She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (10 page)

But Matilda had no further part to play in the government of the Empire. Successful though her marriage had been in personal and political terms, it had failed as a vehicle for dynastic ambition. Had she had a son, she might have ruled in his name until he came of age, as her husband’s grandmother, the redoubtable Empress Agnes, had done for six years during the minority of Heinrich IV. But when the body of Heinrich V was solemnly conveyed three hundred miles along the Rhine to be buried beside his father, grandfather and great-grandfather at Speyer Cathedral, it was as the last emperor of the Salian line. Matilda handed over the imperial insignia to the archbishop of Mainz, who would preside over the election of the next king of Germany, and made her way
to join her father in Normandy. In doing so, she abandoned the German lands with which her dead husband had endowed her, and turned her back on offers of marriage from among the ranks of the German princes. Instead, she returned, a German-speaking woman, to the Anglo-Norman court she had left as a French-speaking child a decade and a half earlier. She brought with her an imperial title, as well as more tangible riches from the imperial treasury, including two jewelled crowns of solid gold – one of them so heavy that it could only be worn when supported by two silver rods – and the mummified hand of the apostle St James, on whose feast day she had been crowned at Mainz Cathedral.

Some Anglo-Norman observers, orbiting around the gravitational fields of Rouen and Westminster, would later remark that the adult Matilda who returned to her childhood home was haughty and full of
amour propre
. Certainly – and unsurprisingly, given the nature of the surviving sources – they betray no sign of sympathy for a young woman who had lost her husband, her guiding influence since childhood, in a bereavement that abruptly uprooted her from everything that was familiar in her life for the second time in fifteen years. Nor is there any acknowledgement that there might be other, less censorious ways of describing the grandeur of a widowed queen who had been the consort of the greatest monarch in Europe for almost as long as she could remember, and had received an imperial crown in the papal basilica along the way. Now, it seemed, she might wear a crown in her own right as her father’s only surviving heir. Whatever view her countrymen might take of Matilda’s deportment, the crucial question was this: could a woman rule?

The simple answer was that there was no formal prohibition to prevent her from doing so. The very fact that the principles governing royal inheritance in the Anglo-Norman realm were so fluid, that precedents had scarcely had time or opportunity to take root since the violent upheavals of 1066, and that realpolitik rather than theoretical right had triumphed in the contested successions of 1087 and 1100, meant that there were few incontrovertible rules
by which candidates for the throne might be either selected or excluded. One of those few rules, thanks to the Church’s increasingly strict control over the sacrament of marriage, was that illegitimate children no longer stood alongside their legitimate half-siblings in the line of succession. Despite the fact that King Henry’s father, the great Conqueror himself, had been bastard-born, neither Henry nor any of his nobles seems to have given serious consideration to the possibility that the eldest of his large illegitimate brood, Robert, earl of Gloucester, might claim the throne, even though the charismatic earl was already a proven leader on the battlefield and at his father’s court.

Bastardy, then, was a clear disqualification; being female, however, was not. There is no record of a single word of protest from any of the Anglo-Norman nobles when Henry required them to swear that they would support his daughter as his successor, should he die without a male heir. The only controversy that erupted in January 1127 was the result not of dissent spilling over but of eagerness to demonstrate loyalty, in the form of a squabble over who should be first in line to take the oath. That honour went to David, king of Scots, the younger brother of Henry’s first queen and Matilda’s maternal uncle, who had been brought up at the English court and held rich estates in England as well as the Scottish throne. Once the Scots king had sworn, however, there was a tussle for precedence between Robert of Gloucester, Henry’s illegitimate son, and the king’s favourite nephew, Stephen of Mortain, who had so narrowly escaped a watery grave in the wreck of the
White Ship
– ‘a noteworthy contest’, William of Malmesbury reported, from which Stephen, the son of Henry’s sister Adela, emerged victorious.

