Queens Consort

by Lisa Hilton

  When Stephen seized power, he initially received the support of Henry I’s illegitimate son, Earl Robert of Gloucester, but in May 1138, Robert withdrew his homage from Stephen and declared for his sister Empress Matilda. If Robert had held his peace since 1136 out of prudence, his decision now was a matter of ambition but also, apparently, one of conscience. The correspondence of Gilbert Foliot, the abbot of Gloucester, with Brian FitzCount, an ally of Robert’s, shows that the earl sought biblical justification for his change of allegiance. According to Foliot, Robert was influenced by the passage in the Book of Numbers about inheritance by women: ‘It seemed to some that by the weakness of their sex they should not be allowed to enter into the inheritance of their father. But the Lord, when asked, promulgated a law, that everything their father possessed should pass to the daughters.’ Foliot’s claim has been disputed, but Robert’s change of heart made an immediate and crucial difference to the Empress’s prospects. With Robert on her side, she was strong enough to make her attempt on the throne.

  In September 1139, the Empress, her brother and a company of Angevin knights landed on the Sussex coast. Robert rode straight away for Bristol and the west country, circumventing the King’s army on the way. The choice of Sussex for the launch of the Empress’s campaign was dictated in part because the Queen Dowager, Adeliza of Louvain, had shown support for her cause. According to William of Malmesbury, Adeliza and the Empress had been in correspondence for some time, and Adeliza now defied her second husband, William d’Aubigne, a staunch Stephenite, to offer the Empress protection at their seat at Arundel Castle.

  Diplomatically, this placed Stephen in an awkward position, as the Empress and Queen Adeliza had anticipated it would. Adeliza and Stephen, Orderic Vitalis corroborates, had up to this point enjoyed a cordial relationship. If Stephen were to attack Arundel, it would be a mark of grave disrespect to a lady who was highly thought of in the kingdom. And Stephen was always gallant where women and children were concerned. To the consternation of Orderic, who suggested he would have been better to act ‘after the fashion of his ancestors’, Stephen permitted a safe-conduct for the Empress and Earl Robert’s wife, Mabel, to leave the castle. William I would have had no truck with such chivalrous gestures.

  It is possible that Stephen, unlike Orderic, had a fuller understanding of what appeared to some contemporaries as a conspiracy between the two women. Adeliza hoped to make peace between the rival claimants. Stephen had visited her at Arundel in 1138, around the time of her marriage to d’Aubigne, and he had confirmed the grants to Reading she had made at the memorial Mass for King Henry in 1136. Adeliza was thus assured of his goodwill, and she chose to make her move towards negotiation when the Empress’s cause was weak. Very few rebel outposts remained in England and the Empress had no significant champion in the country. By hosting her at Arundel, Adeliza could work alongside her husband to try to bring about a settlement, with herself and d’Aubigne as mediators. This was a risk, as Adeliza was gambling with her husband’s standing in the event of displeasing the King. That Adeliza’s conventional adoption of the queen’s ‘peaceweaving’ role could be construed by contemporaries as disingenuous, if not treacherous, shows something of the poisonous, paranoid mood of the country at the time.

  One of the Empress’s main aims on her arrival in England was to disseminate the moral rightness of her cause. Just as commentators had been keen to chart the intellectual progress of Robert of Gloucester’s decision to declare for his sister, now both royalist and Angevin parties concerned themselves not only with results on the battlefield but with their ethical justification. Might had to demonstrate that it was right. The more sophisticated atmosphere of the court of Henry I and Matilda of Scotland had inspired a more scrupulous attention to political ideology: ‘Stephen’s accession started a long-running aristocratic seminar on the subject which did not end until 1153 … In these arguments, the synods and the conferences of the intervening years, we see the stirrings of the effects of literacy on the closet group of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy: its developing tendency intellectually to justify its pragmatic actions … Those at the top of society had begun to feel that they needed to occupy the moral high ground.’8 For an increasingly literate Norman ruling class, conflict now required something other than military resolution, it necessitated an evaluation of theoretical perspectives which could stand up to scrutiny.

