The White Ship

After further arguments – over Anselm’s wish to travel to Rome to receive the symbol of his office from the pope, over doctrine, over the archbishop supposedly sending too few knights when the king raised an army against the Welsh – the relationship between Anselm and William Rufus disintegrated.

The king insisted the elderly archbishop submit to his authority, and not to the pope’s, or receive perpetual banishment. In 1097, Anselm chose exile. William Rufus allowed him to go but, in a fit of petulance, forbade him from making any part of his journey through Normandy, even subjecting Anselm to a final indignity before he sailed: the king’s men unpacked his bags on Dover beach, searching for supposed secret correspondence. There was none. Anselm set sail for Boulogne, and travelled on to Rome, remaining in exile for the remainder of Rufus’s reign.

Henry of Huntingdon summed up all that was wrong in the land, when Anselm departed: ‘Then Archbishop Anselm left England because the evil king would permit nothing right to be done in his kingdom. He harassed the shires through taxes which never ceased: for the building of the wall round the Tower of London, for the building of the royal hall at Westminster, and to satisfy the rapacious and aggressive habits of his household wherever they went.’[23]

William Rufus bequeathed to his successors a building that was, most likely, the largest in Europe. ‘He began and completed one very noble edifice,’ William of Malmesbury noted, ‘sparing no expense to manifest the greatness of his liberality.’[24] Westminster Hall was constructed a mile and a half to the west of London’s city walls, between 1097 and 1099. The king wanted to impress his subjects with the scope and majesty of this architectural masterpiece, and placed at the palace’s core his marble throne. When he summoned the first royal court to attend him there, in May 1099, his brother Henry was among those present.

Henry was viewed by many of the grander courtiers there as something of an eccentric adjunct to the earthy, irrepressible king. Few can have imagined how the following year would conclude for the Conqueror’s overlooked and underestimated youngest son.

FOUR

Opportunity

They went into the New Forest, intending to hunt stags and hinds; they set up their watch throughout the forest, but departed in great sadness. For the king, the knights and those who were his archers took up their positions and stretched their bows just as they saw the hinds coming.

Robert Wace, Jersey-born poet and historian (c.1110–c.1174)

William the Conqueror’s passion for hunting knew no bounds, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle noting that he:

… preserved the harts and boars

And loved the stags as much

As if he were their father.[1]

This obsession led to ruthless punishment for poachers who dared to interfere with his royal prey: ‘If anyone caught a stag or a boar, [William] put out his eyes, and no one murmured,’ recalled Henry of Huntingdon.

Not content with all the land available to him, which had produced ample hunting country for previous monarchs, William took advantage of his conquest of a new land to expand the territory devoted to his gratification. He eventually treated a fifth of England as park and forest where he and his companions could enjoy their sport. There was no law in these lands: they fell under the king’s pleasure, and so did their regulation.

The Conqueror carved out a huge, fresh area in the south for quarry to breed in without interference. ‘He loved the beasts of the chase,’ wrote Henry of Huntingdon. ‘On account of this, in the woodlands reserved for hunting, which are called the “New Forest”, he had villages rooted out and people removed, and made it a habitation for wild beasts.’[2] Two thousand inhabitants of thirty villages were turfed out of their homes so as not to infringe on the king’s hunting habitat, and the forest was expanded by twenty thousand acres. Some suggested the sacrilegious removal of so many religious sites, at the heart of the cleared communities, would surely result in divine retribution against the king.

William passed on his infatuation for hunting to his sons. This was to be at huge cost to them. We have seen how the Conqueror’s second son, Richard, died of injuries sustained while out in the New Forest, crushed between a branch and the pommel on his saddle.

In early May 1100 Richard, one of Robert Curthose’s illegitimate sons, also died in an accident in the field. A knight in the hunting party missed a deer with his arrow but struck the youth, killing him outright. His shocking loss caused consternation because, as Orderic Vitalis wrote, ‘Many had prophesied a lofty destiny for him.’[3] The guilty knight fled to the Priory of St Pancras, in Lewes, Sussex. He showed penance for causing the death, and in becoming a monk he avoided any penalty for his wayward shot.

