by Dan Jones
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.
The Shipwreck
In the last week of November 1135, Henry I and his entourage arrived at Lyons-la-Forêt in upper Normandy. The castle and the forest surrounding it had been a regular haunt of the Norman dukes for two centuries, and Henry arrived with the intention of enjoying himself as his ancestors had, in the thrill of the hunt. Even at the age of sixty-eight, the king remained vigorous and strong.
Having arrived on a Monday, Henry intended to begin his hunting the following day. But during the night he fell ill, and his condition worsened fast. By the end of the week it was apparent that the illness was extremely grave. The old king prepared himself to die. According to a letter from the archbishop of Rouen, Henry ‘confessed his sins … beat his breast and set aside his animosities’. On Sunday 1 December, after three days of absolution, prayer and almsgiving, the archbishop anointed Henry with holy oil, whereupon the king expired.
Although many chroniclers noted the piety with which Henry I died, one of them – Henry of Huntingdon – recorded some gruesome details of the king’s immediate afterlife. The royal corpse was ‘brought to Rouen, and there his entrails, brain and eyes were buried together’. Then, ‘the body was cut all over with knives and copiously sprinkled with salt and wrapped in oxhides to stop the strong pervasive stench, which was already causing the deaths of those who watched over it. It even killed the man who had been hired for a great fee to cut off the head with an axe and extract the stinking brain, although he had wrapped his face in linen cloths …’
It was a far cry from the splendour of kingship. Yet if this was the physical reality of Henry I’s death, the political fallout was far worse. For even as Henry’s deadly embalmed body was transported to England
for burial at Reading Abbey, England was descending into a state of civil war and constitutional crisis that would last for nearly two decades. It is usually known as the Anarchy, but those who lived through it and wrote of England’s darkest days preferred to call it the Shipwreck.
Henry’s failure to provide for an adult male successor left the Anglo-Norman realm contested. Three times since his daughter Matilda’s return from Germany – in 1126, 1131 and 1133 – Henry I had caused his barons to swear that they would be loyal to her. But from the moment that the old king died, his subjects began to abandon their promises.
In December 1135 Matilda’s cousin, Stephen of Blois, was in his wife’s county of Boulogne. As soon as he learned of his uncle Henry’s death, Stephen crossed directly to England. Disregarding the fact that he had sworn to uphold Matilda’s rule, Stephen went straight to London and had himself acclaimed king. Then on 22 December he went to Winchester, where he seized the royal treasury and had himself anointed by the archbishop of Canterbury. He moved quickly to secure the support of the Anglo-Norman magnates on both sides of the Channel. With little hesitation or delay, they threw themselves behind him. The Empress Matilda, Geoffrey Plantagenet and their young family were suddenly disinherited.
The speed with which the barons and bishops of England and Normandy abandoned Matilda’s claim speaks volumes about the nature of kingship in the twelfth century. Female rule had precedents, but they were faint and unconvincing. Rumours flew around that Henry on his death-bed had absolved his barons from their oaths of allegiance to his daughter. They found willing ears. The prospect of being ruled by a woman was not a promising one.
Moreover, the transfer of power between English kings was not yet decided by blood. There was a strong elective element to kingship. Indeed, without it, Henry I himself would never have been king. Henry had grabbed England and Normandy from under his elder brother Robert Curthose’s nose in 1100 and 1106 respectively. Now history repeated itself. Stephen had no real claim under primogeniture to be king. For one thing, he had an elder brother, Theobald of Blois, whose blood-claim was stronger. Yet Stephen was a credible candidate. He had been raised at Henry I’s court with the king’s sons and held an exalted position among the rest of the Anglo-Norman barons. He had narrowly avoided death alongside William the Aetheling by abandoning the White Ship, claiming an attack of diarrhoea, before it left harbour. Since then he had been one of Henry’s favourite relatives. He was a wealthy, powerful, charming and courteous man in his early forties. His wife Matilda’s county of Boulogne was important to the English wool trade. His brother Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester, was a powerful voice in the English Church and commanded the support of many of his fellow bishops. And most important of all, Stephen simply pounced fast to claim the throne in a power vacuum. He was in the perfect place at the strategic moment to claim power and to defend England and Normandy. ‘There was no one else at hand who could take the king’s place and put an end to the great dangers threatening the kingdom,’ wrote the anonymous author of the Gesta Stephani (The Acts of Stephen).
All this contrasted sharply with Matilda and Geoffrey. The empress was pregnant with her third child in December 1135, much further away from England and unable to move as swiftly as her cousin Stephen. Furthermore, she and Geoffrey had been pursuing a violent dispute with Henry in the years before he died, as they attempted to claim the Norman border castles that the old king had promised as his daughter’s dowry. Geoffrey, being an Angevin, was already the object of much suspicion in Normandy and England. Matilda’s reputation was apparently not much better. According to Henry of Huntingdon, the empress ‘was lifted up to an insufferable arrogance … and she alienated the hearts of almost everyone’. Although her two sons – the two-year-old Henry and one-year-old Geoffrey – could both claim more impressive royal blood than Stephen, there was little chance that a toddler would be acclaimed as a twelfth-century king simply by virtue of birthright.
