Authors: Lisa Hilton
The strength of Stephen’s marriage was perhaps one of his greatest assets as a king, and Matilda’s active support became indispensable to him very early in his reign. In 1137, she accompanied him on a five-month military and diplomatic journey through Normandy, resulting in a three-year truce with Geoffrey of Anjou, who was still aggressively pushing his wife’s cause. It was a busy period for Matilda: of the total of fifty-eight charter attestations she made as queen, fifteen fall into the two-year period from 1136 to 1138. Peace in Normandy was essential if Anglo-Norman society was to hold together. For magnates with interests in both countries, a division of their fealty, and their privileges, between two lords was unacceptable, and if the Angevins gained ground in the duchy, it would strengthen the Empress’s case there. Stephen unwisely returned to England in November 1137 — and brought civil war with him.
In the summer of 1138, a series of rebellions broke out across England. The Empress Matilda had been sending envoys to potential pro-Angevins, and a number of lords now set themselves against the King. While Stephen occupied himself with risings in the Welsh marches, Matilda had her first experience of military activity as she took personal responsibility for an
outbreak of unrest in Kent. Her Boulogne inheritance proved its worth in this conflict and in many more to come. Her father’s territories had included the port of Wissant, a vital — and wealthy — centre for the Anglo-Flemish wool trade and a resource for channelling money and mercenaries to England to assist the King. Paid Flemish troops were a crucial royal weapon, and Matilda is credited with having had the foresight, in the wake of William Clito’s death, to make peace with Thierry of Flanders in order to facilitate the provision of these Flemish soldiers. Generous grants to Thierry’s foundation of Clairmarais may have sealed the truce. Thus, when Dover rebelled, Matilda was able to call out ‘friends, kinsmen and dependents of Boulogne’.
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Using troops from Boulogne and Flanders under the command of her illegitimate cousin Pharamus of Boulogne, she successfully besieged Dover Castle. (She was not, incidentally, the only active female military leader at the time: Ludlow Castle was being mobilised against Stephen by Lady FitzJohn, the widow of the castellan, though Stephen chivalrously left Ludlow out of his campaign that year.)
Meanwhile, the Scots, whose ruler, King David, had been persuaded by his niece the Empress to abandon his truce with Stephen, invaded in April, and by the end of July had pillaged their way to Yorkshire. In August, a royalist army defeated them at Northallerton, decimating the rebels, though King David himself escaped. From September, peace negotiations were held and after Christmas, Matilda was appointed to treat with David, who was, of course, her uncle as well as the Empress’s. The papal legate Alberic of Ostia had originally approached Matilda to ask for her help in convincing a reluctant Stephen of the necessity for a truce, and in the end the Queen’s ‘shrewdness and eloquence triumphed’.
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An agreement was reached at Durham on 9 April 1139 according to which Henry of Scotland was created Earl of Northumbria. Matilda and Henry travelled south together to ratify the treaty at Nottingham. Matilda had emphasised that the newly created county of Northumberland was not to be an extension of Scotland, but would remain part of England, retaining its English laws and customs. She thereby succeeded in creating a ‘buffer zone’ on the Scottish border by investing a Scottish prince with an interest in keeping an English peace.
Interestingly, this development may represent a new strategy for the governance of English comital lands which connects Matilda’s Scots initiative with her predecessor, Adeliza of Louvain. The Scots initiative was the first in a series of attempts by Stephen to regulate the administration of the country by incorporating the magnates into a hierarchy of local government. Particular towns or castles would be held for the King by
officials (some of whom were given earldoms for the purpose) who would co-operate with regional military government on behalf of the crown to defend against or anticipate attack. This system was not a consistent feature of Norman or French comital administration, but it had been employed in Adeliza’s father’s territories of Brussels and Louvain. When Adeliza had invited her brother Joscelin to England and invested him as castellan of Arundel, she was following the model of her father, the Duke of Brabant. Introduced by Adeliza in 1136 and imitated by Matilda and Stephen in 1139, this is ‘the only directly proveable example of foreign innovation in administration in Stephen’s reign’, and its source is a queen.
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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 ‘peace-weaving’ 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.’
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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.’
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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.
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Yet if ‘no concerns about inheritance customs pre-programmed men to defect from Stephen’
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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 displayed 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.
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