COPYRIGHT

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © Claudia Gold 2018

Maps and family trees by Martin Brown

Cover design by Jack Smyth

Claudia Gold asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007554805

Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780007554799

Version: 2019-01-11

DEDICATION

For Phil, Asher and Jake

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Maps

Family Trees

Cast of Characters

Prologue

Act I – The Bargain

Act II – Triumph

Act III – Pariah

Act IV – Rebellion

Act V – Nemesis

Epilogue

Timeline

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Picture Section

Index

Also by Claudia Gold

About the Author

About the Publisher

MAPS

FAMILY TREES

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Henry FitzEmpress: King Henry II of England, eldest son of Geoffrey of Anjou and Matilda of England.

Family

Henry I: Henry’s maternal grandfather; king of England and duke of Normandy.

Matilda: Henry’s mother; the widowed empress of Germany, married by her father to her second husband, Geoffrey count of Anjou.

Geoffrey of Anjou: Henry’s father; husband of the much older Matilda. From the age of fourteen, Count of Anjou, a principality in northern France.

Geoffrey FitzEmpress: Henry’s younger brother, who rebels against Henry as soon as he is able.

William FitzEmpress: Henry’s youngest brother; he remains staunchly loyal.

Fulk of Anjou: Henry’s paternal grandfather; leaves Anjou to marry Queen Melisende of Jerusalem. Through this second marriage, becomes king of the Latin Kingdom.

Eleanor of Aquitaine: Henry’s wife, previously married to Louis VII of France; duchess of Aquitaine, the largest and wealthiest province in France, in her own right. She is about eleven years older than Henry.

William of Poitiers: Henry and Eleanor’s eldest son, who dies aged three.

Henri the Young King: Henry and Eleanor’s second son; charming, frivolous, the family ‘golden boy’. Crowned alongside his father in 1170, but given no authority.

Richard: Henry and Eleanor’s third son, destined to rule in Aquitaine.

Geoffrey: Henry and Eleanor’s fourth son; duke of Brittany.

John: Henry and Eleanor’s fifth son and last child, later known as ‘Lackland’; Henry’s favourite legitimate son.

Matilda of Saxony: Henry and Eleanor’s eldest daughter; married to Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony. Her beauty inspires the troubadour poet Bertran de Born to write scandalous verse about her.

Young Eleanor: Henry and Eleanor’s second daughter; married to Alfonso VIII of Castile.

Joanna: Henry and Eleanor’s youngest daughter; married to King William ‘the good’ of Sicily. Later, she is touted as a possible bride for Saladin’s younger brother.

Robert, earl of Gloucester: Eldest illegitimate son of Henry I, one of the greatest magnates in England, and Henry’s uncle. Robert fought for Henry’s rights to rule alongside his half-sister, Matilda.

Reginald, earl of Cornwall: Another illegitimate son of Henry I. Unwavering in his support for his nephew.

Geoffrey Plantagenet: Henry’s eldest illegitimate son; probably his favourite and best-liked child.

Matilda, prioress of Barking Abbey: Henry’s illegitimate daughter, born before his marriage to Eleanor.

William Longsword, earl of Salisbury: Another of Henry’s illegitimate children, born in the 1160s.

Morgan, provost of Beverly, and bishop-elect of Durham: Possibly Henry’s youngest illegitimate child, born in the mid-1170s.

Baldwin, ‘the leper king’: Henry’s first cousin, king of Jerusalem. He rules a kingdom riven with byzantine factionalism.

Marie: Eleanor’s eldest daughter by Louis, married to the count of Champagne.

Alix: Eleanor’s second daughter by Louis. She is married to the count of Blois.

Margaret of France: Louis’ eldest daughter by his second wife, Constance of Castile. Margaret is married to Henri, Henry and Eleanor’s eldest surviving son.

Alice of France: Margaret’s sister; betrothed to Henry’s son, Richard. Possibly Henry’s mistress.

Friends

Adelard of Bath: One of Henry’s four teachers, he brought knowledge of Arabic mathematics to England.

William of Conches: Another of Henry’s teachers, and one of Europe’s most celebrated scholars.

William Marshal: ‘The greatest knight in the world’, who served Henry and his family for over fifty years.

Rosamund Clifford: Henry’s favourite mistress, ‘the love of his life’.

Richard de Lucy: Henry’s co-justiciar and one of his great magnates.

Robert, earl of Leicester: Henry’s other co-justiciar; an enormously powerful nobleman.

Ranulf de Glanville: Justiciar in the latter part of Henry’s reign; possible author of On the Laws and Customs of England, which details the reforms under Henry’s reign that would become the foundations of English Common Law.

Richard FitzNigel: Henry’s treasurer and author of the influential Dialogue Concerning the Exchequer.

Brian Fitz Count: Illegitimate son of the duke of Normandy, and one of Matilda’s closest allies. They were possibly lovers.

Foes

King Stephen: Matilda’s first cousin and mortal enemy. He stole the throne from her.

Matilda of Boulogne: Stephen’s queen, a warrior for his cause.

Eustace: Stephen’s eldest son and heir, who tries to murder Henry.

William: Stephen’s second son; plots to murder Henry, although in secret.

Louis VII of France: Eleanor’s first husband and Henry’s overlord for his lands in France.

Bernard of Clairvaux: King Louis’ closest advisor. Loathes Henry and his Angevin family, believing them to be descended from the Devil.

Thomas Becket: Henry’s chancellor, and then archbishop of Canterbury.

Philip of France: A machiavellian boy-king, and Henry’s nemesis.

Fairweathers

Philip, count of Flanders: Henry’s first cousin, oscillates between fighting Henry and being his ally.

Bishop Henry of Blois: Henry’s cousin, the bishop of Winchester; notorious for changing sides during the civil war, Henry never quite trusts him.

Count Raymond V of Toulouse: Henry’s slippery adversary in the south, he vacillates in pledging his allegiance to Louis, and to Henry. Nevertheless, it is Raymond who warns Henry of impending disaster.

William the Lion: King of Scotland, and Henry’s cousin.

Frederick Barbarossa (Red Beard): The Holy Roman Emperor. Barbarossa’s life mirrors Henry’s in many ways.

Pope Alexander III: Pope during the Becket crisis, but living in France, Alexander is torn between his host Louis, and Henry, who has pledged to support him against an antipope.

Hugh Bigod: One of Henry’s most powerful lords, Hugh virtually controls East Anglia.

Chroniclers

Orderic Vitalis: An Anglo-Norman historian, Benedictine monk and author of the Ecclesiastical History.

Robert of Torigni: The librarian of Bec monastery in Normandy, abbot of Mont Saint-Michel. Henry’s friend and the godfather of young Eleanor.

Roger of Howden: Court clerk, diplomat and itinerant justice, who spent many years in Henry’s company.

William of Newburgh: Historian and Augustinian canon; one of the most balanced writers of Henry’s reign.

Jordan Fantosme: Court clerk, historian, and author of an epic Anglo-Norman poem, chronicling Henry’s war in the 1170s.

William FitzStephen: One of the biographers of Thomas Becket.

Walter Map: Court clerk and author of Courtiers’ Trifles.

Gerald of Wales: A luminous and fanciful writer, who hated Henry in part because he believed he deserved a bishopric, which Henry failed to grant him.

Gervase of Canterbury: Historian, and monk of Canterbury Cathedral.

Ralph Diceto: Dean of St Paul’s, and historian.

Henry of Huntingdon: Historian and author of the Historia Anglorum.

John of Salisbury: One of the greatest writers of his age; a fierce defender of Thomas Becket.

Ralph Niger: A partisan of Thomas Becket; like Gerald of Wales, he detested Henry.

PROLOGUE

They would not let Will leave. The play had finished fifteen minutes earlier. But still 3,000 people roared in delight and begged the players and playwright to remain. They took bow after bow to the din of stamping feet. London’s richest – sat in the luxurious gallery – mixed with its poorest, who had paid a penny to stand. Will had made them believe that ‘this cockpit’ held ‘the vasty fields of France’ and of England too.

It was May 1599. William Shakespeare’s History of Henry II was the first play to be staged at the Globe at its new site on the south bank of the river in Elizabeth I’s capital city; it offered fantasy by candlelight under a ceiling painted as the heavens.

Shakespeare felt that his subject could not be bettered. He had breathed life into the legend of England’s most celebrated king – ‘Good’ King Henry II.

He told of a duke who had battled to become a king, ‘Alexander of the West’ and the finest warrior of his age. Henry had forged and held an enormous empire in twelfth-century Europe. England had not had such a king since the days of Arthur. His court was the most cultured in Europe, attracting writers, poets, scholars and mathematicians from across the known world. The king’s justice was everywhere, for everyone. He was a scholar-king, sportsman, politician and soldier, and his influence stretched as far as the holy city of Jerusalem.

This king had all the talents and all the gifts – until his family turned against him.

At first, there were only the traditional frustrations of royal sons, close to power but denied any of their own. But soon their mother joined the cause. Perfidy was in the air.

Before long, Henry’s sons and wife united with the kings of France and Scotland, and all who bore a grudge against him. Henry was threatened on six fronts: surely an impossible challenge to overcome, even for him.

The audience was enthralled by Henry’s rally to his men as they readied to fight at Dol: ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.’ The Globe, for a suspended moment, was a battlefield in north-western France.

Henry could not lose this encounter; if he did, his enemies would take his kingdom. But his skill and cool head won the day.

The victory at Dol spurred Henry to fight on. He put aside his grief as he battled for two hard years across England and France, moving with almost superhuman speed between the fronts.

By the end he had vanquished them all; and, as a mark of his greatness, he forgave them – even his wife. He gave her what he had promised when he stole her from her first husband, the king of France: real power.

He even forced his fractious archbishop, Thomas Becket, into submission. Henry and Becket had been fighting for ten years. Now Becket limped out of his self-imposed exile back to Canterbury, bitter and broken, worn out by fasts and penances. Henry gave him the kiss of peace.

Shakespeare’s epilogue completed the hero’s life: Henry died the grand old man of Europe, at peace with his wife and his sons, and his empire intact.

The story was brilliant propaganda for Elizabeth, the fairy queen. She was an absolute monarch, just as Henry had been. Shakespeare had not shied from depicting a complex character: Henry sometimes ruled harshly, but he could also be tender. The playwright had shown the audience Henry the king and Henry the man – imperfect to be sure, but remarkable in person and triumphant over adversity.

***

This is, of course, not what happened.

William Shakespeare, the genius propagandist of the Tudor and nascent Stuart dynasties, never wrote about Henry II. Instead he scattered his fairy dust over the Lancastrian faction in England’s War of the Roses, and the ultimate victors: his masters, the Tudors.

When the Globe theatre was moved across the river, the first play to perform there was most likely Henry V. The words I placed in Henry II’s mouth before his battle at Dol, Shakespeare placed in the mouth of Henry V on the morning of the battle of Agincourt on St Crispin’s Day. Agincourt is one of the most famous battles in English history; Dol is known only to a small band of medieval historians and enthusiasts. And today Henry II, the father of the Plantagenet dynasty that ruled England for 330 years, is largely forgotten.*

Henry was trained for power, but he had to fight for all that he gained. By the mid-1170s he was lord of England, Normandy, Brittany, Anjou, Maine, Touraine and Ireland. The princes of Wales and the kings of Scotland owed allegiance to him. He not only won an empire, but held it all. His lands in France were ten times the size of the French king’s.

Besides his conquests, he began a programme of unprecedented reform that set in place the rule of law across England. He was a patron of the arts, a man of letters and he placed England at the very centre of European culture; he was a prince of the twelfth-century renaissance.

By any measure, this is a man who should be celebrated as one of England’s greatest kings. And yet he is not. History might have judged and remembered Henry differently, had (as one of his biographers speculates1) he died in 1182. It is easy to imagine: a pressing matter of diplomacy that required his presence in Normandy, a sea crossing, a violent storm – and the drowning of the king in the English Channel.

Henry did not die in 1182; he lived for another seven years. These were the worst years of his life. They were blighted by his failure to dominate a new French king, Philip Augustus, and renewed fighting with his sons, who would hound him to his death.

Thomas Becket, Henry’s archbishop, did not die in his bed. Henry’s men murdered him in his cathedral church at Canterbury in 1170. The murder was the culmination of six years of bitter quarrels over the precedence of church or state. Just days before, Henry had exploded in anger at Becket’s behaviour. At his Christmas court he shouted, ‘What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and promoted in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born clerk!’ Four loyal knights, believing Henry wanted rid of Becket, sped across the sea from Normandy to Canterbury. As they entered the cathedral fully armed, they shouted ‘King’s men, king’s men’, hacked off the top of Becket’s head and left his body awash with blood on the cathedral floor.

It took years for Henry to recover from the propaganda disaster of Becket’s death, and this may be a reason why Shakespeare never wrote about him – if he had tackled the thorny issue of Thomas Becket, it is doubtful that the play would ever have been performed. The Elizabethan and Stuart authorities did not take kindly to religious themes in plays.

Henry ended his days, not in the warm embrace of a loving family and peaceful empire, but unloved and alone, a broken man. Even his adored youngest son John betrayed him. England’s burning light was reduced to no more than a flicker in the shadows.

Tragic heroes, as Aristotle noted, attract us with their blend of light and shade. Like us, they are neither wholly good nor bad. We empathise with them, in part because the consequences of their mistakes seem to us far more severe than they deserve, echoing Lear’s lament, ‘I am a man more sinned against than sinning.’ We are drawn to them because we see the same frailties and the same capacity to err in judgement that we exhibit ourselves. They hold up a mirror to our own imperfections.

Although we may see fragments of ourselves in them, however, they are ultimately not the same as us. The Aristotelian tragic king plays on a grander stage – and his capacity to do good in the world, or inflict harm on others, is far greater and more wide-reaching as a result.

Henry is in many ways the classic tragic hero. And though an emotionally complex man, the cause of his undoing bears resemblance to that beloved of the Greek dramatists: hubris.

This book tells Henry’s true story, and it is a tragedy. It is the story of a great hero whose life traces an arc from ascent, to glory, to defeat, and who is brought down by a tragic flaw in his own character.

Henry II, who forged an empire that matched Charlemagne’s – the Alexander the Great of the Middle Ages. This most talented of English kings, who became the most haunted.

* ‘Plantagenet’ was not used by Henry and his contemporaries as a family name. Henry referred to himself as ‘FitzEmpress’. It was first used as a surname by Richard duke of York in 1460 when, as ‘Richard Plantagenet’, he claimed the throne from his mentally unstable cousin, Henry VI.

Act I

The Bargain

Henry was eighteen when we met, and I was queen of France. He came down from the North to Paris with a mind like Aristotle’s … and a form like mortal sin. We shattered the Commandments on the spot.

James Goldman, The Lion in Winter, 1966

The playwright James Goldman imagines a first meeting between Henry duke of Normandy and Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen of France, replete with deadly desire and magnetic force. Is there any truth to this imagined encounter?

Whether Eleanor, aged twenty-nine, thought that the eighteen-year-old Henry’s mind resembled that of Aristotle – the apotheosis of mid-twelfth-century intellectual aspiration – and was sufficiently aroused to ‘shatter the Commandments’ there and then, we shall never know.

The chronicler Walter Map’s Eleanor is a seductress, casting her ‘unchaste eyes’ – oculos incestos – upon him. ‘Unchaste’ is the kindest interpretation; the word has underlying meanings of impure, immoral, dirty, or even incestuous. Walter accused Eleanor of not only snaring Henry in Paris, but of sleeping with his father, which would have made her marriage to Henry incestuous.*

In truth, we know very little about Eleanor. We do know that she was clever, powerful and possibly beautiful – a ‘woman without compare’. We also know that Eleanor cared deeply for Aquitaine, the vast lands in the south-west of France that had been bequeathed to her by her father.

Eleanor had brought Louis and the French crown the incredible riches of Aquitaine. And yet married to Louis, she had enjoyed little autonomy. In the few surviving charters, Eleanor rarely acts alone – only jointly with Louis. There was a brief flurry of activity in the period before they departed on crusade, but after their return, when divorce appeared inevitable, Eleanor was further sidelined.

Henry was attractive, clever and bold. He was a soldier, a diplomat, charismatic, educated and ambitious for power; people flocked to him ‘even though they had scrutinised him a thousand times before’. Through his mother Matilda, he held the possibility of inheriting the English throne, if he could only overthrow his usurper cousin King Stephen. Through his father, he was heir to much of northern France. In August 1151, Henry was a man with a glittering future.

Sources do not tell us if the bargain they struck at that first meeting in Paris was at Eleanor’s or Henry’s instigation. Nor do they reveal the precise terms of the bargain, or even whether they were explicit or implicit. But bargain there must have been.

For what if, in return for the advantages he would gain from their marriage, Henry had promised Eleanor something that Louis never had, and never would have, given her: the chance to rule her own duchy as she chose, under the loose auspices of Henry’s domains?