Thus, in 1135, Matilda and Geoffrey were elbowed aside. The most that they could do was move to claim the disputed dowry castles and bide their time while Stephen cemented his unlikely rule in England and Normandy.
Stephen, however, did not find the practice of kingship anywhere near as easy as its acquisition. He lacked the calculated ruthlessness and political intelligence of Henry I. He relied on a small group of baronial friends for advice and assistance while ignoring others of greater status. He failed to impose himself on barons who resisted his authority and he managed to alienate other men who ought to have been his biggest supporters.
Within the first three years of his reign, Stephen’s rule on both sides of the Channel had been severely rocked. In Normandy, Geoffrey Plantagenet took up his son’s claim to be duke of Normandy. From 1136 he began to wage a war of conquest from Normandy’s southern borders, which Stephen was ill-placed to resist. All the king’s attention was focused on England, where he lost the support, in quick succession, of Matilda’s half-brother Robert of Gloucester, who was the most powerful baron in the country; of his own brother Henry, bishop of Winchester, whom he passed over for promotion to the see of Canterbury; and of Roger, bishop of Salisbury, a vastly experienced royal administrator whose followers and son were arrested in clear breach of Stephen’s promise at his coronation not to molest the Church or its bishops.
Stephen’s reign was, from the beginning, divisive. He was generous in dispersing Henry I’s carefully accumulated treasure – but he was not even-handed with it. He lavished favours on friends like the twins Waleran and Robert Beaumont at the expense of established, powerful barons like Ranulf earl of Chester. This destabilized both national and local politics and the effects were exacerbated by Stephen’s ill-advised attacks on the professional government that Henry I had constructed. He dismissed a number of prominent career administrators and attempted to run England through high-born military men, who were appointed to run government in the counties by virtue of their rank, rather than their administrative experience.
If all this was highly disruptive to Anglo-Norman rule, it was equally encouraging to Matilda and her family as they watched Stephen’s government unravel from afar. By 1138 it seemed that a chance had arisen, as Matilda’s influential half-brother Robert earl of Gloucester officially defected from Stephen’s cause. In 1139, as Geoffrey Plantagenet continued his assaults on Normandy, Matilda appealed her case as her father’s heir to Rome and the Second Lateran Council and invaded England, allying with Gloucester and setting up her headquarters and a nascent alternative government in Bristol. A civil war had begun.
Matilda arrived to find England an unsettled realm. Very quickly her presence made things worse. She attracted a small but significant coalition of disaffected barons, including Gloucester, the Marcher lord Brian FitzCount and Miles of Gloucester, who had been a powerful official in the west country during her father’s reign, but the effect was to split England in two. Miles of Gloucester launched attacks on royalist strongholds across England – attacks that Stephen was unable to crush, and which allowed Matilda’s opposition faction to grow in strength and confidence. Yet the empress was nowhere near powerful enough totally to defeat the king and take control of England in her own right. The result was a prolonged period of war between the two cousins: both of them claimed to be the rightful ruler of England, but neither could impress their authority over the whole realm.
In 1141 the empress won her first significant victory. In late 1140 King Stephen had offended Ranulf earl of Chester by granting lands and castles that the earl coveted to his enemies. It had been enough to push him into armed opposition. Ranulf seized Lincoln castle from a royal garrison, and in February 1141 Stephen was besieging the castle to attempt its recapture. Seizing his chance, Robert earl of Gloucester marched troops to Lincoln and attacked the royal army. In the pitched battle that followed, Stephen’s troops were routed and the king was captured.
This should have been Matilda’s moment. She had an opportunity, with her cousin now captive,
to take England for herself and her son. She assumed the novel title of Lady of the English and attempted to arrange a coronation in London. Stephen’s brother, Henry bishop of Winchester, was by now a papal legate and threw his weight behind the empress. Many of England’s major barons abandoned the king and looked to their own estates, unwilling to save a regime of which they had long stood in doubt.
Yet the empress could not press home her advantage. She was opposed by spirited military defences organized under Stephen’s queen – another Matilda. She swiftly managed to fall out with the bishop of Winchester, and to offend most of the magnates whom she encountered with her natural arrogance and haughtiness. As summer approached, the citizens of London took against her when she refused to give them any financial concessions, and on 24 June 1141 they chased Matilda out of the city. With her campaign now in disarray, the empress tried to besiege Henry bishop of Winchester in his diocesan seat. In a disastrous battle, Robert earl of Gloucester was captured. In order to free her half-brother, Matilda had no option but to arrange a prisoner swap. She released King Stephen. Her brief victory, which had lasted just under eight months, was undone.
By the end of 1142, it seemed that Matilda’s battle for queenship was almost over. She had been chased by Stephen’s forces all the way to Oxford and by late November she was besieged in the castle, with hope draining away. Far away across the Channel her husband, Geoffrey Plantagenet, was pushing on with a highly successful conquest of Normandy. Robert earl of Gloucester had failed to persuade him to divert from the task to come and rescue his beleaguered wife. The best Geoffrey would send was 300 knights and their nine-year-old son Henry as a new figurehead for the Angevin cause in England.
