She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (18 page)

Henry was twenty years old, already a proven leader, who had spent the last three years consolidating his hold on Normandy, and on Anjou too after the sudden death in 1151 of his father, Geoffroi, at the age of just thirty-eight. Remarkably, he had succeeded in doing so despite incurring the wrath of Louis VII of France. The pope’s mentor Bernard of Clairvaux, Stephen’s implacable enemy, had prevailed upon the French king to recognise Henry as duke of Normandy in the summer of 1151, but this uneasy alliance was shattered in May 1152 when Henry shocked Europe by marrying the king’s newly divorced wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Louis was incensed by this provocation, and declared war on Normandy, only for his troops to be beaten back with humiliatingly imperious ease by Henry’s forces. When Henry set foot on the English coast in January 1153, he did so, therefore, as master of lands in France which stretched, thanks to his new wife’s duchy of Aquitaine, all the way from Dieppe in the north to the Pyrenees in the south.

Stephen, at last, had no choice but to confront the reality of Henry’s triumph. He was past sixty; his indomitable wife, Mathilde, on whom he had relied so heavily, had died in the spring of 1152; his son, Eustace, could find no support from the Church or among the Anglo-Norman lords; and his nobles, disillusioned by the conflict and desperate to defend their own interests in a war-ravaged land, were in no mood to take up arms yet again on his behalf. He could no longer hold out against a settlement that had become both necessary and irresistible. If the king clung to any hope that God might still vindicate his possession of the crown as
a dynastic rather than a personal right, it was crushed in August 1153 when twenty-four-year-old Eustace died suddenly, only a few weeks after withdrawing from his father’s court in furious protest at his own imminent disinheritance. Stephen had a second son, William, but even the grieving king himself now realised that any attempt to advance William’s claim in his brother’s place would be doomed to abject failure.

The painstaking diplomacy that brought Stephen and Henry to the conference table was conducted by Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury and the king’s brother Henry, Bishop of Winchester. Superficially, they were an odd couple – the archbishop a man of low-key subtlety, while the bishop wore his ego on his richly embroidered sleeve – but they were both skilful politicians, and both now convinced of the desperate need for a permanent peace. The treaty they drafted was formally ratified on 6 November 1153, when Stephen and Henry came face to face – weary resignation meeting restless self-assurance – at Winchester, the ancient city where Stephen had first become king eighteen years earlier. There, surrounded by the lords and bishops of England and Normandy, Stephen recognised Matilda’s son as the lawful heir to his kingdom; and in return Henry ‘generously conceded’, a Norman chronicler wrote, ‘that the king should hold the kingdom for the rest of his life, if he wished’. In order to cement this accommodation between Stephen’s de facto kingship and Henry’s hereditary right, and to smooth over the apparent contradictions between the two, Stephen then ‘adopted’ Henry, solemnly swearing to maintain him ‘as my son and heir in all things’.

The war was over, and the cause for which Matilda had fought so hard was won. The cost of that victory was her own eclipse. The author of the
Gesta Stephani
, ever hostile, seized on the opportunity to write her out of his story completely, while the charter enacting the terms of the treaty mentioned her only in passing as ‘the mother of the duke’, who, along with Henry’s wife and his younger brothers, had committed themselves to observe its terms. It would be less than a year, however, before Matilda reaped the
reward of this self-denial. Stephen had spent the summer of 1154 on progress in the north, masking the destruction of all his hopes in the trappings of royal splendour. But on 25 October, after conducting a meeting with the count of Flanders, the king ‘was suddenly seized with a violent pain in his gut, accompanied by a flow of blood’. It had happened before, but this time he could not be saved. He died later that night – if not a broken man, then one reduced to a shadow of himself. He was buried, as he had wished, at his own foundation of Faversham Abbey in Kent, next to the new graves of his steadfast wife and his ill-fated son.

