Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (27 page)

In the space of a few days, the empress had contrived to lose both her capital and, in effect, the Church.

Events now started to run strongly against her. Bishop Henry met Queen Matilda of Boulogne at Guildford and reached agreement with her by which he renewed his allegiance to Stephen and repudiated Matilda. In riposte, Matilda marched to Winchester, entered the city and laid siege to the bishop in his adjacent palace at Wolvesey. Henry retaliated by firing much of the city, including the suburban monastery of Hyde, where stood the great golden cross, given long ago by Cnut. Meanwhile, Queen Matilda of Boulogne and the Londoners joined in the fray and besieged the besiegers. As the trap started to close round them, Matilda and her forces decided to retreat and left the city on 14 September, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. But ‘the retreat became a flight, the flight a rout’. Matilda herself escaped, riding astride her horse like a man, and reached the safety of Gloucester. Robert of Gloucester was cut off and captured at Stockbridge.

The symmetry powerfully struck contemporaries: within nine months of each other, the leaders of the two sides, King Stephen and Earl Robert, had each been defeated and captured in battle, and both events had taken place on a great feast day of the Church. The result was the status quo ante, as the battle of Lincoln was cancelled out by the rout of Winchester. Two months later, the two captives were exchanged for each other.

Faced with stalemate once more, Matilda, who had resumed residence at Oxford, decided to appeal to her husband for support. But Geoffrey, who had been quick to exploit the battle of Lincoln by launching his soon-to-be-successful conquest of Normandy, preferred to remain on his own side of the Channel and bought time by stating that he would agree the terms of his support for his wife only in personal negotiations with Earl Robert. Robert duly set sail for Normandy, leaving Matilda in safety, as he thought, at Oxford. He even extended his stay to help Geoffrey conquer further territory in the duchy.

His absence presented Stephen with an opportunity and, with characteristic speed, the king raised an army and laid siege to Matilda in Oxford. Robert was unable to return in time and by December 1142 Oxford was on the brink of surrender. Determined to avoid the capture that had been the fate of her rival Stephen, Matilda decided on a daring plan of escape. Clad in white cloaks as camouflage, she and a little escort of only three or four knights slipped out of Oxford by a postern gate, crossed the frozen Thames and trudged through the winter landscape to Abingdon. Thence she rode to Wallingford, Brian Fitzcount’s border fortress, before retreating still further west, to Devizes, where, in the almost impregnable castle built by Bishop Roger, she set up her new headquarters.

IV

Matilda was to remain at Devizes for six years, during which time she was never able to break out of her western heartland, which corresponded roughly to the ancient kingdom of Wessex. But neither was Stephen, equally secure in the east, ever able to make serious inroads against her. Instead, the effective partition of England, which had been apparent from the earliest days of the civil war, perpetuated itself and showed dangerous signs of consolidation, even permanence.

The symptoms were many and various. In view of their pretensions to sovereignty, it was only natural that Matilda in the west, Stephen in the east, and King David I of Scots in the north should each issue separate coinages from the mints under their control. But so did other great lords with no claim to royalty. These included the earls of Leicester, Salisbury and Northumbria, together with mere barons in the remoter fringes of the country, such as the lords of Alnwick and Gower. Even Earl Robert of Gloucester challenged his half-sister’s jealously guarded regality by issuing coins bearing his own name from the mint he had taken over at Bristol. From all directions, therefore, the royal monopoly on coinage, which had alone guaranteed its uniformity and quality and had been one of the great legacies of Anglo-Saxon England, came under severe and sustained challenge.

Nor was the coinage the only royal right usurped by the greater earls. Equipped with the whole panoply of royal power, they even presumed to negotiate with each other like more or less autonomous powers. Most dramatic was the
conventio
(‘agreement’) between Ranulf, earl of Chester, and Waleran’s twin brother, Robert, earl of Leicester. The former’s relentless expansionism brought him into contact with the latter’s sphere of influence and the agreement tried to limit the resulting friction. A formal defiance was to give fifteen days’ warning of any attack by the one on the other; a demilitarized zone was created round Leicester as a no man’s land in which neither might build castles; and, in the event of a breach, pledges deposited for safe-keeping with two local bishops were to be surrendered by the offending party. The detail is impressive; so is the fact that the king is almost ignored. But not quite: if the king attacks either party the other may assist him according to his allegiance. But he must do so with only twenty knights (a fraction of the forces available to him) and any plunder must be returned.