A few weeks later the royal pursuit claimed its most celebrated victim.

On 1 August Fulchred, abbot of Shrewsbury, gave a fiery sermon condemning the disarray that had beset England under Rufus’s rule. The abbot referred to ‘the leprosy of villainy’, ‘unrestrained lust’ and ‘the sickness of evil’ that stalked the land. But, he told his congregation, he believed deliverance to be imminent.

‘Not much longer will effeminates govern,’ he was said to have warned. ‘Behold, the bow of divine anger is bent against the wicked, and the arrow swift to wound is taken from the quiver. It will strike suddenly; let every wise man avoid the blow by amending his life.’[4]

That same night, William of Malmesbury wrote, Rufus had a nightmare. In it he allowed his surgeon to let his blood, but the procedure took on a terrifying tone when the king began to see the blood form a steam that ‘clouded the light, and intercepted the day’.[5] Rufus awoke with a start and called out to the Virgin Mary for protection. He ordered servants to stay with him in his room for the remainder of the night.

The next day – a Thursday – the royal hunting party started out later than usual, reports soon afterwards claiming the hard-living William Rufus was suffering not only from the fright of the nightmare, but also from a hangover that had slowed the start of his day. The king was eating with his companions, which included his brother Henry, when a blacksmith came forward with six arrows for the day’s sport. Rufus is said to have kept four of these for himself while passing the other two to a French knight, Walter Tirel, with the words: ‘It is only right that the sharpest arrows should be given to the man who knows how to shoot the deadliest shots.’[6]

Before setting out Rufus was allegedly handed a letter from Abbot Serlo of Gloucester, in which he warned the king about dreams that had been troubling his monks at night. Their message seemed clear: the king was soon to be punished by God for his constant abuse of the Church. Rufus laughed off Serlo’s letter, then mounted his horse and steered it into the New Forest with huntsmen and companions falling in around him.

The details of what happened later that afternoon are not clear. Perhaps Walter Tirel fired the fateful arrow, though he swore even on his deathbed that he did not. But his name was quickly attached to the disaster, even after he insisted he was in another part of the forest when it occurred. ‘Many people say he stumbled, got caught up in his cloak and diverted the arrow,’ wrote Wace.[7]

Perhaps an arrow ricocheted off a stag or a tree. Certainly, though, William Rufus was struck by an arrow, flush in the chest. He instinctively snapped off its shaft in his hands, then fell to the ground, first onto buckled knees, before toppling forward without uttering a word. This impact drove the arrow deeper into him, killing him at once. ‘A little earlier [that day],’ Henry of Huntingdon reported, ‘blood had been seen to bubble up from the ground in Berkshire.’[8] The sudden death of a king was such a catastrophic event that, in the medieval mind, it demanded a supernatural omen as its herald.

Henry’s part in the day that changed his life for ever started with a humdrum piece of bad luck. On drawing back his bow, he had snapped its string. ‘Henry took the bow in his hand and rode quickly to a peasant’s lodgings in order to get twine or thread to mend his bowstring,’ wrote Wace. ‘While he was delayed over the mending of his bow, an old lady in the dwelling asked a youth who it was who was holding the bow and wanted to go hunting.’[9] When told it was Henry, she prophesied that he would soon be king.

Henry had returned to his brother and his companions by the time the lethal arrow struck. Stunned by what had occurred, the hunting party soon scattered. The period between the death of one king and the coronation of the next was a time of unique insecurity in the land, a vacant throne easily leading to a lawless state. Some of Rufus’s lords rushed from his side to secure their possessions. Others took advantage of the temporary vacuum in royal power, hoping to seize what they could while they could.

As shown by the disrespectful way in which William the Conqueror’s corpse was treated, death for a king took him from the peak of human power to the depths of undignified irrelevance at a stroke. William Rufus’s servants threw a cloak over him and escorted his body from the hunting field, slung over a horse ‘like a wild boar stuck with spears’, before placing it in a cart.[10] The humble funeral wagon trundled through the forest towards Winchester, where Rufus was buried ‘on the day after his perdition’.[11]

Henry and his attendants rode the same path to Winchester, but they were charging ahead, determined to reach the city before news of the royal tragedy got out. Winchester, the second city of England, was the home of the royal treasury, and Winchester Castle had been the repository of Norman kingly power since the year after the Conquest. Whoever controlled Winchester had one hand on the crown.

