Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (26 page)

There was a moment after Henry had taken Mantua in 1091, followed by Ferrara and other important Italian cities, when
peace was once more proposed with Tuscany’s
gran Contessa
: if only she would acknowledge Guibert of Ravenna as Pope Clement III. There were by now many who begged her to accede. ‘You have struggled long enough, oh! most valiant lady, you and your serene consort, to uphold the dignity of the Pontificate.’ Matilda’s reaction can however be most closely gauged by an outburst at the same council of war, held in the Apennines, by one Hermit John: ‘Are you not that Matilda who glories in the title of daughter of Peter? … What sort of peace can be made with the impious?’
²³
No peace was made.

It took a series of deaths, marking the passing of a whole generation who had lived most of their lives entrenched in conflict, to pave the way for Matilda’s comparatively serene old age. Pope Urban II died in 1099 and the anti-Pope Clement III in 1100. Lastly the death of Matilda’s old enemy Henry IV in 1106 ushered in a new era. The Concordat of Worms of 1122 – a compromise by which a clear distinction was made between a prelate’s position as a landed vassal of the crown and his spiritual office – was hammered out towards the end of the reign of his son and successor Henry V.

A new age was dawning in more senses than one. Matilda continued to regard the struggles of the Italian cities for independence as part of her own struggle to establish a free Papacy. She had been born too soon or had spent too much of her life in conflict to understand that as the commercial importance of Pisa and Lucca developed, this was a phenomenon in its own right.
²⁴
And yet as a governor she was far from being naturally despotic: she patronized jurists such as Ubaldo da Carpineti and Irnerius. One has the sad impression that Matilda’s long fights with the Empire, while granting her her reputation in the pantheon of Warrior Queens, actually robbed Tuscany of the possibility of strong, intelligent and benevolent female rule over thirty years.

The new Emperor Henry treated Matilda, towards the end of her life, courteously. He called upon her at Bianello, the sentinel fortress of Canossa, where once his father had set off to shiver in
the snow, ‘swearing in the whole earth there could not be found a Princess her equal’. But Matilda, as her health failed, spent more and more time at Polirone, a Benedictine monastery near Mantua founded by her grandfather. (Although when there was an uprising in the city of Mantua in 1114, this gallant old lady still threatened to command an army against the unruly townsfolk.) Polirone had been the first northern Italian monastery to accept the reformed Cluniac rule: both Anselm of Lucca and Matilda’s second spiritual adviser Bernard of Vallombrosa had been monks at Polirone. The illuminated so-called Matildine Gospels presented by the Countess to Polirone (now in New York, in the Pierpont Morgan Library) commemorate not only her generosity towards the monastery, but also, in the nature of their illustrations, those spiritual sympathies which Pope Gregory and Pope Urban had inculcated.
²⁵

It was at Polirone that Matilda died on 15 July 1115, in her seventieth year, leaving Donizo (his biographical poem unpresented) to repine, ‘Now that thou art dead, oh great Matilda, the honour and dignity of Italy will decline.’ It is however a curious postscript to the life of Matilda that her testamentary dispositions brought about considerable trouble – for the Emperor Henry V and also for the Pope. The Countess, childless if not virgin, left no direct heir since with her own death her family died out. Thus in two separate wills of 1077 and 1102 Matilda had transferred all her allodial property – that is, the Canossa inheritance, not within the feudal structure of the Empire – to the chair of St Peter. After peace was made with Henry V, Matilda willed her feudally held possessions back to him, although Henry seized the opportunity to claim the whole of her territories. This left the Pope, at the next moment of strength, to claim Matilda’s allodial property in his turn. Ironically enough, even in death Matilda, the Warrior Queen in the course of peace, had not brought about that tranquillity between Emperor and Pope which she so ardently desired for the sake of the Holy Father.

Countess Matilda was originally buried at the monastery but in the seventeenth century her body was transported to St Peter’s,
surely the appropriate resting-place for her who had been the Pope’s ‘hand-maid’. Certainly the ‘daughter of Peter’ would have been a more comforting title in death to the Countess herself than that allusion to Penthesilea inscribed on her original tomb. The first of the three Latin inscriptions contained this passage: ‘This warrior–woman disposed her troops as the Amazonian Penthesilea is accustomed to do. Thanks to her – through so many contests of horrid war – man was never able to conquer the rights of God.’
²⁶
And yet, whatever the pious Matilda’s reactions, there remained the need to compare one Warrior Queen to another, for verification as it were, however far-fetched the comparison.

Anselm of Lucca himself, in her lifetime, compared Matilda to the Amazonian Queen; he also compared her to the Queen of Sheba.
²⁷
Where Matilda was concerned, however, Anselm was careful to add that ‘the garb of a Penthesilea’ hid ‘the messenger of mercy’. That is, on the judgement seat, God would see in Matilda not the stern avenger of crime but rather the compassionate mother of the feeble and oppressed. For another perceived need was to prevent Matilda losing her proper femininity due to her military command. Matilda’s latter-day reputation includes a possible tribute from Dante in the
Purgatorio
: the ‘Lady Beautiful’ encountered beside the waters of Lethe, who draws him through its drenching waves to the blessed shore, is named Matilda (although there are other more likely claimants for the poet’s inspiration). A more valiant and thus more verisimilitudinous picture emerges from Tasso in
Jerusalem Delivered
:

