The last vestige of his royal dignity was gone. And it had gone, contemporaries felt, ‘by the just judgement of God’.
It now remained, it seemed, only to give effect to the judgement of battle by conferring the sovereignty on Matilda. Matilda sent notice of her intention to Bishop Henry, who, as usual, accommodated himself to an outcome which he may also have wished for. They met on Sunday, 2 March, in the open air to the west of Winchester. Matilda, for her part, promised to be guided by Henry in all matters relating to the Church and to ecclesiastical appointments; while Henry, for his, swore his allegiance to her as queen.
The next day she was conducted in procession to the cathedral, where she was received as queen by the bishops and abbots of ‘her’ part of England. A few days later, Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury arrived. But he refused to join his fellow bishops in swearing allegiance to Matilda until Stephen in person had released him from his oath to him. Stephen, bowing to the inevitable, gave the necessary release.
A month later, Henry, as papal legate, convened a Church Council at Winchester to effect the transfer of sovereignty. William of Malmesbury was present and gave a unique account of the event, in which he tells us as much about what happened backstage as in the glare of the spotlights. And the former, at least to begin with, was vastly more important than the latter. For Bishop Henry was determined his council should be as smoothly stage-managed as any modern British party conference or American presidential convention. In a clear case of divide and persuade, he spent the first day in a series of separate, private meetings with each rank of the senior clergy: the bishops, the abbots and the archdeacons. All were sworn to secrecy and nothing emerged publicly. Informally, it was a different matter, and a swirl of gossip and speculation filled the cloisters of power as ‘what was to be done engrossed the minds and conversation of all’.
With opposition bought off or at least silenced, Bishop Henry was ready to go public and anoint (though not yet literally) Matilda as the chosen candidate. This was the business of the second day and it went like clockwork. Henry summarized recent events: the peace and good order England had enjoyed under Henry I; the oath to Matilda; her absence from the country on her father’s death which led to Stephen’s nomination as king; Stephen’s breach of his oath to protect the Church and the mounting disorder of his rule and finally the judgement which God had passed on Stephen, ‘by permitting him, without my knowledge [Henry added, surely unnecessarily], to fall into the hands of the powerful’. Therefore, Henry concluded, he had summoned this council ‘of the English clergy, to whose right it principally pertains to elect a sovereign, and also to crown him’.
The result of the ‘election’, of course, had been fixed the day before. All that was left was for Henry to announce it, which he did in suitably ringing terms:
We elect [he proclaimed] the daughter of that powerful, that glorious, that rich, that good, that in our times incomparable king, as sovereign of England and Normandy, and promise her fidelity and support.
His audience knew what was expected and ‘all present’, William of Malmesbury reports, ‘either becomingly applauded his sentiments, or by their silence assented thereto’. Following her election, Matilda was known as ‘lady of the English’, which was the appropriate variation on the title of ‘lord of the English’ given to a king before he had been crowned.
It only remained for the people to rubber-stamp the decision of the clergy, and Henry concluded the day’s proceedings by reporting that a delegation of Londoners, ‘who, from the importance of their city in England, are nobles, as it were’, had been summoned and were expected to arrive the next day – as they duly did.
It is clear that Henry expected no more problems with the Londoners than with his malleable fellow clergy. But he was quickly undeceived. Far from meekly acquiescing, the Londoners dared to request that Stephen, as ‘their lord the king’, might be released from captivity. Henry tried to face them down. Instead, the whole smooth machine of the council derailed, as a clerk belonging to Stephen’s queen, Matilda, followed up the Londoners’ plea by presenting a letter on her behalf to Henry. Clearly flustered, Henry, ‘exalt[ing] his voice to the highest pitch’, sought to shout him down. But the man was not to be silenced and, ‘with notable confidence’, read out the queen’s letter. This restated the Londoners’ request in still bolder and more personal terms. She required the council, ‘and especially the bishop of Winchester, the brother of her lord’, to restore Stephen, ‘whom abandoned persons, and even such as were under homage to him, had cast into chains’.