  As Gloucester’s dilemma had shown, one such area of theoretical concern was inheritance rights, specifically those of women: ‘In particular the inheritance rights of women mattered to them in determining where their allegiance ought to lie.’9 The royalists were in no position to argue against the idea that women could inherit or transmit claims, since their own King’s right to the throne was based on it (though one attempt to circumvent this was the revival of the old claim that Empress Matilda was illegitimate, as her mother Matilda of Scotland had been professed as a nun before her marriage to Henry I). There is little proof, however, that inheritance rights in general were one of the causes of the civil war.

  One theory used to explain Stephen’s desertion by his barons is the ‘tenurial crisis’ whereby uncertainties in inheritance law that were not regulated until the next reign threatened many magnates with dispossession. Yet the three leading magnates who prosecuted the conflict, Robert of Gloucester, Miles of Gloucester and Brian FitzCount, were in receipt of Stephen’s confirmation of their holdings as granted under Henry I and the contention that inheritance law was not ratified in England until Henry II has been challenged. Nor, beyond the Empress’s own claim, did they themselves have any particular interest in women’s inheritance. Anxieties about what was very much a gender issue might be read on another level: that the war was not fought to determine the rights or wrongs of a specific view of land transmission, but as a manifestation of scruple, in which self-interest came to require a bulwark of ideology.10

  Yet if ‘no concerns about inheritance customs pre-programmed men to defect from Stephen’11 and they were therefore not hoping for reform of those customs under the Empress, it does not automatically follow that the magnates were sanguine about the future implications of such a precedent. Another way of looking at the gender aspects of the debate about the Empress’s rights and comparing her position with that of Matilda of Boulogne is to consider the way in which their conduct was perceived. As the Life of St Margaret of Scotland demonstrates, women who wielded power could be lauded, rather than perceived as transgressive, provided that power was modified within a context of appropriately feminine piety and submissiveness. Gilbert Foliot’s praise of the Empress emphasises precisely such qualities (the italics are this writer’s):

  In accordance with her father’s wishes she crossed the sea … 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 … she was in no way puffed up with pride, but meekly submitted to her father’s will and on his advice took a second husband … In all this you will not find any cause why she should have been disinherited.

  Implicitly, Empress Matilda’s fitness to rule is grounded here in her obedience, meekness and submissiveness to her father (and, the repeated emphasis conveys, to her Heavenly Father), and it follows that in pursuing her claim she was not acting with a ‘masculine’ lust for power, but motivated by the ‘feminine’ qualities of compliance and duty. The Gesta Stephani provides an interesting counterpoint. In this instance, even the usually antipathetic writer of the Gesta is compelled to praise Empress Matilda for her bravery. However, he does so by highlighting her masculine qualities: ‘The Countess of Anjou, who was always above feminine softness and had a mind steeled and unbroken in adversity …’ It was these traits — which, as Marjorie Chibnall has so rightly pointed out, would not have been as greatly criticised had they been display
ed by a man — that were to prove disastrous to the Empress’s hopes.

  Initially, the Empress had cause for optimism. After just one month in England, her supporters had organised and taken control of the southern marches and the Severn Valley. On 7 November 1139, Robert of Gloucester successfully attacked Gloucester. Meanwhile, Stephen was busy putting down sporadic uprisings throughout the country. He and Matilda kept Christmas together at Salisbury, and in February Matilda travelled to France for a ceremony that had great propaganda value for the royalists: the betrothal of her fourteen-year-old son Eustace to Constance, the sister of Louis VII of France. This strengthened the alliance agreed between the French and English kings in 1137, and was obviously a powerful demonstration of the French King’s faith in the future of Stephen’s dynasty. Matilda’s role in negotiating this marriage has been seen as establishing a precedent for the involvement of queens in the alliances of their children.12

  The following August, Matilda was once more employed as her husband’s diplomatic representative at a putative peace conference in Bath. She and Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury represented the royalist party, while Robert of Gloucester spoke for the Empress. Bishop Henry of Winchester, King Stephen’s younger brother, then took the proposals to King Louis, who was now concerned for the future of his sister as well as his own rights as the overlord of Normandy. Stephen himself found them too disadvantageous and rejected them. His unwillingness to come to terms exacerbated the unrest in England, but it was not until the siege of Lincoln the following year that the Empress decisively gained the upper hand.