But a pledge of future allegiance imposed by a present and irresistibly formidable king did not guarantee that Matilda’s rule would ultimately be accepted. Within the unpredictable arena of European politics, where frontiers between rival territories were shaped and reshaped not only by the treacherous currents of international diplomacy but by the constant friction of war, a monarch was by
definition a soldier, a feudal lord riding with sword unsheathed at the head of steel-clad knights. Despite the extraordinary exploits of Matilde of Canossa, that was a role for which no woman was trained, or could hope to inhabit without challenge. At the same time, a king’s duty to protect his lands and his people also required that he should be a judge and a lawgiver – and, while women might appear in court as litigants or witnesses, there was no official, public place for a woman in the process of making or enforcing the law.

Though Matilda was not explicitly barred from inheriting her father’s throne, then, the idea of what it meant to be a monarch remained inescapably male. That assumption was embedded even in the language of regality: a queen’s very title, from the Anglo-Saxon word
cwén
, meant the wife of a king, not his female equivalent. In Latin, meanwhile, a
regina
or
imperatrix
– a queen or an empress – was a female adjunct to a
rex
or
imperator
, derivative words representing a derivative form of authority.

Reality did not, of course, always conform so neatly to linguistic etymology or political theory. Matilda’s contemporaries in England hardly had far to look to find instances of women taking a lead in government, whether it was Queen Edith-Matilda presiding over meetings of her absent husband’s council, Empress Agnes holding the German Empire together in the name of her little son, or Matilda herself pronouncing judgement in her husband’s stead in the court at Castrocaro. True, women might be excluded from formal, public office in normal circumstances, but a queen was by definition exceptional, sharing in her husband’s unique authority through the sacrament of marriage and the consecration of her crowning.

But what made such manifestations of female rule fundamentally unthreatening to the maleness of kingship was the fact that this queenly authority was exercised in the name of a husband or son. And, for all that Matilda stood centre stage as the nobles swore their oaths in 1127, it was clear that the capacity of royal women to act as vessels for the transmission of kingly power lay at the heart of Henry’s plans for his daughter. She might still be
supplanted in the succession if he and his young wife had a new son; but, if they did not, Matilda stood ready, a woman young and strong enough to replenish Henry’s lineage with sons of her own. Her destiny might yet lie in her role as the daughter and mother of kings, rather than as a monarch in her own right.

For that, however, she would need a new husband, and quickly – a requirement that became acute in the spring of 1127 with a spectacular revival in the fortunes of Henry’s exiled nephew William Clito, once the rival of William Ætheling, now a threat to the drowned prince’s sister Matilda. In March, Count Charles of Flanders – the man who had blocked Matilda’s path between the Empire and England five years earlier – was brutally murdered while he prayed before the altar of a Bruges church, and King Louis of France seized upon this unexpected chance to install William Clito in his place as ruler of the wealthy and strategically vital lowlands that lay between Boulogne and Antwerp. Matilda’s marriage was now a matter of critical importance defensively as well as dynastically, and the identity of her prospective bridegroom clear: Geoffroi, the son and heir of Count Foulques of Anjou whose lands, immediately to the south of Normandy, might either protect or threaten its borders.

A week before the wedding in June 1128, Geoffroi was knighted by his bride’s royal father in Rouen. He cut a gorgeous figure: fifteen years old, and nicknamed ‘
le Bel
’ (‘the Fair’), he was lithe and athletic, his face ‘glowing like the flower of a lily, with rosy flush’, dressed in the finest armour with golden spurs and a sparkling gem-studded helmet, golden lions rearing proudly on his shield. Matilda, however, was hardly likely to be dazzled by a beautiful boy. Eleven years his senior, and with fifteen years’ experience of imperial politics under the belt of her silken gown, she angrily disdained the idea that she should marry an untested teenager whose status was so vastly inferior to her own. If, as seems entirely possible, her grief for the dead emperor was heartfelt, then the contrast between this arrogant adolescent and the father-figure that Heinrich had been can only have deepened her revulsion at
the match. Hildebert of Lavardin, the learned and deeply pious archbishop of Tours, wrote to her in sorrow soon after the alliance was proposed to seek reassurance that she would no longer distress her father with her disobedience. But in the end, as the archbishop had foreseen, Henry was immovable, and, for Matilda, unhappy duty prevailed.

