The White Ship

Matilda of Flanders had not aimed to meddle in politics and warfare, but to establish peace in her family. She helped to engineer a partial reconciliation between her husband and eldest son in 1080. But three years later Matilda died, leaving nobody in her place capable of patching up the differences between the generations. The Conqueror and Curthose remained bitterly at odds, despite the Norman barons’ attempts to appease the pair.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Orderic Vitalis record that Henry was knighted at Westminster at Whitsun (which fell on 24 May) in 1086. He was perhaps seventeen years old. In a society that needed military excellence as its cornerstone, knighthood took on grave importance, and its exponents were glamorised.

Orderic Vitalis noted the accoutrements handed over during the ceremony: ‘The future King Henry I of England received investiture with hauberk,[fn1] helmet and sword-belt on coming of age from Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury.’[7] He will have had a fine horse as well: in the Similitudo Militis, written in the early twelfth century, the author records the horse as the knight’s ‘most faithful friend’. It was also one of his more valuable possessions.

Despite his official entry into the adult world of knighthood, Henry’s status remained humble when compared to that of his older brothers: they were referred to as ‘counts’ during the Conqueror’s life, while he was not. It seems possible that Henry was being prepared for high office in the Church rather than in the lay world: his education appears to have been overseen by Osmund who, in the easy medieval crossover between state and Church power, had been the Conqueror’s chancellor before, in 1078, becoming bishop of Salisbury. Henry is recorded as being in Osmund’s company on many occasions between 1080 (when the extremely wealthy Osmund built Devizes Castle) and 1086. There are other hints of religious intent in Henry’s upbringing. In 1084, while the Conqueror took Robert Curthose and William Rufus on campaign with him, Henry was ordered to spend time at the ancient Benedictine monastery of St Mary’s in Abingdon.

It may well have been during these years with the bishop of Salisbury that Henry received an education in the classics, which gave him the ability to read. This level of literacy, being a rarity among his family – or the upper reaches of the aristocracy as a whole at that time – contributed to his being regarded as something of an intellectual. There was some truth in this verdict: certainly, during his later life, Henry showed enthusiasm for mixing with learned men, challenging and enjoying their new ideas. Nicknamed ‘clerc’ by some during his lifetime, three centuries after his death Henry was being referred to as ‘Beauclerc’. His reputation for scholarliness had grown through the Middle Ages, but it should be kept in perspective: while he was able to read, there is no evidence that Henry could write.

Henry found his father’s rugged, soldierly illiteracy embarrassing. He once said, within the Conqueror’s hearing, that an illiterate king was no better than a crowned ass. William remained uncompromisingly Norman till his dying day. He tried to learn Old English, but his efforts fell away when confronted by its endless intricacies and irregularities, as well as by the other demands on his time. Henry, meanwhile, understood the language of the country of his birth, even if Franco-Norman was his first tongue.

In 1087 William – by now unrecognisable from the vigorous figure of his youth, after gaining significant weight throughout middle age – crossed the Channel for the seventeenth time in his twenty-one-year rule and prepared to fight once more. The Vexin was a strategically important county on the eastern flank of Normandy, which lay between Rouen and Paris. It was in dispute, Philip of France having swooped on it a decade before when its ruler retired to a monastery. Philip had declared half of it to be naturally French territory. From this ‘French Vexin’ he had launched raids into Normandy. The Conqueror led his army in a revenge expedition, defying his obesity to ride into action during an assault on Mantes, thirty miles west of Paris. But in the turmoil of sacking the town his horse faltered and William was struck hard in his stomach by the pommel of its saddle, causing a serious internal wound.

Clearly gravely injured, William was taken to be treated in the priory of St Gervais, on the outskirts of Rouen, the city that was the administrative, legal and trade fulcrum of Normandy. There was no hope of recovery. It was obvious that the man who had won a kingdom overseas was going to die in this, the hub of his Anglo-Norman realm. Less easy to discern was how his great inheritance would be divided.

