King of the North Wind

Stephen was charming and liked to please people; he swiftly became a favourite of Henry I. In 1113, when Stephen was about twenty-one years old, Henry gave him lands and created him count of Mortain at his Christmas court.

After William Atheling died, the old king showered honours on his other close male relations, creating powerful and wealthy lords out of those he trusted and loved. By 1125, with Adeliza still not pregnant and with Matilda still married and in Germany, Henry may have briefly considered Stephen to succeed him; he loved him, and respected his skills as a politician and a soldier. Stephen was a very likeable man: ‘he had by his good nature and the way he jested, sat and ate in the company even of the humblest, earned an affection that can hardly be imagined’.29 To strengthen Stephen’s hand against William Clito, who had a better claim, the king married him to the heiress Matilda of Boulogne, which made him rich and gave him lands. Stephen was a moral man; his marriage arranged, he left the woman who had been his mistress for at least ten years – Damette (Little Lady) – by whom he had a son, Gervase, and possibly a daughter.30 He did provide financially for Damette and his illegitimate son: in the 1130s, she was able to put a large sum towards the lease of the manor at Chelsea, and, in 1138, he arranged for Gervase to become abbot of Westminster Abbey. But his relationship with Damette was over. Stephen’s marriage to Matilda of Boulogne, although not a love match, would prove an extraordinary partnership.

With his daughter Matilda back in England, Henry I evidently changed his mind about Stephen succeeding him; blood triumphed over gender.

Two years after Matilda’s return, her father finally committed to naming her as his successor. What Matilda’s feelings were, we do not know. We do know, however, that while in Germany, she had aided Heinrich in government, acting with enthusiasm and diligence. She had not been a lazy consort. She evidently had a talent for diplomacy; later, she would apply the lessons learned with Heinrich and at the papal court to aid her own cause. It is likely that her experiences in Germany had given her a taste for power and that she was happy to comply with her father’s plans.

At the end of his Christmas court on 1 January 1127, Henry strong-armed his magnates into accepting her as their future monarch.31 The nobility of England and Normandy, with Matilda supported by her uncle, David King of Scots, lined up before the empress and swore to uphold her right to the throne of England on her father’s death:

[Henry] bound the nobles of all England, likewise the bishops and abbots, by oath, that if he died without a male heir they would immediately accept his daughter as their lady (domina). He said first what a disaster it had been that William, to whom the realm belonged, had been taken away; now there remained only his daughter, to whom alone the succession rightfully belonged because her grandfather, uncle and father had been kings and on her mother’s side she was descended from fourteen kings from the time of Egbert. Edward, the last of the race, had arranged the marriage of Malcolm and Margaret, and Matilda, mother of the empress, was their daughter.32

Stephen, whatever his personal feelings on the momentous change to his prospects, was the first to promise to be faithful to Matilda as Henry I’s chosen successor, even fighting with his cousin Robert of Gloucester for the honour of being first. But Stephen never forgot his uncle’s fleeting desire to make him king.

Henry I knew that his plan was precarious, and it may well have included his daughter getting pregnant and producing a son who would eventually rule England and Normandy in her place. Perhaps Hermann of Tournai’s account of Matilda giving birth to a dead child in Germany was true; the king evidently trusted in her fertility and now he found a husband for her.

His choice was Geoffrey of Anjou, eldest son of Count Fulk V and brother of William Atheling’s widow. Geoffrey was not Matilda’s only suitor. William of Malmesbury wrote in the Historia Novella that ‘some princes of Lotharingia and Lombardy came to England more than once … to ask for her as their lady, but gained nothing from their efforts, the king being minded to establish peace between himself and the Count of Anjou by his daughter’s marriage’.33

Matilda may have agreed with her father’s plans to make her queen, but she was dismayed at his choice of husband for her, and protested. She had been married to an emperor and was now asked to marry a mere nobleman. She may also have been horrified by the age gap. When marriage negotiations began in the spring of 1127, Matilda was twenty-five and Geoffrey fourteen. Her father’s friend Hildebert of Lavardin, possibly at the king’s request, wrote to her to ‘beg her to set his mind at rest about a report brought to him from England that she was causing distress to her father through her disobedience’.34