One thing is for sure: a promise of this potency – a promise made to a woman desperate for the independence that power confers – once given, is best kept.

I

Henry’s story began with a drunken party, a dare, and a shipwreck. It was 1120, thirteen years before his birth, and thirty-one years before he met Eleanor. On a bitterly cold day, 25 November, a large party of the Anglo-Norman elite gathered at the town of Barfleur on the coast of northern France. They were led by Henry’s grandfather, King Henry I of England and Duke of Normandy, and his only legitimate son, the seventeen-year-old William Atheling. The royal pair were on their way back to England from war with Louis VI (the Fat) of France and King Henry’s nephew, William Clito, for control of Normandy. They were in exuberant spirits because they had won.

The party was to sail that night and conditions were perfect. The sky was cloudless, the sea was calm, the moon was in its first quarter but the stars were brilliant.

Prince and king were to travel separately. King Henry had been approached by the owner of a handsome new white ship. His name was Thomas FitzStephen and, during a conversation with the king, Thomas reminded him that it was his father who had carried Henry I’s own father, William the Bastard (or Conqueror), from France to England and conquest in 1066. Now he asked for the honour of taking Prince William Atheling across the Channel in his new ship.

William was impressed. The ship was modern and fast, and he was convinced it would outrun his father’s older and heavier vessel, the Esnecca (the snake, or fast warship).

The ship’s fifty oarsmen were delighted to carry William; the young prince, at their request, ordered the entirety of the town’s wine to be loaded on board.1

Throughout the long winter evening, the 300 or so travellers embarked. They numbered William’s bastard half-siblings Richard, and Matilda countess of Perche, most of his aristocratic friends, and many of their parents. William was in a celebratory mood. Not only had he defeated his enemies; just five months before arriving at Barfleur, he had married Matilda of Anjou at Lisieux to form an alliance with Count Fulk V of Anjou, whose territory bordered Normandy to the south.† His victory was secure. With the alcohol on board, the Norman chronicler Orderic Vitalis tells us, the party began. The oarsmen and many of the passengers quickly became drunk. When the priests arrived to bless the ship before its crossing, they were teased and sent away.2 The mood on the ship was so raucous that some of the passengers got off rather than risk the crossing. Among those who left was William’s first cousin, Stephen, son of the king’s sister Adela, who pleaded diarrhoea rather than travel with the prince. Henry I had created him, a beloved nephew, count of Mortain.

King Henry’s ship departed first. The crossing had to be made at night, in high water, or the boats would not have been able to float. We know that on 25 November 1120 high water was at 10.43 p.m.3 The White Ship left the harbour perhaps an hour later. By now nearly everyone on board, probably including the captain, was drunk. Thomas FitzStephen was persuaded to take a dare from the prince and his friends to out-race King Henry’s ship, despite its head start. He was an experienced sailor who had made the journey from Barfleur to England numerous times. He possibly felt himself to be so familiar with the route that extra speed, despite the jagged rocks that dotted the outskirts of the harbour, would not matter. Perhaps he was so wine-soaked that all caution was disregarded. Or perhaps he was coerced by his drunken master. The White Ship hurtled out of the harbour’s mouth and almost immediately hit a rock, probably the Quilleboeuf Rock or Raz de Barfleur, which knifed through its planks.

The sailors desperately tried to free the boat, but it suddenly overturned. The night was freezing and the waters dark. From the shore, the clergymen whose traditional blessing the travellers had drunkenly jeered, heard the petrified screams of the foundering passengers. The bishop of Coutances was among the clerical witnesses. All three of his nephews and his brother were on board.

The situation was ghastly for the hundreds of souls perishing in the bitter winter seas, but it was not yet a disaster for the Norman dynasty. William still might have escaped. He was bundled into a lifeboat and swiftly steered away. But the prince had humanity. William was close to his illegitimate half-brothers and sisters, who had been given lands and titles by their father. He evidently loved his half-sister the countess of Perche and his brother Richard. He ordered his tiny vessel to go back and rescue them. As it reached the wreck, it was engulfed by the scores of panicked people who tried to climb aboard. The boat capsized and they too drowned. William Atheling, heir to England and Normandy, was dead.

It seemed there would be three survivors of the tragedy: Berold, a butcher from Rouen; a son of the nobleman Gilbet l’Aigle; and the captain, Thomas FitzStephen. Berold and l’Aigle’s son managed to grab hold of a piece of the wreckage and stay afloat. Thomas fought his way through the freezing waters and asked them for news. When they told him William was dead, unable to face the king, he slipped down into the sea to die. And when l’Aigle’s son could hold on no longer, he too drowned. Only Berold the butcher, kept from freezing in the water by his pelisse and his sheepskin coat, lived to bear witness. In the morning, he was rescued by three fishermen.

No one dared tell the king. The screams of the drowning caught the ears of King Henry and his fellow passengers, but they were bemused by what they had heard. It was not until the following day that the king’s nephew, Theobald, persuaded a young boy to break the news.4 The king collapsed in grief.

Many of the Anglo-Norman nobility were dead too. A generation of aristocrats was obliterated, confounding the lords of England and Normandy who survived. Besides William, the king lost an illegitimate son and daughter, his niece Matilda of Blois, her husband Richard earl of Chester, Richard’s half-brother, and members of his household including his scribe Gisulf, William Bigod, Robert Mauduit, Hugh de Moulins, and Geoffrey Ridel.5 Gilbet l’Aigle lost two sons, both of whom had served in Henry I’s household. Eighteen women were among the dead. For the most part their bodies were never recovered, despite the efforts of the families who hired private divers to claw their remains from the sea.

We know so much about the shipwreck because the chroniclers could not make sense of it; so for centuries they picked over the facts. It was an example of what the historian and chronicler William of Malmesbury called ‘the mutability of human fortunes’.6 So senseless did it seem, that a later historian even speculated that the disaster had been the result of a conspiracy to murder.7

King Henry I grieved bitterly. The tragedy was both personal, and political. He was the fourth son of William the Bastard and had had no expectation of the throne. But he was ruthless and ambitious for power. When his elder brother King William Rufus was shot in the eye with an arrow and killed in the New Forest in 1100 (some believed Henry was behind his death), he raced to secure the treasury at Winchester; he was crowned within three days at Westminster by Maurice, bishop of London, before his other elder brother, Robert, honeymooning in Italy on his way back from crusade, even heard of Rufus’s death. By 1106, Henry I was master of Normandy too; he locked Robert up for nearly thirty years rather than concede power. He successfully battled Robert’s son and his own nephew William Clito for lordship of Normandy, and so ruthless was he in pursuit of supremacy that he even ordered the tips of his granddaughters’ noses be cut off to avoid appearing weak.8

William Atheling’s death negated all his efforts. He had no heir, just numerous bastard children, and one legitimate daughter, Matilda, who was married to the emperor of Germany. Even had she been free to return to England, it is doubtful that the nobility would have accepted her as queen. Although no law barred women from the throne of England, there was little precedent in an age when a ruler was expected to lead troops into battle. Matilda was older than her brother, but when William Atheling was born, no one expected her to rule.

King Henry’s heartache was such that he never sailed from Barfleur again.9 But it did not stop him from thinking of the future. The continuation of his ‘usurper’ Norman dynasty as rulers of England lay in his providing the country with an uncontested heir.

The king was a consummate politician. In August 1100, after stealing the crown from his older brother, he had immediately married Edith (Matilda) of Scotland, just days after William Rufus’s death and his own hasty coronation. She was the daughter of the Scottish king Malcolm Canmore, and Margaret, the great-granddaughter of the Saxon king Edmund Ironside. Henry was aware that their children’s claim to rule England, with their blood inheritance of both William the Conqueror and the Saxon kings of England, would be far less precarious than his own. The chroniclers noted that their new king had married ‘a kinswoman of King Edward, of the true royal family of England … descended from the stock of King Alfred’.10

She had been crowned by Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury; he had ignored objections to the marriage, that Edith had ‘taken the veil’ (become a nun) while in her aunt Christina’s care at Wilton Abbey, where Christina was abbess. Edith strongly repudiated these claims, insisting that her disciplinarian aunt had forced her to wear the veil to protect her from libidinous Normans, including Henry I’s brother William Rufus, and that she had never taken vows.11 She had, she said, ‘gone in fear of the rod of my aunt Christina, and she would often make me smart with a good slapping and the most horrible scolding’.12 The marriage, nevertheless, and therefore her and Henry’s heirs, were undisputedly legitimate. Edith’s character was unimpeachable; she was the model of queenly piety and devotion. But now William Atheling, Henry’s only son by his queen, was dead.

King Henry’s contemporaries called him licentious. He had numerous mistresses, and when the White Ship sank he was left with many capable although illegitimate sons, as well as nephews. But the king wanted his own legitimate descendant to rule after him. The dual realm of England and Normandy had only been in – albeit sporadic – existence since 1066, and the king, perhaps thinking of his own experiences of purloining the throne from his brother, needed an heir whom all his nobles would accept. Edith died in 1118. Within ten weeks of the tragedy, Henry married again. His bride was Adeliza, daughter of Godfrey, duke of Lotharingia and count of Louvain. She was seventeen, the same age as his dead son. King Henry was fifty-two or fifty-three years old. The chroniclers called the new queen puella (girl) at her wedding.13

No child arrived. During their fifteen-year marriage the chroniclers did not even hint at a miscarriage or a stillbirth for Adeliza.14 The problem may well have been the king’s. (After his death Adeliza made a love match with William d’Aubigny, the son of Henry’s butler, and they had seven children together.) The king was obviously sensitive about his queen’s childless state. During Easter 1124 he brutally punished leaders of a rebellion and meted out the same punishment – blinding – to a knight, Luc de la Barre. This castigation was universally perceived as too harsh for a mere knight. But Luc had composed offensive songs about the king, and some historians have speculated they were about Adeliza’s failure to have a child. Luc took his own life, crushing his skull against the walls of his cell, rather than face his awful punishment.15

Four years after his second wedding the old king, possibly despairing, was offered a solution to his succession problem when the husband of his only legitimate daughter, Matilda, died.

Matilda was born at the beginning of February 1102. During her early childhood, while her father was fighting for control of Normandy, she and her brother William were placed in the care of Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury. Matilda was extremely fond of him, and they would remain close for the rest of his life. Anselm had been the abbot of Bec in Normandy, and Matilda would show a lifelong devotion to this house, possibly because of her friendship with Anselm.16

When she was only eight years old, King Henry sent Matilda away to Germany and a splendid diplomatic marriage with Heinrich V. Heinrich had gained the throne of Germany only two years before his betrothal; it was his bloody prize following years of fighting his own father, Heinrich IV, for the crown. Matilda was formally betrothed to her groom at Westminster, in his absence, on 13 June 1109. Heinrich’s envoys arrived in England the following year, to escort her to Germany. He was about seventeen years older than his child bride. For King Henry the match and its association with one of Europe’s most powerful princes bolstered his position as a newly crowned king, who had still not been acknowledged duke of Normandy by his overlord, Louis the Fat, over his defeated brother, Robert. Heinrich wanted Matilda because her father was rich; he desperately needed money to pay for his wars and to aid his campaign to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the pope. Matilda’s dowry of 10,000 marks‡ in silver was very attractive.17

Eight-year-old Matilda arrived in Heinrich’s lands in February 1110, at Liège, and although the couple, because of Matilda’s youth, remained unmarried, she was crowned queen at Mainz on 25 July. The day was the feast of St James, whose shrine lay to the west, in northern Spain. St James, one of the twelve apostles, was probably the brother of John the Evangelist – and his hand, looted by Heinrich’s father from the archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen on his death in 1072, was a prized relic of the German kingdom. Matilda developed a strong attachment to it.18 Later, she would steal it, perhaps in memory of her coronation.

Matilda was placed in the care of Bruno, archbishop of Trier, to continue her education, away from Heinrich. We do not know the details of her upbringing, but Heinrich asked ‘that she should be nobly brought up and honourably served, and should learn the language and customs and laws of the country, and all that an empress ought to know, now, in the time of her youth’.19

It was not until she was nearly twelve, however, in January 1114, that Matilda married Heinrich, now emperor, at Worms Cathedral.20 The occasion was the most splendid in living memory. An eyewitness, writing in the usual formulaic, adulatory manner reserved for princesses of whom they knew nothing personal, noted Matilda’s beauty and lineage. He wrote that:

the nuptials were attended by such a great concourse of archbishops and bishops, dukes and counts, abbots and provosts and learned clergy, that not even the oldest man present could remember ever having seen or even heard of such a huge assembly of such great persons. For the marriage was attended by five archbishops, thirty bishops and five dukes … so numerous were the wedding gifts which various kings and primates sent to the emperor, and the gifts which the emperor from his own store gave to the innumerable throngs of jesters and jongleurs and people of all kinds, that not one of his chamberlains who received or distributed them could count them.21

Henry I was doubtless immensely gratified to hear of the expense lavished on his daughter’s wedding.

Matilda had ability and Heinrich developed her talents. He encouraged her to participate in government, following the German tradition which allowed queens to work alongside their husbands. She was enthusiastic and able, acting as his regent in Italy and Lotharingia. She developed keen diplomatic skills, particularly in her dealings with the papal court. Matilda fulfilled the traditional queenly role of intercessor, and she was popular with her German subjects. Her beauty, vivacity and hard work earned their affections, and they called her ‘Matilda the Good’.

Heinrich used Matilda as one of his many instruments of government, just as he used his counsellors. His chief advisor was Adalbert, whom he would create both his chancellor, and then archbishop of the most prestigious diocese in the kingdom – Mainz. This archbishopric held a similar status in Germany to that of Canterbury in England. Ultimately, the combination of the post of chancellor and archbishop in a single individual was a disaster for the crown. It was a lesson that Matilda would never forget, when nearly half a century later she advised her eldest son against the most grievous decision of his life.

The chronicler Orderic Vitalis wrote of how unpopular Heinrich was, particularly for the imperial crowning he forced from Pope Pascal II. When Heinrich entered Rome in 1111 expecting to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor, the pope refused unless he relinquished the privilege of investiture. Heinrich responded by kidnapping and imprisoning the pope until he agreed to crown him, which he did. Orderic wrote that, ‘the emperor loved so noble a wife very much but for his sins he lacked an heir worthy of the empire’.22

For despite his supposed affection for Matilda, they had no children together. Hermann of Tournai, a near contemporary, hinted at a stillbirth or a child who died soon after birth; whatever the cause, the marriage was childless.23

Heinrich had one illegitimate daughter, Bertha, whom he married to Count Ptolemy of Tusculum in 1117, but no legitimate heir.24 In 1122, he fell ill with cancer, and now he put his mind to deciding the succession. Bertha, illegitimate and a young woman with no military experience, was not a feasible candidate.

It is intriguing to speculate that had Heinrich not contracted a fatal illness, European history might have been very different. After William Atheling drowned in 1120, Heinrich saw a real possibility of inheriting Henry I’s domains through right of his wife. She was still young, and it was not impossible to think that they would have an heir who would inherit not only Germany, but the Anglo-Norman realm too. Besides Matilda, Henry I’s nearest legitimate heir was his nephew William Clito, son of the imprisoned Robert. Henry did everything in his power to ensure Clito would not succeed him, for William was allied to Louis the Fat, with whom Henry had spent years sparring for Normandy.

William Clito had not seen his father since he was three years old and would spend his entire life fighting his uncle for his birthright, allying himself with Henry’s foes; uncle and nephew were enemies, and Henry I would not allow him to succeed, despite his valid blood claim.

In the spring of 1122, probably with a view to discussing the succession of Matilda and Heinrich, Henry and Matilda attempted to meet. Henry was nervous at the number of his nobility who professed to support William Clito as duke of Normandy after his death.25 The meeting, however, did not take place as Charles, count of Flanders, for fear of offending his French overlord, refused Matilda safe conduct through his lands. Nevertheless, Heinrich and Matilda’s father continued as allies against the threat of William Clito and France.

Heinrich may feasibly have expected to add king of England and duke of Normandy to his titles. England and Normandy would have been, in the first part of the twelfth century, subsumed into a greater German empire, ruled from Aachen by the Holy Roman Emperor.

But Heinrich died at Utrecht on 23 May 1125, the last of the Salian kings. He was buried at the Romanesque cathedral of Speyer, on the Rhine, beside the body of the father he had fought for the throne. Matilda, with no child heir to act as regent for, was superfluous. Aged twenty-three, she had lived in Germany all her adult life, yet she had few rights. Now she faced a choice. She could either remain in Germany under the protection of Heinrich’s family, married eventually to a candidate of their choice; she could enter a convent, the preference of many widowed noblewomen; or she could answer her father’s command and return to England.26

With no stake in the German throne, she went back to the land of her birth, carrying with her an enormous amount of treasure, including gold crowns, bolts of silk, and a relic: the hand of St James. She would never give up her title, though, calling herself ‘empress’ for the rest of her life.

