Bristol Castle.
Elaborate arrangements were put in place for the exchange of prisoners. Stephen was set free on the arrival at Bristol of his wife, Mathilde, and younger son, William, who were to be held there with all honour as surety for Earl Robert’s safety. Two days later, once Stephen had ridden to Winchester and been welcomed by his supporters there, Earl Robert set out in the opposite direction, leaving his own son behind as a guarantee of the queen’s wellbeing. When the earl had been safely received within the walls of his fortress at Bristol, Mathilde and her son were allowed to return to Stephen’s side, and Robert’s son was then released in his turn. With this stately diplomatic pavane along the road between Bristol and Winchester, the two sides once again took up the positions they had occupied eight months earlier, and Bishop Henry called yet another Church council to rubber-stamp his latest about-turn (‘saying that he had received the empress not of his own will but under compulsion … however, God in his mercy had given affairs a different course from what she had hoped, so that he might avoid destruction himself and rescue his brother from bondage …’). It was almost as though Matilda’s moment of triumph had never happened.
But not quite. The dramatic reverses that took place between February and November 1141 left permanent scars on the politi cal landscape, the profound significance of which only gradually became apparent. While Stephen’s supporters had been occupied in the fight to secure his freedom in England, across the water Matilda’s husband, Geoffroi of Anjou, had seized the opportunity to advance steadily into central Normandy, and his presence in the duchy was now so strong that many magnates whose estates lay principally on the Norman side of the Channel saw no option but to recognise his authority. There could be no clearer demonstration of the new reality of Geoffroi’s power than the defection from Stephen’s cause of the king’s favourite, Waleran of Meulan, who had fought in Stephen’s army in the rout at Lincoln but came to terms with Geoffroi in Normandy only six months later. From this point on, Waleran and his twin brother, Robert of Leicester, would play a delicate game in order to safeguard their family’s lands on both sides of the sea – Waleran in Normandy with Matilda’s husband, and Robert in England with Stephen, each brother, from supposedly opposite sides, doing his utmost to minimise risk to the family’s interests. Despite Stephen’s resurgence in England, therefore, it was clear that, unless he could find some way to halt Geoffroi’s seemingly unstoppable momentum in Normandy, ultimate victory would always elude him.
At the same time, Matilda had discovered quite how deep resistance ran to the idea that she might rule for herself. It was one thing for the magnates to acknowledge that the line of legitimate succession might deposit the crown on a female head; quite another, it turned out, for them to accept that a woman should exercise power like any other king. Her husband’s military successes undoubtedly meant that Stephen would struggle to obliterate Matilda’s claims completely; on the other hand she too would have no chance of winning a decisive victory if the greatest strength of those claims – the theoretical legitimacy of her personal rule – could not in fact be put into practice.
For the moment, however, the implications of this stalemate remained unexamined, as the two sides manoeuvred for the best new foothold in the old terrain on which they now found themselves. Stephen set out on yet another military sweep across his kingdom, but was halted at Northampton in May by a bout of serious illness. Matilda, meanwhile, took advantage of this lull in hostilities to send her brother, Earl Robert, to Normandy to solicit military help from her husband; but Geoffroi – whose principal concern was the conquest of Normandy rather than the pursuit of his wife’s royal title in distant England – found the earl’s presence so useful, as a commander and as a legitimising Norman presence in his Angevin army, that he repeatedly delayed Robert’s return.
Matilda had no way of knowing that Stephen’s health was already beginning to improve even as she despatched her brother to her husband’s side. As a result, Geoffroi’s ruthless prioritisation of his own interests placed his wife in grave danger. While she waited at Oxford for her brother’s return, Stephen gathered his troops and marched to Wareham, the Dorset port from which Earl Robert had sailed. There the rejuvenated king seized the castle and garrisoned it to block the earl’s gateway back into England, before marching north and then east towards Oxford. When Stephen’s army forded the deep waters of the river and stormed into the city, Matilda and her supporters were taken by surprise, horror-struck within the castle’s massive walls to find themselves once again under siege.
