The Anarchy: Civil War in England and the Angevin Conquest of Normandy
Yet they soon took action. Geoffrey launched an attack on Normandy, joined by Duke William X of Aquitaine, but the army contracted dysentery and had to retreat, ‘leaving a trail of filth behind them’, as Orderic Vitalis eloquently put it.35 Geoffrey remained committed to the conquest of Normandy, and although the Norman barons resisted fiercely as they had no desire to be conquered by an Angevin, they received little support from Stephen, who faced growing opposition in England.
The conquest of Normandy is Geoffrey Plantagenet’s great achievement, and gives the lie to the opinion repeated by many modern historians – which originated with Kate Norgate’s several-page demolition of Geoffrey in England under the Angevin Kings – that ‘… one is struck with a sense of something wanting in him. The deficiency was in truth a very serious one; it was a lack of steady principle and of genuine feeling.’36 This seems overly harsh, especially when the only important 12th-century source about Geoffrey was written after his death and expressly seeks to portray him first as a beautiful teenager worthy of marrying an Empress and then as a dashing chivalric hero. That’s the basis for the ‘lack of steady principle’, and the want of feeling is based on his ‘failure’ to help Matilda conquer England.
To our knowledge Geoffrey did nothing to help Matilda in England and devoted all his time and resources to Normandy. It may seem that he should have focused on the larger prize, especially as Matilda came so close to achieving it that we might assume that with his help she would have succeeded. This ‘want of feeling’ in failing to help his wife is taken as evidence that their marriage was loveless.
However, everything is not as it seems. Aside from the brief period when Robert Curthose ruled Normandy, England and Normandy were a unified realm and the aristocracy of both lands had extensive cross-Channel possessions that would be very difficult to disentangle. Stephen ruled both England and Normandy, so an attack on Normandy harmed him just as much as any military activity in England. Indeed, since a key strategic goal of each side in the civil war was to demonstrate that their opponent was incapable of preserving order and that only they could guarantee peace and prosperity for the barons, Stephen’s inability to defend Normandy was a major blow to his cause. After his poor start, Geoffrey returned to the attack with much more success and slowly but steadily took Normandy castle by castle, ultimately being recognized as Duke of Normandy in Rouen in 1144.37 This is astonishing – that the Count of Anjou could be acclaimed Duke of Normandy not as Matilda’s husband, but in his own right. Once Geoffrey had conquered Normandy and installed himself as its duke, all the Norman barons with lands in England had a vested interest in seeing Matilda succeed in England.
We must not forget what a liability it was to Matilda’s cause to have an Angevin husband. The Normans would not accept an Angevin as their king – not yet, anyway – so having Matilda go to England alone to claim her inheritance made great political sense. Matilda’s ways of referring to herself are instructive: in charters she was always ‘Lady of the English’ or ‘Empress’, and her seal called her ‘Queen of the Romans’ (another title from the Holy Roman Empire), but it is notable that her enemies sometimes called her ‘Countess of Anjou’ or ‘Lady of the Angevins’ to label her a foreigner.38 This tactic failed, and it is as ‘Empress’ that she is best known. Geoffrey and Matilda do not seem to have had much affection for each other, but their divided attack on Stephen is not the evidence for a complete breakdown in their relationship that it is sometimes claimed to be.
Matilda and her forces arrived in England in 1139, where she was welcomed at Arundel castle. In addition to Geoffrey’s success in Normandy, the critical factor enabling Matilda’s invasion was the support of her half-brother Robert of Gloucester, who in 1138 had repudiated his oath to recognize Stephen as king. Robert also ceded his Norman possessions of Caen and Bayeux to Geoffrey, significantly helping Geoffrey’s cause. These were major blows for Stephen, as the previous acquiescence of Robert and almost all the other barons had made the throne Stephen’s to lose. This is precisely what Stephen did, alienating key figures in the church and the aristocracy in the years since his accession until as important a figure as Robert finally raised the revolt against him.
