The White Ship

With him went a retinue of five men – a chaplain, a knight and three servants. Wace has Henry spending some of this time serving the king of France. In his account Henry was eventually spotted in Paris by a supporter called Haschier, who was travelling through France in a disguise that seems to have comprised nothing more than a plaster placed over an eye. Haschier is credited by Wace with persuading Henry to leave his life of Parisian poverty for hope of greater things in Normandy.

Wace’s version, written decades after the events, is hard to verify. It remains part of Henry’s myth in a period when he is otherwise unaccounted for. One thing the chroniclers agree on, though, is that this time of want instilled in Henry an eagerness to help the poor and an understanding of the need to account for resources in a thoughtful manner. Both would be notable traits during his later years of power.

THREE

Out of the Shadows

Robert, Duke of the Normans, told his brother King William the Younger through envoys that he would no longer keep the peace which they had both agreed. Furthermore, he called him faithless and deceitful unless he discharged fully the terms of the agreement they had made in Normandy.

John of Worcester, English monk and chronicler (d. 1140)

When Henry reappears for sure, it is in mid-1092, at the invitation of Domfront, a fortified Norman town fifty miles south of Caen, which sat at a point where Normandy met Maine and Brittany. The inhabitants of Domfront could take no more of the vicious rule of their lord, and invited Henry to come to their assistance by taking his place.

Their tormentor was Robert de Bellême, a powerful aristocrat who had been knighted by the Conqueror as a youth. At the time of Domfront’s rebellion de Bellême was in his mid-thirties. The tall and strongly built de Bellême came from impressive stock. A distant cousin of Henry’s, he was the eldest surviving son of Roger de Montgomery, one of the Conqueror’s closest advisers. Roger seems to have helped govern Normandy at the time of the invasion of 1066 before crossing the Channel to assist in the administration of the captured kingdom. William gave him land in eleven English counties, including nearly all of Shropshire and a large section of what is now West Sussex. In making Roger de Montgomery one of the half-dozen greatest landowners in England, William was relying on him in turn to counter the Welsh, and to protect a key stretch of the south coast.

At the time that Domfront turned to Henry for salvation, Robert de Bellême had yet to receive any lands from his father. But he had already become a major Norman aristocrat thanks to his inheritance from his mother, Mabel, a significant force in her own right. On her death she passed to Robert the lordship of Bellême, which was vitally important to the dukes of Normandy as a protective buffer against Maine: Bellême lay thirty-five miles north-west of Maine’s capital, Le Mans. Robert de Bellême was also the lord of Sées and of Alençon, and owned a scattering of other significant castles, of which Domfront was one of the more important.

The diminutive Mabel was judged to have passed on to her eldest son not just her portfolio of power, but much of her daunting character. Orderic Vitalis (whose monastery suffered from some of the de Bellême family’s excesses) described her as ‘small, very talkative, ready enough to do evil, shrewd and jocular, extremely cruel and daring’. Mabel tried to poison a member of the eminent Giroie family, with whom the de Bellêmes were locked in a feud, but her own brother-in-law, parched after a long ride, downed the lethal goblet of wine before he could be stopped, and died in place of her intended victim. Yet Mabel persevered, and got her man next time, after bribing one of his servants to administer the fatal brew.

Mabel had little respect for religion. She once brought her large retinue to a monastery that she knew was obliged to provide all who came to its doors with food and lodging. She did this in the knowledge that it would impose financial strains on her hosts that they would find crippling. When admonished by the abbot for her thoughtlessness, she replied that next time she would descend on him with even more mouths to feed.

Mabel focused on further enriching her family at the cost of its rivals. This she did once too often, seizing the stronghold of Peray, twenty miles south-east of Alençon, which was the inheritance of a nobleman called Hugh Bunel. It provoked Hugh, who was reported to be ‘frenzied with grief’,[1] into gathering together some of his male relatives for vengeance. Breaking into Mabel de Bellême’s home one December night in 1077, they found her relaxing on her bed, having just emerged from her bath. Before she could escape, Hugh decapitated her with his sword.