When Henry arrived, he revealed the death of his brother to incredulous ears. He stated his intention of taking the throne. William de Breteuil, an important nobleman who had ridden with him from the spot where Rufus was slain, was the only man who tried to block Henry’s entry into the treasury. De Breteuil, a religious man, felt compelled to remind the prince that both of them, along with the majority of Anglo-Norman barons, had sworn homage to Robert Curthose. Also, he pointed out, Curthose was even then on his way back from the Crusade, where he had fought valiantly for God: this was a further reason, de Breteuil claimed, for submitting to him as the rightful king.

Henry drew his sword and brushed de Breteuil aside. The royal coffers were his and, the following day, Henry was declared king by the barons in Winchester. The last thing they wanted was a delay for, as Wace wrote, ‘It is necessary for a kingdom to have a king, for it cannot exist without a king.’[12] The barons hoped the swift installation of Henry on the throne would bring about immediate peace and order.

Henry set off for London to be crowned in Westminster Abbey, in a ceremony combining mysticism and symbolism. Coronation was believed to confer on him the status not only of England’s leader, but also that of God’s representative on earth. It would make it extremely difficult for another – even his eldest brother – to challenge his right to rule. This transition, from minor princeling to anointed king of the English, was to be achieved within seventy-two hours of William Rufus’s death.

So great was the hurry that there was no time to summon the archbishop of Canterbury from exile in Burgundy, or the archbishop of York from Yorkshire. Henry was crowned by Maurice, Bishop of London, a former archdeacon of Le Mans who had been chancellor of England to William the Conqueror in the later years of his reign. The new king was, from the start, eager to connect his rule to that of his late father.

Henry obeyed the traditions of English royal succession by making promises to the country that had submitted to him. His ‘Coronation Charter’ was a compact with his subjects that he ordered to be read out at each of England’s county courts. It consisted of fourteen clauses, the thrust of which was to ‘establish a firm peace in all my kingdom’, to stamp out wrongdoing and to commit to the upholding of his predecessors’ laws. As the chronicler and statesman Abbot Suger noted approvingly from France: ‘He gladly restored order to the kingdom of England according to the law of kings of old. And to win the goodwill of his people, he confirmed by oath the ancient custom of the realm.’[13]

Eager for their support, the new king reassured his aristocrats that he would not exploit them as his late brother had done when their families were at their most vulnerable. Someone from a medieval landowning family had a life expectancy of a little over thirty years from birth. This rose to forty-five if they successfully ran the gauntlet of childhood diseases and reached the age of twenty-one. In an era of such short lives, when warfare, illness or perhaps hunting accidents could suddenly carry away even the most powerful, these were guarantees that the aristocracy craved, and felt comforted by.

Henry promised that, when an heir succeeded his father, he would no longer have to pay an exorbitant fee to the crown. Also, when the king stood as the guardian of an heiress, she would not be married off for royal gain. Instead, he promised: ‘When one of my barons or other men die leaving a daughter as heir, I will not give her in marriage except according to the advice of my barons.’[14] Equally, a lord’s widow would no longer be forced to take as her new husband a man chosen by the king.

Henry wanted to reconnect with the firm rule of his father, the Conqueror, who, remembered Henry of Huntingdon with a nostalgia so misty-eyed that it blurred into fantasy, ‘had created such a complete peace that a young girl, laden with gold, could travel unharmed through the kingdom of England’.[15] Henry promised to reassert similar peace in the land. He wanted quickly to set out his stall as a monarch who took the duties of kingship extremely seriously. Henry knew that Curthose would never accept being passed over as the ruler of England for a second time. He would surely soon challenge hard for the crown, so Henry needed to present a brand of kingship to his lords that would stand in contrast to Curthose’s dangerous incompetence in Normandy and Rufus’s past failures in England.

