She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (15 page)

‘Lady of England’ was a nebulous, ambiguous title, but also a telling one. To be England’s lady –
domina
, in the Latin spoken by Bishop Henry and his ecclesiastical colleagues – was to exercise
dominium
, that is, power or lordship, of the kind that her royal father had enjoyed. All that remained was to proceed to Westminster, to take command of her capital and to be anointed as a new kind of queen – one who would rule in her own right, not as her husband’s helpmeet. The crown, it seemed, was finally hers.

 

Now, at last, Matilda stood at the heart of politics, and the chroniclers could no longer keep her at the margins of the stories they told. But they did not like what they saw. ‘She was lifted up into an insufferable arrogance’, Henry of Huntingdon declared censoriously, ‘… and she alienated the hearts of almost everyone.’ The author of the
Gesta Stephani
, who had until now treated her with disdain, also reacted with withering disapproval: ‘she had brought the greater part of the kingdom under her sway, and on this account … she was mightily puffed up and exalted in spirit’.

It has become the defining account of the difficulties Matilda faced at this, the crucial moment when the kingdom lay within her hands. More than eight hundred years later, historians have had no hesitation in endorsing the same damning verdict. ‘All chroniclers agree that in her hour of victory she displayed an intolerable pride and wilfulness,’ one of the most perceptive writers on the period remarks; while another, more gently but no less categorically, explains that ‘here for the first time an aspect of her character, which had not so far been apparent, was to let her down’.

But it is striking that
not
all the chroniclers did in fact join this critical chorus. William of Malmesbury, for example, did not choose to contrast his eulogising account of the earl of Gloucester’s ‘restraint and wisdom’ with any explicit criticism of ‘that formidable lady’, his hero’s half-sister. And another source gives us an altogether different portrait of Matilda’s approach to her royal destiny. The abbot of Gloucester, a renowned scholar named Gilbert Foliot, supplied Brien Fitzcount with a sophisticated legal and theological defence of Matilda’s claim, in the course of which
he penned an elegant sketch of the former empress as a devoted royal daughter.

Foliot’s approving description of a modestly dutiful woman in the years before 1135 is, of course, a partisan portrayal in pursuit of a political argument – but the same is also true of the hostile
Gesta Stephani
, the chief witness for the prosecution in the years after King Henry’s death. And closer examination of the
Gesta
’s account of Matilda’s conduct after the battle of Lincoln demonstrates that criticism of the ‘intolerable pride’ with which she responded to her rival’s defeat cannot for a moment be taken as the product of coolly neutral observation. ‘She at once put on an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the modest gait and bearing proper to the gentle sex,’ the
Gesta
’s author complained, and ‘began to walk and speak and do all things more stiffly and more haughtily than she had been wont, to such a point that soon, in the capital of the land subject to her, she actually made herself queen of all England and gloried in being so called’.

The
Gesta
’s support for Stephen’s cause is unmistakable here – but so is the extent to which the writer is troubled by the very idea of a woman holding power in her own right. Matilda was facing the challenge of becoming queen of England (a title which, despite the
Gesta
’s affronted protests, she did not yet have) – not in the conventional sense of a king’s partner, but in the unprecedented form of a female king. And kings did not deport themselves with a ‘modest gait and bearing’. Instead, they were – and were required
to be – supremely commanding and authoritative, as her father and her first husband had been. William of Malmesbury’s admiring description of King Henry had made the point insistently:

In such circumstances, it is hard to imagine quite what Henry would have had to do to be accused of acting with ‘insufferable arrogance’. The expectation of unquestioning obedience, and the punishment of those who did not comply with his commands, were indissoluble elements of his kingship. He believed in his own authority, and there could be no suggestion of unwonted pride in the fact that he required others to acknowledge it. How, then, could Matilda achieve a ‘royal dignity’ to match her father’s if she could employ only the ‘modest gait and bearing proper to the gentle sex’ to command her kingdom?

We could perhaps argue that the context of violence, division and turmoil within which Matilda was forced to assert herself meant that she needed to tread particularly carefully, to avoid alienating those who did not yet share the unwavering loyalty of her innermost coterie. But her father had also had to fight for his throne against the pressing claims of a rival, and for both Henry and Stephen too, in equally troubled circumstances, it was clear that acting like a king – inhabiting the role with absolute conviction – was essential if the kingdom were to be convinced that the crown was on the right man’s head. In fact, those elements of Stephen’s character that were less than imperious served to raise questions about his authority rather than reinforcing it: his affable
generosity, for example (‘such a kindly and gentle disposition that he commonly forgot a king’s exalted rank’, the
Gesta
noted), or his light voice, so soft that he had had to depute someone else to rouse his troops with a battlefield speech before the fighting at Lincoln.