What was to become of Matilda, the redundant empress with an empty title? Despite recalling her from Germany, it is likely that the king had not yet decided what to do with his daughter. King Henry, ever pragmatic, took his time to consider his options.

II

Kingship and inheritance in Europe in the first half of the twelfth century were flexible. Although by the end of the century, primogeniture – succession of the eldest son – was far more established in feudal law, at the beginning the rules were still fluid. In western Europe, the nation state was only just beginning to emerge as a political entity, which meant that inheritance was often precarious.

It was still possible for an illegitimate child to inherit his father’s throne or lordship, although it was not always easy; William the Bastard had had to fight for his claim to rule in Normandy. But illegitimacy or being the younger son did not yet automatically bar a strong candidate from the throne: successful kings were often the men who could secure the treasury first, or win in battles against their rivals, frequently close relations. Matilda’s own husband Heinrich V had fought his father Heinrich IV for control of Germany. William the Bastard, at war with his eldest son Robert at the time of his death, denied him his full inheritance in favour of his second son William Rufus.27 And King Henry I took full advantage of William Rufus’s death, leaving his brother’s dead body in the New Forest as he raced to Winchester to acquire the wealth of England before his elder brother Robert.

What of ‘queenship’, or a woman’s right to rule independently of a father or son? Women were encouraged to pursue the traditional queenly roles of intercessors, helpmates, and even occasionally regents. But there were hardly any examples in the twelfth century of women ruling alone, and King Henry would have been aware of how unusual it was to nominate a woman as his successor.

Although in France, Salic law – where women were barred from the throne – was a development of the fourteenth century (when the death of all of Philip le Bel’s male heirs by 1328 precipitated a succession crisis), there was no tradition of female rule in France; the French were, at best, ambivalent about women rulers.28 England developed no such law, but there was very little precedent for female rule. Many European noblewomen such as Matilda participated in government, although of Matilda’s contemporaries, only two ruled as queens in their own right – Urraca, daughter of Alfonso VI of Castile and León, and Melisende, daughter of Baldwin II of Jerusalem. Both found it impossible to rule alone for long. Urraca, after her father’s death, swiftly married Alfonso of Aragon, ‘the battler’, to shore up her regime. Melisende was married off to Count Fulk V of Anjou and never reigned entirely alone, obliged to associate herself first with her father, and then her husband.

With Matilda safely back in England, the king pondered. It was still plausible that his young wife would become pregnant and he kept her constantly at his side. The other possible contenders were his sister Adela’s sons, Theobald and Stephen; and his illegitimate son Robert of Gloucester, a man of great intelligence, capability and wealth.

Henry I liked to surround himself with the scions of the Anglo-Norman nobility, partly as companions for William Atheling before his death. At court, Matilda encountered her half-brothers and the king’s eldest bastard sons, Robert and Richard, as well as her uncle, David of Scotland. She also met her cousin, Stephen.

Stephen was born in about 1092, the third son of Adela and Étienne VI count of Blois-Chartres. Étienne was a controversial figure. He had answered the pope’s call to the first crusade enthusiastically in 1096 but had not, according to contemporaries, behaved well; he failed to bring his men to aid the Christian forces as they besieged Antioch. Perhaps to assuage his conscience, he returned to Jerusalem in 1101, where he was killed the following year, at the battle of Ramlah. Stephen’s father was absent during his childhood, and after his death it was Stephen’s uncle, now king of England and duke of Normandy, who showed him kindness and favour when he welcomed him at court.

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.

Was he a realistic contender? Even Henry I thought Robert’s illegitimacy a barrier to power, however far he bolstered him with his trust, a title and money. The author of the Gesta Stephani thought him capable of taking the throne, but that, burdened by the impediment of his illegitimacy, Robert chose not to assert a claim.

The more viable candidates were the king’s nephews by his sister Adela, Theobald and Stephen. Adela’s youngest and by far most impressive and able son, Henry, was not eligible as he was a Cluniac monk who had been consecrated bishop of Winchester by his uncle the king in 1129.

Robert of Torigni told how Theobald was asked by the Norman nobility to take control of the duchy. On 21 December, at Lisieux, they approached him formally, and Robert of Gloucester lent his support too. But although Theobald was the elder, it was his brother, the affable and popular Stephen who flabbergasted the Anglo-Norman world by his swift seizure of the English throne.

There is little doubt that had Matilda not quarrelled with her father, she would have been queen. The magnates surrounding the king would have been forced to recognise her. But as she was not there, and the nobility was already apprehensive at the thought of her taking the throne, the succession became a matter of speed.

Despite his oaths to honour her claim, Stephen barely waited for confirmation of his uncle’s death before he set sail for England. This must have been a premeditated act, long in the planning. The seeds were sown a decade earlier; Stephen could not forget Henry I’s brief flirtation with making him king. This dangled promise, however ephemeral or half-hearted, inculcated in Stephen a desire for the throne that would lead him to perjure himself and forsake loyalties to his family as he stampeded over the rights of his first cousin and elder brother. It was Henry I’s ‘promise’ that justified, in Stephen’s mind, the neglect of his uncle in those last days, and his race to England to steal Matilda’s crown.

It is possible too that Stephen may have felt providence was on his side: he had, after all, disembarked the White Ship before its short, fateful voyage. Had he been spared for this moment?

Stephen was not with Henry as he lay dying, but in his wife’s county of Boulogne – Stephen’s marriage to Matilda of Boulogne in 1125 gave him access to the wealth garnered from her vast estates in Flanders and south-east England. Stephen was evidently kept informed of his uncle’s illness – Lyons-la-Forêt was only two days’ hard riding away – which allowed him to plan.61

Stephen grabbed the opportunity. Most of the political elite were still with the dead king’s body in Normandy. He took advantage of the uncertainty to sail from his wife’s Channel port of Wissant to Kent on 3 or 4 December and was welcomed in London; he carried on to Winchester where he claimed the treasury, aided by his politically adept younger brother Bishop Henry of Winchester who helped mastermind the coup. Stephen was crowned at Westminster on 22 December by William de Corbeil, archbishop of Canterbury. The archbishop’s initial concern at breaking his oath to Matilda was swept aside by Hugh Bigod, who must have travelled with the furies at his back to give his solemn testimony of the old king’s deathbed change of heart.

Perhaps most importantly, Stephen had brought Roger, bishop of Salisbury, over to his side. During Henry I’s reign, the chronicler Henry of Huntingdon wrote of Roger that ‘he was second only to the king.’62 Roger may have been nursing a festering grudge that Henry I had not listened to his protests when he married Matilda to Geoffrey, preferring instead to consult his bastard son Robert, and Brian Fitz Count. The chronicler William of Malmesbury wrote: ‘I myself have often heard Roger bishop of Salisbury say that he was released from the oath he had taken to the empress because he had sworn only on condition that the king should not give his daughter in marriage to anyone outside the kingdom without consulting himself and the other chief men, and that no one had recommended that marriage or been aware that it would take place except Robert earl of Gloucester, and Brian Fitz Count, and the bishop of Lisieux.’63

No one outside Stephen’s immediate circle, least of all Matilda, guessed that Stephen would secure the throne a mere three weeks after the old king’s death. Stephen was now an anointed king. Although only a small number of the nobility had attended his crowning, such was the mystique surrounding the coronation ceremony that it would be very difficult to dislodge him. Life pivoted around religion in twelfth-century Christendom, and the commandment in Chronicles not to ‘touch my anointed ones’ was taken seriously.64

Matilda’s claims were dust; she, and by implication her eldest son Henry, had been forsaken by those magnates who had promised to uphold them.

How did Stephen do it? Despite their solemn oaths, most of the aristocracy were appalled at the idea of Matilda as queen. She was disliked, she was married to the count of Anjou who was unpopular among the Anglo-Norman nobility, and she was a woman. She was thrice damned. Conversely, her cousin Stephen had an easy and appealing manner, was rich and was a respected soldier. He had been a favourite of Henry I and bathed in the residual glory.

And there were the convincing rumours among loyalists to Stephen that Henry I had changed his mind. Those struggling with the moral implications of relinquishing their oaths to Matilda could feel reassured that, if they looked hard enough, the old king had released them from their obligations to a woman.

Stephen had been crowned. Even the pope had given his tacit support. Rather than risk the financial insecurity of civil war, the Anglo-Norman nobility flocked to the new king. ‘All the barons immediately determined, with Theobald’s consent, to serve under one lord on account of the honours which they held in both provinces.’65 For Stephen had bought his elder brother’s loyalty – or at least his silence – with money; he gave him an annual pension of 2,000 marks. In return, Theobald relinquished any claim to the throne of England or the dukedom of Normandy.

Matilda’s claim was abandoned by the nobility, even by her half-brother Robert of Gloucester, putting pragmatism above family loyalty – at least for the time being. In April 1136, he acknowledged Stephen as his king. He was the last to do so and his support for the new king remained at best lukewarm. Robert stayed in Normandy, living quietly on his estates, watching and waiting.

Matilda, as soon as she heard of her father’s death, raced to claim her dowry castles on the Normandy–Anjou borders.66 We have no way of knowing if she mourned, or regretted her argument with her father so close to his death, but she must have lamented the ramifications. For the moment, at least, there was nothing Matilda could do about her English inheritance. She seems to have remained in Normandy, probably in Argentan, holding on to her Norman border. It is probable that Henry and his younger brother Geoffrey remained with her. Her third and last child, William, was born in the summer of 1136.67

Matilda could do nothing but cling on to the tiny part of the Norman inheritance she had managed to secure, while Geoffrey gradually made inroads into the conquest of her duchy, forever watching his back against his own Angevin border lords.

By 1139 – only three years later – everything had changed. Walter Map, with a typical acidity of tongue, pronounced Stephen ‘a man distinguished for skill in arms, but in other respects almost a fool’.68 Stephen had had no success in Normandy. He made the only crossing of his reign in 1137, where he bought off his brother and paid homage for the duchy to Louis the Fat. But he recognised Geoffrey’s superior military force and negotiated a short truce with him, agreeing to an annual payment of 2,000 marks (the truce only lasted for a year). Despite his homage, Stephen had no power in Normandy and would never return again.

In England, within the same three years, he had alienated the bishops and much of his nobility who descended swiftly into factionalism. They had no respect for their king-duke, who had failed in Normandy and was now short of funds, having partially drained his uncle’s enormous treasury.

In the summer of 1139, taking advantage of Stephen’s weakness, Robert of Gloucester used the excuse of rumours that Stephen had tried to have him murdered to put his money and his influence firmly behind his sister’s cause. Matilda had been preparing for war for at least a year, keeping warriors with her such as Alexander of Bohon, a Cotentin nobleman described as ‘the foremost among the countess’s military retinue’.69 Now she and her brother set sail for England together.

Matilda styled herself ‘empress’, and ‘daughter of the king of the English’ to enhance her right to rule. In the coming years, Matilda and Geoffrey would work in tandem, pursuing two separate claims: Matilda’s responsibilities lay with the conquest of England, and Geoffrey’s, with that of Normandy.

The pragmatic Robert’s decision was influenced by the stunning military successes that Geoffrey achieved in Normandy. When Robert declared for Matilda, Geoffrey had made extensive inroads into the duchy. Matilda left Normandy in a much surer position, as she sailed off to England to fight Stephen for her inheritance. She left Henry and his two younger brothers, Geoffrey and William, with their father.

Matilda landed in Sussex on 30 September with her brother Robert and 140 knights, and sought refuge with her stepmother Adeliza, now married to William d’Aubigny, earl of Arundel. Robert, accompanied by only twelve men, left Matilda for his stronghold at Bristol to garner support across the West Country.70

Stephen, in a typical and naive display of chivalry – many of his contemporaries thought it his greatest weakness – did not capture and imprison his first cousin who had come to take the crown from him, but granted her safe passage to join Robert at Bristol. Their cause was joined by their half-brother Reginald of Dunstanville; Matilda’s uncle, now David King of Scots, who fought on Matilda’s behalf in the north; Brian Fitz Count, lord of Wallingford and Abergavenny; and Miles of Gloucester. She received their homage, and it is likely that she set up her court at Gloucester Castle on the banks of the River Severn, while Robert stayed at Bristol.

Matilda’s greatest champion throughout the war would be Brian Fitz Count. He was an illegitimate son of Alan Fergant, count of Brittany. He was at court when Matilda returned from Germany, and over the years he would put all his lands and possessions at Matilda’s disposal.71

He had been one of Henry I’s chief advisors, and owed his king all he had – wealth, lands, and a rich wife. He recalled his time at Matilda’s father’s court as ‘the good and golden days’, grateful that the king had given him ‘arms and an honour’.72

Brian believed in Matilda completely; at least one novelist supposed them to be in love, and the author of the Gesta Stephani noted their ‘affection’ for one another, and his ‘delight’ when she came to England.73 In 1144, Matilda, in public recognition of his unwavering support, issued a grant to Reading Abbey ‘for the love and loyal service of Brian Fitz Count, which he has rendered me’.74 Whether Matilda and Brian Fitz Count were in love, or whether it was the absolute loyalty Brian believed he owed Henry I – and then after his death, his daughter and chosen successor – we will never be sure.

Matilda combined her military campaign with an appeal to the pope to challenge Stephen’s claim to be king. On 4 April 1139, her case was heard before the Second Lateran Council; Matilda’s advocates argued that Stephen had seized the throne illegally, and that he had lied to do so. But although the pope found for Stephen, and ‘confirmed his occupation of the kingdom of England and the duchy of Normandy’, she never ceased to hope that he would change his mind.75

Stephen’s wife, Matilda of Boulogne, joined him in defending England. He still had enough money left in his depleted treasury to employ mercenaries, also known as routiers or ‘ravagers’, and much of the country, besides the borderlands of Wales and the west of England, remained in royal hands.76

Matilda’s friends were tenacious in fighting her cause. Her half-brother Reginald of Dunstanville won in Cornwall, and their grateful brother, Robert, granted him the earldom.77 But one year into the war, the country was feeling its ravages. William of Malmesbury wrote: ‘The whole year [1140] was troubled by the brutalities of war. There were many castles all over England, each defending its own district, or, to be more truthful, plundering it. The war, indeed, was one of sieges. Some of the castellans wavered in their allegiance, hesitating which side to support, and sometimes working entirely for their own profit.’78

The situation had reached a stalemate, with neither side able to gain a decisive advantage. But unexpectedly, everything changed in Matilda’s favour. On 2 February 1141 at Lincoln, in a stellar coup engineered by her half-brother Robert and his son-in-law, Ranulf earl of Chester, who brought with them ‘a dreadful and unendurable number of Welsh’, Stephen was captured and imprisoned at Bristol Castle.79 (It was one of the very few pitched battles of the war – battles were dangerous and their outcomes uncertain; most of the fighting was marked instead by castle sieges.) Stephen had fought bravely, deserted by many of his supporters, with a double-headed axe. But he had lost. Robert placed him in the care of his wife Mabel, at Bristol Castle. It was not a comfortable imprisonment; Stephen would eventually be shackled in irons in his cell.

It looked like the endgame. Matilda was recognised by the church as ‘Lady of England and Normandy’, took possession of the treasury and was given the crown – although as yet she remained uncrowned. She embarked on a progress around the country and was recognised as queen at Winchester. Meanwhile Stephen’s wife, Matilda of Boulogne, frantically attempted to secure her husband’s release, promising he would leave the country and live quietly. Matilda however refused, as she refused Matilda of Boulogne’s pleas to grant their son, Eustace, his inheritance – the lands Stephen had owned before he stole her crown.80 She carried on to London, expecting to be crowned. She was even joined by Stephen’s disaffected brother Henry, bishop of Winchester and now papal legate, who had welcomed her at his cathedral. The bishop had tired of his brother’s hollow promises to uphold the integrity of church freedoms, and was bitter that Stephen had not created him archbishop of Canterbury after William de Corbeil, Stephen’s advocate and the man who had placed the crown upon his head, died in 1136. Stephen dithered for two years, while Bishop Henry lobbied the pope for it. Ultimately however, fearing his brother’s increasing power, Stephen ignored his requests, and instead invited Theobald, prior of Bec in Normandy, to England. It was Theobald, and not Henry, who was consecrated archbishop on 8 January 1139.