And this time, Stephen would not be deflected. Earl Robert – who raced to his ships when news of Matilda’s plight reached Normandy, incandescent with fury that he had been detained to help his brother-in-law at his sister’s expense – hurled his knights into an attack on Wareham as soon as his fleet reached the coast, taking the harbour and the town and pressing hard to force his way into the fortress. But Stephen had decided to let the port go if it kept Robert out of the way while he tightened his grip on Oxford, ‘thinking’, as the Gesta Stephani put it, ‘he could easily put an end to the strife in the kingdom if he forcibly overcame her through whom it began to be at strife’.
By the middle of December 1142, after three months trapped inside a burned and blackened city, Matilda and her small garrison were cold, starving and almost bereft of hope. Just before Christmas, she decided to risk everything on one last effort to escape. It was not the first time she had had to call on her reserves of physical strength or her unbending will, and she had twice before succeeded in slipping through Stephen’s outstretched fingers, once in spiriting herself into Arundel Castle on her arrival in England, and then in securing a perilous route out of the besieged city of Winchester. This, though, was the most dangerous challenge she had yet faced, and she met it with undaunted courage. In the still of the night, with a bodyguard of just three trusted soldiers, she left Oxford Castle by a small side gate. The frozen terrain that confronted her seemed impossibly forbidding: a heavy fall of snow shrouded the ground stretching ahead into the darkness, and the shouts of the watch Stephen had set to encircle the castle echoed on the cold air.
But the bitter winter proved to be a welcome ally. Wrapped in white cloaks as camouflage against the snowy landscape, Matilda and her knights walked silently across the river, its treacherous current now muffled under a layer of ice thick enough to bear their weight with ease. No one saw them pass; no one challenged them as they trudged seven miles through the cold and dark, feet numb and freezing in the drifting snow. Fear and necessity kept exhaustion at bay until they reached Abingdon, where they found horses to carry them just a few miles more to the safe haven of Brien Fitzcount’s castle at Wallingford.
When news of her daring escape began to spread (‘a manifest miracle of God’, William of Malmesbury called it), Stephen accepted the surrender of the beleaguered garrison she had left behind and allowed them to go free, his customary generosity of spirit perhaps reinforced by a rueful admiration of his rival’s bravery. Even the author of the Gesta Stephani, who was sometimes venomous in his hostility to Matilda, seemed reluctantly impressed by the good fortune her courage had brought: ‘I do not know whether it was to heighten the greatness of her fame in time to come, or by God’s judgement to increase more vehemently the disturbance of the kingdom, but never have I read of another woman so luckily rescued from so many mortal foes and from the threat of dangers so great,’ he wrote.
But if Matilda’s escape had kept her cause alive – and raised doubts yet again about God’s verdict on Stephen’s claims – it also marked the end of her hopes that she might one day rule the kingdom her father had bequeathed to her in person. England found itself once more carved up into rival networks of fortresses (Matilda now making her base at the bishop of Salisbury’s massive citadel of Devizes in Wiltshire), with the countryside in between left plundered and desolate by the passing of troops from one armoured island to another. Given that her husband had made it abundantly clear that he could not and would not pause in his conquest of Normandy to send an army that might turn the tide decisively in England, it seemed that the kingdom was condemned to endure a war of attrition between evenly matched enemies, neither of whom had the strength to destroy the other. In the midst of this destructive deadlock, however, one small step pointed a way forward: for when Robert of Gloucester had returned from Normandy to England, too late to rescue his sister from the siege of Oxford, Geoffroi of Anjou sent with him Matilda’s eldest son, nine-year-old Henry.
This visit to England, Henry’s first, was relatively brief – two years spent in training with sword and schoolbooks in his uncle’s household at Bristol Castle – but it was significant nonetheless. Henry was the ace in Matilda’s hand, even at the same time as his presence sounded the death-knell for her prospects of standing alone as England’s monarch. Her sex had proved to be a stumbling block which she simply could not transcend. That she could not command troops on the battlefield had served to compromise her leadership – though it had also protected her from danger – but the fatal flaw in her campaign for the throne was not her own inability to fight, nor any theoretical limitation to her authority, but the inability of her most powerful subjects to accept the reality of a woman ruling by and for herself. Matilda’s son, as he grew towards adulthood, was an entirely different prospect: a male heir who embodied all the hereditary right of Matilda’s claim, but who could also promise the uncomplicatedly powerful kingship of his grandfather and namesake.