Henry of Huntingdon noted: ‘William was rightly cut off in the midst of his injustice. For in himself, and because of the counsels of wicked men, whom he invariably chose, he was more evil to his people than any man, and most evil to himself; he harassed his neighbours with wars, and his own men with frequent armies and continued gelds. England was miserably stifled and could not breathe.’[16]

Henry was determined to show that, now he was king, nobody would be above the law. He took immediate aim at Ranulf Flambard,[fn1] a son of a priest in Bayeux. Flambard had served as one of the compilers of Domesday Book, before rising to become the senior figure in Rufus’s corrupt rule. He was William Rufus’s chaplain, his leading administrator and (for a time) the main legal figure in the kingdom.

The all-powerful Flambard had pleased his royal master by extracting huge sums from rich and poor alike. Henry of Huntingdon wrote how Rufus’s rule was a time of ‘not shaving but skinning the English people with taxation and the worst exactions’.[17] Flambard had also seized wealth from the Church, and as a reward for his loyal service, Rufus had given him the wealthy bishopric of Durham. Now, in a clear indication that things had changed under the new king, the hated bishop, the embodiment of Rufus’s degenerate rule, was imprisoned for corruption in the Tower of London.

Henry, eager to secure Anselm’s backing for his kingship before he could support Curthose’s claim, urged the exiled archbishop to return from Lyons and resume his mission in England. Henry promised to right the wrongs of his late brother’s rule and renounced the ‘evil customs’ by which Rufus had helped himself to the wealth of the Church. Henry also promised to submit to the archbishop’s counsel. Crucially, though, nothing else was agreed between the king and the prelate.

When Anselm arrived back in England, he found himself in a more contrary position to royal power than he had been when he had entered exile. Urban II, instigator of the First Crusade, had issued a papal decree a few months before his death in 1099. In it he determined that any layman who oversaw the investiture of a churchman, or any churchman who accepted investiture from a layman, must be excommunicated. It was the formalisation of the thoughts that Urban had stated a few years earlier: ‘No priest shall perform homage to a layman, because it is unseemly that hands consecrated for God and hallowed by holy anointing should be placed between unconsecrated hands, which may belong to a murderer, or an adulterer, or one guilty of some other heinous sins.’[18]

During his time in exile Anselm had attended the papal councils of Bari and of Rome as an honoured guest, and he had fully absorbed Urban II’s message as it crystallised into dogma. On his return to England Anselm found himself awkwardly placed between a papacy keen to establish the Church’s independence from lay interference and a monarch who was very clear indeed about his rights. ‘Your holiness should be aware that as long as I live,’ Henry wrote to Urban’s successor, Pope Paschal II, ‘with God’s help, the privileges and uses of the kingdom of England shall not be diminished.’[19] It set the stage for an investiture contest in England along the lines of the one that had pitted pope against emperor for a generation.

But Henry had pressing needs at the outset of his reign which put off the moment when either side would confront such thorny issues. One of Henry’s prime duties, as king, was to produce a male heir. Another was to keep peace in his lands. The two obligations were interconnected: there could be no greater danger to harmony than a disputed succession, and no better guarantor of peace than an acknowledged ruler-in-waiting.

Henry had, by this stage, sired a dozen children out of wedlock. For his Norman ancestors, there would have been no barrier to a natural son succeeding his father. But the increasing influence of the Church in England and Normandy since the mid eleventh century had brought a renewed emphasis on the sanctity of marriage. William the Conqueror would be the last illegitimate ruler in Rollo’s direct line. Henry’s most urgent duty as the new king was to marry, before producing a legitimate male heir as quickly as he could.

Orderic Vitalis tried to put a heroic spin on Henry’s now opting for matrimony after a particularly hectic bachelorhood, saying the king’s decision stemmed from his ‘not wishing to wallow in lasciviousness like any horse or mule, which is without reason’. But Henry would, in time, father many more illegitimate offspring. He was marrying not because he had suddenly been swayed by the lure of sanctified monogamy, but because he had to establish his dynasty.