But despite her age and status as widowed empress, Matilda had no voice in the choosing of her second husband, and she complied. As the chronicler noted, Henry needed to cement relations with Anjou, which bordered Normandy to the south. Her brother William Atheling’s death just weeks after his marriage to Geoffrey’s sister, also named Matilda, undermined the alliance between Anjou and Normandy that this union had created. Henry had battled Fulk intermittently throughout the 1110s and 1120s for control of Maine. In 1118, a chronicler wrote how:

All this year King Henry stayed in Normandy because of the war with the king of France and the count of Anjou and the count of Flanders. Because of these hostilities the king was very much distressed and lost a great deal both in money and also in land. But those who troubled him most were his own men, who frequently deserted and betrayed him and went over to his enemies and surrendered their castles to them to injure and betray the king. England paid dear for all this because of the various taxes, which never ceased in the course of all this year.35

Henry could not afford repeated unrest, both on his lands on the continent and among his barons in England, jostling for position should Henry display any weakness. Now it was useful to him, and far more important than his daughter’s desires, that she marry into the Angevin family – the House of Anjou.

Meanwhile William Clito’s star was in the ascendant. Louis the Fat not only arranged a brilliant marriage for him to Joanna, daughter of his queen’s cousin, Rainer of Montferrat; he also gave him Flanders, after the murder of Count Charles the Good in March at the castle church in Bruges.36 It was now imperative to Henry I that his nephew not increase his already bloated power base, and be prevented from forming an alliance with the Angevins. Matilda’s marriage to Geoffrey was the only way to secure the loyalty of the count of Anjou. She had no choice but to agree.

There was an impediment, however. Fulk V, Geoffrey’s father, still ruled in Anjou. It was vital to both Matilda and her father that she marry a count, and not the son of a count. And so to enable Geoffrey’s marriage to Matilda, Henry executed a masterstoke of diplomacy. With Louis the Fat, in a brief shifting of alliances, he persuaded Baldwin II of Jerusalem that the widowed Fulk was the ideal candidate to marry his daughter Melisende. Fulk had already been on crusade, in 1120, and had extensive knowledge of the politics of the region. Fulk, they promised, would rule the crusader kingdom jointly with Melisende when Baldwin died. It is doubtful that Melisende in Jerusalem had any more choice than Matilda in England in deciding her future husband.

The promise of Jerusalem was enticement enough for Fulk. In May 1127, Hugh of Payens, the Master of the Knights Templar, set out from Jerusalem for Anjou, to discuss the marriage.37 Meanwhile Matilda’s half-brother, Robert of Gloucester, and her friend, Brian Fitz Count, travelled with her to her formal betrothal to Geoffrey. The wedding was delayed while Fulk settled his plans to take the throne in Jerusalem and waited for the envoys to arrive; they did so in the spring of the following year.

On 10 June 1128, King Henry knighted Geoffrey in Rouen in preparation for his lofty marriage. One week later the wedding was celebrated at the Angevins’ lavish Romanesque Cathedral of St Julian at Le Mans, Geoffrey’s capital. It had been consecrated when Fulk left for his pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1120 and now, eight years later, Fulk obligingly departed for Jerusalem for good, enabling Geoffrey to become the new count of Anjou.

Pope Honorius II wrote to King Baldwin, describing the selflessness with which Fulk left his domains to Geoffrey; he ‘set aside his barons and the innumerable people under his rule in order to serve God’.38 Fulk and his children then travelled to Fontevraud Abbey, to allow him to say goodbye to his daughter Matilda too, who had retired there, and he left for his new kingdom. He was married to Melisende as soon as he arrived in the Latin Kingdom. Fulk would never see his son Geoffrey or his other children again.

Just a month after the wedding, Henry I’s nephew and enemy, William Clito, obligingly died in battle, at the end of July. For Henry, the succession issue appeared to have passed its crisis.

What was Matilda’s new husband like? He was very good-looking – Geoffrey was called ‘Le Bel’ or ‘the Handsome’ by his contemporaries. But as he was not a king or churchman, we know little of his personality other than what we can infer from his actions and the sources.