But in the capital, Matilda antagonised Londoners, who resented her appointment of earls and levying of taxes. She was heavy-handed where she could have been conciliatory. Meanwhile Stephen’s wife, losing patience with the fruitless negotiations, raised an army and camped on the south bank of the River Thames, just outside the city of London. Londoners, besieged by two Matildas – one threatening pernicious taxes and assaults on their unique rights, and the other threatening them with battle – now decided for Stephen’s queen instead of their ‘Lady of the English’. On 24 June, while Matilda and her followers were celebrating with a feast at Westminster, Londoners declared for Stephen’s queen and attacked. They rang the city’s bells which notified its citizens to strike, and the queen presumptive abandoned her banquet and fled for her life to Oxford. Gerald of Wales left us with a damning comment on her failure: ‘She was swollen with insufferable pride by her success in war, and alienated the affections of nearly everyone. She was driven out of London.’ She was condemned for her pursuit of independent female power, no longer ‘Matilda the Good’.

Meanwhile Bishop Henry oscillated, disgusted at Matilda’s harsh treatment of Eustace. In the end, he did little to win the pope over for Matilda. When Innocent II ordered him to return to his erstwhile support for his brother, he deserted Matilda for Stephen’s queen.

Matilda retaliated with an army, which she took to Winchester, to besiege the bishop’s castle. But she was defeated. She fled, riding astride for speed, with her half-brother Reginald and Brian Fitz Count, while Robert stayed to cover her flight. Disaster ensued; Robert was caught by Flemish mercenaries loyal to the royalist William of Warenne, earl of Surrey, and was sent, a prisoner, by Stephen’s wife to Rochester Castle.

Had Matilda not estranged Londoners, but instead mollified them, pressing the claim of her young son, she might have been queen. Now, however, she was in a dreadful predicament. She had lost her most powerful ally.

Matilda determined to get him back, and although Robert begged his sister not to make a bargain, she insisted on swapping prisoners. On 1 November Stephen was released, in exchange for Robert’s freedom two days later. He hurried to his sister at Oxford where she had, once more, established her court.

Stephen’s capture at Lincoln, although it ultimately did nothing for Matilda in England, had an enormous impact on Geoffrey’s war to conquer Normandy. Orderic Vitalis wrote ‘when he had news that his wife had won the day’, Geoffrey and his armies hurled themselves into Normandy once more. This time, they would win.

But the war in England, with Stephen’s release, was yet again at a stalemate. Matilda begged Geoffrey to come to her aid, reminding him that it was ‘his duty to maintain the inheritance of his wife and children in England’.81 But he refused: he had nothing to offer her. All his resources were concentrated on the subjugation of Normandy, where he was in the process of triumphing through a combination of force and diplomacy, luring the magnates over to his side. He insisted, instead, that Robert of Gloucester join him in Normandy to aid his fight there: ‘If the earl would cross the sea and come to him he would meet his wishes as far as he could; if not, it would merely be a waste of time for anyone else to come and go.’82 Robert was reluctant to leave Matilda – he was aware how integral he was to her campaign – but he answered Geoffrey’s summons.

Around 24 June 1142, Robert left England for Normandy, from the port of Wareham, held by his son William, on the Dorset coast. When they met, Robert tried to convince Geoffrey to send aid to Matilda, but he refused, claiming that ‘he feared the rebellion of the Angevins and his other men’.83 Nevertheless, William of Malmesbury recorded that Robert’s visit was successful, and that together he and Geoffrey captured ten castles in the north-west of Normandy. However, perhaps aided by discussion with Geoffrey, Robert had a change of heart over the direction of the war for England. Matilda, he believed, had no hope of becoming queen. It was time to bring in her eldest son, Henry.

Robert returned to England in September with between 300 and 400 men, fifty-two ships, and the nine-year-old Henry.84

He immediately set out to save Matilda from disaster. Stephen’s forces had surrounded her at Oxford Castle that month; Robert did not have the men to bring an army to confront the king directly, so instead he attacked Wareham, which Stephen had captured earlier, hoping to draw the king away from Matilda. Stephen did not respond to the ruse, and Matilda found herself in terrible personal danger. After a three-month siege, the castle was about to fall, and Matilda’s capture and imprisonment seemed certain. The weather, and her bravery, saved her.

At the beginning of December, the land covered with snow and ice, Matilda escaped. She and the four men who accompanied her camouflaged themselves in white cloaks which made them invisible against the snow, and escaped, walking across the frozen Thames. She fled to Brian Fitz Count at Wallingford, fifteen miles to the south, who took her on to Devizes.

Matilda had not yet seen her son. Sometime before Christmas, while Brian Fitz Count offered her refuge at Wallingford, Robert was able to bring Henry to her there, where they were ‘delighted’ to be reunited. In her joy at seeing her firstborn, Matilda had a brief respite from the hopelessness of her situation.85 It was from this point, when Matilda saw Henry, that she realised the futility of her pursuit of the crown of England. By 1144, while Geoffrey had achieved complete success with the conquest of Normandy, Matilda had failed. Even Robert, having spent three years and a vast amount of money on his sister’s campaign, realised she could never be queen. It was Robert who fashioned the move to bring young Henry from Anjou as the new figurehead of the Angevin party.

IV

While Matilda fought in England, Henry had remained in Anjou, studying with his tutors and learning knightly skills. It is possible that his paternal uncle, Helias, played a part in Henry’s education, acting as his mentor.86

His parents were clever and inquisitive, both were well educated (Matilda received the greater part of her education at her first husband’s German court rather than in England), and they took great care over the young Henry’s schooling. Matilda and Geoffrey had a plan. They would provide their eldest son not only with an exemplary military and political education, but with the tools to enable him to become the Platonic archetype of a philosopher-prince. Walter Map’s claim that Henry ‘had a knowledge of all the tongues used from the French sea to the Jordan’ is undoubtedly an exaggeration; but it gives a hint as to the breadth of his learning. The languages Henry spoke fluently were French and Latin – Walter Map went on to say that he ‘customarily made use’ of them, and later he possibly learned some English.

Western Europe had never experienced such an intellectually exciting period as the twelfth century. Later historians dubbed it the ‘twelfth-century renaissance’ and it defied the Victorian misnomer of the ‘Dark Ages’.87 It was an age that saw the beginnings of humanism, a sense of the importance of the individual, a massive population shift from countryside to town, the rise of the city, the centralisation of government, and the recognition and employment of the greatest intellectuals of the day in the service of the royal administration. It saw an explosion in art, poetry and literature, particularly in the vernacular, as new fiction was explored for the first time since the classical era, and in science, theology and legal reform. It saw the beginnings of the great cathedral schools, the universities and of the soaring Gothic architecture that visually defined the age and fed the medieval Christian soul.

This quest for knowledge was fed by a ‘rediscovery’ of the classical thinkers of Greece and Rome, particularly Christian Rome after Constantine’s conversion, and by increasing contact with the Arab world and the richness of their intellectual traditions, notably in astronomy, medicine and mathematics. Contemporary writers called this movement a renovatio, meaning a rebirth or a renewal, with its underlying connotations of redemption through knowledge.

It was expected that a ruler should be well educated. Henry I and Geoffrey of Anjou were admired for their intellects. William of Malmesbury – monk, historian and devotee of Henry’s uncle Robert of Gloucester – pronounced that ‘a king without letters is [just] an ass with a crown.’88

Henry’s teachers – he had four that we know of – played an enormous role in shaping his interests. They were important not simply because they were clever, but because of the breadth and internationalism of their knowledge and understanding. Two were celebrated scholars, two we know far less about. But we do know that the experience of Henry’s tutors went far beyond the teachings of the church fathers; they had imbibed the wisdom of the philosophers, mathematicians, medics, poets and scholars of Greece, Rome, the Arabs and the Jews.

His first tutor was Peter of Saintes, chosen by Geoffrey because he was ‘more learned in Poetry than anyone this side of the Pyrenees’.89 Peter taught Henry Latin, and told him stories of the Greek and Trojan heroes; he even composed a poem on the Trojan War.90

When Henry was brought to England in 1142, he lived in his uncle Robert’s household at Bristol, where he continued his education under both Robert’s and his mother’s direction. Robert was a scholar. In 1138, Geoffrey of Monmouth dedicated his Historia regum Britanniae (‘History of the Kings of Britain’) to the earl, and it was from this text that Henry probably first became aware of the legends of King Arthur. This was the first time that an author collated and wrote down in Latin, a language the educated classes understood, all the legends connected with Britain’s most famous king. Geoffrey may even have written the text as a reflection of the civil war. Robert had recently made an alliance with Morgan ap Iorwerth, lord of Usk; the Welsh saw themselves as the proud descendants of Arthur.91 And Matilda is possibly portrayed in the text as Cordelia, the loyal daughter of Lear. Geoffrey’s Cordelia is married to a Frenchman and forced to fight her cousin for her birthright.92 It is probable that Henry discussed the book with both Geoffrey and Robert.

His mother, meanwhile, having fled from Oxford at the end of the year, set up headquarters at Devizes, roughly thirty miles from Henry. Henry of Huntingdon enthusiastically called its castle ‘the most splendid’ in Europe.93 It would be the centre of Matilda’s court for the duration of her stay in England.

The chronicler Gervase of Canterbury wrote of the ‘joy’ Matilda experienced in her son.94 It was in England that Henry began his training for leadership. He began to sign himself as ‘rightful heir of England and Normandy’.95 And on the occasions when he was with his mother, he received joint homage from their English vassals.96

Walter Map, in his gossipy and beautifully written Courtiers’ Trifles on the machinations of Henry’s court, later wrote about Matilda’s methods, much of which she had learned from the old king:

I have heard that his [Henry’s] mother’s teaching was to this effect, that he should spin out the affairs of everyone, hold long in his own hand all posts that fell in, take the revenues of them, and keep the aspirants to them hanging on in hope; and she supported this advice by an unkind analogy: an unruly hawk, if meat is often offered to it and then snatched away or hid, becomes keener and more inclinably obedient and attentive. He ought also to be much in his own chamber and little in public: he should never confer anything on anyone at the recommendation of any person, unless he had seen and learnt about it.97

It is not a great leap to imagine that Matilda began to teach her son when he was still very young the political methods learned from her first husband and her father.

At Bristol, Henry, alongside Robert’s younger sons, was taught by Master Matthew.98 Historians are uncertain as to Matthew’s identity. Some believe that he was Robert’s appointment as Henry was living in Robert’s household; however, it would seem that Matthew had been in Geoffrey’s service for years, teaching his two sisters – Henry’s aunts.99 It is likely therefore that Geoffrey sent Matthew to England as part of Henry’s retinue, in consultation with Robert. Both Peter of Saintes and Master Matthew probably initiated Henry into the intricacies of government, working alongside his parents and uncle to teach him the theory as the young boy observed the practice. Henry witnessed his first charter, issued by Geoffrey in June 1138, when he was only five years old.100

Robert undoubtedly had an influence on the young Henry’s education. Robert, who has been called ‘a happy compound of warrior, statesman, and scholar’, had studied enough to attract the admiration of William of Malmesbury.101 Henry I ensured this adored son was well educated, and his library was reputedly vast. It was probably at Robert’s invitation that the renowned scholar Adelard of Bath visited young Henry at Bristol.

Two years later, in January 1144, Henry was recalled to Normandy. It was at about this time that Geoffrey heard of his own father’s death in a riding accident in Acre, in November 1143.102 Fulk and Melisende had two sons together, Baldwin and Almaric; Geoffrey’s brothers were destined to occupy the throne of Jerusalem.

Geoffrey had captured Rouen, Normandy’s capital city. He had never been popular in England, but after his spectacular victories in Normandy and in recognition of his superb military skill, in Angevin and Norman sources he was a hero, ‘a second Mars … a powerful knight … a philosopher in his knowledge’.103

Soon afterwards he began styling himself ‘duke’. His seal at this time was double-sided, reflecting his conquest. One side depicted him on horseback, as duke of Anjou, and the other, holding a sword and shield, as duke of Normandy.104 Geoffrey, having established himself, recalled his son to continue his education and training in Normandy.

In Rouen, Geoffrey employed the remarkable William, ‘the grammarian’ of Conches, as Henry’s tutor. He taught him for three years, and probably taught his younger brothers too.105

William was one of Europe’s great scholars. He possibly taught at the great cathedral school of Chartres in northern France, was either a physician or a physicist (he is described as a ‘physicus’ which meant both), and had a passion for the natural sciences. William wrote commentaries on the works of Plato, Boethius and the Latin grammarian Priscian. When he quarrelled with a bishop, he sought sanctuary with Geoffrey. William approved of Geoffrey’s attitude to education. He dedicated his magnificent work Dragmaticon philosophiae (‘Dialogue on Natural Philosophy’) – the culmination of his studies in natural philosophy and observations of the physical universe, written for Henry – to Geoffrey, praising him for encouraging his children to study rather than playing the popular game of hazard.106 This became one of the most important texts of the twelfth-century renaissance. The work ranged over subjects such as medicine and astronomy, and took the form of a ‘dialogue’ between a philosopher and a duke – that is, between William and Henry. One particular episode may have been based on the recollection of a conversation that took place between them:

Duke: ‘There is one thing that still puzzles me about hearing. If I emit a sound in a cave or a high forest, someone repeats and returns my word to me.’

Philosopher: ‘Do you not know, then, that this is performed by “Echo, the resounding nymph”?’

Duke: ‘I am not Narcissus to be pursued by her. I ask for a physical explanation.’

The philosopher goes on to explain the science to his pupil, and the duke replies, ‘I do not know if what you are saying is true, but I do know that it pleases me a great deal. And so I am waiting all the more keenly for what remains to be said about the other senses.’

Philosopher: ‘It pleases me that such explanations please you.’107

William had taught John of Salisbury – himself among the greatest writers and thinkers of the twelfth century, who wrote on the intellectual energy of the age, and the debt owed to the past:

Our own generation enjoys the legacy bequeathed to it by that which preceded it. We frequently know more, not because we have moved ahead by our own natural ability, but because we are supported by the menial strength of others, and possess riches that we have inherited from our forefathers. Bernard of Clairvaux used to compare us to punt dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.108

The linguist and scientist Adelard of Bath, at the forefront of this renaissance, also had a profound impact on Henry’s education. Adelard probably taught Henry when he was at Bristol. He was famed for his knowledge of Arabic and his translations into Latin of Arabic treatises on mathematics and astronomy. It was Adelard who introduced Arabic innovations in mathematics into England and France. He had travelled for seven years in Italy, Sicily, Antioch and Cilicia (the southern coast of Turkey), dedicating himself to the ‘studies of the Arabs’.109

The twelfth century saw an explosion in knowledge and cultural exchange from as far afield as the icy western fringes of northern Europe to the Middle East. Crusaders had established a Latin Kingdom in Jerusalem in 1099, and it would not fall until nearly two centuries later.

In 1130 in Sicily, a Norman mercenary – Count Roger de Hauteville – founded a dynasty, conquering the island and much of southern Italy. He and his successors presided over a society of remarkable cultural and religious tolerance, marked by an exchange of ideas between Christians, Muslims and Jews. It was a place where all scholars, regardless of faith, were welcomed. From the ninth century, Spain’s Christian kings began their slow conquest of the Iberian Peninsula from its Muslim rulers, leading to a ‘rediscovery’ of the ideas of Greece and Rome, and Arabic intellectual developments, in western Europe. It was in this exceptional atmosphere of intellectual curiosity and achievement that we find tolerant and humanitarian scholars such as Adelard bringing the ideas and teachings of the Greeks, the Muslims and the Jews to the cathedral schools and the burgeoning European universities. Henry learned from among their finest.

In 1150, Adelard dedicated his work De opera astrolapsus (‘The Workings of the Astrolabe’) to Henry. Here he laid out his understanding of the cosmos, gave detailed instructions on how to use the astrolabe, a device used to track the path of the sun and the stars, and even included a section on hawking as light relief for the scholar. It was the apotheosis of his career.

Adelard’s dedication to Henry sets out the aspirations he held for his able pupil:

I thoroughly approve of the fact that the nobility of a royal race applies itself to the study of the liberal arts. But I find it all the more remarkable that preoccupation in the affairs of government does not distract the mind from that study. Thus I understand that you, Henry, since you are the grandson of a king, have understood with the complete attention of your mind, what is said by Philosophy: that states are blest either if they are handed over for philosophers to rule, or if their rulers adhere to philosophy … Since your childhood was once imbued with the scent of this reasoning, your mind preserves it for a long time, and the more heavily it is weighed down by outside occupations, the more diligently it withdraws itself from them. Hence it happens that you not only read carefully and with understanding those things that the writings of the Latins contain, but you also dare to wish to understand the opinions of the Arabs concerning the sphere, and the circles and movements of the planets. For you say that whoever lives in a house, if he is ignorant of its material or composition, its size or kind, its position or parts, is not worthy of such a dwelling …110

The love of learning and spirit of inquiry Henry imbibed from these exemplary scholars would last all his life. His parents had provided him with the tools to be anything he wanted. His teachers (or masters, magistri), tolerant and inquisitive, had opened Henry’s mind; many chroniclers tell of his passion for books, learning and discourse. He would aspire to be a philosopher-prince in the Platonic mould.111

V

The first war on English soil since the Conquest was a war of attrition, bitter and vindictive, with the rule of law sporadic. Although the fighting was mostly confined to the south-east and south-west of England, Stephen’s leadership was inadequate. Contemporaries called it ‘the anarchy’, a time when they believed themselves abandoned by Christ. The author of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle wrote in despair, ‘The earth bore no corn, for the land was all laid waste … and people said openly, that Christ and his saints slept.’