Robert had important holdings in the west of England and established a base at Bristol to support Matilda. After Matilda’s arrival at Arundel, Stephen arrived with an army to oppose her, but for once her sex was an advantage, because Stephen’s chivalric code could not allow him to attack a woman, and so he gave her safe conduct to Bristol, where she joined Robert of Gloucester.39 There was still no immediate upswell of support for Matilda, and she and Robert were only able to create a base in southwest England from which to harass castles and towns controlled by Stephen, which undermined his authority and helped sow dissatisfaction.
It was also this guerrilla warfare that nearly produced a decisive result. A rebel baron took the castle of Lincoln, and Stephen took a small force to besiege the castle in February 1141. Robert of Gloucester arrived with an army and took Stephen by surprise, and Stephen’s bold decision to stay and fight, perhaps prompted by the same chivalric spirit that led him to allow Matilda to leave Arundel, led to his defeat and capture. Matilda would seem to have won and needed only to be crowned in Westminster Abbey.
However, Stephen’s supporters did not abandon the fight after his capture. Matilda and Robert moved slowly, rewarding their own followers and trying to gain additional support before reaching London in the summer of 1141. Most notably, Henry of Blois, Stephen’s own brother, switched sides to Matilda, presumably since his brother had failed to make him Archbishop of Canterbury, and he thought Matilda would show more gratitude. This allowed Matilda to enter London in triumph to prepare for her coronation in Westminster Abbey. Yet she did not seem to understand how precarious her position still was, and that she could not afford to antagonize anyone in the fragile coalition that might bring her to power.
She first disappointed Henry of Blois in his requests for preferment and excluded him from her advisers, driving him back to Stephen’s side. She was unable or unwilling to attract any of Stephen’s other supporters, and then she demanded money from the merchants of London to fund her prospective government. London had never been a centre of strength for Matilda, and in fact Stephen’s wife controlled Kent with a significant army. Matilda’s enemies in London now appealed to Stephen’s queen (helpfully also named Matilda, but we’ll call her ‘Mathilde of Boulogne’ to distinguish her from the Empress Matilda, Lady of the English), and as the Empress was preparing for a banquet in Westminster, Mathilde of Boulogne and her army suddenly appeared and drove Matilda from the city before she could be crowned.40
Matilda would never again come close to victory. The chroniclers almost universally agree that her ‘disgusting’ arrogance and pride alienated everyone in London and led to her downfall, but as Helen Castor astutely observes in She-Wolves, this was the view of male religious chroniclers who could scarcely imagine being ruled by a queen. Castor argues that male rulers were not criticized for being confident and commanding, and ‘arrogant’ is not an adjective often used to describe kings. That said, contemporaries openly applied a double standard to male and female behaviour in the Middle Ages, and the fact that behaviour that would have been acceptable in a male ruler was insupportable in a queen should not have been surprising, unfair as it is.
This view is also not entirely true: sixty years later when Richard the Lionheart died without an heir, there was a disputed succession between Richard’s younger brother John and his nephew Arthur of Brittany. William Marshal (of whom more very shortly), the leading baron of the time whose support would be decisive for the successful claimant, reports his conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury and gives as a reason for not supporting Arthur that he was ‘haughty and proud’. These are standard criticisms, but it is worth noting that they were also applied to men, and undue pride and high-h
andedness could damage male rulers as well as female, as King John himself would find to his cost. It should come as no surprise that in the Middle Ages, like our own age, things were never simple. Matilda, and later Arthur, were denied the throne for being too overbearing and proud, but the usual criticism of King Stephen is that he wasn’t dominant and commanding enough to be a successful king.
Matilda certainly did not suffer from these defects, as she was in the thick of the action from the moment the civil war began. Modern historians often make the point that one of the barriers to Matilda’s succession in her own right was that a woman could not be a commander in an age when kingship was still defined by leadership in battle, but there is no question that Matilda did lead her forces personally, even if she did not fight. She was not the only woman to do so, as Mathilde of Boulogne led Stephen’s armies when he was in captivity. Mathilde also used her control of Boulogne to funnel supplies and mercenaries across the Channel to Stephen’s supporters, preserving Stephen’s position after he had been captured. The Empress was not one to accept defeat though, and there are amazing stories of her deeds in the civil war, two of which will give some sense of her bravery and daring.