Henry chose as his bride a princess of Scotland. Born in 1080 in Dunfermline, she was one of two daughters (there were also six sons) of King Malcolm III of Scotland, who was known as Malcolm ‘Canmore’ – an anglicisation of the Gaelic for ‘Great Chief’. She had been baptised ‘Edith’ at a service where her godparents were Henry’s eldest brother, Robert Curthose, and their mother, Matilda of Flanders. But Edith would be known as ‘Matilda’ – a particularly popular name in royal circles at the time – when she was Henry’s queen.

Malcolm’s militarily incompetent father, King Duncan, had been killed in battle. His successor Macbeth, the earl of Moray, had ruled as king for seventeen years, with a wisdom and touch far removed from Shakespeare’s dark, fictionalised, neurotic. The real-life Macbeth was a devout Christian who attended a papal jubilee in Rome in 1050. Undertaking such an ambitious expedition showed great confidence in the security of his rule back home. He took significant wealth with him to Rome, impressing onlookers with the amount of alms he doled out to the poor. As king, Macbeth insisted on enlightened measures, such as the legal defence of widows and orphans. He governed with a firm hand that ensured order, and he led successful forays over the border into England. His strength of purpose and his vision helped to bring prosperity to his people.

But Malcolm Canmore successfully lobbied the papacy and the English to support him in his bid to become king. After three years of defensive fighting against Malcolm and his English allies, Macbeth was toppled at the Battle of Lumphanan, in north-east Scotland. With defeat certain, Macbeth made a last stand, before being overwhelmed. Near the battlefield is a rock, where Macbeth is said to have been dragged for beheading.

Malcolm Canmore would reign for thirty-five years, before the cycle of violence in Scotland eventually caught up with him. In 1091 he had submitted to William Rufus (just as he had to the Conqueror, in 1072). Two years later he advanced into England to ask why the conditions of his submission had not been honoured by the English king. Malcolm and his son Edward were returning north, still dismayed at Rufus’s deceit, when they were caught in an ambush at Alnwick, in Northumbria, and killed.

But, Malcolm’s lineage aside, it was Matilda’s mother, Margaret, who made her such an enticing match for Henry. Margaret was from the English, West Saxon, royal family that descended through Alfred the Great, all the way back to Cerdic, the sixth-century king of Wessex. Margaret’s great-uncle was Edward the Confessor, while her grandfather had been Edmund Ironside, king of England in 1016 until defeat by Cnut cost him half his territory, then – when accosted by an assassin while on his privy – his life.

Margaret’s father was Edward the Exile, so called because he was driven out of England after Edmund Ironside’s subsequent murder left the entire kingdom in Cnut’s hands. Edward was only a few months old when forced to leave. Margaret’s brother, Edgar Ætheling, was the teenager who had been proclaimed king by the English Witan after the death of Harold at Hastings. His hopes had come to nothing, though, when William the Conqueror was instead crowned at the end of 1066.

Margaret had been born in Hungary in 1045 during her family’s years in exile. She married Malcolm Canmore after her family was shipwrecked on the Scottish coast. The queen was respected for her deep personal piety, sustained in part by her gold-lettered copies of the Gospels. William of Malmesbury noted that Margaret would hear Matins three times a day during Lent, and he claimed that she could recite many of the Psalms from memory. She fasted frequently, gave alms to the poor, championed the protection of orphans and insisted that prisoners be treated humanely. Such Christian devotion would see her canonised two centuries later.

Margaret became gravely ill in November 1093, on hearing of the slaying of her husband and their son Edward. ‘Immediately summoning priests,’ recorded John of Worcester, ‘she went into church, confessed her sins to them, and caused herself to be anointed with oil, and to be strengthened by the holy viaticum.’[20] Then, broken-hearted, she died.

By the age of thirteen, Matilda had therefore been both an orphan and an exile. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle noted that Henry’s bride was ‘of the true royal family of England’.[21] The prospect of her marrying the king reminded people of the famous deathbed vision of Edward the Confessor. In it he had been warned by two ethereal figures that his kingdom would face great trials in the years ahead. England would only be healed, they said, ‘when a green tree, if cut down in the middle of its trunk, and the part cut off carried the space of three furlongs from the stock, shall be joined again to the trunk, by itself and without the hand of man or any sort of stake, and begin once more to push leaves and bear fruit from the old love of its uniting sap’.