When he was fourteen Henry, imbued with loyalty to his parents and belief in his own right to rule, decided to fight alongside his mother for their birthright. At the beginning of 1147, he hired mercenaries on credit and sailed to England with a few companions to aid her. He led an attack against his first cousin, Philip of Gloucester, at Cricklade, just over thirty miles west of Oxford. Philip, Robert’s son, had deserted Matilda for Stephen, ‘seeing that at that time the king had the upper hand, [he] entered into a pact of peace and concord with him, and after being lavishly endowed with castles and lands, he gave hostages and paid him homage’.112 Philip’s defection was a reminder of the extent to which this war left families bitterly divided. But it is likely that Geoffrey knew nothing about his eldest son’s trip to England, for Henry had no money to pay his men, and had arrived in England with virtually nothing; once they realised, they deserted. Henry, desperate, asked his mother for money but she had none to spare. His uncle, Robert, gave him a similar answer.

When Stephen’s forces routed him nearby, at Bampton in Oxfordshire, Henry persuaded his cousin to give him money to pay for his journey home. Unwisely, Stephen agreed; he was, according to the author of the Gesta Stephani, ‘always full of pity and compassion’. But whether it was because, as his detractors claimed, chivalry was his undoing, or because he wanted Henry and his troublesome mercenaries out of England as quickly as possible, we may only speculate.113 By Ascension Day, 29 May 1147, Henry was back in Normandy.

For Henry, the moment marked the passing of the first chapter of his life. It was the last time he would see the uncle who had not only been responsible for shaping so much of his education but who had also made his and Matilda’s cause in England possible. Robert of Gloucester died on 31 October at Bristol. He was buried in the Benedictine priory church of St James, which he had founded.

Matilda left England less than four months after her brother’s death, in mid-February 1148, defeated and exhausted. Gervase of Canterbury wrote that she was ‘worn down by the trials of the English hostilities … preferring to retire to the haven of her husband’s protection than endure so many troubles in England’. She may have stomached the pitiful stalemate for so long because she was waiting for Henry to come of age. And it is possible that she felt unable to continue her cause without the leadership that her half-brother had provided. Robert’s son and heir, William, was not up to taking his father’s place; he was judged ‘effeminate and a lover of bedchambers more than of war’.114 Matilda made her home at Le Pré, near Rouen. She would never return to England.

Matilda was once again cast as a failure. Her biographer Marjorie Chibnall calls her ‘almost a queen’.115 But Matilda’s mission was doomed from the start. She was castigated for her character, her fiery temper – she ‘drove [her enemies] from her presence in fury after insulting and threatening them’ – and for her lack of femininity: ‘The countess of Anjou … was always above feminine softness and had a mind steeled and unbroken in adversity.’116 She was a ‘virago’, who ‘put on an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the modest gait and bearing proper to the gentle sex’.117

For not even clever, ambitious, determined Matilda could overcome the ‘problem’ of her sex. Her father had foreseen the difficulties of his magnates accepting female rule, which is why he had induced them to swear their oaths to her three times. The very few women who did rule independently were encouraged to disregard their femininity altogether and to behave as kings. When Geoffrey’s father Fulk died in Jerusalem in 1143, the powerful Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux urged his widow Queen Melisende to ‘show the man in the woman; order all things … so that those who see you will judge your works to be those of a king rather than a queen’.118 Urraca of the Spanish kingdom of León and Castile pretended to be a man, signing her documents as a king rather than a queen.

Matilda’s hopes would now rest in Henry, her heir. As the coming man and despite his youth, Henry was already attracting support in England to add to those nobles who had staunchly championed the Angevin cause. This allegiance was motivated at least in part by economic interests. As soon as Geoffrey was recognised as duke of Normandy by Louis VII in 1145, it was clear to those magnates who held land on both sides of the Channel that Stephen would never reunite Normandy and England. But once Stephen died, should they offer their allegiance to Henry, and not Eustace, the problem would be solved.

Geoffrey always contended that he conquered Normandy on behalf of his son. His charters, after becoming duke, often read ‘with the advice and consent of Henry my son’.119 The intention was that there should be no impediment to Henry inheriting Normandy. Gilbert Foliot, when consecrated bishop of Hereford in September 1148, swore allegiance to Henry, and not to Stephen. And in mid-1148 William of Gloucester swore to aid Roger of Hereford against all men ‘saving the person of their lord Henry’.120 At this stage, it was more to do with Henry’s lineage, as the grandson of Henry I and the descendant of the Norman conquerors and the Anglo-Saxon kings, than his abilities. That was all about to change.

In October 1148, Henry’s immediate family – Matilda, Geoffrey, and his two younger brothers – met at Rouen to decide their strategy. Normandy was theirs, won both by diplomacy and by military action, and they had a good shot at England. To claim his entire birthright, Henry would return to England where his uncle, David King of Scots, would knight him. The knighting ceremony, very important as a passage to power, would mark the beginning of Henry’s manhood. And as he turned sixteen, it was an apt time to hold the ceremony. On Whit Sunday 1149, David knighted his nephew with the belt and garter in a magnificent ceremony at Carlisle Castle, followed by a lavish party. Henry now began to call himself ‘duke’; the bishop of Lisieux wrote to his friend Robert, bishop of Lincoln, to ‘favour as much as you can the cause of our duke.’121

Many of Matilda’s staunchest supporters – Miles of Gloucester, Brian Fitz Count, her brother Robert – were either dead or retired. With Henry’s return, a new body of men began to coalesce around the freshly anointed scion of Anjou and Normandy. These men included his uncle Reginald of Cornwall, who remained true to his sister’s cause; Robert Fitz Harding of Bristol; Ranulf earl of Chester, married to Robert’s daughter but whose allegiance throughout the past ten years had been in flux; Ranulf’s brother the earl of Lincoln; and the earl of Hereford. Henry was their acknowledged leader – not so much for his qualities, but more as a result of their bitter experience that Stephen could be duplicitous and capricious. Stephen, after Matilda left for Normandy, had courted the earls of Chester and Essex with lands; he had then, without warning or cause, imprisoned them.122 These Anglo-Norman magnates yearned for stability, and they looked to the as yet unproven Henry to provide it.

But just as in the previous generation when William Atheling’s greatest foe had been his first cousin William Clito, so Henry’s biggest danger lay with his cousin Eustace, Stephen’s eldest son. Eustace was as determined to be king of England as Henry was. He had paid homage to Louis for Normandy in 1137, and had been married to Louis’ sister, Constance, as putative heir to England and Normandy. He was knighted a year or so before Henry, at the end of 1147.

Stephen, fearing Henry’s growing importance, and to ensure his son’s succession, appealed to Rome to have Eustace crowned alongside him. But Pope Eugenius III refused. Stephen was anointed king before Rome could approve it. If the pope had given his tacit support to an anointed King Stephen (made holy by the anointing ceremony) over Matilda, that support would not necessarily be extended to Eustace. Even the anonymous author of the Gesta Stephani, until now firmly in the king’s camp, switched sides and proclaimed Henry over Stephen as the coming man, calling him ‘the right heir of England’.123

Henry made his way south from Carlisle, possibly bound directly for Normandy, possibly intending to fight Stephen and Eustace. But whatever Henry’s intentions, Stephen and Eustace were determined to obliterate him. Henry at sixteen – knighted and head of the Angevin party – was a far greater threat than the fourteen-year-old boy who had sailed to England to help his mother. The chronicler John of Hexham captured the spirit of exactly what was at stake: ‘There was between [Henry] and Eustace … a contest of arms, for they were rivals for the same crown.’124 It would be a fight to death.

Henry evaded capture, taking back roads to Bristol, despite Eustace’s dogged quest. The Gesta Stephani recorded the devastation of Eustace’s campaign: ‘They took and plundered everything they came upon, set fire to houses and churches, and, what was more cruel and inhuman to behold, fired the crops which had been reaped and stoked all over the fields, and consumed or destroyed everything edible they found.’125 This bitter civil war had terrible consequences for ordinary men and women, particularly those who lived in the path of battles. The period was peppered with crop failure, famine, wanton destruction, crime and disorder.

Atrocities were committed on both sides; when Matilda’s ally Miles of Gloucester sacked Worcester in 1139, he burned the city; his army (made up of domestic forces, not foreign mercenaries), ‘rabid and debauched, took those citizens who were not killed in the pillaging and led them away, coupled like dogs, into wretched captivity’.126 In revenge, Stephen saw nothing amiss when he attacked the countryside rather than Hereford or Bristol castles, destroying everything in his path that could feed the population; he left ‘nothing at all, as far as it lay in his power, that could serve his enemies for food or any purpose’.127 It was commonplace to kill all the livestock and burn the crops, to prevent them falling into enemy hands. Livestock levels would still not return to normal even by the middle of the 1150s.128

In the West Country, scene of some of the bitterest fighting, the author of the Gesta wrote of famine, the death of the local peasant population, with no one alive or able to bring in the harvest. Stephen’s domains were ‘reduced to a desert’.129 Henry of Huntingdon wrote despairingly in 1140: ‘Gaunt famine, following, wastes away, whom murder spares, with slow decay.’130 Neither side left anything for the general population to live on. Those people who survived the path of the marauding armies often starved to death.

In the counties beleaguered by war, acts of generosity and kindness were considered unusual enough by the chroniclers to record them. A local landlord in Gloucestershire, the Angevin stronghold, paid for a chapel to be built at Winchcombe Abbey, ‘so that both he and his men could have some refuge there from the incursions of robbers and the ruthless machinations of evil men’.131 Similarly, Waleran of Meulan was considered kind when he freed those prisoners he had taken hostage after he attacked Tewkesbury.132

It was not just Stephen’s and Matilda’s forces who ravaged the land; some opportunists took it upon themselves to establish their own armies in areas with little rule of law. The author of the Gesta wrote bitterly of the atrocities carried out by the Caldret brothers, who he thought were Flemish.133 The author of the Peterborough Chronicle, meanwhile, recorded that ‘both men and women [were] put in prison for their gold and silver, and tortured with pains unspeakable’, captured by local lords and held in their dungeons.134 It was generally not the nobility who suffered during this dreadful war, but the innocent local population who stood in the way of their sieges, occasional battles and devastation of the countryside.

The chroniclers recorded tales of torture and ransom to appropriate wealth, the fear engendered by Stephen’s Flemish mercenaries, and the lack of respect for church property. These sacred places were stripped of their valuables and graves were desecrated, often to build more castles upon. Some local lords even extorted money from villages in the form of a ‘protection’ tax, treating the chaos in those areas riven with fighting as a moneymaking opportunity.135

Oxfordshire experienced some of the bitterest fighting of the civil war, owing to Matilda’s presence after Londoners threw her out in 1141, and then her close proximity at Devizes. Both sides had held the county at various points during the war. Oxford, the county’s most important town, was the scene of an annual fair, and its central location made it a magnet for trade. It was a wealthy town, about the sixth richest in the kingdom.136 But Stephen partially burned and sacked it, and besieged the castle in an attempt to capture Matilda in 1142. Local people fled for their lives, leaving all their possessions behind. Matilda had eluded Stephen; but for the people of the town, the burning of Oxford and the loss of their possessions and income were catastrophic. Oxfordshire, one of the most agriculturally prosperous counties in England, suffered regular crop burnings and pillagings, with peasants conscripted into local armies and communities attacked, leaving widows and orphans unprotected. Oxford had still not completely recovered economically by 1155.

In many large towns, however, trade, markets and annual fairs tended to continue as usual, as did the inhabitants’ pleasures – their cockfighting, their wrestling matches, and their football matches where, if the town was large enough, members of the trades and the schools would align themselves into teams, cheered on by their friends and relatives.137

Chroniclers who recorded the woes of the civil war were for the most part from the areas affected by the fighting. If you lived in Essex, firmly in royal hands throughout the period, you would hardly have known that a war was happening at all.

Peasants continued to till their land and bring in the harvest, unimpeded by either army. Villagers went to church on Sundays and feast days, where they would stand for services presided over by a priest speaking Latin, which they did not understand. Churches were a riot of brilliant colour, from the lurid wall paintings depicting the horrors or joys of the Day of Judgement, to the effigies, tombs and carvings of saints decorated with the congregants’ favourite baubles and trinkets.

Community activities held in churches continued too – they were not just a place of prayer, baptism, weddings and funerals, but also the scene of festivals and plays. ‘Church-ales’ would be held here, effectively fundraisers for the church, which elicited money by selling ale.

Anarchy did not therefore exist in all areas, all of the time. Some form of government was exercised nearly everywhere – whether controlled by Stephen, Matilda, or the great magnates such as Ranulf of Chester, Robert’s son-in-law, who acted more or less independently. And each party of power minted coins and collected taxes.

***

Henry left England in January 1150. He would not return for three years, although Eustace continued to pursue him obsessively. Only one of them could be king.

He returned to Normandy to great acclaim, where his father officially pronounced him ‘duke’. As Henry’s star rose, Eustace’s declined. Although Henry was absent from England, he was now taken seriously as one of two contenders for the throne. Many believed he would be England’s next king, and as such his favour was frequently courted more than Stephen’s by the self-interested magnates whose lands straddled the English Channel.

In Normandy, Geoffrey finally captured Gerard Berlai, Louis’ friend and seneschal for the county of Poitou, in June 1150 after a year-long siege. Geoffrey, inspired by his reading of the Roman writer Vegetius, had bombarded Gerard’s seemingly impregnable double-walled castle with ‘Greek Fire’, a feared incendiary device of the ancient world.138

A desperate Eustace joined his brother-in-law Louis to attempt to annihilate Henry on the continent. Louis was pious. In 1147 he and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, had left their kingdom for two years for Jerusalem with the Second Crusade. Militarily it was a disaster, an utter humiliation for Louis. On his return he was dismayed not only at Henry’s and Geoffrey’s victories in Normandy, but also at the stupendous progress Henry had made during his absence in pursuing his claim to the English throne.

Louis feared such a powerful neighbour on his north-western border and joined Eustace to rout father and son. But the new duke and his father were untouchable; Normandy’s defences remained impregnable.

Louis, badgered by his adored advisor Abbot Suger, and then on Suger’s death in January 1151 by his new chief advisor, the cadaverous Cistercian monk Bernard of Clairvaux, was persuaded to pragmatism. He abandoned Eustace’s cause and reluctantly invited Henry and Geoffrey to Paris, to accept Henry’s homage for Normandy. And so, in August Henry and Geoffrey brought their prisoner Gerard Berlai to Paris, that mosquito-infested, unpaved city of mud and marsh, to meet their pious and tedious overlord, the king of France. It would be Henry’s first encounter with Louis’ queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine.

No one was prepared for the upheaval that was to follow.

VI

The encounter did not begin well. The great hall of Louis’ old palace, squatting at the end of the tiny Île de la Cité in the middle of the River Seine, reverberated with screams of rage. Bernard of Clairvaux, Louis, his brother and advisors, and Count Geoffrey of Anjou all competed to be heard. The noise of their frenzy echoed around the chamber.

When they saw Gerard Berlai presented to them, shackled, Louis and Bernard were furious. They demanded Gerard’s immediate release, and the return of the Vexin, a small territory midway between the Norman city of Rouen and the Capetian city of Paris. Whoever controlled this borderland of castles and rivers, whether the Norman dukes or the kings of France, held the advantage. Louis wanted it; Henry and Geoffrey were not prepared to give it up.

Bernard of Clairvaux loathed and distrusted the House of Anjou. He believed they were rogue counts, descended from the devilish fairy Melusine. He had called Geoffrey ‘that hammer of good men, and destroyer of the peace and liberty of the Church’, and in 1147 he had induced Pope Eugenius III to excommunicate Geoffrey for his besiegement of Berlai.139 Furthermore, Geoffrey had been noticeably absent from the Second Crusade, when nearly every other French nobleman had responded to Bernard’s call to take the cross.140 When Henry and Geoffrey walked into the great hall of Louis’ palace with their prisoner, tempers flared.

Louis took Geoffrey’s imprisonment of Gerard as a personal offence; he was incensed.141 He ranted that he would only accept Henry’s homage for Normandy (the ceremony where Henry would become Louis’ man and hold Normandy only by right of Louis) and arrange for the lifting of Geoffrey’s excommunication, if they released Gerard immediately. He demanded that they also cede the Vexin. Geoffrey, equally maddened, stormed out of the meeting, ‘tormented by vapours of black bile’, followed by Henry.142 They would not give up the Vexin, and they would not release Gerard. Geoffrey, in ferocious temper, cared nothing for his excommunication.