Orderic Vitalis noted how, in contrast to their elder brother, ‘William Rufus and Henry … were obedient to their father [and so] earned his blessing, and for many years enjoyed the highest power in the kingdom and duchy.’[8] Henry may well have had expectations of a sizeable inheritance, as a result of his father’s favour and his mother’s legacy: it was common for the property of a royal or aristocratic mother to be passed on her death to younger sons. Matilda of Flanders had owned estates in Buckinghamshire and Gloucestershire, which would have provided Henry with a substantial income of around £300 per year.[fn2]

Robert Curthose was still at war with his father as William lay dying. The Conqueror wanted to disinherit him, but he was persuaded by his lords to leave Normandy to his eldest son, in common with the dynasty’s custom since the death of William Longsword. Besides, in happier times, the Conqueror had twice insisted that his leading men swear to acknowledge Curthose as the legitimate heir to the dukedom.

Primogeniture would not be recognised in England until the end of the twelfth century, though, and the Conqueror felt free to leave his English throne to William Rufus. This was reward for his favourite son’s unfailing loyalty, but the Conqueror appreciated too that Rufus was a brave and charismatic soldier, capable of keeping control of this hard-won prize that attracted covetous looks from across its various seas, and which had Scottish and Welsh enemies on its northern and west fronts.

‘And what, Father, do you give to me?’ Orderic Vitalis quoted Henry as asking William on his deathbed: ‘The king answered to him, “I give you five thousand pounds of silver from my treasure.” To which Henry said, “What shall I do with treasure, if I have no place to make my home?”’[9]

After encouraging Henry to accept his two elder brothers’ seniority to him in the line of succession, the Conqueror said: ‘You in your own time will have all the dominions that I have acquired, and be greater than your brothers in wealth and power.’[10] Ever practical, and aware that the limited inheritance left him by his father was vulnerable to his brothers’ whims, Henry had his silver carefully weighed to see it was all there, then took it away for safe storage.

Henry was by his father’s side on his final day, 9 September 1087. As soon as the Conqueror died and the grandees had left the room, his attendants fell upon his belongings in an orgy of self-enrichment. Even his robes were despoiled, and his hulking carcass was left all but naked on its deathbed. His remains were taken by boat to Caen. But the stately progress of the dead ruler, designed to give all a chance to bid farewell to their great duke, was undone when a fire broke out in the city, prompting onlookers to flee for safety.

Of the three surviving sons only Henry attended the Conqueror’s funeral, at the Abbey of Saint-Étienne, in Caen. With the service underway a man in the congregation stood up and launched into an astonishing tirade, claiming the church had been built illegally on land that rightly belonged to him. An even greater commotion blew up when the time came to lay William to rest in his stone sarcophagus. It had been carved when the duke was younger and slimmer, and it proved too small for his immense body. After much effort by the monks to squeeze him into the tomb, his guts burst open in a putrid cascade. The stench surged through the abbey, assaulting the nostrils of the congregation, causing widespread nausea. The abbey was quickly vacated, and the burial of one of the greatest men of the eleventh century was attended only by those clergy prepared to brave the foul smell of his rotten flesh.

This was the start, for Henry, of more than a decade of insecurity that would often tip over into real personal danger. During this time, he would be seen as an accoutrement of the royal and ducal family, but not as a central figure in it. His status stemmed from his royal parentage, but he had neither the title nor the lands required for real power and wealth.

On his deathbed the Conqueror had committed his English crown, sword and sceptre to Rufus, together with a letter to Archbishop Lanfranc confirming his wish that his second son succeed him in England. The coronation was performed by the archbishop of Canterbury in Westminster, on 26 September – ‘Michaelmas Day’ – 1087, just seventeen days after the Conqueror’s death. ‘William Rufus crossed the sea, was crowned and reigned for thirteen years,’ recorded Robert Wace succinctly.[11]

But Wace’s description fails to point out what a difficult time Rufus often had during those thirteen years. His succession was contested, despite his father’s unambiguous directions. Within months of being crowned, Rufus faced a serious rebellion in England in favour of Robert Curthose. It was led by two of the Conqueror’s half-brothers, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, and Robert, Count de Mortain, and supported by a clutch of leading bishops and noblemen.

