Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (24 page)

The result was a cycle: debasement and inflation were followed in turn by measures of reform. But these, though dramatic, were never long lasting. The first attempts at reform took place early in the reign in 1108 when, on the advice of Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury, Henry issued legislation which threatened the coiners of substandard money with terrible punishment: they were to be castrated and their right hands amputated. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the consequence was an immediate improvement in both the appearance and fineness of the coinage. But the improvement was short lived and was followed by an even more precipitate decline.

By 1124 crisis had been reached. According to
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, debasement and the consequent inflation hit record levels: ‘the penny was so adulterated that a man who had a pound at a market could not exchange it for twelve-pence worth of goods’. The situation was exacerbated by crop failure and, as the price of staples soared beyond reach, public order threatened to break down. It was decided to make an example – or rather, several. In early December, at a court held in Leicestershire and attended by many of the king’s knights, Ralph Basset, the king’s justice, ‘hanged more thieves than were ever known before’. ‘A full heavy year was this,’ the chronicler lamented, ‘the man who had any property was deprived of it by severe taxes and severe courts; the man who had none died of hunger.’

All this was bad enough. But much more directly threatening to Henry was the reaction of his soldiers in Normandy, who complained vigorously about his attempt to pay them in English pennies that were little better than tin. This time something had to be done. As usual, Henry delegated the task to Roger of Salisbury. At Christmas 1125, all the moneyers in England were summoned to Winchester, where ‘they were taken one by one and each deprived of the right hand and the testicles below’. The legislation of 1109 had at last been put into operation. In contrast to his sympathy for the thieves executed the previous year, the Anglo-Saxon chronicler had none for the moneyers:

All was done with great justice, because they had ruined the whole country with their great counterfeitings. They all paid for it.

Here at last there was something that united all Henry’s subjects: when it came to protecting the deservedly high reputation of the English currency, everyone, from the Norman king to the lowliest Anglo-Saxon peasant, was in agreement and was prepared to use the most savage means.

IV

In 1120, Henry’s power reached an apogee. Long unchallenged in England, the king found that the victory over France at Brémule and the renewed exile of William the Clito gave him an equally free hand in Normandy. For the first time in almost four years, he would be able to return to England to spend Christmas with all the pomp of a conqueror.

But, on the way back, disaster struck the royal family, who, then as now, travelled separately. Just before twilight on 25 November, Henry and his court set sail from Barfleur in Normandy and, with a favourable wind, made a quick and safe passage. But his son and heir William the Æthling, who was aged seventeen and ‘possessed everything but the name of king’, decided to stay behind for a final evening of revelry. He and his suite of three hundred (which included the cream of the young Anglo-Norman nobility, who, as usual, were attracted to the rising sun) got thoroughly drunk. As did the crew. Nevertheless, towards midnight, they decided to embark in the
White Ship
. It was a crack vessel of the latest construction and the young sparks boasted that they would soon catch up with the king and his greybeards, even though they had left hours before.

But, less than half a mile out, the drunken pilot steered the ship on to a well-known hazard: a large rock that lurked just beneath the surface at high tide. A hole was ripped in the ship’s side and the vessel started to fill with water. Despite the confusion, the ship’s boat was launched and William was rowed off towards safety. But, hearing the cry of his illegitimate half-sister, the countess of Perche, William ordered the boat to return to rescue her. Desperate men, however, flung themselves into it; the tiny craft was overwhelmed and William was drowned. As was almost everyone else on board the
White Ship
, including William’s half-sister and half-brother, his tutor and the earl of Chester and his countess, who was also of the blood royal. Only a single man survived.

It was, as they say, a moment that changed history: ‘no ship’, William of Malmesbury wrote, ‘was ever productive of so much misery to England; none so widely celebrated throughout the world’.

News quickly reached England. But at first a terrified court withheld it from the king. When, over a day later, he was finally told, Henry collapsed and was helped to a private room, where he wept bitter tears. ‘This mourning’, Orderic noted, ‘lasted for many days.’