But almost immediately Henry and Geoffrey came back and ceded to both of Louis’ demands. Louis kept his word and bypassed his brother-in-law; Henry paid homage for Normandy where he was officially pronounced ‘duke’. Eustace’s claims were denied, by both Louis and the pope, who refused Stephen’s request to guarantee Eustace’s succession.143 Geoffrey, though, still smarting, refused to ask Bernard to lift his excommunication. In a fit of prophetic vengeance, Bernard pronounced that Geoffrey would be dead within two weeks.

Unperturbed by the prophecy, Henry and Geoffrey ‘joyfully’ left Paris.144 Henry went to Lisieux to meet his Norman barons, while Geoffrey travelled on to his castle of Château-du-Loir in Sarthe, near his capital, Le Mans. The late summer weather was extremely hot and Geoffrey took an evening swim in the river. He caught a fever, and by 7 September he was dead. He was thirty-eight years old.

In August, Henry had been a young man with enormous expectations, but only one dukedom in his hand. One month on, his father’s untimely death made him lord of Anjou and Maine, as well as duke of Normandy. He now controlled a vast swathe of northern France.

But in Paris in high summer, why did Henry and Geoffrey, having stormed out of the talks with Louis, return and give him everything he wanted?

The likeliest reason is that the new young duke of Normandy had made a bargain with Eleanor, Louis’ queen. Within a few months of meeting Henry, Eleanor and Louis would divorce; in May 1152, she would secretly marry Henry in her capital, Poitiers.

VII

Henry was eighteen years old when he and Eleanor met in Paris in 1151 and made their bargain. He was tall with a stocky, muscled body and a compelling face. He was charismatic, athletic, clever, educated, empathetic and ambitious. He was already known as a skilful (and lucky) commander of armies. He possessed a restlessness, an unquiet energy that kept his body in perpetual motion. Henry could not sit still.

More stories have been invented about Eleanor of Aquitaine than any other medieval woman. Her life has been imagined by chroniclers, historians, playwrights, poets, romantic novelists and film-makers for over 800 years. She has been portrayed as a vixen, a sexual predator and deviant; as the poisoner of her husband’s mistress; as a desperately unhappy woman in a desperately unhappy marriage; as Shakespeare’s ‘canker’d grandam’; as a model of erudition, beauty and queenly virtue; as the leader of an army of bare-breasted crusader women; a feisty adventuress; a feminist prototype; an intellectual powerhouse and influential patron of the arts; and as the initiator of the famous troubadour courts of love. Although Eleanor undoubtedly grew up at Poitiers among the troubadours, and was the recipient of the unrequited passion of the poet Bernart de Ventadorn – who would follow her to England and Henry’s court, proclaiming, ‘When the cold wind blows from the direction of your country, it seems to me that I felt a breeze from paradise, for love of the lady’ – almost everything that has been written about Eleanor is either a half-truth, wrong, or ultimately unknowable.145

The real Eleanor is a chimera, as illusive and fleeting as quicksilver. Such is her fame, we desire to possess her, yet we know almost nothing about her. The historian Richard Barber notes that ‘to print out all of the records and chronicle entries about Eleanor would take less than a hundred pages’.146 The written record is notably small for one of the most famous figures in European history. And that written record for the most part relates to the last fifteen years of her life – she died in her early eighties. Eleanor’s earlier life remains in the shadows.

What, then, do we know of Eleanor? She was the daughter of William X of Aquitaine and Aénor of Châtellerault, and was born in about 1122 in or near Poitiers; some rumours put her birthplace at Château de Belin, near Bordeaux.147 If we take this as the year of her birth (the records are not exact), she was twenty-nine years old when the eighteen-year-old Henry rode into Paris.

Aquitaine was the largest and the richest of the duchies that owed nominal allegiance to the French crown, although its rulers refused to pay homage to the French kings.148 To the north its border was the River Loire, and to the south the mountains of the Pyrenees. It stretched west to east from the Atlantic to the Massif Central. The territory of its dukes, consisting of several different counties, dwarfed that of the French kings. They resided in their palace at Poitiers, closer to Paris than their southern border, and their subjects treated them as kings.149 Their palace, a Merovingian fortress, sat at the top of a hill encircled by the River Clain. They certainly behaved as kings, encouraging ties of friendship between themselves and their nobility, taking clerical advice to increase their religious authority, and even acquiring relics. Relics held a cult status in the medieval world, a tangible expression of the story of Christ and his promise. Eleanor’s ancestor Duke William V, or the Great, gained the gory prize of the head of John the Baptist for the church of Saint-Jean-d’Angély.150 This duke was apparently called ‘Augustus’ by the pope in recognition of his power.

During the tenth century, the counts of Poitou had expanded their lands and became so powerful that they exercised quasi-royal authority. The relatively weak Frankish kings to the north rarely ventured south, except on their way to shrines such as St James’s at Compostela, or to Rome.151 They were obliged to grant Aquitaine’s rulers the title ‘duke’ towards the end of the tenth century. These dukes expanded their power in the eleventh century, to incorporate all the territory Eleanor brought Louis as her marriage portion. They paid lip service only to their royal overlords. They were rich, their wealth buttressed by fertile vineyards, timber from the vast forests, fish, salt, and trade from Aquitaine’s sea ports, La Rochelle and Bordeaux, on the Atlantic coast.

Eleanor’s family was colourful. We assume that she would have been brought up with the tales of her strong ancestresses, wielding power in their own right – Agnes of Burgundy, her grandmother Philippa of Toulouse – or as regents or wives, and sharing in inheritance, unlike their sisters to the north, where primogeniture was slowly but inexorably becoming commonplace

She would also likely have known of her grandfather William IX, ‘the troubadour duke’, who had died soon after Eleanor’s birth, in 1126. This lotus-eating duke was famous for his poetry, his affairs, his defiance of the church, his crusading expeditions, his success as a warrior, and even of occasional friendship with Muslims allied to Christians. If Eleanor was born in 1122, and not 1124 as some historians contend, she may even have had memories of him. It was about his love life, however, that the most scurrilous stories of the troubadour duke were told. In 1094 he married Philippa, daughter of the count of Toulouse. This was Philippa’s second marriage; she was the widow of the king of Aragon. Philippa’s decision to marry William was political – she wanted him to pursue her claim to rule in Toulouse. And he did, fighting on her behalf, for over thirty years.152 William IX ultimately lost, although Eleanor would later take up her grandmother’s claim.

Philippa silently tolerated William’s numerous affairs. The most notorious was with the married viscountess of Châtellerault, called ‘Dangereuse’. She and Eleanor’s grandfather lived openly together at his palace at Poitiers, Dangereuse residing in the Maubergeon Tower there. We do not know what became of Philippa. She either retired to Fontevraud, that extraordinary foundation on the borders of Poitou and Anjou where the community of men and women lived under the direction of the abbess, or she outlived William quietly and anonymously, away from him and his mistress.153

Dangereuse was Eleanor’s maternal grandmother. Before she began her affair with the duke, she had a daughter, Aénor, with her husband the viscount of Châtellerault. The duke arranged for the marriage of his son, also William, to Aénor, probably at the instigation of his mistress while she still resided with her husband. Philippa’s feelings on the choice of bride for her son are unrecorded.

William was damned by churchmen for this affair; to live with a married woman, particularly while still married, was an affront to God. The bishop of Poitiers excommunicated him, and a monk from the Limousin explained away the duke’s disastrous expedition on crusade, suffering the death of most of his army at the hands of the Turks in Anatolia, as punishment for his adultery: ‘In truth he bore nothing of the name Christian; he was, as everyone knows, an ardent lover of women, and therefore unstable in all his actions.’154

Contemporaries were ambivalent in their attitudes towards him. Although to many churchmen he was damned, to some, this duke, the first of the troubadours, was worthy of praise for his wit and his wondrous (albeit often obscene) poetry. A thirteenth-century source described him as ‘one of the greatest courtiers of the world and one of the greatest deceivers of women … And he knew well how to compose and sing.’155

He died in 1126, although his influence was still felt in the reign of his son Duke William X. This duke was educated at the cathedral school in Poitiers. Yet although he encouraged the troubadours to frequent his court, he was not a poet like his father. He seems to have been rather in his father’s shadow, as the children of able and famous parents often are. His greatest military success was capturing the area around the seaport of La Rochelle. He fell victim to Bernard of Clairvaux’s wrath when he supported the contentious antipope, Anacletus II, in 1130. Anacletus’ ancestry was too much for Bernard to bear, for he had a Jewish great-grandfather, who had converted to Christianity in the middle of the eleventh century, and changed his name from Baruch to Benedict. Voltaire would call him ‘the Jewish Pope’. For this travesty, Duke William X’s lands were placed under papal interdict, and the sainted Bernard denounced him with his typical incandescent rancour.

Nevertheless, William X capitulated to Bernard’s demands that he give up support for Anacletus. In 1135, he agreed to go on pilgrimage to the shrine of St James at Compostela. He left Eleanor and her younger sister Petronilla in Bordeaux, at the castle of l’Ombrière.

We know nothing of Eleanor’s family life, or her early education. Her father had one brother, Raymond, who would seek his fortune as prince of Antioch. She also had five paternal aunts, but frustratingly we know practically nothing about them, or the extent of any interaction with, or influence over, Eleanor. One became abbess of the convent of Notre-Dame at Saintes, and another, Agnes, was married in 1134 to King Ramiro II of Aragon.

Eleanor’s mother, Aénor, for whom she was named (Eleanor means ‘another Aénor’ in Latin) died in 1130, when Eleanor was about eight years old. Her elder brother, Aigret, died in the same year.

Eleanor was close to Petronilla, who would stay with her, and to her mother’s family, particularly her uncle, Raoul de Faye. He would be extremely important to her later in her life.

The men in her family were well educated, with a good knowledge of Latin, but we know little about how the women were educated. We do know, however, that it was commonplace for tutors to be attached to courts, and there is no reason to suppose that Eleanor was not educated. She probably learned to read and she knew Latin. She was not born to rule and did not even appear in a document until July 1129.156 What is much better known is the fame of the cathedral schools of Poitiers and Saint-Hilaire, and the cultural sophistication of the court, with its songs of courtly love written and performed by both the nobility and poor poets.

Eleanor, on her brother’s death, became her father’s heir. William X was still young and intended to marry again in the hope of having more sons. Even in the more liberal south, female rule was problematic, and it was in his interests to shore up the succession with a male heir. In 1136, he had attempted to marry the widow of the lord of Cognac, but she was forced instead to marry the count of Angoulême. For this was a period where it was not uncommon for heiresses to be kidnapped and coerced into marriage for their inheritances.

Eleanor’s father would never return from his pilgrimage to Compostela. He died suddenly on Good Friday 1137, a scant two days away from his destination. He was thirty-eight years old. His death catapulted the fifteen-year-old Eleanor to the position of duchess of Aquitaine in her own right.

Before he left, although he had made no plans for her marriage, Duke William had entrusted his daughter, the richest heiress in Christendom, to the guardianship of his nominal overlord, Louis the Fat. On William’s death, Louis promptly denied any claim that could have been made by Eleanor’s paternal uncle, Raymond, far away in Antioch, and instead betrothed Eleanor to his son, also named Louis. Eleanor’s sister Petronilla had no share of their father’s inheritance. All was subsumed by the French crown; a Capetian king had never been so closely involved in the affairs of Aquitaine.157

Louis VI, although his size had earned him the soubriquet ‘the Fat’, was an impressive and able king. He was, according to a contemporary source, ‘huge in body, but no smaller in act and thought’.158 For such a wily ruler, the marriage of his son and heir to the heiress to the greatest duchy in France was an obvious and necessary step.

Louis was seventeen. He was his father’s second son, and like Eleanor it had not been intended that he rule. But in October 1131 his older brother Philip died when his horse fell over a ‘devilish’ pig in the rutted and unpaved streets of a Parisian suburb. A source describing the prince’s demise paints an uglier picture, of the young man chasing a squire for fun through Paris’s streets, when he fell and died.159 Young Louis reluctantly left the peace of the cloister, where he had been preparing for a career in the church, to learn statecraft. In October 1131, he was anointed king at Reims Cathedral in his father’s lifetime, a not uncommon practice of the Frankish kings.

Young Louis, his marriage arranged, promptly left Paris in the summer of 1137 and travelled south to Bordeaux with his mentor Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, where he and Eleanor were married on 25 July at Saint-André Cathedral. Eleanor was crowned alongside Louis, ‘with the diadem of the kingdom’.160 Eleanor gave Louis a wedding gift – a beautiful pear-shaped vase of rock crystal. At least one historian believes it may have been a christening gift to Eleanor from her grandfather, William IX,161 most probably gifted to him by the Muslim King Imad al-dawla of Saragossa in Spain.162 This vase is one of the few objects associated with Eleanor that survives today; it sits in the Louvre in Paris.

What do we know of Louis? His seal in 1137 shows a long-haired young man, but we know little else of his appearance.163 He had now spent six years, since the death of his elder brother, preparing for rule, yet the aura of piety never left him. Unusually, there was no contemporary gossip of Louis having a mistress. Much later, when he was married to his third wife, Adela of Champagne, it was suggested that a prostitute be sent to him, to hasten his recovery from an illness. The chronicler Gerald of Wales noted this religious man’s response: ‘If nothing else will cure me, let the Lord do his will by me, since it is better to die ill and chaste than to live as an adulterer.’164

Eleanor and Louis began their journey to Paris almost immediately after their marriage. They stopped at Poitiers on the way, where Louis was invested duke of Aquitaine. But Louis’ father, meanwhile, was on his deathbed. Louis the Fat died just days after his son’s marriage, on 1 August. Louis and Eleanor, France’s new king and queen, remained in Poitiers, where they received the news just after Louis’ ducal investiture, and were crowned on 8 August.

What did Louis, now king of France, inherit in the summer of 1137? The French kingdom had emerged out of the remnants of the mighty Carolingian Empire. In 751, Pepin the Short, the mayor of the palace in the service of the last Merovingian king Childeric III, seized the throne from his master. Pope Stephen II countenanced his appropriation of the throne in return for a donation of land in central Italy, known as ‘the Donation of Pepin’, to the papacy.§ Pepin was duly crowned king of the Franks; he was the first of the Carolingian kings.

Pepin followed the common practice of the Frankish kings, and at his death he divided his lands between his two sons, Charlemagne (the Great Charles), and Carloman. When Carloman died in 771, his famous brother become sole master of a vast Frankish Empire. Charlemagne reached the apotheosis of his empire-building when Pope Leo III crowned him emperor of the Romans on Christmas Day 800, accompanied by the words ‘Most pious Augustus, crowned by God, the great and peace-giving Emperor’.165 Charlemagne ruled, either directly or indirectly, lands that encompassed modern-day France, the Spanish March, Germany, Flanders, much of Italy and central Europe. It was the largest land mass in Europe held in a single hand since the fall of Rome in the West.

But Charlemagne’s empire did not long survive his death; his descendants did not possess his extraordinary abilities. His only surviving son, Louis the Pious, held his father’s domains, but when he died in 840, the lands were divided among his three sons – Charles the Bald, Louis the German and Lothair I – at the Treaty of Verdun of 843.166 Lothair took a conglomerate of territory (the ‘Middle Kingdom’) including the lands that would become known as ‘Lotharingia’ – Lorraine, Provence, Burgundy and Charlemagne’s territories in Italy. He kept his grandfather’s imperial capital, Aachen, and the title. This ‘Middle Kingdom’, however, would not survive, and its lands were eventually absorbed into the east and the west Frankish kingdoms.

Louis the German took the eastern part of Charlemagne’s empire, lands which would eventually form Germany. Their half-brother Charles the Bald took the west, uniting Aquitaine, Gascony, Septimania, and an area that encompassed most of the rest of modern France. It was from the remains of the western part of the Frankish Empire that Louis would, nearly 300 years later, inherit his kingdom.

The western Frankish Empire, however, began to disintegrate. By the beginning of the tenth century, Aquitaine, Brittany and Flanders, under their ever more powerful dukes and counts, acted independently of the Crown. In 911, Henry’s ancestor Rollo, a Viking raider most probably from Norway, was given all the lands from the River Epte to the sea by a weak King Charles III (the Simple), in return for his homage and conversion to Christianity. These lands would become known as Normandy (land of the Northmen).

When Hugh Capet, a count of Paris, was elected king by the Frankish magnates after the death of the last Carolingian monarch in 987, Louis VII’s house emerged. Hugh Capet gave his name to the dynasty – the Capetians – which would rule France until 1328, when the throne passed to their Valois cousins. Yet Hugh Capet’s and his descendants’ grasp on their lordships was minimal, as even such relatively small counties as Blois and Anjou paid their monarch little heed.167

Louis the Fat had done more than any of his predecessors to increase the power of the French crown, gradually extending their influence outside the region around Paris and the Île de France. But his success was limited, and the territory inherited by his son, Louis VII, was only a tiny area surrounded by over-mighty vassals – the count of Flanders, the count of Champagne, the duke of Burgundy, the duke of Brittany, the count of Blois, the count of Anjou and the duke of Normandy.