Divided, therefore, the English monarchy was falling into the state of the French. The monarch, whoever he or she might be, was more or less respected as a distant, somewhat ineffectual, feudal overlord. But his or her interventions on the ground were neither expected nor much welcomed, nor greatly to be feared.

And it was Stephen’s inability to instil fear or ‘dread’ that the Anglo-Saxon chronicler saw as the key to the disasters of his reign:

When the [rebellious lords] saw that he was a mild man, and soft, and good, and did not exact the full penalties of the law, they perpetrated every enormity.

‘For every rich man built his castles’, the chronicler continued, ‘and when the castles were made, they filled them with devils and evil men,’ who plundered and burned and taxed and tortured without mercy. At particular risk were those of the common people who were thought to be prosperous and to have hoarded wealth:

They put them in prison and tortured them with indescribable torture to extort gold and silver … They were hung by the thumbs or by the head, and [heavy] chains were hung on their feet. Knotted ropes were put round their heads and twisted till they penetrated to the brains. They put them in prisons where there were adders and snakes and toads, and killed them like that. Some they put in an instrument of torture, that is in a chest which was short and narrow and not deep, and they put sharp stones in it and pressed the man so that he had all his limbs broken.

‘To till the ground’, the writer concluded, in one of the finest and last pieces of prose to be written in the old tongue, ‘was to plough the sea; the earth bare no corn, for the lands was all laid waste by such deeds; and [men] said openly that Christ slept and his saints.’

The Anglo-Saxon chronicler was writing at Peterborough in East Anglia. Similar pictures were painted by William of Malmesbury, writing in Wiltshire; Ailred of Rievaulx, writing in Yorkshire; and Henry of Huntingdon, also writing in East Anglia. There is no reason to doubt that these writers reported accurately what they had seen and heard. But each had the misfortune to live in a hotly contested area. The Anglo-Saxon chronicler was especially unfortunate in being a neighbour of Geoffrey de Mandeville.

De Mandeville’s father had been constable of the Tower when Ranulf Flambard effected his daring escape and was stripped of a third of his lands by Henry I as a punishment for his carelessness. His son devoted his career to winning back what his father had lost: first by conspicuous loyalty to Henry I, later by
dis
loyalty to everybody in the civil war. He changed sides at least three times, and each time increased his fame and fortune. Finally he became too powerful for his own good and Stephen, resorting to his favourite trick of arresting him at court, forced him to disgorge his castles. De Mandeville, faced once more with the ruin of his family, reacted with a furious nihilism. He flung himself from the royal court ‘like a vicious and riderless horse, kicking and biting’. Then he embarked on a regional reign of terror in East Anglia and the Fenland in revenge. He sacked Cambridge; pillaged the Isle of Ely; seized Ramsey Abbey and made it his headquarters. But his warlordism came to an abrupt end in 1144, when he died of the wounds he had received while attacking the royal stronghold at Burwell. Since he died excommunicate, his body remained unburied for twenty years.

Almost certainly, the sadistic excesses described by the Anglo-Saxon chronicler were the work of de Mandeville and his henchmen, William de Say and Hugh Bigod, earl of Norfolk. But, at the other end of the scale, Brian Fitzcount, Matilda’s partisan and one of the best educated and most civilized of the nobility, was also driven to survive by pillage and forced taxation around his border stronghold of Wallingford. And he mounted a powerful defence of his actions to Bishop Henry of Winchester, who had written him a curt letter of reproof. The civil war, he told him, had led to the loss of most of the lands he had received from King Henry. ‘As a result’, he continued, ‘I am in the greatest distress and am not harvesting one acre of corn from the land which he gave me.’ And this necessity was the sole reason for his depredations: ‘neither I nor my men are doing this for money or fief or land’.

