Henry I was ‘the man against whom no one could prevail except God himself’. So wrote the author of the Brut chronicle. And indeed, almost every aspect of Henry’s rule was a success. The fourth son of William the Conqueror enjoyed an exceptionally long, peaceful and prosperous reign of thirty-five years, in which royal authority in England reached new heights. After his father’s death in 1087, England and Normandy had been split apart. Henry ruthlessly reunited them. After snatching the English Crown in 1100, he defeated his elder brother Robert Curthose at the battle of Tinchebrai in 1106 to seize control of Normandy, and thereafter kept Robert imprisoned for nearly three decades until he died at Cardiff castle in 1134. Henry encouraged the intermingling of a truly Anglo-Norman aristocracy, whose culture and landholdings straddled the Channel. Meanwhile, in Queen Matilda he chose a wife who would bring the Norman and Saxon bloodlines together, to heal the wounds of the Conquest.
Henry was a great lawgiver and administrator. He created a sophisticated system of Anglo-Norman government which was a vast improvement on anything that had been known under the rule of his father William the Conqueror or brother William Rufus. He granted the English barons a charter of liberties, which celebrated the laws of Edward the Confessor, guaranteed baronial rights and set out some limits to royal power. He sent royal judges into the English shires on large judicial circuits, investigating crimes, abuses and corruption and strengthening the Crown’s role in local government. He reformed the royal treasury, setting up an exchequer to make accounts twice a year and drawing together the accounting systems of England and Normandy under a single treasurer. And he did much to secure Normandy’s position on the Continent. Taken together, Henry’s government was one of the most sophisticated bureaucratic machines to have been seen in Europe since the Roman era. ‘In his time,’ said the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘no man dared do wrong against another; he made peace for man and beast.’
Yet for all King Henry I’s great triumphs, he failed in one vital task. He never managed to secure the future.
After William the Aetheling’s death in the White Ship disaster, Henry I tried hard to father another legitimate son on whom he could settle his lands and titles. Queen Matilda had died in 1118, so in 1121 Henry married the nubile teenager Adeliza of Louvain. Surprisingly for a man who had sired twenty-two bastard children, he was unable to impregnate his new wife.
That left Henry with one, rather desperate, option. Given that he could not groom as king any of his bastard sons (such as the extremely capable eldest, Robert earl of Gloucester), Henry decided that he would appoint as his heir his only other legitimate child: the Empress Matilda.
When her younger brother died on the White Ship, Matilda was eighteen years old. She had been living in Germany for a decade, having been sent at the age of eight to marry Henry V, king of the Germans and Holy Roman Emperor. She had grown up in utmost splendour in the cities and palaces of central Europe, where she tasted the very heights of political power. The Emperor’s power reached from Germany to Tuscany. Since he was stretched constantly between his large domains, Matilda served as regent when her husband was absent. She had twice worn her imperial crown in great ceremonial occasions at Rome, and as one of the most important women in Europe she kept the company of the most famous and influential figures of her age.
In 1125, however, Matilda was widowed. She had no children with the emperor, so her political role in Germany was cut short. Henry I brought her straight back to England for a new role. She arrived with her title of Empress and her favourite precious relic: the preserved hand of St James, a souvenir from the imperial chapel. As soon as she returned, she was thrust to the centre of politics. At the Christmas court of 1126 Matilda sat beside her father as the Anglo-Norman barons came to swear an oath of allegiance to her as heir to the kingdom and duchy.
This was an extraordinary measure, and both Henry and his barons realized it. The precedents for female rule in the twelfth century were very weak. A king asked a lot when he extracted from his people a promise that they would consent to be ruled by his daughter. Unfortunately, Henry had little other choice.
It was clear that Matilda would need a new husband to bolster her claim to succession. As he had with William the Aetheling, Henry now sought an alliance with the counts of Anjou. He contacted Fulk V and negotiated a marriage alliance between Matilda and Fulk’s eldest son, Geoffrey. On 17 June 1128 the couple were married in the Norman–Angevin border town of Le Mans. The Empress Matilda was twenty-six years old. Her groom was fifteen. John of Marmoutier recorded that the marriage was celebrated ‘for three weeks without a break, and when it was over no one left without a gift’.
On his wedding day, Geoffrey of Anjou was a tall, bumptious teenager with ginger hair, a seemingly inexhaustible natural energy and a flair for showmanship. His fair-skinned good looks earned him the sobriquet Le Bel. Tradition also has it that he liked to wear a sprig of bright yellow broom blossom (planta genista in Latin) in his hair, which earned him another nickname: Geoffrey Plantagenet. John of Marmoutier would later describe him as ‘admirable and likeable … he excelled at arguing … [and was] unusually skilled at warfare’. A week before he married Matilda he had been knighted by Henry I in Rouen, dressed in linen and purple, wearing double-mail armour with gold spurs, a shield covered in gold motifs of lions, and a sword reputedly forged by the mythical Norse blacksmith Wayland the Smith. As soon as the marriage was completed, Geoffrey became count of Anjou in his own right, as Fulk V resigned the title and left for the East, to become king of Jerusalem.
Despite all this, Matilda was underwhelmed. Not only was Geoffrey eleven years her junior; he was also an accursed son of Anjou. Normans saw Angevins as barbarians who murdered priests, desecrated churches and had appalling table manners. A legend held that they were descended from Satan’s daughter Melusine, who had married an Angevin count of old. She had revealed herself as a devil when forced to witness the mass, flew out of a church window and disappeared for ever, but her fiendish blood still bubbled in the veins of her descendants.
If this was legend from the distant ages, there was evidence closer to hand that the Angevin bloodline was dangerous. Geoffrey’s great-grandfather Fulk III the Black was notorious for his violence. He was said to have had his first wife burned at the stake in her wedding dress on discovery of her adultery with a goatherd, and his reputation as a perverted rapist and plunderer stretched from the shores of the Atlantic to the Holy Land.
All that notwithstanding, Geoffrey Plantagenet had seemed to Henry I a necessary husband for his imperial daughter. The couple did not like one another, but that was hardly the point. They argued and separated for the first years of their marriage, then settled down under Henry I’s guidance, and did their political duty. In 5 March 1133 at Le Mans, Matilda gave birth to their first son. The couple named him Henry, after the Anglo-Norman king whose Crown it was intended that he should inherit. The infant was baptized on Easter Saturday in Le Mans Cathedral, and placed under the protection of St Julian. But it would take more than a saint’s protection to provide for the child’s future. Within two years, everything that Henry I hoped for in his grandson would be cast into chaos and doubt.