  Stephen’s actions between August 1139 and February 1141 have been criticised for incoherence, but though it may at first appear that he rushed about the country desperately fighting fires, his policy of ‘administrative’ earldoms theoretically left him free to lend his presence where it was most urgently required. When Ranulf, Earl of Chester seized the castle of Lincoln just before Christmas 1140, Stephen’s response was to try to create a similar role for him. In return for the settlement of a land claim in the region, the earl and his brother were left in charge of the castle. But Stephen did not trust Ranulf and a month later he reneged on his promise. No chronicler offers a precise reason for his change of heart, but John of Hexham gives an account of a quarrel between Ranulf and Henry of Scotland over disputed rights in Carlisle and Cumberland. According to this story, Queen Matilda, advised that Ranulf was planning to kidnap Henry, arranged for him to travel safely back to Scotland with a strong bodyguard. There is little more to this version of events than rumour, though it is notable that it acknowledged the significance of the Queen’s intervention. However, it does hint at an awareness that Ranulf was generally belligerent. His ambitions in Lincolnshire were highly threatening to other magnates, and Stephen may have retracted the concessions he had granted him after a hostile reaction from other lords at his Christmas court.

  The battle for Lincoln was one of the most decisive events of the civil war. Orderic Vitalis notes that two women were closely involved in the original seizure of the castle by the Earl of Chester. The countesses of Chester and Lincoln, Matilda and Hawise, distracted the castellan’s wife while Ranulf entered the castle as though he planned to do no more than collect his wife from her visit. A small detail, but one that illustrates how even women not possessed of queenly authority were able to do more to support their husbands’ strategies than standing by as anxious spectators. Stephen attacked Lincoln Castle on Candlemas, 2 February. It was considered an inauspicious day for a battle, as the feast marks the change in the Church calendar from the celebrations of the Nativity to the anticipation of the sorrows and privations of Lent. In the procession to morning Mass before the King rode out on his raid, Stephen dropped his candle and it broke. Such an interruption in the carefully choreographed liturgy was seen as another bad omen, but Stephen was determined. He made a good show in the mêlée, fighting with first his axe and then his sword, but he was ignominiously laid low by a well-aimed rock (so much for the glamour of chivalry), and taken prisoner.

  Stephen was removed to Gloucester, where he met his cousin the Empress a week later, and then detained at Earl Robert’s fortress at Bristol. Matilda of Boulogne was campaigning in the south. She was in London in April, which suggests she had turned back in an attempt to hold the capital. There the Queen ‘made supplication to all, importuned with prayer, promises and fair words for the deliverance of her husband’.13 The Empress held an Easter court at Oxford, then progressed to Winchester, where she received a royalist delegation from London which included Matilda’s clerk, Christian. The Londoners petitioned for the King’s release, but the Empress slyly insisted that he was not a prisoner — how could a king be held prisoner by his own vassals? Matilda countered this by claiming that the archbishop of Canterbury would never accept the Empress without the specific permission of the King. Yet Stephen’s liegemen were turning to the Empress in increasing numbers. Crucial defectors were Earl Geoffrey de Mandeville, Hugh Bigod of Essex and Aubrey de Vere, the future Earl of Oxford. Mandeville’s declaration for the Empress, in return for which he was granted substantial concessions and rewards, particularly affected the Queen, as he held custody of the Tower of London, which Matilda was forced to quit in mid-May. Her new daughter-in-law Constance, though, was obliged to stay behind. Matilda retreated to Kent, which was safer and well positioned for communication with her county of Boulogne.