Mabel’s epitaph acknowledged that she was:

To some neighbours dear,

To others terrible; she died by the sword,

By night, by stealth, for we are mortals all.[2]

Robert de Bellême perpetuated the consternation that his mother had sown among her neighbours, using his maternal inheritance – of castles and cruelty – to cast a largely malevolent shadow throughout his decades of influence. Orderic Vitalis called him ‘proud and evil in every way’, and said de Bellême ‘committed innumerable crimes’.[3]

De Bellême had been one of the young and unruly supporters of Robert Curthose during the latter’s years of armed opposition to the Conqueror. Captured in 1079, de Bellême was spared punishment by William, but never again trusted by him. The Conqueror saw to it that de Bellême’s potential for troublemaking was negated by billeting his household troops on the young man’s garrisons.

De Bellême was on his way to pay his respects to the duke in 1087 when he heard that the old warrior had died. His first reaction was to order all of William’s troops to quit his castles. He quickly imposed some of his own men on the garrisons of his weaker neighbours in an opportunistic appropriation of power. The neighbours either agreed or had their fort destroyed.

De Bellême soon became a leading participant in Curthose and Rufus’s contest for power. In 1088 he arrived in Rochester, thirty miles south-east of London, to bolster Odo of Bayeux’s revolt against Rufus’s reign. But it quickly became clear that Rochester would fall to Rufus, and when de Bellême and his accomplices started negotiating for their lives and freedom in return for their surrender, the king insisted the rebels be hanged. It was thanks to Roger de Montgomery, and other powerful fathers whose sons had fought for Curthose, that the men holding Rochester were eventually allowed to lay down their arms without also forfeiting their lives.

Before long, de Bellême patched up his differences with Rufus, and he fostered a friendship with Henry. He accompanied Henry back to Normandy, but was arrested alongside him, thanks to Curthose’s suspicion that they had come to cause him trouble.

Bishop Odo encouraged Curthose to strike against de Bellême’s power base, while he was imprisoned. Curthose made good progress, capturing de Bellême’s castle of St Cénéry, east of Sées, mutilating some of the garrison and blinding its commander. But, typically, Curthose failed to push home his advantage by making further inroads. He followed the example of his father and of Rufus, releasing the dangerous de Bellême to continue on his path of self-interest and destruction.

In a cruel age, he became a byword for particular viciousness. At a time when the fear of God persuaded many to respect (or at least bear in mind) the concept of mercy, and divine retribution, de Bellême seems to have been devoid of religious belief or conscience. He chose not to ransom his prisoners – then normal practice, since it was lucrative – because he preferred to keep victims on hand for torture and mutilation.

The chroniclers are unanimous in their condemnation of this curiously sadistic aristocrat. Orderic Vitalis told of how those who fell into his clutches ‘groaned and wailed as they were torn by his iron talons’.[4] The historian-monk recorded how, one Lent, rather than repent of his sins, de Bellême chose to let three hundred prisoners starve and freeze to death while chained in his dungeons.

Henry of Huntingdon noted that de Bellême enjoyed thinking of excruciating ways to inflict pain on captives of both sexes: ‘He impaled men and also women on stakes. To him the most horrible butchering of men was pleasant nourishment for the soul.’[5] William of Malmesbury recalled de Bellême’s rage when upset by the father of a boy he was holding hostage. Even though de Bellême was the child’s godfather, he tore out the boy’s eyes with his fingernails. We read too of de Bellême carrying off the son of a defeated rival and, contemporaries were sure, poisoning him.

Wace called him ‘a baron whom people considered very treacherous, but who was on very good terms with the king. Robert de Bellême was a traitor and knew many forms of treachery and evil; he was an expert in treacherous games and feared on account of the harm he did.’[6]

Despite his outrages de Bellême remained a favourite of William Rufus, who approved an advantageous marriage that had been arranged for him in the final year of the Conqueror’s life: de Bellême’s wife, Agnes, was heiress to the powerful count of Ponthieu, whose brother had distinguished himself at Hastings, being in at the kill when Harold was dispatched. But being married to de Bellême was far from easy: Agnes was kept locked up in one of his castles until she succeeded in escaping and found refuge with the Conqueror’s youngest daughter, Adela, Countess of Blois.