The council now broke up in disorder, but not before Henry, in a final show of authority, had excommunicated several leading royalists.
The debacle of the Winchester Council put Matilda’s candidacy on the back foot and it never recovered the smooth momentum which would have carried her effortlessly to the throne. Instead, it inched forward. Almost three months (from the beginning of April to the end of June) were spent in persuading the Londoners to agree, reluctantly, to allow Matilda to enter Westminster for her coronation. The time was not wholly wasted and Earl Robert, who was an effective consensus politician, had notable successes in winning over more of the aristocracy to his sister’s claim. He used every device: ‘kindly addressing the nobility, making many promises, and intimidating the adverse party’.
But Matilda’s entry into Westminster, which should have crowned both her and the whole enterprise, instead turned into a disaster. For she displayed none of her half-brother Robert’s emollient skills. Instead her imperious instincts came to the fore. She tried to command the Londoners when she should have wooed them. She refused to renew the privileges with which a grateful Stephen had rewarded their support. She even tried to tax them.
The result was that the Londoners, always lukewarm to her cause, became violently hostile and rose in force to drive her out of Westminster. Faced with overwhelming numbers, Matilda and her escort, which included her two chief supporters, her uncle David I of Scotland and her half-brother Robert of Gloucester, as well as Bishop Henry, fled.
As they made good their escape, the citizens plundered the palace, while Queen Matilda of Boulogne, who had been encamped on the South Bank, retook the City for her husband Stephen, to whom it henceforward remained steadfastly loyal.
Matilda and her friends regrouped at Oxford, where she lavishly rewarded the loyalty of her followers. This looked like wisdom. But it had the effect of further deepening partisan divisions. It also led to another crucial rift in the coalition which had so nearly swept her to the crown. For she now quarrelled with Bishop Henry. Despite having abandoned his brother, Henry was determined that his nephew Eustace, Stephen’s elder son, should succeed to his maternal inheritance of the county of Boulogne. Matilda was equally adamant that he should not. Was it vengeance? Or the fact that, as part of her distribution of largesse, she had already promised it to others? In any case, it led to a fatal breach with Henry, who refused her summons to attend her court at Oxford.
In the space of a few days, the empress had contrived to lose both her capital and, in effect, the Church.
Events now started to run strongly against her. Bishop Henry met Queen Matilda of Boulogne at Guildford and reached agreement with her by which he renewed his allegiance to Stephen and repudiated Matilda. In riposte, Matilda marched to Winchester, entered the city and laid siege to the bishop in his adjacent palace at Wolvesey. Henry retaliated by firing much of the city, including the suburban monastery of Hyde, where stood the great golden cross, given long ago by Cnut. Meanwhile, Queen Matilda of Boulogne and the Londoners joined in the fray and besieged the besiegers. As the trap started to close round them, Matilda and her forces decided to retreat and left the city on 14 September, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. But ‘the retreat became a flight, the flight a rout’. Matilda herself escaped, riding astride her horse like a man, and reached the safety of Gloucester. Robert of Gloucester was cut off and captured at Stockbridge.
&nb
sp; The symmetry powerfully struck contemporaries: within nine months of each other, the leaders of the two sides, King Stephen and Earl Robert, had each been defeated and captured in battle, and both events had taken place on a great feast day of the Church. The result was the status quo ante, as the battle of Lincoln was cancelled out by the rout of Winchester. Two months later, the two captives were exchanged for each other.
Faced with stalemate once more, Matilda, who had resumed residence at Oxford, decided to appeal to her husband for support. But Geoffrey, who had been quick to exploit the battle of Lincoln by launching his soon-to-be-successful conquest of Normandy, preferred to remain on his own side of the Channel and bought time by stating that he would agree the terms of his support for his wife only in personal negotiations with Earl Robert. Robert duly set sail for Normandy, leaving Matilda in safety, as he thought, at Oxford. He even extended his stay to help Geoffrey conquer further territory in the duchy.