‘Many
days
’? In the context, ‘days’ seems almost bathetic. But Henry could not afford to indulge his grief for long. For he was a king and he had work to do. His only legitimate son’s death had left him without an heir and his whole achievement in England and Normandy threatened to die with him. This could not be. Instead, on 6 January 1121, the last day of a miserable Christmas, the council, meeting in London, resolved that the king, widowed since the death of Edith-Matilda in 1118, should marry a new wife. The chosen bride was Adeliza, daughter of Godfrey VII, count of Louvain.

Henry had a single purpose in his second marriage: ‘he was anxious for future heirs by [his] new consort’. And there was every reason to suppose that his wish would be fulfilled. Adeliza was ‘a beautiful girl’, who seems to have been chosen on grounds of her looks as well as her family connections; while Henry himself was a man of tremendous sexual appetites – and achievements. His nearest rival among English kings, Charles II, fathered eight sons and six daughters out of wedlock. Henry easily beat this: besides his two legitimate children, he had some nine sons and eleven daughters by at least six mothers of four different races: Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Welsh and Anglo-Danish.

But, like Charles’s marriage to Catherine of Braganza, Henry’s second union was to be barren. At the time it was the young bride who was blamed for a fruitless union. Adeliza, however, would mother seven children with her second husband, Henry’s butler. Her blushes, in Henry’s lifetime, spared the king’s pride.

But as Henry’s virility waned, some other means of settling the succession would have to be found.

Things were probably brought to a head by another death in the family. In 1114, Henry’s daughter Matilda had been married to the Emperor Henry V. But, in May 1125, the emperor died. Matilda was now a widow of twenty-four and Henry’s only surviving legitimate child. She travelled from Germany to join her father in Normandy and in September 1126 father and daughter returned to England together.

Much of the remainder of the year seems to have been spent in debating the succession question. One possibility lay in the children of Henry’s sister, Adela. Adela had married in 1080 Count Stephen of Blois, by whom she had a brood of fine sons. The eldest, Theobald, had his future assured as heir to his father’s county of Blois, sited strategically on the frontier of Normandy and the kingdom of France. But the two younger sons, Stephen and Henry, were attracted into the orbit of their uncle Henry I and made their fortunes in England.

Henry of Blois, like many younger sons, was destined for the Church and was educated at the abbey of Cluny in Burgundy. The abbey was notable for three things: its strict observance of the rule of St Benedict, which regulated monastic life throughout the West; the splendour of its liturgy; and, finally, its empire-building, as it spawned daughter-houses across Europe. The young Henry picked up on the splendour and the empire-building. But the strictness rather passed him by. Instead, in 1126 King Henry appointed his nephew abbot of Glastonbury and, three years later, bishop of Winchester. Since Glastonbury was one of the richest abbeys and Winchester was the richest see, the fact that Bishop Henry contrived to hold both of them together for the next forty years made him a veritable prince-bishop and the wealthiest prelate in the English Church, with an authority eventually outweighing that of Roger of Salisbury himself. Roger exercised power under the king and on his behalf; Henry, however, came to fancy himself as a kingmaker.

But the man who would be king was the middle brother, Stephen. Born in about 1096, he grew up to be a paragon of chivalry. He was handsome, brave and a fine warrior. These personal qualities made him an attractive candidate for the throne. In addition, his uncle King Henry showered him with lands and in 1125 engineered his marriage to Matilda of Boulogne. Matilda, herself a woman in the heroic mould, was a great heiress in England as well as France. Even more importantly perhaps, she too was a descendant through her mother of the Anglo-Saxon royal house. This meant that Stephen’s children, too, would carry the mystic bloodline of the House of Wessex.

Finally, there was Henry’s only surviving legitimate child, the Empress Matilda, who was now, following her husband’s death, back in the Anglo-Norman realm at her father’s side. The fact that she was a woman, of course, was enough to rule her out in most eyes. And father and daughter had not seen each other since the girl was eight. Nevertheless, there was, Henry discovered, much to recommend her. She was beautiful, intelligent and capable and, still in her twenties, had not suffered that coarsening of character which would later make her so controversial and divisive. Her position as dowager empress augmented her status. And above all, she was her father’s daughter and her mother’s too. This double royal descent, all commentators agree, was decisive for Henry.