The death of an enemy who was also a cousin, and a generous man as well as an unremitting opponent, could hardly be a cause for unalloyed jubilation. Matilda’s triumph lay elsewhere: in the fact that, for the very first time since the Conquest, the accession of a new king did not take the form of a race for the coronation chair. Henry was in Normandy when news came of Stephen’s death, and remained there until 7 December, putting his affairs in order and waiting for favourable winds, before he set sail for his new kingdom. For six long weeks England patiently awaited his arrival, with no sign of conflict or resistance: ‘by God’s protecting grace she did not lack peace’, Henry of Huntingdon incisively observed, ‘through either love or fear of the king who was on his way’. And then, on 19 December 1154 – almost exactly nineteen years since Henry I had breathed his last – Henry II was crowned in majesty at Westminster Abbey. After two decades of bitter conflict, the competing imperatives of hereditary right, divine sanction and political pragmatism were united at last in Matilda’s son, now the undisputed successor to her father’s throne.

Matilda herself observed these dramatic events from a distance. She had settled her household at Rouen – ‘a fair city set among murmuring streams and smiling meadows’, Orderic Vitalis had called it – in a residence her father had built on the south side of the Seine amid the green of his park at Quevilly, beside the priory of Notre-Dame-du-Pré, an offshoot of her beloved abbey of Bec. Here she established a routine reminiscent of the life led by her
mother, Edith-Matilda, at Westminster. Matilda was in Normandy not in England, and the king was her son not her husband, but, like Edith-Matilda before her, she acted as counsellor, confidante, and royal deputy when Henry was absent, as he often was, on his constant travels around his vast dominions. Like her mother, she became increasingly preoccupied with spiritual concerns, under the guidance of the monks alongside whom she lived, but she did not retreat from the world. Her son’s trust in her judgement, and the authority she exercised on his behalf, are unmistakable: ‘if you do not do this’, declared one royal mandate despatched from England to the justices of Normandy in the later 1150s, ‘let my lady and mother the empress see that it is done’.

The surviving sources give us only a few glimpses of her influence at work in her son’s government, but it was there nonetheless. In the autumn of 1155, less than a year after his accession, Henry was contemplating an attempt to conquer Ireland, a territory he intended to bestow on his younger brother William, but the overambitious plan was shelved, according to the Norman chronicler Robert of Torigni, when Matilda made clear that she was not convinced of its merits. However daring and impulsive the new king might be, he recognised his mother’s acumen and the wisdom of listening to her words of caution. Walter Map, a writer who knew Henry’s court well, thought Matilda’s advice ill-founded and deleterious, but the specific examples he cites serve only to reinforce the impression of tough lessons learnt by an incisive political brain, rather than his own more scathing assessment. ‘I have heard that his mother’s teaching was to this effect,’ Map wrote,

Henry was not one to hide himself away or to disguise himself behind an inscrutable royal mask: his life was lived in full view of his court and at breakneck speed. Nor, perhaps, was the capricious withholding of rewards necessarily the best way to inculcate unshakeable loyalty – understandable though an obsession with control might be for a woman who had never enjoyed unquestioned command. But Matilda’s insistence on the vital importance of personal knowledge and personal experience was recognisable at the heart of Henry’s rule. The tireless energy of his government was founded on his sharp intelligence and his extraordinary recall of facts and faces; ‘he had at his fingertips an almost complete knowledge of history, and a great store of practical wisdom’, noted his chaplain, Gerald of Wales.

And the king also knew the value of his mother’s experience, which came to the fore in 1157 during negotiations with the Holy Roman Emperor, Friedrich Barbarossa, over the fate of the mummified hand of St James, brought from Germany to England thirty-two years earlier by Matilda herself. The emperor insisted that this sacred relic should now be restored to the imperial treasury, while Henry was equally determined that it should remain as the focus of a developing cult at Reading Abbey, his royal grandfather’s foundation and final resting-place. The result was a tense exchange of elaborate diplomatic courtesies, at the end of which the hand remained safely untouched within its jewelled reliquary at Reading while Friedrich received instead a dazzling array of mollifying gifts, including not only four great falcons but a vast tent of extraordinary workmanship, so huge that a mechanism was required to raise it. There is no direct evidence to put Matilda’s role in this delicate diplomacy beyond doubt, but it is impossible to imagine that her long-ago experience of crossing the Alps with the German court was not brought to bear on the selection of a gift which combined exquisite luxury with such practical good sense. The emperor spent the next four years on campaign in Italy, just as Matilda and her first husband had done before him, and an awestruck visitor to his camp outside Milan remarked admiringly
on the lavish imperial pavilion, which was big enough, he said, to stage a coronation.