The truth of the matter was that Matilda found herself trapped. She urgently needed to show that she was a credible ruler. Her sex had already prevented her from leading her own army into battle, but this, at last, was her chance to prove that being a woman (and a woman standing alone, given that the man to whom she was married was neither present in England nor a political asset there) need not constrain her command in the council chamber. But when she sought to emulate her formidable father and her first husband, the two great kings whose rule she knew best, she encountered not awestruck obedience, but resentment of a ‘haughtiness and insolence’ that was deemed unnatural and unfeminine.

That much is clear from the
Gesta
’s specific objections to her conduct on what should have been her triumphal approach to London. First, the
Gesta
claimed, she failed to show due deference to ‘the chief men of the whole kingdom’, the chronicler’s patron Bishop Henry of Winchester prominent among them.

What this boils down to, when issues of style and substance are disentangled, is that Matilda did not do exactly what her advisers told her – and one can only guess what King Henry would have said to the suggestion that his counsellors should have the last word in his government.

Secondly, she summoned the richest of London’s citizens and asked them for a large sum of money as a contribution to her royal expenses, a request made ‘not with unassuming gentleness,
but with a voice of authority’, the
Gesta
explained disapprovingly. When they begged to be excused, pleading poverty, ‘she, with a grim look, her forehead wrinkled into a frown, every trace of a woman’s gentleness removed from her face, blazed into unbearable fury’, declaring that the Londoners had lavished their wealth on Stephen’s cause, ‘and therefore it was not just to spare them in any respect or make the smallest reduction in the money demanded’. The citizens – here portrayed as innocents abashed by her rage – returned in anxious gloom to their homes.

Both of these incidents also appear in William of Malmesbury’s more sympathetic account – but in strikingly different form. William omits any mention of Matilda’s financial demands on the citizens of London, explaining instead that the inhabitants of the capital, ‘who had always been under suspicion and in a state of secret indignation, then gave vent to expressions of unconcealed hatred’ towards her. Meanwhile, Matilda’s supposedly high-handed treatment of her advisers here becomes a specific dispute with Bishop Henry, the most recent convert to her cause, and one whose support was predicated on his hopes of imposing his own influence on her rule. The bishop wanted Stephen’s personal estates, the rich and strategically vital counties of Mortain and Boulogne (the latter including vast tracts of land in Essex and Kent), to be committed to Stephen’s twelve-year-old son Eustace for as long as his father remained in prison. Matilda understandably refused, unwilling to hand over such power to a boy who would inevitably see her as the usurper of his royal inheritance – at which the bishop, ‘enraged by this affront’, left her court and began at once to plot against her.

Between claim and counterclaim, it is clear that Matilda faced two pressing and intractable problems: her relationship with Bishop Henry, without whom she would not have been recognised as ‘lady of England’, but who expected as the price of his backing a degree of control over royal policy that no monarch could tolerate; and the attitude of the Londoners, whose overwhelming economic interest in the trade route through Boulogne predisposed them to
support Stephen’s claim to the crown, an alliance which Stephen himself had cemented with expansive promises of royal favour. But the minute Matilda tried to tackle those problems with what her father would have recognised as kingly authority, she was accused of acting with a headstrong arrogance unbecoming to her sex.

That is not to say that her decisions and her behaviour were beyond reproach. It is not difficult to imagine that the daughter of the domineering King Henry – a woman who had been raised in imperial splendour and was now for the first time wielding power that she believed had been stolen from her – might have been less than subtle in her treatment of former opponents. At the same time, it is not easy, even with hindsight, to decide whether confrontation or conciliation was the better way of dealing with those of her subjects whose professions of new-found loyalty seemed likely to be the thinnest of political veneers. But we can be more confident in rejecting the suggestion that ‘an aspect of her character, which had not so far been apparent … let her down’. Matilda’s fledgling regime was not crippled by the sudden revelation of previously undetected personal flaws. Instead, she was taking her first steps in the new persona of a female monarch – and found herself stumbling over the implicit contradictions between being a woman and being a king.

Could any woman have kept her footing? It seems unlikely. As Matilda made preparations at Westminster for the coronation she hoped would transform her from England’s lady to its reigning queen, she faced resistance led by an enemy who showed that, in the exercise of female power, context was everything. Stephen himself was doing little from his prison cell in Bristol Castle to stiffen the resolve of those who still hesitated to accept Matilda’s victory. (His characteristic mildness was such that, when visited by the archbishop of Canterbury, a consummate political pragmatist who ‘thought it unbefitting his reputation and position’ to transfer his allegiance to Matilda ‘without consulting the king’, Stephen gave him ‘a courteous permission to change over as the times required’.) But his cause was kept alive by his queen, Mathilde, a
woman every inch as formidable as Matilda herself, but one who – acting as she was in the name of her incarcerated husband – escaped any kind of censure.