It remained only to enforce his decision.

V

At Christmas 1126 Henry summoned a great council in London. According to William of Malmesbury, he presented the case for Matilda forcibly. He reminded those present of her descent from the Norman kings on his side and from the Anglo-Saxon on her mother’s. And he seems to have laid special emphasis on the latter.

Such an appeal to Anglo-Saxon history must have warmed the hearts of men like William of Malmesbury, who may have been research assistant for the speech. But William was under no illusion about the general attractiveness of the argument to Henry’s audience of hard-bitten Anglo-Norman magnates. For what carried the day, he makes clear, was not Henry’s words but his will: Henry ‘compelled’, William states baldly, ‘all the nobility of England … to make oath that … they would … accept his daughter Matilda as their sovereign’.

The clergy, headed by the archbishop of Canterbury, swore first; then it was the turn of the lay nobles. The first to take the oath was King David I of Scotland, who was Matilda’s maternal uncle. His oath was followed by a good-natured dispute between Henry’s oldest bastard, Robert, earl of Gloucester, and Stephen of Blois as to who should have the honour of swearing next: ‘one alleging the privilege of a son, the other the dignity of a nephew’. In the event, Stephen won and swore second, while Robert had to be content with third place. Both men, of course, were possible contenders for the throne themselves. And, it would become clear, they took the oath with very different degrees of sincerity.

Many others present had reservations too. But, as usual, Henry got his way. For the time being at least.

Only a few months passed before Henry put the uneasy acquiescence of his nobility to a severe and arguably fatal test. The king, with his remarkable strategic sense, had long seen that Anjou held the key to the uneasy balance of power in northern France and he pursued an Angevin alliance with his usual undeviating determination. But there were obstacles on both sides. On the one hand, Count Fulk V of Anjou was a flighty opportunist; on the other, the Norman nobility nursed an inveterate dislike of the Angevins as the hereditary enemies of the duchy. Henry had sought to overcome their hostility by marrying his heir, William the Æthling, to the daughter of Count Fulk. But this hope, like so many others, foundered with the
White Ship
. Now that Matilda was securely nominated as his heir, Henry’s first thought was to return to the Angevin alliance. But he recognized that he had to proceed by stealth.

In late spring 1127, Henry sent Matilda to Normandy, where, on Whitsunday, 22 May, she was betrothed to Geoffrey, son and heir of Count Fulk. Henry soon followed in person to celebrate the marriage. Throughout the affair, Henry took into his confidence only a handful of his family and intimates.

And for good reason. The marriage was deeply unpopular. ‘All the French [Normans] and English’, the Anglo-Saxon chronicler wrote, ‘disapproved of this.’ Simple xenophobia played its part. But there was a more substantial point. Geoffrey, as Matilda’s husband, might be expected to play an important part in the government of England. In other words, the Anglo-Norman elite were complaining about having a monarch thrust on them by the back door and without their consent. Swallowing Matilda had been hard enough; to submit to her husband as well was a step too far.

The marriage and the underhand way in which it had been brought about fatally undermined Matilda’s position. ‘I have frequently heard’, William of Malmesbury reports, ‘Roger, bishop of Salisbury say that he was freed from the oath which he had taken to the empress; for that he had sworn conditionally, that the king should not marry his daughter to anyone out of the kingdom, without his consent and that of the rest of the nobility.’ But, no doubt, while Henry lived Roger kept his thoughts to himself.

Moreover, it was even doubtful whether the marriage would last. After the wedding, Fulk had set out again on crusade to the Holy Land, leaving his newly married son Geoffrey, barely aged fourteen, as the ruler of Anjou. Geoffrey and his wife, who shared the same imperious temperament, now proceeded to quarrel. Within a year, they separated and Geoffrey sent Matilda, bag and baggage, back to her father in Rouen. The separation, which lasted for two years, was brought to an end in 1131. On 8 September, the nobility renewed their solemn oath to Matilda and also advised that she should return to her husband. In the course of the next few years, three sons were born in quick succession: Henry on 5 March 1133, Geoffrey (from whose birth Matilda nearly died) in 1134 and William in 1136.