Queens Consort

by Lisa Hilton

  Leprosy was a particular focus for Matilda’s compassion. She was the benefactress of a ‘leprosarium’ at Chichester and possibly the patron of the hospital of St James at Westminster (textual sources attribute the foundation to Henry II, but archaeological evidence dates the building earlier than his reign), while her leper hospital at St Giles was still caring for fourteen sufferers at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539. Matilda’s parents had publicly washed the feet of several hundred paupers as part of their Lenten devotions, and Matilda followed in their footsteps in her own humble ministrations to lepers. Her brother David described a scene in her apartments at Westminster:

  The place was full of lepers and there was the Queen standing in the middle of them. And taking off a linen cloth she had wrapped around her waist, she put it into a water basin and began to wash and dry their feet and kiss them most devotedly while she was bathing them and drying them with her hands. And I said to her ‘My lady! What are you doing? Surely if the King knew about this he would never deign to kiss you with his lips after you had been polluted by the putrefied feet of lepers!’ Then she, under a smile, said ‘Who does not know that the feet of the Eternal King are to be preferred over the lips of a King who is going to die? Surely for that reason I called you, dearest brother, so that you might learn such works from my example.’9

  There is something a little too didactic about this anecdote for it to be entirely authentic, perhaps, but it tells us something about both Matilda’s reputation among her contemporaries and their expectations of their queen. It illustrates the connection between piety and that other important element of queenship, the role of intercessor or ‘peaceweaver’, the Christian duties of compassion and charity mingling with the role of mediator with the earthly representative of God’s power, the king. Matilda showed that it was possible for a queen to combine a public demonstration of religious devotion with an effective political function.

  Matilda played a significant part in the development of the Anglo-Norman Church, which was undergoing a period of problematic evolution in relation to the papacy that was to become known as the Gregorian or investiture controversy While it centred on the issue of ecclesiastical investiture, it had far broader implications for the relative roles of spiritual and temporal powers in England and throughout Europe. The eleventh century had seen many attempts to clarify and consolidate canon law, of which the sacrament of secular marriage that influenced the subsequent reputation of William the Conqueror was one. Other disputes concerned clerical marriage and the sin of simony, or the sale of Church offices. As early as 1059, the papal see had decided that secular leaders had no right to determine the election of popes, since the Church was founded on the authority of God alone. Traditionally, rulers had had the power to invest prelates, and to receive homage from them for their temporal powers, that is, the lands and revenues they controlled. Henry I’s involvement in this controversy was further complicated by the variance between Norman and English practices. Archbishop Anselm had gone into exile to avoid conflict with William Rufus and, although Henry had recalled him on his accession, Anselm, who had attended the Council of Rome in 1099, felt morally unable to condone the prevailing conventions of investiture in England and Normandy. In 1102, a compromise was reached whereby Henry was able to appoint bishops so long as Anselm himself was not required to consecrate them, but this soon broke down. Matilda’s own chancellor, Reinhelm, gave back his ring and staff of office rather than accept what he saw as uncanonical consecration, while William Giffard, a candidate for the see of Winchester, refused to allow the ceremony to proceed. In spring 1103 Anselm felt obliged to leave once more for Rome to seek papal advice.

  During the two and a half years of Anselm’s absence, Matilda corresponded with him. Her letters are the earliest in existence known to have been written by an English queen. Though they are not in her own hand — a clerk wrote them on her behalf — they display ‘a scholarship rare among laymen and quite exceptional amongst laywomen’.10 Her efforts to mediate between the archbishop, her husband, and the Pope, Paschal II, required not only a sophisticated understanding of the theological questions at issue and their political repercussions, but also a great deal of diplomatic discretion. Matilda signalled her support for Anselm just before his departure for Rome, when she witnessed a charter at Rochester which she signed ‘Matildis reginae et filiae Anselmi archiepiscopi’, but she was also aware that she could not afford to alienate Henry. The King had claimed the revenues of Canterbury for himself when Anselm left, on the grounds that the see was vacant, but Matilda was able to get him to set aside a personal allowance for the archbishop. However, when Henry extracted further sums of money from the clergy a few years later and they begged the Queen to intervene, she wept and insisted she could do nothing. She knew that success meant concessions, that she could not afford to overplay her hand without losing her influence over Henry.