He was one of four legitimate children born to Count Fulk V of Anjou and his wife, Aremburga of Maine. His siblings were Matilda, William Atheling’s widow; Sibylla; and their younger brother, Helias. Geoffrey and his brother were brought up together, in the charge of his father, close friends and allies, and tutors. When he was very young, Fulk began to teach him to govern; he witnessed his first charter when he was only three years old. Once Fulk made his decision to leave Anjou for Jerusalem, he embarked on a period of intensive ‘ducal’ training for Geoffrey.39

We know that Geoffrey became an exceptional military tactician, honed by years of war with his own barons, fighting the Normans, and even his fending off a rebellion by his brother Helias in 1145. We know of his admiration for the classics, of his interest in learning and of his desire to ensure that his sons received the best education available. We know of his loyalty to his closest supporters, above and beyond that of simply furthering his own power base, and that he preferred to surround himself with immensely capable men. We also know that he fulfilled only the conventional notions of piety and was most likely not a religious man.

But these character traits were to reveal themselves only later. In the first year of her marriage, Matilda was unhappy and dissatisfied, probably with Geoffrey’s extreme youth and inexperience. He may have treated her with arrogance and disrespect. She is more or less absent from the Angevin charter records. She did not fulfil the role that Geoffrey’s mother Aremburga had, witnessing her husband’s charters, issuing her own, and acting as his regent.

Matilda did not remain with her husband for long. She waited for Henry I to leave Normandy for England the following summer, and then she fled. She and Geoffrey had been married for little over a year.

We can only speculate as to why the marriage broke down after just thirteen months. The Durham Chronicler said that it was Geoffrey who ‘repudiated’ Matilda; she presumably would have had the political sense and experience to stay in her marriage, however loathsome.40 Medieval royal and aristocratic marriages were rarely about love and personal choice, but rather about political and territorial gain.41 Even modern historians such as Josèphe Chartrou tell us that, as Matilda had a ‘detestable’ character, the fracture must have been her fault.42 Matilda’s biographer, Marjorie Chibnall, however, believes that it was a youthful and inexperienced Geoffrey who asked Matilda to leave.

The couple were soon forced together again. At a great council held at Northampton on 8 September, it was agreed that Matilda should return to Geoffrey. The dissolution of a marriage with the heiress to England and Normandy would not have been in the interests of the count of Anjou. Now he asked for Matilda to come back to him, and promised to treat her with respect.43 Before she departed, the king coerced his magnates once again to swear to make her queen on his death.

Matilda and Geoffrey had been made to reconcile; now they determined to make their marriage work, at least politically. Two years later, at Le Mans on 5 March 1133, a son was born. His parents chose 25 March, Lady Day – the feast of the Annunciation of the Virgin – as his christening day. For much of the medieval period Lady Day, one of the four quarter days, was celebrated as the New Year. On this auspicious day at the Cathedral of St Julian in his parents’ capital city, Le Mans, he was baptised by Bishop Guy of Ploërmel. Matilda and Geoffrey named the boy after his maternal grandfather: Henry.

III

For a medieval audience, the occasion was drenched in symbolism. It was New Year; but it was also a commemoration of the day narrated in the Nativity, when Mary was told by the Angel Gabriel that Jesus had entered her pure body, just as baby Henry was now entering the pure body of the church. And just as Jesus had a very special mother, so this baby had a special mother too – Matilda. The source of Henry’s power would come from both Geoffrey and Matilda’s inheritance to him. But its mystique would not be through his father, a count, but through his mother, an empress and daughter and named successor of a king. Henry would style himself ‘FitzEmpress’ (son of the empress) for the rest of his life.

Henry’s birth meant everything to his maternal grandfather. Thirteen years after William Atheling had drowned, taking with him Henry I’s desires for the succession of England and Normandy, a legitimate male child was born into the family. Both Matilda and her father gave gifts and money to the church to mark their thankfulness and their joy.44

Matilda kept Henry with her during his infancy. In August 1133 she left Geoffrey in Anjou, taking five-month-old Henry with her to Rouen, to join the old king when he returned to Normandy. Now she devoted herself to learning statecraft from her father to prepare for her accession. Matilda’s experience in Germany had been limited to the duties required of a queen consort of a regent. Her father meant to teach her to rule.