Not all of Matilda’s interventions were so successful. In 1156 she had to endure the bitterest of divisions among her children, when her second son, twenty-two-year-old Geoffrey, rose in rebellion against his elder brother, complaining that their father had intended him to rule Anjou if Henry succeeded to the throne of England. Matilda presided over a strained family conference that gathered at Rouen in February, but Henry was immovable, and Geoffrey withdrew to prepare for war. He could not resist his brother’s might for long, however; it took less than six months under siege at his castles of Chinon, Mirebeau and Loudun, just south of the Loire river between Angers and Tours, before he was forced to cede his claim to Anjou and settle for an annuity in lieu of the power to which he had aspired.

There is no sign that Matilda held any brief for her younger son’s demands; she had fought too long and too hard for Henry’s inheritance to see it put at risk in his moment of triumph. But she cannot have relished the fragmentation of her family, nor the subsequent and unexpected loss of her two younger children: Geoffrey died, disappointed and humiliated, in 1158, and William at her side in Rouen six years later. By then Matilda, at sixty-two, was no longer the political force she had once been. She had been seriously ill in 1160, and, though she recovered, her influence with Henry began to falter after 1162, when she counselled fruitlessly against the appointment of his close friend Thomas Becket as the new archbishop of Canterbury. Henry would have plenty of time to regret that he did not follow her shrewd advice, but Matilda did not live to see the volatile relationship between king and archbishop reach its violent end. As late as the summer of 1167 she was still playing her now accustomed role as elder stateswoman, writing to Louis VII of France in the attempt to defuse escalating hostilities between him and her son. As she had hoped, a truce was agreed in August, and Henry immediately availed himself of the opportunity to launch an invasion of the independent duchy
of Brittany. It was only a matter of weeks, however, before he was racing back to Normandy, recalled by the devastating news of his mother’s death.

Matilda died on 10 September 1167, surrounded by the devoted monks of Bec who had become her spiritual family. She was buried in their midst, her body sewn into an ox-hide and laid to rest before the high altar in the abbey church, her tomb bathed in light from a magnificent seven-branched candlestick and a halo of lamps above. Her deep faith was reflected not only in the luminous ceremonial of her funeral rites, but in the priceless treasures she bestowed on the abbey. She had already given into the monks’ keeping the two crowns of solid gold she had brought from Germany (the heavier of which, supported by its silver rods, her son had worn at his coronation), as well as portable altars of marble and silver, precious relics housed in an ebony chest, rich plate and vestments, and her own imperial cloak, spangled with gold. Now she left them the contents of her private chapel: ornaments of gold and silver, chasubles and copes, and two silver boxes in the shape of eggs gripped in a griffin’s claws.

They were the glittering traces of an extraordinary life; six decades that had taken her from the quiet of an English childhood across Europe and back again, from the brutality of civil war to the tranquillity of Bec’s echoing cloisters. And it was a life lived by a remarkable woman. Matilda inherited her father’s commanding temperament, his ability to inspire loyalty and his political intelligence – but the role she played and the qualities she possessed have been much obscured, then and now, by the preconceptions of the lords she sought to lead and the clerics who wrote her story. ‘Haughty’ and ‘intolerably proud’ are the adjectives indelibly associated with her name, phrases coined in those few months of her life when she tried to exercise power as a monarch in her own right, and repeated by historians ever since. Strikingly, they were never used to describe any male member of her fearsomely domineering family; and they do not fit well with what we know of Matilda in the decades before and after that brief moment in
1141. Certainly, her demeanour was unflinchingly regal, and she was driven by a resolute belief in her own capacity to rule, but in the end the defining stamp of her political career was her acutely judged pragmatism in securing the succession of her son at the expense of her own claim to the crown.