With his marriage to Eleanor, Louis immediately appropriated the enormous riches of his new wife for the French crown, and called himself duke of Aquitaine. Orderic Vitalis noted that ‘Louis obtained the kingdom of the Franks and the duchy of Aquitaine, which none of his ancestors had held.’168 In theory, through his fabulous marriage, his power was already greater than his father’s.

There was, however, a problem with the marriage; according to the church, it was incestuous, or consanguineous. Eleanor and Louis shared a common ancestor, King Robert II of France, which made them third cousins once removed. Church law would not allow couples to marry if they were related within seven degrees, or if they shared one great-great-great-great-great-grandparent.169

Mutterings about the irregularity of their marriage began almost immediately. Bernard was never an advocate, and wrote to Bishop Stephen of Palestrina to complain about it in 1143, accusing Louis of sanctimoniously haranguing other couples about problematic marriages while his also violated the law.170

But it would seem that in Bordeaux in 1137, although Eleanor may have been aware that she was marrying against church law, Louis was not. And even had Louis the Fat known of the problem as he took advantage of the death of William X of Aquitaine to marry off his son to its wealthy new duchess, Eleanor was far too rich for him to care. Aquitaine was roughly a third of the size of modern France, and its acquisition was irresistible to a king in need of a kingdom.

Louis VII adored his wife – John of Salisbury says he loved her ‘almost beyond reason’ – but Eleanor was unhappy.171 The early years of her marriage to Louis were marred with disappointment, war and heartbreak, marked by a jostling for power with Louis’ formidable mother, Adelaide of Maurienne, his mentor, Abbot Suger, and his powerful advisors.

Louis had spent his early life in the cloisters and had fully imbibed the teaching of the church fathers as to the dangers of sexual desire to the immortal soul. We may assume that their sex life was not particularly fulfilling for Eleanor, and she had limited success in influencing her husband from the privacy of their bedchamber.

Although at the very beginning, Eleanor’s new position by Louis’ side caused her jealous mother-in-law to flounce from court to retire to her estates – she accused Eleanor of spending too much money – and Abbot Suger to devote himself more and more to the rebuilding of Saint-Denis in a magnificent Gothic style, there was little room for her to exercise power; she was soon marginalised. She certainly did not wield the sort of power Adelaide had done as Louis the Fat’s consort, constantly at his side. Louis listened instead to his powerful advisors, particularly Raoul de Vermandois, his cousin and seneschal of France.

Eleanor did not enjoy an easy relationship with Louis’ other close advisors. She loathed some of her husband’s inner circle, particularly Thierry Galeran, who had been an advisor of Louis’ father. John of Salisbury wrote that he was ‘a eunuch whom the queen had always hated and mocked’.172

Louis’ military ineptitude was disappointing to Eleanor. He failed to put down a rebellion in Poitiers, and his campaign in Toulouse to conquer territories she claimed through her paternal grandmother Philippa also ended in failure.

There was another strain on the relationship, one which had unforeseen and dreadful consequences. Eleanor’s sister Petronilla appears to have fallen in love with Count Raoul de Vermandois. Although Raoul was much older than Petronilla, blind in one eye, and already married to the sister of King Stephen, Eleanor pushed hard for a divorce so that he and Petronilla could marry. She had no effective power base, and her sister’s marriage to Raoul would feasibly be a way of clawing out influence for herself with Louis and his inner circle.

Catastrophe followed; Raoul was branded an ‘adulterous tyrant’ by Bernard, and the newly-weds were excommunicated by the pope, who placed France under an interdict. In an age where religion was all-pervasive, a papal interdict meant that no religious rites could be performed – no baptisms, no marriages, no burials. It was a dreadful punishment. The pope described the king as ‘a boy who must be instructed’ in how to behave, and Stephen’s brother, Theobald IV of Blois-Champagne, promptly went to war with Louis over their repudiated sister. This war resulted in a massacre at Vitry, where Louis ordered the burning of the church where 1,300 people had sought sanctuary. All were burned alive and the town became known as Vitry-le-Brûlé – Vitry the Burned.173 In a strange accident of history, the town’s Jews, who had not sought sanctuary in the church, survived, and Louis spared them. For some time after the horrific slaughter, this small town in Champagne hosted a largely Jewish population.

Louis’ delayed horror at his own behaviour led to feelings of enormous guilt and grief. He turned once more to his old mentor, Abbot Suger. On 11 June 1144, Suger’s magnum opus, the marvellous cathedral of Saint-Denis, was complete. At the dedication ceremony, Louis gave away Eleanor’s wedding present, the rock crystal vase, to his old friend. Eleanor may well have taken this as a sign that her marriage was in trouble. Suger, though, was delighted and commissioned an inscription for the base of the vase. It read: ‘As a bride, Eleanor gave this vase to King Louis, the king to me, and Suger to the saints … as a tribute of his great love.’174

But despite war, lost battles and family discord, Eleanor’s greatest problem was her inability to conceive. The marriage was under strain, and the chronicler Robert of Torigni tells us that as early as 1143 ‘a dislike had sprung up’ between Eleanor and Louis.175

The failure to produce an heir was a disaster for any medieval queen. Eleanor’s primary purpose was to bear sons to succeed their father. When Bernard of Clairvaux promised her she would conceive if she helped bring about a peace between Louis, the pope and Theobald of Champagne, a desperate Eleanor agreed. Within a year Bernard’s saintly intercession and the queen’s prayers appeared to have worked – or at least partially – when she gave birth to a daughter, and not the wanted son and heir, in 1145. She was named Marie, possibly in tribute to the Virgin Mary, to whom Bernard and Eleanor had prayed for a child.176

At the first Christmas court after Marie’s birth, Louis, in an uncharacteristically ebullient mood fired by religious fervour and the hope of absolution for the slaughter at Vitry, proposed a crusade. A year earlier, in late December 1144, Christendom had watched in horror as the emir Imad ad-Din Zengi (or Nur-ad-Din, meaning light of the religion), Muslim ruler of Aleppo, seized the crusader state of Edessa, based around the city of Şanlıurfa in southern Turkey. An appalled pope and the Christian kings of western Europe demanded ‘infidel’ blood. Now Louis determined to take back the city for Christendom.

It was Bernard, however, who pushed the initiative as the uncharismatic and weak Louis was unable to fire up his nobility for a crusade. Four months later at Easter, in March 1146, the spiritually irresistible Bernard preached the Second Crusade at Vézelay Abbey, appearing before a massive crowd and crying, ‘Hasten then to expiate your sins by victories over the Infidels, and let the deliverance of the holy places be the reward of your repentance.’ Louis, inspired as always by his powerful mentor, vowed to take the cross to protect the Holy Land for Christianity.

Eleanor would accompany him. She was the first queen of France or England to venture on crusade.

Why did Eleanor choose to go? The journey, she knew, would be hazardous. She may well have preferred to stay behind in France. Despite later entirely false claims that Eleanor was thirsty for battle, leading a battalion of bare-breasted women into war, dressed as the Amazonian Queen Penthesilea, it is doubtful that Eleanor wanted to travel thousands of miles from home. It would be hot, uncomfortable and dangerous. But she had no choice. As queen, Eleanor’s primary role was to conceive, and now in her mid-twenties and with only a daughter, she could not afford to be parted from Louis for the two or more years he would be away from France.

William of Newburgh lamented Eleanor’s presence on crusade as providing the opportunity to ‘sin’: ‘The king, whose love for his young wife was a jealous one, thought he should not leave her behind and decided to take her to war. Many other nobles did likewise and brought their wives along. And as the wives could not do without their serving women, a whole host of women found their way into that Christian camp where chastity should have reigned. And this was an occasion for sin in our army.’177 Nevertheless, at the great church of Saint-Denis on 11 June 1147, both Eleanor and Louis received the papal blessing and departed overland for Constantinople.

Their journey would irrevocably change her attitude to her marriage, and fix in the popular imagination for evermore the ‘black legend’ of Eleanor of Aquitaine – the image of the queen of France as incestuous, a nymphomaniac, an adulteress, a ‘jezebel’ and a ‘whore’.178 The legend endures; as late as 2002, a French historian accused Eleanor of being ‘a real bitch who could think about nothing but power and sex.’179

VIII

It took Eleanor, Louis and their army of crusaders four months to reach Constantinople. They arrived on 4 October 1147, where they were welcomed by the emperor, Manuel Komnenos, who offered Eleanor and Louis the use of his hunting lodge, the Philopatium.180 They stayed for a week and a half, sightseeing and attending banquets, and departed on 15 October.

Meanwhile the army of Louis’ crusading partner, Conrad III of Germany, had been devastated by attacks from the Seljuk Turks. The German crusaders were overwhelmed by completely unknown warfare – exceptionally swift horses, whose riders quickly deployed bows and arrows – and unable to retaliate effectively as they were encumbered by their heavy armour, typically consisting of a chain-mail hauberk and helmet.

Louis now joined his army to the remains of Conrad’s, and the pair departed along the coast, bound for Ephesus. They arrived on 20 December, where they were warned by Manuel Komnenos’s ambassadors that a huge force of Turks awaited them, and advised them not to continue.

Conrad, who had suffered injuries in the attacks on his army, chose to accompany the ambassadors back to Constantinople. Louis, however, insisted on pressing on, ‘forewarned in vain’, along the coast of Anatolia.181 He and his army were not lucky. They were relentlessly harassed by the Seljuk Turks, the terrain was hostile, supplies were scarce, and they suffered attack after attack. The first was on Christmas Eve. The most severe was a few days later, on 6 January 1148, while they attempted to cross Mount Cadmus. This was an enormous army of thousands of soldiers and pilgrims, reaching up to six miles in length, snaking its way through the Anatolian mountains.182 Louis brought up the rear with his guard. The baggage train and foot soldiers were in the middle; presumably Eleanor was here, the safest place from attack, together with the unarmed pilgrims and the other women. The cavalry were at the front. One of Eleanor’s vassals, Geoffrey of Rancon, led the army with Louis’ maternal uncle, Count Amadeus II of Maurienne. But the different parts of the army, as a result of poor communication and poor leadership, became separated as Geoffrey and Amadeus continued on without waiting. The Turks then ambushed, and they struck at the most vulnerable part of the crusader army – the baggage train. Hundreds fled, and many hurtled down the cliffs to their deaths; the Turks slaughtered those they caught. Louis and his guard rushed to defend the baggage train, but the Turks murdered Louis’ personal guard, forcing him to scramble up a rock and defend himself.

Louis survived, and the remnants of his army gradually came together again. But he was humiliated, and William of Tyre wrote: ‘That day the glorious reputation of the Franks was lost through a misfortune most fatal and disastrous for the Christians; their valour, up to this time formidable to the nations, was crushed to the earth. Henceforth, it was as a mockery in the eyes of those unclean races to whom it had formerly been a terror.’183

Now, however, Louis realised the imperative for discipline, although those whom the majority believed had led them to disaster – Eleanor’s vassal and Louis’ uncle – went unpunished. Louis would not reprimand his own uncle, but all the Poitevins, including the queen, were tarnished by association, and Odo of Deuil wrote that Geoffrey of Rancon ‘earned our everlasting hatred’.184 The small force of about 130 men brought by the Knights Templar were the most effective part of his army, and now Louis ceded control and allowed them to lead.

Supplies were scarce and the army was starving. It was bitterly cold as they picked their way across the mountains in mid-winter. The army limped on. Battered and demoralised, it took them nearly a month to reach Attalia, where they hoped to replenish their supplies. But the town was poor and there was nothing to buy – no horses, little food, no clothes, and certainly no ships to take them to the Latin Kingdom. Louis and Eleanor decided to set sail for Antioch with a small force, leaving the army to travel by land to meet them. Less than half the army they left behind would make it, and most of the pilgrims starved to death or were murdered by the Turks. Thousands died.185

Finally, on 19 March 1148, Eleanor and Louis arrived at the port of Saint-Simeon at Antioch. Here at the court of Eleanor’s paternal uncle, Prince Raymond, they stayed for nearly two weeks, recuperating and planning.186

Raymond was ruler of Antioch by right of his marriage to Constance, daughter of Bohemund II, a marriage facilitated by Fulk, now king of Jerusalem. Raymond was only a few years older than Eleanor, born in 1115. He welcomed his niece and the French with generosity and hospitality. Antioch must have appeared incredibly exotic to the Franks. Prince Raymond served Middle Eastern dishes, including sugar; hot baths and even soap were available.187 Eleanor and Raymond were delighted to see one another and spent hours talking privately. The chronicler William of Tyre describes him as ‘a lord of noble descent … the handsomest of the princes of the earth, a man of charming affability and conversation’.

Raymond was keen to impress Eleanor and Louis, hoping the arrival of a French crusader army would help him increase his power in northern Syria. William of Tyre speculated on Raymond’s motives: ‘he felt a lively hope that with the assistance of the king and his troops he would be able to subjugate the neighbouring cities, namely Aleppo, Shaizar and several others. Nor would this hope have been futile could he have induced the king and his chief men to undertake the work.’188 The plan was self-serving; but it made sense for both Raymond and the French crusaders. Louis’ original intention was, after all, to take back Edessa, which would be made easier by the capture of Aleppo first.189

Louis, however, may have feared for the poor state of his army, ravaged and depleted by the months it had taken them to cross Anatolia. He refused to fight alongside Raymond. William of Tyre wrote that he had changed his mind about taking Edessa, deciding he did not want to delay his visit to the Holy Land any longer; he ‘ardently desired to go to Jerusalem to fulfil his vows’.190 But Eleanor disagreed. Speed was now important; Suger, acting as regent in the royal couple’s absence, was sending alarming reports of an uprising by Louis’ brother, Robert of Dreux, and begged the king to return.

Eleanor’s intense conversations with Raymond may well have included discussion as to who would inherit Aquitaine. As she and Louis had no male heir, it is imaginable that Raymond put his own claim to Eleanor. Eleanor and Louis, fundamentally disagreeing on the direction of the crusade and possibly on the inheritance of Eleanor’s own duchy, had a vicious fight which ended in Eleanor refusing to accompany Louis to Jerusalem, threatening to withdraw her vassals, and asking for a divorce.

It was Eleanor who first told Louis that their marriage was ‘incestuous’ during their ferocious argument in Antioch. John of Salisbury wrote: ‘[W]hen the King made haste to tear her away, she mentioned their kinship, saying it was not lawful for them to remain together as man and wife, since they were related in the fourth and fifth degrees. At this the king was deeply moved; and although he loved the queen almost beyond reason he consented to divorce her if his counsellors and the French nobility would allow it.’191 Eleanor, it seems, knew that there had been some problems when they married, but John suggests that Louis did not, and that Eleanor was the first to tell him.

But the sources go further. She was later accused by some contemporary chroniclers of having an adulterous – and incestuous – affair with her uncle Raymond.

These sources are William of Tyre and John of Salisbury. Both were contemporaries, but both wrote about Antioch many years later – John after a period of fifteen years, and William twenty to thirty years later. William was in France when Eleanor and Louis were in Antioch, but he professed to have followed the crusade closely.192 And although John was with the papal court in Tusculum (Frascati) at the time, he was with the royal pair and their entourage when they stopped at Tusculum on their way back to France, and he must have heard the gossip. John wrote that:

the most Christian king of the Franks reached Antioch, after the destruction of his armies in the east, and was nobly entertained there by Prince Raymond … He was as it happened the queen’s uncle, and owed the king loyalty, affection and respect for many reasons. But whilst they remained there … the attentions paid by the prince to the queen, and his constant, indeed almost continuous conversation with her, aroused the king’s suspicions. These were greatly strengthened when the queen wished to remain behind, although the king was preparing to leave, and the prince made every effort to keep her, if the king would give his consent.193

William of Tyre claimed that an embittered Raymond was behind Eleanor’s anger towards Louis:

Raymond had conceived the idea that by [Louis’] aid he might be able to enlarge the principality of Antioch … When Raymond found that he could not induce the king to join him, his attitude changed. Frustrated in his ambitious designs, he began to hate the king’s ways; he openly plotted against him and took means to do him injury. He resolved also to deprive him of his wife, either by force or by secret intrigue. The queen readily assented to this design, for she was a foolish woman. Her conduct before and after this time showed her to be, as we have said, far from circumspect. Contrary to her royal dignity, she disregarded her marriage vows and was unfaithful to her husband.194

This is a damning portrait of Eleanor. She is parodied as a ‘foolish’ woman, easily influenced to commit adultery with her uncle. Later writers, taking their cue from William and John, believed that the queen’s behaviour had been, at the very least, ‘scandalous’. Gervase of Canterbury told of ‘discord’, and wrote, tantalisingly, that events happened which one should be silent on.195 Richard of Devizes, although he called Eleanor ‘a woman without compare’, went on to say in the margin that ‘Many know what I would that none of us knew. This same queen, during the time of her first husband, was at Jerusalem [sic, Antioch]. Let no one say any more about it. I too know it well. Keep silent.’196

We will never know if Eleanor slept with her handsome, clever and charismatic uncle. We do know, however, that they enjoyed one another’s company immensely, and that their close relationship in Antioch maddened Louis.