King Henry I had another reason for keeping Matilda with him. The chronicler Roger of Howden tells us that the king once again demanded that his reluctant nobles and the archbishops swear to uphold not only Matilda’s claim, but young Henry’s claim too.45 Living in her father’s court meant that Matilda, her baby son and the Anglo-Norman nobility got to know one another better, presumably – in the king’s mind – smoothing the way to her future succession. Matilda may have met some of them when she was a child, but as she had left England when she was only eight years old, strong relationships and loyalties had not been formed. Now the king determined to rectify this.

Matilda had arrived in Normandy pregnant. Her second child, Geoffrey, was born in Rouen at the beginning of the summer of 1134. It was a difficult birth, and Matilda did not expect to survive; she even wrote her will. King Henry showed his daughter tenderness throughout her illness. He delayed his plans to leave and stayed with her until she was well, ‘rejoicing in his grandsons’.46 Henry I no longer had any doubts about the succession. He had his daughter and his grandsons close, and may even have asked his nobles and churchmen to swear allegiance to her yet again.47

By September of the following year, however, father and daughter’s relationship had deteriorated. Matilda’s dowry had included the castles of Exmes, Argentan and Domfront, which lay on the border between Normandy and Anjou, but the king, anxious to retain power, refused to hand them over. Now Matilda and Geoffrey demanded them with immediate effect: Geoffrey argued that he would need them to secure Normandy after Henry I’s death and wanted to take possession as quickly as possible. It is likely that the old king’s refusal to give them up had rankled with Geoffrey for some time. He already faced intermittent threats from his own bellicose barons, and it made sound military sense to hold these castles sooner rather than later. Matilda and Geoffrey also urged Henry I to return to William Talvas, one of Geoffrey’s vassals, his father’s castles in Maine.

Talvas was the son of a notoriously barbarous and seditious Anglo-Norman lord, Robert of Bellême, who had briefly harboured William Clito. Even in an age of warfare and violence, Robert’s savagery attracted note: Orderic Vitalis called him ‘unequalled for his iniquity in the whole Christian era’. Henry I, however, had locked him away not for his cruelty, but for his continuous rebellion. The king captured him in 1112, and he remained his prisoner until Robert died nearly twenty years later, in about 1130. Urged by Geoffrey, Talvas asked the old king for his castles of Sées, Almenêches and Alençon back. Geoffrey and Matilda pushed their luck with an outrageous demand that King Henry swear an oath of fealty to them for the castles in Matilda’s dowry – Henry, furious, refused both requests.48 He exiled William Talvas from Normandy, and went to war with his daughter and son-in-law.

The chroniclers, either eyewitnesses or relying on eyewitness accounts, charged Matilda with causing the war that erupted between her husband and father. Robert of Torigni accused her of deliberately causing trouble, of artfulness, and of detaining the king ‘with various disagreements, from which arose several rounds for argument between the king and the count of Anjou’.49 The chronicler and historian Henry of Huntingdon placed the fault entirely with Matilda for stoking the argument; but Henry I and Geoffrey were hardly blameless. The old king had refused to hand over Matilda’s dowry, while Orderic Vitalis accused Geoffrey of avarice, claiming that he ‘aspired to the great riches of his father-in-law and demanded castles in Normandy, asserting that the king had covenanted with him to hand them over when he married his daughter’.50

We do not know how much pressure Geoffrey put on Matilda to side with him against her father. Nevertheless she was forced to choose, and she chose her husband. It is possible that Matilda had softened towards Geoffrey when she was so ill following the birth of her second son. Instead of giving gifts to a Norman foundation as she lay in fear for her life, she chose an Angevin one – Le Mans – and donated costly curtains and tapestries.51 She may have decided between her husband and father already. Now, she left Normandy with her baby sons to join Geoffrey in Angers.

The border war was vicious. Orderic Vitalis, giving us a human and sympathetic portrait of the old king, wrote that Henry ‘took it very hard’ when Geoffrey besieged another of Henry’s sons-in-law, Roscelin, viscount of Sainte-Suzanne, husband of Henry’s illegitimate daughter Constance.52

The war showed that this was not a normal, loving family. Personal relationships were sacrificed to territorial ambitions, and Matilda and Geoffrey were not prepared to wait until the king’s death to claim Matilda’s dowry.

