Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (26 page)

The shock of his fall proved too much for Bishop Roger, who, Wolsey-like to the last, died before the end of the year.

Stephen’s professed motive was to deprive Earl Robert and Matilda, who were expected to arrive at any moment in England, of allies and strongholds. But his actions had more or less the opposite effect. Bishop Henry, appointed papal legate earlier in 1139, donned the mantle of affronted ecclesiastical power and summoned a council of the Church to condemn Stephen’s actions.

A month later, on 30 September, Earl Robert and the Empress Matilda landed in England, accompanied by only 140 knights. This was more of an escort than an army and would have been quite inadequate to force a landing at any of the main ports. Instead, they had done a deal with the queen dowager, Adeliza, who resided in her castle at the river port of Arundel in Sussex. The party was allowed to land there and Matilda was received into her stepmother’s protection. Robert slipped away almost immediately and, with only a dozen knights, made his way through hostile country to his stronghold of Bristol. Halfway there he was joined by Brian Fitzcount, also one of the original supporters of Matilda’s marriage, and henceforward her unshakeable partisan.

Meanwhile, Stephen moved in force against Arundel and forced Adeliza to withdraw her protection. Matilda was saved by two things: by chivalry, which made it unthinkable that Stephen would use violence against a woman, and by Bishop Henry’s advice to his brother that, to contain the Angevin threat in one place, Matilda should be allowed safe-conduct to Bristol as well. Was Henry being too clever by half ? Or downright treacherous? And why did Stephen, who had had one confrontation with him already over the fate of Bishop Roger, accept his brother’s advice? Contemporaries were equally puzzled: Matilda’s escape was ‘quite incredible’, one well-informed chronicler thought.

Robert met his half-sister at what was already called ‘the frontier’ and escorted her to Bristol. Soon, Gloucester submitted as well, followed in the course of the year by most of the Welsh marches, as ‘partly by force and partly by favour, [the whole region] espoused the side of the empress’. Matilda even managed to make her half-brother Reginald earl of Cornwall.

Stephen had already lost the north; now he had lost the West Country as well and his writ would never run there again. The result was the effective partition of England: the north and west belonged to the empress, while the south and east remained loyal to Stephen. And neither side was able to make much headway into the territory of the other.

In 1140, there were attempts at resolving the stalemate by negotiation. A peace conference was held at Bath, at which the empress was represented by Earl Robert, and Stephen by Bishop Henry, Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury and by Stephen’s wife, Queen Matilda.

The queen, indeed, was emerging as her husband’s most effective and dogged advocate – so much so that at times the civil war appears as a women’s war of the two Matildas: empress against queen. Moreover, though Queen Matilda yielded nothing to her cousin the empress in courage or strength or determination, she was able to express these qualities in a way which did not overtly challenge the conventions of the period. This enabled her to play both gender roles and plead as a woman and command as a man. In the Empress Matilda, on the other hand, the female was too often swallowed up in the male. ‘She was’, her panegyrist wrote, ‘a woman who had nothing of the woman in her.’ That was intended as praise. But it meant that her behaviour tended to grate and that she had only to see toes to tread on them.

The Bath peace conference came to nothing. Instead, in the new year, both sides tried to settle the issue by a single, bold throw of the dice. For Stephen, with his manic warrior energy, which repeatedly took him from one end of the country to the other, this was thoroughly in character. But for Earl Robert, whose motto, according to William of Malmesbury, was ‘to do what he could, when he could not do what he would’, it was a novel departure. Nevertheless, at first it seemed to pay off handsomely.

III

The background, once again, lay in the effective partition of England. One of the principal beneficiaries was Earl Ranulf of Chester, who was the dominant magnate in the north Midlands. This was now a debatable land between the rival spheres of influence of Stephen and Matilda, and both sides were eager to win the earl’s support. In late 1140 Stephen seemed to have outbid the opposition by conceding Earl Ranulf ’s claims (through his mother) to Lincoln and giving him as well a great swathe of territories across the Midlands.

These joined together Ranulf ’s original centre of influence in Chester and his new one in Lincoln. But they also trespassed on the power bases of many of Stephen’s other loyal supporters, who made their feeling plain at the Christmas court, which was also held at Lincoln. The result was a characteristic volte-face by Stephen: having come to terms with Ranulf before Christmas, in the new year he turned against him.