The most compelling evidence of marital discord and Eleanor’s ‘bad behaviour’ comes from the unimpeachable Abbot Suger. Suger had obviously heard of problems between Eleanor and Louis, for he wrote from France to Louis in 1149: ‘Concerning the queen your wife, we venture to congratulate you, if we may upon the extent to which you suppress your anger, if there be anger, until with God’s will you return to your own kingdom and see to these matters and others.’197

Louis, meanwhile, urged on by his advisor and Eleanor’s adversary Thierry Galeran, refused Eleanor a divorce.

Louis may have been ready to agree to it, but Galeran persuaded him that to return to France with a failed crusade and no wife would injure his reputation. And so he slipped away from Raymond’s court in the middle of the night, dragging Eleanor away from Antioch and on to Jerusalem. William of Tyre recorded that Louis’ ‘coming had been attended with glory … and his departure was ignominious’.198

Whether or not Louis believed that Eleanor had committed adultery, there were evidently some in his entourage ready to accuse the queen. It is probable that she and Raymond spoke together in the language of the southern Aquitaine, the langue d’oc (oc meaning ‘yes’) or Provençal. It probably sounded similar to modern Italian, and was unfathomable to most northerners, who spoke the completely different dialect of langue d’oȉl. Although Eleanor spoke the langue d’oȉl fluently, by choosing to converse with her uncle in the Aquitaine tongue, it may have increased suspicion of her. On their way back to France, on 9 October, the royal couple arrived at the papal court at Tusculum, where they had been invited to stay by Pope Eugenius III. Here, they discussed their marital problems with Eugenius.

John of Salisbury wrote an account of the pope’s intercession; evidently neither Eleanor nor Louis was calm. Eleanor had been kidnapped on the way to Italy. Although she was rescued almost immediately, this, added to her violent arguments with Louis, his refusal to divorce her and his ignoring of her military advice, must have made her agitated. She also learned at Tusculum of Raymond’s brutal death in battle, at the end of June 1149. Nur ad-Din defeated Raymond and his allies at the battle of Inab. To celebrate, he decapitated Raymond and sent his head and right arm to the caliph of Baghdad.199 Raymond had apparently fought valiantly, ‘like the high-spirited and courageous warrior he was’.200 We have no evidence, but Eleanor may have blamed Louis for refusing to help Raymond militarily, and for his bloody death.

It was in this atmosphere that Eleanor and Louis put their cases to Eugenius, who, acting the role of marriage counsellor and friend, sought to heal their relationship.

John recorded that:

He reconciled the king and queen after hearing severally the accounts each gave of the estrangement begun at Antioch, and forbade any future mention of their consanguinity: confirming their marriage, both orally and in writing, he commanded under pain of anathema that no word should be spoken against it and that it should not be dissolved under any pretext whatever. This ruling plainly delighted the king, for he loved the queen passionately, in an almost childish way. The pope made them sleep in the same bed, which he had had decked with priceless hangings of his own; and daily during their brief visit he strove by friendly converse to restore love between them.201

They departed the following day. The pope cried as they left: ‘though he was a stern man, he could not hold back his tears’.202 But he had succeeded. There would be no divorce for the king and queen of France. Eugenius’ intervention worked – or at least for the time being.

Eleanor and Louis arrived back in Paris in November 1149, over two years after they had left on their crusade. The experience had been bruising for them both: Eleanor appears to have lost all respect for Louis, and Louis in turn allowed her no power once they returned to France. Yet Eleanor was pregnant again – she may have conceived at Tusculum in the pope’s beautiful bed – and Louis was once more full of hope for a son. She gave birth to another daughter, Alix, in 1150.

Alix’s birth finally persuaded Louis that the marriage was incestuous in the eyes of God, and to grant Eleanor a divorce. Ever pious, Louis now believed God would never give them a son. The pair disliked one another, and the prevailing view of the church – following the teachings of Hippocrates – was that a woman who did not enjoy sex would not produce a ‘seed’, and would therefore not conceive.203 The marriage was by this point so dreadful that it was difficult to imagine, even for Louis, that she would become pregnant again. The death of Abbot Suger – who had been a strong advocate of the marriage – in January 1151 allowed other voices to be heard, particularly Bernard of Clairvaux’s.

Why did Eleanor push so hard for a divorce? She is rumoured to have said that Louis was ‘more monk than man’, a statement which implies incompatibility, whether sexual or otherwise.204 But leaving aside any marital discord or a lack of power in her ancestral lands, Eleanor was an aristocratic woman who had lived all her life at a court, whether her father’s or her husband’s. Although we have very little evidence of her personality for this period in her life, we have a great deal for her last fifteen years. The older Eleanor was intelligent, brave, determined, a capable and respected politician.

Looking at her character in her twenties through the prism of what we know of the woman in her seventies and early eighties, we may make an intelligent guess that the younger Eleanor was pragmatic enough to realise that she had to be married to someone. If Louis granted her a divorce, as duchess of Aquitaine she would become his vassal; he would have the power to marry her to whomever he pleased, probably a court acolyte – anything to hold on to Aquitaine until Marie was old enough to inherit. Eleanor would not be allowed to rule alone.

We can deduce that Eleanor, although queen of France, rich, and with access to her young daughters, was extremely and irrevocably unhappy, and this is why she manoeuvred for Louis to divorce her. She had no guarantees that she would be any happier in a second marriage than in her first, but Eleanor needed to leave Louis.

By August 1151, the matter was not quite decided – Louis may well still have been deliberating. When Henry arrived in Paris in late summer, he must have appeared to Eleanor as a gift. He erupted into her life, and his energy, self-belief and optimism would have been luminous to her.

Everything we know of their characters suggests that Henry was able to persuade Eleanor to marry him by offering her a match of equals and mutual advantage. For Henry, marriage to Eleanor would provide him with wealth, land and heirs enough to gain and secure an empire. For Eleanor, if she took the gamble, this young duke would be her best chance for autonomy. Louis had denied her power in Aquitaine, and she likely envisaged the rest of her life married to him, the mother of daughters, gradually losing every shred of influence. From our knowledge of Eleanor, we may imagine this would have been intolerable to her. Henry appeared at the right moment, promising her heart’s desire: real power, rather than its trappings – the rightful duchess of Aquitaine, in deed as well as name. Theirs would be far more of a partnership than Louis had ever offered her. It was the best she could hope for from a marriage.

As far as we know, there were no witnesses to any formal agreement between Henry and Eleanor, nor are there any surviving documents that attest to it. Meanwhile, the chroniclers – mostly churchmen – were too consumed with Eleanor’s supposed sexual voraciousness to pay it much attention. Walter Map and Gerald of Wales later accused her of sleeping with Henry’s father Geoffrey. Walter claimed she ‘married Henry despite rumours circulating to the effect that she had already shared Louis’ bed with Geoffrey, Henry’s father’. Walter went on to speculate that ‘this … is why their progeny, sullied as their origins were, finally came to naught’.205 If true, it would have made their marriage incestuous in the eyes of the church. The chronicler William of Newburgh believed it was Eleanor who ‘longed to be wed to the duke of Normandy as one more congenial to her character’, and Gervase of Canterbury wrote that ‘people said that it was she who had cleverly brought about that contrived repudiation’, as she had grown tired of Louis’ ‘decrepit Gallic embraces’. Helinand de Froidmont, writing at the beginning of the thirteenth century, went even further, ascribing Eleanor’s desire to divorce entirely to her desire for Henry: ‘It was on account of her lasciviousness that Louis gave up his wife, who behaved not like a queen but more like a [whore].’206

And as late as the early twentieth century, one historian of the counts of Poitou explained Eleanor’s pursuit of marriage to Henry thus: she had grown bored of Louis’ ‘almost effeminate grace’, and rather she ‘wished to be dominated, and as the vulgar crudely put it, she was among those women who enjoy being beaten’.207

Eleanor was far more likely to have been seduced by promises of autonomy rather than Henry’s personal charms alone. Henry was a risk-taker and an optimist. His parents and his tutors had imbued him with self-belief since babyhood. Henry – young, arrogant and talented – likely believed that the crown of England was his; despite Eustace’s formidable claim, he had only to wait. England, Normandy, Maine and Anjou, together with the cornucopia of Aquitaine offered by marriage to Eleanor, would all eventually be theirs if she chose him as her new husband.

No wonder Henry left Paris ‘full of joy’; he had secured a promise of marriage from the wealthiest heiress in the western world. Now he planned to travel to England immediately, to fight Stephen and Eustace.

The historian Kate Norgate, quoting the chronicler Peter Langtoft, says that Matilda was also in Paris with Henry and Geoffrey, and if so it is likely that both parents were party to his plans.208 But if Matilda was there to help to smooth the negotiations with Louis, she left before Henry and Geoffrey. The worldly Geoffrey, under Bernard’s ‘curse’, could not have imagined he would have so little time to live. On their way to Lisieux to meet with Henry’s Norman barons, Geoffrey caught a fever and died. Henry was not with him, although Geoffrey’s last thoughts were of his eldest son. He is purported to have left him sound advice: to govern each of his diverse provinces by its own laws, and not as one ‘empire’.209

Geoffrey’s sudden and shocking death meant that Henry immediately doubled his possessions. He was now lord of Normandy, Anjou and Maine and his territories already dwarfed Louis’. But he was unable to travel to England to aid his desperately beleaguered supporters – at least not for now. He buried his father in the Cathedral of St Julian at Le Mans, his own birthplace, and commissioned a splendid tomb effigy, which reputedly contained a portrait of Geoffrey rendered in gold and precious gems.210 Henry mourned; later, he would pay for two chaplains to say prayers daily for his father.211 For now, he stayed in Anjou, asserting his authority over his Angevin barons.

As Henry grieved, Louis prepared for divorce. By Christmas he had pulled his forces out of Aquitaine, ready to give the duchy back to Eleanor.212 Would Louis have ceded nearly half of France so easily had he known of Eleanor’s designs? It is doubtful.

He certainly knew nothing of her plans with Henry when, on 18 March 1152 at Beaugency Castle, halfway between Paris (Louis’ capital) and Poitiers (Eleanor’s), their marriage was dissolved. Eleanor left behind her young daughters Marie and Alix. Even if she had remained in her marriage to be close to her children, one historian has pointed out that the girls left the French court the following year to join their fiancés’ households – Louis’ troublesome vassals the brothers Henry of Champagne and Theobald of Blois, whom he hoped to appease by the marriages. We have no evidence that Eleanor ever saw them again.213

No records survive of the proceedings at Beaugency, but anecdotal evidence tells us that Bishop Geoffrey of Langres nastily suggested an investigation into Eleanor’s supposed adultery, which was thwarted by the archbishop of Bordeaux, Eleanor’s subject.214 The archbishop proposed instead that the marriage be dissolved because it was consanguineous. The archbishop of Sens pronounced the marriage annulled, and their daughters legitimate, as Eleanor and Louis had been unaware their marriage was incestuous.215 Eleanor’s property was returned to her in its entirety. After years of wrangling, it was all over within hours. Louis immediately went north, and Eleanor south.

Luck was on Henry’s side – and Eleanor’s. As she rode towards Poitiers, she was ambushed in two separate attacks, by two noblemen who attempted to kidnap her and force her into marriage, to acquire her wealth and power – the count of Blois (who would later marry her daughter Alix), and Henry’s own seventeen-year-old brother Geoffrey, smarting and sulking at his puny inheritance of only four castles. But Eleanor escaped and sent an urgent message to Henry at Lisieux, as he prepared to sail for England. The news that Eleanor was free, however, made him turn around and race to her at Poitiers.

Here, on Whit Sunday, 18 May 1152, a scant eight weeks after her divorce, they were married at the city’s cathedral in a secret ceremony, bringing Aquitaine under Henry’s control.

Henry and Eleanor were together for nearly a month; Henry then rode for Barfleur, and England.216 But at Barfleur, on 16 July, he was forced to turn around once more to deal with Louis’ reaction to their marriage.

Louis was furious and bellicose. Although the boundaries of allegiance owed by the rulers of Aquitaine to the French kings were still, in the mid-twelfth century, unclear, Eleanor had at best humiliated him.217 Eleanor’s language, in contrast, was respectful and pacific. In a grant to Fontevraud Abbey she made at this time, she referred to her divorce from Louis in the following way: ‘separating from my lord Louis, the very illustrious king of the Franks, because we were related’.218 But to Louis, two of his vassals had flouted his authority and married without his permission. Eleanor’s stupendous inheritance had turned his erstwhile relatively minor vassal into one of the most powerful princes in Europe.

Now Louis declared Henry’s lands in France forfeit and went to war, joined in an unholy trinity with Eustace, the thwarted count of Blois, and Henry’s brother Geoffrey.

First, Henry dealt with Louis. He surprised and confused him with a devastating attack on the lands of his brother, Robert of Dreux, and laid waste to the Vexin. Then, in August, he moved against his brother Geoffrey, taking his castles away – its castellans surrendered completely to him. He besieged Montsoreau, stronghold of the rebels, where Geoffrey was forced, humiliatingly, to yield. Henry clearly would not be able to rely on his brother to help him fulfil his ambitions.

Henry’s military training had been exceptional; now he showed himself to be a level-headed general, fighting tenaciously, with cool and excellent judgement, on many fronts. Speed, one of the defining traits of his warfare, was key to Henry’s success. As he marched his armies along at a lightning pace (far beyond the seventeen and a half miles per day averaged by a medieval army) he would soon become known as the ‘King of the North Wind’.219 Henry’s father, Geoffrey, had reputedly studied the fifth-century AD Roman military author, Vegetius. Henry too may have remembered Vegetius’ lesson: ‘Courage is worth more than numbers, and speed is worth more than courage.’220 In 1152, at Barfleur, forced to abandon his plan to sail to England as he turned to defend Normandy instead, he moved his army along at such a breakneck pace that Robert of Torigni and Gerald of Wales noted that horses died.221

Louis, unable to fend off Henry’s whirlwind attacks, developed a fever and sought peace. Louis’ allies, including an apoplectic Eustace, who had only remained in France to murder Henry, were forced to comply. By the autumn, Henry had routed them all, as swiftly as Hermes. Louis, Henry’s overlord for his lands in France, had failed utterly to bring his rebellious vassal to heel.

Henry was now free to return to Eleanor in Aquitaine, where they embarked on a progress of her lands. Henry made known what sort of a duke he would be; at Limoges, the abbot of Saint-Martial withheld money, and the people of the town attacked his men. Henry’s brutal response was to raze the walls of the town, his instinct in Aquitaine being to keep the local lords under his control with a heavy hand.

While Henry had been preoccupied with marrying Eleanor and fighting Louis and his allies, the Angevin party in England was desperately fending off Stephen’s attacks. When Stephen’s men captured Wallingford on the banks of the Thames, not strategically important in itself but a potent symbol of Angevin strength, its defenders begged Henry to help them.

As far as Stephen and Louis were concerned, England was lost to Henry; it would be impossible for him to leave France. Eustace continued his relentless pursuit, and Louis, Henry knew, would stick to their truce only to resume his attack in the spring.

But they had underestimated Henry FitzEmpress. He was a gambler, trusting his intuition that Eustace would follow him, and that Louis and Geoffrey would not be overly troublesome in their harassment of his lands. He left a now pregnant Eleanor in Rouen with his mother, gave Normandy over to Matilda’s charge, and sailed from Barfleur during a storm, two weeks after Christmas, at the beginning of 1153. No one but a madman or Henry would have sailed in such conditions, and no one expected him in England. He sailed with a mercenary force of 140 knights and 3,000 foot soldiers in thirty-six vessels, paid for with borrowed money, ready to seize his birthright.222

A new man, the ‘King of the North Wind’, was about to storm Stephen’s world.

* Medieval church law stipulated that if you had sexual relations with a relative by marriage, or with someone related to you within the degrees forbidden by the church, you were guilty of incest. It also decreed that if you had already had sexual relations with a close relative of your future husband or wife, you were barred from marrying them as you would be committing incest.

† William’s bride was not on the White Ship. She travelled instead with King Henry.

‡ A mark was roughly equivalent to two-thirds of a pound.

§ These lands, known as the Papal States, were ruled over directly by the papacy for over 1,000 years, until 1870.

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