After decisive military action Rufus pulled out the roots of the revolt by promising to be a strong and fair ruler, uphold the laws of his predecessors as kings of England, stamp out unjust taxation and respect the people’s rights in the forests. But Curthose remained determined to displace his younger brother from the English throne that he was convinced was his by right.

Curthose’s hopes of military gain were compromised by his extravagance. He heaped gifts on his supporters, and was so bad with money that he was said to pay whatever outrageous sum was requested, whether for a horse or for a hound. Within six months of inheriting Normandy, he had gone through all the treasure left to him by the Conqueror. By contrast Rufus’s English wealth seemed infinite.

Curthose became so financially hobbled that, in 1088, he accepted a payment from Henry of £3,000 in return for the rights to the land of the Cotentin. This was the peninsula in the north-west of Normandy that included Barfleur, a favoured crossing point for ships heading to the southern coast of England. Henry became count of the Cotentin, in practice and probably in name, taking the rank that had been planned for his brother Richard during his brief life. He was around twenty years of age at this stage, and starting to establish himself as a man of importance.

Henry must surely have sworn homage to Curthose on assuming his duties. While the revenues and the castles of the Cotentin were now his, so was the responsibility of serving his eldest brother as peacekeeper there. Henry expanded his control, and his new power base included the monastery-fortress of Mont Saint-Michel and the counties of Avranches and Coutances. He remained on the south side of the Channel for nearly all of the next seven years. The one trip to England that we know of during this period of his life took place in the second half of 1088. It was a failure, for he was unable to persuade William Rufus to hand over those properties that, Henry remained adamant, their mother had left to him. More disappointment and frustration followed: when Henry returned to Normandy Curthose imprisoned him in Bayeux. So toxic was the relationship between the two older brothers that Curthose was convinced Henry had been sent by Rufus to undermine him. Henry remained a prisoner for six months, being released only after paying for his freedom.

Shorn of much of his wealth, Henry seemed to face a modest future. He appears to have inhabited a desolate no man’s land while his brothers fought one another across a broad front. Because of his rootlessness and limited resources, Henry remained at the mercy of whichever one of them temporarily showed him favour, as and when they required his help. On his release from Curthose’s prison in Bayeux Henry sought a place in Rufus’s court, but was rebuffed. Feeling he had nowhere else to go, Henry felt compelled to swallow his pride and offer his services to Curthose, despite having so recently been his captive.

It was humiliating, but Henry bided his time, waiting for an opportunity to step forward into a role suited to his drive and ambition. Soon enough his chance seemed to come along.

In 1090 William Rufus secretly sent money to leading citizens of the Norman capital of Rouen who were unhappy with Curthose’s rule. When this disaffected group plotted a riot on Rufus’s behalf, Henry rode to Rouen Castle to help Curthose deal with the uprising.

Open fighting broke out on 3 November, Curthose and Henry leading their men out of the castle to meet the rioters. What followed was brutal, and in the bloody mayhem Curthose was persuaded by courtiers to slip away to safety rather than risk his life in a street fight. He lay low in a church in Rouen’s suburbs while Henry led his soldiers into the heat of the action. Henry was eventually joined by the troops of Gilbert de L’Aigle, a nobleman from the south-east of Normandy, who had penetrated Rouen from the south. Their forces fought through to unite, and began to put the rebels to the sword with gusto. The survivors faltered, then scattered, pursued by Henry’s men who were eager for bloodshed and plunder, as well as ransom from the richer prisoners.

They quickly captured the leader of the rebellion, who Curthose ordered to be taken away in chains. But Henry insisted the prisoner be brought to him at once. The man turned out not to be a powerful aristocrat, but a rich merchant by the name of Conan. Henry found the lowly status of the rebel particularly maddening: by breaking the homage he had sworn to Curthose, Conan had shattered the social conventions of the time. Such oaths formed the glue of feudal society, and their infringement was seen as being beyond the pale.

Wace explained the gravity of such treachery: ‘No one could do worse [than he] who betrays his liege lord. No man, for any reason, should fail his earthly lord; he should protect his life and limb and uphold his earthly honour.’[12] Henry decided Conan should pay for his unforgivable transgression immediately.