This was the moment that Robert, with all his caution, had been waiting for. With an ally as powerful (and as powerfully motivated) as Earl Ranulf, he could strike a decisive blow against Stephen. Calling up his full strength, he marched his army through the Midlands; joined forces with Ranulf at Derby and arrived before Lincoln on 2 February with a formidable force.

Stephen, too, was spoiling for a fight. That day, 2 February, is the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary or Candlemas and, early in the morning, the king had carried the customary candle in procession to mass in the cathedral. But, as it was being lit, the candle broke in two. Stephen, however, brushed the ill-omen aside. He also ignored the advice of his council of war that, since the army of the earls was bigger and stronger, he should stage a tactical retreat. Instead, as Orderic observes, ‘the wilful prince turned a deaf ear to the advice of prudent men’ and ordered his men to prepare for battle.

The armies met on the water meadows which lie between the River Witham (which the earls had to cross) and the city on its steep hill, which, then as now, is crowned by the cathedral and castle. The odds were heavily stacked against the royalists. In accordance with the latest tactics, both Earl Ranulf and King Stephen dismounted to lead the resistance to the cavalry charges of the enemy. But the royalist charge broke almost immediately on the earls’ lines. At this point, much of Stephen’s army, including the flower of the English nobility, decided that their cause was hopeless and fled the field.

Stephen, in contrast, stood his ground, and though quickly surrounded on three sides, fought bravely on. First he laid about him with his sword; then, when that was broken, with an old-fashioned two-headed battleaxe handed to him by one of the Lincoln militia. But finally, when the battle-axe too was broken, he was overcome and knocked out with a blow to his helmet from a heavy stone. ‘Here everybody! Here! I’ve got the king!’ cried his captor, who was one of Earl Robert’s household knights.

Robert, according to William of Malmesbury, treated his royal captive with every respect. He was first taken to Gloucester, where he was presented to the Empress Matilda, and then sent to Bristol Castle, where he was imprisoned. At first his captivity was honourable. But then, after trying to escape or bribe his gaolers, he was kept in chains.

The last vestige of his royal dignity was gone. And it had gone, contemporaries felt, ‘by the just judgement of God’.

It now remained, it seemed, only to give effect to the judgement of battle by conferring the sovereignty on Matilda. Matilda sent notice of her intention to Bishop Henry, who, as usual, accommodated himself to an outcome which he may also have wished for. They met on Sunday, 2 March, in the open air to the west of Winchester. Matilda, for her part, promised to be guided by Henry in all matters relating to the Church and to ecclesiastical appointments; while Henry, for his, swore his allegiance to her as queen.

The next day she was conducted in procession to the cathedral, where she was received as queen by the bishops and abbots of ‘her’ part of England. A few days later, Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury arrived. But he refused to join his fellow bishops in swearing allegiance to Matilda until Stephen in person had released him from his oath to him. Stephen, bowing to the inevitable, gave the necessary release.

A month later, Henry, as papal legate, convened a Church Council at Winchester to effect the transfer of sovereignty. William of Malmesbury was present and gave a unique account of the event, in which he tells us as much about what happened backstage as in the glare of the spotlights. And the former, at least to begin with, was vastly more important than the latter. For Bishop Henry was determined his council should be as smoothly stage-managed as any modern British party conference or American presidential convention. In a clear case of divide and persuade, he spent the first day in a series of separate, private meetings with each rank of the senior clergy: the bishops, the abbots and the archdeacons. All were sworn to secrecy and nothing emerged publicly. Informally, it was a different matter, and a swirl of gossip and speculation filled the cloisters of power as ‘what was to be done engrossed the minds and conversation of all’.

With opposition bought off or at least silenced, Bishop Henry was ready to go public and anoint (though not yet literally) Matilda as the chosen candidate. This was the business of the second day and it went like clockwork. Henry summarized recent events: the peace and good order England had enjoyed under Henry I; the oath to Matilda; her absence from the country on her father’s death which led to Stephen’s nomination as king; Stephen’s breach of his oath to protect the Church and the mounting disorder of his rule and finally the judgement which God had passed on Stephen, ‘by permitting him, without my knowledge [Henry added, surely unnecessarily], to fall into the hands of the powerful’. Therefore, Henry concluded, he had summoned this council ‘of the English clergy, to whose right it principally pertains to elect a sovereign, and also to crown him’.

