Queens Consort (13 page)

By then, though, Henry had attempted to shore up his daughter’s power by marrying her to Geoffrey of Anjou. The Empress herself appears to have objected to this match with a boy ten years her junior, and felt it
as a disparagement, since Geoffrey barely had even a comital title, but in 1127, with Clito and Louis plotting against him, Henry had deemed an alliance with Anjou a necessity. Negotiations were rushed through, and the wedding took place at Le Mans in June. The marriage secured Henry’s southern Norman border against incursions from the French, but it made his nomination of his daughter more controversial, as it was unclear what role Geoffrey was intended to play when his wife inherited the crown. The Durham chronicler, the
Le Mans
Chronicle and Henry of Huntingdon suggest there was some understanding that Geoffrey would share a joint rule, a possibility of which William of Malmesbury was also aware. Huntingdon and Malmesbury claim that a further oath-swearing took place in 1131. Nevertheless the unpopularity of the marriage among the English magnates was used by some as a way of levering themselves out of their promise.

Matilda’s concept of her own queenship, then, should not be measured against a simple model in which the rightful heiress was dispossessed of her claim. In the rapidly changing political climate of Henry’s last decade the King’s motivations and contingencies were constantly shifting, and the position of the Empress remained less a legal reality than a matter of opinion, even at her father’s deathbed.

When Henry I of England died at Lyons-la-Forêt on 1 December 1135, the validity of the oaths was questioned by pro-Stephen chroniclers, while even pro-Empress commentators conceded that the King had to some extent changed his mind as he was dying. William of Malmesbury maintained that he nominated Matilda, but not Geoffrey — ‘He assigned all his lands on both sides of the sea to his daughter in lawful and lasting succession’ — adding that he had recently been angry with Geoffrey, which suggested that Henry had originally envisioned shared rule but had had doubts at the end. John of Salisbury quotes the leading magnate Hugh Bigod as declaring that the lords were absolved from their oath by the King; the
Gesta Stephani
, which is hostile to the Empress, went further, claiming that the oath had been extracted under duress and was therefore invalid, though, unlike Salisbury, the
Gesta’s
author did not record that Henry named Stephen. That no official announcement was made is shown by the account of Orderic Vitalis, who describes the anger and confusion of the Norman barons. They continued to argue about what to do for some weeks, having no idea which candidate they were supposed to support. From both pro-Empress and pro-Stephen writers, then, it is evident that there was some equivocation about the succession, indeed, enough to conclude it is ‘beyond question that [Henry] chose to die
without committing himself to any successor’.
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So why did Henry who had apparently been so keen to assure the Empress’s succession, lose his resolve in his last hours? Did he perhaps feel that the Angevin marriage had been a precipitate error, now that fate had disposed of Clito? According to Malmesbury the bishop of Salisbury maintained he had sworn the original oath only on condition that Henry did not give his child in marriage to ‘anyone outside the kingdom without consulting himself and the other chief men’, and while the second oath-swearing of 1131 would technically have overridden such objections, the very need for it shows that Henry was aware of the sensitivity of the situation. It is quite possible that he was in pain, confused and afraid, and thus unable to make his wishes clear; on the other hand, it is just as likely that he had expressed those wishes privately during the week it took him to die.

Ultimately, what Stephen did mattered more than what Henry said. Henry himself had understood the necessity of speed in securing the crown, and his nephew followed his example. When the King died, Stephen and Matilda were in Boulogne and the Empress in her husband’s lands in Anjou. Within four or five days, Stephen and a small band of supporters had arrived in London. Most of Henry’s leading magnates remained in Normandy, attending Henry’s corpse, a factor which eased Stephen’s progress considerably, and on 22 December the new King was crowned at Westminster. It was a bloodless coup.