His absence presented Stephen with an opportunity and, with characteristic speed, the king raised an army and laid siege to Matilda in Oxford. Robert was unable to return in time and by December 1142 Oxford was on the brink of surrender. Determined to avoid the capture that had been the fate of her rival Stephen, Matilda decided on a daring plan of escape. Clad in white cloaks as camouflage, she and a little escort of only three or four knights slipped out of Oxford by a postern gate, crossed the frozen Thames and trudged through the winter landscape to Abingdon. Thence she rode to Wallingford, Brian Fitzcount’s border fortress, before retreating still further west, to Devizes, where, in the almost impregnable castle built by Bishop Roger, she set up her new headquarters.
IV
Matilda was to remain at Devizes for six years, during which time she was never able to break out of her western heartland, which corresponded roughly to the ancient kingdom of Wessex. But neither was Stephen, equally secure in the east, ever able to make serious inroads against her. Instead, the effective partition of England, which had been apparent from the earliest days of the civil war, perpetuated itself and showed dangerous signs of consolidation, even permanence.
The symptoms were many and various. In view of their pretensions to sovereignty, it was only natural that Matilda in the west, Stephen in the east, and King David I of Scots in the north should each issue separate coinages from the mints under their control. But so did other great lords with no claim to royalty. These included the earls of Leicester, Salisbury and Northumbria, together with mere barons in the remoter fringes of the country, such as the lords of Alnwick and Gower. Even Earl Robert of Gloucester challenged his half-sister’s jealously guarded regality by issuing coins bearing his own name from the mint he had taken over at Bristol. From all directions, therefore, the royal monopoly on coinage, which had alone guaranteed its uniformity and quality and had been one of the great legacies of Anglo-Saxon England, came under severe and sustained challenge.
Nor was the coinage the only royal right usurped by the greater earls. Equipped with the whole panoply of royal power, they even presumed to negotiate with each other like more or less autonomous powers. Most dramatic was the conventio (‘agreement’) between Ranulf, earl of Chester, and Waleran’s twin brother, Robert, earl of Leicester. The former’s relentless expansionism brought him into contact with the latter’s sphere of influence and the agreement tried to limit the resulting friction. A formal defiance was to give fifteen days’ warning of any attack by the one on the other; a demilitarized zone was created round Leicester as a no man’s land in which neither might build castles; and, in the event of a breach, pledges deposited for safe-keeping with two local bishops were to be surrendered by the offending party. The detail is impressive; so is the fact that the king is almost ignored. But not quite: if the king attacks either party the other may assist him according to his allegiance. But he must do so with only twenty knights (a fraction of the forces available to him) and any plunder must be returned.
Divided, therefore, the English monarchy was falling into the state of the French. The monarch, whoever he or she might be, was more or less respected as a distant, somewhat ineffectual, feudal overlord. But his or her interventions on the ground were neither expected nor much welcomed, nor greatly to be feared.
And it was Stephen’s inability to instil fear or ‘dread’ that the Anglo-Saxon chronicler saw as the key to the disasters of his reign:
When the [rebellious lords] saw that he was a mild man, and soft, and good, and did not exact the full penalties of the law, they perpetrated every enormity.
‘For every rich man built his castles’, the chronicler continued, ‘and when the castles were made, they filled them with devils and evil men,’ who plundered and burned and taxed and tortured without mercy. At particular risk were those of the common people who were thought to be prosperous and to have hoarded wealth:
They put them in prison and tortured them with indescribable torture to extort gold and silver … They were hung by the thumbs or by the head, and [heavy] chains were hung on their feet. Knotted ropes were put round their heads and twisted till they penetrated to the brains. They put them in prisons where there were adders and snakes and toads, and killed them like that. Some they put in an instrument of torture, that is in a chest which was short and narrow and not deep, and they put sharp stones in it and pressed the man so that he had all his limbs broken.
‘To till the ground’, the writer concluded, in one of the finest and last pieces of prose to be written in the old tongue, ‘was to plough the sea; the earth bare no corn, for the lands was all laid waste by such deeds; and [men] said openly that Christ slept and his saints.’