The result of the ‘election’, of course, had been fixed the day before. All that was left was for Henry to announce it, which he did in suitably ringing terms:

We elect [he proclaimed] the daughter of that powerful, that glorious, that rich, that good, that in our times incomparable king, as sovereign of England and Normandy, and promise her fidelity and support.

His audience knew what was expected and ‘all present’, William of Malmesbury reports, ‘either becomingly applauded his sentiments, or by their silence assented thereto’. Following her election, Matilda was known as ‘lady of the English’, which was the appropriate variation on the title of ‘lord of the English’ given to a king before he had been crowned.

It only remained for the people to rubber-stamp the decision of the clergy, and Henry concluded the day’s proceedings by reporting that a delegation of Londoners, ‘who, from the importance of their city in England, are nobles, as it were’, had been summoned and were expected to arrive the next day – as they duly did.

It is clear that Henry expected no more problems with the Londoners than with his malleable fellow clergy. But he was quickly undeceived. Far from meekly acquiescing, the Londoners dared to request that Stephen, as ‘their lord the king’, might be released from captivity. Henry tried to face them down. Instead, the whole smooth machine of the council derailed, as a clerk belonging to Stephen’s queen, Matilda, followed up the Londoners’ plea by presenting a letter on her behalf to Henry. Clearly flustered, Henry, ‘exalt[ing] his voice to the highest pitch’, sought to shout him down. But the man was not to be silenced and, ‘with notable confidence’, read out the queen’s letter. This restated the Londoners’ request in still bolder and more personal terms. She required the council, ‘and especially the bishop of Winchester, the brother of her lord’, to restore Stephen, ‘whom abandoned persons, and even such as were under homage to him, had cast into chains’.

The council now broke up in disorder, but not before Henry, in a final show of authority, had excommunicated several leading royalists.

The debacle of the Winchester Council put Matilda’s candidacy on the back foot and it never recovered the smooth momentum which would have carried her effortlessly to the throne. Instead, it inched forward. Almost three months (from the beginning of April to the end of June) were spent in persuading the Londoners to agree, reluctantly, to allow Matilda to enter Westminster for her coronation. The time was not wholly wasted and Earl Robert, who was an effective consensus politician, had notable successes in winning over more of the aristocracy to his sister’s claim. He used every device: ‘kindly addressing the nobility, making many promises, and intimidating the adverse party’.

But Matilda’s entry into Westminster, which should have crowned both her and the whole enterprise, instead turned into a disaster. For she displayed none of her half-brother Robert’s emollient skills. Instead her imperious instincts came to the fore. She tried to command the Londoners when she should have wooed them. She refused to renew the privileges with which a grateful Stephen had rewarded their support. She even tried to tax them.

The result was that the Londoners, always lukewarm to her cause, became violently hostile and rose in force to drive her out of Westminster. Faced with overwhelming numbers, Matilda and her escort, which included her two chief supporters, her uncle David I of Scotland and her half-brother Robert of Gloucester, as well as Bishop Henry, fled.

As they made good their escape, the citizens plundered the palace, while Queen Matilda of Boulogne, who had been encamped on the South Bank, retook the City for her husband Stephen, to whom it henceforward remained steadfastly loyal.

Matilda and her friends regrouped at Oxford, where she lavishly rewarded the loyalty of her followers. This looked like wisdom. But it had the effect of further deepening partisan divisions. It also led to another crucial rift in the coalition which had so nearly swept her to the crown. For she now quarrelled with Bishop Henry. Despite having abandoned his brother, Henry was determined that his nephew Eustace, Stephen’s elder son, should succeed to his maternal inheritance of the county of Boulogne. Matilda was equally adamant that he should not. Was it vengeance? Or the fact that, as part of her distribution of largesse, she had already promised it to others? In any case, it led to a fatal breach with Henry, who refused her summons to attend her court at Oxford.