By late autumn the king and his daughter were still not speaking. Perhaps to alleviate his anger and disappointment, King Henry went hunting at one of his favourite spots, Lyons-la-Forêt. On 25 November at supper he ate too many lampreys, a jawless fish and delicacy which his doctor had advised him not to touch. He became mortally ill. Although the sources differ as to what he actually said over the following days, all agree that he was lucid and aware that death was coming.

Three days later he sent for his confessor Hugh, archbishop of Rouen, and arranged for his burial in Reading Cathedral. The king also had his most powerful magnates and protégés, including William of Warenne earl of Surrey, the Beaumont twins – Robert of Leicester and Waleran of Meulan – and his eldest and beloved bastard son, Robert of Gloucester, at his bedside. He made them promise not to desert his body, but to accompany it to burial. But during his final bleak days, did he discuss the succession?

As far as we are aware, nothing was written down at this time. The historian William of Malmesbury claimed that, ‘when he was asked … about his successor he assigned all his lands on both sides of the sea to his daughter in lawful and lasting succession, being somewhat angry with her husband because he had vexed the king by not a few threats and insults’.53 Matilda’s biographer Marjorie Chibnall speculates that before their argument, perhaps the king had intended Geoffrey and Matilda to rule together. But now he reserved his bile for his son-in-law. His wishes were clear: Matilda would rule alone.54

But the anonymous author of the Gesta Stephani (‘The Deeds of Stephen’) claimed that during his final hours, the king performed a volte-face. He was so incensed with Matilda and Geoffrey for their audacious request that Henry pay them homage, and for the war, that he freed his magnates from their oaths of loyalty to his daughter, and repented ‘the forcible imposition of the oath on his barons’.55 John of Salisbury, the brilliant cleric, polymath, diplomat and writer, made a similar claim; he repeated the story told by Hugh Bigod, Henry I’s steward, of a deathbed change of heart.56 The tale appeared in other trustworthy sources.

If this is true, and the king was lucid during his final days as the sources claim, he would have been fully aware of the implications of his actions. The result, he knew, would be a perilous dash for the treasury and the throne.

A clue to the truth may lie with Orderic Vitalis, whose account in his Deeds of the Dukes of Normandy contains intricate details of the king’s illness and the heated discussion of the succession among the Norman magnates surrounding their dying lord, but says absolutely nothing about who old King Henry nominated during his final hours. It is likely that the king never withdrew support for his daughter, but was still so angry that he chose not to reiterate his wishes. Henry I died on 1 December 1135. He was about sixty-seven years old and had been king for thirty-five years.

If he did withdraw support from Matilda, either tacitly or implicitly, who were her likely rivals?

The Gesta Stephani reported that Robert of Gloucester proposed Matilda’s son, young Henry, as England’s monarch. But as he was only two, his claims were in abeyance.57

Robert himself, Matilda’s half-brother and the eldest of the king’s bastard sons, was with his father throughout his illness. It was to Robert that the king entrusted the payment of his debts on his death. Robert was born sometime before 1100 at Caen in northern France, before his father became king. The chroniclers did not name his mother, although an early source claimed she was Henry’s mistress, Nest, the grandmother of the chronicler Gerald of Wales. Gerald documented his family history so carefully that had Robert of Gloucester, the uncle of his king, been related to him, he would doubtless have used the family connection to promote his own interests, for the chronicler ‘lived every day an existence of dramatic egotism’.58 It is more likely that Robert’s mother came from Oxfordshire, although we know nothing more about her.59

When William Atheling died, their father sought to boost the power of this son who had already proved so loyal. Robert had fought both with and for his father; against Louis the Fat at the battle of Brémule in 1119, and he went on to aid him in suppressing an uprising of Norman barons in 1123. Later in the 1120s, he had custody of his uncle, Robert Curthose, at his castle at Cardiff. Henry I ensured he received an impeccable education, made him wealthy by marrying him to Mabel, the stupendously rich daughter of Robert Fitz Haimon (a very close friend and possibly lover of William Rufus), and created an earldom for him – Gloucester. Robert was an excellent soldier, clever and capable, and his father evidently loved and trusted him completely. He relied on him and sought his advice, in matters both military and financial.60 Robert was one of his father’s chief advisors, and was even consulted on his half-sister Matilda’s marriage to Geoffrey.