When the inhabitants of Domfront rebelled in 1092, anyone must have seemed a better choice to be their lord than the depraved Robert de Bellême. But the loss of Domfront infuriated de Bellême. It would be the starting point of a personal hostility between him and Henry that, apart from one brief rapprochement, proved impossible to overcome. Domfront’s powerful fortress provided Henry with a base from which to build his reputation and grow his influence. He swore to respect and uphold the laws and customs that the townspeople had in place, and he gave his word that only he would be their lord, for as long as he lived. Henry offered security, in place of de Bellême’s savagery.

As Henry began his ascent to prominence and power, his two brothers’ animosity towards one another rekindled. By late 1093 Curthose was threatening to end the peace between them, because he was tired of Rufus’s relentless untrustworthiness. Meanwhile Rufus prepared for renewed aggression by bribing some leading Normans to join his cause.

But when hostilities resumed Curthose was able to rely on the support of Philip I of France. Philip laid siege to the key frontier castle of Argentan, thirty-five miles south-east of Caen. He took it in a day, and in the process captured 700 royal knights and 1,400 squires.[7] At the same time Rufus found himself fighting a bitter war from England with the Welsh. He needed Henry’s support now more than ever. Henry of Huntingdon noted how Rufus ‘sent his brother Henry to Normandy with a great deal of money, to attack it on his behalf with daily raids’.[8]

From 1095 Henry and Rufus were as one against Curthose, and in the process Henry’s star rose. From political and territorial irrelevance four years earlier, he had now achieved a firmer grip than ever on the Cotentin: Rufus had been forced to confirm him in his authority there as part of the price of his crucial support. In return Henry brought his military ability and energy to bear against Curthose. While leaving the fighting in Normandy to Henry, Rufus tackled his enemies in Britain. After much ravaging of the western counties of England, he led an expedition into Wales at the end of 1094.

Curthose also found himself under considerable pressure, since his inheritance lay in total disarray: ‘For at that time there was exceptional unrest among the magnates of Normandy and a great stirring of evil throughout the land,’ remembered Orderic Vitalis. ‘The law of the strong was to rob and ravage. The whole country was devastated by fire and plunder, which drove many of the inhabitants into exile and left whole parishes destroyed and churches abandoned as the priests fled.’[9]

Given the pitiful state of the Church in Normandy at the time, it was ironically the papacy that seemed suddenly to offer Curthose an exit from the chaos.

At the Council of Clermont, held in November 1095, Pope Urban II summoned an impressive gathering of prelates and aristocrats. He had recently received urgent requests from the emperor of Byzantium, the head of the Christian faith in the East, for mercenaries to help fight the Turks. Urban took the opportunity to ramp things up to an altogether greater level. He announced a great Christian undertaking, to retake Palestine and drive out Islamic people from the Holy Land.

Fulcher of Chartres is considered the most accurate of the chroniclers present at Clermont. He recorded Urban as saying: ‘I, or rather the Lord, beseech you as Christ’s heralds to publish this everywhere, and to persuade all people of whatever rank – foot-soldiers and knights, poor and rich – to carry aid promptly to the Christians [in the East] and to destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends. I say this to those who are present, and to those who are absent. Moreover, Christ commands it.’[10]

One of Pope Urban’s many reasons for calling Christians to arms, against an enemy whose threat he hugely exaggerated, was a wish to bring about greater peace in western Europe. He had already tried to initiate the concept of the ‘Peace of God’, to protect non-combatants from the rolling bloodshed of endless wars, and he had brought in the ‘Truce of God’, marking out fixed days in the year when no fighting was allowed.

Pope Urban insisted that private wars cease during the life of the Crusade, exhorting ‘Let those who have been fighting against their brothers and relatives now fight in a proper way against the barbarians.’[11] This looked attractive to the hard-pressed Curthose, who was buckling under the pressure of fighting against his brothers and their supporters in Normandy.

The pope also guaranteed that all those pilgrims who answered his call would not only be assured of a place in heaven, they would have their possessions protected while they were serving God far away from home. Curthose could remove himself from the disgrace brought about by his being ‘a weak duke … sunk in sloth and voluptuousness … who feared the vassals in his own duchy more than they feared him’,[12] and garner some much-needed prestige as one of the leaders of an enterprise that was divinely blessed, and hugely popular.