Matilda stayed in Boulogne with her family for the first months of 1136. She and Stephen had five children: Eustace, William, Baldwin, Matilda and Mary. If Stephen could succeed in holding the crown, their prospects, as well as her own, would be radically different. From Boulogne, she was in a position to keep a close eye on events in Normandy. In early December, Stephen’s elder brother Count Thibault had been invited by the Norman lords to receive the dukedom from them, but as they met the news arrived from England that Stephen had already been acknowledged by the people of London as king. Speculatively, we might consider that Thibault’s acceptance of this fraternal treachery (he was, after all, Countess Adela’s elder child and therefore had a stronger claim than Stephen if the Empress was to be overlooked) points to Henry’s having privately named Stephen before he died. Further, the invitation of the Norman magnates suggests that Stephen’s usurpation was not a simple matter of his having swiped the crown from under the nose of a defenceless woman, but a decision enacted in an environment where, if the lords were clear on anything, it was that they did not wish a woman to govern them. That
the Normans summoned Thibault so swiftly makes it clear they preferred a man.

The Empress, meanwhile, had also acted quickly to consolidate her power as far as she was able. She and Geoffrey were on the Norman borders in the first week of December, laying claim to the castles she had been given as dower, but she received no further support from the Norman lords, another confirmation that their wishes lay elsewhere. Matilda had achieved a little peninsula of power in the duchy, which would be crucial in years to come, but for the moment her attempts to prosecute her claim were contained within the southern marches.

Matilda of Boulogne’s own coronation at Westminster at Easter 1136 was an important step in reinforcing her husband’s status. She was the second English queen to descend directly from the Anglo-Saxon royal line after her aunt Matilda of Scotland and, since Stephen’s claim was bolstered by his wife’s heritage, her own connections, as Henry I had recognised, were significant in lending him legitimacy The coronation, and the court held afterwards at Oxford, was Stephen’s first major display of regal power, intended to impress his kingship on the people in a way his unavoidably rushed coronation could not do. Henry of Huntingdon recorded excitedly that ‘never was there one to exceed it in numbers, in greatness, in gold, silver, gems, costume and in all manner of entertainments’. Among the guests was Henry of Scotland, Matilda’s cousin through her uncle King David, who had paid homage in his father’s name to Stephen at York, and who was now seated on the King’s right, a mark of the speed with which the Scottish monarch had submitted to the new rule in England. Three archbishops, five earls and more than twenty-four barons attended the court, as did Matilda’s eldest son Eustace, now the heir to the English throne.

All of Matilda’s children were now royal, and almost immediately their future marriages became matters of state. Her two-year-old daughter Matilda was betrothed to the thirty-one-year-old Count Waleran of Meulan, the second-greatest landowner in Normandy and, along with his stepfather and cousin, one of the leaders of an important group of magnates. Little Matilda even went through some sort of marriage ceremony. But her parents’ hopes of cementing Waleran’s loyalty suffered a setback when Matilda and her brother Baldwin died in London the following year. The Queen chose to bury her babies at Holy Trinity Aldgate, a house to which she had formed a particular attachment since her marriage and which, as a foundation of Matilda of Scotland, also had a place in the emergent spiritual traditions of English queens. The tiny
coffins were interred on either side of the high altar, and records from the priory describe the King and Queen grieving together over their double loss.

The royal couple sought solace in their faith, and piety seems to have been one of the cornerstones of their relationship. They shared an intellectual interest in developing variants of belief, from the simple, mystical spirituality of hermits and anchorites to the elaborate splendours of high Cluniac ritual. As queen, Matilda was able to both witness and participate in one of the most prolific periods of monastic expansion since the Conquest. During the twelfth century, over a hundred religious houses were founded for women where, in 1066, only nine had existed. The vigour of this renaissance was characterised by an unusual degree of cooperation between the sexes as men and women worked together the better to serve their God, a mood that was reflected in the pious collaborations of Matilda and Stephen.

The tensions between the worldly and spiritual elements of her new role were brought home to Matilda when she visited a holy hermit, Wulfric, as she travelled from Corfe Castle to Exeter the summer after her coronation. Wulfric was a favourite of King Stephen, who had visited him some years before and heard him prophesy that King Henry would die in Normandy and he, Stephen, would succeed him, but now Matilda found herself being scolded by the holy man for having taken too high-handed a stance in the case of a Somerset noblewoman who had attended her court at Corfe. Chastened, Matilda later chose to patronise her own, female hermit, Hehmd the nun, who was provided with an acre of land to build a cell in the domains of the abbey of Faversham, Kent, founded by Stephen in the hope that it would become a family resting place, as Reading had been for Henry I.