Ensconced in her west-country power base after all the dramas and dangers of 1142, Matilda recognised that the battle she now faced was to win the crown for her son, rather than to wear it herself. The decision to fight for her son’s rights rather than her own was born of tough-minded political pragmatism, as well as fierce maternal and dynastic ambition, and in it there was no trace of the intolerable personal pride of which she had been accused during the months when the throne had seemed to be hers for the taking. Either that arrogance had disappeared as suddenly as it had supposedly appeared; or it had never in fact existed in the form that her enemies alleged.
Our view of Matilda during these years of dogged struggle is even more elusive than before because of the loss of the two greatest chroniclers among the ranks of her contemporaries: Orderic Vitalis, who died in 1142, lamenting the disintegration of his Anglo-Norman homelands, and William of Malmesbury, whose humane and inexhaustible curiosity was finally extinguished just after he had noted his intention to discover more details of Matilda’s audacious escape from Oxford at the end of that year. (The last sentence of his Historia Novella poignantly reads, ‘I am disposed to go into this more thoroughly if ever by the gift of God I learn the truth from those who were present …’) As a result, we have no way of knowing how Matilda coped with six years of relentless attrition during which she endured bereavements of her own. Miles of Gloucester, her ablest general, was killed by a misdirected arrow on a Christmas Eve hunting trip in the Forest of Dean in 1143. Four years later, her greatest lieutenant, her brother Robert, earl of Gloucester, succumbed to a fever at his castle at Bristol, and two years after that the staunchly faithful Brien Fitzcount died, having already retreated from the political world into a life of religious contemplation.
Despite these losses, Matilda could still rely on the west-country strongholds of which her brother’s earldom of Gloucester formed the heart, while Stephen dominated much larger swathes of territory across the midlands and the east. Some lords offered loyalty to one side or the other, while others, striving to protect their own interests, hovered between the two – though it is worth noting that, in the case of Robert of Gloucester’s powerful son-in-law, Ranulf of Chester, it was Matilda’s quietly steadfast treatment of her supporters, rather than Stephen’s suspicious unreliability, that won such allegiance as this serial turncoat was ultimately prepared to offer. Still other magnates, Waleran of Meulan among them, abandoned altogether the dark ambiguities of internecine conflict to pursue a war that offered instead the glorious certainties of faith and salvation, joining the crusade that set out from Europe for the Holy Land in 1147.
In 1148, Matilda herself left England to return to Normandy. This was not a surrender, but a recognition of where the long-term power of her position now lay. While she and Stephen had been locked in violent stand-off in England, her husband had advanced through Normandy with methodical ruthlessness, finally sweeping into the capital, Rouen, at the beginning of 1144. That summer, he was formally invested as duke of Normandy – his claim to the title justified by his wife’s inheritance and his own military success – amid the solemn grandeur of Rouen’s great cathedral. By the end of the year he had secured recognition as duke from Louis VII of France, and controlled every castle in the duchy save one, the fortress of Arques, just outside the port of Dieppe. A few months later, when Arques finally capitulated, Geoffroi’s conquest was complete. Stephen no longer held a single Norman stronghold, and all hope that he might one day retrieve his position there was extinguished.
From that point on, though Stephen unquestionably had the upper hand in England, it was increasingly apparent that the foundations of his power were crumbling away. No magnate with a claim to estates in Normandy could now afford to commit himself irretrievably to Stephen, however great the short-term advantage on the English side of the Channel. The king, too, was getting older – he turned fifty probably in 1142 – and, because the legitimacy of his rule depended on the personal sanction of his coronation rather than hereditary right, it could not be assumed that his teenage son, Eustace, had any certain claim to succeed him.
Stephen pressed hard in the attempt to persuade Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury to crown his son during his own lifetime, a custom previously adopted by the kings of France in an attempt to reinforce the practice of hereditary succession. But the days were gone when his brother, Bishop Henry, stood ready and able to swing the weight of the Church behind Stephen’s cause. The new reformist pope, Eugenius III, elected in 1145, refused to renew the worldly bishop’s status as papal legate. (Only a year earlier, Eugenius’s spiritual mentor, Bernard of Clairvaux, had vituperatively denounced Bishop Henry as ‘the man who walks before Satan, the son of perdition, the man who disrupts all rights and laws’.) And Stephen’s determination to take a stand on his royal authority over episcopal appointments in England antagonised Eugenius enough for the pope to reject any suggestion that Eustace should be pre-emptively crowned.