Curthose arrived in England in the spring of 1096 to make peace with Rufus and to ask the king to fund his role in the Crusade. The brothers agreed that, in return for three years’ control of the dukedom of Normandy, Curthose would be paid ten thousand marks of silver. Rufus raised some of the enormous sum needed for this most Christian of endeavours by plundering his churches of many of the gold, silver and bejewelled treasures given them by previous generations of kings and aristocrats. That September the king accompanied the money raised in this way to Normandy, and Curthose set off on the Crusade soon afterwards.

Having gained control of his family’s ancestral lands at such expense, Rufus set about making good his investment. He realised he could best achieve this by placing strong and loyal lieutenants throughout Normandy to bring it back under control. The king had pressing requirements in Britain and, according to John of Worcester, after Easter 1097 he ‘set out a second time for Wales with an army of horse and foot with the intention of killing all the male population’.[13] Unable to direct operations in Normandy, Rufus gave the military governorships of Coutances and Bayeux to Henry. These lay, respectively, at the western and eastern bases of the Cotentin which Henry already controlled, and so considerably increased his hold over the western part of the dukedom.

In the campaigns of 1097 and 1098, Henry proved one of his brother Rufus’s leading commanders in Normandy, fighting to gain control of the French Vexin and to regain control of Maine, which had been occupied by Fulk IV, Count of Anjou. The retrieval of Maine held great importance for Rufus because of the county’s long associations with his family. It had been given to his ancestor Rollo, Duke of Normandy, in 924, by the king of France. Normandy, to the north, and Anjou, to the south, had played a game of tug-of-war with it ever since. William the Conqueror’s brutal invasion of 1063 had succeeded in quietening down Maine for a while, reassuring him of safety on that troublesome flank when he set off for England. But the Normans had been overthrown in a rebellion in 1070, and Maine remained unsettled for the rest of the Conqueror’s reign.

With Curthose absent on Crusade, it was Rufus’s turn to fight for Maine. This he did vigorously, forcing Fulk IV to hand back Le Mans and all the castles that had belonged to Normandy during the Conqueror’s pomp. But Le Mans flared up again the following year, provoking the king to cross the Channel at astonishing speed and once again drive out the rebels from the city.

These were times of widespread and brutal warfare for Rufus across many fronts, Orderic Vitalis noting how, in the autumn of 1098, his forces ‘advanced rapidly into France as far as Pontoise [twenty miles north-west of Paris], burning, plundering, taking captives, and so destroyed all the wealth of that fair province’.[14]

Meanwhile Rufus had to cope with other dangers back in England, including the continuing possibility of invasion from across the North Sea. His father, William, had had to contend with various Viking threats, including a planned invasion by Cnut the Holy of Denmark, in 1085. The Scandinavian menace remained in Rufus’s reign, even if the protagonists had changed. After becoming king of all Norway in 1095, the aggressive Magnus Barefoot took control of a string of islands around the north and west of Scotland, moving on to the Isle of Man, then the Welsh coast, before landing on the island of Anglesey.

However, the chroniclers of England recorded how, for many of Rufus’s subjects, the great fear was not of invasion, but of a visit from the lawless royal household. The king let his men do as they wished, without punishment or restraint. Once it was known that they were approaching, people would flee with their families into the woods, abandoning homes and possessions rather than risk their personal safety. ‘When they could not consume all the provisions that they found in the homes that they had invaded,’ the contemporary historian and churchman Eadmer of Canterbury wrote, ‘many of them, intoxicated by their own wickedness, made the inhabitants take the remaining provisions to market and sell them for the benefit of the invaders; or else they set fire to the goods and burned them up; or if it was drink, they washed their horses’ feet with it and poured the rest on the ground … It is shocking to contemplate the cruelties they inflicted on the fathers of families, the indecencies on their wives and daughters.’[15] Henry of Huntingdon also wrote of how ‘the King’s friends robbed and subverted everything, even going unpunished when they committed rape’.[16] They were, he concluded, guilty of ‘unspeakable debauchery’.[17]