Later in 1141 the Empress and her forces laid siege to Winchester, but suddenly a huge force of Stephen’s mercenaries arrived and blockaded the besieging army. Realizing the peril, Robert of Gloucester held off the attackers while the Empress and a small group of retainers fled toward Ludgershall Castle, hotly pursued by the much larger force of the mercenary William of Ypres. Matilda rode sidesaddle, which so delayed her party that they were in danger of being captured. John Marshal, one of Matilda’s most faithful and plainspoken retainers, forced the Empress to break convention and ride astride, and they managed to stay ahead of their pursuers. Whether this story is true or not, it shows the Empress’s determination to do whatever was necessary to claim her throne, though it could also be a commentary on Matilda’s willingness to abandon conventional female roles and assume a more male persona in her quest for power, making her a true ‘virago’ (in Latin literally meaning a woman who ‘acts as a man’). In fact, William of Malmesbury would use just this word to describe her, perhaps the first use of the word in England.41
The postscript of the story is equally compelling and appalling, since John Marshal was forced to stay behind and guard the ford of the river Test to cover Matilda’s escape; after his small force was overwhelmed by William of Ypres’s men, he and a companion retreated to the church of Wherwell Abbey. The mercenaries set fire to the church to drive them out, and after seeking refuge in the tower John Marshal lost an eye in the shower of molten lead that fell on them. Nevertheless he escaped to Ludgershall, where he continued to ravage the countryside as one of Matilda’s strongest supporters.42
Matilda’s escape makes a good story, but there was a much more important event for Matilda that day. The main army was routed and Robert of Gloucester was captured, leaving Matilda without her mainstay. Seeing no alternative, Matilda exchanged Stephen for Robert, thus returning her to exactly the position she had been in before Stephen’s capture in 1141. It seems extraordinary that Matilda would release Stephen when his capture should have been a knockout blow to the anti-Angevin party, but her failed coronation and the defeat at Winchester revealed that she still had a long and difficult war ahead of her, and pursuing this without Robert was simply impossible. This also demonstrates the difficulty involved in holding an anointed king captive, because what exactly could be done to him? King John killed his nephew and rival Arthur, who was not even a crowned king, to the horror of his contemporaries. A hundred years later Charles of Anjou would behave with utter ruthlessness and execute his rival Conradin, to widespread condemnation, but again Conradin had not been crowned, and Charles was in a much stronger position than Matilda. Stephen was no use to Matilda in captivity, but releasing him must have been a bitterly difficult decision.
It was at this point, with Stephen once again free and Matilda’s bid for the throne in real danger, that an appeal was made to Geoffrey Plantagenet. This is the key piece of evidence for the argument that Geoffrey cared little for his wife, because his response only came after a three-month delay, and even then it was said by William of Malmesbury to have been: ‘if the earl of Gloucester would cross the sea and come to him he would do his best to meet his wishes; but for anyone else to make the journey would be a waste of time’.43 Geoffrey may have believed that leaving Normandy unconquered and diverting his forces to England, where they would have been seen as an invading army and possibly done more harm than good, was the wrong decision. It certainly would have been a quite risky policy. Yet the fact that he refused so categorically to help his wife at her lowest point does indicate that there were no ties of affection that would influence Geoffrey when it came to strategic decisions. Still, Matilda was not one to give up, and she continued the fight.
Her courage and determination were displayed in another incredible escape, when she and her supporters were besieged in Oxford in the winter of 1142. Henry of Huntingdon recounted that a heavy snowfall had covered the area, so the enterprising Matilda and her party slipped over the walls and crossed the frozen river Thames, ‘wrapped in white clothes, deceiving the besiegers by appearing so like the dazzling snow.’44 To further confuse pursuers they wore their shoes backwards.45 These adventures indicate just how perilous Matilda’s position was, but in fact this marked the turning point in her fortunes, because Robert of Gloucester had heard of her peril and returned from Normandy. He brought 300 knights, but also something much more valuable: Matilda and Geoffrey’s heir, Henry.