  Anselm confirmed his awareness of that influence when he wrote: ‘Counsel these things, intimate these things publicly and privately to our Lord the King and repeat them often.’11 The perceived intimacy of husband and wife was one of the most powerful (and occasionally feared) elements of queenly power, and Matilda declared herself ready to make use of it. She encouraged Anselm: ‘Farther, frequent, though secret consultation promises the return of the father to his daughter … of the pastor to his flock.’ She claimed that she was ‘skilfully investigating’ Henry’s heart and had discovered that ‘his mind is better disposed towards you than many men think; and I favouring it, and suggesting wherever I can, he will become yet more courteous and reconciled towards you’. Matilda appeared confident of her power to persuade her husband. ‘As to what he permits now to be done, in reference to your return, he will permit more and better to be done in future, when, according to time and opportunity, you shall request it.’

  Henry’s understanding of the investiture issue was that it represented a diminishing of the royal prerogative, and he was reluctant to give way. In 1104, the Pope threatened to excommunicate him. Matilda had written to Paschal, describing the ‘lugubrious mourning’ and ‘opprobrious grief’ the realm of England was suffering from the lack of its ‘dearest father’, Anselm, and pleading in high-flown classical rhetoric for the archbishop’s return. Now, as excommunication was mooted, Anselm urged Matilda to ‘beg, plead and chide’ Henry to change his position. A compromise was eventually agreed in which Henry gave up his powers to invest prelates but retained the right to receive homage for ‘temporalities’, a concession in ecclesiastical terms, but one in which the secular powers of the crown were arguably augmented.

  Matilda’s involvement in the investiture controversy demonstrates a degree of confidence between King and Queen that is reinforced by the political responsibilities Henry assigned to her. The first six years of his reign were dominated by his ambition to retain control of Normandy. In 1101, he had made peace with his brother Robert in the treaty of Alton, but in 1105 he began the conquest of the duchy in earnest. After the battle of Tinchebrai in 1106, where Robert was taken prisoner, Normandy was his. It has been estimated that Henry spent 60 per cent of his time in Normandy,12 and Matilda, the designated head of his curia, or council, frequently acted as regent of England during his absence. That a woman should fulfil such a role was not perceived as odd by contemporaries: ‘The sources reveal the Queen intimately and actively involved in the public affairs of the kingdom, and none of the writers of these sources exhibit any surprise or dismay that this should be the case.’13

  Charter evidence is particularly important in ascertaining Matilda’s status. Her earliest public attestation took place in 1101, at the same time as Henry granted her the abbey of Waltham. Matilda pardoned the canons of Waltham the sum they had previously paid to the see of Durham for work on the cathedral there. In the sixty-five charters she witnessed during the first eighteen years of Henry’s reign, her name is placed above that of the bishops, second only in status to the King himself (the
only exception being a charter to the Conqueror’s foundation of St Stephen’s Caen, where Matilda appears after two kings, Henry and her brother Edgar King of Scots). Many charters feature clauses concluding with the words ‘per reginae Matildis’, which has been interpreted as an indication that the Queen supervised the document between the council and the clerks’ office to ensure that its contents accorded with what had been decided.14Matilda also issued at least thirty-three charters of her own, and a smaller group ‘clearly shows the Queen acting with what amounts to vice-regal authority’, sending out writs in her own name. The second-ever mention of the English exchequer, in the Abingdon Chronicle, describes a sitting of the exchequer court at Winchester in IIII, presided over by Matilda while Henry was in Normandy. As in the case of Matilda of Flanders, the cross-Channel division of property in the Anglo-Norman realm made shared rule both necessary and natural, and Matilda of Scotland’s career represents a high point in the opportunities for medieval women to exercise public power.