Matilda, meanwhile – who knew from her years of experience in Germany and Italy just how destructive conflict with the papacy could be – handled her relations with the Church with skilful diplomacy, something which contributed to the growing perception that, as the Gesta Stephani now began to suggest, it was her son, not Stephen’s, who was iustus regni Anglorum heres et appetitor – ‘the lawful heir and claimant to the kingdom of England’. Strikingly, the Gesta’s author speaks of Stephen as ‘the king’ and Henry as ‘the lawful heir’ as if there were no incompatibility between the two. And, from one increasingly influential point of view, there was none: it was possible to accept that Stephen was king with God’s blessing as manifested through his anointing, and at the same time to argue that the hereditary right to succeed to Henry I’s throne had passed through Matilda to his grandson.
Young Henry had returned to Normandy in 1144 in the wake of his father’s conquest of Rouen, to continue his political education in the duchy where, as Geoffroi soon astutely declared, he would take over the reins of government once he reached adulthood. Three years later – now almost fourteen, with his grandfather’s restless energy and a temperament as fiery as his flame-coloured hair – Henry made another impromptu appearance in England. He recruited a small company of mercenaries, hired on credit because he had no ready cash, and sailed across the Channel in an impulsive attempt to relieve his mother’s hemmed-in military position. News of his unexpected arrival sparked panic among Stephen’s supporters: rumour had it that he stood at the head of an army of thousands, with more troops to come. But soon more accurate reports, of a tiny band led by an inexperienced boy, began to spread, and, after a failed attempt to seize Purton Castle near the Wiltshire town of Cricklade, Henry’s unpaid soldiers began to desert him. Neither Matilda nor Robert of Gloucester, hard pressed as they were, had the funds to bail him out of the hole he had dug for himself; so the chastened teenager appealed for help instead to Stephen himself, who – ‘ever full of pity and compassion’, theGesta Stephani reported – sent him the money for his return crossing to Normandy.
Stephen’s magnanimity to his young cousin might seem extraordinary – and it certainly appeared so to the Gesta’s author, who could explain it only in terms of a ‘profound and prudent’ belief that ‘the more kindly and humanely a man behaves to an enemy, the feebler he makes him and the more he weakens him’. It was not the first time that the king had conducted himself with unusual mildness, a quality that might variously be lauded as generosity or condemned as weakness. In this case, however, his lack of a killer instinct dovetailed neatly with the inescapable political conclusion that it was entirely in Stephen’s interests for Matilda’s son to be removed from English soil as quickly as possible – an achievement for which a limited amount of cash clearly seemed a small price to pay. As for Henry, safely back in Normandy by the end of May 1147, it had been a hot-headed and in some ways foolish escapade; but it had also put down a marker of his utter determination to fight for his inheritance.
A year later, when Matilda at last gave up her personal leadership of the struggle in England to return to Normandy in the summer of 1148, her decision seems to have been precipitated by the need to tread carefully in relation to the Church. Her strategically vital stronghold at Devizes Castle, thirty miles east of Bristol, had belonged to Bishop Roger of Salisbury before Stephen had confiscated it when the bishop fell from power, and Matilda’s troops had then captured it from Stephen’s forces. But the new bishop, Jocelin de Bohun, now demanded its return with the vigorous support of Pope Eugenius, who threatened excommunication against anyone unjustly withholding the fortress from ecclesiastical hands. Matilda was determined neither to risk the kind of bitter confrontation with the papacy that was damaging her rival’s cause, nor simply to abdicate control of a castle that formed one of the keys to her territorial position. It made sense, therefore, to remove herself from the firing line, and in June 1148 she travelled to Falaise, twenty miles south of Caen, to make her personal peace with Bishop Jocelin, while at the same time leaving the fortress itself safely in the hands of a loyal garrison.