The Anglo-Saxon chronicler was writing at Peterborough in East Anglia. Similar pictures were painted by William of Malmesbury, writing in Wiltshire; Ailred of Rievaulx, writing in Yorkshire; and Henry of Huntingdon, also writing in East Anglia. There is no reason to doubt that these writers reported accurately what they had seen and heard. But each had the misfortune to live in a hotly contested area. The Anglo-Saxon chronicler was especially unfortunate in being a neighbour of Geoffrey de Mandeville.
De Mandeville’s father had been constable of the Tower when Ranulf Flambard effected his daring escape and was stripped of a third of his lands by Henry I as a punishment for his carelessness. His son devoted his career to winning back what his father had lost: first by conspicuous loyalty to Henry I, later by disloyalty to everybody in the civil war. He changed sides at least three times, and each time increased his fame and fortune. Finally he became too powerful for his own good and Stephen, resorting to his favourite trick of arresting him at court, forced him to disgorge his castles. De Mandeville, faced once more with the ruin of his family, reacted with a furious nihilism. He flung himself from the royal court ‘like a vicious and riderless horse, kicking and biting’. Then he embarked on a regional reign of terror in East Anglia and the Fenland in revenge. He sacked Cambridge; pillaged the Isle of Ely; seized Ramsey Abbey and made it his headquarters. But his warlordism came to an abrupt end in 1144, when he died of the wounds he had received while attacking the royal stronghold at Burwell. Since he died excommunicate, his body remained unburied for twenty years.
Almost certainly, the sadistic excesses described by the Anglo-Saxon chronicler were the work of de Mandeville and his henchmen, William de Say and Hugh Bigod, earl of Norfolk. But, at the other end of the scale, Brian Fitzcount, Matilda’s partisan and one of the best educated and most civilized of the nobility, was also driven to survive by pillage and forced taxation around his border stronghold of Wallingford. And he mounted a powerful defence of his actions to Bishop Henry of Winchester, who had written him a curt letter of reproof. The civil war, he told him, had led to the loss of most of the lands he had received from King Henry. ‘As a result’, he continued, ‘I am in the greatest distress and am not harvesting one acre of corn from the land which he gave me.’ And this necessity was the sole reason for his depredations: ‘neither I nor my men are doing this for money or fie
f or land’.
But both de Mandeville and Brian Fitzcount were, in their very different ways, exceptional. Each was a product of a frontier; elsewhere, in the solid blocks of territory held by each of the three main parties to the war, Stephen, Matilda and David I of Scotland, there was what one chronicler calls umbra quaedam pacis (‘the shadow or simulacrum of peace’): a certain level of public order was maintained, taxes and dues were collected, charters were issued and even justice was done – if with a backward glance at happier, more stable times.
I am, as you see [a witness began his testimony at a meeting of the Shire Court in Norwich], a very old man, and I remember many things which happened in King Henry’s time and even before that, when right and justice, peace and loyalty flourished in England. But because in the stress of war, justice has fled and laws are silenced, the liberties of churches, like other good thing, have in many places perished.
This testimony was given shortly after 1148, and it suggests that there was already a profound and pervasive war-weariness. This extended even to one of the principals. That same year, Matilda left for Normandy. There she spent the last nineteen years of her life in a dignified and pious retirement. She never returned to England and she never used the title of ‘lady of the English’ again.
But if Matilda had given up the struggle for herself, she had only passed on the torch to her son, Henry. Henry, then aged nine, had first been brought to England by his uncle, Earl Robert, in the aftermath of Matilda’s flight from Oxford in 1142. For the next seven years, he divided his time between England, where he stayed with either his mother or his uncle, and Normandy, where his father Geoffrey, having completed the conquest of the duchy, was formally invested as duke in 1144. The intention, clearly, was to present Henry as the rightful heir to both halves of the Anglo-Norman realm.
Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy Page 20