Orderic Vitalis portrays Rufus as the debaucher-in-chief: ‘He was generous to knights and foreigners, but greatly oppressed the poor inhabitants of his kingdom and took from them by force the wealth that he lavished on strangers.[18] Orderic was appalled by the identity of some of these royal hangers-on, calling them ‘effeminati’ – homosexual men who flaunted their ostentatious clothing and what the monk saw as their blatant immorality. ‘He never had a lawful wife,’ Orderic noted of Rufus, ‘but gave himself up insatiably to obscene fornications and repeated adulteries. Stained with sins, he set a culpable example of shameful debauchery to his subjects.’[19] It has never been established for sure if Rufus was homosexual. He had no wife, and there are no records of mistresses or illegitimate children. The consensus among his modern biographers seems to be that he was probably bisexual, and that he enjoyed frequent sex with an ever-changing cast of lovers of both genders.

It is unsurprising that so many of the chroniclers of the time wrote so scathingly of Rufus, for they were churchmen, and the Church suffered terribly during his reign. The income from the estates of the archbishoprics, bishoprics and abbeys of England was vast – Domesday Book had estimated that churches and monasteries held a quarter of the land value of the kingdom, in 1086 – and Rufus found it irresistible. He chose to leave senior ecclesiastical offices vacant so the revenue would fall to him. He even left the see of Canterbury unfilled, after the death of the Conqueror’s last archbishop, Lanfranc, in May 1089. At Christmas 1092 Rufus announced his intention to keep the see empty for the rest of his life.

Three months later, while staying at a royal hunting lodge in Alveston, in Gloucestershire, Rufus was struck by a life-threatening bowel condition. He was rushed to Gloucester, twenty-five miles away, so he could be treated by the monks there. Attending the king’s sickbed in Gloucester Castle, they persuaded Rufus that his affliction was divine punishment for his sins. ‘Thinking that he would die soon,’ wrote John of Worcester, ‘he vowed before God, following his barons’ counsel, to reform his way of life, never again to sell or tax churches, but to guard them with royal power, to annul unjust laws, and establish just ones.’[20]

But still Rufus remained critically unwell. His confession was taken by Anselm of Bec, a sixty-year-old Italian who was one of the most respected churchmen in Europe. When the sickness reached its most dangerous point Anselm administered the last rites to the king. Contemplating how to appease the God who he feared he was about to encounter, Rufus told Anselm he wanted him to become the new archbishop of Canterbury.

Problems quickly arose when William Rufus began to get better. Anselm seemed reluctant to take the position, citing his age and his poor health as barriers. Perhaps he was concerned about the demands of high ecclesiastical office, for Anselm was at heart a man of contemplation. Coming from the quiet of the Aosta Valley, in the modern-day Italian Alps, he had seriously considered life as a hermit, and a yearning for tranquillity was in his soul. His Christianity was earnest, but without personal ambition. It centred around a belief that he had answered God’s calling to serve Him. In turn it was his duty to persuade others to live as good Christians, so they could earn the reward of joy in the next life. He said he was keener to remain in Bec than to move to England.

Anselm eventually yielded to Rufus’s wishes, and agreed to become archbishop provided the king honour three stipulations. First, Rufus was required to recognise Urban II as the true pope, rather than contemplate supporting his rival, Antipope Clement III. Next, Rufus had to commit to returning all Church lands that he had wrongly taken for himself. The third point was more personal: the king must agree to receive his spiritual counselling from Anselm. The king reluctantly agreed, and Archbishop Anselm was enthroned at Canterbury in September 1093.

It was a relationship forged in a moment of panic. As Henry of Huntingdon wrote, Rufus had ‘promised to amend evil laws and to establish peace in the house of the Lord’, when in fear of his life. ‘But as soon as he recovered, he went back on this, and behaved worse than ever.’[21]

In 1094, with Rufus preparing to cross the Channel to fight Curthose once more, Anselm offered to bless the English fleet. The archbishop’s chronicler, Eadmer, recorded Rufus’s thoughts on the matter: ‘As to his blessings and prayers, I utterly abominate them and spew them from me!’[22] When Rufus’s campaign that year went less well than its predecessors, Eadmer was unsurprised.