But she was able to leave England secure in the knowledge that her son was poised to take her place. The developing partnership between mother and son was obvious from their seamless manoeuvring over Devizes: Matilda wrote to Henry explaining her pious decision to observe the dictates of the Church, and handing over the responsibility for implementing that decision to him; sixteen-year-old Henry, arriving at Devizes in the spring of 1149, then dutifully restored the outlying properties to the bishop, but explained that he needed to hold on to the castle for just a little longer, until God had brought victory to his cause. Between them, they had smoothly managed to pacify the Church, while leaving their troops undisturbed behind the walls of the bishop’s castle.
By the end of that year Henry had been knighted at Carlisle by his great-uncle David, king of Scots, a solemn moment which publicly signalled his emergence into adulthood. He had also demonstrated his developing credentials as a military leader not only by seizing the Dorset harbour of Bridport, but, more importantly, by evading Stephen’s best attempts to capture him. And, on his return to Normandy at the beginning of 1150, Henry’s father Geoffroi, true to his word, handed over the government of the duchy into the hands of its new young duke.
Stephen now found himself in unfamiliar and deeply unnerving territory. He had succeeded for years in defending his crown against a rival whose claim raised as many questions as it answered, simply because she was female. Whatever arguments Matilda might make on the grounds of hereditary right or broken oaths of fealty, Stephen had on his side the fact of his kingship, a role which – as had become clear at the gates of London in 1141 – she could not hope to inhabit in any straightforward way. That fact, however, offered Stephen little defence against the charismatic new duke of Normandy, his revered grandfather’s namesake and every inch his heir. Meanwhile, Stephen himself could no longer lean on the mighty weight of the Church, which had done so much to underpin his acceptance as king; and the magnates too, on both sides of the partisan divide, increasingly saw in Henry the only hope of reuniting the dismembered Anglo-Norman realm.
Stephen’s powerlessness was now exposed with merciless clarity. A king who had won his throne by taking his chances without fear or hesitation suddenly found that he had no more moments left to seize. He could not force Henry onto the battlefield, because his nobles did not want to fight. The earls of Chester and Leicester, the former in Henry’s camp and the latter in Stephen’s, went so far as to agree a private treaty of mutual protection: if they were forced to go to war against each other, they declared, they would lead no more than twenty knights into battle, and any property each captured from the other would be returned. They were not alone in seeking an insurance policy of this kind; and the Gesta Stephani reported that, when Henry returned to England in 1153, Stephen found to his despair that a number of the magnates in his camp ‘had already sent envoys by stealth and made a compact with the duke’. The Gesta’s author had, of course, come to exactly the same political conclusion himself: he describes Stephen (who is clearly by this point no longer the hero of the narrative that bears his name) as ‘gloomy and depressed’ in the face of this betrayal, before recounting with breathless admiration how Henry ‘attacked the king’s party with determination and spirit everywhere … Nor did he fail of splendid success, rather did it come to him more abundantly the more eagerly he strove for loftier aims.’
Henry was twenty years old, already a proven leader, who had spent the last three years consolidating his hold on Normandy, and on Anjou too after the sudden death in 1151 of his father, Geoffroi, at the age of just thirty-eight. Remarkably, he had succeeded in doing so despite incurring the wrath of Louis VII of France. The pope’s mentor Bernard of Clairvaux, Stephen’s implacable enemy, had prevailed upon the French king to recognise Henry as duke of Normandy in the summer of 1151, but this uneasy alliance was shattered in May 1152 when Henry shocked Europe by marrying the king’s newly divorced wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Louis was incensed by this provocation, and declared war on Normandy, only for his troops to be beaten back with humiliatingly imperious ease by Henry’s forces. When Henry set foot on the English coast in January 1153, he did so, therefore, as master of lands in France which stretched, thanks to his new wife’s duchy of Aquitaine, all the way from Dieppe in the north to the Pyrenees in the south.