  After a second conference with a party from London in June at St Albans, the Empress proceeded to Westminster. Initially, the citizens had been reluctant to receive her, as Matilda of Boulogne’s forces, under her Flemish captain William of Ypres, were laying waste to the land on the Surrey shore, but De Mandeville’s change of sides, and thus the possession of the Tower, smoothed the Empress’s path and she began to make plans for a crown-wearing ceremony at Westminster. It was at this point that she adopted the title of ‘Lady of the English’. The Gesta Stephani, however, considered her behaviour at Westminster far from ladylike. The crown appeared to be within reach, but it was her conduct that allowed it to slip from her grasp. To the Londoners, her behaviour seemed discourteous and stubborn, even downright pig-headed. She demanded large sums of money from the city and insulted its representatives when they turned her down. On her arrival at the palace, she had received petitioners, as was customary for a ruler, including envoys from Matilda of Boulogne who requested that Eustace be allowed to inherit King Stephen’s Continental holdings if he were not to become king. Failing to appreciate that a show of clemency and ‘feminine’ pacifism would win her vital support, the Empress refused outright. By 24 June, the Londoners had had enough of her, and decided to declare their loyalty to Queen Matilda. The city bells were rung as a signal to the people to storm the palace, and the Empress and her entourage made such a hasty escape that they were obliged to abandon their dinner.

  At first King Stephen’s brother Bishop Henry had been prepared to come to an accommodation with the Empress, but the Westminster debacle was so distasteful to him that he withdrew his support. It was rumoured that the Empress was planning to make an illegal gift of the county of Boulogne to one of her champions, and the Bishop met with Matilda to reassure her, promising to work for the King’s freedom. To recover from the embarrassment of London and to stage a show of strength, the Empress held a court at Oxford, moving on in August to Winchester, where Bishop Henry had immured himself in Wolvesey Palace. Matilda rushed to her brother-in-law’s defence, arriving on 12 August to besiege the besiegers. Her supporters were now swelled by the earls of Essex and Pembroke, who had returned to the royalist camp, bringing a contingent of Essex and Suffolk barons with them, and after two days the Empress and Robert of Gloucester were hounded out of the city, the Empress riding astride her horse like a man for greater speed. She managed to reach Devizes, but Earl Robert, fighting in her rearguard, was taken by the Earl of Warenne.

  Matilda of Boulogne now had a vital hostage of her own and the rival campaigns had reache
d a stalemate. Once again, women took the diplomatic lead. Matilda communicated with Robert’s wife Mabel, Countess of Gloucester, through messengers to negotiate an exchange of prisoners. Mabel, anxious for her husband’s safety, proposed easy terms for his return, while Matilda suggested that if Stephen were released, Earl Robert could be appointed royal justiciar. William of Malmesbury saw this as an attempt to bribe Robert into changing sides, but the Earl himself rejected both plans, his wife’s because it was motivated by her ‘too eager affection’, according to Malmesbury, and the Queen’s because his sister would never countenance it. Nevertheless, Matilda and Countess Mabel were able to come to an agreement about the fates of the two most powerful men in the country without their conduct being portrayed as arrogant or excessively ambitious. ‘It is striking that there is no disparaging comment, only recognition of their actions as peacemakers and indeed power brokers, involved in careful diplomacy.’14 They finally brokered a complex deal in which Matilda and her younger son William went to Bristol, remaining with Mabel as hostages for Stephen. Meanwhile, the King was liberated to travel to Winchester, where he freed Earl Robert. Robert then returned to Bristol to release the Queen, leaving his son William at Winchester with the King, who freed him when his own wife and child were released. During this exchange, Stephen and Gloucester had time for a polite, rather sportsmanlike chat, agreeing that neither should take the situation personally.