The unwilling bride endured three weeks of extravagant celebrations, from the wedding ceremony in the glorious new cathedral at Le Mans on 17 June until the couple’s tumultuous arrival in Angers, the capital of her new husband’s
comté
, where they were greeted by cheering crowds and a cacophony of bells. By that time it had at least been arranged that Matilda’s new title would be that of a countess, rather than a countess-in-waiting. Her father-in-law, Count Foulques, left immediately after the wedding to embark on the long journey to the Holy Land, abandoning Anjou to his son in favour of a crown of his own, acquired through a new marriage to Melisende, heiress to the recently established Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. However, Matilda remained unimpressed. Whenever she could, she avoided calling herself ‘countess’, preferring the overriding magnificence of her personal style as ‘empress, and daughter of the king of the English’.

Vows, however reluctantly taken, could not be forsworn. Nevertheless, within a year it seemed that the relationship might founder. Matilda’s personal antipathy to the match had not been enough to outweigh the political logic of an Angevin alliance to counter the threat of William Clito’s menacing presence in Flanders; but less than six weeks after the wedding that threat abruptly vanished when Clito was killed in a skirmish with a Flemish rival. It is possible that this welcome reversal of fortune prompted King Henry to reconsider the calculations he had made about his daughter’s future and the usefulness of her new husband – and, if Matilda’s prospects as a female heir remained profoundly uncertain, her husband’s position was more nebulous still. Did Geoffroi expect in time to become a king in right of his wife, as his father was about to do far away in Jerusalem? Certainly the young count,
whose golden good looks concealed a will and temper to match Matilda’s own, was antagonised by Henry’s refusal to elucidate his plans for his new son-in-law. By the end of 1129 the couple were living apart. Matilda had left Anjou to return to her father’s city of Rouen in Normandy, and Geoffroi was loudly threatening to turn his back on the whole fiasco by departing on pilgrimage to the shrine of St James at Compostela in north-western Spain.

Still, reservations or no, Henry decided that he could not allow the marriage to disintegrate before it had served its purpose in providing him with a grandson. In the late summer of 1131 he brokered – or perhaps imposed – a reconciliation. A great council was held at Northampton on 8 September; there the Anglo-Norman nobles renewed their solemn oaths of allegiance to Matilda, who then returned with all honour to her husband in Anjou. Nothing had been clarified, but personal discontent had been suppressed, for the time being, under the pressure of an irresistible political imperative. And to good effect: on 5 March 1133 thirty-one-year-old Matilda gave birth at Le Mans to her first child, a healthy boy, Henry, who inherited his Angevin father’s red-gold hair and the vigorously stocky physique of the royal grandfather for whom he was named.

Little more than a year later, at Rouen in June 1134, the difficult birth of a second son, Geoffrey, almost cost Matilda her life. King Henry was at her bedside as she prepared for death by arranging her bequests and burial. Characteristically, she found the strength even in this extremity of illness to insist that her own wishes should be respected in the planning of her tomb, forcing her father to agree that she should be interred not, as he wanted, in the ancestral vault of the dukes of Normandy at Rouen Cathedral, but at the abbey of Bec in the peaceful valley of the Risle thirty miles south-west of the city, a spiritual home to which she had developed a particular devotion. Slowly, however, she recovered; and thereafter she and her husband found a way to work together as political partners united, if not by affection, then by their shared interest in their sons’ inheritance.

While Henry delighted in his sturdy grandsons, the dynastic triumph of their birth encouraged another attempt at self-assertion by their ambitious father. Geoffroi had succeeded in providing Henry’s daughter with legitimate male heirs, but he had received little encouragement to hope that the king envisaged him ruling England and Normandy at Matilda’s side. He had been granted no Anglo-Norman lands; he had not been invited to attend Henry’s court since his wedding; and he had not stood beside his royal wife as she received the oaths of the Anglo-Norman magnates in 1131. Four years later, it was beginning to grate heavily that he had not yet even taken possession of the castles along the border between Normandy and Anjou which he had been promised as a dowry along with Matilda’s hand. Henry, it seemed, had no intention of ceding control there to his son-in-law before his death. For Geoffroi, however, this royal refusal to hand over the fortresses was not only a slap in the face in terms of his already uncertain standing as Matilda’s husband, but a strategic blunder that might compromise his ability to make good her claim to Normandy and England whenever the time came to do so.