Stephen, at last, had no choice but to confront the reality of Henry’s triumph. He was past sixty; his indomitable wife, Mathilde, on whom he had relied so heavily, had died in the spring of 1152; his son, Eustace, could find no support from the Church or among the Anglo-Norman lords; and his nobles, disillusioned by the conflict and desperate to defend their own interests in a war-ravaged land, were in no mood to take up arms yet again on his behalf. He could no longer hold out against a settlement that had become both necessary and irresistible. If the king clung to any hope that God might still vindicate his possession of the crown as a dynastic rather than a personal right, it was crushed in August 1153 when twenty-four-year-old Eustace died suddenly, only a few weeks after withdrawing from his father’s court in furious protest at his own imminent disinheritance. Stephen had a second son, William, but even the grieving king himself now realised that any attempt to advance William’s claim in his brother’s place would be doomed to abject failure.
The painstaking diplomacy that brought Stephen and Henry to the conference table was conducted by Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury and the king’s brother Henry, Bishop of Winchester. Superficially, they were an odd couple – the archbishop a man of low-key subtlety, while the bishop wore his ego on his richly embroidered sleeve – but they were both skilful politicians, and both now convinced of the desperate need for a permanent peace. The treaty they drafted was formally ratified on 6 November 1153, when Stephen and Henry came face to face – weary resignation meeting restless self-assurance – at Winchester, the ancient city where Stephen had first become king eighteen years earlier. There, surrounded by the lords and bishops of England and Normandy, Stephen recognised Matilda’s son as the lawful heir to his kingdom; and in return Henry ‘generously conceded’, a Norman chronicler wrote, ‘that the king should hold the kingdom for the rest of his life, if he wished’. In order to cement this accommodation between Stephen’s de facto kingship and Henry’s hereditary right, and to smooth over the apparent contradictions between the two, Stephen then ‘adopted’ Henry, solemnly swearing to maintain him ‘as my son and heir in all things’.
The war was over, and the cause for which Matilda had fought so hard was won. The cost of that victory was her own eclipse. The author of the Gesta Stephani, ever hostile, seized on the opportunity to write her out of his story completely, while the charter enacting the terms of the treaty mentioned her only in passing as ‘the mother of the duke’, who, along with Henry’s wife and his younger brothers, had committed themselves to observe its terms. It would be less than a year, however, before Matilda reaped thereward of this self-denial. Stephen had spent the summer of 1154 on progress in the north, masking the destruction of all his hopes in the trappings of royal splendour. But on 25 October, after conducting a meeting with the count of Flanders, the king ‘was suddenly seized with a violent pain in his gut, accompanied by a flow of blood’. It had happened before, but this time he could not be saved. He died later that night – if not a broken man, then one reduced to a shadow of himself. He was buried, as he had wished, at his own foundation of Faversham Abbey in Kent, next to the new graves of his steadfast wife and his ill-fated son.
The death of an enemy who was also a cousin, and a generous man as well as an unremitting opponent, could hardly be a cause for unalloyed jubilation. Matilda’s triumph lay elsewhere: in the fact that, for the very first time since the Conquest, the accession of a new king did not take the form of a race for the coronation chair. Henry was in Normandy when news came of Stephen’s death, and remained there until 7 December, putting his affairs in order and waiting for favourable winds, before he set sail for his new kingdom. For six long weeks England patiently awaited his arrival, with no sign of conflict or resistance: ‘by God’s protecting grace she did not lack peace’, Henry of Huntingdon incisively observed, ‘through either love or fear of the king who was on his way’. And then, on 19 December 1154 – almost exactly nineteen years since Henry I had breathed his last – Henry II was crowned in majesty at Westminster Abbey. After two decades of bitter conflict, the competing imperatives of hereditary right, divine sanction and political pragmatism were united at last in Matilda’s son, now the undisputed successor to her father’s throne.
Matilda herself observed these dramatic events from a distance. She had settled her household at Rouen – ‘a fair city set among murmuring streams and smiling meadows’, Orderic Vitalis had called it – in a residence her father had built on the south side of the Seine amid the green of his park at Quevilly, beside the priory of Notre-Dame-du-Pré, an offshoot of her beloved abbey of Bec. Here she established a routine reminiscent of the life led by her mother, Edith-Matilda, at Westminster. Matilda was in Normandy not in England, and the king was her son not her husband, but, like Edith-Matilda before her, she acted as counsellor, confidante, and royal deputy when Henry was absent, as he often was, on his constant travels around his vast dominions. Like her mother, she became increasingly preoccupied with spiritual concerns, under the guidance of the monks alongside whom she lived, but she did not retreat from the world. Her son’s trust in her judgement, and the authority she exercised on his behalf, are unmistakable: ‘if you do not do this’, declared one royal mandate despatched from England to the justices of Normandy in the later 1150s, ‘let my lady and mother the empress see that it is done’.