  Cultural patronage was a vital element of such powers, and one of Matilda’s first demonstrations of this was the commissioning of the Life of her mother, St Margaret of Scotland, which may have had a didactic as well as a hagiographic purpose, serving as a ‘mirror’ (in the sense of model or guide) of the virtues of the perfect princess for the young queen to emulate. Matilda certainly succeeded in imitating Margaret in her piety and her desire to regulate the Church, but she seems to have been less successful at reconciling her own inclinations towards simplicity and humility with the grandeur that was both expected of her and indeed obligatory as a manifestation of royal authority. In a pre-literate, highly visual culture, opulence and magnificence were essential badges of power, and as such were considered necessary virtues. St Margaret herself had recognised this in her attempts to spruce up the Scottish court, and Matilda may have been aware of the example of her erstwhile namesake, St Edith of Wilton, a holy Kentish princess who dressed splendidly even as a nun. When St Aethelwold reprimanded her for her worldliness, Edith replied that spiritual purity could sit just as well under silks as rags and continued to show off her beautiful gowns. Matilda, though, was ‘possibly somewhat uninspired in matters of style’.15 In fact, her Norman courtiers thought her rather a bore.

  The glamour and sophistication associated with royal courts naturally led to their condemnation by moralists as places of licentious behaviour. Margaret of Scotland had been aware of their potential for scandal and kept it in check: ‘None of her women were ever morally degraded by familiarity with men and none ever by the wantonness of levity.’16 The showiness and self-indulgence of the Anglo-Saxon court, it was implied, constituted one of the ‘sins’ for which the English had paid at the Conquest. William of Malmesbury draws an unflattering comparison between the clean-shaven, ‘delicate’ and economical Normans and the ‘fantastically appointed English’, who adorned themselves with masses of gold jewellery, drank to excess and sported tattoos. Forty years later, though, the contrast was less apparent: long hair was in, absurdly pointed shoes were fashionable for men and women’s gowns required extravagant amounts of fabric, their sleeves trailing on the ground. Elegant ladies painted their faces and bound their breasts to achieve a slimmer figure. In the midst of this finery the Queen seemed dowdy. Marbod of Rennes ventured tactfully: ‘You, o Queen, because you are, fear to seem, beautiful,’ but the outfit Matilda wears on her seal had been out of style for a generation before she was crowned. (The dress shown on the seal is probably a copy of one belonging to Matilda of Flanders, and it is similar, too, to a gown in which Henry’s sister Cecily, the abbess at Caen, is depicted elsewhere.)

  The atmosphere at Henry and Matilda’s court was very different from the racy environment of the unmarried Rufus’s reign, and William of Malmesbury suggests that Matilda was blamed for the change. Although Malmesbury’s 1066 portrait sneers at the English for their extravagant appearance and behaviour, it was Matilda’s Englishness that was now perceived as dull. At their traditional crown-wearing at Westminster a few weeks after their wedding, Henry and Matilda were nicknamed Godiva and Godric, two unambiguously English names that would have had old-fashioned and stuffy connotations. The fact that Matilda’s first language was English may have been a positive advantage to Henry, whose own grasp of the tongue is uncertain, but French was the language of social status, of the elite, and the very fact that Matilda spoke English at all provided the snobbish with a reason to look down on her.

  The difficulty of reconciling piety and the sophisticated behaviour expected of a courtier had formed part of the background to Matilda’s education at Wilton. ‘Courtly love’, the term used to describe the elegant, mildly licentious literature that had such tremendous cultural influence in Europe from the twelfth century onwards, is particularly associated with the legend of a later English queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, but long before Eleanor supposedly presided over her ‘courts of love’, the ideas, if not the form of the literature were being discussed in the Anglo-Norman kingdom. There are as many definitions of what precisely its ethos was as there are scholars to debate it, but in essence the genre is concerned with the idealisation of a married mistress by the poet, who worships his beloved and performs all manner of elaborate deeds in an attempt to win the merest mark (sometimes considerably more) of regard. The tradition later melds with the cult of chivalry and knightly honour, producing a romantic dreamworld of valiant knights and beautiful ladies that maintains a vague but potent grip on modernday perceptions of medieval life. Muriel, the poetess who was particularly honoured by her burial next to the relics of the Venerable Bede at Wilton, was described in a pre-1095 poem addressed to her by Baudri de Bourgueil as a beautiful young noblewoman who eschewed marriage and wealth to devote herself to virginity in the convent. A monk poet, Serlo, wrote to Muriel praising her choice and explaining the conundrum that a lady in ‘society’ could not be both elegant and virtuous since, in a world where marriages of convenience ruled, a woman who did not take a lover would be looked down on as ill-bred or provincial. This was precisely the dilemma ritualised by the troubadour poets. Given the veneration of Muriel’s memory at Wilton, it is likely that Matilda encountered this conundrum during her training there. Much to the disappointment of the court, Matilda inclined to virtue, but the connection with Wilton and Muriel strengthens the association of Matilda with a prototype of the courtly lady who was to become such a significant cultural entity in the following centuries.