The future Henry II was always a much more acceptable face of the Empress’s party than his mother or father. He was only nine when Robert of Gloucester brought him to England in November 1142, and he served only as a figurehead to rally his mother’s party after the disaster in London, soon returning to Normandy. Robert and Matilda now seemed content to hold their territory in England until Henry was old enough to fight for himself, and what allowed this strategy was that Geoffrey had broken the Norman resistance by the end of 1142, and within two years he would be recognized as duke. The nobles with cross-Channel holdings would now lose their holdings in either England or Normandy if they backed the wrong side. With Geoffrey in control of Normandy, if Matilda or Henry ever looked like gaining ground in England, there might be a quick surge of support for them. Geoffrey also announced that he would make Henry duke of Normandy as soon as he was old enough, and he began to issue charters in Henry’s name as well as his own. If only Matilda had shown some of this diplomacy, the war might have ended in 1141 instead of dragging on for another decade.
Henry was certainly not responsible for any delay. With Normandy secure and the prospect of becoming duke before him in only a few years, Henry nevertheless organized a party of mercenaries and went to England on his own in 1147, when he was only fourteen. There was a brief panic over this invasion and Henry attacked a couple of castles, but the invasion quickly fizzled out when Stephen realized how small Henry’s force actually was and moved against him. Worse, Henry’s mercenaries, whom he had expected to pay with plunder, now threatened to desert when the money wasn’t forthcoming. Henry appealed to Matilda and Robert of Gloucester for money, but they refused, probably so that he would go back to Normandy after this dangerous and unauthorized attack. Henry, in a move that was absolutely typical, then asked for help from Stephen himself – after all, Stephen was his cousin – and incredibly, Stephen produced the money. Contemporary and modern critics attack Stephen for this foolish generosity and attribute it to that most impractical of codes, chivalry, and also use it as evidence that he lacked the necessary ruthlessness to rule. Of course, a perfectly valid reason for Stephen’s behaviour could be that he didn’t want an unpaid mercenary force on the loose in England.46
Yet Stephen’s lack of ruthlessness does contrast starkly with Matilda’s steely resolution. In 1152 Stephen’s forces suddenly attacked John Marshal’s cast
le of Newbury, which was poorly garrisoned. Stephen ordered the castellan to surrender, and when he refused, Stephen vowed to hang every member of the garrison when the fortress fell. As was customary, a day’s truce was arranged for the castellan to speak to John Marshal and find out if reinforcements were available; if they weren’t, a surrender would usually be arranged with safe conduct guaranteed for the garrison. John Marshal was not in a position to reinforce the castle so quickly, but he asked for a further truce to allow him to speak to Matilda. Stephen grudgingly agreed, but required John to leave his youngest son William, then only five or six years old, as a hostage to guarantee he wouldn’t reinforce the castle. John agreed, but once Stephen’s army retired he immediately sent a strong force of knights and provisions into the castle.
William’s life was forfeit, and Stephen’s men prepared to hang him in sight of the castle. Stephen sent a messenger to John demanding that he surrender the castle or his son would be killed. John replied that he had no need of this son since he had the ‘hammers and the anvils’ to forge another, better son. As Stephen’s men prepared to hang him, the child, oblivious to his danger and considering this a very exciting game, begged one of the knights to let him play with his weapons. Stephen was overcome by William’s innocence and carried him in his arms back to the camp. This story was told by William Marshal in his old age and seems to have been true, and it is frequently used as evidence that Stephen was simply too gentle to succeed as a medieval king.47
Eleanor of Aquitaine
Against the backdrop of the civil war in England and Geoffrey’s conquest of Normandy, significant events that would profoundly affect the Angevins were happening in France and Aquitaine. Most important of all is the career of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry II’s future wife. This is not only because Eleanor brought a huge swathe of territory to the Angevin lands. In addition to ruling Aquitaine personally, Eleanor was fully involved in Henry’s reign and at various times acted as regent. It is most instructive that it was only after Eleanor’s death, not Henry’s, that the French king managed to make significant inroads against the Angevins.
Angevin Dynasties of Europe 900-1500 Page 11