The surviving sources give us only a few glimpses of her influence at work in her son’s government, but it was there nonetheless. In the autumn of 1155, less than a year after his accession, Henry was contemplating an attempt to conquer Ireland, a territory he intended to bestow on his younger brother William, but the overambitious plan was shelved, according to the Norman chronicler Robert of Torigni, when Matilda made clear that she was not convinced of its merits. However daring and impulsive the new king might be, he recognised his mother’s acumen and the wisdom of listening to her words of caution. Walter Map, a writer who knew Henry’s court well, thought Matilda’s advice ill-founded and deleterious, but the specific examples he cites serve only to reinforce the impression of tough lessons learnt by an incisive political brain, rather than his own more scathing assessment. ‘I have heard that his mother’s teaching was to this effect,’ Map wrote,
that he should spin out the affairs of everyone, hold long in his own hand all posts that fell in, take the revenues of them, and keep the aspirants to them hanging on in hope; and she supported this advice by an unkind analogy: an unruly hawk, if meat is often offered to it and then snatched away or hid, becomes keener and more inclinably obedient and attentive. He ought also to be much in his own chamber and little in public: he should never confer anything on anyone at the recommendation of any person, unless he had seen and learnt about it.
Henry was not one to hide himself away or to disguise himself behind an inscrutable royal mask: his life was lived in full view of his court and at breakneck speed. Nor, perhaps, was the capricious withholding of rewards necessarily the best way to inculcate unshakeable loyalty – understandable though an obsession with control might be for a woman who had never enjoyed unquestioned command. But Matilda’s insistence on the vital importance of personal knowledge and personal experience was recognisable at the heart of Henry’s rule. The tireless energy of his government was founded on his sharp intelligence and his extraordinary recall of facts and faces; ‘he had at his fingertips an almost complete knowledge of history, and a great store of practical wisdom’, noted his chaplain, Gerald of Wales.
And the king also knew the value of his mother’s experience, which came to the fore in 1157 during negotiations with the Holy Roman Emperor, Friedrich Barbarossa, over the fate of the mummified hand of St James, brought from Germany to England thirty-two years earlier by Matilda herself. The emperor insisted that this sacred relic should now be restored to the imperial treasury, while Henry was equally determined that it should remain as the focus of a developing cult at Reading Abbey, his royal grandfather’s foundation and final resting-place. The result was a tense exchange of elaborate diplomatic courtesies, at the end of which the hand remained safely untouched within its jewelled reliquary at Reading while Friedrich received instead a dazzling array of mollifying gifts, including not only four great falcons but a vast tent of extraordinary workmanship, so huge that a mechanism was required to raise it. There is no direct evidence to put Matilda’s role in this delicate diplomacy beyond doubt, but it is impossible to imagine that her long-ago experience of crossing the Alps with the German court was not brought to bear on the selection of a gift which combined exquisite luxury with such practical good sense. The emperor spent the next four years on campaign in Italy, just as Matilda and her first husband had done before him, and an awestruck visitor to his camp outside Milan remarked admiringly on the lavish imperial pavilion, which was big enough, he said, to stage a coronation.
Not all of Matilda’s interventions were so successful. In 1156 she had to endure the bitterest of divisions among her children, when her second son, twenty-two-year-old Geoffrey, rose in rebellion against his elder brother, complaining that their father had intended him to rule Anjou if Henry succeeded to the throne of England. Matilda presided over a strained family conference that gathered at Rouen in February, but Henry was immovable, and Geoffrey withdrew to prepare for war. He could not resist his brother’s might for long, however; it took less than six months under siege at his castles of Chinon, Mirebeau and Loudun, just south of the Loire river between Angers and Tours, before he was forced to cede his claim to Anjou and settle for an annuity in lieu of the power to which he had aspired.