With manlike vigour shone her noble look,

And more than manlike wrath her face o’erspread …

Henry the Fourth she beat, and from him took

His standard, and in Church it offered

Which done, the Pope back to the Vatican

She brought, and placed in Peter’s chair again.
²⁸

In general, however, the many tributes to Matilda both in her lifetime and afterwards, down to the twentieth-century
biographies of the Countess, are careful to stress the compassionate side of her nature. Like Boadicea, she is excused the final responsibilities for her actions and their consequences by her sex. At Sorbara, for example, the warrior maid with the ‘terrible sword of Boniface’ raised above her head was also depicted as begging a halt to the slaughter once the fortress was surprised: slaughter, it could be plausibly argued, that she herself had initiated. ‘Her heart did not grow hard – she cared for the sick, nursed the wounded, made bandages and dressings, prepared and distributed food, and nourished and clothed the destitute, dispossessed by the German scourge.’ So runs a hagiographical modern life of Matilda, published in Italy in 1937.
²⁹

The judgement delivered by Leone Tondelli in his classic modern biography of Matilda, which has run through many revised editions since its first publication in 1915, is on firmer ground; for throughout it stresses the religious inspiration which not only supported Matilda in her ‘so many contests of horrid war’, but also justified her participation in them to her contemporaries.
³⁰
The Countess Matilda, wrote Tondelli, was ‘a heroine of Christian Italy’. Her whole life constituted ‘luminous proof’ that if a Christian upbringing tends, with ‘modest self-effacement, self-reflection and a mystical union with God, to elevate and refine the spirit’, it nevertheless does not take away vigour in action. Most significantly of all, it is to Matilda’s ‘Christian upbringing’ that Tondelli ascribes that martial ability so uncharacteristic of her sex. In moments of need, Tondelli continues, such an upbringing can suggest ‘even to a woman’s heart the heroism of chivalry and it can mould the female soul – usually rich in generosity but little resistant to long-lasting tests’ – shades here of Gibbon and Mommsen on the subject of Zenobia – ‘into an indomitable constancy’. One feels that that is a judgement with which the
gran Contessa
herself – ‘Matilda by the Grace of God or she is nothing’ – would have agreed.

¹
The metaphors of strife and battle used by commentators on both sides at the time make it difficult (except in the case of Sorbara) to be certain when Matilda actually led her men, as opposed to commanded them.

²
But only the foundations of Countess Matilda’s fortress remain; the ruins above ground date at earliest from the thirteenth century.

³
Matilda was second cousin to Henry IV through her mother Beatrice of Lorraine.

CHAPTER TEN

England’s Domina

On bier lay King Henry

On bier beyond the sea,

And no man might rightly know

Who his heir should be.

PIERS OF LANGTOFT,
on the death of Henry I (1135)

I
n 1114, the year before the death of the
gran Contessa
Matilda of Tuscany, there took place the May-and-December marriage of an English princess to the German Emperor Henry V. The girl herself, who was variously known as Matilda or Maud (but owing to the plethora of Matildas in this period, will be here generally described as Maud), was a mere twelve years old, having been betrothed and sent to Germany four years before.
¹
Her bridegroom, nearly twenty years older, was a veteran of many a military campaign and military struggle. He had taken part in the prolonged investiture arguments with the Pope, and had actually enforced the abdication of his father Henry IV, scourge of the Countess Matilda, before his death in 1106.

At the time it hardly seemed likely that the young Empress Maud, or Matilda Augusta, daughter of King Henry I of England, would be called upon to take to the field of battle; but perhaps the unlikely nature of their destiny is one of the few things that all the Warrior Queens outside the antique days have in common. Her married life with the Emperor Henry V was, as it turned out, comparatively brief in a long and eventful life: he died in 1125. Nevertheless Maud’s youth at the moment of her transference from the royal English court of her powerful Norman father to the imperial court of Germany ensured that these were formative years. The Emperor sent away her English attendants – there
were to be no Scottish Maries, as would escort the infant Mary Queen of Scots to France – and he had Maud carefully instructed in the German language and customs.

Some of the apparent haughtiness of which, as we shall see, the Empress Maud was to be later accused must have sprung from these early experiences, working upon a naturally strong character. (It is noteworthy indeed how many of the female descendants of William the Conqueror show a vigour and even guts worthy of their great progenitor, starting with his strong-minded and intelligent daughter Adela of Blois.) Here was a girl who was crowned in Germany before she was in her teens and whose official title was ‘Queen of the Romans’. Yet at the time, Maud, having a natural outlet for her energies by contemporary standards for females, in her position as consort to the Emperor, secured nothing but golden opinions. To her German subjects, she was ‘the good Matilda’; a description which would have had an ironic ring to many of those English upon whom she attempted to lay her rule, in the course of her prolonged martial dispute for the crown with her cousin Stephen during that English period known as the Anarchy.

It was the death of Maud’s brother William in 1120, drowned in the tragedy of the White Ship, which brought about the first stage in her transformation. The Empress Maud was now the only surviving legitimate child of Henry I since Henry’s second marriage to Adeliza of Louvain was to be childless (although he was to have more than twenty bastards). The death of Maud’s husband, the Emperor Henry, leaving her also childless and thus without stake in Germany, brought about the second stage. The Empress now returned to the court of her father, and Henry now set about making Maud his heiress with all the considerable energies still at the forceful old King’s command.