He ordered the prisoner to accompany him and his men as they went up the stairway of Rouen Castle’s great tower. While Conan followed, no doubt becoming increasingly terrified, Henry is said to have given a goading commentary of the sights opening up to them as they ascended the steps: ‘Admire, Conan, the beauty of the country you tried to conquer. Away to the south there is a delightful hunting region, wooded and well stocked with beasts of the chase. See how the River Seine, full of fishes, laps the wall of Rouen and daily brings in ships laden with merchandise of many kinds. On the other side see the fair and popular city, with its ramparts and churches and town buildings, which has rightly been the capital of Normandy from the earliest days.’

Panicked by the barely controlled fury of his captor, Conan misread his man. He hoped for some way out of his predicament and he trusted that it might lie in bribery on a colossal scale. ‘My Lord,’ he conceded, ‘I deserve condemnation for my own guilt, but now I ask mercy for the sake of God who created all things. For my ransom I will give my Lord all the gold and silver that I can find in my own and kinsmen’s treasure-stores, and in compensation for my treachery I will give you faithful service until I die.’

‘By my mother’s soul!’ Henry countered with contempt. ‘There shall be no ransom for a traitor, only swift infliction of the death he deserves.’[13]

Conan, realising that his life was over, begged for time to confess his sins, believing he could purify his soul before meeting judgement in the afterlife. But Henry’s patience was shot. He was said to be ‘trembling with anger’ when he seized the merchant and hurled him from a high window. Conan plunged to his death, and his broken corpse was tied to the tail of a horse, which dragged it through Rouen’s streets in a grisly circuit of shame.

Contemporaries and chroniclers applauded Henry’s delivery of such instant and fitting justice. William of Malmesbury wrote of this episode: ‘The punishment of a man who turned traitor after swearing loyalty and doing homage ought never to be deferred.’[14] Conan had broken the sacred bond that tied him to Robert Curthose, his duke, and he had paid for his treachery with his life.

The contrast between Henry’s bold conduct that day and that of his eldest brother could hardly have been more vivid. Henry, fighting hard, then dispatching the defeated rebel leader with apt ruthlessness, was considered to have behaved admirably. Meanwhile Curthose’s decision to quit bloody hand-to-hand combat for the sanctuary of a church was viewed as humiliating. As a result, even though Henry had put down the dangerous rebellion he received no gratitude from Curthose. Instead, soon afterwards, his brother forced Henry to leave Rouen, his status yet again that of a wandering knight without a cause.

The tit for tat between Curthose and Rufus continued. Having failed to remove Rufus from the English throne, Curthose found himself attacked from across the Channel. But in a move as sudden as it was unexpected, in 1091 Rufus and Curthose agreed a peace treaty, witnessed by twelve barons on either side. They recognised each other as one another’s heir, in the event that either should die before fathering a legitimate son. At the same time Rufus was fed various slivers of Normandy: Cherbourg, the county of Eu, the abbeys of Fécamp and Mont Saint-Michel, and those castles that had repudiated their loyalty to Curthose and already come over to him. Henry had no role in their plans, except as victim: the two had also agreed to turn on their younger brother, and to deprive him of his lands.

Henry looked to one of his father’s most faithful supporters, Hugh, Earl of Chester, to help him defend against the imminent attack. But Hugh had weighed his affection for Henry against the combined strength of Curthose and Rufus, as well as the loyalty he owed to his anointed king. The earl was among those who, in the words of Orderic Vitalis, ‘deserted the noble prince [Henry] in his military need, and handed over their castles to the king’.[15]

Although Hugh of Chester felt compelled to surrender rather than face the inevitable consequences, he remained quietly supportive of Henry. He advised Henry to assemble his forces and take a stand at his most promising defensive position. This was Mont Saint-Michel, the monastery that stands in a bay joining Normandy to Brittany, which Rufus was now claiming as his own. Mont Saint-Michel has significant natural protection: a craggy rock, it becomes an island at high tide. Hugh suggested that Henry should add to this some man-made fortifications of his own.