  Her contemporaries may have considered her a failure in the glamour stakes, but Matilda’s intellectual legacy is satisfactorily enduring. One of her passions was architecture, and if her taste in clothes was conservatively ‘English’, the buildings she loved were uncompromisingly Norman in their awe-inspiring grandeur of scale. She has links with the abbey at Waltham, rebuilt by architects whose style was influenced by the designers of Durham Cathedral, Abingdon Abbey, Selby Abbey, Merton Priory and the church at St Albans, all either Norman foundations or rebuilt in the Norman style after the Conquest. Neither her Augustinian foundation of Holy Trinity Aldgate, of which the Queen’s confessor, Norman, was the first prior, nor her leper hospital survive, but contemporary accounts note their fashionable style and size. While ‘it is unquestionably true that Matilda shared the Norman passion for erecting large buildings’,17 she also took an interest in projects of a more domestic scale, building the first arched bridge in England, over the River Lea at Stratford-le-Bow, where previously there had been only a dangerous ford. The bridge was endowed with land and a mill to keep it in repair and was still in use in the nineteenth century. At Queenhithe, Matilda added a bathhouse with piped-in water, along with a set of public lavatories — appealingly pragmatic, if not exactly the sort of undertaking normally associated with courtly ladies.

  More conventionally, Matilda was a keen patron of music and literature, the former being among her main enthusiasms, according to William of Malmesbury. The musician William LeHarpur was given tax relief on lands granted t
o him by the King, and the Norman minstrel Rahere, who had performed for William Rufus, continued to work under Henry Henry himself has preserved an historical reputation for learning, his nickname, Beauclerc, attesting to his literacy, but ‘it has long been recognised that the epithet … is something of an exaggeration, and that the credit for court sponsored literary and artistic activity in the first quarter of the twelfth century belongs to Henry’s wives rather than the King himself.18

  The context of Matilda’s own literary interests is that of the ‘Twelfthcentury renaissance’, ‘the first age since classical antiquity when the intellectual emerges as a driving force’.19 As with the later, best-known Renaissance, there is a good deal of dispute about when this new intellectual current began to flow, of what exactly it consisted and the degree to which contemporaries were aware that they were part of it, but essentially, as the cohesive concept of ‘Christendom’ emerged after the Gregorian reforms, both Church scholars and the secular elite had a ‘lively awareness of doing something new, of being new men’.20 The authority of the Church fathers was being challenged by a modern sensibility to the possibilities of analysing rationally the natural world and man’s place in it as the link between the created universe and the divine power. Christian humanism was beginning to take form. This exciting intellectual energy manifested itself in systematised administrative and canon law, a rapidly expanding interest in books and libraries, developments in vernacular literature such as the courtly romance, a sense of historical writing as a discrete genre (this particularly strongly in the new Anglo-Norman kingdom with the works of Malmesbury, Orderic Vitalis and Geoffrey of Monmouth), the development of the famous ‘schools’ at Laon, Chartres and Paris and increasing opportunities for exposure to Jewish, Arabic and Greek science after the reconquest of Toledo from the Moors in 1085. Man’s relationship with Christ was also reconfigured, with the Saviour considered for his human as well as divine qualities, and hence a greater emphasis was placed on His suffering and sacrifice. Such radical ideas often led to accusations of heresy, but the figure of Christ as Redeemer contributed to the development of the cult of Marianism, which became a particularly dominant motif in the representation and understanding of English queenship. Anselm was one of the innovative churchmen who popularised such thinking and Matilda was also close to his pupil, Gundulph of Rochester. Gundulph revered Mary Magdalene and promoted Marianism, celebrating the Feast of the Immaculate Conception before it was universally recognised. The celebration of the women in Christ’s life highlighted a gentler, more compassionate Christianity, but Marianism also elevated the simple village girl of the New Testament to a Queen of Heaven, frequently depicted in the glorious raiments of her earthly counterparts.