But both de Mandeville and Brian Fitzcount were, in their very different ways, exceptional. Each was a product of a frontier; elsewhere, in the solid blocks of territory held by each of the three main parties to the war, Stephen, Matilda and David I of Scotland, there was what one chronicler calls
umbra quaedam pacis
(‘the shadow or simulacrum of peace’): a certain level of public order was maintained, taxes and dues were collected, charters were issued and even justice was done – if with a backward glance at happier, more stable times.

I am, as you see [a witness began his testimony at a meeting of the Shire Court in Norwich], a very old man, and I remember many things which happened in King Henry’s time and even before that, when right and justice, peace and loyalty flourished in England. But because in the stress of war, justice has fled and laws are silenced, the liberties of churches, like other good thing, have in many places perished.

This testimony was given shortly after 1148, and it suggests that there was already a profound and pervasive war-weariness. This extended even to one of the principals. That same year, Matilda left for Normandy. There she spent the last nineteen years of her life in a dignified and pious retirement. She never returned to England and she never used the title of ‘lady of the English’ again.

But if Matilda had given up the struggle for herself, she had only passed on the torch to her son, Henry. Henry, then aged nine, had first been brought to England by his uncle, Earl Robert, in the aftermath of Matilda’s flight from Oxford in 1142. For the next seven years, he divided his time between England, where he stayed with either his mother or his uncle, and Normandy, where his father Geoffrey, having completed the conquest of the duchy, was formally invested as duke in 1144. The intention, clearly, was to present Henry as the rightful heir to both halves of the Anglo-Norman realm.

To begin with, however, Henry had no better luck in enforcing his claim in England than his mother. In 1147, he ran out of money to pay his mercenaries and had to be rescued – by – of all people – Stephen, who, with characteristic chivalry, paid off his rival’s debt. The generosity was not repaid. Henry returned two years later in 1149, was knighted by his uncle David I of Scots at Carlisle and joined in a pincer attack on Yorkshire. But this too was thwarted by Stephen; while Stephen’s son and heir, Eustace, shadowed Henry on his march south through the Welsh marches. Having failed, yet again, to alter the balance of power in England, Henry returned to Normandy in 1150.

On Stephen’s side, too, the focus was shifting to the next generation, as Stephen, following French custom, sought to secure Eustace’s position by having him crowned king in his own lifetime. But here the alteration in the king’s relations with the Church counted heavily against him. While his brother Bishop Henry remained papal legate, the two had run the Church as a family concern: three family members were made abbots and one a bishop. But when the new pope, Eugenius III, deprived Bishop Henry of his legation, relations rapidly cooled and Stephen’s nepotistic candidates for York and Lincoln were turned down by the pope ‘indignantly and with harsh language’. In the circumstances, Eustace’s coronation became a bargaining counter and the English hierarchy played for time by claiming that it would be against precedent.

V

The crippling stalemate in England was broken, as it turned out, by events far away in France. In 1150, Henry, having returned from his second, less-than-successful expedition to England, was invested as duke of Normandy by his father Geoffrey. Shortly after Geoffrey died, leaving Henry as count of Anjou as well as duke of Normandy.

Henry’s dizzying rise to international power was aided by another twist of fate. Louis VII of France had married Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1137, but they were divorced in 1152. Eleanor immediately gave her hand and her duchy to Henry. They married the following 18 May, thus adding her vast inheritance to his own. In two years Henry had gone from almost nothing to lord of the better half of France.

With his hand thus strengthened, Henry sailed to England in January 1153, determined to add it too to his empire. He won no great military victories. But he had no need to: the tide of events was now running strongly in his favour. There was a palpable longing for peace. Most of the great lords, with one eye on their lands across the Channel, were eager to come to terms. And Stephen had given up the attempt to keep the throne in his family. For the last few years had been as fatal to him as they were beneficial to Henry. His queen, Matilda of Boulogne, died in 1152 and his son and heir Eustace in 1153.