Wace wrote of Henry: ‘He did not leave [for Mont Saint-Michel] without companions, taking a large number of men with him; he took with him the brothers and sons of the most noble and high born and they all served with him very willingly, for they put great hope in him.’[16] Bolstering this force of enthusiastic adventurers, who chose to believe in Henry’s potential, came a body of mercenaries from Brittany who were confident that Henry would find the money to pay for their services. Further help arrived from an unlikely quarter: Mont Saint-Michel’s religious foundation. John of Worcester, writing in the late 1090s till 1118, noted how some of the monks assisted Henry as he dug in, preparing to fight.[17]

After Henry fell back to Mont Saint-Michel, William Rufus and Robert Curthose soon followed, besieging him there from March 1091. Frequent skirmishes took place on the same sand flats in front of the monastery where the man who would briefly rule England, Harold, had fought in support of Henry’s father, William, a quarter of a century beforehand. These small engagements cost Rufus and Curthose many casualties, of which Rufus was nearly one. According to William of Malmesbury, Rufus launched a singlehanded attack against some of Henry’s knights, during which his horse was mortally wounded. It galloped on, with Rufus’s ankle wedged in a stirrup, until slowing up, collapsing in death and leaving him sprawled out on the sand.

One of Henry’s knights stepped forward, raised his sword and was about to smite the life out of the helmeted figure lying defenceless before him when a distinctive voice bellowed up from the ground: ‘Hold, wretch! I am the king of England!’ Recognising Rufus for who he claimed to be, Henry’s men shrank back, shocked that they had been about to dispatch a man who (in common with the beliefs of the time) they took to have been transformed by holy anointment at coronation from mere mortality to the status of God’s regent on earth. They put aside their weapons and offered Rufus one of their mounts.

As the king swung his leg up over the saddle, he asked the soldiers which of them had unhorsed him. The man responsible stepped forward, admitting that it was him. Fearing punishment, he nervously explained that he had mistaken the king for one of his knights. Rufus, who loved courage in another as much as he enjoyed magnanimity in himself, voiced his favourite oath, ‘By the face of Lucca!’, then promised: ‘From now on you shall be my man and, being placed on my muster list, you shall be well rewarded for your gallant deed.’[18] It was a typical gesture by Rufus, who was a soldier’s soldier. Robert Wace recorded that the king ‘was brave, and very generous. He did not hear of any knight whose prowess he heard praised and then fail to mention him in his register and give him some … reward.’[19]

As the siege dragged on through Lent, Rufus departed, leaving operations under the complete command of Curthose. William of Malmesbury recorded how Henry sent a messenger to his eldest brother at this point, saying that he and his men were dying of thirst. While Mont Saint-Michel’s main strength lay in the protection of the surrounding sea, its weakness was an inability to access fresh water. Henry challenged his brother to allow him and his men something to drink, so that any victory gained could be fairly and gloriously won, and not come about through something as banal as the defenders’ lack of supplies. Curthose sent what was requested – and is reported to have thrown in some good wine too, for his brother to enjoy.

When he found out what Curthose had allowed in his absence, Rufus was furious: ‘This is a fine way indeed to run a war, allowing the enemy all the water they need! How shall we ever conquer them if we indulge them with food and drink?’ Curthose is said to have replied: ‘Indeed, should I condemn my own brother to die of thirst? And if we lose him, where shall we find another?’[20]

Exasperated by Curthose’s softness, Rufus refused to continue the fight in Normandy, and the two older brothers went their separate ways. But Henry failed to profit from the falling out: after a six-week siege, he was still obliged to surrender Mont Saint-Michel, on terms that guaranteed his liberty. He had now lost all the land that he had purchased from Curthose with the money left to him in their father’s will. Henry of Huntingdon recorded: ‘When Robert had sold Henry part of Normandy in return for this treasure, he took the land away from him. This was very displeasing to God, but He deferred vengeance for a time.’[21]

Allowed safe conduct from Mont Saint-Michel, Henry paid off his mercenaries with his remaining money. Banished from Normandy by his brother, he set off for Brittany before arriving in France. So began the start of a reduced life, when Henry was forced to learn ‘to endure poverty in exile’.[22] The next year, from 1091–2, is a mystery; this man, who was to become a titan of medieval history, simply disappears from view, a dispossessed younger son, deceived and degraded by his brothers, seemingly condemned to a life of obscurity and dependence.