There is no sign that Matilda held any brief for her younger son’s demands; she had fought too long and too hard for Henry’s inheritance to see it put at risk in his moment of triumph. But she cannot have relished the fragmentation of her family, nor the subsequent and unexpected loss of her two younger children: Geoffrey died, disappointed and humiliated, in 1158, and William at her side in Rouen six years later. By then Matilda, at sixty-two, was no longer the political force she had once been. She had been seriously ill in 1160, and, though she recovered, her influence with Henry began to falter after 1162, when she counselled fruitlessly against the appointment of his close friend Thomas Becket as the new archbishop of Canterbury. Henry would have plenty of time to regret that he did not follow her shrewd advice, but Matilda did not live to see the volatile relationship between king and archbishop reach its violent end. As late as the summer of 1167 she was still playing her now accustomed role as elder stateswoman, writing to Louis VII of France in the attempt to defuse escalating hostilities between him and her son. As she had hoped, a truce was agreed in August, and Henry immediately availed himself of the opportunity to launch an invasion of the independent duchy of Brittany. It was only a matter of weeks, however, before he was racing back to Normandy, recalled by the devastating news of his mother’s death.
Matilda died on 10 September 1167, surrounded by the devoted monks of Bec who had become her spiritual family. She was buried in their midst, her body sewn into an ox-hide and laid to rest before the high altar in the abbey church, her tomb bathed in light from a magnificent seven-branched candlestick and a halo of lamps above. Her deep faith was reflected not only in the luminous ceremonial of her funeral rites, but in the priceless treasures she bestowed on the abbey. She had already given into the monks’ keeping the two crowns of solid gold she had brought from Germany (the heavier of which, supported by its silver rods, her son had worn at his coronation), as well as portable altars of marble and silver, precious relics housed in an ebony chest, rich plate and vestments, and her own imperial cloak, spangled with gold. Now she left them the contents of her private chapel: ornaments of gold and silver, chasubles and copes, and two silver boxes in the shape of eggs gripped in a griffin’s claws.
They were the glittering traces of an extraordinary life; six decades that had taken her from the quiet of an English childhood across Europe and back again, from the brutality of civil war to the tranquillity of Bec’s echoing cloisters. And it was a life lived by a remarkable woman. Matilda inherited her father’s commanding temperament, his ability to inspire loyalty and his political intelligence – but the role she played and the qualities she possessed have been much obscured, then and now, by the preconceptions of the lords she sought to lead and the clerics who wrote her story. ‘Haughty’ and ‘intolerably proud’ are the adjectives indelibly associated with her name, phrases coined in those few months of her life when she tried to exercise power as a monarch in her own right, and repeated by historians ever since. Strikingly, they were never used to describe any male member of her fearsomely domineering family; and they do not fit well with what we know of Matilda in the decades before and after that brief moment in 1141. Certainly, her demeanour was unflinchingly regal, and she was driven by a resolute belief in her own capacity to rule, but in the end the defining stamp of her political career was her acutely judged pragmatism in securing the succession of her son at the expense of her own claim to the crown.
The implications of that decision are clear in the Latin verses later inscribed on her grave: ‘Great by birth, greater by marriage, greatest in her offspring, here lies the daughter, wife, and mother of Henry.’ Her son’s triumph was the vindication of everything she had done; but the price to be paid for that victory was her disappearance between the lines of her own epitaph – a tacit acceptance that a female heir to England’s throne, unlike her male counterpart, could not expect to rule for herself. The question would not arise again for four hundred years, until the agonising death of a fragile boy in 1553, and in the meantime any woman who aspired to the exercise of power in England – most immediately Matilda’s formidable daughter-in-law, Eleanor of Aquitaine – could hope to achieve it only by negotiating the roles of daughter, wife and mother that, etched into Matilda’s tomb, came to define her career in retrospect.
But, if Matilda’s last resting-place framed her achievements only in relation to her father, husband and son, one of those men was unwilling to do the same. Her son would become one of the most exceptional rulers in medieval Europe, and throughout his turbulent life this volatile, powerful monarch acknowledged the political legacy of his courageous and controversial mother by calling himself ‘Henry FitzEmpress’.