Matilda’s provision for Helmid shows that she was attentive to a religious movement that represented a revolution in human consciousness, a new concept of meditative, inward-looking spirituality which appears for the first time in texts such as the
Ancrene Riwle
, a guide for anchoresses produced at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Anchorites were voluntarily walled up to spend their lives in prayer for their communities, many of them remaining in tiny cells (Eve of Wilton’s was just eight feet square) for as long as fifty years. Matilda’s attraction to this extreme, isolated spirituality was shared by Stephen, and together they patronised the Savignac movement, inspired by the wandering saint Vitalis, who had established a community in the wild lands of Savigny in Stephen’s county of Mortain. Matilda founded a Savignac house at Coggleshall in Essex,
and Stephen endowed three, at Furness in Lancashire, Buckfast in Devon and Longvilliers, across the Channel in Montreuil.

Matilda and Stephen also continued their close family association with the Cluniac order, which had received Matilda’s father and to which Stephen’s mother, too, had retired before her death. Matilda’s mother, Mary of Scotland, was buried in the Cluniac house at Bermondsey in 1115, and when Stephen came to endow Faversham, a colony of the faithful was sent from Bermondsey to inaugurate the community. Another strand of the reformed Benedictine order was the Cistercians, whose house at Clairmarais also enjoyed royal patronage. Matilda was also interested in the crusading traditions of her own and her husband’s families, and she supported the order of the Templars, who protected and financed the crusaders. The first documented English grant to the Templars was made by Matilda’s father, Eustace, and the Queen herself founded Cressing Temple in Essex in 1137 and Temple Cowley in Oxfordshire in 1139. The grand master of the order, Osto of Boulogne, witnessed two of Matilda’s charters as well as the treaty which eventually ended the civil war. Providing for the crusades was an active form of piety that appealed to Matilda’s ‘dauntless and decisive nature … accustomed to command. If she could not lead the knights of Christ against the enemies of the Church, she could at least provision them.’
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Religion was central to the lives of all aristocrats at the time, and daily attendance at Mass was a feature of the royal household, but Stephen and Matilda’s mutual enthusiasm for exploring new spiritual movements suggests that their religious life was very much a shared one, gesturing towards their closeness as a couple. As well as their religious affinities, both families had a strong tradition of educating their women. Stephen’s grandmother Matilda of Flanders had ensured that her children were well schooled, and Countess Adela, his mother, was a notable patron, praised by the poet Godfrey of Reims, who went as far as to suggest that God had arranged the battle of Hastings in order that she might become a princess. Adela corresponded with her husband when he was on crusade; she wrote, too, to Archbishop Anselm, from whom she requested prayers in manuscript, and Hugh de Fleury, who dedicated his
Historia Ecclesiastica
to her. She also demonstrated publicly that she was able to speak Latin. Adela combined intellectualism and spirituality with the capacity for government she had inherited from both her parents and, after the death of her husband, she was active in ruling Blois, Chartres and Meaux until her retirement. Matilda’s mother, Mary of Scotland, had enjoyed the same excellent education at the convents of Wilton and Romsey as her sister
and, probably at her instigation, Matilda of Boulogne was also educated in England. Her own daughter Mary eventually became abbess of Romsey, linking the women of Matilda’s family over three generations with this centre of feminine piety and scholarship. Stephen, then, was accustomed to the company of cultivated women, and his consistent reliance on his wife’s advice and diplomacy indicates both trust and a respect for her intelligence.

Other evidence of the intimacy between Stephen and Matilda is the fact that Stephen, unlike the spectacularly promiscuous Henry I, is known to have been faithful to his wife. He had taken a mistress, as was almost expected of young aristocrats, before his marriage, and had a child by her in 1110, but he showed himself uxorious even in his arrangements for sin. ‘Damette’, or ‘Little Lady’, as his mistress was referred to, was firmly paid off when Stephen married, but their son, Gervase, was educated and entered the Church, eventually becoming abbot of Westminster. The only whiff of scandal attaching to the liaison came when Gervase arranged for his mother, ostensibly a woman of modest means, to rent the abbey’s manor at Chelsea at a cheap rate. When she took possession of the property, however, she was recorded as owning forty shillings and a valuable silk cloth, which suggests that Stephen had maintained her honourably for some years.