King of the North Wind: The Life of Henry II in Five Acts. Claudia Gold
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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